Arts and Humanities Commons^™

A Dream Deferred, Ruth-Arlene W Howe

Ruth-Arlene W. Howe

Presentation at the MLK Annual Unity Breakfast, Boston College, January 19, 2005.

The Living Earth: A Nineteenth-Century Latter-Day Saint Perspective, J. Michael Hunter

J Michael Hunter

By studying the worldview of Mormons living in the nineteenth century, we can better understand their interpretation of nature and their relationship to it. For Mormons of that era, the earth was alive and deeply affected by the attitudes and actions of the humans living upon it. Nineteenth-century Latter-day Saints spoke frequently of the earth, its nature, and its relationship to humanity. They referred to the earth in anthropomorphic terms. It was a living orb endowed with intelligence and feelings. The earth’s life paralleled that of the humans who lived on it. So entwined were the lives of the earth …

Americanized Catholicism? A Response To Thomas Schärtl, Dennis M. Doyle

Dennis M. Doyle

I stand in fundamental agreement with what Thomas Schärtl has said in his article describing recent trends in US Catholicism. I am a lifelong Catholic and a lifelong Democrat. I felt personally distressed and discouraged by the support given to Mitt Romney and the Republicans by some leading US Catholic bishops. Most of this support may have technically passed the legal test of being nonpartisan, but undeniably it functioned in a partisan manner, as did the attacks launched on President Obama in the midst of a campaign to defend religious liberty. Schärtl’s analysis of these trends as reflecting marketing strategies …

Extraordinary Love In The Lives Of Lay People, Dennis M. Doyle

Dennis M. Doyle

The College Theology Society (CTS), initially called the Society of Catholic College Teachers of Sacred Doctrine, was founded mainly by religious and clergy in the early 1950s to support those who taught college-level theology to Catholics in non-seminary settings. Sometimes CTS, in comparison with another group, is said to be relatively more lay-oriented. What this actually means, I think, is that for the CTS, the college classroom, populated mainly by lay people, was the primary locus for carrying out the task of teaching theology. The main goal was to promote the religious formation of Catholic lay people. Given some of …

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

Dennis M. Doyle

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 …

The Militarization Of Prayer In America: White And Native American Spiritual Warfare, Elizabeth Mcalister

Elizabeth McAlister

This article examines how militarism has come to be one of the generative forces of the prayer practices of millions of Christians across the globe. To understand this process, I focus on the articulation between militarization and aggressive forms of prayer, especially the evangelical warfare prayer developed by North Americans since the 1980s. Against the backdrop of the rise in military spending and neoliberal economic policies, spiritual warfare evangelicals have taken on the project of defending the United States on the “spiritual” plane. They have elaborated a complex theology and prayer practice with a highly militarized discourse and set of …

Wild Things: Stories, Transition And The Sacred In Ecological Social Movements, Luigi Russi

Luigi Russi

This article examines the role of stories in ecological activism. It first situates stories inside object ecologies, encompassing relationships of reliance, care and maintenance of things. It suggests that ecologies of this sort work as an extended mind where our cognition takes place and meaning is apprehended, so that what we can think of is always a function of what we have Ôat handÕ. The article then considers how these ecologies are impacted by discourses on climate change and peak oil, which stress the impossibility to keep ordering our lives through the same entanglements that have supported them so far. …

The Genealogy, Ideology, And Future Of Isil And Its Derivatives, Ahmed E. Souaiaia

Ahmed E SOUAIAIA

New Buddhist Silk Roads, Rosita Dellios, R. James Ferguson

Rosita Dellios

As China embarks on its One Belt, One Road Initiative it is recreating not only the economic Silk Road of the past but incorporating a Buddhist-based regionalism that stretched from Eurasia to maritime kingdoms in the southern seas. It was a mandalic world of trade and a dharma of easy communication between cultures and religions. After outlining China’s One Belt, One Road Initiative, this paper provides the historical setting of silk road regionalism with its Buddhist contribution, and then moves to the possibility of a new silk road mandala. The paper concludes with a Buddhist geopolitics of peace. Here Buddhism’s …

New Buddhist Silk Roads, Rosita Dellios, R. James Ferguson

R. James Ferguson

As China embarks on its One Belt, One Road Initiative it is recreating not only the economic Silk Road of the past but incorporating a Buddhist-based regionalism that stretched from Eurasia to maritime kingdoms in the southern seas. It was a mandalic world of trade and a dharma of easy communication between cultures and religions. After outlining China’s One Belt, One Road Initiative, this paper provides the historical setting of silk road regionalism with its Buddhist contribution, and then moves to the possibility of a new silk road mandala. The paper concludes with a Buddhist geopolitics of peace. Here Buddhism’s …

The Great Virtue Of Heaven And Earth 天地之大德:" Deep Ecology In The Yijing 易經, Joseph Adler

Joseph Adler

No abstract provided.

