Confessions of A Fractured Catholic Theologian

Horizons ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-122
Author(s):  
William L. Portier

In the Divine Milieu, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin talked about the “passive diminishments” that accompany the passage of time. But often time's passing also brings a growing desire to look back, to reflect, and to try to see things whole. Recently I have found myself reflecting on U.S. Catholicism, Catholic theology in the United States, and myself as an historical theologian at the University of Dayton. My reflections assess the past, address the present, and look to the future.I begin with U.S. Catholicism. The story I want to tell about it has a threefold lesson and I will state it very generally. First, as embodied mortals with immortal longings, we are rooted in particular times and places in the world. German philosophers sometimes call this our “historicity.” Second, whether we are aware of it or not, our historical sites or locations provide the forms and terms of our coming to know God. It was in Tenafly, New Jersey, for example, that my mother taught me to pray. Third, if we remain unmindful of the second lesson, we risk mistaking historical forms and terms for God. In biblical language, this would be idolatry. And finally, if my Catholic story is not your own, I ask you to allow it to stand as a figure or a type of the particular sited story you have to tell.

Horizons ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 374-396
Author(s):  
William L. Portier

This article1offers an impressionistic look back over the past five decades, from 1968 to 2016, in Catholic theology in the United States. At the heart of this story are Christology, the world of grace, and their relationship. This memoir unfolds in three parts: “Running on Empty, 1968–1980”; “Jesus and the World of Grace, 1980–2016”; “Can Liberal Catholics Come Back?” It identifies the most neuralgic question left to us from this period: How is Christ related to the world of grace?


Author(s):  
Kai Erikson

This chapter tells the story of peasants from rural Poland who entered a migrant stream around the turn of the twentieth century that carried them, along with tens of millions of others, across a number of clearly marked national borderlines as well as a number of unmarked cultural ones. The peasants were a couple named Piotr and Kasia Walkowiak, and the words spoken by them as well as the events recalled here are based on the hundreds of letters and diaries gathered in the 1910s by two sociologists from the University of Chicago, W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki. The chapter first describes the world into which Piotr and Kasia were born, focusing on family, village, and land. It then considers their journey, together with millions of other immigrants, and how they changed both the face of Europe and the face of the United States.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (3) ◽  
pp. 5-23
Author(s):  
Grzegorz W. Kolodko ◽  

The huge leap made by the Chinese economy over the past four decades as a result of market reforms and openness to the world is causing fear in some and anxiety in others. Questions arise as to whether China’s economic success is solid and whether economic growth will be followed by political expansion. China makes extensive use of globalization and is therefore interested in continuing it. At the same time, China wants to give it new features and specific Chinese characteristics. This is met with reluctance by the current global hegemon, the United States, all the more so as there are fears that China may promote its original political and economic system, "cynicism", abroad. However, the world is still big enough to accommodate us all. Potentially, not necessarily. For this to happen, we need the right policies, which in the future must also include better coordination at the supranational level.


2005 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
pp. 411-426 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. CHRISTOPHER JESPERSEN

The frequent use of the Vietnam analogy to describe the situation in Iraq underscores the continuing relevance of Vietnam for American history. At the same time, the Vietnam analogy reinforces the tendency to see current events within the context of the past. Politicians and pundits latch onto analogies as handles for understanding the present, but in so doing, they obscure more complicated situations. The con�ict in Iraq is not Vietnam, Korea, or World War II, but this article considers all three in an effort to see how the past has shaped, and continues to affect, the world the United States now faces.


Traditio ◽  
1973 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 391-458 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Brückmann

The importance of the manuscript pontificals for the study of the medieval evolution of the Latin liturgy needs no reaffirmation here. The state of the published descriptions and classifications of these manuscripts, however, is not commensurate in all cases with what their importance would lead one to expect.Ehrensberger has provided a full description of the manuscript pontificasl preserved in the Vatican Library; although this is no longer recent, it is invaluable in the absence of a complete catalogue of the Vatican manuscripts. The monumental work of Leroquais describes in detail the manuscript pontificals extant in the public libraries in France; as most of the pontificals in France appear to be in public libraries, this work is fairly comprehensive in its coverage. Dom Anselm Strittmatter has listed and classified the liturgical manuscripts preserved in the United States. For pontificals in other countries, however, there exist no such reference works. Professor Richard Kay of the University of Kansas is currently compiling a handlist in which all the manuscript pontificals extant throughout the world will be cited and briefly identified, but not fully described. Until this appears, anyone working on pontificals or on ordines normally included in pontificals will quite likely have to work systematically through innumerable catalogues of manuscript collections to cover every library, city by city, for a frequently minimal return.


