Trajecta - Current Issue

‘Free at last!’ The words come from Reverend Martin Luther King’s famous speech ‘I have a dream’ from August 1963.² The speech and those words evocate all what the sixties stand for – but also some of the dilemmas and paradoxes of the historiography of the period. The religious dimension in the speech is evident. However, there is virtually no room for religion in the general (political, social and cultural) historiography of the 1960s,³ and insofar it does speak specifically about religion, it usually does so in terms of crisis, decline, and secularization – the ‘death of God’ –, while Church and religious history rather explore the variety of ecclesiastical reactions and particularly forms of religious renewal (sometimes, as in many histories of Vatican II, rather disconnected from society at large).⁴ Freedom is mainly associated with sexual liberation, not exactly what King intended. It is therefore striking that almost exclusively ‘white’ men and women dominate the debate. I’m one of those too, but try to take a slightly different, ‘decentralized’ perspective to reflect upon the uses of ‘freedom’ with regard to religion in the sixties, taking in consideration the complexities of the changing context of the time. King’s freedom incidentally did not focus on religious freedom either, which dominates the debate on freedom and religion today, especially in the US.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly known as LDS or Mormon Church, translates its originally English scriptures worldwide, also in Dutch for its 10,000 members in the Low Lands. The focus in this article is on the Book of Mormon, written in an English biblical style of the 1600s, first translated in Dutch in 1890 and followed by several revisions and a retranslation. This article sketches how LDS translation is conducted in a tight framework that is both religiously and institutionally defined. It explores how the developments that characterize new Dutch Bible translations also play out in the LDS Dutch context as the Church’s insistence on formal-equivalent translation rubs against modernizing pressures. Exemplary for these transitions in Dutch Bible versions is the choice of the pronoun of address: from gij which the Statenvertaling Bible (1637) deeply embedded, to the modern but still solemn u and next to the informal jij, je, jullie. The Dutch retranslation of the Book of Mormon struggled with these and similar issues, in particular because the wording and style should reflect, for coherence, the official LDS choice for an existing Dutch Bible. When a Bible choice changes, it affects the next revision of Het Boek van Mormon. Finally, translation is also and perhaps foremost the story of human actors — how each of them has room to maneuver in spite of the tight framework. As a result, diversity thrives where unity was intended.

The contribution of the Dutch Roman Catholic Church in the resettlement policy of collaborators after the Second World War has generally been acknowledge, although the Catholic charity organisations which took part in this process, especially the so-called Dutch Vatican Mission (Nederlandse Vaticaan Missie, NVM) and her successor the Dutch Charity Mission (Nederlandse Caritas Missie, NCM) has hardly been subject to academic investigation. In this article the influence of both short-lived organisations (1945-1950) in the reconciliation-process of convicted and non-convicted collaborators is described, which makes it clear that the NVM and the NCM played a role in the spiritual, material and financial support of former political offenders who had to return into society. The Missions also appealed on their behalf to the government and the Dutch society to establish a more merciful and lenient policy. Finally, the NCM was abolished ingloriously due to internal Catholic competition, financial and administrative mismanagement, and an unclear profile.