It is imperative to respect the claims of conscience behind the pacifist convictions often associated with the rejection of the modern state. But if Catholic social teaching is going to incorporate nonviolence more fully, it also must develop the connection between nonviolence and modern politics.
The notion of quality of life, an extended conception of common good, and the solidarity with the victims can move nonviolence from the margins of Catholic Social Teaching to its center.
The virtues and practices include confronting the issue rather than the person, practicing forgiveness, tolerance, and reconciliation, embracing the enemy as a child of God, and protecting human dignity and the common good. It explores how the combination of CST and nonviolence can address human actions that sustain marginalization, racism, conflicts, oppression, domination, and diverse forms of social exclusion.
In turning away from more abstract debates about liturgy to those that center on its lived and material dimensions, we hope to enliven a conversation about ‘lived liturgy’ to consider what practices uphold, challenge, or fail to account for the global political order.
[P]romoting justice and defending human dignity need not only hinge on grand self-sacrificial gestures…. That social structures are sustained by social practices suggests that the everyday is consequential too and dispels the notion that smaller or more mundane acts are too paltry and thus powerless to effect the kind of structural change justice requires.
Nonviolence presses us to face and points us toward the challenge of integrating charity and respect for human dignity into our practice of addressing entrenched social injustice.
This essay is a storied and theological proposal for non-violent, disruptive anti-fascism.
Jean-Luc Marion waded into political discourse with his 2017 book Brève apologie pour un moment catholique (Brief Apology for a Catholic Moment) which uses aspects of his phenomenological and theological project to argue for a model of non-political politics: one based exclusively on the perfect will of the Triune God.
At the base of Christofascism lies the response of uncritical obedience. For this reason, Christians need to become aware of how their own language of obedience functions Christian moral systems and concepts of faith.
An examination of responses that are counteracting the fascism emboldened by Trumpism; including Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement as well as Christ’s moral imperative for anti-fascist action. A provision of counternarratives of hope to the prevailing motif of the Catholic Right’s resurgence.
This post is a cataloguing of contemporary fascism which is bolstered by religious ideology. I seek to define it, trace its roots, and remove it from the shadows while inspiring Christian ethical response to counter this plague.
You discuss a God that both invites us to love our enemies, already incredibly challenging, and a God that also seems to allow, endorse, or sometimes invite violence against the oppressor in certain scriptural texts. Both are hard theological pills to swallow.