This text examines why the official Church leadership is in such confusion, why there are so many efforts to restore the Church to the pre-Vatican II model, and why dissent is so vigorously discouraged. The author helps readers to clarify the purpose and styles of leadership/government required in contemporary Gospel communities using religious congragations as examples of Gospel-oriented communities in an in-depth case study.
On May 10, 1776, the Second Continental Congress sitting in Philadelphia adopted a Resolution which set in motion a round of constitution making in the colonies, several of which soon declared themselves sovereign states and severed all remaining ties to the British Crown. In forming these written constitutions, the delegates to the state conventions were forced to address the issue of church-state relations. Each colony had unique and differing traditions of church-state relations rooted in the colony’s peoples, their country of origin, and religion. This definitive volume, comprising twenty-one original essays by eminent historians and political scientists, is a comprehensive state-by-state account of disestablishment in the original thirteen states, as well as a look at similar events in the soon-to-be-admitted states of Vermont, Tennessee, and Kentucky. Also considered are disestablishment in Ohio (the first state admitted from the Northwest Territory), Louisiana and Missouri (the first states admitted from the Louisiana Purchase), and Florida (wrestled from Spain under U.S. pressure). The volume makes a unique scholarly contribution by recounting in detail the process of disestablishment in each of the colonies, as well as religion’s constitutional and legal place in the new states of the federal republic.
Loyal Dissent is the candid and inspiring story of a Catholic priest and theologian who, despite being stripped of his right to teach as a Catholic theologian by the Vatican, remains committed to the Catholic Church. Over a nearly fifty-year career, Charles E. Curran has distinguished himself as the most well-known and the most controversial Catholic moral theologian in the United States. On occasion, he has disagreed with official church teachings on subjects such as contraception, homosexuality, divorce, abortion, moral norms, and the role played by the hierarchical teaching office in moral matters. Throughout, however, Curran has remained a committed Catholic, a priest working for the reform of a pilgrim church. His positions, he insists, are always in accord with the best understanding of Catholic theology and always dedicated to the good of the church. In 1986, years of clashes with church authorities finally culminated in a decision by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, headed by then-Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, that Curran was neither suitable nor eligible to be a professor of Catholic theology. As a result of that Vatican condemnation, he was fired from his teaching position at Catholic University of America and, since then, no Catholic university has been willing to hire him. Yet Curran continues to defend the possibility of legitimate dissent from those teachings of the Catholic faith—not core or central to it—that are outside the realm of infallibility. In word and deed, he has worked in support of more academic freedom in Catholic higher education and for a structural change in the church that would increase the role of the Catholic community—from local churches and parishes to all the baptized people of God. In this poignant and passionate memoir, Curran recounts his remarkable story from his early years as a compliant, pre-Vatican II Catholic through decades of teaching and writing and a transformation that has brought him today to be recognized as a leader of progressive Catholicism throughout the world.
A provocative study in contemporary sociology and the first full-scale account of Roman Catholic fundamentalism, The Smoke of Satan offers new insight into the Catholic Church and explores the nature of religion in society.
This provocative book takes a critical look at what is increasingly viewed as the central political issue for Catholics—abortion. From pro-choice politicians being denied communion to Democrats being called "the party of death," for some of the most vocal Catholic leaders, the abortion issue often trumps all others. The author, a practicing Catholic who is against abortion in principle, believes the Church is on the wrong course with this issue, with grievous results for the Church and American society more broadly. He gives a brief history of abortion legislation, then explores the issue from legal, moral, and Christian perspectives, presenting compelling reasons why Church leaders and Catholics should stop trying to overturn Roe v. Wade and reconsider the issue.
In ten eloquent speeches, Paul James Toscano traces the odyssey of his life from conversion to the LDS church in 1963 to excommunication for heresy in 1993. Included are the addresses that resulted in church action against him.Authority is adored as the dominant divine characteristic of Mormonism, Toscano alleges; patriology blows unimpeded through the church like a cold wind, chilling compassion, hope, and faith. He worries that unless there is a spiritual revival of mythic dimensions, Mormonism is doomed to resolve itself into yet another sect full of ethical pretension and xenophobic aspiration.Considering himself a Latter-day Saint in exile, Toscano remains confident that Christian love may yet overflow the banks of righteousness, sweep away respectability, turn dignity into mud, lay waste the levees of our vaunted invulnerability, and contaminate us with holiness. The church will yet become an open, compassionate, and forgiving community, according to Toscano's wish -- one dedicated to the spiritual empowerment of each individual, the celebration of diversity, and the sanctity of dissent.
Early modern Central Europe was the continent’s most decentralized region politically and its most diverse ethnically and culturally. With the onset of the Reformation, it also became Europe’s most religiously divided territory and potentially its most explosive in terms of confessional conflict and war. Focusing on the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, this volume examines the tremendous challenge of managing confessional diversity in Central Europe between 1500 and 1800. Addressing issues of tolerance, intolerance, and ecumenism, each chapter explores a facet of the complex dynamic between the state and the region’s Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Utraquist, and Jewish communities. The development of religious toleration—one of the most debated questions of the early modern period—is examined here afresh, with careful consideration of the factors and conditions that led to both confessional concord and religious violence.
In early modern times, religious affiliation was often communicated through bodily practices. Despite various attempts at definition, these practices remained extremely fluid and lent themselves to individual appropriation and to evasion of church and state control. Because bodily practices prompted much debate, they serve as a useful starting point for examining denominational divisions, allowing scholars to explore the actions of smaller and more radical divergent groups. The focus on bodies and conflicts over bodily practices are the starting point for the contributors to this volume who depart from established national and denominational historiographies to probe the often-ambiguous phenomena occurring at the interstices of confessional boundaries. In this way, the authors examine a variety of religious living conditions, socio-cultural groups, and spiritual networks of early modern Europe and the Americas. The cases gathered here skillfully demonstrate the diverse ways in which regional and local differences affected the interpretation of bodily signs. This book will appeal to scholars and students of early modern Europe and the Americas, as well as those interested in religious and gender history, and the history of dissent.
"This book seeks to tell the story of religious dissent as a polemical and dialectical argument from the seventeenth century to the present, from Bunhill Fields to Plymouth Rock. Its narrative displays the ongoing contestation about the proper mode of dissent from evangelical to political to radical, and more importantly it places Bunyan, Defoe, and Blake and their writings within this extended argument"--Preface.
