Postmodern Christianity: the flight from being

If you're a regular reader of HA, you've probably heard/read me blabbing on about postmodern-this and postmodern-that. Trying to define postmodernism is a lot like trying to nail Jell-O to a raging waterfall -- only more difficult.

Below is the first paragraph of an excellent article by Fr. Joseph R. Laracy from the Homiletic and Pastoral Review. 

Give it a read. . .it sorta proves that I'm not just making all this postmodernism stuff up.

The salient characteristics of postmodern philosophy can be seen in many aspects of contemporary culture. In particular, the “flight from being (or truth)” is particularly evident in the areas of politics, ethics, and religion and is not constrained by the principle of non-contradiction. The rejection of grand narratives, fragmentation of knowledge, loss of the human subject, and so-called “death of man,” have had particularly devastating consequences on both the academic study of theology, and the practice of religion. Philosophers, theologians, and indeed entire ecclesial communities have attempted to adapt the Christian faith to this new perspective.

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Go out to the existential peripheries!

Before the 2013 Papal Conclave that elected him to the Chair of Peter, Jorge Cardinal Bergoglio, S.J. offered his thoughts on the New Evangelization: 

Evangelizing Implies Apostolic Zeal 

1. Evangelizing pre-supposes a desire in the Church to come out of herself. The Church is called to go to the peripheries, not only geographically, but also the existential peripheries: the mystery of sin, of pain, of injustice, of ignorance and indifference to religion, of intellectual currents, and of all misery. 

2. When the Church does not come out of herself to evangelize, she becomes self-referential and then gets sick. . .living within herself, of herself, for herself. This should shed light on the possible changes and reforms which must be done for the salvation of souls. 

3. Thinking of the next Pope: He must be a man who, from the contemplation and adoration of Jesus Christ, helps the Church to go out to the existential peripheries, that helps her to be the fruitful mother, who gains life from “the sweet and comforting joy of evangelizing.”

Given our relatively affluent, comfortable middle-class lifestyle, I wonder how many American Catholic preachers understand those who struggle at the existential peripheries of our culture?

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Missing Books

A couple of months ago a kind and generous HA reader purchased two books for me from the Wish List.

They never arrived.

Sometimes used bookstores or individual sellers lose orders, or the orders get lost in the mail.

I'm reporting this b/c I don't want my Book Benefactor to think that I'm ungrateful due to the fact that they haven't seen a Mille Grazie!

The two books are:

Encountering Jesus, Encountering Scripture: Reading the Bible Critically in Faith

Preaching the Whole Bible as Christian Scripture: The Application of Biblical Theology to Expository Preaching

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After a long day, three pleasant surprises. . .

An Ample Mendicant Thanks to the kind and generous soul(s) who sent three books my way from the Wish List:

The Four Codes of Preaching
Dear Life
The Experience of God

All of my Book Benefactors are in my daily prayers!
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No Go for Seminar

Well, I'm sorry to say that my Preaching to Nihilists seminar didn't make for the spring semester.

I'll just have to try for next year!
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Emily Dickinson: nihilist?

Could it be that Emily Dickinson was a nihilist?

By homely gift and hindered Words
The human heart is told
Of Nothing —
"Nothing" is the force
That renovates the World —

(#A 821)
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Pope Francis: "the spirit of adolescent progressivism"

YIKES! I think Francis has been reading HancAquam! 

Pope: God save us from the "hegemonic uniformity” of the "one line of thought" (Slams progressives) Asia News ^ | 11/18/2013

God save us from the "hegemonic uniformity " of the "one line of thought", "fruit of the spirit of the world that negotiates everything", even the faith.  This was Pope Francis' prayer during mass this morning at Casa Santa Marta, commenting on a passage from the Book of Maccabees, in which the leaders of the people do not want Israel to be isolated from other nations , and so abandon their traditions to negotiate with the king.

They go to "negotiate " and are excited about it. It is as if they said "we are progressives; let's follow progress like everyone else does". As reported by Vatican Radio, the Pope noted that this is the "spirit of adolescent progressivism" according to which "any move forward and any choice is better than remaining within the routine of fidelity". These people, therefore, negotiate "loyalty to God who is always faithful" with the king. "This is called apostasy", "adultery." They are, in fact, negotiating their values​​, "negotiating the very essence of being faithful to the Lord."

