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The Psychological Assessment Of Applicants For Priesthood And Religious Life, Thomas G. Plante

Psychology

The recent clergy sexual abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church have focused a great deal of attention on how we evaluate applicants to the priesthood and religious life. The crisis has underscored the critical need to ensure that men who have a sexual predilection towards children be barred from entering religious life and priesthood. Additionally, men who have other significant psychiatric conditions that put them at risk of harming children or others have no place as Church leaders or clergy in positions where they have access to and power over vulnerable others.

The Psychoanalyst And The Exorcist: Perspectives On Psychology And Religion, Diane Jonte-Pace

Religious Studies

A century ago psychology declared war on religion. Describing religion as "nothing but psychology projected into the external world," Sigmund Freud, the first psychoanalyst, mounted a campaign to expose religion as something far worse than a comforting illusion. He tried to show that religious belief and practice were harmful to both psyche and culture. In his view religion distorted and deformed the mind by demanding that we refrain from thinking deeply or from asking serious questions. Religion forces us, he claimed, to accept the authority of others, and it promotes excessive guilt and shame for transgressions of its mandates. In …

Explore, Winter 1999: Psychology And Religion, Ignatian Center For Jesuit Education

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Contents: Dear Readers; Letter From the Director; The Psychoanalyst and the Exorcist: Perspectives on Psychology and Religion; Interlacing Psychotherapy and Religion: Clinical Perspectives; A new Rapprochment between Psychology and Religion; The Shared Terrain of Psychology and Spirituality: An Interview with Gerdenio Manuel, S.J.; A unitarian Reflects; Being Muslim in a Catholic University; SCU's Jesuit Identity in the Eyes of a Non-Christian Professor; Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam: The Strength of a Jesuit Education; Reflections of a Jewish Faculty Member at SCU; The Investment of My Life: My Santa Clara Experience; Book review: Making Disciples, A Handbook of Christian Moral Formation; Coming …

Explore, Spring 1999: Faith And Culture, Ignatian Center For Jesuit Education

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Contents: Letter from the Director; Cultural Understanding in Jesuit Education: A Pedagogy of Engagement; The Emerging Role of Service Learning at Jesuit Universities; Cuba Experience and Jesuit Education; Cuba and the Jesuits: Fidel's Teachers Come Back to Life; A Conversation with Ron Hansen; Book review: Religion and Prime Time Television; Coming Events: Lecture Series, Spirituality Series, Bannan Visitor; Next Issue

Congregational Leadership And Spirituality In The Postmodern Era, Sandra Marie Schneiders

Jesuit School of Theology

In addressing the issue of leadership in congregations which are increasingly influenced by the emergence of cultural postmodernism, I write not as one who is engaged in leadership or trained in the fields of organization and management, but as a theologian reflecting on the spirituality of contemporary religious. But part of my preparation for these reflections involved talking with a number of religious in leadership positions, asking them what were the major challenges they faced as leaders.

Contemporary Religious Life: Death Or Transformation?, Sandra Marie Schneiders

Jesuit School of Theology

No one who attends carefully to the present experience of religious life in North America can be entirely sanguine about its present or its future. Despite the celebratory character of this gathering (and certainly the twenty-five year work of the Institute for Religious is something to celebrate) we are all aware of the signs of diminishment that mark contemporary religious life: aging membership, decline in recruitment, dwindling financial resources in the face of relentlessly rising costs, loss of institutions, if we attend only to the material problems. When these are compounded by ecclesiastical harassment of individual members in their ministries …

Discernment Of Spirits, Michael J. Buckley S.J.

Jesuit School of Theology

The capacity for the discernment of spirits responds to a profound expectation and a pervasive temptation within Christianity. All human beings who search for God want God to guide their lives, and Christians have been taught normatively to expect "to be guided by the Spirit" (Gal 5: 18; Rom 8: 14).

