Roger Haight Ordered by Vatican to stop teaching, publishing

Rome orders Roger Haight to stop teaching, publishing

By JOHN L. ALLEN JR., NCR Staff

Published: 

Jan. 5, 2009

Roger HaightAmerican Jesuit theologian Fr. Roger Haight, whose writing on Christ and non-Christian religions was censured by the Vatican in 2005 for causing “grave harm to the faithful,” has been ordered by Rome to stop teaching and publishing on theological subjects.

Sources told NCR that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican’s doctrinal agency, communicated the restrictions to the Jesuits in spring 2008. They apparently came amid back-and-forth discussions involving the Vatican, the Jesuit leadership in Rome, and the order’s New York province. Among other steps, Jesuit officials in America reportedly had consulted the late Jesuit Cardinal Avery Dulles in an effort to resolve the concerns.  Read it all 

FRANCIS X. CLOONEY, S.J. comments :

 I am sure you know about the case against his Jesus Symbol of God and the Notification several years back. Since then Fr Haight, moved from teaching at the (then) Weston Jesuit School of Theology, has continued his writing, and also taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York, a Protestant seminary. But now, he is barred from further theological writing and from teaching, even at Union. The reason, it seems, is that he is not willing to recant and disown what he wrote in Jesus Symbol of God. 
     Now, as I have just said, it is von Balthasar I love to read, and he is the one I find inspiring to me in my interreligious, comparative theology. While I admire the solidity and clarity of Fr Haight’s writing,Jesus Symbol of God but also his other works too, it is not the kind of theology that helps me very much in the work I do. I also recall that when Fr Haight’s book came out, it quickly became a hot topic in theology, and the early reviews of it were quite varied, some positive, and some quite critical of this or that aspect of the book. I recall hearing Fr Haight speak about reactions to the book at the Catholic Theological Society annual meeting one year. Even at that point, there were some 25 or 30 reviews of it (the author in me dies of envy), and many of them engaged in the academic delight and duty of giving Fr Haight a hard time. I have taught the chapter of it on world religions in my classes, first at Boston College, and now at Harvard, and while there are things I admire greatly in the chapter, both my students and I found cause to quarrel with the book and the way in which Fr Haight explains the relation of Christ, Christianity, and the world religions.  Read it all here

Gutiérrez speaks of the theocentric nature of liberation theology

Liberation theologian says hope takes work

By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
Published: October 30, 2008

Dominican Fr. Gustavo Gutierrez speaking at DePaul Univeristy Oct. 30 (Photo by David V. Kamba)
Conference marks 40 years of 'preferential option for the poor'

Chicago

Hope isn’t synonymous with just sitting around waiting for something good to happen, the widely acknowledged father of Latin American liberation theology said this morning. Instead, it implies concrete effort in daily life to generate reasons for that hope.

“Hope is a gift, but you don’t receive that gift if you’re not creating resources for it,” Dominican Fr. Gustavo Gutiérrez said this morning in Chicago. “Reasons for hope don’t just drop from the sky. They come from below, from what people are doing or not doing.”

Gutiérrez, a Peruvian, spoke this morning at a conference titled “Transformed by Hope: Building a Catholic Social Theology for the Americas,” sponsored by the Catholic Theological Union and DePaul University.

The conference marks the 40th anniversary of the famous meeting of the Latin American bishops in Medellín, Colombia, in 1968, which gave rise to the Catholic church’s “preferential option for the poor” -- a social commitment recently reaffirmed during the 2007 conference of the Latin American bishops in Aparecida, Brazil. Coincidentally, 2008 also marks 35 years since the first translation of Gutiérrez’s famous book, A Theology of Liberation, into English. More

Gustavo Gutiérrez - Biography

Encyclopedia of World Biography on Gustavo Gutiérrez

The Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez (born 1928) was known as the father of liberation theology.


