Search For God Research Articles

Pascal et l’expérience du corps. Par Hélène Bah Ostrowiecki

This is an original and imaginative study. Hélène Bah Ostrowiecki sets out to show the body — whether animate or inanimate as pure physical entity, and distinct from mind, spirit, or soul — as the anchor of Pascal’s apologetic discourse, both as a nucleus in which his ideas cohere, but also as the essential and independent reference point in man’s search for God. ‘Bodies’ function as witnesses for those able to recognize them as such. The text is densely written, and careful reading is required to avoid becoming disorientated, because it imitates Pascal’s own to-and-fro style of argumentation, and constantly relates Pascal’s various ternary ordres to the Cartesian division of body from spirit. But the reader is rewarded by Ostrowiecki’s fresh insights, and her close attention both to Pascal’s writing, principally the Pensées, and to scholarly debate. From the matrix of ternary and binary interactions, five focuses are identified through which to interpret Pascal’s attitude to the body. The first is ‘Maladie: la fiction d’un homme sans corps’. After an excellent discussion the dualist proposition, ‘séparant un esprit (une intérieure salvatrice) et un corps (une extériorité corruptrice)’ (p. 43), is firmly rejected. Since this is not a physiological study, there is no extended discussion of the diagnoses of Pascal’s pathophysiological illnesses, nor of the effect of physical illness of the body on the psychopathological development of the mind. In the second chapter, ‘Chair’, Ostrowiecki provides an illuminating examination of Pascal’s distinction of corps from chair, how they interact, and the primacy of the former. Without the body, there can be no carnality. The following chapter, ‘Sentiment’, continues the exploration of corporality in the mystical subjects of feeling/conscience and experience and the place of the cœur in the theological argument. The notion of the body as witness is introduced and elaborated. The next and most inventive chapter is ‘Machine’, which deals with two of the most enigmatic words of Pascal’s imagery: ‘machine’ and ‘abêtir’. Here we find what might serve as a mission statement for Ostrowiecki’s enterprise: ‘[P]our Pascal, la réponse au défi apologétique passe conjointement par un geste de soumission et par un recours au corps, ce qui invite à explorer les voies selon lesquelles cette soumission est soumission au corps’ (p. 123). The final chapter, ‘Tout’, is a particularly absorbing text about the part played by the body in the constitution of the individual. The body opens the moi to experience and situates the individual among other bodies and also within metaphorical bodies such as the Church. Ostrowiecki incorporates Pascal’s scientific pursuits into this discussion, and by the end of the book all idea of the body as a barrier is convincingly abolished. There seems to be an inclination, possibly unintentional, to rationalize all of Pascal’s many personal activities under the apologetic umbrella, and the odour of hagiography is occasionally unmistakable, as, for example, when Pascal’s involvement in the commercialization of a public transport system, initially alluded to as ‘troublant’ (pp. 167, 168), has within a few paragraphs become ‘l’expression de la piété’ (p. 169). These few caveats notwithstanding, this thought-provoking book is a valuable contribution to Pascal studies.

Богоискательство Д. С. Мережковского

Богоискательство Д. С. Мережковского

DAKWAH ISLAM DAN SPIRITUALITAS KEJAWEN

Kejawen belief teaches that the search for God must be actualized in a set of acts (laku). Laku is the way to achieve the highest level of human’s spirituality. This spirituality is present in the unity between a human being as a God’s creature and Him (manunggaling kawula Gusti). This spirituality becomes the ultimate goal of Javanese mysticism. Apart from Kejawen belief, Islam views that the highest level of human’s spirituality is iman. As a religion, Islam contains fundamental value in human life, that is godly value (iman). Iman will bear a set of values based on one God (rabbaniyah) which builds the awareness that the beginning and the end of life is from God. God is sangkan paran (the beginning and the end) of every creature’s life. Facing the changing society, da ’wa activist should be able to drive social engineering comprehensively by applying amar makruf (emancipation), nahi munkar (freedom) and tukminu billah (theological humanism).

