Arts and Humanities Commons^™

What Is The Rosary? Why A Set Of Beads And Prayers Are Central To Catholic Faith, Kayla Harris

Marian Library Faculty Publications

It’s one of the most famous moments in modern Catholicism: the apparition of Our Lady of Fatima. The Virgin Mary allegedly appeared to three Portuguese children in 1917, when much of the world was engulfed in World War I. Over a series of six appearances, Mary emphasized to these young shepherds that to bring peace, they should pray the rosary every day.

Devotion to the rosary already had a centuries-old history, and the Marian apparition at Fatima only deepened it. So what is a rosary, and why is it so important to many Catholics?

Otto Semmelroth And The Advance Of The Church As Sacrament At Vatican Ii, Dennis M. (Dennis Michael) Doyle

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Otto Semmelroth played a major role in advancing the notion of the church as sacrament at Vatican II. His preconciliar works as well as his participation in working groups and committees were instrumental in introducing this systematic concept into the 1963 draft of Lumen gentium. His commentaries on the document disclose how his own understanding of the historical and eschatological dimensions of the church as sacrament was enriched through the process of developing the final 1964 text. Semmelroth’s nuanced treatment of this progressive theme enables him to serve as a mediating figure in the continuing ecclesiological controversies of today.

Vatican Ii And Intellectual Conversion: Engaging The Struggle Within, Dennis M. (Dennis Michael) Doyle

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

In 1980 I took a course with Joseph Komonchak entitled “The History and Theology of Vatican II” at the Catholic University of America. True to the title, Komonchak was doing history and theology together at the same time on a class-by-class basis. He would bring in documents from the Council and from the times leading up to it, often in Latin, and he would talk about how his goals as a theologian required him to work in a historical manner. To understand Vatican II, or the Church itself for that matter, required not just understanding theological concepts but also grasping …

Otto Semmelroth, Sj, And The Ecclesiology Of The ‘Church As Sacrament’ At Vatican Ii, Dennis M. (Dennis Michael) Doyle

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

This essay will demonstrate how Otto Semmelroth’s preconciliar work on the Church as sacrament connects with several ecclesiological themes that would later be developed in Lumen Gentium. These themes include the importance of a lay-inclusive Church, the universal call to holiness, the relationship between Mary and the Church, a Trinitarian ecclesial spirituality, and the use of sacrament as a fundamental category for organizing and interpreting a variety of images and concepts of the Church.'

First will come an attempt to take the measure of Semmelroth’s significant impact on Lumen Gentium within the context of the myriad contributions made by a …

Some Practices Of Theological Reasoning, Or, How To Work Well With Words, Brad Kallenberg

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

This Companion introduces readers to the practice of Christian theology, covering what theologians do, why they do it, and what steps readers can take in order to become theological practitioners themselves. The volume aims to capture the variety of practices involved in doing theology, highlighting the virtues that guide them and the responsibilities that shape them. It also shows that the description of these practices, virtues and responsibilities is itself theological: what Christian theologians do is shaped by the wider practices and beliefs of Christianity. Written by a team of leading theologians, the Companion provides a unique resource for students …

Selected Bibliography: Bonaventure And Thomas Aquinas On The Blessed Virgin Mary (1995-2013), Richard E. Lenar, Jason Paul Bourgeois

Marian Library Faculty Publications

A bibliography.

Why Study Mary?, François Rossier

Marian Library Faculty Presentations

Simple as the title "Why Study Mary?" may sound, Father François Rossier situates Marian studies in the broader context of Scripture and the Christian tradition. Making special reference to the Marianist tradition and its intimate connection with the University of Dayton's spirit and vision, he sees in Mary the "origin of theological reflection." It is a reflection that is documented not in a book, but in Mary's person. Being the "first theologian," she has a "concretizing function." She makes Jesus "tangible, concrete, accessible to our senses," but she also helps us "to get a sense of God's action and presence …

The Aesthetic Hermeneutics Of Hans-Georg Gadamer And Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Jason Paul Bourgeois

Marian Library Faculty Publications

This book compares two figures that are not often associated together within the field of Roman Catholic theology, namely Hans-Georg Gadamer and Hans Urs von Balthasar. This work attempts to find deep structural affinities in the aesthetics and hermeneutics of both thinkers, as expressed through shared metaphysical and anthropological assumptions about the dialogical nature of truth and interpretation. The body of the work will be devoted to analyzing these assumptions of Gadamer and Balthasar, both individually and in comparison with each other. However, this preface is necessary to place the concerns of this book into a broader theological context.

A Comparison Of The Aesthetic Approach Of Hans-Georg Gadamer And Hans-Urs Von Balthasar, Jason Paul Bourgeois

Marian Library Faculty Publications

Hans-Georg Gadamer (1901-2002), the German philosopher of hermeneutics, has exercised a powerful influence on post-Vatican II Roman Catholic fundamental theology, especially regarding questions of the development of doctrine and the appropriation of tradition. There is a tension in interpreting Gadamer's thought between his concept of "fusion of horizons," in which the horizon of the past is fused with the horizon of the present to yield new interpretations of past texts, and his defense of "prejudice, authority, classics, and tradition," in which Gadamer upholds the enduring truth-value of received wisdom from the past. … This article will broadly point out the …

Fundamentalism, William Vance Trollinger

History Faculty Publications

In America fundamentalism is a movement within Protestantism that was organized immediately after World War I in opposition to "modernism," which included liberal theology primarily, and also Darwinism and secularism. A subgroup of evangelicalism, fundamentalism staunchly affirmed with evangelicals "fundamentals of the faith," including the deity of Christ, his virgin birth, his bodily resurrection, and his substitutionary atonement. What distinguishes fundamentalists from other evangelicals is their strident opposition to modernism. They are, to quote George Marsden, "militant anti-modernist evangelicals."

