In recent years, it has become increasingly common for Christians to give up Facebook for Lent. The idea seems to be something like this: Lent is a season of penance, in which one seeks to grow closer to God by imitating the ascetical practices of figures such as Elijah and Jesus, renouncing ordinary comforts and pleasures; Facebook has become one such good; therefore one can well give up Facebook for Lent. Given the preponderance of social media in today’s culture, this rationale seems to make sense. Catholic author, Cheryl Dickow, who uses social media to promote books, even calls it “the ultimate sacrifice.” In her view, to give up Facebook or Twitter—unlike, say, Double Stuf Oreos or supersize Cokes—is to renounce what is otherwise beneficial to a person.

But is this true? That is to say, is it true that social media, not to mention the Internet in general, are good or at least “neutral” instruments, which stand in a long line of technologies promising to facilitate human progress? Recent research on information technology suggests the answer is “no.” Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (Basic Books, 2011) argues that, even as social media connects persons online, it alienates persons from real-world relationships. We can communicate more readily, but what we communicate lacks meaning. It is the language of organizational details and hollow witticisms. Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (W.W. Norton & Co., 2011) is perhaps even more damning. Drawing on a host of neuroscientific and psychological studies, Carr maintains that the Internet is changing the way the human brain functions. The mind, he points out, conforms to the medium through which it receives information. The codex (our present book form) requires an attentive and, quite literally, deepening engagement with material. In contrast, the Internet’s hyperlinks and tabs sate the brain with data. We get more but understand less, rendering our reception of information (to borrow from Tolkien) thin, like butter scraped over too much bread.

Carr does not relate his findings to theology or to spirituality, but the implications are as plain as they are concerning. As any first-year theology student can tell you, to study God is to study that which requires profound concentration, for God is precisely the one who can’t be picked out from the world of everyday experience. Nicholas of Cusa puts this in terms of “learned ignorance”: spiritual praxis entails an ever-deepening awareness that we know God best when, pushed to our very limits of understanding, we know how little we actually know. The Internet might flood us with thousands of definitions of or cases for (or against) “God,” but these cannot help but confuse the situation: God is not a piece of data, nor even the conclusion of an argument. These insights have been developed by Christian thinkers as diverse as Thomas Aquinas and Søren Kierkegaard, but, of course, they are rooted in the Bible. And yet, Carr indicates why biblical literacy is at an all-time low: it is a lengthy text—indeed, in the Christian tradition, a codex—which requires patient, even prayerful attentiveness. “Clicking” through it is about as useful as watching a YouTube clip of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech: one can only scratch the surface of what’s really going on there.

This point brings the discussion full circle. The practice of giving up social media for Lent may, in fact, disclose a powerful spiritual truth, however naively it plays out in practice (surely, the act of declaring that one is renouncing Facebook via a status update is almost painfully ironic). But the insights of persons such as Turkle and Carr open up a different dimension to this question—one that we are only beginning to grapple with. If the Internet is physiologically altering the human brain, fabricating a need for immediate stimulation, at what point will contemplative prayer become impossible for most persons? What about liturgical practice? Is that why so many young people today complain that Mass is “boring”? If Christianity is a religion of “the Book,” can it exist (or, at least, flourish) in a post-codex society, wherein so much reading takes place electronically? Such worries may prove unfounded. Certainly, most Christians (including the Bishop of Rome!) seem to be banking on the utility of social media, particularly as a means of interacting with digital culture. Time will tell if this is a sound investment or a Faustian bargain. Until then, the question must be confronted…slowly, thoughtfully, and with iPhones shut off.

