Brixton and Belfast: The English Young Christian Students Movement and Grassroots, Liberatory Theologies in post-1968 Britain
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This article considers the activities of a generation of young English Catholics – mostly middle-class convent and grammar school students – who belonged to the international Young Christian Students movement. Through examining two decades of the YCS magazine, alongside its detailed Study Programmes and annual Conferences, it charts the organisation’s increasingly politicised engagement with social justice and decolonisation agendas (especially in Africa) and its creative embrace of Christian-Marxism and Liberation Theology. Into the 1970s, with escalating tensions in Northern Ireland, the English YCS sought to incubate ecumenical Catholic–Protestant encounters in schools in Belfast and beyond, educating Catholic schoolchildren about the conflict and its causative links to British imperialism. As a case study of the religious experiences and faith-fuelled activism of thousands of young people in post-conciliar Britain, this recovered history of varieties of grassroots, liberatory theologies offers insight into present-day experiments with synodality.
Source: Irish Theological Quarterly
Author: Alana Harris
Institution: King's College London
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,650
OpenAlex ID: W7160328553
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