The evangelical financial ethic: Doubled forms and the search for God in the economic world

In evangelical churches across the United States, volunteers assist other church members in transforming household budgets into lenses that reveal God's kingdom on earth, reframing the force and volatility of markets as divine mystery. The strategies of financial ministry are distinctive, yet they engage a more general conundrum that pits economic success against conflicting ethical projects; they illuminate the process of ethical management in the financial economy. The ministries’ uses of budgets also challenge the idea that market devices gain power primarily by formatting economic transactions and establishing conditions for market exchange. Evangelical financial ministries show how, in everyday calculative practices, a device such as a household budget renders the spiritual economic, and the economic spiritual. In the exercise of evangelical ethics, financial ministry returns the divine touch to the invisible hand. [Christianity, economy, ethics, finance, households, markets, United States]

The Maritain Factor: Taking Religion into Interwar Modernism ed. by Rajesh Heynickx and Jan De Maeyer (review)

Maritain Factor: Taking Religion into Interwar Modernism. Edited by Rajesh Heynickx and Jan De Maeyer. [KADOC Studies on Religion, Culture and Society, 7.] (Leuven: Leuven University Press. Distrib. Cornell University Press. 2010. Pp. 211. $42.50 paperback. ISBN 978-90-5867-714-3.)This strong collection of essays fills an important niche in Maritain studies. Through its consideration of the interwar period during which Jacques and Raisa Maritain first launched their apostolate to culture, these authors do much to illuminate the interplay of the aesthetic, religious, philosophical, and political aspects of the crucial decades preceding World War II. Maritain works best known to American readers were written during the two decades after World War II. Therefore, this collection of essays would assist such readers to appreciate the broader perspectives as well as the origins of Maritain's later work.The collection includes both overviews of the Maritains' work and studies of particular relationships and specific trends and movements. These essays are well informed, and they unearth new details about the important relationships of the age. Most of all, the authors develop fresh interpretations of their life and work. editor, Rajesh Heynickx, seeks to break with the schematic and myopic views (p. 14) of Maritain that either consign him to irrelevance because of his Catholicism and Thomism, as well as those who lionize him as the privileged way into the recovery of revitalized philosophy. What they both miss, he claims, is the concrete historical dimension that would make possible such a tremendous impact of a philosopher of fixed principles (p. 14) and eternal perspective on the practices and discourse of the modernists who celebrated change and fragmentariness.Exploring Maritain's own paradoxical claim to be both antimodern and ultramodern, the many essays in book considers how Maritain's Thomism and devout Catholicism led him to friendships and significant dialogue with many of the leaders of modern art, literature, and culture. Stephen Schloesser's The Rise of a Mystic Modernism presents a nice summary of the discoveries and hypothesis of his book Jazz Age Catholicism (Toronto, 2005). In sum, he explores how the very distinction between matter and form opened Maritain to a variety of ways of manifesting the form in diverse materials, style, and approaches. Rather than imitate the past in a neo-Gothic style, modernism could be seen as a way to explore new manifestations of the personal being, the search for God, and the conflict of good and evil. In addition, the modernist struggles with the guilt of war would lead to a reparation for the dead in fitting tribute to the young lives sacrificed in the horror of war. …

War or the business of God

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to establish the importance of accounting in the management of Spanish military hospitals by the St John’s Order (SJO) of the Roman Catholic Church in the eighteenth century, a time of crisis between the Church and the State. The sacred mission of the Order required that they had a significant role outside the Roman Catholic Church in the care and treatment of the sick and infirm which required them to establish hospitals throughout Spain and across the lands that it had conquered. The study establishes that accounting played a key role in ensuring the success of the unconventional commercial relationship between the SJO and the government and the military. Design/methodology/approach – Niebuhr’s typology is used to help understand how accounting practices were consistent, indeed essential, expectations of the sacred mission of the SJO and not something which represented a denial of the Order’s religious beliefs. The paper relies primarily on documents and other material located in Spanish archives. Findings – The SJO accepted that secular accounting and accountability processes were relevant to their search for God’s love and to showing this love to others. The need for the Order to be accountable to the State was not regarded as profane and antithetical to their religious beliefs. Adopting Niebuhr’s typology of religion and society, this study concludes that the Order was an extraordinary example of Christ the transformer of the culture. Originality/value – This study recognises the need to deepen the understanding of the way in which accounting practices have often played a critical role in the activities of religious organisations by examining an extraordinary example of one organisation which was engaged in an unusual, ongoing, highly complex commercial relationship with the Spanish State.

