Pentecostalisation. A Catholic Voice in the Debate

Pentecostalisation is one of several contentious issues in the Catholic Church. While charismatic experience is welcome and refreshing, it is also connected with various spiritual and pastoral abuses, which is very concerning. When set in the context of the new evangelization and the charismatic reality, people become open to a new type of ecumenism, namely an ecumenism relying on forms of living the faith, on permeating pious practices, singing, and literature. Some people may ask if this features an exchange of gifts or rather indicates the rise of a new hybrid form of Christianity. An analysis of how Pentecostal spirituality has developed, particularly in the Catholic communities, does not lead to a conclusion that the new shape of spirituality poses a danger. Obviously, the theological and pastoral mistakes that do occur need to be corrected but a growth of the charismatic sphere that is integrated within a correct interpretation of faith and with the Tradition leads to a renewal of the Church and greater evangelization. The good outcomes of the catholic, i.e., universal, Charismatic Renewal cannot go unnoticed. In the increasingly secular world, it is only a return to the fundamental experience of apostolic evangelization and a testimony to a living faith of the baptized that may inspire non-believers to start looking for Jesus Christ. The Church cannot, therefore, be reduced to the hierarchical, sacramental, doctrinal, and moral reality only. It is necessary that the involvement of lay people increases and that they use charismatic gifts in a responsible and confident manner. For all this to happen, people must be open to new inspirations of the Holy Spirit.

“O Roman, Spare this God!”

In the dominant tradition of Christian epic poetry, Pilate’s judgement of Jesus is not explained by his brute political calculations. Rather, Pilate is literally conquered by Caiaphas and his Judaean allies. In this Christian tradition, the Roman trial of Jesus has not one but two judicial victims—Pilate and Jesus. For instance, in Marco Girolamo Vida’s Renaissance epic, Christiad, the dramatization of Pilate’s inner life permits the legal reality of his judgement to be recognized, and its moral reality to be denied. For many Christian writers, the Roman magistrate who interrogates Jesus is (virtually) guiltless. It is thus not only in pagan, Judaic, and Islamic traditions, but in early and august Christian traditions that Pilate has enjoyed—in many circles—twenty centuries of innocence.

Christian Bioethics and the Partisan Commitments of Secular Bioethicists: Epistemic Injustice, Moral Distress, Civil Disobedience

Secular bioethicists do not speak from a place of distinction, but from within particular culturally, socially, and historically conditioned standpoints. As partisans of moral and ideological agendas, they bring their own biases, prejudices, and worldviews to their roles as ethical consultants, social advocates, and academics, attempting rhetorically to sway others and shift policy to a preferred point of view. Their pronouncements represent just one voice among others, even when delivered with strident rhetoric, in an educated and knowing tone, from within institutional positions of power. This essay argues that, given the hegemony of progressive secular bioethics, traditional Christians routinely face epistemic injustice within medicine. That is, Christian knowledge regarding moral reality is all too often demeaned or dismissed, unless such norms can be translated into and defended within a secular ethos. Given such systemic bias, I argue, Christians also experience significant moral distress: they are fully aware of their moral obligations and what they ought to do, but institutionalized power structures make it nearly impossible to so act. But, Christian physicians are not mere technicians, obliged to provide whatever patients request from the list of legally available treatments. That antireligious critics seek to remove the rights of Christian physicians to limit how they practice medicine, where they do not offer or refer for abortion, euthanasia, physician-assisted suicide, and other inappropriate forms of care, is unjustified and prejudicial, singling out Christians, and other religious groups, for singular treatment. Regardless of what the law requires or institutional policy demands, however, Christians are obliged to submit to God in all things. As a result, they may at times find themselves required to engage in acts of civil disobedience.

Faith, Medicine, and Healing

This chapter develops from the revealed realities and moral culture formed by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints a theological and ethical rationale for the healing professions as callings within which the moral reality of healing is conceptualized and enacted. Healing, which is characterized by restoring wholeness, relationships, witnessing the patient’s narrative, the potency of touch, and empathetic solidarity, provides moral convergence and continuity between communal rituals and practices oriented by faith convictions and communal reliance on medical interventions. An evolving moral reality of healing is represented through a typology of three broad patterns of relationship between faith convictions and medical practice that emerged historically in LDS culture: faith against medicine, faith and medicine, and faith in medicine.

Introduction

This chapter constructs a moral reality of the ethics and moral culture of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) by (1) identifying critical and distinctive pre-moral convictions that manifest the revealed realities of the LDS religious worldview and (2) providing a substantive exposition of formative principles, values, and virtues of LDS ethics that constitute a restored morality. The pre-moral values highlighted include a progressive salvation narrative, the harmony of religion and biomedicine, embodiment, and family. These values are supplemented by five core ethical principles, including love, hospitality to strangers, covenant, justice, and respect for agency and self-determination. These principles display moral continuities with the moral values and ethical teachings of other philosophical, religious, and cultural traditions.

Moral Realism

Reinhold Niebuhr’s moral realism can be confusing, as he draws upon multiple categories that are often in tension in contemporary discussions of moral reality. This chapter lays out three frameworks Niebuhr used to discuss moral reality: naturalism, moral ideals, and divine nature and command. It argues that these frameworks are mutually supportive in Niebuhr’s thought and locates each in the context of contemporary discussions in moral philosophy. In relation to naturalism, Niebuhr’s thought is compared with the neo-Aristotelian thought of Philippa Foot and Rosalind Hursthouse. Concerning ideals, Niebuhr is put in dialogue with philosophers such as W. D. Ross, Martha Nussbaum, and Isaiah Berlin. Niebuhr’s treatment of divine command and nature is compared with the work of Robert M. Adams.

Reformed Ethics

Within the wider field of ethical reflection and moral theology, Reformed ethics is tasked with understanding and orienting human action theologically by formative reference to the fundamental description of moral reality provided by Reformed doctrine. The essential features of this moral reality can helpfully be displayed and coordinated around the themes of belonging, gratitude, law, and holiness. Consideration of these themes helps to bring out what is distinctive in a Reformed theological ethic in the midst of much that is evidently also held in common with the wider Christian tradition. As this chapter looks to demonstrate, the history of Reformed theological ethics testifies to the fundamental and abiding conviction on the part of Reformed believers and theologians that reformatio doctrinae is intrinsically bound with and finds it term in serious and joyful reformatio vitae.

Nietzsche’s Genealogie der Moral Pro and Contra Distributed Cognition

Nietzsche’s writing and thought about the mind challenge some of the same Cartesian dichotomies that the more recent frameworks of 4E and distributed cognition do. Zur Genealogie der Moral (On the Genealogy of Morals), a highpoint in Nietzsche’s project of the ‘Umwertung aller Werte’ (revaluation of all values), is a proclamation of perspectivism: there is no objective perception and nothing objectively to be perceived, only perspectives on objects. This thesis is expressed through evocations of space and movement that, the chapter argues, promote and depend on readerly cognition in which embodied and enactive imagining is central. In these same passages, however, the equivocations underlying the whole perspectivist enterprise are exposed: the supposed discovery of a new extra-textual moral reality through philosophical agility is undermined by rhetorical structures that turn out to merely simulate movement, and so ask readers’ imaginations not to be too enactive. This equivocation has important consequences for readers’ engagement with the interplay of rhetorical form and conceptual content. Cognitive analysis thus gets us to the heart of a grand paradox of Nietzschean philosophy – absolute assertion of the relativity of language – while also shedding light on current questions about action-based distributed cognition as an intellectual force.