American Catholic Social Ethics
Schroth, Raymond A.
early Marx but rejected by the later Marx -- is perplexing. Segundo rightly suggests that the continuity between the early and later Marx consists of his "ideal conception of the human...
...He ends his book calling for the creation of "an effective cultural tradition" -- a task to be achieved only if the supreme evolutionary quality, flexibility, is internalized and transmitted to the younger generation of freedom fighters...
...His chapter on world hunger, for example, documents the extent of starvation, deals with conflicting evidence, analyzes the role of food in religious values and rituals, allows for cultural differences in attitude toward food, connects hunger with the energy and population problems, explains the technical and social advantages and disadvantages of the Green Revolution, and prudently answers those who argue that their giving up a juicy steak won't help a starving child in India: I repeat that changed lifestyles, isolated from a larger political strategy, accomplish little...
...Raymond A . Schroth T HE STRUGGLE between the demands of staying Catholic and being American--between loyalty to an ancient universal faith and the allures of a prosperous democratic society forged by a unique, brief historical experience-has been the central tension of the story of the American Catholic church...
...Curran's method, on the other hand, is briefly place his subject's career in context, painstakingly summarize his work, then offer criticisms and comments of his own...
...The great symbolic change came in 2012, when the Vatican issued a solemn encyclical on the moral duty of persons to limit reproduction...
...thor of Prophesy Deliverance...
...But, perhaps because he is the prisoner of the old "manual" theology that trained him and of themoralist's method of weighing every position systematically in order to achieve a proper balance between the "natural" and "supernatural" response, Curran does not write with a felicitous style...
...FORCED OPTIONS SOCIAL DECISIONS FOR THE 21ST CENTURY Roger Lincoln Shinn Ilarper & Row, $16.95, 267 pp...
...So why defend Fromm's exorbitant claim...
...An AfroAmerican Revolutionary Christianity...
...II sion now so subtly relaxed that after almost two hundred years of pleading and debating, with both, Washington and Rome, and dying in their nation's wars to prove themselves true Americans, American Catholics 'now appear so absorbed by their cultures to be barely distinguishable in social and ethical behavior...
...The tire turns on Gabriel Marcel's distinction between a mystery and a problem, mystery being essentially irreducible, while problems submit (sub specie aeternitatis, at least) to methods productive of solutions...
...His book illustrates the severe limitations of opting for a full-blown philosophical anthropology...
...And we should know more about how Murray both transcended and suffered from the limitations of a doctorate from the Gregorian Univeristy...
...One is repeatable, universalizable within a system intentionally independent of the accidental, including the individual practitioner...
...Indeed, one of the striking things about Curran's history is how isolated some of these theologians, with a few exceptions, have been from the main currents of American intellectual life--from Protestant theology, Puritanism, the Social Gospel, revivalism, the Nicbuhrs, as well as Emerson, Thoreau, James, l~ewey, and secular humanism...
...Furthermore, Curran observes, the Catholic Worker movement has an awe-inspiring spiritual beauty...
...Catholic University sociologist Paul Hanley Furfey offered the fullest theoretical development of the Catholic radicalism inspired by the Catholic Worker movement, and, unlike Ryan and the German-Americans of the Central-Verein, based his social ethics not on reason but on faith and the Scriptures (thus following 1 Cor...
...He is the author of The Eagle & Brooklyn...
...but, concentrating on derelicts, it has done little or nothing to help the ghetto poor: John Courtney Murray's creative genius made him the most outstanding American Catholic theologian of the century...
...Theology & ways of knowing DISCERNING Tile NY|TERY AN ESSAY ON THE NATURE OF THEOLOGY Andrew Louth Clarendon/Oxford, $19.95, 147 pp...
...CTU is one of the largest Catholic Schools of Theology in the country...
...The church theologians are not likely to put forward sophisticated social analyses, just as the more broadly engaged social theorist cannot possibly do justice to the complexities of church theology -- though both can write for a wider audience...
