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Earth’s Lament: Suffering, Hope, and Wisdom [Rev. version]
No full textThis is a revised version of Lambert Zuidervaart's inaugural address presented on November 21, 2003, on the occasion of the author's taking up the position as professor at the Institute
Written Into the Land: Use, Identity and the Human Awakening to an Eloquent Creation
No full textThis thesis argues that human land use is a decisive yet commonly overlooked indication of the sort of people we are. As such, to grasp that we live in a world in 'ecological crisis' requires grappling with the moral, spiritual and narrative underpinnings and effects of those twentieth century shifts in urban/suburban development and farming practices that have so dramatically altered the North American cultural and geographical landscape. In particular, this dilemma is approached from a biblically informed Christian perspective. Chapter 1 proposes that understanding and experiencing the world as Creation requires accounting for the embodied and wondrous character of existence. Chapter 2 examines aspects of the biblical narrative that provide resources for rethinking destructive land use patterns. In conversation with agrarians and new urbanists, Chapter 3 provides an agrarian ethic for urbanites; a vision rooted in agrarianism that acknowledges how deeply the fate and health of cities and farms are intertwined
No One is Immune: Reflections on Graham Ward's The Politics of Discipleship: Becoming Postmaterial Citizens
No full textA Certainty of Death: Appreciating Human Animalhood
No full textEngaging the work of Barry Allen and Karl Marx, a range of topics come together in an analysis of civilization as the buildup and breakdown of tissues. Life and death are both moments and directions. Death, as a moment in life, is certain. Human life, lived against death at its present scale, doesn't succeed in controlling or securing what it seeks to control and secure. Concerns about human knowledge and economies-civilizational tissue and its behaviours-are contrasted with familiarity and wealth as tissue, which are valuable goods against which their bastardizations can show up. We cannot place blind faith in technology, since it often fails the test of good tissue-life and the means to continued life. We cannot place blind faith in market freedom, as long as economic agents are programmed as they are, and as long as wealth is not understood as good, living tissue
'All That Man Has and Is' : a Study of the Historiographical Concerns Guiding the Work of Christopher Dawson
No full textThis thesis presents the historiographical concerns guiding the work of Christopher Dawson, Roman Catholic historian, sociologist, and philosopher of history, in terms of a science of human being, which is adequate to conceptualize human activity in time. The author attempts to show that Dawson rejects the modern, empirical paradigm, both for its secularity and its reconceptualization of the relation between time and human activity in history. A conceptual continuity Dawson sees between the work of modern empirical thinkers G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche, and its consequences for understanding history as a teleological process, or the progress of Reason, consciousness, Spirit, self-overcoming, etc., is treated in the first section. Dawson's account of the natural conditions of human knowing, and its relation to his theory of culture, is treated in the second section. And in the final section, Dawson's understanding of the relation between religion and culture is presented
Theologizing in Vain: a Dialogue with Ellul Between Truth and Reality
No full textIn this study, I propose through the thought of Jacques Ellul that humanity has perverted the original creation. In doing so, we have constructed what I will call a Counter-Creation; a second creation. In this counter-creation, mankind has replaced the creativity and the fluidity of the original. Along with this I argue in the second chapter that we have socially constructed new gods, which I will call sacred myths. These sacred myths are unquestionable, and hold power over against humanity. In the third chapter, I depart from Ellul, and go beyond his reflections on the vanity of life, on the vanity of socially constructing the world around us. Through the story of Cain and Abel, I propose that in Qoheleth there are two types of vanities in play: One that is unrighteous and one that is righteous. In doing so, I hope to help people recognize their finitude, while not being paralyzed or being tempted to plunge into chaos due to the meaninglessness of life
Weapons of Mass Instruction: Secular and Religious Institutions Teaching the World. Proceedings of a St. Michael's College Symposium (25-26 November, 2005)
No full textThis paper will examine the pedagogy of the exemplary vignette as a means of "mass" identity formation within the Dominican Order and among its far flung supporters. In the process, I make the case that Cistercian Conrad of Eberbach's earlier Exordium Magnum provided a model for a Dominican "memory" and the identity that shared memory was to ensure