‘Go to the ant, you lazybones’ (NRSV, Prov. 6:6): The Church and Nonhuman Animals in the World

2013 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-44
Author(s):  
Matthew Barton

Abstract This article engages with the ecclesiology of Stanley Hauerwas in considering the relationship of church to world within the broader context of God’s creation, which includes nonhuman as well as human animals. In conversation with Hauerwas, an evaluation of understandings of ‘world as creation’ and ‘world as fallen’ gives rise to a new understanding of world, as a public of responsible beings. This understanding produces three questions: what does it mean for nonhuman animals to be perceived by the church as part of the world, how are we justified in advancing such a perception and what are the implications of this? In answering these questions, two distinct classes of responsibility are recognized: animal responsibility, shared by human and nonhuman animals; and responsibility to God, unique to humans. In having responsibility, animals are part of the world to which the church is called to respond; and in responding, to learn as well as to witness.

2020 ◽  
pp. 46-76
Author(s):  
Michael Barnes, SJ

The background of Vatican II’s pastoral and missionary concerns cannot be separated from what is arguably the Council’s most unexpected and far-reaching document, Nostra Aetate, the Declaration on the relationship of the Church to non-Christian religions. While very often interpreted as changing, not to say reversing, traditional Church-centred soteriology, this chapter argues that Nostra Aetate needs to be understood primarily as an event, a moment of self-understanding on the part of the Church which provokes a radical conversio morum. By calling the Declaration the ‘moral heart of the Council’, the chapter focusses specifically on its original purpose. That the Declaration has opened up a broader interreligious perspective to which all the major religions of the world can relate is testament less to the power of particular theological ideas than to its central conviction that the Church finds its own origins not apart from but through the faith which it shares with the people of the Sinai Covenant.


Author(s):  
Paul T. Nimmo

This chapter exposits and analyses the central contours of Barth’s mature doctrine of the church, in which the church is innovatively characterized by a twofold ec-centricity—a double decentring of its life and work. In a first section, it considers Barth’s radical understanding of the being of the church in relation to Jesus Christ and the Spirit, and the way in which the church has its originating centre outwith itself, in its being from God. In a second section, it attends to the creative way in which Barth conceives of the church as a divine event, and thereby relativizes the church as human institution. In a third section, it focuses on the significance and content of the human activity of the church, and the provocative way in which Barth locates the ultimate purpose of the church outwith itself, in its being for the world. In a fourth section, the chapter explores in outline some of the critical responses to Barth’s groundbreaking doctrine of the church. Finally, by way of conclusion, the chapter considers the relationship of Barth’s ecclesiology to ecumenical conversation.


Author(s):  
J.M.M.H. Thijssen

The problem of the eternity of the world was much debated in Western philosophy from the twelfth through the fourteenth centuries, but its history goes back as far as Philo of Alexandria and the Church Fathers. The principal topic of controversy was the possibility of a beginningless and yet created world. The arguments that fashioned the medieval discussion rested upon assumptions concerning the concepts of eternity and creation. In addition, the issue of eternity intertwined with discussions of the relationship of God to creation, with proofs of the existence of God, with the nature of the material universe and with the nature of infinity. Some of the most ingenious ideas in these debates were obtained from pagan Greek, Islamic and Jewish traditions.


Sympozjum ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol XXIV (2 (39)) ◽  
pp. 39-50
Author(s):  
Mieczysław Polak

„Laboratory for dialogue”, that is, dialogue in catechesis Dialogue is one of the fundamental human relationships. It is also of particular importance in the life of the Church. The article tries to answer the question whether catechesis is a space for dialogue. It first shows the dialogue of salvation as a relationship between God and man. Then it presents the relationship of the Church to the world, which is a relationship of dialogue. Since catechesis is at the service of God’s dialogue of salvation and is an ecclesial ministry, it is therefore also dialogical. There is, however, a specificity of this dialogue, which is based on the spirituality of dialogue. This vision of catechesis is contained in the new Vatican Directory for Catechesis, which describes it as a „laboratory for dialogue”.