Chris Barnett, Assistant Professor of Theology

Adventus for the Rest of Us

It would be easy to complain about how, as a culture, no one seems to care about advent.  And most Catholics have probably heard similar complaints or even rants, from priests and the devout, who do very much care about advent.  I’ve heard the complaints of Christmas decorations appearing after Halloween, whereas before it was always Thanksgiving—the cynics swear that soon it will be Labor Day!  These are common with religious and non-religious alike.  But for Catholics, even post-Thanksgiving is not Christmas time.  It is advent.  So there are complaints about carols, nativity scenes, and trees being up too early.  ‘It’s advent, people!’ they say.To these complaints I usually give my customary half smile, which not even I know the meaning of, while thinking: ‘quit your bellyaching… what’s the big deal.’  I think it’s pointless, pious party pooping.Okay.  Personally, I can’t stand the 24/7 holiday music stations, cranking out cool yule from Thanksgiving to Christmas.  But not because they are jumping the gun.  Rather, because it’s terrible music for the most part.  Even in the years following my father’s death when holidays were more painful and awkward than pleasurable and eagerly anticipated, it was not that this music was a prolonged pouring of salt in the wound, but simply that hearing Feliz Navidad for the twentieth time in a week was even more painful and awkward than grief.  And that’s saying something.  (Not to mention—Feliz Navidad is such a repetitive song to begin with that hearing it once is already equivalent to having heard it three consecutive times.)  One of the contributing factors to the annoyance of prolonged holiday music is that there simply aren’t that many good holiday songs.  (Technically, this is not true.  There are tons, but they don’t get recorded by mainstream artists.  According to iTunes, my collection of mediaeval and renaissance Christmas music alone lasts about three days.  I can’t get enough of that.)  How many times can one hear ‘Winter Wonderland’, ‘Sleigh Ride’, ‘The Christmas Song’, and ‘Here Comes Santa Claus’ in a day without the screw coming just little bit loose?  Only a few listens can cause one to realise what a manic and deranged tune the ‘Ukrainian Bell Carol’ is.  It doesn’t really matter that these same songs are being tastelessly performed by a whole variety of pop artists.  It’s the same few songs, over and over; one arrangement and performance more unconvincing than the next.  And I’m not saying that one has to be a good Christian to make good Christmas music.  The Jews have made most of the best Christmas music in the past 100 years.  I say, ‘Amein to that!’

My view is not so negative, though: if the music lifts your spirit for a month and helps you get through the other dreary months of winter, I’m all for it.  Though, I don’t work in a cubical, or for a retailer, so I may be biased.

The trees and the lights I love.  If I could have my druthers, the lights would stay up all year—on everyone’s house, not just the creepy guy’s who is either too eccentric or too lazy to take them down.  Further, there are few amenities more therapeutic than the ambient glow of delightfully adorned Fraser Fir in a dimly lit living room.  You can bet I’ll be marinating in that for a solid 25, at least.  And if this temporary installation causes even a few couples to sit quietly a while, closely snuggled together on the couch, in lieu of ‘her’ watching the Real Housewives of Atlanta while ‘he’ checks his fantasy football team stats, then I shall sing a hymn to thee, O Tannenbaum.

Even though I have more admiration for the real St. Nicholas than the Coca-cola Santa at every mall in the country, if as a society we still encourage belief in a chubby white male who is actually loving and benevolent, rather than a corporate criminal, then I say, ‘Thank God!  It really is the season of hope!’

What does bother me, (even more than people being merry and bright, believe it or not) is when even intelligent Catholics get advent totally wrong.  As frequently as it happens, I still startle every time I meet someone who thinks advent is about preparing for the birth of Jesus.  Spoiler alert: Jesus was born somewhere between the years 4 and 6 B.C.  Yet, I see this misunderstanding of advent being most frequently employed.  In many ways it is the very ethos that drives the aforementioned pointless, pious party pooping—no tree, no lights, no little figurine in the manger until Christmas eve.  This misses the point and embodies the snivelling to which the pseudo-pious are prone.  Advent is not the season when we pretend or act as though Jesus has not yet been born.

But, since no one likes a bitter know-it-all, I have preferred that such opportune encounters spark a deeper understanding and appreciation, within my own life and thinking, of what advent really is all about.  I don’t claim to have all the answers, and the realisation of this is in many ways one of the great lessons of advent.  Nevertheless, here are some thoughts.

