scholarly journals ‘Something is recognised’: A liberal Protestant reflection on Erik Borgman’s cultural theology

2016 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rick Benjamins
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Mutual Understanding ◽  
Specific Character ◽  
Catholic Theology ◽  
Different Types ◽  
The Way

The Dutch Roman Catholic theologian Erik Borgman (1957), who developed a cultural theology, was appointed as a visiting professor at the liberal Protestant theological Mennonite Seminary in Amsterdam. In this article, his progressive Roman Catholic theology is compared to a liberal Protestant approach. The historical backgrounds of these different types of theology are expounded, all the way back to Aquinas and Scotus, in order to clarify their specific character for the sake of a better mutual understanding. Next, the convergence of these two types of theology in the twentieth century is explained with reference to the philosophy of Heidegger. Finally, the difficulties posed by postmodern philosophies to both a progressive Roman Catholic theology and a liberal Protestant theology are shown. It is asserted that both types of theology claim that the insights of their particular tradition can be relevant beyond this tradition to modern and postmodern humans.

A Question of Interpretation: The Roman Rota and the Theology of Marriage

2006 ◽  
Vol 8 (39) ◽  
pp. 425-437
Author(s):  
Aidan McGrath Ofm
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Canon Law ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Code Of Canon Law ◽  
Complete Reversal ◽  
The Law ◽  
Roman Catholics ◽  
The Way

Judges need guidance if they are to apply the law in particular circumstances with an even hand. For Roman Catholics, Canon 19 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law provides this guidance by reference to the practice of the Roman Curia and by the constant opinion of learned authors. Useful as these supplementary sources are, they mean that judges have to trust that those responsible for making decisions in the Roman Curia and the learned authors have drawn their conclusions on a sound basis. This study considers what happened when a specific document was misunderstood in the Roman Catholic Church for almost four hundred years. The document, a letter from Pope Sixtus V to his Nuncio in Spain in 1587, responded to a specific query concerning the capacity for marriage of men who had been castrated. The interpretation of the letter defined the Roman Catholic Church's concept of marriage in general and its understanding of the impediment of impotence for four centuries. In the twentieth century, several Roman Catholic judges and canonists refused to take at face value the conclusions offered by other judges and learned authors, and decided to carry out their own analysis of the document in question. This resulted in a complete reversal of the way in which marriage cases were considered by the Apostolic Tribunal of the Roman Rota, and contributed to the emergence of a much richer and more integrated theology of marriage.

Teaching Merton to Undergraduates

Horizons ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 260-265
Author(s):  
Thomas P. Rausch
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Monastic Life ◽  
Thomas Merton ◽  
Significant Figures ◽  
The Way

AbstractThomas Merton is one of the most significant figures in twentieth-century Catholicism. His books are still to be found in almost any bookstore with a section devoted to religion. Yet today, just over twenty-five years after his death, both Merton himself and the monastic life he represented are virtually unknown to most Roman Catholic undergraduates. This article describes a seminar on Merton offered for undergraduates. It outlines the books and articles used, the way the seminar was structured, and the reactions of the students, to Merton himself and to the issues he raises in his works.

Henri de Lubac’s wending naar de kerk

2019 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 223-233
Author(s):  
Sjoerd Mulder
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Catholic Theology ◽  
The Social ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
The Church ◽  
Historical World

Abstract In the last thirty years, theologians such as Milbank and Hauerwas have allowed ecclesiology to play a fundamental role in theology. This move is grounded in their conviction that the meaning of Christianity consists primarily not in its theory and doctrine but in its lived form, which is the church. Interestingly, this contemporary 'turn to the church' in many ways resembles an earlier revival of ecclesiology in the beginning of the twentieth century in Roman Catholic theology. In this paper, I will focus on the work of Henri de Lubac, and demonstrate how the particular way in which he develops his idea of the church might offer valuable insights for contemporary theology. First, I sketch how his particular understanding of the church as the social and historical embodiment of God's gracious action immediately implied an embrace of the social and historical world. Second, I argue that notwithstanding all his emphasis on the church, his particular understanding of the church as springing from the Eucharist means that the church is never idolized but always points beyond itself to God. I conclude by relating these insights to the contemporary turn to the church.

