CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND PSYCHOTHERAPY: A RESPONSE TO BERGIN'S ANTITHESES

Abstract. Secular and religious values of psychotherapists influence the process of psychotherapy. The psychologist Allen Bergin has pointed out several major antitheses between values of secular psychotherapists and their religiously oriented clients. The present essay is a response to Bergin's antitheses, on the one hand, and to humanistic psychology, on the other, from the point of view of a Christian humanism. Karl Rahner's theological anthropology is proposed as one possible foundation for an explicit articulation of the relationship between psychotherapy and religion, and as a means to address apparently divergent values of psychotherapists and religious believers.     

The Evolution of Social Ethics: Using Economic History to Understand Economic Ethics

In the development of Roman Catholic social thought from the teachings of the scholastics to the modern social encyclicals, changes in normative economics reflect the transformation of an economic terrain from its feudal roots to the modern industrial economy. The preeminence accorded by the modern market to the allocative over the distributive function of price broke the convenient convergence of commutative and distributive justice in scholastic just price theory. Furthermore, the loss of custom, law, and usage in defining the boundaries of economic behavior led to a depersonalization of economic relationships that had previously provided effective informal means of protecting individual well-being. Hence, recent economic ethics has had to look for nonprice, nonmarket mechanisms for distributive justice. This is reflected, for example, in the shift in attitude from the medieval antipathy toward unions to the contemporary defense of organized labor on moral grounds.     

MAKING SPACE FOR THE METHODOLOGICAL MOSAIC: THE FUTURE OF THE FIELD OF SCIENCE-AND-RELIGION

This article is a response to Josh Reeves's recent book Against Methodology in Science and Religion: Recent Debates on Rationality and Theology that welcomes Reeves's proposal for an anti-essentialist future for the field of science-and-religion, particularly because it has the potential to move the field beyond current, well-worn methods: the dominance of Christian theology and doctrine, the importance of credibility strategies, and the dependence upon philosophical discourses. Reeves’ proposal has the potential to open the science-and-religion field to other topics, problems, and methods, such as studying lived science-and-religion. One way of doing this is to study popular culture and its artifacts such as literature, which portrays a co-mingling of religion and science at the level of day-to-day experiences and practices of characters. For at the level of lived experience, religion and science are not well-defined disciplines neatly compartmentalized into separate academic departments.     

The Erotic Eucharist

Pope Benedict XVI's encyclical Deus Caritas Est continues the magisterium's twentieth‐century shift from an act‐oriented, procreative approach to sexual ethics to what I will term a heterosexually personalistic one. Situating a heterosexual anthropology within a heterosexual cosmology, Benedict argues that just as God loves humanity with heterosexual eros, so must human beings love each other heterosexually. Although Benedict depends upon the explanatory power of heterosexuality, he perhaps unwittingly ends up depicting God's love not as iconically heterosexual, but as queer. In casting God's love as queer, I do not, even analogously, impute to God a type of homosexuality as Benedict does a heterosexuality. Instead, by drawing attention to the discursive specificity and historical instability of both homosexuality and heterosexuality, I use “queer” to recognize God's love as beyond categorization and as strange; it cannot be corralled into or contained by the historically specific notions of heterosexual and homosexual. But this essay does not merely deconstruct Benedict's heterosexually personalistic cosmology. It uncovers in Benedict's Eucharistic transfiguration of marital love a new and promising way of situating discussions about the ethics of sex.     

MIGRANT DOMESTIC CAREWORKERS: Between the Public and the Private in Catholic Social Teaching

This essay argues that Catholic (magisterial) social teaching's division of ethics into public and private creates a structural lacuna which makes it almost impossible to envision a truly just situation for migrant domestic careworkers (MDCs) within the current horizon of Catholic social thought. Drawing on a variety of sociological studies, I conclude that it is easy for MDCs to “disappear” between two countries, two families, and, finally, two sets of ethical norms. If the magisterium genuinely wishes Catholic ethicists to address the plight of these migrant women, normative Catholic social teaching must pay more attention to household sociological realities and more fully absorb the feminist critique of the sharp line between the public and the private, between care and paid work.     

‘Dear Hindu Friends’: official Diwali greetings as a medium for diplomatic dialogue

ABSTRACT

This article discusses greeting messages as a genre of interreligious communication. Greeting messages are defined as official communication issued by religious institutions and addressed to the members of another religious community on the occasion of specific feast days or anniversaries. Drawing on the insights of politolinguistic analysis, this article treats these messages primarily as a form of public diplomacy. The case study analyses the messages issued on the occasion of the Hindu festival Diwali/Deepavali by the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue and World Council of Churches between 2015 and 2017. Distributed through the social media and posted on the institutional websites, the Diwali messages seek to speak as a Christian voice to all Hindus. Beyond the official addressee, the messages also potentially face the scrutiny of the global public sphere, especially an internal Christian readership. This article analyses what language strategies are used to deal with these varied demands.     

Formative and Transformative

This review essay discusses the significance of Charles Curran's contribution to the field of Catholic theological ethics. I suggest that Curran's theological voice is a distinct and important one, that his preoccupations mirror major concerns in moral theology, and that his approach has been shaped through his long‐standing ecumenical and interdisciplinary commitments. I consider four recent monographs and analyze Curran's impact under the headings of (1) the nature of moral theology; (2) the ecclesial shape of moral theology; (3) the (historical) contexts of moral theology; and (4) the (social) character of moral theology. I note that Curran's primary concern has been to honor the richness of the Catholic moral tradition, and that the range and depth of his work is unrivalled in contemporary Catholic moral theology. I conclude by suggesting that Curran's contribution to the discipline of moral theology has been both formative and transformative.     

ACTIONS AS THE TIES THAT BIND Love, Praxis, and Community in the Thought of Gustavo Gutiérrez

Gustavo Gutiérrez develops an account of human action or praxis that I—borrowing the language of Charles Taylor—label expressivist. Human action must be understood as expressing an underlying potential or impulse that only becomes real through expression in action. Gutiérrez's expressivism is fundamental to his view of the relationship between faith and love, his notion of three dimensions of liberation/salvation, and his understanding of the fundamental option as a yes or no in response to grace. Moreover, it supports a valuable approach to community as defined more by shared actions than a shared tradition or narrative. The final section briefly indicates two limitations to Gutiérrez's vision—especially with regard to the conception of community—and suggests the direction that a constructive appropriation of his thought might take.     

Renegotiating Aquinas

While Roman Catholic feminist ethicists typically endorse moral realism and crosscultural standards of justice, they also have been influenced by the postmodern interrogation of abstract reason and moral universalism. As theologians writing after the Second Vatican Council, they are increasingly sensitive to the communal and ecclesial dimensions of morality and of Christian ethics, and to the integral relation of Christian faith and ethics. This essay will consider two approaches to Catholic feminist ethics that differ in the relative weight they give to constructive work for social justice (realist gender justice ethics), or to the grounding of ethics in prayer and mysticism (postmodern gendered faith ethics). Using critical feminist reappropriations of the theology and ethics of Aquinas as examples, this essay will argue that the two approaches are overlapping and interdependent.