Defending Hauerwas, Brad Kallenberg, Terrence W. Tilley, M. Therese Lysaught

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

The commentary begins: Jeffrey Stout and Stanley Hauerwas have long been friends and conversation partners. One would not know that from reading Stout’s “Not of This World” (October 10). Nor does one emerge from Stout’s essay with an accurate sense of Hauerwas’s position.

Stout’s presentation is incomplete in many ways. For example, he labels Hauerwas’s ethic as “perfectionist,” implying that it is, in the words of the article’s title, unrealistic or “not of this world.” However, Stout fails to mention Hauerwas’s untiring emphasis on human sinfulness and-most crucially- the subsequent centrality of the practices of forgiveness and reconciliation. This is …

Is There A Center To American Religious History?, William Vance Trollinger

History Faculty Publications

Is there a center to American religious history? Of course, this question grows out of what David Wills has referred to as “the perennial debate that always seems to hold center stage as the Big Issue in the field ... [that is,] the ongoing quarrel between those who center their stories on the culturally formative role of a dominant Protestantism and those who emphasize the countervailing forces of religious pluralism and toleration.”

As I take the question, Is there some sort of center to American religion – dominant Protestantism or otherwise – that enables us to tell the story of …

Balthasar's Theodramatic Hermeneutics: Trinitarian And Ecclesial Dimensions Of Scriptural Interpretation, Jason Paul Bourgeois

Marian Library Faculty Publications

Hans Urs von Balthasar developed a unique style of biblical interpretation. This paper discusses four elements of his scriptural hermeneutics, a topic that offers glimpses of his fundamental theology and his ecclesiology as well. The first element of Balthasar’s hermeneutics is aesthetics. Balthasar’s aesthetic approach to scriptural interpretation stands in contrast with the commonly employed historical-critical method, which he found to be potentially limiting. The second element is theodrama. In Balthasar’s notion of theodramatic hermeneutics, the interpreter is already participating in the very salvation history that is being interpreted. The third and fourth elements of Balthasar’s hermeneutics involve the Trinitarian …

All Suffer The Affliction Of The One: Metaphysical Holism And The Presence Of The Spirit, Brad Kallenberg

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

When Copernicus and Galileo proposed that the earth circled the sun and not the 217 other way around, Christian believers faced the difficult prospect of surrendering a long-held belief that had seemingly undeniable support from the biblical text. After all, Joshua reported that the sun, not the earth, stood still; what could this mean if not that the sun orbited the earth? Today, centuries later, believers unanimously hold a heliocentric view of the solar system and are somewhat embarrassed by the ignorance of our pre-Enlightenment brothers and sisters. Ironically, however, such embarrassment masks the possibility that we ourselves may one …

Ethics As Grammar: Changing The Postmodern Subject, Brad Kallenberg

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Wittgenstein, one of the most influential, and yet widely misunderstood, philosophers of our age, confronted his readers with aporias—linguistic puzzles—as a means of countering modern philosophical confusions over the nature of language without replicating the same confusions in his own writings. In Ethics as Grammar, Brad Kallenberg uses the writings of theological ethicist Stanley Hauerwas as a foil for demonstrating how Wittgenstein’s method can become concrete within the Christian tradition. Kallenberg shows that the aesthetic, political, and grammatical strands epitomizing Hauerwas’s thought are the result of his learning to do Christian ethics by thinking through Wittgenstein.

Kallenberg argues that …

How John Nelson Darby Went Visiting: Dispensational Premillennialism In The Believers Church Tradition And The Historiography Of Fundamentalism, William Vance Trollinger

History Faculty Publications

In the United States the history of John Nelson Darby's dispensational premillennialism is intimately tied up with the history of fundamentalism. It is difficult to talk about dispensational premillennialism in the believers church tradition in the twentieth century without making some reference to the fundamentalist movement. In fact, the two distinguishing marks of fundamentalist theology have been the doctrine of biblical inerrancy and the eschatological schema known as dispensationalism. It is thus rather surprising that historians have de-emphasized dispensational premillennialism in explaining the history of fundamentalism. I think that this is a mistake. But to explain why I think this …

Marian Center And Library News Notes Vol. 1 No. 2, Marian Center And Library, Franciscan Fathers

Father Alfred Boeddeker Collection

A revised version of the of the Marian Center and Library's first issue of News Notes, numbered volume 1, issue 2. Introduces goals and services of the San Francisco Marian Center and Library; lists Marian titles and devotions in 36 countries and the continent of Africa, indicating "As we receive additional images of Our Blessed Mother, the brief history for each will be added in future supplements to this our first News Notes." Reproduced typescript.

Marian Center And Library News Notes, Vol. 1 No. 1, Marian Center And Library, Franciscan Fathers

Father Alfred Boeddeker Collection

First newsletter of the Marian Center and Library in San Francisco, introducing the center's services and goals, and listing Marian titles and devotions in 36 countries and the continent of Africa. Reproduced typescript.

The Catholic Theatre Year Book, Catholic Dramatic Movement, Mathias Helfen

Father Alfred Boeddeker Collection

A catalog of plays sold by the Catholic Dramatic Movement (also known as the Catholic Dramatic Guild), including Christmas pageants and Passion plays. Reproduced typescript.