Abstract
The late John Lewis, the heroic—indeed saintly—advocate for justice, who faithfully walked in the way of non-violence, described his philosophy as “very simple: When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, say something. Do something. Get in trouble. Good trouble.” I hope it is not far-fetched to propose that, in the circumstances that currently are deepening human social divisions, the kinds of “good trouble” into which Lewis invites us most certainly include the actions, attitudes, and practices that diminish enmity, uproot violence, heal division, and bring about reconciliation. We get ourselves in “good trouble” whenever, as challenging as it may be, we become agents of mercy, of peace-making, of forgiveness, of friendship, and of healing in a world eager to provoke hostilities. These are among the very kinds of good trouble that the Roman liturgy, in the Preface for the Second Eucharistic Prayer for Masses of Reconciliation, prays that the Spirit of God empowers us to make fundamental for the ways we live with one another:
In the midst of conflict and division, we know it is you who turn our minds to thoughts of peace. Your Spirit changes our hearts: enemies begin to speak to one another, those who were estranged join hands in friendship, and nations seek the way of peace together. Your Spirit is at work when understanding puts an end to strife, when hatred is quenched by mercy, and vengeance gives way to forgiveness. For this we should never cease to thank and praise you… (Provisional ICEL Text, 1975)
The good trouble of reconciliation, like the conflicts it is called upon to quench and the divisions it is called upon to heal, takes multiple forms. The first four articles in this issue, while not directly framed in the language of good trouble, do, nonetheless, engage questions for which the dynamics of conflict and division are at work and for which appropriate enactments of the “good trouble” of reconciliation and peace-making are requisite for bringing about resolution.
Thus, in “Challenges to Religious Freedom in the US: Some Lessons from Global Crises,” David Hollenbach examines controversies over religious freedom, both in the United States and in other parts of the world. The first have arisen in cases such as the US Catholic bishops’ invocation of religious freedom in objecting to the contraception mandate in the Affordable Care Act; the second have been instanced in such things as the attacks on the Rohingya in Myanmar (Burma), the severe restrictions placed on the freedom of the Uighurs in western China, and the sharp limitations on religious freedom placed upon Christians in many parts of the world today. What Hollenbach sees as common among these is the urgent need they indicate (paraphrasing the Second Preface) for working to bring about the “understanding that puts an end to strife.” He argues that the understanding requisite for engaging these issues effectively comes with the recognition that social unity and respect for freedom, including freedom of religion, stand in interdependent relations with each other. They are not oppositional to one another, as they are often framed from within these controversies, but rather they properly go together. Such recognition would open a way to overcome such perceived divisions between social unity and religious freedom, by affirming the key principle that social unity itself requires respect for freedom, including the freedom of those with whom one disagrees.
In the second essay in this issue, “‘Tongues of Fire’: Hiroshima as Hell and a New Pentecost?,” William George searches to find and articulate a redemptive theological meaning from, in, and for a most unlikely conflictual locus: the horrific destruction that seventy-five years ago the atomic bomb dropped by the US military wrought on Hiroshima and its people. He finds an initial clue pointing to such meaning in the name that J. Robert Oppenheimer, a central figure in the development of the bomb, gave to the bomb’s first test in the New Mexico desert: “Trinity.” This name, George contends, does not just point to theological concerns embedded in Oppenheimer’s documented wrestling with the morally searing quandaries that faced those who fashioned weapons of such apocalyptic destructive force; George additionally proposes that “Trinity” may also fittingly name the bombings themselves. To make a case for this, he draws upon a wide array of conceptual and imaginative resources: Bernard Lonergan’s work on conversion and on the Trinity; historical accounts of the development of the atomic weapons; the influence of Hindu religious thought and writings upon Oppenheimer’s ethical and life horizons; and, intriguingly, the 2005 opera by John Adams, Doctor Atomic, in which the text of a dramatic central aria, sung by the baritone playing Oppenheimer, is John Donne’s Holy Sonnet XIV: “Batter my heart, three person’d God.” George thus invites us to consider the possibility that Hiroshima’s terrifying “tongues of fire” may also signal a “new Pentecost,” calling diverse peoples to form vibrant new communities of charity and grace, a Pentecost that enables “nations [to] seek the way of peace together.”
In “Can We Hear Him Now? James Cone's Enduring Challenge to White Theologians,” Karen Teel looks directly at a long-standing issue that, even more urgently now, requires white Roman Catholic theologians to stir up among themselves some “good trouble.” In this case, the aim of such trouble is to undertake directly, fully, and unflinchingly James H. Cone’s long-standing challenge to white Christian theologians, and specifically to white Roman Catholic theologians, that they confront the sin of white supremacy. Based on an examination of the most consequential venues for the exchange of Catholic theological research—the programming of the Catholic Theological Society of America and articles published in Theological Studies—Teel makes the case that white Catholic theologians collectively have yet to recognize the truth and righteousness of Cone’s challenge, or to accept its implication for the practice of theology. She affirms Bryan Massingale’s judgement that most white Catholic theologians have yet to take up Cone’s challenge with the seriousness that it deserves. She further argues that that the reason for this is fear: We, white US Catholic theologians, have not found the courage to recognize that Cone’s challenge indeed applies to us, both personally and disciplinarily. In order to acknowledge this fear and to start overcoming it, Teel proposes that white US Catholic theologians begin to participate differently in our guilds and our discipline and offers a number of specific action steps for professional societies and scholars to take in order to move toward this end.