Gustavo Gutiérrez was born in the Monserrat barrio of Lima, Peru, on June 8, 1928. He was a mestizo, part Hispanic and part Quechuan Indian. He had polio as a boy and spent most of his teenage years in bed. This experience motivated him to begin training for a career in medicine, but along the way he decided instead to become a Roman Catholic priest. Because of his outstanding work in theology, the church sent him to do graduate work in Europe, at Louvain (Belgium), Lyons (France), and the Gregorian (Italy).

On his return to Lima to begin work as a priest and teacher, he discovered that the "classical" formation he had received in Europe had not equipped him to deal with the needs of the poor and oppressed in Latin America. Three discoveries in particular were important. First, instead of seeing poverty as a "virtue," or at least something to be accepted by Christians, he came to see poverty as something destructive that must always be opposed. Second, instead of seeing poverty as the result of laziness or bad luck, he came to see it not as accidental but structural, something that society conspires to ensure, so that there will always be enough poor people to keep wages down. Third, instead of accepting poverty as inevitable, he came to see that the poor were a social class and could organize to bring about change.

Re-reading the Bible in the course of making these discoveries, he realized that the God of the Bible makes "a preferential option for the poor," rather than (as the institutional church so often implied) for the rich. God loves all persons, but has a special concern for the victims, and sides with them in their struggle for justice. The true concern of both the Bible and the Christian tradition, Gutiérrez came to feel, is the promise of liberation, a three-fold liberation from unjust social structures, from a sense of fate, and from personal sin and guilt.

These concerns received his powerful expression in what became the most influential theological work in the 1970s and 1980s, A Theology of Liberation (1971; reissued with a new introduction in 1988). The prominence of this book led many to describe Gutiérrez as "the father of liberation theology," a description he disavowed because, as he insisted, a theology of liberation is not the work of the experts but of "the people," meaning the poor people for whom he was simply the one to write a book about what he had learned from them.

The main themes of liberation theology are congruent with the themes of the Christian tradition, save that they are always seen "from the underside of history," namely, from the perspective of the poor and oppressed. There has been "an irruption of the poor" challenging the unjust structures of society and the church when either becomes a defender of the status quo rather than the champion of its victims. God is the God of the poor, Jesus Christ is "God become poor" in a Galilean carpenter, and the Holy Spirit is the power of God on the side of transformation. All this is particularly evident in the "base communities," small groups within the church who combine Bible study with involvement for change. Over a hundred thousand base communities sprang up in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s.

Because liberation theology means, among other things, a challenge to the authorities, there was heavy opposition from those same authorities. Those holding power killed thousands of priests and lay people for siding with the poor and seeking to improve their lives. Gutiérrez himself was attacked from within the church by those who did not want the church to be on the side of change. A familiar charge in the 1970s was that he and liberation theologians like him were Marxist, seeking to transform Christianity into nothing but left-wing politics. The charge was unpersuasive to any who had actually read his writings or examined his life, and by 1990 this criticism was receding from the scene.

Gutiérrez was essentially a parish priest in Rimac, a slum area of Lima near where he grew up. But his writings made him a world figure, and he occasionally visited the United States and Europe to speak and teach. The fullness of the faith he thus communicated was further evident in such later works as We Drink From Our Own Wells (1984), in which he described a "spirituality of liberation" and argued that the two terms could not be understood apart from each other. His book On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent (1987) distinguishes two types of "God-talk," prophetic language about God that stressed the need for justice in human affairs, and mystical or contemplative language addressed to God, a language of praise and relationship. He contended that the two forms of speech were essentially one.

While his later writings were less overtly "political" than his earlier ones, they nevertheless served to make the basis for political involvement increasingly firm. They mined the resources of scripture and tradition for fuller understanding of the God of the Hebrew prophets and of Jesus Christ, a God who, rather than being remote and uninvolved, is found "in the midst" of the world and the suffering of God's people. Thus, Gutiérrez affirmed that human effort for social justice contributes to laying of the groundwork for the Kingdom of God, which is ultimately God's gift rather than a human achievement.

