The Long Shadow of Vatican II

The Long Shadow of Vatican II
Author: Lucas Van Rompay
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 178
Release: 2015-07-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 146962530X

With the Second Vatican Council (1962–65), the Roman Catholic Church for the first time took a positive stance on modernity. Its impact on the thought, worship, and actions of Catholics worldwide was enormous. Benefiting from a half century of insights gained since Vatican II ended, this volume focuses squarely on the ongoing aftermath and reinterpretation of the Council in the twenty-first century. In five penetrating essays, contributors examine crucial issues at the heart of Catholic life and identity, primarily but not exclusively within North American contexts. On a broader level, the volume as a whole illuminates the effects of the radical changes made at Vatican II on the lived religion of everyday Catholics. As framed by volume editors Lucas Van Rompay, Sam Miglarese, and David Morgan, the book's long view of the church's gradual and often contentious transition into contemporary times profiles a church and laity who seem committed to many mutual values but feel that implementation of the changes agreed to in principle at the Council is far from accomplished. The election in 2013 of the charismatic Pope Francis has added yet another dimension to the search for the meaning of Vatican II. The contributors are Catherine E. Clifford, Hillary Kaell, Leo D. Lefebure, Jill Peterfeso, and Leslie Woodcock Tentler.

The Laywoman Project

The Laywoman Project
Author: Mary J. Henold
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2020-01-30
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1469654504

Summoning everyday Catholic laywomen to the forefront of twentieth-century Catholic history, Mary J. Henold considers how these committed parishioners experienced their religion in the wake of Vatican II (1962–1965). This era saw major changes within the heavily patriarchal religious faith—at the same time as an American feminist revolution caught fire. Who was the Catholic woman for a new era? Henold uncovers a vast archive of writing, both intimate and public facing, by hundreds of rank-and-file American laywomen active in national laywomen's groups, including the National Council of Catholic Women, the Catholic Daughters of America, and the Daughters of Isabella. These records evoke a formative period when laywomen played publicly with a surprising variety of ideas about their own position in the Catholic Church. While marginalized near the bottom of the church hierarchy, laywomen quietly but purposefully engaged both their religious and gender roles as changing circumstances called them into question. Some eventually chose feminism while others rejected it, but most, Henold says, crafted a middle position: even conservative, nonfeminist laywomen came to reject the idea that the church could adapt to the modern world while keeping women's status frozen in amber.

Liberation Theology and the Others

Liberation Theology and the Others
Author: Christian Büschges
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 327
Release: 2021-09-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1793633649

Looking beyond prominent figures or major ecclesial events, Liberation Theology and the Others offers a fresh historical perspective on Latin American liberation theology. Thirteen case studies, from Mexico to Uruguay, depict a vivid picture of religious and lay activism that shaped the profile of the Latin American Catholic Church in the second half of the 20th century. Stressing the transnational character of Catholic activism and its intersections with prevalent discourses of citizenship, ethnicity or development, scholars from Latin America, the US, and Europe, analyze how pastoral renewal was debated and embraced in multiple local and culturally diverse contexts. Contributors explore the connections between Latin American liberation theology and anthropology in Peru, armed revolutionaries in highland Guatemala, and the implementation of neoliberalism in Bolivia. They identify conceptions of the popular church, indigenous religiosity, women’s leadership, and student activism that circulated among Latin American religious and lay activists between the 1960s and the 1980s. By revisiting the multifaceted and oftentimes contingent nature of church reforms, this edited volume provides fascinating new insights into one of the most controversial religious movements of the 20th century.

Nonreligious Imaginaries of World Repairing

Nonreligious Imaginaries of World Repairing
Author: Lori G. Beaman
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 153
Release: 2021-08-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3030728811

The world is confronted with multiple intersecting crises including exploitation, inequality, political polarization and climate change. World-repairing work is vitally needed. But just at a time when humans most obviously require robust moral imaginaries on which to draw, it is no longer clear what kinds of beliefs, meanings, stories and encounters inspire them to act. We know that nonreligious identities are on the rise in numerous countries throughout the world. But with so much focus on the “non” part of nonreligion, what we don’t know is what nonreligious imaginaries actually look, sound and feel like. What do nonreligious people believe in? What stories inspire them? In what moments do they find meaning? This book seeks to answer these questions through a series of short essays exploring the nonreligious imaginaries that emerge in a range of world-repairing practices, including ethical consumption, community organizing, eating habits, and environmental activism. In so doing, the book provides a crucial contribution to two areas of increasing social and political concern: First, the need to understand not only what nonreligious people are rejecting but also their sources of meaning and action. Second, the urgent need for cultural tools for mobilizing people towards more compassionate and sustainable practices.