Faith in Faith: Reason, Faith, and Prayer in the Theology of Servais Pinckaers, OP

audacity of faith is to believe in a knowledge, a truth, a superior and more profound wisdom than science. Moreover, it is to hold that there is no opposition between a believing intellect and authentic science insofar as each of them follow and respect the same love of truth, each according to their own nature and methodology. (1) Though fundamental for theology, the relationship between faith and reason is much contested, at least in terms of the degree to which they overlap. It is a relationship intrinsically connected to those other much fought over pairings--theology and philosophy, and nature and grace. In this article I wish to survey the thinking of Servais Pinckaers, OP, the influential twentieth-century Belgian moral theologian. (2) Pinckaers presents a robust defense of the priority of faith in theology that is rooted in the need to see prayer as a source of theological reflection. Pinckaers's account of the role of faith does not resort to a Catholic fideism, but upholds reason's intrinsic place in Catholic theology, very much in the tradition of St. Thomas Aquinas. Faith as the Starting Point in Theology In his definition of moral theology (or, more precisely Christian ethics), Pinckaers states that moral theology needs to be studied in light of revelation and reason (and in that order). (3) He asks whether moral theology should be seen as primarily a rational science with revelation seen as having a role as confirmation or external inspiration. Or should moral theology consider revelation as its primary and direct source? Pinckaers answers: Without a moment's hesitation I choose the second alternative. I hold that the priority given to Scripture and faith in no way fetters the use of reason in theology, but rather supports it. Reason has its rightful place in my definition. But this faculty must not be viewed according to the rationalistic concept, which would separate it radically from faith. It should be viewed rather as the power of human intelligence simultaneously open to spiritual enlightenment and faithful to the rigorous discipline of thought. This is how the Fathers saw it. (4) It is also, according to Pinckaers, how Aquinas sees it: teaching method St. Thomas proposes to us, like that of the Fathers of the Church, includes two moments. first consists in planting faith in the disciple as the root of the wisdom of God, placing it in mind and heart as a foundation and source of divine truth. Faith is the acceptance of the preaching of the Cross ... as a mystery hidden from human eyes. It is not contrary to reason but rises above it and summons us to abandon our human reasoning in order to receive this higher wisdom as a sheer gift of the Holy Spirit. (5) Pinckaers believes that any renewal in moral theology will be ineffective if the fundamental methodological question is not addressed. This question involves asking what the primary source and starting point of moral theology is: faith or rational knowledge? (6) answer for Pinckaers is faith. Theology must begin its research with an act of faith. This act of faith submits to the word of God as read and interpreted in the Church, that is, to something exterior. It is also an act that submits to the interior action of the Holy Spirit: The theologian is not simply an intellectual, a scholar who chooses the text of revelation and the life of the church as an object of study. theologian is before all else a believer, well aware that for the one who receives the Word of God with a docile mind, it becomes a source of light and life surpassing all human reason and communication. (7) In reflecting on the connection between the prologue of John's Gospel--the meditation on the preexisting word of God made manifest in the flesh of Jesus of Nazareth--and theology, Pinckaers states the following: These words [the prologue of John's Gospel] are addressed to us in our search for God through intellect and free will, in the search for light and life, the struggle with the darkness of sin and death--all this, in order to form faith in the human heart. …

Paradigma al-Qur’an: Model Analisis Tafsir Maqasidi dalam Pemikiran Kuntowijoyo

This article assumes that Kuntowijoyo’s thought can be grouped into the maqasidi thought movement, because of his treatment of the objectivication of the verses of the Qur’an in search for God’s intention based on the scientific measurement. His difference from the thinkers of maqasidi in general lies on the use of epistemology. Maqasidi thinkers uses in general usul al-fiqh as their epistemological tool of analysis, whereas Kuntowijoyo deploys social sciences’ epistemology. This library research finds that the characteristics of Kuntowijoyo’s interpretation of the Qur’an can be included into the spirit of maqasidi scientific interpretation with a tendency of con- structing scientific knowledge based on the Qur’an. His characteristics of tafsir maqasidi can be grouped as manhaj din (religious methodology) atau in his word, (Quranic paradigm.)