...For information or for a catalogue, write or call: CATHOLIC THEOLOGICAL UNION 5401 South Cornell Chicago, Illinois 60615 [312] 324-8000 27 January 1984:57 but-not-timorous moralists, traces five twentieth-century men and movements-John A. Ryan, the Central Verein, Paul Hanley Furfey, John Courtney Murray, S.J., and James W. Douglass--in a critical analysis of the principal ways in which Catholics have defined the social, economic, and moral costs of being American...
...10016 For the endosed $9 send the next 11 issues (6 months of Commonweal) to: Name Address City, State, Zip [-]I prefer a full-year subscription at $24 ~/27/u tian Mystical Tradition, From Plato to Denys (Clarendon, 1981), was a systematic and rigorous introduction to the major Greek concepts that wended through and were transformed in the course of creedal development and the establishment of liturgical and mystical praxis...
...Surely not...
...This when so many of the ncw challenges to Christian morality are emerging from the "success" of the culture itself, from consumerism, from thc "good life" strangling the life of thc spirit...
...In my opinion, the major intellectual task of liberation theologians is to continue to reexamine and reshape the traditional doctrines of the church, engage in more serious efforts of social theory, cultural criticism, and historical reconstruction, and write palpable and intelligible essays and texts for the nonacademic literate laity and clergy...
...but he ~ a s a Cold War economic conservative whose clever solution to the church-state issue -- arguing that papal pronouncements condemning religious freedom were historically conditioned and thus subject to "development" (change) -- was sometimes more clever than exact...
...FATHER RAYMOND A. SCHROTH, S.J., is Dean of the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts...
...At that time the population of the globe had reached 6,5 billion, and about 20 million people starved in one year . . . Now, within slightly less than a century of the new era, the world population has stabilized at ten billion people . . . . The change in procreative habits was hard to work out, but not so hard as some had expected...
...Nouwen sees that we need to move out of our house of fear and into the house the Lord invites us to...
...But does such an ideal constitute a philosophical anthropology...
...An uncommitted and detached liberation theologia~ is ' co, tradiction in terms...
...Thus, for the last decade, Catholics--now with like-minded fellow Christians-- have begun asking themselves if the spiritual cost of membership in the Country Club has been too high: even the liturgy for the Fourth of July reflects this questioning as it warns against nationalism and has us pray that we might "ward off the pride that comes with worldly wealth and power...
...A tenwith prophetic churches and progressive movements...
...Nell Oifford tnjrl HE FIUNDAMENTAL thing that & Christian theology can contribute as one way of pursuing knowledge, to all other ways of pursuing knowledge i s . . . 'that it should hinder and resist the natural craving of the human spirit for a clear transparent and definite system...
...Kathleen Hughes (Liturgy), Philip King* (OT), Claire Lowery* (Pastoral Ministry), George MaeRae (New Test), Sally MeFague (Systematica), Gabriel Moran (Religous Ed...
...Louth goes to this root assumption by imaginative and engaging routes, beginning with a temperate but unsparing analysis of the evolution of the opposition between reason and will, emotion and thought, sense and cognition, and the corresponding determination to master the intractable and contingent by means of method...
...but today his notion of "Catholic sociology," where the major of a syllogism is provided by the church and the minor by empirical research, may strike us as quaint, and his "personalist" emphasis on voluntary poverty and charity as solutions to.economic and racial problems neglects the need to establish social justice through law...
...In a long Horizons (Fall 1982) symposium, Rodger Van Allen, John A. Coleman, S.J., June E. O'Connor, George G. Higgins, and David J. O'Brien pay generous but critical tribute to Ctwran's book...
...NELL GIFFORD lives and writes in New York City...
...The Enlightenment's systematic "dissociation of sensibility" implied (however accurate its understanding of its methodological heritage from Descartes) that even the questions of philosophy, including ontology, were amenable to "method," were in fact "problems...
