The ArgumentThis essay describes the emergence and stabilization in French and English experimental accounts, in second half of the seventeenth century, of the narrative sequence: X did (some process in the laboratory) and X saw (something happen), where X stands for a pronoun, I or we in English,je, nousoronin French. Focussing on the French case, it shows how the use of the collective pronounonin the experimental accounts registered in the files of the Académie des Sciences is directly related to the (...) will of this newly created institution to assert a collective authority on the production and legitimization of experimental matters-of-fact produced in the laboratory. It is argued, through the case of the discovery of the blind spot in the eye by Mariotte, that this new narrative form imbeds a construal of the experiment as a public spectacle, and of the proof as a witnessing event, which eludes the Academy's attempts to monopolize the process of fact validation and favors the diffusion and display of experiments in front of larger audiences. The question of whether a privileged witness such as the King of France who patronized the Academy could not have constituted by himself a suitable audience to ensure a full legitimization of experimental matters-of-fact while remaning within the bounds of academic practices is addressed. It is answered in the negative by providing evidence for the lack of interest of the absolute monarch in experiments. On the other hand, the outdoor practices of observation and measurement are shown to interfere in a constructive manner with the absolutist power and to capture the attention of the absolutist monarch, where laboratory experiments had failed. It is proposed that natural philosophers in the early modern period bear the burden of proof in buying credibility for the phenomena they try, by paying a tribute to the standing of the patrician elites that witness their experiments. This makes sense in a straightforward manner of the lack of interest of the King of France in a practice which exalts the power of the very group he is trying hard to control through the absolutist structure of power. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Prophetic Evangelicals: Envisioning a Just and Peaceable Kingdom ed. by Bruce Ellis Benson, Malinga Elizabeth Berry, and Peter Goodwin Heltzel, and: Bearing True Witness: Truthfulness in Christian Practice by Craig HoveyGuenther “Gene” HaasReview of Prophetic Evangelicals: Envisioning a Just and Peaceable Kingdom EDITED BY BRUCE ELLIS BENSON, MALINGA ELIZABETH BERRY, AND PETER GOODWIN HELTZEL Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012. 225 pp. $35.00Review of Bearing True (...) Witness: Truthfulness in Christian Practice CRAIG HOVEY Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011. 258 pp. $27.00Christian thought and practice in North America—especially in the evangelical world—has undergone significant changes in recent years. Prophetic Evangelicals and Bearing True Witness deal with two areas where this is evident: first, the attention many evangelicals are now giving to social justice and peace and, second, their determination to witness to the truth about Christ in a manner consistent with the Christian gospel. Prophetic evangelicals is the name the editors apply to a new generation of evangelicals who believe that the gospel of Christ requires a commitment to proclaim and embody “the just and peaceable kingdom” (2). These evangelicals view Jesus as inaugurating “a new social order that is a radical alternative to the order of empire” (7).This trend among evangelicals to move beyond the preaching of the gospel in a narrow sense (over against the liberals’ emphasis on social justice) is the culmination of a trend that has been happening since the publication in 1947 of Carl Henry’s The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism. What is new about many younger evangelicals in recent decades is their embrace of the Anabaptist perspective on justice and peace. It is clear in the introductory and concluding chapters by the editors—with their appeals to John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas and their references to the “cultural captivity” of the church—that this is the trend they have in mind. One also reads hints of liberation theology in the editors’ references to the needs of the people being “holy” (12), to God’s being on the side of—and the gospel always being in favor of—the “least” (47), and to a critique of “the order of empire” (7). Of course, [End Page 221] non-Anabaptist evangelicals are also concerned with these themes as part of their commitment to justice and peace. But it is the distinctive emphasis of this book—with some exceptions among the contributors—that it highlights the ways Anabaptist evangelicals are prophetic.The chapters consist of expositions on the following biblical themes: creation, shalom, justice, kingdom, news, Mary, the cross, church, freedom, reconciliation, resurrection, and hope. The authors include a wide range of evangelicals: from a Kuyperian (Vincent Bacote on creation) to a committed Anabaptist (David Gushee on shalom), to postcolonial Christians (Gabriel Salguero on the cross, and Raymond Alfred on freedom). Although the term is slippery, the inclusion of two contributors raises the question about who the editors consider to be an “evangelical”: Helen Slessarov-Jamir (on justice) agrees with her students’ desire not to learn theology from “dead white men” (77) and embraces religious pluralism (85); Pamela Lightsey (on reconciliation) embraces liberalism and liberation theology and calls herself a “womanist theologian” (169).The chapters contain a diversity of contributions in length and quality. Some are good, short expositions of themes: creation (Bacote), kingdom (Christian Collins Winn), Mary—actually about suffering—(Ruth Padilla DeBorst), church (John Franke), and resurrection (Cherith Fee Nordling). Gushee’s chapter contains a good exposition of the Anabaptist view of shalom, along with typical sweeping statements about the “Constantinian compromise” and the evangelical compromise with the state (72). Two chapters deserve special recognition. Chris Boesel’s chapter, “News,” is an excellent account of the Christian call to justice as part of the full goodness of the gospel. He criticizes both liberal-progressive and evangelical-conservative assumptions about the church’s mission and calls for a “recovering evangelical faith” that pursues justice with repentance, humility, and a reliance on the Holy Spirit. Telford Work’s chapter, “Hope,” also articulates a perceptive critique of the activism of both the Christian Right and the Christian Left. Rejecting all alignments with worldly power, he calls on the... (shrink)

What does it mean to be a peacemaker in a polarized world? It can feel as if the world-and the church-has never been more polarized. But when we feel worn down by the chasms dividing us, we can take hope from the early Christian vision of God uniting all things in Christ, a hope that can lead us to act. Stuck Together explores Bible stories and narratives ancient and modern that inspire us to open hearts and minds to persons with (...) whom we disagree as we gain confidence in our own convictions. Drawing from Scripture, from his own life journey, and from the witness of others, author J. Nelson Kraybill demonstrates how even small steps of reconciliation by confessionally grounded Christians can have big effect and give loving Christian witness in a polarized church and society. (shrink)

"Applies Emmanuel Levinas's thought in approaching environmental philosophy from both humanistic and nonanthropocentric points of view, arguing that themes at the heart of his work--the significance of the ethical, responsibility, alterity, the vulnerability of the body, bearing witness, and politics--are important for thinking about many of our most pressing contemporary environmental questions" --Provided by publisher.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps, and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may (...) freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

All too often, the study of ineffability only looks on the bright side of life—mystical experiences of blissful unity, primordial grounds of overflowing fecundity, noetic truths of existential profundity. To some extent, this is true too for Mélanie V. Walton’s Expressing the Inexpressible in Lyotard and Pseudo-Dionysius: Bearing Witness as Spiritual Exercise, which turns to a “desperate love letter to God” —the eros-infused naming and unnaming of God in The Divine Names, a treatise by the sixth-century Neoplatonic-Christian Pseudo-Dionysius (...) the Areopagite—for a means by which a Holocaust survivor might confront a Holocaust denier. Still, that the Holocaust features at all in a religio-philosophical book on ineffability might help give an otherwise lofty field of inquiry a much-needed grounding.It is difficult to put Walton’s thesis succinctly: Expressing the Inexpressible in Lyotard and Pseudo-Dionysius is a multi-faceted work with several theses. To begin with, there is the pro .. (shrink)

Rigorously studying the inexpressible expression provoked by the silenced testimony of the Holocaust survivor, in Jean-François Lyotard's The Differend, and the religious faithful, in Pseudo-Dionysius' The Divine Names, proves to dissolve the apparent heterogeneity of postmodernism and Neoplatonist Christian mysticism and open radical new lines of dialogue. Expressing the Inexpressible critically evaluates each thinker and tradition, rethinks witnessing, testimony, sublimity, and apophaticism, and then engages them together to forge a new reading of silence and eros.

The moral theology of Hans G. Ulrich is presented here in English for the first time. These collected essays represent the culmination of a lifetime of reflection on Christian living from this German theologian in conversation with Luther, Bonhoeffer, and contemporary philosophers and theologians. Ulrich's ethics affirms the lively presence of the living work of God in orienting the daily life of Christians. This presence enables members of the Church to live as creatures trusting in God's promises, bearing (...) class='Hi'>witness in political and economic spheres, and trusting in life as a gift in response to bioethical issues. Ulrich's fresh take on living out of the promise of God yields further guidance on issues in international relations, economics, parenting, disability, and more. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Christianity and the Religions: From Confrontation to DialogueJohn BorelliChristianity and the Religions: From Confrontation to Dialogue. By Jacques Dupuis, SJ. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001. 276 pp.Why read Jacques Dupuis's Christianity and the Religions (2001) when his more comprehensive, ground-breaking Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism (Orbis, 1997) is still available? Father Dupuis reminds us in the introduction to Christianity that he has actually (...) written three books on the same subject—Jesus Christ at the Encounter of World Religions (Orbis, 1991) being the first—but he reaffirms the central importance of Religious Pluralism. After publication of this second work, his editors wanted another volume on the same topic, "less ponderous, more accessible, and aimed at an audience broader than the circle of specialists and the academy." That was the origin of Christianity and the Religions, a story Fr. Dupuis related to me when I visited him at Gregorian University in early February 2001. It was meant to be an easier-to-read version of Religious Pluralism, something for students who do not need abundant references to authors and historical developments. Circumstances, however, added another dimension to the need for yet another volume. [End Page 182]Christianity and the Religions was ready for publication in early 2001, but Fr. Dupuis was waiting for "official notification" from the Holy See's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith regarding its charges that Religious Pluralism contained "serious doctrinal error." By then, the case was in its thirty-second and final month, for later in February 2001 he received word from Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation, that the charge had been reduced to "ambiguities and difficulties on important points which could lead a reader to erroneous or harmful opinions." Dupuis last appeared before Cardinal Ratzinger and the Congregation's advisers on the day before Dominus Iesus was released in September 2000, accompanied by Fr. Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, superior general of the Jesuits, and Dupuis's advocate and colleague at the Gregorian University, Fr. Gerald O'Collins. Dupuis used the opportunity of a more accessible version of the book in question to address squarely the charges raised against him. He writes in the introduction to Christianity and the Religions: "Suffice it to say that in this new book I have scrupulously avoided all expressions that could raise any misunderstanding or create ambiguity over either the content of the faith or my thought." Dupuis dedicated the book to retired Cardinal Franz Kōnig. He chose to quote an earlier (1963) text by Cardinal Ratzinger on the page following the dedication: "What the Church needs today, as always, are not adulators to extol the status quo, but men whose humility and obedience are no less than their passion for truth: men who brave every misunderstanding and attack as they bear witness; men who in a word, love the Church more than ease and the unruffled course of their personal destiny." In 1999, Ratzinger and Kōnig had exchanged views, point and counterpoint, in the British Catholic weekly, The Tablet, over Dupuis's earlier Religious Pluralism.Fr. Jacques Dupuis died of an apparent stroke on 28 December 2004 at age 81. Although the investigation had brought him increased attention and invitations to speak, he was in Rome, his home since 1984, at the time of his death. When I visited him in 2001 and again heard him speak at the Catholic University of America just twenty-four days before his death, it was clear how much the case and accompanying suspicion had hurt him. Dupuis was principally a theologian who had considered it his good fortune to have lived and taught in India for thirty-six years. He also had taught theology for nearly fifteen years at Gregorian University, the premier university of his religious order. Many viewed the outcome of the investigation as a vindication of his work because he did not have to change a single sentence in Religious Pluralism for it to remain in publication, but the success of his defense came at a great price. The shadow of suspicion never left him. He had adopted a style of stopping, often amidst reflections on religious... (shrink)