"And this is a contradiction: we do not negotiate values​​, but faithfulness. And this is the fruit of the devil, the prince of this world, who leads us forward with the spirit of worldliness. And then there are the direct consequences. They accepted the habits of the pagan, then a further step: the king wrote to his whole kingdom that all should be one people, and everyone would abandon their customs. A globalizing conformity of all nations is not beautiful, rather, each with own customs but united, but it is the hegemonic uniformity of globalization, the single line of thought. And this single line of thought is the result of worldliness."

And after "all peoples had adapted themselves to the king's demands, they also accepted his cult, they sacrificed to idols and profaned the sabbath. "Step by step", the moved along this path. And in the end "the king raised an abomination upon the altar of devastation". "But, Father, this also happens today! Yes, because the worldly spirit exists even today, even today it takes us with this desire to be progressive and have one single thought. If someone was found to have the Book of the Covenant and if someone obeyed the law, the king condemned them to death : and this we have read in the newspapers in recent months . These people have negotiated the fidelity to the Lord and this people, moved by the spirit of the world, negotiated their own identity, negotiated belonging to a people, a people that God loves so much that God desires to be like Him. "

The Pope then referred to the 20^th century novel, "Master of the World" that focuses on "the spirit of worldliness that leads to apostasy". Today it is thought that "we have to be like everyone else, we have to be more normal, like everyone else, with this adolescent progressivism." And then "what follows is history": "the death sentences, human sacrifices". "But you think that today there are no human sacrifice s? There are many, many! And there are laws that protect them."

"But what consoles us faced with the progress of this worldly spirit, the prince of this world, the path of infidelity, is that the Lord is always here, that he can not deny Himself, the Faithful One: He is always waiting for us, He loves us so much and He forgives us when we repent for a few steps, for some small steps in this spirit of worldliness, we go to him, the faithful God. With the spirit of the Church's children, we pray to the Lord for His goodness, His faithfulness to save us from this worldly spirit that negotiates all, to protect us and let us move forward, as his people did through the desert, leading them by the hand like a father leads his child. The hand of the Lord is a sure guide".

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God exists : God does not exist

This is for YOU. . .You know who you are!

A case of contradictories which are true.  God exists : God does not exist.  Where is the problem?  I am quite sure that there is a God in the sense that I am quite sure that my love is not illusory.  I am quite sure that there is not a God in the sense that I am quite sure nothing real can be anything like what I am able to conceive when I pronounce this word.  But that which I cannot conceive is not an illusion. (Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, Routledge, 114.)

Note the near perfect Thomistic distinction. . .
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Who will I be. . .at the end?

33^rd Sunday OT

Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP

Our Lady of the Rosary, NOLA

The Man and The Boy—father and son—walk through an unnamed country laid waste by greed, hubris, and stupidity. There is nothing now but bitter ash, steel-gray bones, and cold human savagery. When the apocalypse arrived, it arrived with a whisper—no warning: no time to think, to pray, to remember. Those who survive do not gives thanks to luck or God; they do not count themselves among the fittest or the privileged. They are damned to live, damned to living on so little that it could be nothing with the next step, the next breath. The Man and The Boy have fire. And they carry this fire toward somewhere That Way. Anywhere but Here. Since God did not show His face nor did He send His angels to rebuke the stupidity of Man, The Man and The Boy walk. That's their prayer, their itinerant liturgy of starvation and unrelenting fear. What the world is for them now is nothing. There is nothing now but the world abandoned, left to rot as it turns around a star no one will ever see rise again. Jesus warns: “All that you see here—the days will come when there will not be left a stone upon another stone that will not be thrown down.” Who will you be when everything is thrown down?

That question—who will you be when everything is thrown down?—is the question our apocalyptic literature asks us to ponder. From the Book of Daniel to the Book of Revelation, from The War of the Worlds to World War Z and The Walking Dead, we are confronted again and again with the possibility that everything we know and love will come to an abrupt, explosive end, and we will be left with nothing. In Cormac McCarthy's world-ending novel, The Road, a man and his son walk toward an undefined, undisclosed Somewhere. Mid-way through their pilgrimage, McCarthy gives us a vision: “[The Man] walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.” What is the absolute truth of the world? Cold, unrelenting, darkness. And who are we? Hunted animals living on borrowed time. Believe it or not, this post-apocalyptic nightmare is for some among us a dream come true, and serves not only as a vision of things to come but as a philosophy as well, a settled-upon way of thinking about life.

