The Changing Faces of Catholicism: National Processes and Central, Local and Institutional Strategies, Volume 9: The Changing Faces of Catholicism.
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Catholicism is generally over-institutionalized and over-centralized in comparison to other religions. However, it finds itself in an increasingly interrelated and globalized world and is therefore immersed in a great plurality of social realities. The Changing Faces of Catholicism assembles an international cast of contributors to explore the consequent decline of powerful Catholic organisations as well as to address the responses and resistance efforts that specific countries have taken to counteract the secularization crisis in both Europe and the Americas. It reveals some of the strategies of the Catholic Church as a whole, and of the Vatican centre in particular, to address problems of the global era through the dissemination of spiritually progressive writing, World Youth Days, and the transformation of Catholic education to become a forum for intercultural and interreligious dialogue. The volume also reflects on the adaptation of Catholic institutions and missions as sponsored by religious communities and monastic orders.
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1 online resource. :
9789004380073
Religion and ethnocentrism : an empirical-theological study /
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Previous studies reveal that religion, despite its ideal of solidarity, hospitality and compassion, has been the primary origin of ethnocentrism. However, other researches dispute this sweeping claim by indicating several other factors that affect this complex relationship. This empirical-theological study is an endeavour to dig deeper into these factors by examining the extent to which a number of religious images which are culled from five religious themes, namely, God, Jesus, Spirit, salvation and church, contribute to ethnocentrism. It situates these religious attitudes within the framework of the Dutch civil religion, and the different reactions to it by contemporary Dutch catholic believers.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004193703 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Encountering cruelty the fracture of the human heart /
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Interest in recent years in reconciliation and conflict transformation has witnessed a great deal of attention to building a future through forgiveness and preventative measures in order to impede egregious wrongdoing. This effort for a reconciled future is absent reflection on the nature of cruelty. Cruelty has always been apparent in massive acts of wrongdoing and yet is repeatedly concealed in our assessment of the acts themselves. This book is a theologically honest and deep-structure exploration of cruelty in its personal, communal and institutional encounters in human life. Drawing on Nietzsche's challenge of cruelty to the western tradition, the work offers a comprehensive study of how cruelty undermines care, trust, respect and justice - all those elements of human reciprocity that mark our lives as interdependent beings. The work concludes with a tightly written Epilogue on interpreting the theological meaning and accessibility of reconciliation today.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004205598 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Francis A. Sullivan, S.J. and ecclesiological hermeneutics : an exercise in faithful creativity /
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In Francis A. Sullivan, S.J. and Ecclesiological Hermeneutics , Canaris traces the significant contributions that Francis A. Sullivan, S.J. has made to Catholic ecclesiology, paying particular attention to the method and application of his hermeneutical approach to the writings of the magisterium. Though highly esteemed by professional theologians in both Catholic and ecumenical circles, Sullivan is less well-known among general audiences than many of his peers. The author addresses this lacuna by arguing that Sullivan's work, when viewed through an interpretive lens, can aid the faithful to engage seriously with magisterial texts of various genres and levels of authority, find meaning within them, and encourage an active reception process whereby contemporary understanding of the teaching (and learning) role of the entire church becomes possible.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004326859 :
2352-5746 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
The Vatican and Mussolini's Italy /
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Lucia Ceci reconstructs the relationship between the Catholic Church and Fascism. New sources from the Vatican Archives throw fresh light on individual aspects of this complex relationship: the accession of Mussolini to power, the war in Ethiopia, the racial laws, the comparison between Pius XI and Pius XII. This book offers a comprehensive reconstruction of this encounter, explaining the criteria that led Catholics to support a dictatorial, warmongering and racist regime. In contrast to the traditional periodization, the history begins with the childhood of Mussolini in the final years of the nineteenth century, and ends with the sudden collapse of his puppet regime, in 1945. This means to some extent placing in a different light the exceptional nature of the ventennio. The Italian original L'interesse superiore, Il Vaticano e l'Italia di Mussolini has won the "Friuli Storia" Prize for Studies of Contemporary History.