Mission is shaped by the life and experience of the church, both past and present, and this in turn is the function of both the work of the Spirit of God and the interaction of the people of God with their contexts. In line with this position, we examine the impact of Covid-19, highlighting some elements of the global context of mission, trends in world Christianity and mission. We then explore how global mission is in a process of realignment (...) that has the potential to be enhanced through embracing the conditions Covid-19 has imposed on us. Finally, we consider the need for deep reflection on our identity if we are to take the opportunity to bear faithful witness in this moment. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Scriptural AuthorityA Christian (Protestant) PerspectiveReinhold BernhardtThe Sola Scriptura Principle in the Reformation MovementIn curbing the authority of the ecclesiastical Magisterium the Reformation movement brought the authority of the Holy Scripture to the forefront as the normative foundation of Christian theology. One of its basic axioms is the sola scriptura principle, meaning that all one needs to know in order to live in a salvific relation to God can be (...) acquired “by scripture alone.” This constitutes the formal, epistemological principle of Protestant theology up to today, and complements the material principles solus Christus, sola gratia, and sola fide. Whereas these material principles refer to the manifestation of salvation in Christ (alone), to the eternal ground of salvation through the grace of God (alone), and to the gift of salvation by faith (alone), the formal principle of sola scriptura calls upon the Christian to realize that these three principles of material truth are made known to us (only) by the formal principle—by Holy Scripture. “The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man’s salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture.” 1On the one hand, the Reformers taught that Holy Scripture not only offers testimony to the Word of God but also is itself of divine origin since the authors wrote under the immediate influence of God. In view of this, God is ultimately the principal author, while the writing humans are only instrumental scribes. It follows from that that the Bible possesses divine authority.On the other hand the Reformers distinguished between the Bible as the Word of God and the Word of God in the Bible. Furthermore they made a distinction between the written word of the biblical books and the “Logos,” the eternal word of God, which speaks through the words of the Bible and addresses the reader here and now, existentially. As a testimony to and a medium of the Word of God the Holy Scripture for Luther is “Christ’s spiritual body,” 2 and thus the authority of the biblical scriptures is a derived and secondary authority. This authority does not rest simply on the sacred text as such but rather on the proclamation of God’s grace-filled Lordship over nature [End Page 73] and history in general and over the individual life in particular. It is not the text as such which is to be regarded as Word of God, but the text’s message. “Message” does not refer primarily to the semantic focus of the text as intended by the human author and as understood by the reader, but to the kerygma, the living and effective word of God. The Reformers stressed the soteriological efficacy of the “Word of God” as witnessed in the Scripture. Not only does this Word bear a specific significance and lead to insight and knowledge, but it also heals the broken relationship between the human and God, imparts forgiveness, incorporates into the community of saints, creates faith, and renews life. The Bible is the instrument of God through which God reveals Godself and opens the way to salvation through faith (which signifies existential incorporation) in Christ.Let us now take a closer look at the differences among the three branches of the Reformation movement—the Lutheran, the Calvinist-Reformed, and the Spiritualist—with regard to their understanding of scriptural authority.LutheranFor Luther there is a normative core message in the New Testament, a gospel within the gospels. It consists in the “good news” of the justification of the sinner sola gratia in Christ, without any contribution on the part of the one justified. God is the author of that “good news,” though it is not expressed in all of the biblical scriptures with equal clarity. As a consequence of this difference between the gospel and the scriptures Luther assesses the relative worth of the various books of the Bible, using the gospel of unmerited and unconditionally granted grace as the criterion for interpreting and evaluating the various biblical texts. The Epistle of James, for instance, he dismissed as a stroherne Epistel—a... (shrink)

There is an ancient Christian tradition of a ‘good and holy death’. That tradition has largely been forgotten in the medicalization of death, which regards death solely as an enemy to be defeated at all costs. This paper examines the tradition of a holy death through the lens of Margaret Edson's play W;t, with particular attention paid to the use of John Donne's poetry in the play. The paper then uses theologian Allen Verhey's writings on the Christian art of dying (...) as a means to understand the play in a Christian context, with special attention paid to the way in which it portrays Vivian Bearing, the play's protagonist, as a victim as much as a beneficiary of modern medicine. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Lotus Sutra as Good News: A Christian Reading 1Paul J. GriffithsChristian Reading of Non-Christian WorksFor Christians, the good news (the gospel) is, first and most fundamentally, a set of events: God’s loving creation of all things; his calling, or election, of a particular people to bear a covenanted relation with him; his incarnation, death, and resurrection; and the salvation of humanity wrought thereby. I’ll call this the fundamental (...) good news. Second, and derivatively, the good news is any witness to these events, any reflection or description or commendation of them in words or actions. Not all such witnesses are equally comprehensive and explicit. Some may present only a part of the fundamental good news: God’s love, say, or some truths about the human condition that comport well with or are required by the fundamental good news. And such parts may be presented directly and explicitly; or largely implicitly, veiled by allusion and metaphor; or even entirely implicitly, present only in what is not said. I’ll call all such witnesses, no matter the degree of their comprehensiveness and explicitness, examples of derivative good news.For us Christians, the Bible is the paradigm or archetype of derivative good news. There, for us, is found the supremely authoritative literary record of God’s acts for us and our responses to them. And in that literary record are the four gospels, which are also instances of derivative good news, but which bear the title ‘gospel’ or ‘good news’ (evangelism) and are derivative good news in an even more special sense than is the Bible as a whole. This is because they contain an explicit record of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, whose presence in the world was, is, and will be the pivotal event in God’s relations with human beings. The Bible as a whole is, for Christians, a work whose central topics are God’s acts and God’s relations to us, and it is uniquely authoritative on those topics. It is not itself the fundamental good news, nor the only witness to or literary presentation of the fundamental good news, nor a fully comprehensive and explicit witness to the fundamental good news; but it is uniquely authoritative for Christians as a witness and presentation to this fundamental good news. Christian understandings of the fundamental good news are therefore always formed in conversation with it, and are self-consciously constrained by what it says. It frames and constrains all other Christian instances of derivative good news, but is not itself framed or constrained [End Page 3] by them: this is its syntactic function in the formation of a properly Christian account of things.This, obviously, is a specifically Christian view of what the good news is, of what the phrase ‘good news/gospel’ means. The claims made in the preceding paragraph are part of the grammar of Christian faith, enshrined in doctrine, liturgy, and practice. The gospel book may be lifted and kissed before being read to the community of the faithful; the sign of the cross may be made on forehead, lips, and heart before the gospel’s words are read, to signify the purification of understanding, speech, and emotion required before the words of the good news can be heard, and to prepare for the sanctification of the person that is ideally consequent upon their hearing. Thinking and doing such things is part of what it means to be Christian, much as bowing upon meeting is part of what it means to be Japanese. I am a Christian, so this view of the good news is mine. It is the place from which I begin in thinking about the good news. To pretend otherwise would be disingenuous, or worse.But this Christian view of what the good news is does not entail, nor even suggest, that derivative good news is found nowhere but in the Bible. The claim that God is related lovingly to all human persons is part of the grammar of Christian faith: the state of affairs it describes is part of the fundamental good news. It suggests that evidences of God’s love ought... (shrink)

This collection of articles explores a broad range of issues relating to the development of Platonism. The volume takes in such figures as John Scotus Eriugena and Salomon ibn Gabirol, while bearing witness to an understanding and appreciation of the last head of the Platonic Academy, Damascius. The volume begins with a study of an aspect of Plato himself, his distinctly ironic way of making use of the ancient concept of the golden age and the history of a (...) notion that he bequeathed to his successors, the idea that the philosopher should develop something of an art or science of erotics. The volume continues on to explore areas such as the philosophical stature of Plato's nephew and successor, Speusippus, the functioning of Platonic dialogues within the intellectual life of the school, issues and figures within middle Platonism - notably Philo of Alexandria and Plutarch - various aspects of Plotinus' thought, evidence from Porphyry and Iamblichus and different aspects of the philosophy of Proclus. (shrink)

This is a series of essays by a group of young writers on the influence of the ecumenical dialogue on the fuller understanding and consequently on the development of Christian doctrine. As Fr Lash puts it in his introduction: ‘if the contemporary Christian is going to discover the life-giving word in its wholeness, then the ecumenical movement becomes a critical factor in doctrinal development’. That is quite patently true. But what appears to the present reviewer as less exact and in (...) a certain sense misleading is the statement made in the same introduction : ‘The one sure way of betraying the truth which enlivens it would be for the church merely to repeat the formulas of yesterday. Significantly, a persistence in the repetition of dead formulas is the best way of ensuring the death of effective Christian witness, for if you can convince yourself that nothing new needs to be said, you are more than half-way to convincing yourself that nothing new needs to be done’. When Pope John XXIII pointed out the difference between the substance of the deposit of faith and the way in which it is presented, he assuredly had not in mind the dogmatic formulas in which the church expressed its faith in the course of its history. Or are the formulas of Nicea dead? or those of Chalcedon and Trent? One fails to see in what precise sense a formula can be termed dead. The first part of the book deals in five essays rather with the abstract principles behind the relationship between ecumenism and the development of doctrine, that is, between ecumenism and the church’s fuller understanding of the Christian message. The second part consists of a long essay by the Dutch Jesuit Fr Frans Jozef van Beeck, entitled: ‘Towards an ecumenical understanding of the sacraments’, dealing with the theologically very important and practically very delicate problem of communicatio in sacris. This essay deserves a very attentive but critical reading. One is somewhat surprised to find no mention anywhere in the book of the ecumenical directory published by the Secretariat of Christian Unity on Pentecost Monday 1967. It has, as is well known, a direct bearing on the practical problem of communicatio in sacris. Fr Lash’s introduction is dated: July 1967. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Liberation and SpiritualityRoger HaightThese reflections on liberation and spirituality respond to a precise question. There is no better way to begin than in stating it clearly. People committed to action in behalf of liberation need a spirituality. What spirituality does Christianity offer them? The issue is not why Christian spirituality needs to be attentive to the demands of the poor and other victims of discrimination. The reasons why (...) Christian spirituality must be liberationist have been made convincingly over the past forty-five years. It should be taken for granted that Christians are to be concerned with liberation. A slightly different issue is at stake in the question of what spirituality, present in Christianity, is summoned forth when people who are dedicated to the project of liberation turn to Christianity and ask about its spiritual resources. This question comes from a different audience, one made up of those who are not sure that Christianity or religion generally has anything to offer to the commitment to human liberation. In addressing that question the goal is to respond with some clear convictions about what Christianity has to offer and how it may affect the lives of liberationists.Because this has to be done in a short space, the response will appear more like an outline than an argument. But both those familiar with Christianity and those less so will be able to understand the basic elements of the spirituality that is proffered. The presentation moves forward in three parts. The first explores the language of liberation and spirituality. The second and substantive part brings forward four classic witnesses to Christian spirituality and allows each to highlight a particular element of an integral Christian spirituality. And the third emphasizes the dimensions of ultimacy and finality.liberation and spiritualityThe words “liberation” and “spirituality” are familiar to everyone, but they do not bear the same meaning in everyone’s usage. The discussion, then, has to begin with a brief definition of the meaning of these terms as they are used here. These definitions [End Page 135] do not have to be developed at length. What follows simply stipulates aspects of these terms that are crucial for the logic of the position presented here.The term “liberation” is used very broadly because human repression takes many forms. In these reflections “liberation” refers to the process of attaining or assisting others to attain freedom from various obstacles to human flourishing. There can be no doubt that since the nineteenth century social oppression has provided a focal point for understanding liberation. Humanity in the West has gradually become more and more conscious of social and historical conditioning of individual human beings. We have learned that societies are human constructions; that they favor some and neglect, marginalize, and positively subjugate others; that no society has to be the way it is; that it can be changed; that some people encourage and others resist change; and that human beings can have a less or more conscious role in the process. We have the potential to be agents of social liberation. But other forms of liberation need not be excluded from the concept. It does not make any sense to neglect some forms of repressed human freedom in favor of others, even though some forms of human deprivation are more serious than others.One problem with such an open view of liberation is that it seems to give every liberationist concern an equal voice. It may even open a door to competitive interests. It is one thing to say that every human diminishment requires attention, but in a limited economy of human energy, time, and resources we cannot, either as individuals or societies, attend to all problems with equal vigor at the same time. We need some criteria for measuring importance. To this question a scale of values offered by Bernard Lonergan has some relevance. He begins to rank from below in an ascending scale the needs and values that lie open to human commitment.1 The denial of any basic human requirement like food and shelter calls out for liberation. But a scale of values measures relative importance of various human needs and opportunities for freedom’s development... (shrink)