That some of us would celebrate “the crushing black vacuum of the universe” and prefer to see themselves as “hunted animals trembling. . .in their cover” shouldn't surprise us. Given fallen human nature and the excuse of There Is No God So All Is Permitted, why not think of creation as a random cosmic process and humanity as prey-animals. Helmut Thielicke calls this attitude nihilism, writing, “Nihilism literally has only one truth to declare, namely, that ultimately Nothingness prevails and the world is meaningless.” Our own cultural turn to nihilism is attributed to the 19^th c. German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, whose anti-Christ prophet, Zarathustra proclaimed the death of God. Nietzsche wrote, “Nihilism is. . .not only the belief that everything deserves to perish; but one actually puts one’s shoulder to the plough; one destroys.” Contemporary nihilists continue the tradition. Nothing is true. Nothing is good or beautiful. Nothing matters. There is no point. No hope. No faith. Just destroy it all, release nothingness from its confining order, and let chaos reign.

 

Who will you be when everything is thrown down? Apocalypse fascinates western man b/c he wants to know who he is w/o the confining order of law, family, moral obligation, or God. Who am I really in the absence of tradition, science, the transcendent? If McCarthy's novel can be taken as a partial answer, Western Man is a violent serial rapist just one missed-meal away from becoming a cannibal. Jesus too gives us a glimpse of who we might become. He tells us that we will be “seized and persecuted,” handed over by family members and friends. At the end—the end of everything—even those who love us will abandon us. “You will be hated by all because of my name. . .” Is this a reason to despair? No, “not a hair on your head will be destroyed,” he promises. And yet, even this reassurance may seem shallow in light of the destruction of everything we know and love. So, to put The End in the proper perspective, we have to broaden our view to include the whole of salvation history, the entire prophetic tradition from God's first Word spoken over the nothingness of the void all the way to the last flickering images of Revelation in the mind of St John. What do we see? The long promise of God: be with Me, persevere with Me, and I will not abandon you. 

 

This is the promise that tells us who and what we are right up to The End. We are the recipients of a Divine Promise, a promise that constitutes the foundation of our lives in faith and shapes our lives with the hope of the resurrection. In this hope, that we will go on in the presence of God, nothing here and now, not even the destruction of the world, means the end of who and what we are in Christ. Because who and what we are is Children of the Most High, the redeemed sons and daughters of the Creator. Reaching back from this promise is the Hand of God, anointing those who believe with the blood of the Son and endowing them with more than just existential meaning, more than just a temporal purpose: we are anointed prophets, priests, and kings in the name of Christ and nothing can remove from us the ministry and mission we have received from Him Who made us. If an apocalypse sets fire to the whole world, nothing for us changes. We are still charged with proclaiming the freely offered mercy of the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit. Jesus promises us, “By your perseverance you will secure your lives.” 

 

Who will we be when everything is thrown down; when not one stone is left standing on another? With steadfast faith and iron perseverance, we will be who we are made and saved to be: Christs for one another. The temptation to give our praise and thanksgiving to Nothingness, to yield our hearts and minds to the numbing background noise of nihilism—it's constant: yield to the illusion that you are nothing more than thinking animals! Accept that you are accidents of chemistry and radiation! Live like commodities in a stockyard—eating, breeding, dying like cattle. For those who worship Nothing, nothing is sacred; nothing is good, true, beautiful. Yet we know that He Who made us and saves us shows Himself to us through everything He has made. So, even The End—when it comes—will reveal the glory of God. The Good News is that the end is not The End for those who fear His name. “There will arise the sun of justice with its healing rays” for those live in awe of His power, His unyielding love. When everything is bitter ash and steel-gray bones, the Son will shine and those who look to him will see. We will see the coming of his kingdom; his coming to rule with justice.

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We must correct the Apostles' Creed!

Evangelical theologians call for the Apostles' Creed to be amended to exclude the sentence, "He descended into Hell." 

This is the sort of non-sense that passes for scholarship when you have no Tradition and no magisterial authority to enforce said Tradition. 

One good response to this ridiculous argument:

There are potentially a number of errors here. One is that Christ Himself did not have a human soul. Many Protestants, without knowing it, do not believe that Christ has a human soul. They instead believe that Christ has a human body but that His deity serves as the animating principle of His body. Hence, when Christ died, His deity was naturally in Heaven. The conclusion is that He would have skipped Hell entirely.

On the other end of the spectrum is the heretical doctrine of Calvin that states that Christ literally descended into the Gehenna of the damned in order to receive the full punishment of sin. This is contrary to Scripture, contrary to the Fathers, and contrary to orthodox Christology.