An Autoethnographic Reading of Djanet Sears’s The Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God

Djanet Sears’s play The Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God offers a generous opportunity for the careful contemplation of the intersections between Christianity, motherhood, and blackness in Canada—a topic hitherto unexamined in scholarship about Sears’s plays. The protagonist’s search for God is a personal exploration of self in relation to each of these topics; similarly, Naila Keleta-Mae draws from the analysis of self through the article’s incorporation of methodologies employed in autobiographical performance and autoethnographic research. Specifically, the author maps her examination of Sears’s play through her own body and experiences of Christianity, motherhood, and blackness in Canada. One of the key ways that this article seeks to differ itself from traditional Canadian scholarship is by foregrounding the explicit ways the scholar’s topic of inquiry intersects with her/his/their personal lived experience. To some extent, this article is about visibility and transparency—it is an effort to make equally visible the preoccupations of the scholar in her/his/their analysis of a subject matter—in this specific case it is the unambiguous articulation of why Keleta-Mae cares about Sears’s play.

Guest Editorial: The Search for God and Afterlife in the Age of Science

Abstract: Near-death experiences (NDEs) and other transpersonal experiences -- those that transcend the usual personal experiential limits of space and/or time -- point to the existence and nature of God and ongoing personal consciousness following physical death. In this article, I review the history of these experiences prior to 1850 and of their study during three periods of scientific research between 1850 and the present. I conclude that (1) a large percentage of the population has experienced NDEs and other transpersonal experiences, (2) the overwhelming majority of these experiencers are mentally healthy, and (3) these experiences change people's lives for the better. I contend that although NDEs and other transpersonal experiences cannot prove the existence of a personal God and afterlife, they definitely point to them.

Gauging Proximities: An Inquiry into a Possible Nexus between Middle Eastern and Western Painting

Gauging Proximities:An Inquiry into a Possible Nexus between Middle Eastern and Western Painting Evrim Emir-Sayers The blind and the seeing are not equal. —Koran 35:20 There is nothing more going on between the things and the eyes, and the eyes and vision, than between the things and the blind man’s hands, and between his hands and thoughts. —Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” p. 3021 I Nobel Prize-winning Turkish author Orhan Pamuk stages an exploration of the art and philosophy of Ottoman miniature painting in his 2001 novel, My Name Is Red.2 Pamuk’s work clearly suggests parallels between the Middle Eastern miniature tradition and twentieth-century Western philosophy of art. Why would a contemporary reader with a Western education find My Name Is Red appealing? Why do Middle Eastern paintings themselves, or Islamic philosophy, seem to lack the proximity to the West that is suggested by the novel? A response may perhaps be found in another set of questions: What could be the inspiration for a twentieth-century author who writes about Ottoman miniaturists? Ottoman history, clearly. Islamic philosophy, perhaps. But what about twentieth-century Western philosophy? This paper primarily examines whether the proximity between Islamic and modern Western philosophy of art implied by Pamuk is [End Page 563] really possible, or whether Pamuk’s assertions are instead influenced by the twentieth-century Western philosophy of art, including the ideas of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jacques Derrida. I believe that the philosophy of art portrayed in My Name Is Red is at least unconsciously conditioned by, if not consciously fashioned after, the recent Western philosophy of art. Nonetheless, the novel opens up a space for inquiry into a possible nexus between two art forms, specifically miniature painting and twentieth-century Western abstract painting, which seem to be not only historically but philosophically radically apart from each other. II To God belongs the East and the West. —Koran 2:115 The old masters of Shiraz and Herat … claimed that a miniaturist would have to sketch horses unceasingly for fifty years to be able to truly depict the horse that Allah envisioned and desired. They claimed that the best picture of a horse should be drawn in the dark, since a true miniaturist would go blind working over that fifty-year period, but in the process, his hand would memorize the horse. (MR, p. 24) We read in My Name Is Red that a miniaturist needs to paint the same figure over and over again to achieve a depiction that is “perfect,” or in accordance with God’s perception. After many years of illustrating the same form, it would appear, the process is memorized not only by the miniaturist’s eye but also his3 body. Thus, a miniaturist can carry on painting, even after the loss of his eyes, to fulfill the demands of his work. According to the miniature tradition described in My Name Is Red, going blind after having devoted a lifetime to painting is reason to be proud. It is believed that God’s vision or perception of the world can be manifested only through the memory of a blind miniaturist. Blindness is the final destination of the miniaturist in his search for God’s vision; the inimitable perspective of God can only be attained through memory, after the eyes have perished. As Pamuk states, “When this image comes to the aging miniaturist, that is, when he sees the world as Allah sees it through the darkness of memory and blindness, the illustrator will have spent his lifetime training his hand so it might transfer this splendid revelation to the page” (MR, p. 97). However, what is really valuable is not physical blindness but the substitution of visual and bodily memory for eyesight. As Pamuk puts [End Page 564] it, “A blind miniaturist could see the horse of God’s vision from within the darkness; however, true talent resided in a sighted miniaturist who could regard the world like a blind man” (MR, p. 348). The idea of God’s darkness is central to the thought of miniaturists in My Name Is Red. This darkness exists before...