1997 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-207
Author(s):  
Paul G. Hiebert

The World Council of Churches (WCC) has launched a major study project on the gospel and cultures resulting in the formation of study groups around the world and the publication of 15 study pamphlets that discuss how the gospel relates to different cultures. This article reviews the contents of these pamphlets around the themes of the gospel and cultural pluralism and the church and social pluralism. In evaluating these materials, it is noted that the tension between gospel and culture, revelation and hearing, divine and human is central to the Christian Faith. The WCC debate on the relationship of the gospel to cultures and the church to the world is an attempt to move ahead and chart a mission course for the twenty-first century.


Author(s):  
Alistair Fox

This chapter examines Merata Mita’s Mauri, the first fiction feature film in the world to be solely written and directed by an indigenous woman, as an example of “Fourth Cinema” – that is, a form of filmmaking that aims to create, produce, and transmit the stories of indigenous people, and in their own image – showing how Mita presents the coming-of-age story of a Māori girl who grows into an understanding of the spiritual dimension of the relationship of her people to the natural world, and to the ancestors who have preceded them. The discussion demonstrates how the film adopts storytelling procedures that reflect a distinctively Māori view of time and are designed to signify the presence of the mauri (or life force) in the Māori world.


2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-259
Author(s):  
Joseph Acquisto

This essay examines a polemic between two Baudelaire critics of the 1930s, Jean Cassou and Benjamin Fondane, which centered on the relationship of poetry to progressive politics and metaphysics. I argue that a return to Baudelaire's poetry can yield insight into what seems like an impasse in Cassou and Fondane. Baudelaire provides the possibility of realigning metaphysics and politics so that poetry has the potential to become the space in which we can begin to think the two of them together, as opposed to seeing them in unresolvable tension. Or rather, the tension that Baudelaire animates between the two allows us a new way of thinking about the role of esthetics in moments of political crisis. We can in some ways see Baudelaire as responding, avant la lettre, to two of his early twentieth-century readers who correctly perceived his work as the space that breathes a new urgency into the questions of how modern poetry relates to the world from which it springs and in which it intervenes.


1893 ◽  
Vol 10 (9) ◽  
pp. 401-412 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karl A. von Zittel

In a spirited treatise on the ‘Origin of our Animal World’ Prof. L. Rütimeyer, in the year 1867, described the geological development and distribution of the mammalia, and the relationship of the different faunas of the past with each other and with that now existing. Although, since the appearance of that masterly sketch the palæontological material has been, at least, doubled through new discoveries in Europe and more especially in North and South America, this unexpected increase has in most instances only served as a confirmation of the views which Rutimeyer advanced on more limited experience. At present, Africa forms the only great gap in our knowledge of the fossil mammalia; all the remaining parts of the world can show materials more or less abundantly, from which the course followed by the mammalia in their geological development can be traced with approximate certainty.


Author(s):  
Minh-Tung Tran ◽  
◽  
Tien-Hau Phan ◽  
Ngoc-Huyen Chu ◽  
◽  
...  

Public spaces are designed and managed in many different ways. In Hanoi, after the Doi moi policy in 1986, the transfer of the public spaces creation at the neighborhood-level to the private sector has prospered na-ture of public and added a large amount of public space for the city, directly impacting on citizen's daily life, creating a new trend, new concept of public spaces. This article looks forward to understanding the public spaces-making and operating in KDTMs (Khu Do Thi Moi - new urban areas) in Hanoi to answer the question of whether ‘socialization’/privatization of these public spaces will put an end to the urban public or the new means of public-making trend. Based on the comparison and literature review of studies in the world on public spaces privatization with domestic studies to see the differences in the Vietnamese context leading to differences in definitions and roles and the concept of public spaces in KDTMs of Hanoi. Through adducing and analyzing practical cases, the article also mentions the trends, the issues, the ways and the technologies of public-making and public-spaces-making in KDTMs of Hanoi. Win/loss and the relationship of the three most important influential actors in this process (municipality, KDTM owners, inhabitants/citizens) is also considered to reconceptualize the public spaces of KDTMs in Hanoi.


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