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.

The Reception of Athanasius within Contemporary Roman Catholic Theology

2010 ◽  
Vol 90 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 311-337
Author(s):  
Arwin van Wilgenburg
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
Historical Interpretation ◽  
Catholic Theology ◽  
Salvation History ◽  
The Trinity

This article gives a brief overview of the reception of Athanasius in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Roman Catholic theology. Besides papal documents, mainly German theologians are discussed. First, Johann Adam Möhler’s Athanasius der Grosse (1827) is analyzed. Möhler was convinced that Athanasius was of great importance for modern society. However, Möhler’s attempt to give Athanasius a prominent position in contemporary theology seemed to fail. Although Athanasius is not absent in nineteenth-century dogmatic compendia, nor in papal documents of the last two centuries and many dogmatics of the twentieth century, his quantitative reception is rather poor, especially in comparison to Augustine. The dogmatic compendia and Neo-Thomistic theology did not have an interest in a historical interpretation of Athanasius and Thomas, himself, hardly referred to Athanasius. Moreover, the Trinitarian and Christological dogmas were not really contested. This changed in twentieth-century theology, because of a new understanding of historical development and the rise of phenomenology and existentialism. The doctrines of the Trinity and Christology were reinterpreted from the perspective of salvation history (Heilsgeschichte). Many theologians wanted to correct the anti-Arian tendency, stressing that Christ was truly God and truly man. Athanasius overlooked Christ’s humanity and the Alexandrian Logos-Sarx-Christology needed the complementation of the Antiochene Logos-Antropos-Christology. Nevertheless, Athanasius’s has received great formal authority within Roman Catholicism. He is a Saint and honored as doctor ecclesiae, because of his impact on Christian doctrine and the development of monasticism.

Excerpt from “Tarantism and Catholicism”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ernesto de Martino
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Saint Paul ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Rural People ◽  
Different Types ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Regional History ◽  
Catholic History ◽  
The Way

Ernesto de Martino (1908–65) could be described as one of the founding figures of Italian ethnology. Until his work was translated into English, he was fairly unknown to English-speaking anthropologists. Since then, however, the importance of his contributions to the field has received wider recognition. In the book Terra del Rimorso: Contributo a una storia religiosa del Sud (The Land of Remorse: A Study of Southern Italian Tarantism), de Martino unravels how alterity may be found “at home,” through a study in the southern peninsula of Salento of rural people seasonally affected by tarantismo, a form of possession attributed to the bite of the tarantola spider.1 The affliction is cured by the performance of “choreutic” dances followed by pilgrimages and offerings made to Saint Paul. For de Martino, tarantismo is the living presence of an other-than-Catholic history—an echo of earlier pagan, erotic ritual forms. Tarantism can be understood only when placed within the context of Catholicism’s regional history, its broader social and economic conflicts, and tensions around gender, kinship, and sexuality within the home. The cult is one that the Catholic Church has “purged” but also resignified and appropriated in an effort to contain its vitality. As de Martino shows, however, the church’s engagement with the cult in the first half of the twentieth century colludes with scientific and medical—particularly psychiatric—discourses. The relevance of this work for a modern anthropology of Catholicism is plain in its historical breadth and the richness and detail of de Martino’s ethnographic research. But it is also interesting for the way it highlights how questions of science, magic, and enchantment have posed challenges of different types for the modernizing, bureaucratic church.