His Final Homily: Pope John Paul Ii's Death As An Affirmation Of His Life's Message, Joesph M. Valenzano

Joseph M. Valenzano III

Every Sunday morning, a member of the Roman Catholic clergy addresses his flock after a reading from one of the Gospels. These homilies ordinarily last between 10 and 20 minutes and allow the priest an opportunity to interpret the Gospel message from that day's reading, as well as discuss how that message relates to contemporary events and issues. During the final two months of his life, Pope John Paul II provided a longer, more powerful symbolic homily to the world. The message summarized his positions on freedom, suffering, and the dignity of human life.

Review: 'Harold Frederic’S Social Drama And The Crisis Of 1890s Evangelical Protestant Culture', William Vance Trollinger

William Vance Trollinger Jr.

Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896) is a terrific novel. The title character is a young, naïve, poorly educated Methodist minister who — when the narrative begins — has been appointed to take the pastorate of a small-town church in upstate New York. It is within only a matter of weeks after moving to Octavius with his wife, Alice, that Theron makes the acquaintance of exotic and compelling individuals who challenge his heretofore unexamined evangelical faith. Abandoning his Methodism with impunity, Ware is soon hurtling toward his “damnation.”

Damned but not dead: At the end of the novel, …

Review: 'God's Own Party: The Making Of The Christian Right', William Vance Trollinger

William Vance Trollinger Jr.

There has been no end of predictions that the demise of the Religious Right is imminent. Over the past three decades, proof of its impending collapse has included the televangelist scandals, Pat Robertson’s failure to secure the Republican presidential nomination, the election and re-election of Bill Clinton, and the emergence of “young” evangelicals who refuse to toe the Religious Right line (this one keeps popping up).

The latest version involves the notion that economically focused libertarians of the Tea Party will inevitably find themselves in heated conflict with evangelical and fundamentalist social conservatives, thus challenging the power of the Religious …

Why Urbanists Need Religion, Joshua D. Ambrosius

Joshua D. Ambrosius

This essay summarizes a conference paper presented at the October 2008 Society for the Scientific Study of Religion meeting in Louisville, Kentucky. The paper was reviewed by several leading scholars.

Managing A Merger, William Vance Trollinger

William Vance Trollinger Jr.

It was not the sort of place where one would expect to find the folks who produced the More-with-Less Cookbook, but the massive and hermetically sealed Opryland complex in Nashville was where 9,330 Mennonites gathered in early July for a momentous meeting. The two largest Mennonite bodies in the U.S. — the General Conference Mennonite Church (established in 1860) and the Mennonite Church (formally established in 1898, but with roots that go back much further) — voted to merge into one denomination, the Mennonite Church USA, after first finding a way to address the issue of homosexuality.

In Lockdown America: The Corruption Of Capital Punishment, William Vance Trollinger

William Vance Trollinger Jr.

Reviews of three books:

• Randolph Loney, A Dream of the Tattered Man: Stories from Georgia’s Death Row.
• Austin Sarat, When the State Kills: Capital Punishment and the American Condition.
• Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America.

Author's introduction: I finish this review in the shadow of Timothy McVeigh's execution. But while America's most notorious mass murderer is dead, and while the pundits continue to argue the merits and meaning of his execution, news about capital punishment just keeps coming. Next after McVeigh on the federal death list is Juan Raul Garza, but because …

Review: Stuart Banner's 'The Death Penalty: An American History', William Vance Trollinger

William Vance Trollinger Jr.

In this dispassionate but chillingly detailed survey of capital punishment, Banner, professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis, documents and explains the dramatic "changes in the arguments pro and con, in the crimes punished with death, in execution methods and rituals ... [and] in the way Americans have understood and experienced the death penalty."

Religion, Politics, And Polity Replication: Religious Differences In Preferences For Institutional Design, Joshua D. Ambrosius

Joshua D. Ambrosius

This article presents a theory of polity replication in which religious congregants prefer institutions in other realms of society, including the state, to be structured like their church. Polities, or systems of church governance and administration, generally take one of three forms: episcopal (hierarchical/centralized), presbyterian (collegial/regional), or congregational (autonomous/decentralized). When asked to cast a vote to shape institutions in a centralizing or decentralizing manner, voters are influenced by organizational values shaped by their respective religious traditions‘ polity structures. Past social scientific scholarship has neglected to explicitly connect religious affiliation, defined by polity, with members‘ stances on institutional design. However, previous …

Pusey's Sermons At St. Saviour's, Leeds, Robert Ellison

Robert Ellison

"E . B. Pusey as a Preacher." It would not be surprising to find such a phrase as the title of a nineteenth-century work. Authors in both Britain and America used it in books and articles about numerous ministers, literary figures, the Apostle Paul, and even Jesus himself.1 Edward Bouverie Pusey, in fact, was the subject of one such piece: a review of Sermons for the Church's Seasons from Advent to Trinity, published in the Spectator on 11 August 1883. Such a scope would, however, be too broad for a scholarly study in the twenty-first century. Pusey's canon is simply …

