Saturday, November 28, 2015

Items of Interest: Week of Domini Nostri Jesu Christi Regis

Mission abandoned: did we betray John XXIII’s vision for Vatican II?
by George Weigel (Catholic Herald). «[As] John XXIII understood it, the purpose of Vatican II was to renew the Church’s understanding of the patrimony of truth it bore as a gift from Christ himself. Why? So that the Church might become a more effective witness to the truth about humanity...Vatican II was intended as a call to unity and evangelism, but its legacy has been an escalation of intra-Catholic wars. It is time to embrace John XXIII’s original vision.»

Sartre and the Christmas of Jesus
by Massimo Borghesi (30 Days). «Christmas 1940: Sartre, interned in a German prison camp, composed a story to be recited in a hut. It was the play text Bariona, ou le Fils du tonnerre. From it emerges an unfamiliar Sartre who seems touched for a moment by the stunned affection of Mary, Josephs’s gaze and the hopes of the Magi and the shepherds in front of the God child. ‹They have joined their hands and are thinking: something has begun. And they are wrong…›»

Abortion in/as a Consumer Structure
by Matthew Tan (Solidarity). « is article argues that the contemporary acceptability of abortion is not solely due to the Liberal imperative to exercise individual choice. Rather, abortion's acceptability needs to be explained with reference to the techniques of consumer culture. is article will begin by explaining how practices in general predispose one to gravitate towards one form of practices rather than another. It will then look at how consumer practices generate a biopolitics of economic e ciency and corporeal commodi cation which culminates in a politics of visibility. Under such conditions, even basic categories like mere existence is dependent on its ability to be displayed for public view. is article will conclude by re ecting on the necessity of forging the Church not as a subsection of a public framed by consumerism, but as an alternative public in its own right.»

Laudato si’ Invites You: An Economy Beyond Capitalism
by Keith Michael Estrada (Proper Nomenclature). «It is crucial to understand the encyclical as it is written. Reading commentaries or quick news bits that include a few quotes and mesh it together either with an ideological attack or an ideological defense, whether left or right, typically seems to reinforce and rationalize a comfortable embrace of various brands of cafeteria Catholicism, for some, and à la carte reasoning, for others. In other words, Laudato points out and rebukes various brands of the same relativism in today’s society.»

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