A good place to start is the word itself, ‘advent,’ and what a remarkable word it is.  It comes from the Latin, adventus, which comes from advenire, meaning ‘arrival.’  However, there is a sense in which ad venire can indicate the ‘coming toward one’ of something from someplace else, as in something ‘other,’ something beyond us, that transcends us in a marvellous way and is approaching.  Thus, this word is saturated with mystery, evoking thoughts of pregnant expectation, but also the shattering of expectations; patience, but also ardent longing; hope, but also uncertainty.  An ‘advent’ is something utterly astonishing, that invites us to become adventurers, pursuing the strangeness of what has manifested itself in our world as a kind of inbreaking.  So there is a directionality to this word, indicating that something is coming toward us.  And the whence of this coming toward is connected to the future.  In Latin there are two kinds of directionality when it comes to the future.  Futurum expresses future in the sense that we in English usually mean it, as the point to which we are progressing in chronological fashion.  The word adventus also is connected to the idea of the future, but it is the future approaching us.  The German language also allows for two kinds of ‘future’ with these two different trajectories.  Futur expresses our chronological movement toward the future, and Zukunft expresses the future’s approach toward us.  So, the future is not simply something that we arrive at through our projects and human striving in the passing of chronological time, but it is also something arrives at us, with its own plans and intentions, which exceed our limited understanding and expectations.  There can seem something unsettling in this idea.  Our tendency is to want to control our destiny, to make plans for how things are going to go, and we prepare things so that they will go our way, the way we would like them to go.  But this sense of advent in some way tells that we cannot prepare for something definite, but would do better in preparing to be surprised.

The Latin, adventus, is preceded by the Greek word, παρουσία (parousia), well known in theology as the arrival of the ‘Second Coming,’ or the arrival of the fulfilment of creation, the fullness of time.  The word also means something like ‘becoming present.’  In some theologies this Second Coming is seen in rather harsh terms as Judgement, a day of great sorrow and great exaltation, or as the Day of YHWH, where the world will be obliterated and a new one will replace it.  Though these ways of thinking have some validity, a more robust response that seems better able to accommodate more elements of tradition more coherently speaks of this Second Coming as the full realisation of God’s intentions for humanity, to share most abundantly in God’s love.  The advent that we await with joyful hope is the fulfilment of the reign of God.

In Jesus’ ministry, he tells us that the reign of God is at hand already, if one changes one’s way of seeing and thinking and being, attuning oneself to God’s intentions for human life.  This change is referred to as μετάνοια (metanoia), which can be translated as: going beyond the mind that you have, or a radical, holistic change from a way of being that is curved in on itself (curvatus in se) and fearful, toward a way of being that participates in a trusting relationship with God, allowing God to empower oneself.  In many ways, original sin, famously depicted in the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, represents the tendency for humans not to trust in God.  Though many readings of this story focus on who was at fault in eating the fruit first, and the true meaning of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, I think these discussions often miss the point.  For me, the most important aspect of the story is that it is the serpent who convinces Adam and Eve that they too could be gods, but that God doesn’t want them to be because God is trying to keep them down, in a subservient way.  Thus, the serpent convinces Adam and Eve that God is their competitor rather than the one in whom they can trust most ultimately.  It is when they turn toward themselves in an autonomy wherein God becomes extrinsic to their lives, as a competitor or judge, that they becoming fearful and attempt filling the void in their lives and shielding themselves from without by the proverbial fig leaves.  And today these fig leaves are represented in all of the goods we feel we need or must have in order to feel safe, secure and fulfilled.  This autonomous state in which we feel we must be gods ourselves, at odds with God, causes a mindset of fear which is the root of all sin and evil.  Although this can sound simplistic and ‘too easy’ an explanation, it is remarkable how well this perspective holds up.  Try to think of an evil in our world today that is not caused by fear.  In many ways, this story predicted the unfolding of world history, in nuce.