Gutiérrez spent 20 years writing Las Casas: In Search of the Poor of Jesus Christ, the story of the early Spanish missionary Bartolome de Las Casas, which was released in the mid-1990s. During this time he also alienated some Peruvian feminists by saying that feminism was alien to Latin America. Critics argued that this showed he was losing touch and dividing communities. link

Viewing The Bible Through The Eyes And Ears of Subalterns In India

by Sathianathan Clarke

................
In this paper, the term Subalterns refers to the last two groups, namely, the Dalits and the Adivasis. But before I proceed further, a brief word on the background of the term ‘subaltern" may be in order. Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist writing to counter Fascism in 1920s and 1930s, popularized the term. He substituted it for the commonly accepted term "proletarian class." In India, this term has been brought to the center of critical scholarship by the Subaltern Studies Collective writing since 1982 on South Asian history and society from a "subaltern perspective." In the Preface to Subaltern Studies, Volume I, Ranajit Guha proposes the following definition: "The word ‘subaltern’. . . stands for the meaning as given in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, that is, ‘of inferior rank.’ It will be used . . . as a name for the general attitude of subordination in South Asian society whether this is expressed in terms of class, caste, age, gender and office or in any other way."11 In a clarificatory note, at the end of this same Preface, he further opines, "The terms ‘people’ and ‘subaltern classes’ have been used synonymous throughout this note. The social groups and elements included in this category represent the demographic difference between the total Indian population and all those whom we have described as the elite."12 While I have no objections to this general trend to rewrite history and write about society from a people’s viewpoint, my own use of the term is confined to the Dalit and Adivasi communities in India. In the most general of ways they can be taken to be the labouring people who are not the elite of India. They stiffer multiple disadvantages. In the words of the World Development Report 2000/2001, "Evidence from India shows that scheduled castes [Dalits] and scheduled tribes [Adivasis] face a higher risk of poverty. These are among the structural poor who not only lack economic resources but whose poverty is strongly linked to social identity, as determined mostly by caste."13 Thus, the term Subalterns is utilized to allude to those communities, which were outside the Hindu-based caste system (Dalits and Adivasis or Tribals). Dalits number about one hundred and eighty to two hundred million and Adivasis number about eighty-five to ninety million in the population that has touched the one billion mark. In this paper, I have consciously avoided talking of the Subaltern, as if it is one phenomenon. Rather, in order to integrate the awareness that this tern connotes multiple realities, having many context-specific variations, I employ the plural, that is, Subalterns. And yet I opt for the one common term mainly to reflect the history of solidarity that is emerging between Dalit and Adivasi communities. In the end, Subalterns’ scholarship finds strategic rather than essential reasons to project a common identity for the differing strands of Dalit and Adivasi communities in India.

II. Subalterns’ Viewing of the Bible Accentuates the Domestic, the Local, and the Particular

Subalternity is characterized by the primary interplay of domestic, local and particular mechanisms of colonialism. Despite all the caveats that are built into the postcolonial biblical discourse, I find that "postcolonial" is somewhat of a modern marker, which takes its multiple birthings from a common master narrative. Thus, postcolonialism tends to deal with the diverse variants of a grand narrative: East-West, North-South, European-Asian, and Empire-Native subjects.

Of course, there is a struggle to break free of this Orientalist trapping. And yet one cannot get away from the fact that there is a divide between the local or national context and an international or global context. Thus knowledge about the local and the particular is framed, and being framed, within the overall dynamics of this international/transnational world. In the domain of Asian biblical studies let me cite the example of R.S. Sugirtharajah. From one angle, his description of postcolonialism relocates its interrogatory activity well beyond the domestic and the local. Thus he suggests, "The current postcolonial criticism takes the critique of Eurocentricism as its central task . . . negatively put, postcolonialism is not about historical stages or periodization. Neither is it about lowering the flags of the Empire and wrapping oneself with new national flags. Positively, it signifies three things -- representation, identity, and a reading posture, emerging among the former victims of colonialism."14 This line of argument is further picked tip in another article, which functions as a sort of Preface for The Post-colonial Bible. Here Sugirtharajah attempts to allow representatives from various former colonies to boldly and engagingly talk back to their Eurocentric colonizers. He reiterates the west/north/colonial -- east/south/colonized feature of the bilateral dialogue pointed to earlier: "What postcolonialism does is to enable us to question the totalizing tendencies of European reading practices and interpret the texts on their own terms and read them from our specific locations. 15 Interestingly, much of the "us" and the "our" doing this reading is projected in nation-state terms. Read it all from Religion on line

Richard John Neuhaus Lutheran turned Catholic intellectual passed away on 08 Jan 2009 at the age of 72

NEW YORK (AP) — Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, a leading intellectual of the Christian right who helped build a new coalition of conservative Protestants and Roman Catholics and informally advised President George W. Bush, died Thursday. He was 72.

