The Catholic Southern Gothic author Flannery O’Connor’s short story A Temple of the Holy Ghost explores the contradictions of incarnation in ways relevant to contemporary discourse between Catholicity, political theology, and transfeminism. By engaging with the carnivalesque and Freud’s uncanny, I will apply the story to conversations about trans inclusion in Catholic communities.
While giving tribute to Fuchs’s noteworthy efforts at reimagining our understanding of moral norms by appreciating the emergent process of human evolution through the appropriation of a dynamic/future-oriented theological anthropology, this analysis will seek to press the limits of his robust framework whilst inquiring what an ethic of vulnerability might look like in an age of terrestrial/ecological crisis.
The lived practices of Afro-Bolivian farmers invite not only a philosophical reinterpretation of vulnerability but also a rethinking of Catholic social thought. Their adaptive and relational forms of life disclose a theological reconfiguration of Catholic political theology.
The question is not only whether Catholics and Calvinists can understand one another better doctrinally. It is whether they can think together about concrete political questions and their entanglement with power, authority, and the conditions necessary for a more just and peaceful society.
Debt forgiveness was not an act of discretionary charity but a matter of divine justice — a God-ordered liberation of persons and families crushed by debt and indentured to creditors.
The problem of how to resolve the tension between private property and the universal destination of goods, perhaps, obscures a deeper problem in CST. I contend that Catholic social teaching tends not to perceive its own entanglements in modernity and its hidden side of slavery, genocide, and unprecedented ecological waste.
In presenting natural law as an inscribed a priori, CST circumvents difficult questions about whose reason discerns this law, which historical mediation informs its articulation, and what constitutive exclusions its putative universality has required.
What can the Vatican’s meeting of Catholic influencers can tell us about religion in the digital age?
Worship, with its “meaning-laden symbols, repeating rituals, sacred texts, shared song, prescribed prayers, re-enacted narratives,” has a way of moving the worshiper away from what is proscribed to what is prescribed; in effect, from the vices of corruption to the virtues that promote the common good.