Revelation as Liberation from Oppression: Black Theology's Challenge for American Catholic Theology

Horizons ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 232-252
Author(s):  
John R. Connolly
Keyword(s):  
Final Section ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Black Theology ◽  
Taylor Cone ◽  
Systematic Theology ◽  
Catholic Theology ◽  
Symbolic Communication ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
American Catholic ◽  
Theology Of Liberation

AbstractBased on a reading of James Cone's and Avery Dulles' analyses of revelation, this article raises questions about the adequacy of the American Catholic theology of revelation. In A Black Theology of Liberation, Cone criticizes contemporary American theology's understanding of revelation for not including the category of liberation from oppression in its definition of revelation. Systematic Theology: Roman Catholic Perspectives defines revelation as symbolic communication, but does not include the category of liberation from oppression. Dulles' omission, in light of Cone's criticism, suggests the possibility of and the need for revising the American Catholic theology of revelation. In pursuing this question, the article begins with an examination of Cone's notion of revelation and the challenge which it presents to American Catholic theology. This is followed by an investigation of some of Dulles' other writings to consider if such a revision would be compatible with his thought. In the final section, drawing upon the works of Dulles, Mark Kline Taylor, Cone, and other black theologians, suggestions for a revision are made.

The End of Salvation History

Horizons ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-245
Author(s):  
Bradford E. Hinze
Keyword(s):  
Final Section ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Systematic Theology ◽  
Catholic Theology ◽  
Salvation History

AbstractThe debate about salvation history brings to the surface a variety of issues, problems, and proposals that can be designated with some justice postmodern. In an effort to explore these contested issues, I offer a composite portrait of the meaning and uses of the concept of salvation history, drawing attention to its importance for recent Roman Catholic theology. I then review the various kinds of criticism leveled against salvation history models in an attempt to show that Peter Hodgson's contention is warranted: that is, the concept salvation history is problematic both as a category for interpreting the scriptural witness and as a pivotal category for fundamental and systematic theology. Thus, postmodernity, understood in broad terms, should mean the end of salvation history. The final section will explore how the legitimate concerns that generated interest in salvation history models can be recast in light of these broader postmodern approaches.

The Role of the Bible in Roman Catholic Theology

1971 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-94
Author(s):  
Roland E. Murphy ◽  
Carl J. Peter
Keyword(s):  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Systematic Theology ◽  
Catholic Theology ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Catholic Theological

The role of Scripture as norm is growing significantly in Catholic theological work. But with that growth the problems of its relation to other norms become clearer and more urgent as the agenda for systematic theology.

American Saints: Gender and the Re-Imaging of U.S. Catholicism in the Early Twentieth Century

2012 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-231
Author(s):  
Kathleen Sprows Cummings
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Religious Community ◽  
Catholic Theology ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Negative Images ◽  
American Catholic ◽  
Heaven And Earth ◽  
Female Saints

AbstractIn Roman Catholic theology, saints are intermediaries between heaven and earth. In American Catholic practice, saints could also serve as intermediaries between two cultures—the minority religious community and the larger Protestant one. This article focuses on two female saints who became popular among American Catholics in the early twentieth century in part because American Catholics believed that devotion to them would help to undermine negative images of Catholicism in American culture. Presenting St. Bridget of Ireland as an antidote to popular stereotypes of Bridget the Irish serving girl, Irish-American Catholics argued that the former's beauty and wisdom provided a more authentic rendering of Catholic womanhood than the ignorance and coarseness of the latter. Seton's devotees, meanwhile, highlighted her status as a descendant of the American Protestant elite, offering her as model of Catholicism that was socially, racially, and culturally distant from that presented by recent Catholic immigrants. Taken together, the revival of Bridget and the quest to canonize Seton show how U.S. Catholics looked to the saints not only as models of holiness but also as agents of Americanization. It may seem counterintuitive that Catholics would choose to mediate their Americanness through saintly devotion, the very religious practice that appeared most alien to Protestant observers. There is, however, no question that hagiography took on a decidedly American dimension in the early twentieth century as U.S. Catholics repackaged European saints for a U.S. audience and petitioned for the canonization of one of their own.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas J. Wheeler
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Calculative Trust

This Introduction to the book does three things. First, it introduces the concept of trust and develops a definition of trust as the ‘expectation of no harm in contexts where betrayal is always a possibility’. Next, it identities two conceptions of trust that guide the book, ‘calculative trust’ and ‘trust as suspension’, which provide very different explanations for how actors form expectations that another will be trustworthy. It then shows how trust as suspension opens up a new theory of accurate signal interpretation and demonstrates how this theory is superior to costly signalling-based theories of accurate signal interpretation. The final section of the Introduction sets out the rationale for the case studies and the key assumptions.