 

As I am constantly reminding the seminarians at NDS: get the Incarnation wrong and everything that comes after it is wrong.

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An Exercise in Style

Here's how I'm torturing. . .ermmm. . .teaching my pre-theologians a few in lessons in style. . .

1. Take a reasonably complex sentence:

"From this intimacy with the faithful God, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, Moses drew strength and determination for his intercession" (CCC, 2577).

2. Then, under each word identify its part of speech. . .  

From   this        intimacy  with    the      faithful  God. . .

Prep    Pronoun Noun       Prep   Article  Adj        Noun

3. Then delete the original sentence, leaving the parts of speech. . .

Prep    Pronoun Noun       Prep   Article  Adj        Noun

4. And rewrite the sentence, using different words that match the parts of speech:

Inside that despair underneath a wasting pain. . .

The idea is to learn how different writers use words to shape their style. A good grasp of grammar -- something woefully missing in our public education these days -- helps a writer/preacher form a recognizable writing signature. The ultimate goal is to help them break out of their Style Ruts so that they can write homilies written "for the ear."

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"All of His children are alive!

32nd Sunday OT 
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP 
Our Lady of the Rosary, NOLA 

The Sadducees pose a difficult theological question to Jesus, hoping to catch him in an intellectual bind. Since they do not accept the novel idea of the resurrection, the Sadducees divide humanity into two categories: the Living and the Dead. Their convoluted scenario about the widow and her seven husbands is designed to refute the idea of a resurrection after death. If resurrection is real, they ask, then to which of her seven dead husbands will she be married after they are all resurrected? It's a set-up. And Jesus knows it. If he answers the question as posed, he will either have to name the dead husband, or deny the reality of the resurrection. So, he does what he always does when his religious opponents try to trap him: he spins the situation around and grabs the opportunity to teach his audience the truth. Calling on the authority of Moses, Jesus says, “. . .the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. . .is not God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive.” Body and soul, living or deceased, all of His children are alive! Do you live as one alive in the Lord? 

Though none of here this evening have yet to experience the Resurrection of the Dead, we have some small idea of what being alive in the Lord means. We have all sinned. And we have all received God's mercy. We have all fallen flat on our faces. And we have all been raised up. We have all loved and lost. And we have all been found again by Love Himself. Being forgiven, being raised up from failure, and found by Love isn't the same as being resurrected from death—of course not—but we know what it feels like to die in small ways: to welcome sorrow and grief; to entertain despair and despair of hope; to consider the temptations of nothingness—just being no-thing at all. And then, right when sorrow and grief and despair are about to tip us over into an unrecoverable darkness, something breaks, something grabs us by the heart and mind and swings us back from the edge. As we walk away, back toward a light, all that darkness, everything that drew us in, changes, and now it looks like the trap that it is. “Our God is not God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive.” Body and soul, living or deceased, all of His children are alive! Do you live as one alive in the Lord? Do you live in the constant, fervent hope of the resurrection? 

Maybe just once in your life, or maybe nearly every day, you experience something like the resurrection, a rising again from death, from sin, to live in the glory of the Lord. If so, thanks be to God! But we don't want to confuse the Resurrection of the Dead with its useful, psychological metaphor. I mean, yes, we can think of the Resurrection in terms of being spiritually renewed in love, but the Resurrection itself is something altogether different, something altogether more miraculous than feeling God's enduring mercy. The CCC teaches us: “Christ is raised with his own body. . .but he did not return to an earthly life. So, in him, 'all of them will rise again with their own bodies which they now bear,' but Christ 'will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body,' into a 'spiritual body.' [How this happens] exceeds our imagination and understanding; it is accessible only to faith” (nos. 999-1000). The Resurrection of the Dead at the end of this age is not a spiritual metaphor or a psychological transformation or a myth borrowed from our pagan ancestors; it is an historical event yet to be experienced, an event made possible by the only resurrection that we know to have taken place: the resurrection of Christ from the tomb on the third day after his death. 