Book Review: I Told My Soul to Sing: Finding God with Emily Dickinson

I Told My Soul to Sing: Finding with Emily Dickinson. By Kristin LeMay. Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2013. ISBN 978-1-61261-163-1. Pp. 291. $17.99. Emily Dickinson is a writer who prompts personal responses from her readers, even from scholars. Susan Howe's widely read My Emily Dickinson (1985) blends scholarly inquiry with a dash of first-person pronouns, and Wider Than the Sky: Essays and Meditations on the Healing Power of Emily Dickinson (2007), edited by Cindy Mackenzie and Barbara Dana, overtly calls for personal responses to Dickinson's work. More recently, Susan VanZanten published Mending a Tattered Faith: Devotions with Dickinson (2011), which provides close readings of twenty-nine poems for the purpose of devotional exercise. Kristin LeMay's I Told My Soul to Sing: Finding with Emily Dickinson takes its place among these projects, with an emphasis on the ways in which Dickinson's poetry has impacted the author's own spiritual journey. LeMay calls Dickinson Saint Emily, patron of all who wrestle with God and explains, For over ten years, I have turned to her poems as others have to Scripture, adding, I've read her poetry the way others go to Bible study, in order to challenge what I know and to know better what challenges me (3, 11). Although this book is marketed as a spiritual autobiography, the author's knowledge and use of Dickinsons life and work is both extensive and responsible. LeMay's reading of the poems is thorough, insightful, and likely to be of use to scholars. Throughout five chapters, LeMay examines twenty-five Dickinson poems alongside her own search for God. She intentionally selects lesser-known poems that address religious subjects, avoiding those much-discussed titles like Some keep the Sabbath going to Church in order to provide fresh insights into Dickinsons spiritual life coupled with a new mode of analysis. Though LeMay's exploration of twenty-five poems is rooted in close readings, she combines careful textual analysis with theological and historical contexts, with Dickinson's letters and biographies, and with the impact of the poems on the author's own life. LeMay hopes her book will guide readers to Dickinson, help them encounter the richness of her poetry, and finally, gain the kindlier and jauntier view of God that she has found in the poems after years of diligent reading (14). The first chapter, Belief, starts with the season of revivals in New England during Dickinson's life and with the story of her refusal to convert to Christianity while a student at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. In this chapter, LeMay explores the extent to which Dickinson considered conversion a sign of giving up or resignation. She states that Dickinson's own experience with conversion counters her contemporaries' beliefs: for the poet, it was an ongoing process, not a one-time, dramatic experience. In her discussion of doubt, belief, and proof, LeMay asserts that Dickinson did not view doubt and belief as mutually exclusive, but as complementary states that keep faith healthy. Similarly, LeMay unpacks Dickinson's thoughts on proof and concludes that proof is the enemy of belief rather than doubt. This chapter includes references to Blaise Pascal and St. Augustine, as well as to the author's trips to the Homestead in Amherst to see the poet's desk and to Notre-Dame de Paris to see relics from the Passion. In the second chapter, Prayer, LeMay identifies with Dickinson's disinclination toward prayer, expressed most directly in her 1863 letter to Louisa and Frances Norcross, in which she writes, Let Emily sing for you because she cannot pray. LeMay, thus, provides a thorough examination of Dickinson's substitutes for prayer: songs and poems. Through a discussion of hymnody, featuring Isaac Watts, LeMay describes and illustrates the great impact of hymns on Dickinson's poetry. She also juxtaposes George Herbert's stance toward prayer with Dickinson's, finding both similarities and differences in these writers' verse. …