...Segundo rightly suggests that the continuity between the early and later Marx consists of his "ideal conception of the human being...
...through ecstasy which calls us to move out of the static places in our lives where all is secure...
...And, as Curran begins his chapter on the Catholic peace movement, "No sooner had John Courtney Murray proved there was no incompatibility beCommonweal: 58 tween being American and being Catholic than the Berrigan brothers and their cohorts came to almost the opposite conclusion...
...In Forced Options, Roger Shinn, of Union Theological Seminary, takes up where Curran leaves off: in an imaginative, wellresearched and well-written series of twenty-first century scenarios in which the" new" problems--the destruction of the environment, the depletion of energy, uncontrolled population growth, the chaos of world disorder, and nuclear war--overtake the moralists with dilemmas which John Ryan, who wrote the famous 1919 Bishops' Program of Reconstruction, and maybe even John Courtney Murray, never dreamed of...
...Permanent Institute Faculty...
...but his "principle of expediency," which insisted that good ethics is also good economics, failed to acknowledge that the self-interest of capitalists is often incompatible with social justice, and his reliance on natural law and his insistence on structural change neglected Scripture and the need for a change of heart...
...but we are left wondering how widely Murray searched clsewhcrc in American culture for the consensus...
...We offer you a talented and distinguished faculty, a superior library and a complete theological curriculum, all set in one of the most beautiful cities in the world...
...Price: $79 net video cassette 53 minutes (VHS & Beta I!) $8.95 net audio cassette O BOSTON COLLEGE Institute of Religious Education & Pastoral Ministry Already A Tradition in preparing and renewing Christians for Ministry offers Summer Courses June 25 - August 3 Two week courses for credit or audit, for continuing education or a degree (M.A., M.Ed., Ph.D) Summer 1984 Faculty Gregory Baum (Sociology), Margaret Brennan (Spirituality), Walter Brueggemann (OT), Franeine Cardman (Church History) Michael Cavanagh (Psychology), Bernard Cooke (Sacraments), Regis Dully (Liturgy), Thomas Groome* (Religious Ed...
...Method" contrasts with techne as, paradigmatically, mathematics does with art...
...The other depends precisely on unique conjunctions of accidents, is unrepeatable and therefore untestable...
...as Coleman says, he has written a "valuable and important book...
...7:31, one should avoid dishonorable vocations, such as working as a stockbroker...
...In contrast, Shinn's method springs from a dialogue with the traditions and the disciplines which Catholic intellectuals, until the 1960s, neglected...
...Furfey, for one, is still'alive in Washington and Curran says in Horizons thai he has known him for fifteen years...
...While he tells us more than we want or need to know about the thought of his subjects, we would love to know more about the men them, selves and how their life experiences - - particularly their economic backgrounds, reading, and educations - - accounted for the development of their thought...
...Michael O'Neill (Leadership), Fayette Breaux Veverka (Religious Ed...
...Without some fort, of ecclesiastical and political praxis, cri~ ical consciousness becomes :,': sounch, brass and theological reflection a tinklii~g cymbal...
...Does the mere possession of values mean that one adheres to a philosophical anthropology...
...the other only by the most Commonweal: 60...
...degrees as well as the Certificate in Pastoral Studies...
...Some of the older bishops complained, but the Pope resolutely stuck to her position and made a worldwide tour advocating it...
...Nouwen FROM THE HOUSE OF FEAR TO THE HOUSE OF LOVE A Spirituality of Peacemaking In this talk at the University of Notre Dame Father Nouwen presents his insights into social justice ministry and Christian commitment...
...Most recognize Immanuel Kant as the one who worked out that implication at the expense of the notion of philosophy itself...
...One is the "technotopia": to By the year 2100 the world has recovered from the near breakdown at the end of the twentieth century...