Wrestling With Angels: Postsecular Contemporary American Poetry, Paul T. Corrigan

Paul T. Corrigan

In the current “secular age,” more and more people find beliefs and behaviors associated with traditional religion intellectually and ethically untenable. At the same time, many “postsecular” writers, both believers and nonbelievers, continue to write with religious or religiously-inflected forms, themes, and purposes. In the United States, postsecular poets “wrestle with angels” by engaging constructively and deconstructively with matters traditionally considered the domain of religion and spirituality. While the recent work of Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, John McClure and others puts the concept of the postsecular at the cutting edge of various fields of study, including religion, sociology, and literature, …

Earth-Honoring Faith: Religious Ethics In A New Key By Larry Rasmussen, Laura Stivers

Laura Stivers

Larry Rasmussen’s new book, Earth-Honoring Faith: Religious Ethics in a New Key, like his last environmental ethics masterpiece Earth Community Earth Ethics (won the 1997 Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion), is eloquently written and incorporates a multitude of interdisciplinary sources to argue for Creation justice.

Civil Religion In The Interfaith Context Of Northern California: Revisiting Robert Bellah's Broken Covenant Project, Harlan Stelmach

Harlan Stelmach

Are there signs of new emerging myths and stories about our religious self-understanding as a nation that will help us address what Robert Bellah calls, our "third time of trial"? On and off for many years, I have been interested in the questions raised by Robert Bellah's work on civil religion. Specifically, I have sought answers to the above question posed in the last Chapter of Broken Covenant, "The Birth of New American Myths." Perhaps to be more precise about my interest in this question, I would at least have to go back to my graduate student days in Berkeley …

The Jewish Nature Of The First Century Church, Barry D. Fike

Barry D. Fike

“When men realized that the teaching of God was no heritage that one accepts passively but rather a heritage that has to be won, they began to see this relationship to the Bible as a religious obligation. It became a supreme commandment to “study”, to explore the Scriptures. To explore means to consider the Bible as a challenge rather than a gift…..The duty to “explore” requires further rethinking: each end becomes a new beginning and each solution a new problem…Once Today’s Church is fully aware of the vast importance of learning, it too will realize that it cannot afford to …

Law's Religion: Rendering Culture, Benjamin L. Berger

Benjamin L. Berger

This article argues that constitutional law's inability to deal with religion in a satisfying way flows, in part, from its failure to understand religion as, in a robust sense, culture. Once one begins to understand the Canadian constitutional rule of law itself as a cultural form, it becomes apparent that law renders religion in a very particular fashion, and that this rendering is a product of law's symbolic categories and interpretive horizons. This article draws out the elements of Canadian constitutionalism's unique rendering of religion and argues that, although Canadian constitutionalism claims to understand religion as a culture, this is …

Assembly Required: Christ's Presence In The Pews, William L. Portier

William L. Portier

When I attempt to articulate what I "get out of" going to church, I find myself increasingly emphasizing the real presence of Christ in the assembly. It has been almost 50 years since Vatican II, so it is well to recall what the council's Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy said in 1963 about that presence. It taught that in order to accomplish the work of salvation for which the Father sent him, Christ is always present in the church, especially in the church's liturgical celebrations.

Our Technological Past And Future: From Predigital To Postdigital Apocalypses, Michael J. Paulus Jr.

Michael J. Paulus, Jr.

An exploration of technological hopes and fears in apocalyptic literature.

Cit Seminar Committee Members Present Panel In Amsterdam, June-Ann Greeley

June-Ann Greeley

On September 12, Catholic Intellectual Tradition (CIT) Seminar committee members June-Ann Greeley (religious studies), Nathan Lewis (art & design) and Joe Nagy (English) presented a panel entitled "The Timeless "Comedy" of Life: Dante's Divine Comedy as a Vade Mecum for the Contemporary Student" at the Liberal Arts and Sciences Education and Core Texts in the European Context Conference at Amsterdam University College in the Netherlands.

Cit Seminar Committee Members Present Panel In Amsterdam, Nathan Lewis

Nathan Lewis

On September 12, Catholic Intellectual Tradition (CIT) Seminar committee members June-Ann Greeley (religious studies), Nathan Lewis (art & design) and Joe Nagy (English) presented a panel entitled "The Timeless "Comedy" of Life: Dante's Divine Comedy as a Vade Mecum for the Contemporary Student" at the Liberal Arts and Sciences Education and Core Texts in the European Context Conference at Amsterdam University College in the Netherlands.

Proposition For Ending The Crisis In Syria: Concurrent Devolution Of Power Regionally And Military Action Against Genocidal Fighters Nationally, Ahmed Souaiaia

Ahmed E SOUAIAIA

Syria's civil war is on a path to world war. Should Russia, like the Friends of Syria, take part in the military action in Syria and Iraq, the region will enter a new phase that could change the geopolitics of the region. However, Russia' military build up could force a political solution for a crisis that is impacting all many countries around the world.