Tag: <span>04 article</span>

Tag: 04 article

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At Odds With the Pope: Legitimate Authority and Just Wars (Cavanaugh, 2003)

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At a recent campus discussion about the bishops’ authority to speak on matters of war, much airtime was given to whether the bishops had overstepped their competence in judging such matters. Near the end of the session, a genuinely perplexed student stood and echoed the disciples’ question to Jesus: “To whom should we go? If we can’t rely on the church’s judgment in these matters, where should we form our opinions?” It is one thing to argue, on just-war grounds, against the overwhelming judgment of the pope and worldwide bishops, that the recent campaign in Iraq was morally justifiable. It is another thing to argue that the pope and bishops are not qualified to make such judgments.

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Pledging Allegiance: A Theological Reflection on the Kobasa Case (Cavanaugh, 2006)

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Christians have a word for putting earthly things in the place of God: idolatry. Furthermore, the Church has not hesitated to identify the danger of idolatry attendant to the modern state. Pope Pius XI said that nationalism is “an ideology which clearly resolves itself into a true, real pagan worship of the state—a Statolatry which is not less in contrast with the natural rights of the family than it is in contradiction to the supernatural rights of the Church.” In its section on idolatry (2113), the Catechism makes clear that “idolatry not only refers to false pagan worship. It remains a constant temptation to faith.” The Catechism continues, “Man commits idolatry whenever he honors and reveres a creature in place of God,” and includes “the state” in a list of examples. Elsewhere, the Catechism warns against the “idolatry of the nation” (57).

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Threat of Torture Plays with More Minds than You Might Have Imagined (Cavanaugh)

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What is torture for? Torture has a formative effect on the collective imagination of a society. It is, in the strict sense, a taboo. Its name must not be spoken, but its presence must be widely known, because it generates a special kind of collective imagination about us and about our enemies. Torture does not merely respond to enemies; it helps make them.

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“A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House”: Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State (Cavanaugh, 1995)

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My purpose in this essay will be to focus on the way revulsion to killing in the name of religion is used to legitimize the transfer of ultimate loyalty to the modern State. Specifically I will examine how the so-called “Wars of Religion” of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe are evoked as the founding moment of modern liberalism by theorists such as John
Rawls, Judith Shklar, and Jeffrey Stout.

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The Ecclesiologies of Medellin and the Lessons of the Base Communities (Cavanaugh, 1994)

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My purpose in this article will be twofold. First, I will illuminate the general thrust of Medellin’s conflicting ecclesiologies by sketching the political background of the conference and examining the documents themselves. Second, I will show how the base-community movement contributed significantly to the strategies of both traditionalists and liberationists in the church; and I will argue for a theology of the base communities that supersedes both these ecclesiologies.

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The Good of Marriage and the Morality of Sexual Relations: Some Philosophical and Historical Observations (Finnis, 1997)

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Aquinas organized his account of the morality of sexual relations around the good of marriage. The good of marriage is one of the basic human goods to which human choice and action are directed by the first principles of practical reason. Sex acts are immoral when they are “against the good of marriage” and therefore unreasonable (and, inasumuch unreasonable, unnatural).

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Evangelism and Discipleship: The God Who Calls, the God Who Sends (Brueggemann, 2004)

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I begin with four affirmations that I will exposit in some detail: (1) The God of the gospel is a God who calls persons and communities to God’s own self, to engage in praise and obedience. (2) The God of the gospel is a God who sends persons and communities to claim many zones of the world for God’s governance of “justice, mercy, and faith” (Matt 23:23). (3) The God of the gospel lives among and in contestation with many other gods who also call and send, but whose praise and obedience are false, precisely because there is no commitment to “justice, mercy, and faith.”. (4) Consequently, the persons and communities called by this God for praise and obedience and sent by this God for justice, mercy, and faith also live among and in contestation with other gods, other loyalties, other authorities. Inescapably, the ones called and sent are always yet again deciding for this one who calls and sends. This endless process of deciding again is accomplished in freedom from all other calling gods and all other sending loyalties. That endless deciding, moreover, requires great passion, imagination, and intentionality.