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Offerings Vol. 8 Contents and Editorial Overview

THEOLOGY AND SPIRITUALITY EMBRACE THE EVERYDAY WORLD

 

Editorial Overview

This issue of Offerings allows the reader to explore from various perspectives how theology, in tandem with an active spiritual life, can effectively connect with everyday experience and call faith to greater heights. As faith seeking understanding, exemplary theology necessarily entails lively belief nurtured by prayer.

The article by Philip Sheldrake shows how from an Ignatian viewpoint, spirituality’s practical goals are best rooted in contemplation.  Because of the real-world implications of the Spiritual Exercises, it may seem inappropriate to speak of a mystical or contemplative component of Ignatius Loyola’s spirituality. Yet clarity regarding such a component is essential to properly understanding his spiritual vision. Influenced by the Devotio Moderna and personal mystical experience, he cherished an interiority directly attuned to God and intimately conjoined with the life and work of Jesus. Such intimacy, the root of practical and hopeful responses to Christ’s call, is nurtured by various prayerful forms of meditation and contemplation. Such intimacy is a practical mysticism grounding a sense of the all-pervasive presence of God. This is the terrain of prudential judgment, discernment that shapes one’s character and finds ennobling purpose in serving the common good, even in the details of everyday life.

 From his own experience, John Shea illustrates such prayerful discovery in several ways. He shares how some of his own meditations on the gospels have led him in certain directions. Such paths appear in learning to carry the influence of God’s Word into the ordinariness of the day, especially by acting for the good of others, by being ready to respond meaningfully to whatever happens. For example, Peter’s resistance to Christ’s washing Peter’s feet can provoke one to question whether one’s own ability to love is impeded by resisting the love of others, love that may be a revelation of God’s own love. Again, Jesus’ mild compliance with his arrest, when the apostles react violently, can be a reminder to address antagonism with gentleness rather than hostility. Or finally, the Good Samaritan’s readiness to provide the wounded Jew with whatever is necessary can be a dramatic reminder to mirror God’s abundant mercy.

From a perspective of foundational theology, John Staak reflects on theology’s call to facilitate the spread of the Gospel by considering implications of culture, even everyday manifestations of it. The horizon in which faith is aware of its encounter with God as Christ is influenced by culture, whether the latter is progressing or deteriorating. Theological attention to naming such influence, or to bringing it into consciousness, can then better attune faith’s receptivity to divine, Christocentric revelation and thus facilitate higher levels of personal freedom. Here lies ever-greater capability for self-sacrificing service or charity which theology can illuminate by disclosing where the paschal mystery, as culturally embedded, is facilitating such capability or being tragically impeded. Since the intentionality of personal freedom is accompanied and authenticated by affectivity, theology elaborates what knowledge and values to which one is attached lend themselves to advancement in freedom and love, thereby contributing to cultural progress. Critical attention to tradition and social analysis is among theology’s tools as it so deliberates in faith. Assisted by such theology, which concurrently affects one’s imagination, one is ever freer to assent credibly to determinations of new directions and activities bringing one closer to God. But such credibility must involve sensitivity to others, who are likewise advancing in their freedom, so that a sense of the transcendent and the values associated with it are truly shared or in fact culturally conditioned. With its paschal sense of the Cross, theology can assist a culture as it inevitably faces challenges and is called to self-sacrificing love, but always in a way that the individual believer can find theology’s message personally meaningful and then in turn, born on by grace, contribute to cultural progression. Since, as evidenced by fresh acceptance of the message, the horizon in which one believes is permeable, a new personal and cultural vision emerges contributing to a communal solidarity which can be expressed theologically as renewal in the Body of Christ or as greater sharing in the life of the Triune God. The believer experiences life as participation in an ongoing divinely facilitated drama where faith and love mean solidarity with others, even all others, including the most vulnerable and marginalized. Individual concerns become contextualized in a far larger terrain of shared personal and cultural horizons of awareness and faith, in a hoped-for universal discernment of God’s designs for the human community, in a far-flung ambit of rich and enriching yet unified diversity. Here new ways of witnessing to the Gospel of Jesus Christ are born. And for all of this, theology, sensitized by the marginalized and enlivened by the Spirt, provides some estimable tools.

Dwight N. Hopkins provides a particular example of such sensitization by delineating current challenges to black theology. While wealthy and professional black Americans have made welcome advances since the 1960s, most poor and working class black Americans are faring worse. Moreover the African-American community has largely lost healthy contact domestically with its heritage while appearing less concerned globally with the homeland of its ancestors, Africa. Such issues indeed challenge African American pastoral leadership. But the primary challenge is theological. What does God want of African Americans? Even as millions under slavery refused to believe that the God of Christianity wanted them to remain oppressed, African American pastoral leadership today needs to discern anew its vocation. The divine promise of freedom from oppression, a covenantal assurance as articulated in the Old Testament, is fulfilled in the liberation preached and wrought by Jesus. The vocational response is then, like the mission of Jesus, to serve the needs of the deprived, and to do so practically, pastorally, and prophetically. Originating from the situations of local communities rather than the halls of academe, Black Liberation Theology must continue to serve the biblically supported vocational response to such needs, namely to remain steady in this manner of fostering African American pastoral leadership. Oblate School of Theology’s Sankofa Institute is eminently pursuing such a course in an ecumenical way.

Supported and guided by a contemplative and practical spirituality, Christian theology in various historical and cultural settings, must ever be at work cooperating with ministry in more finely attuning peoples’ hearts and minds to divine revelation, and in responding practically to the challenges of God’s liberating action in the everyday world.

Ronald Quillo

Executive Editor

 

CONTENTS

Theology and Spirituality Embrace the Everyday World – Editorial Overview

A Mysticism of Practice – Ignatius Loyola –Philip Sheldrake

Only the Day Can Decide: Meditating on the Gospels –John Shea

Freedom for Faith: Theological Hermeneutics of Conversion Leading to a Permeable Horizon –John Staak, OMI

Black Theology Today –Dwight N. Hopkins

Theses and Dissertations for 2011-2012

More Articles

December 13, 2022
Staring Into the Light
August 30, 2022
The Magnificat
August 23, 2022
Ver lo que se Encuentra Cerca de Nuestras Puertas
August 23, 2022
Seeing What Lies Near Our Doorsteps
August 16, 2022
One God, One Guidance System, and One Road For Us All
August 2, 2022
Disarmed and Dangerous

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