The recent renaissance of Augustinian ethics remains mostly silent about the central place of slavery in Augustine’s thought. Although Augustinians appear confident his insights can be excised from his legitimation of the institution of slavery, two facts challenge this assumption: First, slavery constitutes not simply one moral issue among others for Augustine but an organizing, conceptual metaphor; second, the contemporary scene to which Augustinians apply his thought is itself the afterlife of a slave society. Thus, to bear faithful witness (...) in a racialized world, Augustinians must grapple with slavery as Augustine’s key conceptual metaphor, one that animates his thought and subtly reproduces the moral vantage of the master. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 257-259 [Access article in PDF] Jesus through Buddhist Eyes: 3rd Conference of European Network of Buddhist-Christian Studies, Archabbey St. Ottilien, Germany, February 26-March 1, 1999 John D'Arcy MayIrish School of Ecumenics, DublinThis ambitious conference, attended by well over 100 participants including a number of practitioners of Buddhist meditation from southern Germany and Austria, has put the European Network of Buddhist-Christian Studies firmly on its feet. (...) Intended mainly for academics working in the field and held entirely in English, the conference, on "Buddhist Perceptions of Jesus," traced various paths from the polemics which characterized relations between Buddhists and Christians well into the century now ending to the remarkable progress made by Buddhist-Christian dialogue in recent decades. The Archabbey of St. Ottilien has itself been the scene of intermonastic exchanges between the Benedictine monks and their Japanese Zen counterparts.The architecture of the conference brought out clearly the distance that has been traveled. Iso Kern (Berne) examined the missionary methodology of the Jesuits in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century China. He showed how they preferred to rely on arguments from reason rather than affront the Chinese with the full implications of Christian revelation, treading a thin line between absorption into harmony with Chinese religion as "a special type of Buddhism" and controversy about the uniqueness of Jesus and his redemptive death on the cross. The Christian idea of a Creator who redeems a sinful world by the substitutionary sacrifice of his own Son was so repugnant to Confucian sensibility that the Jesuits chose a different route, though Professor Kern defended them against Pascal's accusation that they 'hid' the scandal of the cross. Heinz Murmel (Leipzig, in a paper read in his absence) sketched the sterile polemics which characterized early Buddhist-Christian encounters in Ceylon/Sri Lanka, while Frank Usarski (São Paulo) analyzed the equally bitter exchanges between early German converts to Buddhism and their Christian opponents. We were to find not only that these controversies are still remembered in Southeast Asia, but that the obstacles to understanding encountered by the Jesuits in China and Japan still cause problems in Buddhist-Christian relations today. [End Page 257]Of fundamental importance to the development of the conference was a difficult paper by Shizuteru Ueda (Kyoto) on "Jesus in Contemporary Japanese Zen." Starting with his teacher Nishitani's presentation on "Nietzsche and Eckhart" to Heidegger's seminar in 1938, Professor Ueda set out to show how both European nihilism and Christian absolutism can be overcome by Nishitani's understanding of s´unyata: "The last ground of 'I am‚' is without ground and groundless." S´unyata is itself subject to s´unyata: nihilism can only be surmounted through nihilism itself. This dynamic relationship between Into-Nothingness and Out-of-Nothingness is Zen's point of access to Paul's characterization of Christian life-out-of death: "I live no more, Christ lives in me" (Gal. 2:20). Confronted by the question "Who said this?" as Nishitani confronted his Christian friend Muto, the Christian is challenged to ask whether he or she can actually say it, thereby bearing true witness. Ueda's problem is not with this witness, but with the Christian claim that Jesus is unique, for God is not only infinite Person but infinite Openness (basho).Some of these themes were echoed by two speakers who based themselves on experience rather than philosophy: Karl Schmied, a lay associate of Thich Nhat Hanh, and Than Santikharo Bhikkhu, an American monk at Suan Mokkh and Buddhadasa's translator in the last eight years of his life. Without repudiating his Catholic roots, Schmied said that he had simply found more joy in Buddhism. If Jesus is Son of Man and Son of God non-dualistically, could not the relationship between Buddhism and Christianity be one of non-duality, despite obvious differences (rebirth/ historical uniqueness; no-self/person; emptiness/being). Cannot Jesus be seen as a universal Bodhisattva whose 'center,' is everywhere rather than as God's 'only' son?Santikharo Bhikkhu, who still visits... (shrink)

Christians read the Jewish Scriptures in the light of what God did in Jesus the Christ. This ACCS volume on Exodus through Deuteronomy bears ample witness to this new way of reading these ancient texts. Varied in texture and nuance, the interpretations included in this volume display a treasure house of ancient wisdom, speaking with eloquence and intellectual acumen to the church today.

Christians have an obligation to attend to the voices of persons who are crying out that their dignity and very lives are in jeopardy when physician-assisted suicide becomes legalized. The following essay begins with an account of the concept of “disability moral psychology,” which elucidates the unique ways persons with disabilities perceive the world, based on their phenomenological experience. The author then explores the disability critique of PAS and the shared social conditions of persons who are chronically disabled and terminally (...) ill. Finally, the author positions the disability critique within Christian moral deliberations on PAS to unearth its significance for Christian ethics. To bear witness to a compassionate God, theological and ethical judgments concerning PAS must seek perspectives from persons who claim that their dignity and even their lives are in jeopardy by the practice. (shrink)

This illuminating study by Christian Jambet explores the essential elements of the philosophical system of Mulla Sadra Shirazi, an Iranian Shi'ite of the seventeenth century. The writings of Mulla Sadra Shirazi bear witness to the divine revelation in every act of being, from the most humble to the most celebrated. More generally, Islamic philosophy employs an ontology of the real that is important to the destiny of metaphysics, an ontology that belongs to our own universe of thought. The Act (...) of Being, nourished by the Sufism of Ibn al-'Arabi, the philosophy of classical Islam, the thought inherited from the Greeks, and the esoteric and mystical dimension of Shi'ism, seeks to make sense of this intuition of the real.Mulla Sadra saw the world as moving ceaselessly in an uninterrupted revolution of its substances, in which infinite existence breaks through the successive boundaries of the sensible and the intelligible, the mineral and the angelic. In a flourish of epiphanies, in the multiplied mirror of bodies and souls, Mulla Sadra perceived absolute divine liberty. Revealing freedom in the metamorphosis of the believer and the sage, existence teaches the imitation of the divine that can be seen "in its most beautiful form." Reading Mulla Sadra reveals the nexus of politics, morality, liberty, and order in his universe of thought--a universe, as Christian Jambet shows, that is indispensable to our understanding of Islamic thought and spirituality. (shrink)

This article explores the often-disparate commitments the chaplain has made to both the institutional church as well as the hospital system through the lens of the baptismal rite. As baptism is primarily a religious act meant to initiate new members into the Christian faith and a specific community, the chaplain must grapple with the meaning of baptism in the hospital system, a place of crisis and transient community. It is the numinous presence that binds the chaplain’s disparate commitments together in (...) the liminal space between the clinical and ecclesial within which the chaplain exists. The numinous expands the boundaries of institutions often at odds. The chaplain finds meaning and purpose by bearing witness and remaining committed to this numinous presence that binds. (shrink)

As evidence of the unintended consequences of industrial farm animal production continues to mount, it is becoming increasingly clear that, far from being a trivial matter of personal preference, eating is an activity that has deep moral and spiritual significance. Surprising as it may sound, the simple question of what to eat can prompt Christians daily to live out their spiritual vision of Shalom for all creatures--to bear witness to the marginalization of the poor, the exploitation of the oppressed, (...) the suffering of the innocent, and the degradation of the natural world, and to participate in the reconciliation of these ills through intentional acts of love, justice, mercy, and good stewardship. The aim of this work is to understand the cultivation of more intentional "compassionate eating" habits as a form of engaged Christian discipleship that responds to a wide array of practical, moral, and spiritual problems affecting all aspects of creation--human, animal, and environmental. The guiding suggestion is that compassionate eating is a spiritual discipline that offers a symbolically significant and practically effective way to live in faithful anticipation of the "peaceable kingdom" described in Judeo-Christian creation and redemption narratives. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:CHRISTOLOGY IN POLITICAL AND LIBERATION THEOLOGY R. R. RENO Creighton University Omaha, Nebraska Then I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse! He who sat upon it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he judges and makes war. His eyes are like a flame of fire, and on his head are many diadems ; and he has a name inscribed which no one knows but himself. (...) He is clad in a robe dipped in blood, and the name by which he is called is The Word of God. And armies of heaven, arrayed in fine linen, white and pure, followed him on white horses. From his mouth issues a sharp sword with which to smite the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron; he will tread the wine press of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty. On his robe and on his thigh he has a name inscribed, King of kings and Lord of lords. Revelation 19:11-16 SHARP IS THE SWORD of The Word of God: so proclaims a growing body of literature in political and liberation theology. Although this literature evidences a deep pluralism when describing wherein the sword is sharp and toward what it is aimed, the unifying claim is that Christianity has decisive political significance. And this significance takes an explicitly theoretical form. Unlike other politically directed theological programs (e.g., Reinhold Niebuhr, Walter Rauschenbush, Paul Lehmann), political and liberation theologies do not restrict the practical to a pre- or post-theoretical moment. The practical questions of liberation and justice are internal to explicitly theological reflection. The manner in which questions of liberation and justice are 291 292 R. R. RENO woven into the fabric of theology is manifold. Juan Luis Segundo, in Liberation of Theology, presents an account of theological method which is necessarily political.1 He attempts to show that, to the degree that it is faithful, theological reflection must be constituted by ideological critique and transformative social commitment. In a similar although more ambiguous way, Matthew Lamb's Solidarity with Victims seeks to build social and political issues into the ground floor of method.2 On a different front, Jiirgen Moltmann's Theology of Hope emphasizes the necessarily political dimension of eschatology.3 Quite far removed from the radicalism of most political and liberation theologies, but equally important and increasingly self-conscious of its theological context, the Roman Catholic human rights tradition can be seen as a political theology which chooses to operate within the context of a strong doctrine of creation.4 1 Juan Luis Segundo, Liberation of Theology. (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1976). 2 Lamb's program is more than a methodological proposal for theology in itself. He promotes an interesting mixture of critical theory and interdisciplinary study as a path for all inquiry. The result is a pastiche of Adorno and Lonergan. Lamb explains his interdiscipinary vision as follows : " Such a noetic praxis of theologizing would develop academically institutionalized ways of promoting an intellectual conversion (metanoia) whereby the suffering witness of the victims of history would challenge the systems and theories constitutive of our world experience " (Victims, p. 17). However, the critical element of this interdisciplinary "noetic praxis" which Lamb draws from Adorno's Negative Dialectics militates against this " institutionalized" use. At the deepest level Adorno questions the very possibility of a noetic practice which mediates the reality of experience, and he certainly rejects any institutional reification of the small insights which we might garner. For Adorno, critical thought cannot mediate the actual suffering of concrete individuals ; rather, its ultimate impotence in the face of such a reality mirrors the suffering of finite beings. Thought bears witness formally not materially. This basic feature of Adorno's thought runs counter to Lonergan's cognitive optimism, making Lamb's program interesting but implausible. Matthew Lamb, Solidarity with Victims (New York: Crossroad, 1982). SJiirgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope. (New York: Harper & Row, 1967). 4 David Hollenbach's Claims in Confiict (New York: Paulist Press, 1979) provides an example of a recent attempt to uncover the theological foundations for a theory of rights. Showing that the language of rights flows from a basic respect... (shrink)

Our text can redeem Christian participation in public affairs from sliding into a colorless humanism, just as it can do this by redeeming us from bearing witness to half a Jesus and to half a gospel.