Jesus’ ministry predominantly focuses upon getting people to move out of that fearful state and into a state in which one realises that he or she is profoundly loved by God, and that God desires from him or her an empowering relationship of love and trust.  When one allows oneself to be empowered by this relationship of love and trust, and this relationship enhances one’s attunement to God’s intentions for humanity, then one begins to see with the eyes of the reign of God and can begin to bring that more just way of life to realisation.  Thus, Jesus calls us to live in and work toward the reign of God here and now.  Of course the reign of God is not complete, nor will it be completed by us.  The reign of God is completed by the advent of God’s fulfilment of creation.  This is where our human efforts to create a more loving and just society, in which it is possible for all to enter into loving relationship with God and neighbour, are brought to fulfilment by God.  Our movements forward meet God’s loving embrace toward us in the advent of the perfect fulfilment of creation.

Advent, then, is a time in which we recommit ourselves in working toward the bringing about of the reign of God, continuing the work of Jesus’ ministry, in the joyful hope that we will more deeply experience the reign of God present in our world now, seeing the world as God intends it to be, not in the distorted vision caused by fear; preparing for when God brings this reign to its fulfilment.  It is fitting that the advent season marks the ‘new year’ of the liturgical calendar, since this season calls us to envision a new way for humanity, of peace, justice, and healing.  We are asked to ponder possibility, in hope.  The line from ‘O Holy Night’ that I have come to appreciate most is expressive of this: ‘For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn!’

This is connected with the other sense of parousia, ‘becoming present.’  During advent we prepare for the celebration of the incarnation of God, God’s having become human, and thus made present to us in the most radical manifestation.  The way in which we properly celebrate this incarnation, God’s becoming concretely present among us, is to live in the way that Jesus, God incarnate, did.  In this we allow God to work through us, so that God’s presence among us can be more fully recognised, and that humans might live in happiness with one another, which is precisely why God loved the world into being in the first place.  Human persons are made in the image and likeness of God, the Imago dei, and thus we are called to be like God by being empowered by God, and living in a way that participates in and reflects that love.  Due to the human tendency not to live in this way, we tend to forget what a proper life in relationship to God looks like.  And so God became human in Jesus to provide a perfect example of what human life should look like, and by imitating this example, we are able to be restored to proper relationship with God, and can live once again as citizens of the reign of God.  Jesus shows us how to be properly human.  It is interesting to note that in German, the word for incarnation is Menschwerdung, which literally means ‘becoming human.’  We become most like the image and likeness of God when we are most human.  We are not most Godly when we try to be false gods, but when we are who God intends for us to be as humans.  This is the true realisation of human freedom, wherein we are free to be us.

St. Gregory of Nazianzus speaks of the doctrine of divinisation.  His famous phrase states that “God became human so that we might become divine.”  Of course he doesn’t mean that we become God, but that we participate most fully in the divine life in following the example of Jesus’ relationship of love and trust in God, which enabled him, as it will us, to proclaim the reign of God.   He also uses the example of a fresco, which has become dirty and decrepit, in the same way that the human image has become decrepit by millennia of sinful behaviour.  Jesus comes as the restored image, showing us most profoundly how to be human in the most full sense of the Imago dei.  Thus it is important to recognise that God’s voluntary entrance into humanity is a wondrous affirmation of the immensely positive possibilities for humanity.  In advent we commit ourselves to refining our vision for imagining these possibilities within us and for our world.  The best way to celebrate the incarnation, God’s profound presence among us, is to continue to deepen the way in which our way of life makes God manifest among us.

We still struggle with doing this, with putting on Christ.  One of my favourite ideas to reflect upon in advent is a famous quotation from Karl Rahner, S.J.:  “It is both terrible and comforting to dwell in the inconceivable nearness to God, and so to be loved by God Himself that the first and last gift is infinity and inconceivability itself. But we have no choice. God is with us.”  This is profoundly expressive of the desire for but also the difficulty in accepting God’s invitation, the gift of God’s self.   It is ironic that as often as we seem godlike in our own ambitions and projects, we often do not count ourselves worthy or able to do God’s work; yet this irony magnifies the delusional state that is at stake.  In advent we prepare ourselves to recognise more significantly how God is trying to become more present in our lives and in our world.  And that indeed this is the greatest gift we can receive, and the greatest gift that we can give to one another.  God is with us and completely for us.  We are still struggling to accept this.Perhaps it is by preparing a space within ourselves and rethinking the arrangement of our priorities that we might allow God a more profound space within us and our world; the outward manifestation of which might indeed proclaim, but with authentic expression of love, “It’s advent, people!”