Šeimos kaip „namų Bažnyčios“ ugdymosi principai

Christian marriage according to John Paul II creates natural environment, in which persons integrate into the big Church family and create the Church. The family is able to create the Church only when it turns into the so called “miniature church” or “domestic church”. The Pope Paul VI has said that various aspects of the whole Church have to be found in every Christian family. Catechism of the Catholic Church discusses the Church as the People of God, the Body of Christ and the Temple of the Holy Spirit. Family as the People of God. Spiritual relationships are more important than natural ties and are earlier and deeper than the relationship of benefit. Apostles and theologians maintain that love is most important in the spiritual life of the family. To achieve that, love has to be based not only on natural ties; it is important to help each other in the road to holiness. This stimulates the emergence of relationships of common good and common goal that relate persons. Domestic church carries out its mission by: a) integrating into the family of the Church; b) being “a small oasis of love” for all of its members; c) acting as an apostle in the world. Family as the Body of Christ. Three characteristics of the Church as the body of Christ are particularly distinct: Unity of all of its members through uniting with Christ (with the help of sacraments). Unity requires a certain sacrifice: “Like Christ, we have to give ourselves, die for our hostility every day, and share our dee­pest subsistence with others”. The family can grow only if its every member grows, if the needs of everyone, particularly of the one who lacks the most, are considered; Christ as the Head of the body . In the Christian family, which acknowledges limitations of its members, the most important place is given to the Creator. This approach helps parents both to bring up children ba­sed on the authority that is higher than theirs, to perceive mistakes, to seek perfection, and to acknowledge the importance of learning from children themselves; Domestic church as the bride of Christ. St. John of the Cross, Saint Teresa of Avila and others speak about the man’s spirit as the bride of Christ. F. J. Parrella discloses this relationship discussing the essence of the sacrament. The family is understood as a sacrament only when relationships of its members are discussed as a visible expression of relationship of Saint Trinity which is love. Love, which creates the community of the family, turns the family into bride of Christ. The family as the Temple of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Script states: “That what remains in me and me in it, gives many fruits” (Jn 15, 4, 5). Acknowledgement of human weakness and limitation, which encourages relying on the divine mercy, seeking theological virtues, seeking to ground life and activities on obedience, trust and search for God’s will, acquires particular importance in every family. All of this enhances spiritual relations within the family and between the family and the Creator. The main purpose of the community is to help one’s personality grow. Personal and communal im­provement, approaching sanctification and salvation, can take place only in natural medium. R. Leitner, A. Steinbock describe the family as an ideal “feeding medium” for developing religious behaviour and per­sonality. The family that nourishes Catholic values creates natural conditions for development of children’s spirituality and its likely improvement. Such insights enable formulating guidelines of Catholic education for the family. This is a short presentation of them: The family is naturally united for sanctification and salvation of one another. Catholic education is based on care for every family member’s dignity and freedom. Unconditional love teaches to rule, and not to be ruled by things. Children’s love, respect and obedience to parents are important. Religious education is based on general conditions: parents’ relationships, common psychological at­mosphere, attention to and time spent with every child, endeavour to recognize everyone’s personal pecu­liarities. But religious education requires much more – to integrate faith into family’s life as inseparable part is to find a personal relationship with God. Common prayer creates unity and Christian spirituality in the family. The family is liable for education of autonomic, responsible, able to choose, and seeking for truth per­sonality. Educational exchanges should occur in the family between parents and children under Christ’s autho­rity. Domestic church should be built on the foundation of peace, confidence, and joy. Religion in the family should be used as creative learning and neighbourhood evangelization, but not as an instrument. According to all those guidelines, the family should be discussed not as existing domestic church, but as the one that is turning into a domestic church.

Hledání skrytého Boha v díle Rainera Maria Rilka

The article aims at shedding light on the search for God in the work of the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Rilke’s relentless search for God, who appears to be concealed (and obscured), threads through his entire work as a basso continuo and could be summed up into the motto of “searching for an immediate relationship”. The Christian tradition, to which Rilke has a highly ambivalent attitude, plays a crucial part in the relationship to God. The article considers the poet’s strong alignment to the relationship to everything terre- strial as an attempt to involve everything in the broader complex, also in the relationship to infinity.

