ABSTRACT This article deals with the most important points of contact between feeling and cognition in the thought of Félicité de Lamennais. The following arguments are focused on: i. the central role of love; ii. the advocacy of self-denial, taking the shape of a denunciation of earthly pleasures and passions, especially pride; iii. a failure to endorse moral pluralism; iv. the necessity for people to fulfil their ‘duties’; v. a view of the post-revolutionary phase as fateful; and vi. a tendency (...) to criticise and antagonise. It emerges that Lamennais the pious believer, extolling the authority of the Church (i.–iii.), always coexisted with Lamennais the revolutionary, preaching religious and political subversion (iv.–vi.). He spread the same affective tropes, although in different doses, over the various phases of his career. (shrink)

Today is dedicated to the remembrance of the Holy Innocents, who were victims of a state sponsored terrorist attack at the very beginning of the Christian era. We believe this is an appropriate spiritual time to review and question the moral judgement of the Catholic Bishops of the United States of America that our nation's war on the people of Afghanistan is just. We do this in a spirit of fidelity to the teachings of the Catholic Church and (...) to the charism bequeathed to us as Catholic Workers by our founders, the Servants of God Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day of New York. Our statements, questions, and conclusions may seem startling to you, they may make you uncomfortable. This is because we come to you, not as the rich and powerful, but as the weak, poor, and powerless. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Walking the Bodhisattva Path/Walking the Christ PathU.S. Conference of Catholic BishopsCatholics and Buddhists brought together by Dharma Realm Buddhist Association, the San Francisco Zen Center, and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) met 20-23 March 2003 in the first of an anticipated series of four annual dialogues. Abbot Heng Lyu, the monks and nuns, and members of the Dharma Realm Buddhist Association hosted the dialogue (...) at the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas in Talmage, California. The community had transformed their Confucius Hall into a chapel, with a large, newly constructed wooden cross on a wall above an altar facing out from a raised platform, so the Catholic delegation would have a space for worship. A special poster announcing the theme of the conference, "Walking the Bodhisattva Path/Walking the Christ Path," showing a Buddhist dharma wheel at one foot of a bridge and a Celtic cross at the other foot, had been created by the hosting community.The daily schedule for the dialogue did not interfere with the monastic routine at the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas, which included early morning chanting (4:00-5:00 am), daily rituals in the Buddha Hall, and the single large meal for monastics before noon to which all participants were invited. Catholics and Buddhists meeting in the dialogue began each day with an optional forty-five minutes of quiet sitting together in the monastery meditation hall, each following their own form of meditation and prayer. There was a Eucharist on Friday and Saturday evenings for the Catholics and to which the Buddhists were invited, and additional meals of breakfast and supper throughout the meeting at the City's Jyun Kang Restaurant.Fourteen Buddhists and fourteen Catholics participated in the formal discussions. Each participant spoke on what it means to them to follow Christ or the way of the Bodhisattvas or enlightened beings. In addition to speaking, each participant distributed a short passage, usually from a traditional text, on this topic. Several passages from Master Dogen's Shobogenzo and the Gospel of John were among those shared by the group. Other passages shared were taken from the Avatamsaka Sutra and the Shurangama Sutra and from the other gospels and the writings of Zen master HakuinZenji, the Dalai Lama, Korean Zen Master I-sahn Hye-yeon, the teachings of Master [End Page 247] Hsuan Hua, Shantideva, Origen, St. Ignatius, St. Benedict, the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, St. John of the Cross, and Chiara Lubich. A minute of silence separated the fifteen-minute segments for each presentation. With so large a group, most of the time in the formal sessions involved listening to series of presentations; however, during discussion periods the participants asked several challenging questions of one another.Some participants noted the tension they felt between belonging to a particular religious group and the need to let go of any consequential narrowness. The goal of the discussion was to promote understanding of the differences and similarities between Christianity and Buddhism. At one point, the participants noted several concerns about mutual enrichment: whether Buddhist methods can be separated from Buddhism and Christian methods from Christianity, and what specific aspects of Christian practice truly enrich Buddhists and which Buddhist practices likewise enrich Christians. Several times participants discussed their understanding of terms such as transformation, grace, the incarnation and the passion of Jesus, discernment of spirits, prayer, Buddha-nature, and related terms. There was consensus that Buddhists and Catholics can practically help one another regarding mental cultivation and religious precepts. They expressed this consensus in their choice of the topic forthe next dialogue, "Transformation of Hearts and Minds: Chan/Zen-Catholic Approaches to Precepts."The group agreed to reconvene in 2004 to respond to six presentations, three from each side, on different aspects of this topic.Chairing the sessions were Rev. Heng Sure for the Dharma Realm Buddhist Association, Rev. Taigen Dan Leighton for the San Francisco Zen Center, and Bishop John Webster for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Their three organizations are the sponsors of the Northern California Chan/Zen-Catholic Dialogue. Chan and Zen are respectively the Chinese and Japanese terms for the meditation school... (shrink)

An account of the life of Dr P.J. Ryan, Australian Catholic scholastic philosopher and anti-Communist organiser.

