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.
When we perceive La Santa Muerte devotees as people operating outside of the rules instead of people seeking God in the messiness of a broken world, we miss the fundamentally holy desires that operate alongside the damaged ones in these practices.
In practice, their liturgies demonstrated a complex interweaving of different social justice commitments throughout the liturgy, while simultaneously, the community described only limited connections between their liturgy and the social issues they addressed as a community.
Join recent Catholic Re-Visions contributors as they engage the relationship between nonviolence and Catholic social teaching in these times.