...And his editors have not helped by missing several typos, leaving out words between pages 27 and 28, and leaving in some "hopefullys" when he means, " I hope...
...We offer the M.Div., M.A...
...For free catalogue, call or write: Institute of Religious Education & Pastoral Ministry, Boston College, Dept...
...In stark contrast to The Liberation of Theology, Segundo's Faith and Ideologies is more a phenomenon than an event, a symptom of the second alternative in the evolution of liberation theologies rather than a mover and shaker on the contemporary scene...
...Those who adopt simpler diets may be useful pioneers, showing more timid people that life can be enjoyable without lavish consumption...
...through fecundity remaining in Jesus and receiving gifts of life from the poor...
...Since he based part of his foreign policy on his analysis of the Russian mind, how well trained was he in foreign affairs...
...In American Catholic Social Ethics, Father Charles Curran, of Catholic University, one of our foremost moderateA deep respect for our religious traditions...
...Much of the book is dull - - duller than it has to be...
...Individual courses may be taken on a limited basis...
...Furthermore, if liberation theologies have taught us anything, it is that Christian thinkers must be organically linked Ethics & isolation AMERICAN CATROLIC SOCIAL ETRICS TWENTIETH CENTURY APPROACHES Charles E. Curr~a Notre Dame, $21.95, 353 pp...
...Like Rahner, Louth is versed in patristics: his most recent previous book, The Origins of the ChrisCommonweal' s '84 I Trial Subscription Offer ! _ 11 I s s u e s for $ 9 __ COMMONWEAL, 232 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y...
...Too often people work for peace out of fear...
...Curran wisely questions Murray's bold assertion that the AmeriREVIEWERS CORNEL WEST teaches philosophy at Union Theological Seminary and is the au...
...and M.T.S...
...but little of this colorful man's personal complexity comes through...
...Father Nouwen's personality shines through this presentation as he proclaims his gospel message with great ener~, humor and a deep sense of God's presence...
...A scholarly search for tomorrow's answers...
...American Catholic social ethics is coming of age, even if it it not--nor should it be-- completely at home...
...This is a work of theological epistemology...
...Maria Harris (Religious Ed...
...It goes something like this: John A. Ryan, dubbed by Father Charles E. Coughlin "the Right Reverend New Dealer," who developed the idea of the obligation to pay a family living wage, exemplified the best of American social liberalism...
...One can be said to "progress...
...The last section of Segundo's book is a sketch of " a Latin American anthropology" -- a reading of Latin American realities from 1950-1975 in light of his philosophical perspective...
...This happens through intimacy with the Lord which becomes solidarity with all people...
...Needless to say, these three activities require different persons working on different terrains...
...R Chestnut Hill, MA 02167, (617) 552-8440 27 January 1984:59 can consensus is ultimatcly grounded on natural law...
...Sydney & Robert MeAfee Brown (Social Ethics), John & Denise Carmody (Systematics), Kathy & Jim MeGinnis (Church...
...Yet they have a purpose...
...Today, as the bishops' letter on nuclear armaments demonstrates, Catholic moralists are both in dialogue with technology and constantly feeling for that balance which Curran sees as central to a moral decision...
...After brief generalizations of the periods of consciousness-raising, violent action, and repression, Segundo tries to go beyond mere economic and political analysis and accents "the ecological state of human beings" in relation t o nature, the state, and class exploitation...
...from Henri J.M...
...We are the theological home for over twenty religious communities of men and an ever-increasing number of religious women, lay women and lay men...
...As such it belongs to that growing body of post-critical, postsystems studies of theological anthropology to which Karl Rahner is the most prolific contributor...
...And even if one decides to do so, it is better to revise already refined versions rather than create one's own out of thin air or derived from anthropologists and psychologists...
...Those foundations, of classical Christian anthropology freshly realized, support this present book...
...Audience: adult education, social justice groups, prayer groups, seminary...
Vol. 111 • January 1984 • No. 2
