Authority, Community & Identity Articles

From St. Francis to the Pope: Preach the Gospel Always. If Necessary, Use Words


Reading some of the latest conclave buzz this morning, I’m reminded that the cardinals, like the rest of the world, want everything from the new pope. Administrative prowess and soul-throbbing charisma. The persistent plea for the latter half of this combo reveals a misguided optimism: that all we have to do is find the right words to explain ourselves to one another and to the world. Read the full article »

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Pope Benedict XVI: Modern, Not a Modernist


PAOLA BERNARDINI

While Benedict XVI’s sympathetic observers define his act of resignation as “an eruption of modernity inside the Church,” critics point to his “crackdowns on nuns and liberal theologians,” “his outreach to the Lefebvrists” and “his resurrection of the old Latin Mass” as a sign of his conservative legacy. Neither side is completely wrong, nor completely right. For Benedict XVI’s papacy seems to have struck a balance between “the modern” and “the traditional,” in an attempt to avoid the excesses of both modernism and traditionalism. Read the full article »

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The Two Others


Since at least the time of Pope Urban II and the launching of the first Crusade (1096-99), European Catholicism was partly defined in relation to two “others”: the Jews, who were left dispersed as a negative testament for their failure to accept the teachings of Jesus and for their supposed complicity with deicide, constituted the other within; and the Muslims, against whom Christendom came to be articulated cohesively as such, constituted the other without. Recognizing the intricate connections between the Vatican’s relations to both Jews/Israel and Muslims may be pivotal for the ever complex interfaith challenges facing the Church globally. Read the full article »

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The Tyranny of Practice


It is characteristic of Western modernity that in discussions of schooling and business and politics there is a common truism: “theory into practice.” At the very least, the underlying assumption of this truism can readily be found there. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in schools of education, teacher education programs, and the institutional teaching and learning efforts of higher education. This saying yields a soft hammer, a gentle reminder that the theory must always be “grounded in practice” in order to be worthwhile — and profitable.

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An Interfaith Encounter with America (Part 3)

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Believers in a religion such as Islam can scarcely hope to speak for all Muslims, let alone for all humanity. They must accept the authority of a public sphere in which people are free to make their case to their fellow women and men on the basis of culturally normative modes of discourse. This sounds exactly like the manner in which prophets used to operate back in the day. Moses defeated the magicians in pharaoh’s court, and Muhammad outdid the Arab poets on their home turf.

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An Interfaith Encounter with America (Part 2)

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In my spiritual quest that led to political Islam, I had one all-important stroke of fortune. Despite my zeal, I did not happen to get recruited by al-Qaeda! Instead, I landed in a group called Tanzeem-e-Islami, a Pakistani-based movement that had a few unique elements going for it, including advocacy of a nonviolent strategy of pursuing justice as well as the “revitalization of faith with an intellectual dimension.” I internalized these elements of Tanzeemi thought by traveling to learn Arabic, remaining true to a strategy of nonviolence, and pursuing the path of higher education.

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An Interfaith Encounter with America (Part 1)

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“If Islam is so great and things are so wonderful back home, why did you come here?” As an international student from Pakistan who had grown up in a relatively privileged household, my transition to college life in America had promised to be seamless. And in many ways it was, at least outwardly. So my culture shock was extraordinarily abrupt. In the course of a midnight conversation on religion and politics, a fellow student had jolted me out of my comfort zone with his jarring question.

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Which Language, Whose Vernacular?: Vatican II and Liturgical Politics in Bangalore (Part 3)

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This post is the third in a three-part series on the sometimes violent liturgical battles that have been waged in the Catholic Church in Bangalore, India, since the reforms of Vatican II. Though the Second Vatican Council began fifty years ago this year, conflicts about the place of Bangalore’s diversity of vernacular languages in the Church’s liturgy remain unresolved to this day. Part 1 recounted the origins of the conflict in the 1960s. Part 2 picked up the story at the beginning of the 1970s. Part 3, the present post, takes the story to the present day, drawing out its ironic implications for Catholic modernity and the Church’s modern “reforms.”

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