The American Catholic Minority in the Later Nineteenth Century

1953 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 275-302 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas T. McAvoy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Church And State ◽  
The United States ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
American Democracy ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Hierarchical Arrangement ◽  
Great Culture ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
American Catholic

The factors that caused the Roman authorities to insist on a Plenary Council of the American Bishops in 1884 have not been sufficiently explained. Perhaps the role of the American prelates in opposing the opportuneness of the definition of the doctrine of infallibility had some influence. Undoubtedly the reports of the bishops in their ad limina visits to Rome did little to subdue any fears that may have arisen. The frequent appeals of recalcitrant clergymen against their bishops were going directly to Rome because there was no intermediate court. The Instruction of 1878 makes this quite clear. Rome had shown its dissatisfaction with the condition of Catholic education by its interrogatory and its Instruction of 1875. The renewed condemnation of the Fenians had some American effects; and the renewed condemnation of the Masons with applications to certain other American social organizations indicated that all was not well in the social conditions of Catholics in the United States. Had the prelates in Rome understood American democracy and American conditions they would have had to have been much better informed than most Europeans in the nineteenth century. America was to Europe a land of great physical possibility, but a land without any great culture or religious accomplishments. Even European liberals did not understand the manhood suffrage of American democracy. The Catholic leaders of southern Europe, so generally aligned with conservative and monarchist parties, could have little understanding of American democracy in the religious sphere. In Rome where the hierarchical arrangement had not been fully dissociated from monarchical government and where Roman law with its insistence on the union of Church and State was the basis of most political thought, even the most sympathetic seemed to have some misgivings about the manifest loyalty of the American Catholics to the Holy See.

A Black Theology of Liberation

2005 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dwight Hopkins
Keyword(s):  
Black Theology ◽  
Theology Of Liberation

Removing the Nationality Paradigm from Herodotus’ Histories

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 306-323
Author(s):  
Salvatore Tufano
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Test Cases ◽  
Persian Wars ◽  
Classical Definition ◽  
Mixed Language ◽  
Archaic Greece ◽  
The Common ◽  
Definition Of

Abstract The present paper suggests that the recurring appeal to kinship diplomacy undermines a fixed idea of ‘nation’ in Archaic Greece, especially in the first two decades of the fifth century BC. It aims to present a series of test cases in Herodotus that explain why contemporary patterns and theories on ancient ethnicity can hardly explain the totality of the historical spectrum. Blood ties could sometimes fortify ethnic relationships, as in the case of Aristagoras’ mission to Sparta (Hdt. 5.49.3), since the common Greekness could elicit the Spartan to help to the Ionians. In other times, the same blood ties were applied to divine genealogies, and they could also be used to show the feeble devotion of cities like Argos to the Greek cause (7.150.2: Xerxes expects the Argives to join the Persian cause, since they descend from Perses). Habits and traditions, often taken as indicia of national feeling, could be thought of as clues of ancient migrations (so the Trojans became Maxyes in Lybia: 4.191). Even language might not help in justifying ethnic relationships: for instance, the Greeks living in the Scythian Gelonus spoke a mixed language (4.108). These few case studies may shed a different light on the classical definition of Greekness (to hellenikon) in terms of blood, language, cults, and habits, all given by Herodotus (8.144). Far from being a valid label for all the Greeks of the fifth century, this statement owes much to a specific variety of the language of kinship diplomacy. The final section argues for the opportunity to avoid the later and misleading idea of nation when studying Herodotus and the age of the Persian Wars, which are instead characterized by various and contrasting strategies. Greek groups and ethne can be better described as networks of lightly defined communities.

"What God hath joined ...": Religious perspectives on marriage and divorce in late Victorian Canada

2009 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-25
Author(s):  
Marguerite Van Die
Keyword(s):  
Final Section ◽  
Community Networks ◽  
Lived Religion ◽  
Property Law ◽  
Religious Perspectives ◽  
Recent Debate ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Folk Tradition

Prompted by recent debate and legislation in Canada about the definition of "marriage," this article explores the impact of socio-economic change and stress upon marriage as an institution among the middle class in Victorian Canada. It does this through the lens of "lived religion" as defined by Robert Orsi and others, taking the form of a case study of a marital scandal involving a respected Presbyterian minister in Brantford, Ontario in 1883. This is placed within the wider context of competing definitions of marriage as found in folk tradition and community networks, in various ecclesiastical marriage liturgies, and in marriage, divorce and property law. In its final section it examines the contradictions, tensions and anxieties that surrounded these definitions in late Victorian Canada as a result of changes in people's experience of space and time. It concludes by briefly drawing attention to the nature of "lived religion" and its implications in redefining marriage within a society that today has become highly urbanized, secular and pluralistic.

scholarly journals Ebuhlanti Amandla ngawethu: Womanism and black theology of liberation, in memory of Vuyani Shadrack Vellem

2020 ◽  
Vol 76 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Fundiswa A. Kobo
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Black Theology ◽  
Black Consciousness ◽  
The West ◽  
Women’S Experiences ◽  
Women's Experiences ◽  
Heuristic Device ◽  
A Site ◽  
Theology Of Liberation

The liberation of black humanity has been an area of scholarly reflection by black theologians and the black consciousness communities. The constructs of oppression such as race, class and sexism amongst others have been critiqued in the quest for liberation of a fragmented black humanity. In this article, this quest for liberation happens within ubuhlanti [kraal], a site for which Vuyani Vellem is ‘like a hermeneutical circle, where the mediations of the bonds of spheres and the instantiation of their life take place’. By looking at a fragmented black humanity and black women’s experiences, we posit that no western framework could ever be representative of those bodies, ubuhlanti becomes our solution as a heuristic device and symbol of a communication of the efficacy of integrated life. From a womanist perspective, ubuhlanti decentres the West. Ebuhlanti Amandla ngawethu [power belongs to us], as black women and men dialogue issues that affect black humanity. The whole proposition of this dialogue ebuhlanti is animated by our lived experiences, which already offer alternatives for us to decentre.Contribution: Premised by the lived experiences of black humanity in their quest for liberation, this paper contributes in the dewesternising discourse by presenting alternative epistemologies and spiritualities. A womanist dialogue with black theology of liberation ebuhlanti, a decolonising and decentring praxis for the liberation of black humanity is our solution as blacks.

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