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Category Archives: Work

Keeping the World Awake to God: Conference on Vatican II in January 2012

13 Thursday Oct 2011

Posted by Communio in Conference, Vatican II, Work

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Communio is pleased to announce a forthcoming conference on the campus of The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, January 12-14, 2012. Sponsored by the Pontifical John Paul II Institute and co-sponsored by Communio, “‘Keeping the World Awake to God’: The Challenge of Vatican II” marks the 50th anniversary of the convocation of the Council. The program, participant list, and registration information may be found here.

Topics include “Vatican II and the Catholic Contribution to Metaphysics,” “The Catholicity of the Council,” “Holiness, World, and the Meaning of Work,” “Religious Freedom and American Culture,” “Family and the Identity of the Person,” and “God, the Church, and Scientific Intelligibility.”

Speakers include Supreme Knight Carl Anderson, Catholic University of America President John Garvey, Francis Cardinal George, Communio authors and editors David L. Schindler, Nicholas J. Healy Jr., D. C. Schindler, Adrian J. Walker, Giorgio Buccellati, Antonio Lopez, FSCB, Roch Kereszty, O. Cist., Margaret H. McCarthy, and others.

From the conference description:

The main purpose of the conference is thus to provide an authoritative grille de lecture for approaching the Council as a whole in its significance for the Tradition and in relation to the current “signs of the times.” The letter of the conciliar documents, taken as a whole, contains a hermeneutical center radiating outwards from the doctrine contained in Dei Verbum and Lumen Gentium and illuminating the Council’s teaching on mission, inter-religious dialogue, modernity, religious freedom, and the like. . . . (read the complete text).

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Michael Hanby: Human Making in a Sacramental Cosmos

23 Friday Sep 2011

Posted by Communio in Hanby, Liturgy, Michael Hanby, Work

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From the Summer 2011 issue on “Work”:

Michael Hanby (bio). Homo Faber and/or Homo Adorans: On the Place of Human Making in a Sacramental Cosmos.

From the text:

Where there is no contemplation, there can be neither great art (save under the irrepressible form of suffering) nor great festivity, for without a contemplative openness to the mystery of being there can be no gratitude and joy in its gratuity. Where there is neither great art nor great festivity, there can be no “priority of man over things” and ultimately be no genuinely human and humane making, whether beautiful or useful. Where there is no priority of man over things, work ceases to be “for man”; man lives “for work,” and our instruments become our masters. . . .  Read the full text.

Michael Hanby is assistant professor of biotechnology and culture at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family at The Catholic University of America.

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David Cloutier. Working With the Grammar of Creation: Benedict XVI, Wendell Berry, and the Unity of the Catholic Moral Vision

23 Thursday Jun 2011

Posted by Communio in Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate, Moral Theology, Wendell Berry, Work

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From the Winter 2010 issue:

David Cloutier.  Working With the Grammar of Creation: Benedict XVI, Wendell Berry, and the Unity of the Catholic Moral Vision

From the text:

At the heart of Berry’s work is a conviction about the pattern of nature, a pattern he seeks to discover through the careful practice of farming. He is sometimes called an “agrarian writer,” and he notes the influence of the “Southern agrarians” on his work. Yet he worries that, for some of these writers, their agrarianism “is abstract, too purely mental . . . too often remote from the issues of practice.” Berry’s own life is “forcibly removed” from “abstraction,” and instead “must submit to the unending effort to change one’s mind and ways to fit one’s farm.” But ultimately such effort is aimed at “seeing in nature the inescapable standard and in natural processes the necessary pattern for any human use of the land.”

The patterns are discovered through ignorance and discipline.  “Ignorance” here refers to a “humbling knowledge” that is “a way of acknowledging the uniqueness of every individual creature, deserving respect, and the uniqueness of every moment, deserving wonder.” Such a way of proceeding acknowledges limits, both in oneself and in the human condition. Since we are often uncomfortable with such limits, hewing to them also requires discipline. In preferring a lack of discipline, we ordinarily end up allowing our desires to determine what we will do and how we will do it. However, “we have, in fact, no right to ask the world to conform to our desires.” . . .

[The] conflict between environmental romanticism and industrial capitalism, two oversimplified patterns, also appears in virtually the same form in our thinking about human sexuality. Indeed, Berry argues that our sexual lives are governed primarily by a “sexual romanticism,” that worships “true love,” trying to defend against the “sexual capitalism” of purely instrumental use of sex for pleasure. Sexual capitalists, he remarks, are merely disillusioned sexual romantics. As he puts it wryly, “The sexual romantic croons, ‘You be-long to me.’ The sexual capitalist believes the same thing, but has stopped crooning.” An oversimplified pattern of possessive ownership replaces the much more complex mutual belonging that is marriage.

Summarizing these oversimplified grammars in an essay on language, Berry diagnoses its “increasing unreliability” by explaining two types of language that fail to be accountable in their imprecision, and hence oversimplification. One kind of language is “diminished by subjectivity, which ends in meaninglessness . . . .” This is the language of expressivist romanticism. But then there is also “a language diminished by  objectivity, or so-called objectivity (inordinate or irresponsible ambition), which ends in confusion.” This is the language of  specialization, which Berry so often derides, a language characteristic especially of industrial science, but which also infects most areas of knowledge. Both these sorts of language, in different ways, ultimately dispense with the matter of truth, insofar as they fail to be accountable to the reality which they are trying to designate. Therefore, the languages are useful for concealing ignorance, but also for attempting supposed knowledge of things without the practices of discipline actually required. (full text.)

DAVID CLOUTIER is associate professor of theology at Mount St. Mary’s
University in Emmitsburg, Maryland.

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Kaveny: The Instrumentalization of Time in Professional Life

10 Thursday Mar 2011

Posted by Communio in Work

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From the archives:

M. Cathleen Kaveny,  Living the Fullness of Ordinary Time: A Theological Critique of the Instrumentalization of Time in Professional Life. (2001).

From the text:

Many lawyers are very unhappy, particularly lawyers who work in big firms. They may be rich, and getting even richer, but they are miserable, or so they say. . . . . full text.

 

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Current Issue: Liturgy and Culture (Winter 2012)

Communio, a journal of Catholic theology and culture, was founded in 1972 by Hans Urs von Balthasar, Joseph Ratzinger, Henri de Lubac, and Jean Danielou, among others.
The journal is present in 16 countries and languages. The English-language edition of Communio is located in Washington, D.C. and is published quarterly.

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