'Springs of newness and beauty' : Grace Jantzen and the search for God

One of the key foci in the work of Grace Jantzen is an investigation of how we speak about God and who does the speaking. In this article I describe two ideas she investigates, namely God as embodied and God as the divine horizon. A sub-theme is Jantzen's critique of the Western preoccupation with mortality, death and violence and her suggestion that we instead look for signs and metaphors of flourishing, 'springs of newness and beauty'.

Discernment as a Way of Life

S cenario One: The parish council of an urban church is confronted with diminishing finances and increasing needs as the neighborhood changes. One member, a part-time lay student at a local seminary, proposes that they use a discernment model to sort out the confusing situation and search for God’s will for their future. He provides a book that describes a process they can use. After several weeks of trying to work with this model, however, most members of the council feel that confusion and tension are even worse and that no solutions to their original concerns are on the horizon. They end the experiment, expressing great cynicism about the very idea of discernment.

"Their blood shall not be shed in vain": American Evangelical Missionaries and the Search for God and Country in Post-World War II Asia

A year after Japan's surrender to the Allied powers, Luther J. Holcomb, a Texas-born Baptist minister, heralded a new era of American supremacy in both world affairs and Christian evangelism. Calling on Christians to seize the postwar moment to bring “the message of Christ, with its transforming power” to “those who are starving for the Bread of Life,” Holcomb, in an article in the popular evangelical magazine Moody Monthly, gave a religious cast to the widely circulating notion that Americans had an obligation to spread their way of life across the world. He stressed that “whatever faith other peoples have in our country must be attributed to the fact that we are a Christian nation and that the ideals for which we strive are those which are consonant with the principles of Christian living.” Holcomb thus imbued American foreign relations with divine purpose. He did not just want to spread the gospel: he wanted to spread an American version of the gospel.1

The Confessions of Walker Percy

The Confessions of Walker Percy John F. Desmond (bio) "I would meet you upon this honestly." "Gerontion," T. S. Eliot "I have only in my life carried to an extreme what you have not dared to carry halfway, and what's more, you have taken your cowardice for good sense, and have found comfort in deceiving yourselves." Narrator, Notes from Underground Both in his personal life and in his writings, Walker Percy was deeply attracted to the idea and practice of confession. When he and his wife, Mary Bernice, converted to Catholicism in 1947, Percy told his friends and fellow converts Jidge Minyard and Sal Milazzo, "This is one of the main reasons I've become a Catholic."1 At the time, private sacramental confession was widely practiced in the Catholic Church the Percys were joining. The ritual of confessing one's sins to a priest, expressing repentance, and receiving penance and absolution would have been profoundly important to someone with Percy's tragic family past—his father's suicide, his mother's untimely death (and suspected suicide), his struggle with tuberculosis, and [End Page 126] his troubled search for his vocation and a meaningful life. Sacramental confession could be a help in his struggle to come to terms with the burden of that past. After his conversion and throughout his life as a Catholic, Percy made more than twenty retreats at the Jesuit Retreat Center in Manresa, Louisiana, during which all retreatants could avail themselves of sacramental confession.2 Percy's faith and his writings were strongly influenced by two prominent confessional works in the Catholic tradition: Pascal's Pensées and St. Augustine's Confessions. His first published novel, The Moviegoer, was based partly on the initial draft of Diary of the Last Romantic, the first chapter of which was titled "Confessions of a Moviegoer." That chapter eventually evolved into the novel, which is the "confession" of moviegoer Binx Bolling, a religious skeptic. In the novel, a crucial scene between Binx and his half-brother Lonnie Smith, a devout Catholic, centers on a discussion of Lonnie's recent confession, on his concern with the sin of envy, on overscrupulosity, and on absolution. In Percy's third novel, Love in the Ruins, a first-person novel like The Moviegoer, Dr. Tom More confesses his wayward life during a time "near the end of the world" when America is falling apart. At the end of the novel, with his career and dreams of medical fame in tatters, Dr. More goes to confession to Father Rinaldo Smith, receives absolution and penance, and celebrates his return to grace by attending Christmas Mass, receiving the Holy Eucharist, and enjoying a holiday barbecue. Percy's fourth novel, Lancelot, is a somber, chilling first-person confession spoken by murderer Lance Lamar to his friend Father John, a priest struggling with his vocation. In his monologue Lance undertakes a "search for sin" as an ironic way, he argues, to prove God's existence. Percy saw Lance's search as analogous to Augustine's search for God in his Confessions by understanding his own sin.3 As we shall see, Lance's complex search challenges the meaning of confession in modern culture and of the confessional mode in writing. Finally, in Percy's last novel, The Thanatos Syndrome, the disturbed priest Father Rinaldo Smith made a painful confession to [End Page 127] Dr. Tom More (set off in the text as "Father Smith's Confession") of his misanthropic view of humanity except for "children and the dying, who do not lie," and of his youthful infatuation with the Nazi Schutzstaffel and their romantic cult of war and death.4 It is useful to view Percy's concern with confession, both sacramental and secular, and with the confessional mode in writing in the light of his concern with the predicament of the modern self, that is, ordinary citizens living in a technological society. Two inter-related issues are especially relevant here. The first is Percy's belief that modern man has suffered a "loss of self," due to the dominance of scientism—the scientific perspective elevated into an all-consuming ideology—in the culture. Scientism has largely alienated...