Fire For A Weekend: An Experience Of The Spiritualexercises, Paul A. Soukup

Communication

Although in this essay I am speaking in particular of adaptations of the Spiritual Exercises, my experience has also been in other retreat settings, both formal and informal. There are many other kinds of retreat approaches which are offered throughout the member of a team, and other times as guest director for a specialized group. These include Marriage Encounter, retreats for alcoholics or co-dependents, and youth renewal weekends. I know the different graces that arise. All are valid; but I must say, in general, that on the average weekend at a silent retreat given over to more reflective sessions and …

Jesuit Response To The Communication Revolution, Paul A. Soukup

Communication

This essay will consider both. In order to offer a context, it begins with a review of the impact of the communication revolution on our individual and collective lives. Communication, the process of exchanging information and influence, occurs through interpersonal methods or through the mass media. However, recent technological advances lead me to focus more on mass communication.

The Effects Of Women’S Experience On Their Spirituality, Sandra Marie Schneiders

Jesuit School of Theology

Whatever else the feminist movement may have accomplished, it has established the fact that Western society, including the Christian church, is male-dominated.(1) Some are convinced that this state of affairs corresponds to the divine plan of God.(2) Others, both men and women, are convinced that the God of Judeo-Christian revelation calls us to liberate ourselves and one another from what can only be called the shackles of sexism, as we are to liberate ourselves from racism, anti-Semitism, and every other form of human oppression.(3) In this article I am not concerned primarily with the fact of this male dominance, nor …

The Women Theologian And The Ideal Of Christian Wisdom, Sandra Marie Schneiders

Jesuit School of Theology

Teresa of Jesus, better known as St. Teresa of Avila, was born on March 28, 1515 and died on October 15, 1582, four hundred years ago tomorrow. By any human standards this sixteenth century Spaniard was an extraordinary woman. Despite the restrictions placed on the education and the lifestyle of women in her time Teresa, who entered the cloistered religious Order of Mount Carmel at the age of twenty-one, not only achieved superlatively the ideals of the life she had chosen but virtually single-handedly reformed the feminine branch of the Carmelite Order and cooperated with St. John of the Cross …

Mission In Companionship: Of Jesuit Community And Communion, Michael J. Buckley S.J.

Religious Studies

Jesuit communities come out of a historical paradox, one which has been with the Society since its beginnings and which has marked almost every subsequent attempt to form and foster a local community: The order came into being at the very moment when its members were to separate. Jesuits emerged as Ignatius' early companions were dispersed forever into missions. The Society of Jesus became the permanent community of men who would never be together again.

A Contemporary Theology Of The Vows, Sandra Marie Schneiders

Jesuit School of Theology

This article is entitled "a theology of the vows" in order to call attention at the outset to the difference between the Gospel reality of religious life and the human effort, called theology, by which we seek to understand and articulate that reality. There will never be a totally adequate theology of religious life (or of the vows), but the inadequacy, and at times even the falsity, of our understanding and articulation can not destroy or diminish religious life as a gift of Jesus Christ to the Church. Nevertheless, the efforts we make to understand religious life and to make …

Jesuit Priesthood: Its Meaning And Commitments, Michael J. Buckley S.J.

Religious Studies

My Brothers: Peace!

Over these next few pages, I would like to meditate about the mystery which has caught up so much of our lives, the priesthood within the Society of Jesus. I would like to ask: What does it mean to be a Jesuit priest? What stamp has this priesthood left upon our history and upon the almost infinite variety of our engagements? How does this understanding of priesthood bear upon the life of a scholastic as he moves through the years of studies?—or upon the life of a Jesuit with final vows as with a quiet seriousness he …

The Confirmation Of Promise: A Letter To George Ganss, Michael J. Buckley S.J.

Religious Studies

Dear George: Peace!

Your request for my impressions on the 32nd General Congregation of the Society is here on my desk. A letter is a better form for my remarks. It indicates their character: personal, impressionistic, tentative, and somewhat hesitant. They come out of my random experiences and out of my own attempts to read these experiences. They draw into a unity my personal interpretation of the General Congregation, especially what it might mean for the Society within the United States. They are tentative because they possess all of the shaky particularity of the prudential interpretation, that amassing of so …