Simone Weil’s Radical Ontology of Rootedness: Natural and Supernatural Justices

This paper argues that Simone Weil developed an anthropology of the human condition that is a radical ontology of the human spirit rooted in reality. Weil begins her account from the real, but this real is not only the historical or social reality. It is also what is true about the human person as a created being in connection with the transcendent reality. She believes that affliction reveals the human condition and provides an openness to transcendence in which the individual finds the meaning of the human operation of spirit. Therefore, Weil’s radical ontology is based on a philosophy of the human being as an agent rooted in the world. In order to be rooted, a human being needs decreation (the creation of a new human) and incarnation (cross and love in the world). In her radical ontology derived from attention to the real, Weil argues for an active incarnation in social reality that recognizes others, especially the unfortunates, for the purpose of empowering them and promoting their dignity. Her radical ontology incarnates the human in the world between necessity and good, that is, between the natural and the supernatural.

“To Educate for the Practice of Freedom”

Sounding the call for an integral human development, CST invites considering the subsidiary nature of relationships at multiple levels of society as a spiritual matter. Drawing from diverse sources in theology, relational sociology, and evolutionary biology, this essay explores Catholic educational institutions and their role in fostering the moral agency of students and faculty. In the face of epidemiological evidence of the social ills of economic inequality, the question becomes: Do we have the freedom to imagine an alternative to current trends in the commodification of education? The partnership of Catholic Relief Services and the university offers hope as a relational subject from which emerges the good of mutuality. Integrating student experiences from the classroom to the field, this essay advances the development of a “pedagogy of liminal mutuality” in the reciprocal practices of solidarity-building at and from the margins.

The Practice of Social Justice

This paper presents the “signs of the times” methodology and proposes its use as an appropriate pedagogical tool for contemporary practical theology, particularly in the area of social justice. The author presents three examples of the application of the method by students in theological formation for the Augustinian Order, and also provides an explanation of the method’s suitability for other Catholic traditions and Christian denominations.