The basis for the paper ‘Exploring a Framework for the Mentoring of Early Career Teachers in Catholic Schools in Western Australia’ stems from the work undertaken in the author’s recently published PhD study and on personal experiences of teaching philosophy to students as a classroom teacher, gifted and talented coordinator and School leader for over 28 years. The mixed methods study identified and explored the mentoring experiences in the transition from graduate to Early Career Teacher in selected Catholic (...) primary and secondary schools in Western Australia. The research addressed a significant deficit, as presently the lack of a system-wide framework for the mentoring of ECTs, the cessation of the current ECT program and the limited training of mentors, has resulted in less than ideal mentoring experiences for ECTs. A chief finding was that the guarantee of a mentor does not necessarily alleviate every problem faced by an ECT. However, the attributes of a mentor may significantly assist or hinder the aspirations of an ECT. Encouragingly, the majority of principals recognised the importance of mentoring by offering support for the instigation of a system-wide mentoring framework. On the basis of these findings, principles upon which a new mentoring framework might be developed are proposed. The suggested system frame-work for Western Australian Catholic Education, titled ‘Borromeo’s Mentoring Framework’, may benefit system-leaders, principals, mentors and ECTs through the implementation of programs at a school based level, that enhance critical thinking skills i.e. Philosophy for Children and Circle of Inquiry. (shrink)

My discussion is presented in three steps: The present position of the Catholic Church; why it is a relatively recent tradition; and the roots of the tradition.

Government and market forces have fundamentally transformed the religious healthcare sector. Religious healthcare organizations are struggling to define their identities and determine what it is that makes them different and what implications the differences have for the delivery of social services and for public life. In response to these questions, the defenders of traditional Catholic healthcare make a variety of responses that first defend the continued relevance of the major institutions of Catholic healthcare, especially its hospitals, and second, (...) specify reforms to make these institutions even more relevant to the new healthcare system. This essay argues that these defenses are inadequate to that challenge and that the reforms proposed are too timid. Catholic healthcare needs a better theoretical account of its mission and more creative institutional adaptations. (shrink)

A survey of twentieth-century Catholic moral theology with an overarching argument against conscience-centered Christian ethics.

Philosophy at KUL seems to be omnipresent, for - similarly as at the medieval university - it fulfilled and still fulfils the propaedeutic functions. Students from all the faculties must gain philosophical culture much more thoroughly than at other Polish universities. Thereby we refer to the ancient ideal of philosophy as an alma mater of all other scientific disciplines, and express the fact that the university cares that the students of all the departments could better perceive the specific character of (...) their own discipline against a historical and methodological background. Now the most important thing is that at KUL one sees in philosophy an inspiring, ordering and integrating foundation of an outlook shaped by young people. They take up various studies and at the same time undertake the most beautiful effort to form themselves. In like manner, „unfortunately", the students of all the faculties from the very beginning had to and have to take an exam in the basic philosophical issues, including especially history of philosophy and ethics, and also the disciplines developing formal skills, like logic or methodology. (shrink)

Intense religious and political hostility to Roman Catholicism, or "popery" as its detractors referred to it, played a pervasive and constitutive role in the development of both liberal and republican conceptions of liberty in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English political thought. Liberal and republican thinkers alike endorsed both individual and collective notions of liberty, such as freedom of thought and the idea of a free state, in contradistinction to various political and religious evils closely associated with Catholicism. The rhetoric of anti-popery (...) served as the common language of thinkers who otherwise approached the question of English liberty in different ways. Ideas of Creation in the Writings of Richard Overton the Leveller and Paradise Lost. (shrink)

This article will explore the musicianship of Bishop Charles Henry Davis, osb, coadjutor to Australia's first Catholic Archbishop, John Bede Polding, osb. It will focus on his musical contribution to the early Australian Catholic Church-his ability to improvise, compose, conduct and perform during his short time as bishop at St Mary's, Sydney.