1,720,979 research outputs found
Language, Structure, and Sacrament: Reconsidering the Eucharistic Theology of Edward Schillebeeckx
No full textAfter the Second Vatican Council, Flemish theologian Edward Schillebeeckx, O.P. (1914-2009) made a significant turn in his theology towards radical hermeneutics, through which he dealt with the interpretation and evaluation of meaning present in reality. Prior to his groundbreaking Jesus trilogy, Schillebeeckx applied a version of his hermeneutical method to an analysis of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. This short work is relatively undervalued today and deserves to be reconsidered. Schillebeeckx examines the way that interpretation influences human perception and experience of reality, and what this does to our understanding of ‘transubstantiation.’ By viewing this argument through the wider lens of a hermeneutical ontology, where language becomes the primary structure of being, Schillebeeckx proposes to recontextualize the Council of Trent’s canons on the Eucharist. This linguistic understanding of reality reveals the sacraments as both signs and as points of mediation and inter-personal communication. The wider context for the sacraments, and specifically the Eucharist, is always their place within a liturgical framework that aids in our interpretation and trans-signification of reality. Here, we argue that these inter-personal, linguistic mediations are already based on God’s prior actions – especially in God’s on-going act of creation, such that there is always an objective (offer of reality) and a subjective (interpreted acceptance of reality) element involved in the Eucharistic event. The inter-personal mediation of the sacrament presupposes the personal presence of Christ in the Eucharistic elements, but this understanding will require a repositioning the way in which we understand Eucharistic change as a sacramental bond between God and creation, as well as a hermeneutically and phenomenologically sound understanding of the sacraments as signs of this bond. Here we propose to [1] critically retrieve Schillebeeckx’s hermeneutical interpretation of Trent; [2] to uncover the phenomenology of the sacraments that is implicit in this linguistic understanding of reality; finally, [3] to demonstrate how this linguistic ontology is productive for seeing the sacraments as interruptive, inter-personal, and revelatory events of mediation between creation and Creator.status: Publishe
Liturgy, Theology, and the Crisis of History: Clearing Space for Liturgical Theology
No full textThe authors of this short introductory article look at the need for contemporary theology to clear a 'space' for the liturgy, both in terms of worship as theology and as essential to the task of the systematic theologian. They draw out the necessity to rejoin the disciplines of systematic and liturgical theology as aspects of sacra doctrina, rather than as two entirely separate scholarly discourses. Here, the problem of liturgical theology is considered in the historical context of the Liturgical Movement that began in Belgium in the early twentieth century and 'culminated' in the promulgation of Sacrosanctum Concilium in 1963. The public nature of the liturgical act is stressed, as is the meaning of such actions in the world, where the church can be seen as the visible sacrament of God’s grace. The specifically Christian nature of the liturgy reflects the divine liturgy of the world, the reality of creation as a sacrament of God. This sacramental reality is not, however, automatically discerned from ‘nature'. Since all understanding is an 'understanding from' a specific narrative position, the liturgy is necessary to attune us to the sacramental nature of the world we inhabit, and it forms what and how we believe: lex orandi, lex credendi.
This programmatic introduction to the topic sets the stage for the rest of the volume, Approaching the Threshold of Mystery: Liturgical Worlds and Theological Spaces. The authors argue for both the timeliness and necessity of the task at hand: a 'synoptic' theology that takes systematic and liturgical approaches together, rather than artificially separating them. Finally, the proceeding essays and their authors are briefly introduced, within different areas of study from the architecture of contemporary church buildings, to the histories and composition of non-Western liturgical rites.status: Publishe
‘You Will Be Like God’ – Original Sin and Ideology Critique
No full textThe Second Vatican Council was and continues to be a source of transformation and inspiration for many Catholic theologians, and this is even more the case for those who lived through it and even helped guide the Council’s progress. Schillebeeckx was shaped both by formation and promulgation of the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et spes, in 1965, and through his subsequent reflections on its meaning. The Constitution’s confrontation with the perceived divide between ‘church’ and ‘world’ prompted Schillebeeckx to take up the question of theological intelligibility in contemporary culture, and it also helped form the way that he envisioned God’s transcendence and associated it with the eschatological future of humanity. In this article, the author traces some of the ways that Schillebeeckx, following Gaudium et spes, approached the problem of ‘mutual intelligibility’ between society and the church. As his theology matured, this primarily took shape in his appropriation of hermeneutics and critical theory. The author shows how this led him to a future-oriented recovery of God’s transcendence, and reapplies Schillebeeckx’s eschatological-hermeneutical structure to the meaning of the doctrine of Original Sin in the present context. Next, the author briefly engages with basic elements of St. Augustine’s reading of the Genesis narrative that can aid in this task. His intent is to show that this doctrine, when interpreted in light of some of Schillebeeckx’s critical insights, holds serious potential as a powerful critique of social and structural sin within contemporary culture, and can continue to allow ‘church’ and ‘world’ to carry on a meaningful, mutually-critical dialogue. Finally, the author explores the eschatological dimension of this approach as both a gift and a challenge for Christian faith as a structural-linguistic reality. This study seeks to retrieve Schillebeeckx’s structural framework, not through historical exegesis alone, but also through systematic reflection on the signs of our time in dialogue with elements of past tradition.status: Publishe
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Economic Theological Anthropology and Metaphysics of Money: The Challenge of Optimism for Active Christian Hope
No full textOne of the most important issues in contemporary fundamental theology is the noted shift away from epistemology and towards the political. Within political theology itself, there is a new ‘economic turn’ that needs to be accounted for. Any substantial theological engagement with politics must also take into account the importance of economy for our socio-political context, especially in its current ‘neoliberal’ incarnation. In this chapter, the author examines the basic assumptions that neoliberalism makes about humanity. He argues that neoliberal market economy treats money as ‘god’. It functions as the highest signifier in a metaphysical economic system. The anthropology espoused by neoliberalism is therefore a theological anthropology. The author then uses Edward Schillebeeckx’s theology of hope to formulate a critical response to this anthropology. Schillebeeckx’s ‘anthropological constants’ offer a constructive critique of neoliberal theological anthropology based on the contradictions inherent in neoliberalism itself. This leads the author to an important distinction between ‘economic optimism’ and the Christian virtue of hope which is, above all, an active hope for something that exists outside of the self-enclosed system of markets and exchange. Such a possibility is not offered by neoliberalism as a metaphysical system, but it remains possible for the Christian tradition.status: Publishe
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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