Despite growing internationalization, national ties have remained a structural aspect of missionary and humanitarian work. This was especially true of the Interwar period in the Middle East, where colonial powers, independent states and political ideologies competed. The beginnings of the Action Chrétienne en Orient bear witness to this: the ACO, specialized in assistance to Christian Anatolian refugees and missionary work towards Muslims, made strategic use of its national connections. It retained German and Protestant connections, while serving as a formally (...) French broker between refugees or Protestant missionary organizations and the French colonial authority. Yet as looming independence seemed to threaten the position of Christian refugees, the ACO gradually entered the ‘colonial quadrillage’ through which France exerted guidance over voluntary organizations. (shrink)

Résumé Il existe inévitablement une distance entre les pratiques ecclésiales et le Dieu auquel elles s’efforcent de rendre hommage. Comment nos paroles et nos gestes humains pourraient-ils témoigner de façon juste du Dieu parfait? Cet écart est le lieu même de la théologie pratique, sa tâche étant bien sûr d’aider à le réduire. Mais cet écart n’est pas seulement la réalité de la vie ecclésiale, il en est aussi la chance ; car il fait entendre, au sein des institutions ecclésiales, (...) l’appel à vivre dans la confiance en Dieu plutôt que par leurs propres forces. Aussi la première tâche de la théologie pratique est-elle de mettre en évidence la réalité de cet écart et l’appel dont il est porteur.There is an unavoidable distance between the Christian observances and the God whom they try to serve ; human words and gestures can’t correctly witness to the perfect God. This gap is the very place of practical theology whose task is, of course, to help to shorten it. But this gap is not only the reality of church life, it’s also its good luck ; because it bears, within the churches, a call to live by faith rather than by their own strength. That’s why the main task of practical theology is to give evidence of this gap and of the call it bears. (shrink)

This contribution explores in detail the presence and the context of two quotations of the philosopher and theologian Abū Ḥāmid al-Ġazālī (Algazel for the Latin world) in Albert the Great’s late Summa theologiae sive de mirabili scientia Dei. The two quotations, which concern the notion of the soul as “abridged letter” or “copy” [nusḫa muḫtaṣara, chartula brevis] on which all pieces of knowledge are potentially transcribed, occur in two significant textual points of Albert’s Summa. Two different aspects of al-Ġazālī’s simile (...) are addressed in the article: the consideration of the soul as a book, which has extremely wide biblical and literary echoes, and the consideration of the soul as a place, also with regard to the already Aristotelian, and then Albertinian notion of locus intelligibilium. The feature the two passages by Albert share is the acknowledgment of Algazel as a source of primary importance, capable of corroborating with his authority both a Christian theological doctrine and the littera itself of Aristotle’s De anima, in a culturally momentous philosophical-theological, and Islamic-Christian, cooperation. Thanks to a focused analysis on further contexts of reception of the same Ġazālīan image, which bear witness to its peculiar memorability and its differentiated usages, the article argues in conclusion in favour of a more attentive and in-depth study of philosophical similes such as the one here discussed. (shrink)

The immense wealth of Greek and Latin Christian epistolography shows that in the first five centuries, the type of the letter reflects particularly the numerous topics in which theological and doctrinal issues, ecclesial and liturgical matters, and moral and social developmental questions are addressed. The epistolary genre increasingly becomes richer and more diversified as each letter bears witness to the faith and culture of its author. The pedagogical purpose remains dominant while the contents reflect the many issues and problems (...) that concern both the sender and receiver in matters of doctrine, the Church, and the reality of social life. The line of argument and style indicate at the same time the author’s culture and heritage as received from the classical tradition. (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 279—285. Concerning its Transitive Nature, the Conversion of Native Americans of Spanish Colonial California, Indoctrinated Catholicism, & the Creation There’s no direct archaeological evidence that Jesus ever existed. 1 I memorized the Act of Contrition. I don’t remember it now, except the beginning: Forgive me Father for I have sinned . . . This was in preparation for the Sacrament of Holy Reconciliation, where in a confessional I confessed my sins to Father Scott, who looked like Jesus, (...) at least in Western cultural representations of Jesus since the middle ages, and if Jesus put on a few pounds. Father Scott was long-haired, redheaded, bearded, chubby, and tall. When he left church with the procession of altar servers and Eucharistic ministers, yelling, “Sing a Good Song Unto the Lord,” he smiled, hands folded, and he gazed over his parishioners, and bounced along. For four months every year he lived among the Crow Nation in Montana, where towards the end of his tenure at Our Lady of Refuge, they adopted him as an honorary member of their tribe. * This is the prayer we chanted, holding hands, every night before dinner: Bless us oh Lord, for these our gifts, which we are about to receive, our bounty through Christ, our Lord, Amen. Then we all said, God bless the cook! When we were with my grandparents, Grandpa said, God bless Chicky, and Holly, and Harvey, and Boots—all the dead dogs. * My sister tells me that she sits next to a handsome man on a flight across the country. After chitchat, she withdraws her book. She’s reading Kevin Sampsell’s A Common Pornography . After a few moments, the handsome man also reads from his book—his leather-bound Bible. Sister thinks, Oh, Jesus—too bad. She falls asleep. Later, settled in Nashville, she opens her volume and out falls a Jesus-covered card that reads, You can still find God and Salvation! Because that handsome God-fearing young man saw that word— pornography . * I suppose Father Jim’s dark hair, beard, and glasses made me think doctoral-ly of him. He called while I was in the midst of a breakup, after I’d twice attempted suicide, and my mother was desperate for help. She somehow found and phoned him. And Jim, now years out of Our Lady of Refuge’s parish, twenty years since my baptism, years even since he’d left the priesthood and the Catholic faith, still made the effort to bring me back into the fold. He said, “Have you seen a priest?” I did not respond, as I was more shocked to hear his voice than anything, so I said, “How are you, Father Jim? Sorry, I guess I shouldn’t call you ‘Father.’” And I said, “Why did you leave the priesthood? Do you have a girlfriend?” He said that I should call him just “Jim.” He said, “Do you need someone to talk to?” I said, “Not really.” He said, “Call your mother; she’s worried about you.” That was the last time I talked to Father Jim. * Mother let me know just how disappointed Jesus was. I cried and cried, and said I was sorry. Into my hands she placed my missal, ordered forty Rosaries. She said next Saturday I would go to confession. I hated confession. Who wouldn’t? * I realize, of course, that this page is a kind of confessional. * The Kumeyaay, Ipai, Tipai, Chumash, Esselen, Rumsen—all Native Americans of Alta California—shared similarities in their religions. Southern Californian tribes made use of Datura, or jimpson weed, a hallucinogen, for religious rituals. In the creation, God made brother sky and sister earth. Brother and sister mated, and sister gave birth to all things on Earth, including people, but it was difficult to distinguish people from all other aspects of Earth because everything was alive: granite and obsidian, the Pacific and its waves, the San Diego and Los Angeles Rivers. Wiyot—a hero—was very powerful, born from lightning, the son of the Creator and a virgin. When Wiyot thought that human women’s legs were more beautiful than Frog’s, Frog became jealous and poisoned Wiyot. The dying Wiyot went to all the people’s villages, and he distributed his power among them. He said, “When I die, I should be cremated.” The people built the fire and funeral pyre. When the fire was ready, and the people about to place Wiyot’s body upon it, Coyote came and snatched away Wiyot’s heart. * My friend Nick told me once how he ate some jimpson weed and that he hallucinated for three days. His family took a road trip and, while driving over the Sierra Nevada mountains, he kept seeing dinosaurs roaming the open meadows and charging down snowy slopes. So it’s no wonder that Native Americans who ingested this plant would have developed religion. * Walking Castroville’s streets after school I got into fights but mostly watched other boys scrabbling on the asphalt. I went to Burger King for Whoppers. Me and my friends cussed. Antonio admonished me when I said, “damn,” while strutting a sidewalk alongside the church. He said, “Jaime”—pronounced Hi-May, which was what all the Mexicans called me—“you’re crazy, eh. Don’t cuss at the church.” He meant while at church, as in, within its vicinity. I said, “We’re not in church.” Once we’d crossed the street, Tony said, “Damn dude, you’re fuckin crazy!” * Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra raised the Eucharistic goblet to his lips, and candlelight danced on the blood’s tiny waves. Incense clouded the church so completely that some of the Pame natives grew nauseous. So, too, felt Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra later that night, as he bent over a ceramic bowl and vomited blood, not only the Lord’s, but his own, for poison had laced the sacred vessel into which he poured the sacrament. The physician tending to the sick prelate urged him to take the remedy he’d prepared. But Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra refused, said that he would pray, for he had never taken any medicine in his life, and he never would. * The Chumash of El Valle de Los Osos called themselves the Stishni, separating themselves from Chumash of other regions, those varying tribes of the central California coast that spoke mutually unintelligible dialects of their Hokan language. This made learning their languages impossible for the Spanish friars, to say nothing of translating the Doctrina. Thus the priests baptized few natives, despite the help that the tribes offered the fledgling settlements in the form of meat and acorn meal, which the Spaniards found repugnant. Some from these cultures, feeling threatened by the newcomers, shot flaming arrows into the thatched roofs of the mission structures. And why wouldn’t they feel threatened when priests chastised them for performing, for example, their Coyote Dance, wherein a man donning a coyote-skin-and-skull costume dances while a singer sings his tale, which laments the human feces strewn imaginatively about the Earth? Coyote, meantime, tries to get an onlooker to lick his genitals, and finally engages in public sexual intercourse with a female tribe member or two, then ends the dance by defecating. Though the Franciscans called such forbidden acts devilry , the Chumash maintained their Datura cult religion, along with the enforced Christianity. For the Chumash, the Earth was made of two enormous snakes that caused earthquakes when they slithered past one another—a vast reptilian tectonics. In the 20th century, long after Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra and his cohorts had died, when asked by an anthropologist about religious contradictions, conflating the Datura and Christian cults, a Chumash man replied, incredulous: “But these are two different religions.” * When Portolá ordered that if by March 19th, the feast day of St. Joseph, the San Antonio had not arrived in San Diego Bay to relieve them, the Sacred Expedition to Nueva California would be abandoned, Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra prayed a novena for San José’s intercession. And lo, a lookout sighted the San Antonio ’s sails—what seemed to the priest a miracle—that very Saint’s feast day. Europeans would stay in California, and Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra would continue to reap a great harvest of souls for the Lord. By the end of mission secularization in 1836—sixty-six years after the San Antonio rescued the Spaniards—Native American populations in California had declined by seventy-three percent. * When Peter the Aleut would not renounce his Eastern Orthodox faith the padre of San Francisco had a toe severed from each foot with each refusal, totaling ten. The native Ohlones employed in this gruesome task—their obsidian chiseled knives tearing through skin and grinding bone—continued as per their orders, and cut off also each of Peter’s fingers (equals a total of twenty refusals). They quartered the martyr, spilled his bowels, as if from bear attack, attack by a bear in the shape of a Catholic. * Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra absolutely believed that the slow rate of conversion for the native people was due to the influence of the Devil, who had been outraged by the coming of the Catholics to California, this region that he had long held in his dominion. * In his reception speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature, John Steinbeck said, “Man himself has become our greatest hazard and our only hope. So that today, St. John the Apostle may well be paraphrased: In the end is the Word, and the Word is Man—and the Word is with Men.” * In 1602, when Sebastián Vizcaíno and his friars sang mass on Catalina Island, as many as a hundred Pimungans witnessed the rite, asking by signs what it was about. According to Vizcaíno’s records, the Californians marveled not a little at the idea of Heaven and at the image of Jesus crucified. * Vizcaíno was brought to a prairie on Santa Catalina Island where the Pimungans worshipped their sun god. Upon the prairie they had placed an icon, a headless figure with horns protruding from the body, a figure that Vizcaíno predictably described as a demon. The Pimungans urged Vizcaíno not to approach the image of their deity, but he ignored them. He placed his crucifix against the wooden figurine and prayed the Our Father. Vizcaíno told the natives that his prayer was from Heaven, and that their god was the Devil. Vizcaíno held out his crucifix, encouraging the Pimungans to touch it and receive Jesus. He pointed at the sky and indicated Heaven. The Pimungans worshipped a sun deity, so they were impressed with this white man and his description of his god, for their gods seemed to be one and the same. It’s no wonder then that Vizcaíno’s diary reports the natives being pleased with this exchange. “Surely,” the diary says, “they will be converted to our Holy Faith.” * The Miwok women wailed and scratched at their faces when their men consorted with Sir Francis Drake and the other Englishmen who had landed on California’s coast in the summer of 1579. “The blood streaming downe along their brests, besides despoiling the upper parts of their bodies of those single coverings . . .they would with furie cast themselves upon the ground . . . on hard stones, knobby hillocks, stocks of wood, and pricking bushes.” Drake and his men fell themselves to their knees in prayer, their eyes Heavenward, so that the natives might see they prayed to God and they too might worship God then their eyes that had been so blinded by the deceiver might be opened. * Father Fray Antonio de la Ascención—Carmelite friar in Vizcaíno’s party—writes that the Indians of California can “easily and with very little labor be taught our Holy Catholic faith, and that they would receive it well and lovingly.” He calls for two hundred older and honorable soldiers to ensure brotherhood during the conquest, so that peace and love—the best tools to pacify pagans—should reign. The religious, the friar says, should likewise be wise and loving to easily quell animosities between Spaniards and the heathen, and therefore avoid war. The Spaniards should bring with them trinkets—beads, mirrors, knives—to distribute amongst the gentiles, so that they might come to love the Christians, and see “that they are coming to their lands to give them that of which they bring, and not to take away the Indians’ possessions, and may understand that they are seeking the good of their souls.” No women are to accompany the conquest, says Father Fray Antonio, “to avoid offenses to God.” * In 1955 Wallace Stevens admitted himself to St. Francis Hospital in Hartford, Connecticut. There, it’s rumored he converted to Catholicism before dying of stomach cancer, exclaiming to his priest after the baptism, “Now I am in the fold.” Stevens’s late-career poems seem less cynical, more in awe of being and death (read “Metaphor as Degeneration” from The Auroras of Autumn ). He could have chosen from at least three secular hospitals in Hartford at the time. * I was reading Stevens’s Collected Poems when I joined eHarmony and listed that as my “currently reading” book among the “more than twelve” books a year that I would read. I fell in love with my wife when she said, “Are you sending your work out to literary journals?” Prior to this, the first girl I talked to on the phone, when I explained my doctoral exams, said, “So, you’re like, reading Stephen King and stuff?” When I said not exactly she responded defensively: “He must be doing something right, since he makes all that money.” * Mom walked me, my brother, and sister, through the Stations of the Cross. We did this on Ash Wednesdays, or whenever she thought we needed extra God after church. It might’ve happened before church, though that’s unlikely because we were always late. Anyway, it’s easiest to walk the Stations of the Cross when there’s no one else around. To walk the actual Stations means one goes to Jerusalem and walks the Via Dolorosa to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. So the Stations elsewhere—usually paintings, or low-relief sculptures upon church walls—serve as a kind of virtual Dolorosa. Mom held our hands and started from the rear of Our Lady of Refuge: the First Station. Mom said we should say a prayer at each Station and to think of all the pain Jesus went through so that we could go to Heaven. It was hard to keep thinking about that one thing for so long. My mind went to that Saturday’s little league game, to the donut and chocolate milk (our after-church reward from Castroville Bakery), and as I grew older I thought about girls. When you’re thirteen you can’t not think about the girl’s butt in the pew in front of yours as she kneels and stands to pray throughout mass. * It grew increasingly juvenile to lie awake at night daring myself to utter a simple sentence. Even if I said I didn’t believe in God, wouldn’t He know the truth? He was omniscient, like a narrator. Even the idea of Him as a him ceased making sense. Not only did this come with a budding realization of my paternalistic culture, but due to the simple question of why? If God was everything, everywhere, all knowing, then why would he be a man? There’s that question: If God is a man then God must have a penis, and if so, what for? * The Catholic Church incorporates some modern scientific research into its dogma concerning the formation of the Universe, Solar System, and Earth, as well as evolution. According to Catholic doctrine, in approximately the fifth millennia BCE, humans began to worship the one true God. Those humans were Adam and Eve, though the Church says humans had been around for thousands of years prior to Adam and Eve. The Church claims to be infallible. Every time the Church changes its doctrine it remains infallible. * One Catholic writer, Tom Meagher, writes that “Modernism[—]the idea that we come to our beliefs individually through emotional or personal experiences[—]has crept into our Catholic schools.” * Catholics believe that evil spirits, given power through Original Sin, can imbue ordinary inanimate objects of everyday use. Thus, such objects should be blessed in order to induce in them the desire to serve the good. Such objects are not limited to, but include, “new ships and boats, railways and trains, bridges, fountains, wells, cornmills, limekilns, smelting furnaces, telegrams, steam engines, and machines for providing electricity.” * In The Sound of Music Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer sing together: “Nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could...” * To explain competing theories on the very early universe, and pre-verse would be another book. What was the inflaton? Did (mem)branes collide, initiating the Big Bang, as opposed to Lemaître’s primordial atom, a singularity? Without a unified theory there’s gravity hanging out there, fucking everything up. We cannot make sense of the mechanics of the Planck Epoch—0-10-34 seconds into the Universe’s creation—named for Max Planck, who stumbled into the discovery of quantum mechanics in the early twentieth century. * My students often ask if I believe in God, since I espouse evolution, the Big Bang, Science, reject a strictly biblical or creationist theory of the Universe. I tell them that yes, I believe in God, though not the God that they imagine one must believe in. * When questioned regarding the rumor that, before his death, founder of quantum mechanics Max Planck had converted to Catholicism, he replied that he did not believe “in a personal God, let alone a Christian God.” * Physicist and Catholic priest George Lemaître, who formulated the theory and wrote the 1946 book The Primeval Atom Hypothesis , was made a household name by then-detractor Fred Hoyle, who pejoratively referred to the idea as a “Big Bang.” * Suicide is a mortal sin. To end one’s own life one must have despair, which is to lose hope, which is to lose faith, and to disbelieve in God. * Archaeology has uncovered graffiti in all of California’s missions—Indian pictographs inscribed into the adobe, covered with layers of whitewash. Native deities and depictions of cultural practices show that tribespeople never fully gave up their native traditions even after baptism and coming to the missions. There was something inside Native Californians that would never die. (shrink)