Neuhaus died from the side effects of cancer treatment, said Joseph Bottum, editor of First Things, a journal of religion and public policy that Neuhaus founded.

A one-time Lutheran minister, Neuhaus led a predominantly African-American congregation in New York in the 1960s, advocating for civil rights and protesting the Vietnam War. With Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and the Rev. Daniel Berrigan, the Catholic peace activist, Neuhaus led the anti-war group Clergy Concerned About Vietnam.

He later broke with the left, partly over the Supreme Court's 1973 ruling legalizing abortion. He converted to Catholicism in 1990, and a year later was ordained a priest.

He then worked to break down the historic mistrust between evangelicals and Catholics over their theological differences, helping build the coalition of churchgoers across faith traditions who became key to Republican electoral victories in recent years.   source

Neuhaus has been  Columbia's intellectual superstar you've never heard of. You've never written a paper for him, you've never checked his CULPA reviews, and you've certainly never shown up late to one of his classes. This is because Neuhaus's lectures are delivered not from a Hamilton Hall lectern, but from the pulpit in St. Paul's Chapel. Every Sunday for the past four spring semesters, Father Neuhaus has made his way uptown from his parish on 14^th Street to say the 5 PM Mass at Columbia.

"Lecture" is a loose way of describing what Neuhaus does — but not that loose. The Catholic priest is an orator of Roman proportions — with a stentorian voice, perfect sense of timing, and a knack for rhetorical flourish. The sermons themselves are peppered through with references to great works of theology, philosophy, and literature—classic and contemporary. All are variations on a theme: "the attractiveness of the high adventure of Catholic faithfulness," as he puts it. They are recorded and archived on the Columbia Catholic Ministry's web site for the greater listening public.

Neuhaus's relationship with Columbia is also a variation on a theme: his status as a maverick intellectual. When New York Magazine named the top five intellectual movers and shakers in Manhattan, they grouped Father Neuhaus with Jeffrey Sachs, Columbia physics professor Brian Greene, NYU law professor Noah Feldman, and CUNY philosopher Saul Kripke; Neuhaus is the only one who does not teach at a university. Neuhaus is famous not only as speaker, but as the Editor-in-Chief of First Things, which is — as the New York Times put it, and First Things re-put it on their subscription cards — "the spiritual nerve center of the new conservatism." The monthly magazine of religion, politics, and culture is indeed the place to find top-notch conservative thought presented for a general reading audience. This is the work of impresario-Neuhaus. Once a far left-wing Lutheran minister, he re-emerged in the 1990s as a conservative Catholic priest and founder of First Things.  more

Dr Paul Nimmo gets the John Templeton Award for Theological Promise 2009

 Edinburgh University lecturer is top young theologian

09 January 2009

A CITY lecturer has been named as one of the most promising young theologians in the world.

Dr Paul Nimmo, who works at Edinburgh University, has been awarded a 2009 John Templeton Award for Theological Promise for his work on the ethics of the Swiss theologian Karl Barth.

Dr Nimmo will receive a prize of $10,000 plus additional funds of up to $10,000 to pay for public lectures at universities around the world.

He will receive the prize at a ceremony at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, in May.

Established in 2005, the John Templeton Award for Theological Promise is given annually to twelve young scholars in any area of religious studies, for the best doctoral thesis or best first book related to the topic of God and spirituality.

Dr Nimmo's award was in recognition of his recent book Being in Action: The Theological Shape of Barth's Ethical Vision, which arose out of his doctoral research carried out at Edinburgh.  source