Critical Intersections: Religion and Society

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AuthorHouse, 2006 M06 19 - 420 pages

Life is all about intersections. Living is where sorrow meets joy, where pain encounters ecstasy, where the weakness of the flesh is buoyed by the strength of faith, where love conquers all doubts and betrayals. Marriage is for better and worse, for richer and poorer, in sickness and health; it is for life and death. Spirituality is the arduous integration of lifes dispositions and tendencies, of ones urges and habits, for the whole to reach out in transcendence to ones fellow human beings and to God. Growth to Christian maturity is actualizing the intersecting, because cruciform, demands of love of God and love of neighbor, which follows the path that leads from Good Friday to Easter Sunday.

Academic life is also becoming one of intersections. After the increasing structural differentiation and functional specialization characteristic of modernity, academic disciplines are critically intersecting and cross-fertilizing with each other for integration, enrichment, and further enlightenment. The behavioral sciences need genetics and biology for a more adequate explanation of human behavior. Homo oeconomicus of neoclassical economics is complemented by the realities of power of homo sociologicus. Theology calls on the social sciences, in addition to its ancient ancilla, philosophy, to make moral sense of social and global problems. Interdisciplinary courses try to make connections between the disciplines students have studied, and to integrate the breadth and the depth of knowledge they have been exposed to.

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Page 229 - The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these too are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ.
Page 7 - So if you are offering your gift at the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your bro'ther, and then come and offer your gift.
Page 12 - That is, private property does not constitute for anyone an absolute and unconditioned right. No one is justified in keeping for his exclusive use what he does not need, when others lack necessities. In a word, « according to the traditional doctrine as found in the Fathers of the Church and the great theologians, the right to property must never be exercised to the detriment of the common good.
Page 51 - In the face of such widely varying situations it is difficult for us to utter a unified message and to put forward a solution which has universal validity. Such is not our ambition, nor is it our mission.
Page 150 - I do say that we must win our freedom by deserving it, by improving the mind and enhancing the dignity of the individual, loving what is just, what is good, what is great, to the point of dying for it. When a people reach these heights, God provides the weapon, and the idols and the tyrants fall like a house of cards, and freedom shines in the first dawn.
Page 10 - You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.
Page 220 - Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
Page 114 - capitalism" is meant a system in which freedom in the economic sector is not circumscribed within a strong juridical framework which places it at the service of human freedom in its totality...
Page 30 - ... our moral, political and economic responsibilities do not stop at the moment of birth. Those who defend the right to life of the weakest among us must be equally visible in support of the quality of life of the powerless among us: the old and the young, the hungry and the homeless, the undocumented immigrant and the unemployed worker.

About the author (2006)

M. D. Litonjua is professor of sociology at the College of Mount St. Joseph in Cincinnati, Ohio. He has Licentiates in Philosophy and Theology from the University of Santo Tomas (Manila), a Ph.D. in Sociology from Brown University, and an M.B.A. from the University of Missouri at St. Louis. He is the author of Liberation Theology: The Paradigm Shift,and Structures of Sin, Cultures of Meaning: Social Science and Theology. He has also published in Theology Today,the Journal of Hispanic/Latino Theology, Studies in ComparativeInternational Development, Chicago Studies, Philippine Studies, and International Review of Modern Sociology.

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