Jean Richard | Résumé : Cet article se présente comme une réflexion sur un écrit de Paul Ricoeur concernant l’herméneutique du témoignage chrétien. À la simple confession de foi, « Jésus est le Christ », le témoignage ajoute un noyau narratif, comme on voit dans les évangiles. Il ajoute aussi la dimension existentielle de l’expérience personnelle. Car le témoignage de foi est plus qu’un simple reportage. Il exprime l’engagement du témoin dans la cause pour laquelle il témoigne. Le témoignage devient (...) ainsi profession de la foi personnelle, où le témoin s’identifie avec la cause de celui pour lequel il témoigne. Ricoeur peut parler alors du « témoignage absolu de l’absolu ». |: This article is a reflection on a paper by Paul Ricoeur on the Christian testimony. A testimony is more than a bare confession of faith. It includes a narrative, as we see in the gospels. But it is also more than a bare report. It comprises an existential layer of personal experience. It voices the whole commitment of the witness to the cause to which he bears witness. Thus, the testimony becomes a personal profession of faith, whereby the witness identifies himself with the cause and with the person he bears witness to. Hence Ricoeur’s word : “the absolute testimony about the absolute”. (shrink)

The present study examines how two famous professors in Central Europe decided to network together in order to promote traditional Christian faith through New Orthodoxy of Debrecen and Reformed Pietist of Vienna which became the source of renewal in the Reformed Church of Hungary. Their correspondence bears a witness to the endeavour to train, teach and guide young students enabling them to become persons of influence in the church. This research paper examines contents of the exchange of letters between (...) Ferenc Balogh of Debrecen and Eduard Böhl from Vienna with a particular view on how they educated the future generation along the evangelical-pietist faith that both professors adhered to. (shrink)

Literary sources In the closing days of his life Adam sends his son Seth to Earthly Paradise in order to find the soothing Oil of Mercy. However, Seth receives a twig from the Tree of Life to be planted on Adam's grave. The Jews will use the wood for the construction of Christ's Cross. In 1962 Esther C. Quinn publishes the first monograph on the Seth-personage in the context of the Legend of the Crosswood. In 1977 A.F.J. Klijn studies the (...) Seth-personage as it appears in the commentaries on Genesis, in the apocrypha of the life of Adam, in gnostic writings. While the Jewish apocrypha already considered the Seth-personage as a new Abel and a new Adam, patristics also typified him as a forerunner of Christ. Created after the image of Adam, he also was the pivot in the apocrypha on the life of Adam and Eve after the expulsion and the christian Gospel according to Nicodemus ). Two motives from that have persistently survived: the journey of Seth to Paradise and the Divine knowledge that was attached to two columns. Iconographical sources The fresco-cycle of Agnolo Gaddi in the Santa Croce in Florence at the beginning of the iconographical part of this article is not an arbitrary choice. It is here that the Seth-personage is visualized for the first time in the context of the Legend of the Crosswood. Subsequently it remains firmly bound to the fresco-medium and Franciscan donors in Italy. In this context the iconography of the Legend of the Crosswood is being transformed in function of an exegesis of the history of salvation. The Book of Hours of Catherine of Cleve from the middle of the 15th century is an isolated case, because its iconography of the Crosswood remains exceptional within the Netherlands. In the usual way the mass on Fridays concentrates upon the Cross or the Crucifixion in the text as well as in the iconography, but unusually by means of the long office of Gods Mercy and moreover illustrated by the Legend of the Crosswood culminating in an image of the Man of Sorrows. The choice of the subject might refer to a Franciscan background. From an iconographical point of view it is of considerable value that the Lutwin 14th-century German variant of the Vita Adae et Evae has been illustrated in a 15th-century manuscript. An existing tradition may be assumed, because the same iconography appears in three from the Vitae interpolated scenes in a Bavarian manuscript of the chronicle of Rudolf von Ems. This insertion in the Genesis-part of a worldchronicle allows it to presume that the Seth-personage could be found in 'classical' Genesis iconography. The southern porch of the choir in Schwabisch Gmünd and the northern friezes of the cathedral of Toledo bear witness to this. The second seems to use a Legenda-source. The representation of the Seth-vision seems to be confined to the one of Toledo, although Spanish variants of the Legenda-source have not been discovered as yet. Finally, the Seth-of-the-columns passage, as described in the Vita and included in medieval worldchronicles through Flavius Josephus, symbolizes the transmission of Divine knowledge to humanity. The Geometria Divina that was assigned to Adam, is destroyed by the Flood. This is shown in a miniature in a 14th-century manuscript of Rudolf von Ems, where Adam's column acts as counterpart of Noah's ark. The knowledge of astrology, Seth's learning, lives on. In this way the Chronica Regia Coloniensis wants to found the Holy Roman Empire on these columns: Seth and Adam represented as the 'authors' of the Civitas Dei. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Becoming Nonviolent Peacemakers: A Virtue Ethic for Catholic Social Teaching and US Policy by Eli Sasaran McCarthyMarc V. RuganiBecoming Nonviolent Peacemakers: A Virtue Ethic for Catholic Social Teaching and US Policy Eli Sasaran McCarthy EUGENE, OR: PICKWICK PUBLICATIONS, 2011. XVII 1 259 PP. $32.00Contemporary US political discourse is generally couched in the language of rule-based rights analysis or utilitarian calculus, both of which limit the imagination of decision-makers (...) and society at large. In Becoming Nonviolent Peacemakers, Eli Sasaran McCarthy seeks to disrupt any complacency Americans and our representative leadership might have with these ethical approaches. Drawing on well-reasoned philosophical arguments and the witness of paradigmatic figures, McCarthy builds a case for public policies of nonviolent peacemaking created from and analyzed through the framework of virtue ethics. Such policies, he posits, would not only achieve a more comprehensive agenda of peacemaking but would also approach more closely the vision of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Beloved Community."McCarthy's project is ambitious and multifaceted. He sets out to synthesize critiques of prevailing rule- and strategy-based assessments of nonviolent [End Page 204] peacemaking, making proposals for a virtue-based assessment from Christian, Hindu, and Muslim sources as well as with the best contributions of human rights theory in order to supplement a virtue approach. At the outset he states, "My thesis is that a virtue-based assessment of nonviolent peacemaking enhanced by aspects of human rights discourse largely resolves key limits of rule-based and strategy-based assessments of nonviolent peacemaking for public discourse and policy" (2). To prove this, he grapples with influential scholars on the subject, such as James Childress and Gene Sharp, to show how deontology and consequentialism too narrowly constrain the vision of what nonviolent peacemaking can achieve, both in effect and the formation of agents' character. Addressing the work of Bernard Häring, Stanley Hauerwas, and Lisa Sowle Cahill, he brings the fruit of Christian theological ethics to bear on the advantages of a virtue-based assessment of nonviolence. Though that is significant enough, McCarthy also presents the life and work of both Mahatma Gandhi and Abdul Ghaffar Khan to demonstrate the consonance of a virtue approach even across cultural and religious lines. He finally plots a way forward using the best of rights theory and virtue theory to show how nonviolent peacemaking fulfills the Catholic social tradition's vision of human dignity and the common good.McCarthy lends much to the argument that "we ought to consider nonviolent peacemaking a distinct virtue rather than merely subsuming it in the paradigmatic actions of other virtues" (75). With scripture at its foundation and positioned within the traditions of virtue ethics and the Catholic social doctrine, he weaves a tight argument for nonviolence within a Christian context while also aiming to be approachable and sympathetic to non-Christian perspectives. Because of the contemporary context of McCarthy's project, he does focus his attention almost exclusively on twentieth- and twenty-first-century sources; it would be helpful to be already familiar with virtue ethics and its classic sources, like Aristotle, Cicero, and Aquinas.McCarthy writes clearly and directly to readers, making the schema of his argument explicit in each chapter. His extensive referencing and ample bibliography engage both academic research and popular journalism, making this a great resource for those pursuing public theology and students in advanced undergraduate and professional study. His last chapter, which provides a case study regarding the Sudanese genocide in Darfur, applies his peacemaking proposals in a compelling thought experiment. One can hope McCarthy's continued research yields not only more case studies that invite creative problem-solving through the virtue of nonviolent peacemaking but also a book-length study that challenges US domestic policy as successfully as his investigation of US foreign policy here. [End Page 205]Marc V. RuganiThe Catholic University of AmericaCopyright © 2017 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