Beyond the Veil

Beyond the Veil
Author: Aubrey Thamann
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2021-05-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1800730659

Looking at the cultural responses to death and dying, this collection explores the emotional aspects that death provokes in humans, whether it is disgust, fear, awe, sadness, anger, or even joy. Whereas most studies of death and dying treat the subject from an objective viewpoint, the scholars in this collection recognize their inherent connection with death which allows for a new and more personal form of study. More broadly, this collection suggests a new paradigm in the study of death and dying.

Womanpriest

Womanpriest
Author: Jill Peterfeso
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Total Pages: 442
Release: 2020-05-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0823288293

This book is openly available in digital formats thanks to a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. While some Catholics and even non-Catholics today are asking if priests are necessary, especially given the ongoing sex-abuse scandal, The Roman Catholic Womanpriests (RCWP) looks to reframe and reform Roman Catholic priesthood, starting with ordained women. Womanpriest is the first academic study of the RCWP movement. As an ethnography, Womanpriest analyzes the womenpriests’ actions and lived theologies in order to explore ongoing tensions in Roman Catholicism around gender and sexuality, priestly authority, and religious change. In order to understand how womenpriests navigate tradition and transgression, this study situates RCWP within post–Vatican II Catholicism, apostolic succession, sacraments, ministerial action, and questions of embodiment. Womanpriest reveals RCWP to be a discrete religious movement in a distinct religious moment, with a small group of tenacious women defying the Catholic patriarchy, taking on the priestly role, and demanding reconsideration of Roman Catholic tradition. Doing so, the women inhabit and re-create the central tensions in Catholicism today.

Finding God Among our Neighbors, Volume 2

Finding God Among our Neighbors, Volume 2
Author: Kristin Johnston Largen
Publisher: Fortress Press
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2017-02-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1506423302

For too many students, Christian theology is learned in isolation from other religions traditions. With this, the second volume of her important work, Kristin Johnston Largen returns to expand the systematic theology she began in the original volume. Largen places the work of Christian theology soundly within the interreligious dialogue that is the defining feature of our time. In doing so, she prepares students of theology for the task of understanding and articulating their Christian beliefs in the context of a religiously and culturally diverse world. In the original volume, Largen focused her work on three loci—God, Creation, and Humanity. In this second volume she expands the project to include salvation, the Church, and the Holy Spirit. As before, each locus is set within the broader context of interreligious dialogue by considering how the varied beliefs of the world’s religious traditions inform our understanding of our own tradition. This volume explores indigenous religions, Sikhism, Confucianism, and Daoism, in particular.

The Second Vatican Council on Other Religions

The Second Vatican Council on Other Religions
Author: Gerald O'Collins
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2013-03-28
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0199672598

Gerald O'Collins explores the full scope of the positive teaching by the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) on other living faiths, illustrating how the Council made a startling advance in official Catholic teaching and how this teaching was borne out in the work of Pope John Paul II and Jacques Dupuis.

The Transition of Religion to Culture in Law and Public Discourse

The Transition of Religion to Culture in Law and Public Discourse
Author: Lori Beaman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2020-03-27
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1000050556

This book explores the recent trend toward the transformation of religious symbols and practices into culture in Western democracies. Analyses of three legal cases involving religion in the public sphere are used to illuminate this trend: a municipal council chamber; a town hall; and town board meetings. Each case involves a different national context—Canada, France and the United States—and each illustrates something interesting about the shape-shifting nature of religion, specifically its flexibility and dexterity in the face of the secular, the religious and the plural. Despite the differences in national contexts, in each instance religion is transformed into culture or heritage by the courts to justify or excuse its presence and to distance the state from the possibility that it is violating legal norms of distance from religion. The cultural practice or symbol is represented as a shared national value or activity. Transforming the ‘Other’ into ‘Us’ through reconstitution is also possible. Finally, anxiety about the ‘Other’ becomes part of the story of rendering religion as culture, resulting in the impugning of anyone who dares to question the putative shared culture. The book will be essential reading for students, academics and policy-makers working in the areas of sociology of religion, religious studies, socio-legal studies, law and public policy, constitutional law, religion and politics, and cultural studies.

The Synod of Pistoia and Vatican II

The Synod of Pistoia and Vatican II
Author: Shaun Blanchard
Publisher:
Total Pages: 363
Release: 2020
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190947799

In this book, Shaun Blanchard uses a close study of the Synod of Pistoia (1786) to argue that the roots of the Vatican II reforms must be pushed back beyond the widely acknowledged twentieth-century forerunners of the Council, beyond Newman and the Tübingen School in the nineteenth century, to the eighteenth century, in which a variety of reform movements attempted ressourcement and aggiornamento.