Gregory Grimes, Theology Instructor, Villanova University(This piece was originally posted at http://wisdomandculture.com/).

Every year since 1990, the Center for Peace and Justice Education at Villanova University has given the Adela Dwyer/St. Thomas of Villanova Award to one individual or group who has made “outstanding contributions to the understanding of the meaning and conditions of justice and peace in human communities.” Past recipients have included Habitat for Humanity, Noam Chomsky, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, among others. This year, the award was given to Wendell Berry, a novelist, poet, essayist, and farmer from Port Royal, Kentucky.  It is difficult to estimate the scope and richness of Berry’s insight. His teacher, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Wallace Stegner, once called his stories “good like bread.” His essays span a number of topics, from the importance of land conservation to marriage and the family, from poetics to economics, from racism to feminism, and most things in-between. He has been an advocate for agrarianism and the renewal of human communities by calling persons to a sense of rootedness and place. And perhaps the reason that his thought is so wide-ranging is that he refuses to view one topic completely in isolation from the others; his cultural criticism is astute, both for its timeliness and timelessness. On Nov. 13, 2012, hundreds of Villanova faculty and students and members of the surrounding community crowded into Connelly Center to see Berry, the author of dozens of books and recent Jefferson Lecturer (“the most prestigious honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities”), receive the award and give a couple of short readings. Mr. Berry’s first remarks upon receiving the award were these: “To be the recipient of a peace award brings an occasion for thinking of all the reasons you don’t deserve it.” I was instantly reminded of his poem, “A Warning to My Readers”:

Do not think me gentle
because I speak in praise
of gentleness, or elegant
because I honor the grace
that keeps this world. I am
a man crude as any,
gross of speech, intolerant,
stubborn, angry, full
of fits and furies. That I
may have spoken well
at times, is not natural.
A wonder is what it is.

However short his failings may be, humility was the beginning of Berry’s wisdom in his address; for as he alluded, only through humility as a response to the sheer giftedness of the world can we begin to seek peace. He then read two pieces; one on some of the effects of government-subsidized farming, and the other a short story entitled “The Girl in the Window” from his new book A Place in Time: Twenty Stories of the Port William Membership. Following his readings, there was a short question and answer section, wherein the final question was, “What are you thankful for this season?” His response was that one should be “skeptical” about being thankful for only one thing at one time of year. To truly “be thankful” is a response that can only be cultivated through a lifetime of reflection and care for the world and the people that surround us.

 AJ DeBonis, Graduate Student in Theology

Last Friday I had the opportunity to meet one of my theological heroes, James Alison. Some of you may be asking yourselves, what heroic act has Alison performed? In the comments below, I’ll point out two examples.

Let’s begin with the glaring conflict between the Johannine identity of God as love (1 John 4:7-21) and the traditional theory (in its many variants) of atonement. How does one reconcile an understanding of God as overflowing, gratuitous love with the ultimately vindictive nature underlying substitutionary atonement, which argues essentially that Christ suffered punishment in the place of humanity, thereby satisfying the demand for justice, so that God can justly forgive the sins of humanity? The theological importance of this question is amplified in the context of an inter-relational (over and against an understanding based upon divine versus created essence) understanding of the Trinity (see Catherine Mowry LaCugna’s God for Us). This is to say, if one understands the Trinity as rooted in relationship, the most acceptable theory of atonement (the condition of being at-one with) demands an understanding of the relationship between God and humanity rooted in the identity of God as love. Alison elegantly resolves the conflict by (i) pointing out the laser-focus of the traditional theory on sin, rather than God, and its presupposition that we have “an independent source of knowledge as to what sin is, prior to and independent of any knowledge of salvation.”[1]; and substituting a theocentric understanding of the revelation of salvation in the resurrection of Jesus, which demands that “sin is only and always a term that is ancillary to, or secondary to, and dependent on, an understanding of salvation…sin is ‘that which can be forgiven’.”[2] Thus, by shifting the focus from the egocentricity of sin to the theocentricity of forgiving, we gain an “understanding of salvation which is purely gratuitous, without any element of retribution, and in which forgiveness is a divinely initiated process lived out in our midst with a view to making us participants in something bigger than we are.”[3] Clearly, this simple shift in focus from the sinfulness of humanity to God’s preference for forgiving produces a theory of atonement that enriches both the Johannine identity of God as love and our understanding of the inter-relational Trinity.

