BEAUTY AND THE BEST
Editorial Overview
It is easy to be casual about beauty. One can say for example “It’s a beautiful day” but essentially overlook the splendorous harmony of earth, tree, and sky. Utterance here becomes cliché, hardly capable of more profoundly reflecting, by Gerard Manly Hopkins’ view that “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” The poet’s expression here constitutes enrapturing imagery and engaging metaphysics. His words disclose heightened sensitivity to disclosure of the divine through the profane. Pursing a like perspective from Scripture, namely that God’s “glory covered the heavens, and the earth was full of his praise (Hb 3:3b NRSVCE),” one can observe theologically that creation mediates divine grandeur. Such theology is particularly urgent in an age when faith is too frequently lured toward, or even into, the camps of secularism. Here theology’s arsenal is eminently served, both conceptually and pastorally, by attention to what have been traditionally denominated the transcendentals. For here the common elements of being – all being, divine and created – can be surveyed for their revelatory potential. For tracing the mediated presence of divine splendor in nature, history, society, and the Church, the quite alluring though perhaps most neglected of the transcendentals stands out, shines forth, as Beauty. In its absolutely supreme form, and in creaturely supremacy within species, the Beautiful coalesces with other transcendentals, enjoying unity with the best of the good and the truest of the true. In this issue of Offerings such Beauty energizes Gregory Zuschlag’s opening article, “The Turn to the ‘Beautiful’ in U.S. Hispanic/Latino Theology,” wherein he illuminates how the Hispanic/Latino theologians, Roberto Goizueta and Alejandro García-Rivera, employ the category of the Beautiful in theologically expounding inculturation. The article thus sets a tone that can suffuse and illuminate this issue’s subsequent contributions, though in them Beauty may go unnamed. As a dimension of divine being, Beauty emerges perforce through the grace sustaining human virtue. Thus the admirable humility which Joseph T. LaBelle examines in “The Enduring Counsel of Humility for Ordained Priestly Life and Ministry” shines with the Beauty of Christ’s own meekness. With proper unpretentiousness not letting the right hand know what the left is doing, ministry exhibits the generosity of ecclesial service and thus reflects Jesus’ lowly splendor. All ministry then merits the Church’s official legislative support and encouragement, as Joseph G. Diermeier well argues in “Lay Ministry and Its Rightful Place in the Church.” Stephen K Sherwood’s lecture, “The Old Testament Background of the Fourth Gospel,”discusses how John the evangelist deftly employs Old Testament theology and imagery to enhance his gospel’s attention to the glory and thus the Beauty, human and divine, of Christ the Word made flesh. And with his review of Herriot’s book, Grass, Sky, Song, Ronald Rolheiser draws attention to the Beauty of nature by discussing the moral imperative of caring for grassland birds. Beauty’s splendor, divine and creaturely, shines overall, in overview, from beginning to end.
Ronald Quillo
Executive Editor
Contents
Beauty and the Best – Editorial Overview
The Turn to the “Beautiful” in U.S. Hispanic/Latino Theology: Theological Aesthetics of Roberto Goizueta and Alejandro Garcia-Rivera –Gregory J. Zuschlag
The Enduring Counsel of Humility for Ordained Priestly Life and Ministry -Joseph T. LaBelle, O.M.I.
Lay Ministry and Its Rightful Place in the Church -Joseph G. Diermeier
The Old Testament Background of the Fourth Gospel -Stephen K. Sherwood, C.M.F.
Review of Grass, Sky, Song: Promise and Peril in the World of Grassland Birds by Trevor Herriot –Ronald Rolheiser, O.M.I.
Theses and Dissertations for 2008-2009