Receptive Ecumenism and the Call to Catholic Learning

Abstract

Abstract This book has a fresh strategy for looking at ecumenical engagement — ‘Receptive Ecumenism’ — that is fitted to the challenges of the contemporary context and has already been internationally recognised as making a distinctive and important new contribution to ecumenical thought and practice. Beyond this, the book tests and illustrates this proposal by examining what Roman Catholicism in particular might fruitfully learn from its ecumenical others. Challenging the tendency for ecumenical studies to ask, whether explicitly or implicitly, ‘What do our others need to learn from us?’, this book presents a radical challenge to see ecumenism move forward into action by highlighting the opposite question, ‘What can we learn with integrity from our others?’ This approach is not simply ecumenism as shared mission, or ecumenism as problem-solving and incremental agreement but ecumenism as a vital long-term programme of individual, communal, and structural conversion driven, like the Gospel that inspires it, by the promise of conversion into greater life and flourishing. The aim is for the Christian traditions to become more, not less, than they currently are by learning from, or receiving of, each other's gifts.