Like the feminist theologians who remind us of the patriarchal and androcentric elements of Christian tradition and the liberation theologians who remind us of our role in the structural oppression of the poor and weak, Alison reminds us of our tendency to demonize the created ‘other’. One need only look at today’s characterization of Islam or our historical characterization ofGermanyandJapanduring the Second World War to understand what I mean. As an openly gay clergyman, Alison has heroically strived to reconcile his faith within a church that fundamentally rejects him. In this regard, he challenges the church to reject the characterization of gay and lesbian individuals as “defective heterosexuals” and suggests that over time we might understand same-sex relationships as benignly other, much like our understanding of left-handedness. Thus, just as society once used the Bible to justify slavery, Alison’s hope is that today’s use of scripture to condemn same-sex relationships will seem as anachronistic as a contemporary reading of Genesis 9:20-27.

I admire the theological approach of James Alison because he thinks synthetically and systematically. I admire the person of James Alison because he knows that he is loved as a child of God and, in turn, he loves his church so dearly that he is willing to suffer rejection and persecution in his efforts to illustrate the identity of God as love. On paper, Alison is my theological hero; in person, he is the kind of individual with whom I would be proud to share a beer and discuss the wonders of God’s creation.

Lisa Cahill came to the University yesterday afternoon into the evening to give a lecture entitled, “Peacebuilding: A Practical Strategy of Hope.” She spoke at a blistering pace, and I scribbled approximately ten pages of notes, and could have written more. Her presentation moved from the two strands of theoretical basis to the Christian peace traditions, pacifism and just war theory, to her own practical experiences in Colombia, working through the Catholic Peacebuilding Network at the University of Notre Dame, and other accounts of practical engagements in peacebuilding. In 2007, Cahill attended a conference there, went to a bario near the capital city of Bogotá, meeting a small group of women, who called themselves in Spanish what translates to “Little Aunts of Peace” in English and some of the national Catholic Bishops there. She recounted stories of people whose lives exemplified the mission of peacebuilding: Fr. Darío Echeverri, head of the Bishops’ Conference Commission of National Reconciliation in Colombia and a mediator between different armed groups, the government, and the Catholic Church, and Nancy Sanchez, a journalist for twenty years in Colombia reporting on the violence in Colombia and identifying dead bodies in morgues for families to mourn properly. Both of these people, Cahill said, were willing to take put their lives at risk in order to work for peace. Such an approach to peacebuilding, of being willing to risk one’s life, seemed like it was essential to the process of peacebuilding in such a context where violence is consistent and peace negotiations progress and regress as the tide comes and goes.

Her lecture moved into more explicit theological reflection when she urged a sense of Augustinian caution about trying too hard to bring the City of God to the City of Man, which she conveyed as retaining tension in our present world. She also posed a series of more enigmatic questions: Where do people get this courage to keep going in the face of defeat? What inspires hope in the context of unending violence? Drawing on a line from Pope Benedict XVI’s second encyclical letter, Spes Salvi, in which he writes “All serious and upright human conduct is hope in action” (35). While such profound words provide substance for reflection, she pined to know the locus of hope itself, since although action can yeild hope, it does not address the locus of hope when the action is a failure. She shared her personal reflections about some Jesuit Refugee Service workers who witnessed first hand an unjust judicial system were affirmed only in the response of the victims of corruption whom they had accompanied through the process of filing a lawsuit. While the accompaniment provided by the JRS workers had revealed an even more deeply ingrained institutional injustice, the victims shared with them the fruit of their work: the honest relationship that had developed, an affirmation of mutual respect of the victims as persons, and a just search for accountability.