Modlitwa w Dziejach Apostolskich

The present study aims at presenting the role of prayer in the life of the early Church the Acts of the Apostles. First, the practice of prayer in the early Church was discussed. In light of the analysis, prayer appears as a fixed practice among the fi rst Christians. The author of the Book of Acts underscores its basic characteristics, to wit faithfulness, perseverance, and unanimity. Second, the places of gathering for prayer were discussed. As many texts from Acts revealed, besides the Jerusalem temple, the private houses were the primary places of gatherings and prayer for early Christians. Third, different approaches and forms which characterized early Christian prayer were revealed. In the final threefold part of this study, the most salient features of prayer were discussed in detail: (1) the prayer of petition, connected in particular way with the gift of the Holy Spirit; (2) the prayer uttered at some crucial moments of the history of the early Church; Luke wanted to show how the first Christians faithfully followed the lead of Jesus, the master of prayer, in their search for God’s will revealed to them in prayer; and (3) the prayer of worship and thanksgiving.

Editorial

Justice is an essential dimension of religious teachings and religious consciousness. In fact it could be argued that religion, in its central inspiration, is nothing else than the realization of justice. The Gospel of Matthew teaches “seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his justice and all these things shall be added unto you” (Matthew 6 :33). This is an unambiguous indication that justice is primary in the religious search since it flows, or should flow, from the search for God. The Greek word used for justice is in this passage dikaiosyne, which is akin to righteousness and, through its connection to dike, the human reality of law and justice that is born from divine justice. In Islam, justice stems from the discernment of the shahādah, and the consequent ability to give all realities, all human and non-human beings, their respective due, and sometimes more, in mercy and love. The just are both wise and generous, they embrace both intelligence and love. Their justice is first of all objectivity, or the ability to make abstraction of one's interests, and consequently charity vis-à-vis others that stems from our unity in humanness through the divine “imprint” of our theomorphic nature, and manifests itself in the forms that are most consonant with our respective vocations, destinies and circumstances. The Quran beautifully expresses this conjunction of objectivity and love in one of its most poignant calls for justice: “O ye who believe! Be steadfast witnesses for Allah in equity (qawwāmīn li-llāh shuhudāha bi-l-qist), and let not hatred of any people seduce you that ye deal not justly (allā; ta'dalū). Deal justly (a'dilū), that is nearer to your duty (li-l-taqwa). Observe your duty to Allah. Lo! Allah is informed of what ye do”. Justice is truth in action. It presupposes an ability to be objective about oneself, and objective about others. It therefore presupposes a degree of command over one's egocentric impulses, as well as, by extension, over one's sentimental identification with a particular group, culture or nation. Justice is an ability to transcend oneself to recognize the right of others. To the extent that religion teaches the ways of transcending oneself it is also all about justice. Today justice is almost entirely identified with social justice, which is only one of its manifestations. Religions preach justice for all, and particularly for the weak, but they also stress – and that is what distinguishes them most clearly from merely humanistic ethics, that social forms of injustice do not only nor primarily result from external factors, or structures, but from the fundamental inner injustice that gives rise to, and sustains, these very structures and factors. Justice starts at home, in the heart that chooses and loves the true.