Based on detailed analysis of interviews with gay clergymen, and also with retired heterosexual clergymen whose ministries span the period since the 1967 Sexual Offences Act, Transcendent Vocation provides specific examples to back up the contention that the approach of the Church of England to homosexuals has increasingly been characterised by hypocrisy. It considers why gay men wish to work within an organisation that treats them with such negativity, especially now that such discrimination is illegal in secular society. The prime conclusion is that they do so because of their “Transcendent Vocation” – a conviction of having been called to the ministry by God that is so strong that it enables them to transcend all the hypocrisy and negativity that they encounter. ,
During the 1980s, university-based intellectuals came under heavy fire from both radicals and conservatives. They were accused by the former of betraying their public duty as general critics of society, and by the latter of promulgating radical ideologies and corrupting the young. In this work, the author counters both left and right, arguing that the professionalization of literary study was inevitable and fortuitous. Robbins undertakes close studies of such figures as Edward Said, Fredric Jameson and Raymond Williams, while considering the major trends in contemporary cultural studies and giving significant attention to relevant developments in such disciplines as ethnology and sociology. Secular Vocations ranges over materials from Britain, France and the US, knitting them together in a synthesis that places, in bold relief, many of the major controversies in contemporary intellectual life. It concludes with a plea for what Robbins calls “comparative cosmopolitanism” to displace the more militantly particularist projects that have come to dominate the human sciences.
This book gathers the foundational concepts which characterise the approach to the person, as human and as Christian, which has been developed at the Institute of Psychology of the Pontifical Gregorian University during its more than 35 years of activity. The book directs these concepts towards further paths for investigation and puts them in dialogue with sister schools of depth psychology and with other areas of scholarship (in particular philosophy and theology) which are equally interested in exploring the human mystery. Hence the variety of authors - psychologists, philosophers and theologians - brought together by a common interest in understanding and forming the human person in better ways. The reflections contained in this book gain concrete expression in an educative-therapeutic practice, and they review the nodal points which are part of every journey of growth and of psychotherapy: personal identity, interaction with the external world and the attainment of personal truth, inner imagination, desires and affections, conflicts. Instruments are offered to enable the formator and the psychotherapist to make the best possible use of the great energies which are made available by their application: how to identify the real problem, where to concentrate one's attention, what to listen to, how to handle the relationship, on what element to act in order to promote improvement/cure, what kind of change to propose. While accompaniment and psychotherapy are different procedures, they nevertheless have many similarities and points of contact. The dynamic relations and the factors involved in growth which this book describes are valid for both modalities of intervention and will be of interest to anyone who wishes to help others in a more enlightened educative dialogue.
Since Martin Luther, vocations or callings have had a close relationship with daily work. It is a give-and-take relationship in which the meaning of a vocation typically negotiates with the kinds of work available (and vice-versa) at any given time. While "vocation language" still has currency in Western culture, today's predominant meaning of vocation has little to do with the actual work performed on a job. Jeffrey Scholes contends that recent theological treatments of the Protestant concept of vocation, both academic and popular, often unwittingly collude with consumer culture to circulate a concept of vocation that is detached from the material conditions of work. The result is a consumer-friendly vocation that is rendered impotent to inform and, if necessary, challenge the political norms of the workplace. For example, he classifies Rick Warren's concept of "purpose" in his best-selling book, The Purpose-Driven Life, as a functional equivalent of vocation that acts in this way. Other popular uses of vocation along with insights culled from traditional theology and consumer culture studies help Scholes reveal the current state of vocations in the West. Using recent scholarship in the field of political theology, he argues that resisting commodification is a possibility and a prerequisite for a "political vocation," if it is at all able to engage the norms that regulate and undermine the pursuit of justice in many modern workplaces.
Human sexuality is a very important subject, especially in a cultural context such as ours, in which social and work transformations offer behavioral models that are characterized by a remarkable sexual indeterminacy. In Transcending Gender Ideology, Antonio Malo tries to rethink sexuality with equilibrium and intellectual rigor, using a philosophical approach, since sexuality does not only affect biological aspects or social conditioning, but above all the same essence of the relationship between man and woman. Malo’s reflections begin with the historical evolution of the concept of sexuality: the naturalistic conception, which sees the difference between man and woman as something biological and absolute, and the postmodern conception, which criticizes it by judging human sexuality as a socio-cultural construction or gender. According to Malo, the limitation of the gender approach is to deny the relationship of human sexuality to the body and to the differences between man and woman. In fact, by rejecting these aspects, they end up sustaining a limitless creativity of freedom, which transforms the body into something that is used at will, and relationships as something fluid. Faced with these extremes, Malo proposes a vision of sexuality as a personal condition or sexed condition, received at the time of birth, but which develops, grows and matures through family models, experiences and relationships. Even if based on an original sexual difference, sexed condition covers many other aspects: physical, psychological, social and cultural, as well as behavioral patterns and, above all, the personal integration of sexuality through the gift of oneself in marriage or in celibacy.
Fraternity is a feeling, and a moral virtue, but fraternity is also a political concept. The French Revolution proclaimed an ethical and political ideal with its three principles: liberty, equality and fraternity. Since then, western political philosophy has gone to great lengths to analyse the liberty and equality, but has ignored, and even disdained, the third part of the revolutionary triad: fraternity. Forgetting or underestimating fraternity as a political category is unjustifiable. Political fraternity can help us to overcome some of the main problems with liberal egalitarianism and theories of liberty in current social and political thought, and it contributes to a better understanding of the real significance of justice and democracy. In this book, Angel Puyol examines the theoretical and normative challenges of the political idea of fraternity, its history and meanings, its role in current political philosophy, its distinction regarding related concepts – such as relational equality, solidarity or civic friendship – the place that political fraternity should occupy in feminist criticism, and its relationship to social justice, global justice and democracy in modern-day politics.
A collection of revised and expanded writings culled from the author's popular Washington Post Book World "Poet's Choice" column demonstrates how poetry responds to world challenges and introduces the work of more than 130 writers.