In this essay, a translation into English of Martin Heidegger's paper Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry, Paul de Man demonstrates his significant engagement with the work of Heidegger. He considers Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin's five key-passages on the subject of poetry, suggesting that the order in which these passages appear as well as the inner coherence that links them together will reveal the essence of poetry. He first comments on Hölderlin's claim that poetry is ‘the most innocent of all (...) crafts’ and goes on to discuss the four other key-passages: ‘Therefore, man was given language, the perilous of all blessings... that he bear witness to what he is... ’; ‘There is much that men have experienced. They have called the many of the heavenly by name, since we are an exchange of words, and one can hear from another’; ‘The poets found what will endure’; ‘With merit, and yet poetically, man dwells on this earth’. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Mystery of Sacramentality:Christ, the Church, and the Seven SacramentsCharles JournetTranslated by Aaron D. Henderson, with Introduction and NoteOriginally: Charles Journet, "Le Mystère de la sacramentalité: Le Christ, l'Église, les sept sacrements," Nova et Vetera 49 (1974): 161–214.Translator's IntroductionThe thought of Charles Cardinal Journet, venerable founder of the present journal and unparalleled twentieth-century master of Thomistic ecclesiology, merits a wider reception and a more ardent love.1 Not a few (...) have recognized this of late, producing articles and books dedicated to explicating his teaching.2 Nevertheless, much remains to be done to ensure that English speakers have fuller access to Journet's corpus. For instance, only the first [End Page 611] volume of L'Église du Verbe incarné,3 his magnum opus, has been translated into English.4 It is with this in mind that we set out to translate the article below. And it is no meager article that is reproduced below (though such a work is foreign to Journet), but one of considerable substance and importance. After all, it is a wonderful (and wonderfully extensive) expression of his post-conciliar Christology, ecclesiology, and sacramental theology. Indeed, written in 1974, but one year before his death, this article represents the mature fruit of many years of contemplation and prayer.With respect to his ecclesiology, Journet was influenced by the Second Vatican Council, in which he participated after his elevation to the episcopacy and cardinalate. As an example of this influence, an influence evident in the article below, the conciliar documents speak in several places of the sacramentality of the Church.5 The Church is, in Christ, a sacrament, "a sign and instrument both of a very closely knit union with God and of the [End Page 612] unity of the whole human race."6 Describing the Church as a sacrament is part of the Council's effort to unfold for the Catholic faithful and for the whole world the Church's inner nature and universal mission. Following the teaching of the Council, therefore, Journet includes the Church herself, in her being and action, in "the mystery of sacramentality."7But the mystery of sacramentality includes more than the Church. Indeed, there is a respect in which the entire economy of salvation is sacramental. Furthermore, the Church is a sacrament (a sign and instrument) only in a derived sense, in a way wholly dependent on her divine Spouse and Head. It is for this reason that Journet refers to Christ as "the sacrament of the divine life in its source" and to the Church as "the sacrament of the divine life communicated." Both Christ and the Church, then, are sacraments, but not in precisely the same manner. As Journet puts it, "Now, to which of these two is the Second Vatican Council's definition, 'universal sacrament of salvation,' suited? To Christ and to his Church respectively, though proportionally (that is, analogically)."8Journet's systematic ordering (first Christ, then the Church, and finally the sacraments) is intelligible and consonant with others who suggest that, had St. Thomas written an ecclesiological treatise in the Summa theologiae, it would be situated between the questions on Christ (ST III, qq. 1–59) and the questions on the sacraments (ST III, qq. 60–90).9 Journet begins [End Page 613] his work, however, with a reality that he refuses to call a sacrament, namely, the Most Holy Trinity. The Trinitarian mystery stands at the heart of the Christian faith; it is the source of the mystery of sacramentality. We see the splendor of the entire economy of salvation, and of the New Law especially, in the mystery of the Trinitarian indwelling and missions of the Son and Spirit. The Word became flesh, became human, so that he might rescue our sin-ravaged world. Jesus is, in his sacred humanity, the sacrament of the Trinity, the sacrament of the divine life in its source, to employ again Journet's language.Journet describes the Word as seizing or taking hold of the depths of his sacred humanity in his being and in his action. The Gospels bear authoritative witness to this, but they... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.4 (2002) 619-637 [Access article in PDF] Maimonides and the Rise and Fall of the Sabians:Explaining Mosaic Laws and the Limits of Scholarship Jonathan Elukin The Koran mentions the Sabi'un three times (II 6-2, V 69, XXII 17). "Believers, Jews, Christians, and Sabi'un—whoever believes in Allah and the Last Day and does what is right—shall be rewarded by their Lord; they have nothing (...) to fear or to regret." This language is repeated in the second citation. The third appearance is slightly different: "As for true believers, the Jews, the Sabi'un, the Christians, the Magians, and the pagans, Allah will judge them on the Day of Resurrection. He bears witness to all things." 1 Early Islamic commentators often disagreed on the identity of the Sabi'un, and the confusion continued throughout the medieval Islamic period. 2 The term Sabi'un was applied by some early Koranic commentators to the survivors of an ancient Jewish-Christian sect, the Elchasites in southern Iraq. 3 One minority group of ethnic Arab "pagans" with a hellenized elite in Harran, in Arabia, also took the Koranic name Sabian in the third/ninth century to claim the status of a "people of the book" and therefore avoid persecution. It is this group that some later Muslims identified as Sabi'. 4 The scholarly consensus now suggests that [End Page 619] the term Sabian refers to some kind of Gnostic identity that can encompass "the disciples of Judeo-Christian baptizing sects... and, on the other, Harranian astrolators, the last representatives of decadent Greco-Roman paganism." 5The mysterious Sabians would play a key role in attempts by early modern European scholars to understand the origins of the Mosaic legislation. It was through Maimonides, the great twelfth-century Jewish scholar, that the Sabians were transmitted to Christian scholars. By the seventeenth century, the Sabians of Maimonides's Guide for the Perplexed had become a fixture in how scholars understood or at least debated the history of the origins of Mosaic law. Increasingly perceived as a diffuse paganism rather than a specific ethnic identity or subsumed by the more tangible reality of Egypt, Sabianism drifted to the margins of scholarship by the end of the Enlightenment. During the nineteenth century the Sabians became superfluous to scholarly efforts to understand the origins of Israelite monotheism. This study is an attempt to understand the growth of the enthusiasm for the Sabians by early modern scholars and then its precipitous decline. In a large degree it was the nature of the evidence itself regarding the Sabians that shaped and ultimately undermined the survival of the Sabians in European thinking. Still, both Christian and Jewish scholars well into the twentieth century lived with the ghosts of the Sabians as they sought to explain otherwise mysterious Mosaic commandments.In the Guide Maimonides argued that the sacrificial system legislated by Moses was an example of God's mercy. It would have been impossible for the Israelites to abandon suddenly the style of idolatrous worship learned in Egypt, and so Moses crafted the sacrificial system gradually to replace false gods with the true God. Maimonides still needed to explain the particular details and reasons for the sacrifices and the other ritual laws. 6 To that end he claimed to have read various texts, particularly the so-called Nabataen Agriculture, which purported to describe Abraham's education among and flight from the Sabians as well as a summary of the practices of the Sabians. 7 (The Sabians had made one brief appearance before Maimonides's discussion in the Guide; the tenth-century Karaite Jew, Qirqisani, declared in his Kitab al anwar, "the modern Christian philosophers assert that the laws of the Torah were given to the Children of Israel only because of God's wrath; and that they [Israel] have chosen these laws for themselves only on account of their resemblance to the laws of the Sabians, which was due to the fact that they became... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Keeping Philosophy in Mind:Shadworth H. Hodgson's Articulation of the Boundaries of Philosophy and ScienceThomas W. StaleyIntroductionShadworth H. Hodgson's (1832–1912) contributions to Victorian intellectual discourse have faded from prominence over the past century. However, despite his current anonymity, Hodgson's case is important to an understanding of the historical split between philosophy and science in late nineteenth century Britain. In particular, his example illuminates the specific role played by developing concepts (...) of the mind in a period of deep transition in the British intellectual community. His virtual disappearance from the record, I contend, is indicative also of the disappearance of his form of philosophy as a vital social project. His ideas, rather than being rejected, were instead largely neglected—they became lost as philosophical discussion moved elsewhere, both conceptually and institutionally. However, in the inaugural volume of Mind in 1876, Hodgson's ideas initially found a prominent place in a central dialogue over the position of philosophy with respect to science. There, and throughout his career, Hodgson engaged in the defense of an intellectual tradition he regarded as under threat from psychological science. Both his particular formulation of an ongoing role for philosophy and his own uneasy position in the intellectual environment of late Victorian Britain shed significant light on an under-examined issue [End Page 289] of the period: the fraught relationship between philosophy and science as competing enterprises engaged in the study of the human mind."Philosophy" and "science" are easily construed as partnered intellectual complexes in modern Western society. However, closer scrutiny of the historical record shows that the two terms—whether as theoretical referents or actors' categories—have often reflected divergent priorities and that transitions from "philosophical" to "scientific" terms have been contentious. In examining the birth of natural science out of natural philosophy during the Enlightenment, the historian Andrew Cunningham has emphasized how the reordering of intellectual fields created new conflictive relationships between philosophy, science, and religion.1 He reminds us that the process of scientific secularization was but one of a set of constitutive shifts among these human activities, and that the earlier natural philosophy thus played by fundamentally different rules than its successor. A similar story can be told about the late nineteenth-century transition I am considering: in a nutshell, to borrow a phrase from Cunningham, men did not start doing mental science until they stopped doing moral philosophy. However, this time, philosophy already stood in competition with existing scientific institutions, sparking a more severe contest for authority. As mental science began to develop along the lines of the natural disciplines, Hodgson and others feared little would remain as a distinctive domain for philosophy as such, moral or otherwise. His efforts on the part of philosophy thus represent one front in an intellectual "turf war"—what recent scholars have called "boundary work," shoring up the institutional positions of different intellectual enterprises competing for authority in the world.2 Gieryn's formative analysis of boundary work was based on the contemporaneous example of John Tyndall's campaign to promote scientific over religious authority in Victorian Britain, but this was much more than a two-way struggle. The early career of Mind bears witness to a closely related, but less discussed, battle for influence between philosophy and science, in which the journal itself served as a critical "boundary object," a medium for enforcement of the distinctions between these two intellectual fields.3 [End Page 290]Thomas Dixon has recently surveyed the origins of this shift. Like Cunningham, Dixon emphasizes the constitutive differences in scope and orientation of the two intellectual enterprises, salient among them the secularization of the new human sciences.4 This process—begun tentatively by Thomas Brown and brought to fruition by Bain, Spencer, and Darwin—involved wholesale shifts in the scholarly linguistic complex, from a set of several mental categories rooted in Christian philosophical categories—affections, passions, sentiments, etc.—to a novel, explicitly "scientific," and singular grouping of emotions. While the older tradition dominant until mid-century had understood the broad range of mental phenomena as largely rational and voluntary, the new emotions were formulated as more circumscribed in purview, subconscious or autonomic in action... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Holy Communion: Altar Sacrament for Making a Sacrificial Sin Offering, or Table Sacrament for Nourishing a Life of Service? Paul J. Nuechterlein Emmaus Lutheran Church, Racine, WI The title spells out the alternative I would like the reader to consider: Is Holy Communion more appropriately considered the "table sacrament" or, as is more commonly accepted, the "altar sacrament "? I will make my preference clear. In Holy Communion, I (...) believe Jesus Christ to be offering nourishment for a different way to live —namely, the way offreely chosen service to others, as opposed to violent domination over others. "Table sacrament" more appropriately conveys the sense of nourishment toward a new life. I will support this positive reasoning in favor of "table sacrament" through an appeal to Christian scripture. I will also suggest a negative reasoning against "altar sacrament," by questioning whether the very reference to "altar" betrays a link to violence, with its base in the blood ofsacrifice. For this negative argument, the support will come primarily from the brilliant and far-reaching theories ofRené Girard regarding the relation between religion and violence. I would like us to consider whether the most obvious point of the relation between religion and violence—namely, rituals ofsacrifice—has been precariously intermingled with the church's practices and experiences of the "altar sacrament." Girard's theories force us to ask: Is not the altar ofsacrifice essentially the site for a ritualized form of collective violence? 202Paul J. Nuechterlein Girard contends that there are overwhelming cultural and anthropological forces that make it difficult for religions to free themselves from such violent underpinnings. He considers that all religions, in fact, are cultural manifestations ofa generative mimetic scapegoating mechanism, a natural human/social mechanism which contains an all-against-all, communitywide violence by means ofan all-against-one act of violence, i.e., a scapegoating. Religion is, according to this theory, the primary cultural institution that forms in the aftermath ofwhat Robert Hamerton-Kelly summarily calls the "Generative Mimetic Scapegoating Mechanism, or "GMSM" event (1994). Institutionalized religion fortifies the relative peace that the event has accomplished through a three-fold structure: (1) laws and prohibitions, established to prevent further outbreaks ofmimetic violence; (2) mythical stories of the GMSM event, told from the perspective of the perpetrators as a means to justify their violence and disguise it behind the veil of the sacred; and (3) ritual reenactments ofthe GMSM event, most commonly in the form of blood sacrifice, that channel any continuing violent impulses into structured, contained releases. We must be bold to ask of each religion, then, the ways in which it manifests and perpetuates the GMSM. This includes Christianity. To the extent that Christians practice religion, we can expect to find effects ofthe GMSM in essential aspects of the church, such as its practice ofthe "altar sacrament." Girardian support for my argument, however, does not end with this negative thesis regarding the "altar sacrament." Nor does Girardian criticism leave us with a wholly negative assessment of the Christian tradition. In fact, Girard himself experienced a conversion of sorts (see Golsan 129-30), as he began to see his basic premises and theories already revealed in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures, especially the gospel narratives of Jesus Christ. He came to view the Christian faith—in spite of its susceptibility to the violent forces of religion—as unique in its core message ofrevealing the one true God. Contrary to the gods ofmythology, the Christian message, through Jesus Christ, reveals the true God to be on the side ofthe GMSM's victims. As such, the Gospel ofJesus Christ stands in opposition to the three-fold structure of religion: (1) it frees people from the oppressive systems oflaws and prohibitions;1 (2) it demythologizes the mythical stories told from the perspective of the perpetrators;2 and (3) it 1 A theme of St. Paul and his criticism of the Law? (see Hamerton-Kelly 1992). 2 A theme of St. John's emphasis on Jesus, the Lamb of God, as bearing witness to the Truth? Holy Communion203 makes obsolete the need for rituals of sacrificial violence.3 The Gospel opens up the way for new life, and for rituals that nourish the new... (shrink)