She then turned to John Sobrino for more inspiration to answer the question, “What inspires hope?” In his Christ Liberator, he writes “Hope and praxis (action) are not opposed but can require each other… The praxis guiding hope is not only justice, it is love. Love produces hope”  To her, Sobrino’s answer provides a more convincing answer to the question about the locus of the inspiration for hope since love, not in the usual conception of affinity or emotional connextion to another person, but as a real feeling or solidarity which is a personal and social virtue. Such love makes a person willing to sacrifice her or himself and takes risks. And it is love in the social-practical form of solidarity and willingness to risk itself that explains well what hope is. Further developing this line of thought of love as solidarity and political willingness to iniate the peacemaking process, she drew on Glen Stassin’s Just Peacemaking and Eli McCarthy’s Becoming Nonviolent Peacemakers to speculate about the possibility of institutionalizing hope in society. She concluded with a concise definition and a litany of Peacebuilding: Peacebuilding is a process marred by incompleteness and constituted by hope inspired by love whose form is solidarity. Peacebuiliding is a practical strategy of hope, which is able to get past fear and prejudice. Peacebuilding depends on moral and religious virtue.

Dr. Cahill’s lecture exemplified the concrete and practical work that needs to accompany theology if it is to stay relevant in today’s world. Theologies of peace, like all theology, risks ethereality without embodiment in the lives of real people and the conflicts of human communities.

Where to go from here: how does a middle class American community reflect dynamics of violence and peacebuilding?

how are middle class American communities able to contribute to peacebuilding strategies?

Peter O’Connell, theology graduate student

I spent the week of mid-semester break in Spencer, Massachusetts with the Trappist monks of St. Joseph’s Abbey.  It was good to ‘come away and rest awhile’(Mk. 6:31) in an atmosphere of silence and contemplation. While looking out into the rolling hills and meadows of the Abbey the Sunday I left, this thought occurred to me:

The sun shines differently on Sundays

I don’t know what it is

but it has been this way since I was a child

maybe even since the beginning…

it casts a graced light on things

as if to see

with the eyes of God

the inner glow of all the things

(no greater meaning than simple presence)

to see as on that first day

that all is indeed very good’.

The Sabbath is a gift for our own good.  God gave this grace for us to partake of the rest which only he gives.  It is a time to remember that we are more valuable than what we do and we are a part of something much bigger than ourselves.  In this rest we find our meaning, our freedom and our place in giving thanks.  St. Bernard of Clairvaux likened contemplation to the Sabbath, when all creation sighs an ‘alleluia’ and moves into the life of God to rest and enjoy the good things of his Creation.

One of the monks told me that what is ‘neat’ about the life of contemplation is that you get to notice things, all the things we often overlook and take for granted in our carelessness.  He was telling me about one of the hermits in the community who has been a monk for over fifty years who loves to watch the squirrels.  He finds great joy in this.  As we were walking he noticed a small shy drape of ivy sneaking up the stone wall.  Delighted, he pointed to it and said softly ‘look! a little poem!’

Christ said that we had to become like children to enter the kingdom of heaven.  These ‘noticings’ are part of the simple awareness of contemplation that recognizes in the world around us the traces of heaven.  It is a eucharistic awareness that the world of which we are a part overflows with the life of God.  It is a deep and intimate knowledge that the Incarnation isn’t just something that happened two-thousand years ago but something that continues.  Once Christ took on flesh and his blood was spilled on the earth he transformed it just as he transforms the bread and wine into himself every day.