Sight Readings: Photographers and American Jazz, 1900-1960

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan John Ainsworth
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Different Types ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Way

This book explores the work of a wide range of American photographers attracted to jazz during the period 1900–60. It includes discussions of jazz as a visual subject, its attraction to different types of photographers and offers analysis of why and how they approached the subject in the way they did. While some of these photographers are widely recognized for their work, many African American photojournalists, studio photographers, early twentieth-century émigrés, the Jewish exiles of the 1930s and vernacular snapshots are frequently overlooked. Drawing on ideas from contemporary photographic theory backed up by extensive archival research, this book allows the reader to explore and understand twentieth-century jazz photography in both an engaging and comprehensive fashion.

‘Grey Dawn’ in the British Pacific: Race, Security and Colonial Sovereignty on the Eve of World War I

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Tumblin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
World War ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
Cooperative Security ◽  
Strategic Defense ◽  
Racial Discourses ◽  
The Way

This article examines the way a group of colonies on the far reaches of British power – Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and India, dealt with the imperatives of their own security in the early twentieth century. Each of these evolved into Dominion status and then to sovereign statehood (India lastly and most thoroughly) over the first half of the twentieth century, and their sovereignties evolved amidst a number of related and often countervailing problems of self-defence and cooperative security strategy within the British Empire. The article examines how security – the abstracted political goods of military force – worked alongside race in the greater Pacific to build colonial sovereignties before the First World War. Its first section examines the internal-domestic dimension of sovereignty and its need to secure territory through the issue of imperial naval subsidies. A number of colonies paid subsidies to Britain to support the Royal Navy and thus to contribute in financial terms to their strategic defense. These subsidies provoked increasing opposition after the turn of the twentieth century, and the article exlpores why colonial actors of various types thought financial subsidies threatened their sovereignties in important ways. The second section of the article examines the external-diplomatic dimension of sovereignty by looking at the way colonial actors responded to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. I argue that colonial actors deployed security as a logic that allowed them to pursue their own bids for sovereignty and autonomy, leverage racial discourses that shaped state-building projects, and ultimately to attempt to nudge the focus of the British Empire's grand strategy away from Europe and into Asia.

Breeding Better Babies in the Eugenic Garden City: ‘Municipal Darwinism’ and the (Anti)Cosmopolitan Utopia in the early Twentieth Century

2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 267-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Currell
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
City Planning ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Core Beliefs ◽  
Garden City ◽  
New Town ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
National Body ◽  
Practical Level ◽  
The Way

Showing how ‘modernist cosmopolitanism’ coexisted with an anti-cosmopolitan municipal control this essay looks at the way utopian ideals about breeding better humans entered into new town and city planning in the early twentieth century. An experiment in eugenic garden city planning which took place in Strasbourg, France, in the 1920s provided a model for modern planning that was keenly observed by the international eugenics movement as well as city planners. The comparative approach taken in this essay shows that while core beliefs about degeneration and the importance of eugenics to improve the national ‘body’ were often transnational and cosmopolitan, attempts to implement eugenic beliefs on a practical level were shaped by national and regional circumstances that were on many levels anti-cosmopolitan. As a way of assuaging the tensions between the local and the global, as well as the traditional with the modern, this unique and now forgotten experiment in eugenic city planning aimed to show that both preservation and progress could succeed at the same time.

Watching Birds and People

2008 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 160-176
Author(s):  
Mikael Rothstein
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Field Work ◽  
Personal Knowledge ◽  
Mutual Understanding ◽  
Knowledge And Skills ◽  
Good Working ◽  
Anthropological Field Work ◽  
Different Cultures ◽  
The Way

This article explores ornithology as a hidden resource in anthropological field work. Relating experiences among the Penan forest nomads of Sarawak, Borneo, the author describes how his personal knowledge of bird life paved the way for good working relations, and even friendship, with the Penan. Representing two very different cultures simple communication between the scholar on duty and the Penan community was difficult indeed, but the birds provided a common ground that enabled the two parties to exchange experiences, knowledge and skills. In certain ways the author's fieldwork-based project relates to the Penan’s religious interpretation of birds, but the article is primarily concerned with the fact that a mutual understanding was created from this common ground, and that our thoughts on fieldwork preparations may be taken further by such experiences.

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