2001 ◽  
Vol 32 (127) ◽  
pp. 377-407 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary E. Daly

In the proclamation that was issued on Easter Monday 1916 the provisional government of the Irish Republic undertook to grant ‘equal rights and opportunities to all its citizens’ and to ‘cherish all the children of the nation equally’. It also emphasised that the Republic was ‘oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an alien government, which have divided a minority from a majority in the past’ and referred to the support given to the Republic ‘by her exiled children in America’. The belief that the Irish nation included all inhabitants of the island was a central tenet of Irish nationalism both before and after 1922, and the numerous visits that nationalist leaders have paid to the United States from the time of Parnell and Davitt to the present testify to the importance that has been attached to the Irish overseas. In November 1948, while introducing the second reading of the Republic of Ireland Bill, the Taoiseach, John A. Costello, noted that ‘The Irish at home are only one section of a great race which has spread itself throughout the world, particularly in the great countries of North America and the Pacific.’


2016 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacqueline A. Sparks

Psychiatric drugs have been a mainstay of treatment for a range of behavioral and emotional problems over the past 6 decades in the United States and around the world. Although their use has skyrocketed, the problems they purport to alleviate have not diminished but, in fact, have increased (Whitaker, 2010a). This article summarizes current evidence for the efficacy of antidepressants, antipsychotics, and stimulants. Findings from meta-analyses, reviews, and major trials do not support widespread use of these drugs.


Author(s):  
Deepak Nayyar

This chapter analyses the striking changes in the geographical distribution of manufacturing production amongst countries and across continents since 1750, a period that spans more than two-and-a-half centuries, which could be described as the movement of industrial hubs in the world economy over time. Until around 1820, world manufacturing production was concentrated in China and India. The Industrial Revolution, followed by the advent of colonialism, led to deindustrialization in Asia and, by 1880, Britain became the world industrial hub that extended to northwestern Europe. The United States surpassed Britain in 1900, and was the dominant industrial hub in the world until 2000. During 1950 to 2000, the relative, though not absolute, importance of Western Europe diminished, and Japan emerged as a significant industrial hub, while the other new industrial hub, the USSR and Eastern Europe, was short lived. The early twenty-first century, 2000–2017, witnessed a rapid decline of the United States, Western Europe, and Japan as industrial hubs, to be replaced largely by Asia, particularly China. This process of shifting hubs, associated with industrialization in some countries and deindustrialization in other countries in the past, might be associated with premature deindustrialization in yet other countries in the future.


Significance On March 12, Cairo announced a 2-billion-dollar deal to buy advanced fighter jets from Russia. This comes against the background of new data showing that Egypt has climbed to third place in the world in a ranking of arms imports over the past five years. Impacts Diversification of Egypt’s procurement away from the United States will reduce Washington’s political leverage. The Egyptian armed forces’ prestige will be enhanced by the arms build-up. Gulf funders may exert pressure on Egypt to deploy its enhanced military muscle in support of conflicts in which they are engaged.


2006 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
pp. 631-647 ◽  
Author(s):  
Candy Gunther Brown

The centennial of the Azusa Street revivals of 1906 provides us with convenient poles for charting shifts in the landscape of Christian spiritual healing practices during the past century. Alongside unprecedented achievements in medical science, nearly 80 percent of Americans report believing that God supernaturally heals people in answer to prayer. Individuals who need healing, even after trying the best medical cures, readily transgress ecclesiastical, physical, and social boundaries in their quest for health and wholeness. The promise of a tangible experience of divine power, moreover, presents an attractive alternative to seekers disillusioned with what they perceive as the callous materialism of medical science and the religious legalism of traditional Christian churches. This essay calls for new narratives of sacred space that map the ways that pentecostal and charismatic healing practices have proliferated, diversified, and sacralized a growing number and variety of physical, social, and linguistic spaces in the past hundred years. At the turn of the twentieth century, modernist epistemological assumptions that privileged reason over experience encouraged fine intellectual distinctions between the sacred and the secular. In esteeming bodily experience as more trustworthy than disembodied doctrine and in resisting linguistic binaries as culturally constructed, postmodern epistemologies have multiplied the number and range of places available to be endowed with sacred meanings. I argue that boundaries between the sacred and the secular are dissolving at the same time that new boundaries are being established, privileging particular places and defining a new relationship among the United States, the Americas, and the world.


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