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Category: Catholic Re-Visions

Creation, Vengefully Transfigured

Pope Francis suggests that trans people are destroying the world. Perhaps he might learn something if we did.

Is nature taking its revenge on us?

There’s an understandable temptation to think that climate disaster is nature’s way of rebelling against the Anthropocene. But this is a dangerous way of thinking we should ward against.

Catholic Re-Visions Call for Content

Catholic Re-Visions welcomes proposals for its next slate of content. How might we talk of “Catholicism,” being attentive to the past, while engaging with the messy present, to encounter a future that is not yet known?

Decolonizing Knowledge with Brenna Moore and Onaje X.O. Woodbine

“Both authors travel to the margins and then send back a warning signal to fellow scholars about the limits and potential intrusiveness of our established methods.”

The Inner Life and the Constraints of the World in Woodbine and Cajka’s New Books

Woodbine’s beautiful narrative is extraordinarily self-aware, and deeply humane. Haskins’ own voice is strong, active, present throughout. I had not planned to read it in one sitting but I literally could not put it down. Only a couple miles northwest of Haskins’ Roxbury, in the mostly Irish Catholic neighborhood of Chestnut Hill near Boston College, there is a totally other religious and cultural world. This is the place of white priests, educated Catholics, lecture halls, and the circuits of urban Catholic power. Particularly in the 1960s and 70s, it might as well have been another planet from Afro-Caribbean Roxbury.

Research and Me-Search: A Conversation with the new Catholic Re-Visions Conveners

As Catholic Re-Visions welcomes two new members to its leadership team, the three co-conveners sit down for a conversation about their backgrounds and the blog’s direction.

Marie-Thérèse Lacaze and “The End of Promised Lands”

This essay traces the story of Marie-Thérèse Lacaze, a French woman whose experience of Catholic communal life in solidarity with the poor and disenfranchised in Palestine eventually led her to denounce both the state of Israel and the Catholic Church as unjust institutions failing to live up to the ideals on which they were founded.

Corita Kent and “A Sort of Growing Up”

This essay presents some historical sources for tracing and understanding Corita Kent’s departure from Catholic religious life and the institutional Catholic church. This effort to make sense of Corita’s spiritual trajectory sheds light on wider trends in Post-Vatican II U.S. Catholic life.

Mary Daly and “Boundary Living”

Despite her rejection of Catholicism as irredeemably patriarchal, this essay explores Mary Daly’s complicated relationship with her theological past. Daly offers a vision for “boundary living” — where institutional disaffiliation creates a space for creatively reclaiming and reconstructing the tradition.

Black Queer Natural Law: On Brownness and Disidentification

Because of its deployments within white supremacist and heteronormative projects, the natural law has not been seen as a partner in liberative ethical projects. Considerations with respect to José Muñoz’s concepts of disidentification and brownness, however, allow for a rapprochement between queer-of-color epistemologies and a Thomistic epistemology of the natural law.

Butler, Norms, and Mystical-Political Hope

Judith Butler’s work in queer theory inspires Catholics to consider the material relations of the body and contributes to a mystical-political, eschatological hope.

What Queer Theory Taught Me About the Saints

A different type of project beckons the queer, brown Christian: Invention, coupled with mourning for what is irrecoverably absent, becomes a necessary spiritual practice for all those who cannot find their own ancestors in the canons of church history