In “Indigenous and Roman Catholic Canonizations of Nicholas Black Elk,” Michael Stoeber explores another locus of theological import in which division and conflict have been in play: the plurality of the world’s religious and spiritual cultures. The challenges arising from such plurality have been historically important, but now draw increasing attention in a world in which lived awareness of religious plurality has become unavoidable. Stoeber’s exploration focuses specifically on the question of “multiple religious belonging/participation” that, in this case, is instanced in the Lakota-Roman Catholic religious hybridity of Nicholas Black Elk and his teachings. Stoeber frames his exploration around the question: How are we to understand Black Elk’s transforming identity in light of this apparent shift to Lakota Sioux—Roman Catholic multiple religious participation? This exploration is conducted in dialogue with postcolonial and decoloniality theorists, and with commentators on Black Elk’s spirituality. This dialogue highlights how Black Elk’s religious hybridity manifests a spirituality and theology of liberation while also providing a basis for his actions of decoloniality. It argues for two related points. First, Black Elk is motivated by a “proto-liberation spirituality” that “embraces and interprets the teachings of Christianity and Lakotism through the experiences of a severely impoverished people.” Second, Black Elk acts as “an agent of ‘decoloniality’—as a force struggling against structures of destructive oppression” and the “colonial matrices of power—social, political, economic, religious” in support of his impoverished, starving and oppressed people. The outcome of this struggle is a creative integration of aspects of Christina spirituality with traditional Lakota spiritual experience, attitudes, and tenets: respectful approaches to visionary mysticism and dreams; positive affirmations of embodied spirituality; ecological connections, consciousness and responsibility; and a transformed sense of spiritual intimacy with nature. Black Elk’s recent nomination for canonization could lend further support to developments in aspects of Christian spirituality that are attuned to the influences of Lakota spiritual experience.
The five final contributions to this issue engage a range of other significant questions and issues that arise in biblical interpretation, Christology, the theology and aesthetics of the body, Christian ecumenical encounter, and integral ecology put forth in the encyclical Laudato si’.
In “A Biblical View of Covenants Old and New,” Andrew Davis considers the theological consequences of shifts in understanding the relationships between the “Old” and the “New” covenants that have taken place in Jewish-Christian dialogue subsequent to Nostra Aetate, as these shifts have recently been articulated by Adam Gregerman. One important shift has been away from casting the “Old (i.e., Sinaitic) Covenant” and the New Covenant of Jesus as opposites set in stark opposition, but to view them, instead, in comparative terms: the Old Covenant is enduring but limited, while the New Covenant is eternal and universal. Another is that Catholic theologians in the dialogue have eschewed the language of “replacement” in favor of “fulfillment”—a welcome approach that recognizes continuity between the two covenants and avoids supersessionism. As Gregerman notes, however, this comparative model introduces a new tension: the Old Covenant, though still holy and valid, is inferior to the New; the fulfillment of the former by the latter exposes the shortcomings of the Old Covenant and the superiority of the New Covenant. Davis thus offers a critical assessment of this tension from a biblical perspective that argues for three points: (1) Scripture presents a multiplicity of covenants (rather than a singular “Old Covenant”), which coexist together in complementary ways; (2) This multiplicity produces dynamic tension among the covenants; and (3) the tendency in recent theological discussion to describe the New Covenant as a fulfillment of its predecessors lacks a biblical basis in that it is not biblical covenants that are fulfilled but, instead, their promises. This small shift in language, Davis concludes, can help avoid the superiority complex identified by Gregerman and aid in recognizing the shared hope of Jews and Christians for the ultimate fulfillment of God’s covenantal promises.
In “Deleuze, Balthasar, and John Paul II on the Aesthetics of the Body,” Angela Franks poses the provocative question, “Is the body a grid or a window?” to initiate a tripartite exchange on the aesthetics of the body among what appear at first to be an unlikely trio for productive conversation over this question: a leading post-structuralist thinker, Gilles Deleuze, for whom the body is most aptly seen as a grid, “a surface upon which desire writes;” and two formidable Catholic theologians, Hans Urs von Balthasar and Pope John Paul II, for whom “the body expresses the person” and, in accord with classical Christian aesthetics, “the beauty of the surface is an expression of depth.” Out of Deleuze’s side of the conversation Franks will propose that the phenomenon of transgenderism is “a synthetic expression of contemporary attitudes toward the sexually differentiated body” and from that will articulate the “prior aesthetic convictions” that would make transgenderism plausible. The side of the conversation represented by von Balthasar and John Paul II will present, in contrast, an alternate aesthetic of the body, in which the body functions as an expression of personal depth, and for which beauty’s form is the expression of an interior reality. What John Paul II’s theology of the body thus presents is an “aesthetic” account of the body as the (exterior) expression of the (interior) reality of the person-subject. Franks then concludes by presenting a trinitarian analogy of the body in which the body as the image of the person functions similarly to the Son as Image of the Father.