Proclus, successor of the School of Athens in the fifth century AD, is one of the last great voices of a pagan polytheistic world in crisis in the face of the gradual rise of Christianity. His writing bears witness not only to one of the most influential metaphysical representations for the constitution of the idea of a philosophical "system" based on a complex "language game" based on the conceptual sphere of "order" and "unity", but also of an attempt (...) to reconcile rhetorics with philosophy. In the three chapters in which the book is structured (style, system, unity), then, a conscious intention is evident in Proclus, to adapt the content of his systematic metaphysics to literary form. Hence there is a consistency traced in Proclus' stylistic choices, with the aesthetic norms of a rhetorical canon, probably established in the cycle of readings of the Neoplatonic school. His writing bears witness not only to one of the most influential metaphysical representations for the constitution of the idea of a philosophical "system" based on a complex "language game" based on the conceptual sphere of "order" and "unity", but also of an attempt to reconcile rhetorics with philosophy. In the three chapters in which the book is structured (style, system, unity), then, a conscious intention is evident in Proclus, to adapt the content of his systematic metaphysics to literary form. Hence there is a consistency traced in Proclus' stylistic choices, with the aesthetic norms of a rhetorical canon, probably established in the cycle of readings of the Neoplatonic school. The way in which expressive "art" is subordinated in Proclus to philosophy is one of the most emblematic examples of a development in late antiquity, that of the enkuklios paideia - the union of all the arts necessary for the formation of man - that would later constitute in the Latin world the cycle of liberal arts. (shrink)

South Africa has a long history of orality deeply embedded in the archival memory of the ‘Other’ or the history of the poor and oppressed. Their untold stories, undocumented histories with displacing identities are how the historical ‘Other’ has been perceived by colonialism and the apartheid regime. The ‘Other’ or primary oral communities in the context of this article can be seen by a name, a face and a particular identity, namely, indigenous people. This article will engage the work of (...) Finnegan on what is ‘Orality – if anything’. The term ‘orality’, as a conceptual tool, can help us to widen our horizons and attention to forms of human creativity and imagination which was neglected or unnoticed by scholars. Orality has forced scholars to ask new questions on what is the meaning of ‘text’ and encouraged and challenge scholars in orality and literacy research with a new analysis of what we thought we already knew. The article engages oral and written research and how it can assist in understanding the discourse of the ‘Other’ and the power relation in reconstructing and re-ordering of their social universe through collective memory, songs, rituals, satire, drama and political protest which at large was perceived by the apartheid era and Western colonisers as savage, uncivilised and barbaric. The oral discourse of the ‘Other’ has become part of the power struggles politically and educationally in South Africa. Orality has further reshaped the Christian discourse in South Africa and Africa as the poor and oppressed find new power in a discourse of metaphysics of presence of the Gospel through preaching and bearing witness of their new encounter spiritually. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological CategoryMax RosenkrantzThomas Dixon. From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. x + 287. Cloth, $60.00Thomas Dixon's From Passions to Emotions defends a provocative set of theses. (1) The concept of "emotion" is of relatively recent vintage, having been designed by secular Scottish writers in the first half (...) of the nineteenth century. (2) That concept embraces a range of phenomena that earlier Christian writers such as Augustine and Aquinas understood in terms of a manifold of concepts such as "appetites," "passions," "affections," and "sentiments." (3) The concept of "emotion" is too crude an instrument for understanding human psychology. Further, (4) today the secular conceptual framework has completely displaced the religious one. This has nothing to do with the former's greater proximity to the truth, as is shown by the persistence of cogent Christian theories in the second half of the nineteenth century, the period of secularism's triumph; and (5) The opposition between reason and emotion arises only when theorists begin to think of "emotions" rather than "appetites," "passions," "affections," and "sentiments." Christian writers did not see the passions as simply the enemies of reason.The basis for Dixon's argument is his interpretation of nineteenth-century psychological theory in the English speaking world. Specifically he argues that the concept of "emotion" was invented by the Scottish thinker Thomas Brown (1778-1820). Brown's innovation was then appropriated and developed by Spencer, Darwin, and William James. The foil for this story is the Christian tradition represented most compellingly by Augustine and Aquinas and carried on by a host of lesser nineteenth-century figures. In my judgment, the story thus told cannot bear the weight Dixon places upon it.The centerpiece of Dixon's argument is his claim that Brown "invents" (109) the emotions and thereby initiates a conceptual revolution in western thought. While Dixon may be right in asserting that Brown is the first to use the word 'emotion' in a systematic fashion, this achievement is merely terminological. Brown deploys the term to develop a mechanistic account of human nature, one in which the springs of action are located not in the will and reason, but in the emotions. Replace 'emotion' in the preceding sentence with 'passion' and one gets a concise characterization of Hobbes's view. Dixon is aware that Brown and others work within a Hobbesian framework (250) but does not attend to that framework. Thus his claims for the significance of the developments he describes fail to convince. The real innovation in psychological theory—as in so much else—took place in the seventeenth century.Just as Dixon overestimates the importance and originality of the Scottish writers he discusses, so too he overestimates the intellectual importance of Augustine and Aquinas. His presentation of their views (26-62) is accurate, but he does not note that they take over the Platonic-Aristotelian view of the soul according to which reason can and should penetrate, educate and direct the passions. Thus the guiding thought that structures the work—the nineteenth century witnesses an ultimately successful revolt against Christian psychology—must be rejected. The revolt is against ancient, pre-Christian modes of thought and is undertaken and largely won in the seventeenth century. The events Dixon describes are skirmishes in that larger campaign.The rest of the theses Dixon defends can be dispatched with more quickly. The idea that the modern concept of "emotion" is insufficiently subtle is averted to frequently, but never adequately defended. At no point does Dixon demonstrate, or even claim to demonstrate, that Christian thinkers recognized something secular thinkers miss. Roughly the same can be said for his claims about the persistence of Christian psychology in the nineteenth century. What Dixon means is not just that such thinkers exist, but that their thought remains vibrant. Again I see no argument for such a verdict. Finally, there is the matter of the opposition between reason and passion. To his credit Dixon rejects the view according to which almost all Western thought is hostile to the passions. As he shows, this... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Comparing Eckhartian and Zen1 Mysticism2Jijimon Alakkalam JosephMeister Eckhart (ca. 1260–1328?), often referred to as “the man from whom God hid nothing,” is one of the great Christian theologians and philosophers of all time. But it is as a mystic that Eckhart is generally known. So any serious study of mysticism, in our times, cannot overlook this Dominican whose birth, childhood, and death remain obscure to this day.3 About the (...) age of eighteen, he probably entered the Dominican order. He was trained at the universities of Cologne and Paris. After completing his higher studies in theology at Paris, twice he was appointed as Paris magister (i.e., lesemeister or master)—in 1302 and in 1311—a rare honor, until then given only to Thomas Aquinas, whose teaching influenced him.After completing his second term as Paris magister, in 1313, he was called to function as the special vicar for the Dominican master general. From 1314 to 1326 Eckhart lived and worked first in Strasburg and then in Cologne, where he served as a spiritual guide for many Dominican nuns, also for Beguines. It was there Eckhart plunged into a life of a preacher and spiritual guide (lebemeister). His academic accomplishments, the positions he held, and the sermons he preached bear witness to his influence on Christian theology, philosophy, and mysticism.During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as the Occident came in contact with Oriental religious traditions, Eckhart’s theology and mysticism were suddenly seen in a new light. His daring insistence on the transcendence of the Godhead, his central theme of the union of God and the soul, his genius for apophatic theology, and so on were considered as the European parallel to the metaphysics of Asian religious traditions, especially Vedanta and Mahāyāna Buddhism.Of all the Christian mystics, Eckhart perhaps comes closest to Asian religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism, especially the Mahāyāna tradition. Scholars like the late Ananda K. Coomaraswamy saw Eckhart as a bridge between Hinduism and Christianity, and called Eckhart’s sermons the “Upanishad of Europe.”4 Eminent Japanese Zen Buddhist scholar D. T. Suzuki considered Eckhart to be an “extraordinary” Christian, saying that Eckhartian mystical thoughts “closely approached Buddhist [End Page 91] thoughts, so closely indeed, that one could stamp them almost definitely as coming out of Buddhist speculations.”5A plethora of writings have compared Eckhartian mysticism with Zen, which has its basis on the Mahāyāna tradition. In this paper I will highlight some of those already discussed comparisons and explore a few more areas that could serve as a jumping-off point for the dialogue between these two mysticisms, especially in the Asian context. My point is not that these two mystical traditions are totally identical. Differences do exist. But I will only make a very brief mention of them because as a novice researcher of comparative religion my interest is to delve deeper into religious traditions of the world to discover those teachings that unite them.godhead and buddha-natureIn Eckhartian mysticism, ultimate reality is called Godhead, which he distinguished from God. “The Godhead is for Eckhart, … an expression for the character of the Highest Being.”6 Godhead “includes both existence and the existing subject.”7 Godhead is being itself. Godhead is “pure Being,” “completely ‘fashionless,’ without … mode of being,” “above all conceptions and conceptual differentiations, and so beyond all comprehending and apprehending.”8 “It is not only beyond being, beyond goodness, but the ‘supra-Being’ and the ‘supra-Good.’”9 “It is neither conscious nor self-conscious … It is beyond the contrast of subject and object, knower and known, yet it is above and not below this contrast.”10 For Eckhart, “this highest Godhead is … the absolute ‘One.’”11 “Is-ness”12 is another term used by Eckhart for Godhead. He uses “is-ness” as “an abstract noun to draw our attention to the primordial existence that every existent thing and every predication about existent things presupposes.”13For Eckhart, “Intellect” is the privileged term for Godhead. God is the “pure intellect.”14 “The One, being, and intellect, the three most important concepts in Eckhart’s understanding of God... (shrink)