Allow me another quote from the CCC: “In death, the separation of the soul from the body, the human body decays and the soul goes to meet God, while awaiting its reunion with its glorified body. God. . .will definitively grant incorruptible life to our bodies by reuniting them with our souls, through the power of Jesus' Resurrection” (no. 997). Because Christ died and rose from death, our bodies, if we are perfectly united with him in life, our bodies will rise from the corruption of death, receive glorification from God, and be reunited with our immortal souls. We will live with God as whole persons—body and soul—incorruptible, forever perfect. Believing this, knowing this, we remain in Christ b/c remaining in Christ is how we will find ourselves raised and renewed in the Father's glory. We remain in Christ not b/c we want a reward or a prize, but b/c we have found in him a life of on-going perfection, a life of constant healing and renewal. A life lived with Christ is a life lived in the divine promise of eternal life, a life lived in hope, in the hope of the resurrection. We remain alive in the Lord by being living signs of God's love and mercy and hope for one another, for the nations, for all of His creation. If we are alive, He is our God, the God of all the living. 

Body and soul, living or deceased, all of God's children are alive! Do we live in the constant, fervent hope of the resurrection? Living in the hope of the resurrection is much more than just living in the expectation of being raised from the dead. That's too intellectual, too abstract. As Catholics, we gather weekly, daily to participate directly in the divine life of the Blessed Trinity. We are participating in that divine life right now, right here. When we gather to celebrate the Eucharist, we gather as One Body to partake in a sacrificial meal, a meal where Christ is made present in the bread and wine, where we eat and drink his body, blood, soul, and divinity, where we take into ourselves everything he is for us and anticipate our own transfiguration after death. In the 2nd century, St. Irenaeus wrote, “Just as bread is no longer ordinary bread after God's blessing has been invoked upon it, the Eucharist is formed of two things, one earthly, the other heavenly: so too our bodies, which partake of the Eucharist, are no longer corruptible, but possess the hope of resurrection.” Living in the hope of the resurrection is not an intellectual exercise, an abstract hobby—it is living a Eucharistic life, one moment of thanksgiving after another, one instance of praise after another, taking into ourselves all that Christ is for us so that we might become Christs for others. 

Jesus teaches the Sadducees and us: “. . .those who are deemed worthy to attain. . .to the resurrection of the dead. . .They can no longer die. . .they are the children of God because they are the ones who will rise.” We are the children of God b/c we have been adopted into His Holy Family by baptism. We remain His good children so long as we remain in Christ. Yes, we will die. Our bodies will be separated from our souls. We will die. But b/c Christ—in whom we remain—b/c Christ defeated death by rising from the tomb, we will not remain dead forever. And the life we live after death—perfect, whole, incorruptible—that life is the promise that must drive our lives here and now. Not Pie in the Sky By and By complacency but righteous, hopeful, loving service done in the name of Christ for the greater glory of God. We meet our Lord in the Eucharist. And we take him with us when we leave. If we will live in the hope of the resurrection, as the Father's children, we will allow anyone who wants to to meet him through us. Body and soul, living or deceased, all of God's children are alive! May they all meet Him in you and in me. 

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Gratitude

As always. . .I am both grateful for and humbled by the generosity of HA readers.

Recent activity on the Wish List confirms my long-held belief that Catholics want and appreciate well-prepared homilies. This is more than just encouraging. . .it's downright exciting! 

My preaching students at NDS are aware of the need for well-prepared and well-delivered homilies. I always point to HA readers and your generosity as proof that Catholics will respond positively to their hard work in composing and preaching the Well-wrought Homily.

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Medjugorje still not legit

The Papal Nuncio to the U.S. sent a letter last week to our bishops reminding them that Medjugorje as a site of an alleged Marian apparition is not yet a legitimate site for Catholic pilgrimages.

The local Yugoslavian bishops in 1991 ruled that the apparitions were not authenticate. Until the CDF rules on the apparitions, the 1991 ruling is to be followed.

I'm indifferent about Marian apparitions. If the CDF rules that Medjugorje is legit, more power to it! If not, ho-hum.  Apparitions (Marian or otherwise) are completely extraneous to human salvation. All we need for our salvation is revealed in scripture and authentically interpreted by the magisterium.

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Medio Ecclesiae: Music for the New Evangelization

Eastern Province Dominican students cut an album!

Recorded in historic St. Dominic’s Church in downtown Washington, D.C., the friars of the Dominican House of Studies, Province of St. Joseph, present In Medio Ecclesiae, the first release from Dominicana Records. Directed by Fr. James Moore, O.P., In Medio Ecclesiae offers some of the finest chant and polyphonic treasures of the Church’s musical tradition as well as two new compositions by Dominican friars. Proceeds from the sale of this album contribute to the educational and other needs of the Dominican students.

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