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Translantion of: L'interesse superiore : il Vaticano e l'Italia di Mussolini. Roma : Laterza, 2013. :
1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and indexes. :
9789004328792 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Maurice Blondel on the supernatural in human action : sacrament and superstition /
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How do sacraments differ from superstition? For Enlightenment philosophers such as Kant, both are merely natural actions claiming a supernatural effect, an accusation that has long been ignored in Catholic theology. In Maurice Blondel on the Supernatural in Human Action: Sacrament and Superstition , however, Cathal Doherty SJ reverses this accusation through a theological appropriation of Blondel's philosophy of action, arguing not only that sacraments have no truck with superstition but that the 'Enlightened' are themselves guilty of that which they most abhor, superstitious action. Doherty then uses Blondel's philosophical insights as a heuristic and corrective to putative sacramental theologies that would reduce the spiritual or supernatural efficacy of sacraments to the mere human effort of perception or symbolic interpretation.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004342446 :
2352-5746 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Trade and Finance in Global Missions (16th-18th centuries) /
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"The book was drafted by Jesuits and their students of the Flemish province to commemorate the Society of Jesus's hundred years of existence. It was as much a homage to the Society's founders as a celebration of the spiritual and material achievements of its members over the century, with a particular emphasis on the order's missionary vocation. From the moment of its publication, the Imago was attacked by the Jesuits' enemies: both Protestants and Jansenists denounced the Society's arrogance as well as its casuistical methods. Here is not the place to relate the history of the work or its reception, but it seemed essential to us to highlight the significance of the emblems illustrating the book's"--
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004444195
9789004444171
Pieties and gender /
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Taking up the challenge of Saba Mahmood to feminist studies in religion, that there is a liberalist understanding of agency and a tendency to mix the feminist political project with the analytical, the authors of this anthology discuss the relations between pieties and politics, pieties and methodologies, virtuous masculinities, and symbolic gender representations. Several articles discuss highly controversial questions: Muslim piety, religion in the European Union between the Vatican and the Muslim populations, the religiously motivated abstinence policies of the US. Furthermore, there is an interesting section about religious masculinities in a historical and contemporary perspective.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789047440611 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Religion and internet /
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While the churches are emptying, other virtual religious places - as the religious websites - seem to be filling up. The researcher focusing on religion and internet or digital religion as an object of study must seek answers to a number of questions. Is computer-mediated religious communication a particular communication process whose object is what we conventionally call religion? Or is it a modern, independent form of religious expressiveness that finds its new-born status in the web and its particular language? To examine the questions above, and others, the book collects more empirical data, claiming that the Internet will have a specific or novel impact on how religious traditions are interpreted. The blurring of previous boundaries (offline/online, virtual/local, illegitimate/legitimate religion) is another theme common to all the contributions in this volume.
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1 online resource (xi, 217 pages) : illustrations (some color) :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004302549 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Human rights and the impact of religion /
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This volume is about the impact of religion (beliefs and practices) on attitudes towards human rights of the first, second and third generation. The first four papers about the impact of Lutheranism, Calvinism, Catholicism and Islam are historical and theoretical of character. The six other papers are based on empirical research in England and Wales, Germany, Turkey, India, Norway and on comparative empirical research in six North-West European countries. From both groups of articles it appears that 'the' impact of religion does not exist. In varying historical periods and contexts various religions, c.q. religious denominations, have various effects on attitudes towards human rights, id est positive effects (+), ambivalent effects (±), no effects (0), and negative effects (−). Contributors include: Francis-Vincent Anthony, Pal Ketil Botvar, Selim Eren, Leslie Francis, Üzejir Ok, Ruud Peters, Marion Reindl, Mandy Robbins, Rik Torfs, Johannes (Hans) van der Ven, John Witte Jr., Hans-Georg Ziebertz
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1 online resource (280 pages) :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004251403 :
1877-881X ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
AIDS and religious practice in Africa /
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This volume explores how AIDS is understood, confronted and lived with through religious ideas and practices, and how these, in turn, are reinterpreted and changed by the experience of AIDS. Examining the social production, and productivity, of AIDS - linking bodily and spiritual experiences, and religious, medical, political and economic discourses - the papers counter simplified notions of causal effects of AIDS on religion (or vice versa). Instead, they display people's resourcefulness in their struggle to move ahead in spite of adversity. This relativises the vision of doom widely associated with the African AIDS epidemic; and it allows to see AIDS, instead of a singular event, as the culmination of a century-long process of changing livelihoods, bodily well-being and spiritual imaginaries.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789047442691 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Religious identity and national heritage : empirical-theological perspectives /
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In some parts of our world, religion is on the wane, losing its thrust of doctrinal authority and communal bonds. In other regions, it is gaining public significance as a powerful social, cultural and political force. Secularization theories are less successful in accounting for these differences in religion's role. Other theories describe religion in terms of social capital to be invested whenever it offers certain personal, social or political benefits and market opportunities allow smart choices. Still other theories simply hold that religion corresponds to an inborn need or stable disposition that guarantees a culture's identity and reflects a natural equilibrium of social cohesion. There are also critical theories that point to the intrinsic relationship of religion with power and identify it as a major cause of tension and conflict. In this book distinguished scholars reflect on these questions and present empirical research about religious identity and national heritage.
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Description based upon print version of record. :
1 online resource (320 pages) :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004228788 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
The quest for a common humanity human dignity and otherness in the religious traditions of the Mediterranean /
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The worldview that all human beings belong to one big family has, in the history of religions, never been taken for granted. Moreover, human rights are a modern notion that should not be projected back onto the sacred texts of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. However, from the Hellenistic period onwards one encounters the idea of human duties towards not only parents, neighbours and fellow citizens but to all human beings. This volume explores the development of this idea from Antiquity to the present time focussing on the \'other\' as \'neighbour, enemy, and infidel\', on the interpretation of the Biblical story of Abraham´s sacrifice and on ancient and modern ethical and legal implications of the concept of human dignity.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and indexes. :
9789004211124
Handbook of hyper-real religions /
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Today a new trend is clearly discernable, that of 'hyper-real religions'. These are innovative religions and spiritualities that mix elements of religious traditions with popular culture. If we imagine a spectrum of intensity of the merging of popular culture with religion, we might find, at one end, groups practicing Jediism appropriated from the Star Wars movies, Matrixism from the Matrix trilogy, and neo-pagan rites based on stories from The Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter series. At the other end of the spectrum, members of mainstream religions, such as Christianity can be influenced or inspired by, for example, The Da Vinci Code . Through various case studies, this book studies the on- and off-line religious/spiritual consumption of these narratives through a social scientific approach.
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1 online resource (456 pages) :
9789004226944 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.