In “The Archetypal Faith of Christ,” Christopher Hadley offers an exploration of the relationship between dogmatic theology and Christian experience focused, first, on the sense in which it may be said that Jesus had faith and, second, on the extent to which his experience of faith informs the experience of Christian faith in general. Hadley argues that Hans Urs von Balthasar’s theological position on Jesus’s “archetypal faith” both converges with contemporary biblical scholarship and provides insight into Jesus’ biblically-attested growth in awareness of being loved and sent by the Father. Hadley then articulates how this archetypal faith of Jesus serves as the foundation for the Christian experience of faith as growth in self-knowledge in relation to God and the world. A further point of importance that Hadley sees and underscores in Balthasar’s position on Jesus’s faith is that it draws significantly upon the work of Karl Rahner; their converging understanding of the faith of Christ thereby provides an unexpected point of contact between two modern theologians who are so commonly (and deservedly) considered to be rivals.
Lucas Briola, in “Praise Rather Than Solving Problems: Understanding the Doxological Turn of Laudato Si’ through Lonergan,” provides an account of the significance of Pope Francis’s doxological and Eucharistic emphases in Laudato Si’ through the thought of Bernard Lonergan. Cognizant that the relationship between the church’s work of praise and its work of justice has been a source of contention between two strains of Catholic social reflection within the United States, Briola argues that Lonergan’s theology, particularly his theology of history, can supply the “systematic heft” to show why a doxological and, by extension, Eucharistic vision is central for the integral ecology Francis advocates in the encyclical. Central to Briola’s argument is a parallel he draws between Lonergan’s identification of “general bias” (along with the “longer cycle of decline”) and Francis’s identification of the “technocratic paradigm” (along with its “ironclad logic”) as the “suffocating idol” from whose bondage the capacious horizon of the church’s practices of praise and worship empowers us to be freed. What this parallel further points to is that “integral ecology,” understood as a task, encapsulates the church’s call to care for the twin “cries” of the poor and the earth echoing across our common home: all of those vulnerable populations that are trampled upon by what Francis labels “the technocratic paradigm.” In Laudato Si’, Francis thus uniquely yokes together the church’s work of praise and the church’s work of justice, its ora et labora, the Benedictine motto that succinctly expresses the claim that practicality becomes genuine care when it is a form of praise; when, however, the technocratic paradigm untethers practicality from the more capacious horizon provided by enactments of praise and of eucharist, it becomes a suffocating idol.
Viorel Coman’s essay, “The Orthodox Neo-Patristic Movement’s Encounter with the Christian ‘Other’: An Ecumenical Hermeneutics of Receptivity,” examines an overlooked dimension of the Orthodox Neo-Patristic movement, the most influential theological direction in 20th-century Orthodox Christianity. This group of Orthodox thinkers advocated that Eastern theology return to the patristic sources of Christianity, both to renew itself and to depart from the centuries’ long negative influences of Western scholasticism. The essay argues that, even within this overall rejection of Western scholasticism, an important ecumenical hermeneutics of receptivity towards Western theology is present in the writings of the Orthodox Neo-patristic author, Dumitru Stăniloae (1903–1993). Instead of cultivating opposition between Eastern and Western Christianity, one finds in his notion of ‘open sobornicity,’ an invitation to the churches to engage in dialogue and mutual enrichment. Coman’s examination of Stăniloae’s thinking takes note of some important general points, e.g., the struggle within the Neo-Patristic movement to keep a balance between faithfulness to the Orthodox identity and openness to the Christian ‘other,’ but his primary focus is on Stăniloae’s notion of ‘sobornicity’ as the most perfect expression of the idea that the Church is the life of communion based on unity in complementary diversity. Such ecclesial sobornicity, moreover, has an open dimension, which means that the Church needs to recognize God’s working presence even outside its canonical borders and to strive to realize its unity in complementary diversity without betraying the great gifts of God’s grace that flourish in non-Orthodox churches and communities. In other words, ‘open sobornicity’ is a life of communion as unity in complementary diversity extended beyond the borders of Orthodoxy to embrace the genuine experience of God as lived by other churches and cultures.
Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to Kevin Burke, SJ, Chair of the Theological Studies Board of Directors, for overseeing the preparation of the “In Memoriam” tribute to Paul Crowley, SJ that stands at the head of this issue.