The figure of Martin Buber emerges very clearly from this little book as that of a modern Hebrew prophet in revolt “against the complacent satisfaction of the sciences, against the triumph of relativism in the social, scientific and humanistic disciplines”, turning for inspiration to the mediaeval mystics of the West and to Hasidism, and preaching a way of life rather than a systematic body of doctrine. As such, he is more a philosophical anthropologist than a philosopher; he is preoccupied with (...) the central problem of the redemption of creation and of man, in relation to God Who is present and reveals Himself in them. His key-concept seems to be that of “meeting,” the intimate encounter, implying love, understanding and surrender, in which creation and man are not just used, treated as object, but reached in their intimate being as subject by subject. Fully to adopt such an attitude implies an inner conversion, but not a withdrawal, in any mystic isolation, from life; it leads to sanctifying self and creation through communion and community in the stream of life, and allows God to enter the world as an active force and, in Buber’s language, to fulfil Himself in otherness. Not that God needs man, but rather that He desires that redemption be achieved with man’s co-operation. In describing the dialogue between God and man, Buber makes use of some Christian teaching, but he remains essentially a Hebrew prophet bearing witness to the mystery of the Holy, striving to further that human community in which the Holy may be realized, and God made once more efficaciously present to the world. One could hardly ask for a clearer portrait of Buber, nor a more succinct presentation of his leading ideas, than those given us by Mr. Cohen; and the reader who wishes to know more about this remarkable man, whom Reinhold Niebuhr has called “perhaps the greatest living Jewish philosopher,” will be helped by the biographical notes and selected bibliography at the end of the book. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:LONERGAN'S "CRITICAL REALISM" AND RELIGIOUS PLURALISM TIMOTHY R. STINNETT University of Detroit Mercy Detroit, Michigan THE PHENOMENON of religious pluralism is raising ome basic questions for philosophical thought that must e faced not only by philosophies not linked to any particular religious tradition but also by the theologies or philosophies of specific religious traditions. Christian theologians seem first to have discovered the range of questions raised by religious pluralism (...) in the face of apparently conflicting truth claims. No less important, however, are certain moral questions: how the advocates of the various religious traditions should bear witness to their respective traditions, and how they should go about identifying and correcting the ideological biases that seem inevitably to occur as the result of the historical and cultural conditions in which their respective witnesses emerge and develop. Thus, a philosophical treatment of religious pluralism will need to make explicit the relevant conditions of truth by which religious claims must be assessed. It will also need to clarify how apparently conflicting truth claims may be examined to see whether they are genuinely conflicting and then how genuinely conflicting truth claims may be adjudicated. Bernard Lonergan's philosophy of critical realism may be considered a valuable resource for addressing such questions insofar as he undertakes to answer such fundamental questions as " What am I doing when I am knowing? Why is doing that knowing? What do I know when I do it? " 1 Attention to these questions 1 Bernard Lonergan, Method vn Theology (New York: The Seabury Press, 1979), p. 25. See also Bernard Lonergan, A Third Collection: Papers by Bernard I. F. Lonergan, S.J., edited by Frederick E. Crowe, S.J. (New York: Paulist Press, 1985), p. 210. 97 98 TIMOTHY R. STINNETT promises clarification about how religious truth claims may be shown to be true (and thus to count as " knowledge ") and how genuinely conflicting truth claims may be adjudicated. It also promises to clarify how one may recognize ideological bias and correct for it in a fully reflective understanding of a particular religious witness. For Lonergan, answers to the three questions cited above provide respectively a cognitional theory, an epistemology, and a metaphysics, all three of which together constitute his philosophy of critical realism.2 In this essay I will explore the relevance of his critical realism for philosophical treatment of questions raised by religious pluralism. After an analysis of the salient features of Lonergan's philosophy, I will consider the disadvantages and advantages it affords a philosophy of religious pluralism. By attending to the disadvantages I will register an immanent criticism of Lonergan's critical realism, and I will atexplain how it must be revised in order to become a useful resource for treating philosophical questions raised by religious pluralism. Lonergan's "Critical Realism" The human capacity to know is for Lonergan what constitutes human being as spirit. " Let us say," he writes, that intelligibility that is not intelligent is material, and that intelligibility that is intelligent is spiritual.... But inasmuch as we are spiritual, we are orientated towards the universe of being, know ourselves as parts within that universe, and guide our living by that knowledge.8 Knowing, then, is a process with distinguishable moments, and it is completed in action consistent with what is known. Moreover, what can be known by a human subject determines the parameters of "proportionate being." The coordination of all of the departments of human knowledge is the object of metaphysics, 2 Method in Theology, pp. 25, 83, 261, 316. See also Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, revised ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), pp. 322ff., p. 350. a Insight, p. 516. LONERGAN ON RELIGIOUS PLURALISM 99 which Lonergan defines as " the integral heuristic structure of proportionate being." 4 Proportionate being is not, however, a comprehensive term for everything that exists ; there is also "transcendent being." Transcendent being is revealed as mystery, and knowledge of it is obtained through the operation of grace in religious conversion.5 But I will postpone discussion of this knowledge of transcendent being for the moment. The orientation of the human spirit toward " the universe of being" manifests itself in "the primordial drive" to know. "It... (shrink)

Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar pushed back in various ways against the tide of historical criticism in the twentieth century. On the one hand Rahner wished to distance theology from biblical revelation in his turn towards the subject. In so doing, he sought to preserve theology from the rising tide of skepticism resulting from contemporary exegesis. His philosophical system left little room for historical revelation because of a fixation on individual revelation. Balthasar, on the other hand, questioned whether (...) the Rahnerian system strips Christianity of the need to bear witness to the world, and relativizes Christ’s Incarnation. Balthasar saw the indestructible unity of the form (gestalt) presented to humanity in the revelation of Old and New Testaments as an antidote to the fragmentation within biblical studies. Because of gestalt, Scripture is more than a mere sum of its parts. For Balthasar, the faith of the exegete is an irreplaceable requisite for accurate hermeneutics. Dispensing with the revelatory character of the Scriptures would also be unscientific; it is an unsuitable approach to a text that calls one to bear witness. Balthasar thus correctly called for a theological hermeneutic whereby the faithful exegete recognizes the unity of the scriptural account. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Lost Sutras of Jesus: Unlocking the Ancient Wisdom of the Xian Monks, and: The Buddha's Gospel: A Buddhist Interpretation of Jesus' WordsJohn D'Arcy MayThe Lost Sutras of Jesus: Unlocking the Ancient Wisdom of the Xian Monks. Edited by Ray Riegert and Thomas Moore. London: Souvenir Press, 2004. 140 + xi pp.The Buddha's Gospel: A Buddhist Interpretation of Jesus' Words. By Lindsay Falvey. Adelaide: Institute for International Development, (...) 2002. 108 pp.Since Roy C. Amore's Two Masters, One Message (1987) revived the hypothesis of Buddhist influence on Christian origins and Hans-Joachim Klimkeit's research established links between Nestorian Christianity, Gnostic Manichaeism, and Mahayana Buddhism in Central Asia, there is scope for further reflection on commonalities between the two traditions over and above the purely doctrinal and philosophical. The two books under review, though intended for a general readership, are indications that interest in these matters is very much alive.Riegert and Moore preface their selection of texts with the story of Bishop Aleben (A-lo-pen), who travelled the Silk Road from Persia and was received with honour at the imperial capital of Xian (Chang-an) at the beginning of the Tang dynasty (635 CE). The emperor Taizong was sympathetic to what he called the "Luminous Religion," a Nestorian version of Christianity, possibly in Syriac, as presented by Aleben. It seems that these teachings were translated into Chinese in the form of sutras. One of them, preserved in stone as the Monument Sutra, features the cross rising from the lotus, the symbol chosen by Karl Reichelt for Tao-fung Shan, his Christian center in Buddhist style at Sha-tin outside Hong Kong, many centuries later. Thousands of Buddhist texts were preserved in the library cave at Dunhuang monastery, about one thousand miles west of Xian, where they were rediscovered by the Taoist priest Wang Yuanlu, who arrived there in the 1890s and became the self-appointed guardian of the scrolls.Included in this treasure trove were the Jesus Sutras, which are now scattered in museums and private collections, largely inaccessible to the public. But if the selection published here in a very elegant translation is anything to go by, they are [End Page 190] extremely significant religious documents with a spiritual value all their own. For the uninitiated, there is no way of checking the authenticity of these translations. The commentaries that accompany them could be slightly tendentious in that they nudge us in the direction of the editors' particular holistic worldview. But the texts themselves have a beauty and integrity that speaks for itself. They represent a Higher Dharma of perfect purity (p. 86), which, like a mirror, reflects the world with no trace of self: no desire, no action, no virtue, no truth (pp. 80–83, 126–129). The Jesus story is retold, and Jesus is portrayed as the teacher of this Higher Path. The sutras speak of One Spirit who is self-created, One God who is creator of the world, and One Lord, the Messiah who will return. There are prayers, too: "O Loving Father, Enlightened Son, Holy Spirit King"; "Lamb of Love and Bliss"; "O Holy Sage, Universal Lord, Messiah" (pp. 110–113). The texts obviously bear witness to a Buddhist-Christian dialogue much earlier and at a far deeper level than many would have thought possible. Whether they represent the religion of the future, as the editors suggest, remains to be seen.Lindsay Falvey's project of interpreting the canonical texts of Buddhism and Christianity in reference to one another has a similar orientation. In the course of agricultural development work in Thailand he came to realize "that the striking similarity between the two teachers may well be a seamless cloak of congruence beneath the mantle of culture and lore" (p. 13); the texts, in other words, may be quite literally translatable into one another's terms. Though aware that Q, the collection of Jesus' sayings that is supposed to have been available to the synoptic evangelists, is a hypothetical reconstruction, he still feels able to use a version of it as a basis for his experiment. He prefaces this with what he calls "A... (shrink)