This awareness can make all that we do prayer, it can make all things acts of worship, and this is what it means to ‘pray unceasingly’ as St. Paul says(1 Thess. 5:17).  With this awareness we can read the ‘Book of Nature’ and find in everything the subtle secrets of our Savior, the quiet theology and testimony of critters, trees, wind and leaves.  One of my favorite spiritual practices is to watch leaves fall from trees in autumn to which I wrote:

A leaf lets go 

            of its home in the tree

and is carried like a butterfly

            in the arms of the breeze                      

                        that lays it down gently

                         like a grain of wheat

                        as the sun smiles warmly

                                    in the October heat

These observations are often too simple and poor to make it into books of theology but that is often the nature of contemplation.  It is a different kind of knowing, a poetic insight into the depth of things.  It is these small ‘noticings” that draw us closer to Christ in a very personal and intimate way.  Through the eye of faith and the light of grace we can see the mysteries of Incarnation and redemption, Passion and Resurrection played out before us in very simple ways.  All creation has his fingerprint on it and thus speak about him in their own way, about his goodness and beauty, passion and suffering, gentleness, playfulness, patience and good-humor. These little things like flowers, birds, leaves, trees, bugs and critters, these too are the poor of the earth that he cared for so much.  Thus, contemplation doesn’t make us see different things but helps us to see things differently.  This happens through a different relationship, a eucharistic relationship of communion, not of ‘subject’ with ‘object’ but as Thomas Berry says of ‘subject with subject’.  It is the communion of all things ‘through him, with him and in him.’

‘To gather up all things in him’(Eph. 1:10), through our own awareness, appreciation and delight is a participation in God’s own awareness and delight.  It is an experience of the Trinity when we experience God through the beauty and goodness of Creation; to see all things in the Spirit through the window of Christ who is the image of the invisible God and thus reveals all the mysteries of the Father through his flesh, all the ‘mysteries hidden from ages and from generations past’(Col.1:26), waiting to be noticed by you!  Noticing these things in the goodness that God has bestowed upon them helps us to live a life in harmony with the rhythm of the respiration of Creation which is alive with the intimate breath of God!  It is a very down-to-earth and Incarnational holiness.^[1]

This mystery and child-like joy reveals itself in the simplicity and silence of contemplation and is articulated gracefully by the poet e.e. cummings when he says:

I thank you God for most this amazing

day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees

and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything

which is natural which is infinite which is ‘yes’

(I who have died am alive again today,

and this is the sun’s birthday; and this is the birth

day of life and love and wings; and of the gay

great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing

breathing any-lifted from the ‘no’

of all nothing-human merely being

doubt unimaginably You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and

now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

Matthew Riddle, Graduate Student in Theology

Thanksgiving is around the corner.  Across the country, people will be traveling great distances and small in order to spend the day with family and loved ones.  And across the country, people will sit down around tables and share meals.  I wonder how many of those meals will feature left overs.  I am not talking about food that will be left over after the meal, although I am sure that there will be such left overs.  I am talking about the food that is served *at* the meal.  Do people serve left over food for Thanksgiving or do they do what they can to prepare food expressly for the Thanksgiving dinner? As you think about this question, think about the Sunday Mass.  Across the country and indeed around the world, people will be traveling great distances and small to observe the Lord’s Day by listening to the Word of God, by praying and singing, and by sharing in the Eucharistic bread and wine.  How many assemblies will serve left overs by resorting to consecrated bread stored in a tabernacle?

Surely, the Blessed Sacrament in reserve in the tabernacle is no more or less “blessed” than the elements consecrated during the Mass in question.  At the same time, however, the specific consecration at a specific Mass is a function of the Eucharistic praying of this or that specific assembly.  It is, as Augustine would say, the mystery meaning “you” that is on the altar (cf. Sermon 272).  This “you” is not generic.  It refers to the assembly at hand, which has prayed through and with the presbyter that God’s Spirit may sanctify the gifts of bread and wine and sanctify, too, this specific assembly. It is for this reason that both Vatican II’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy (in paragraph no. 55) and the General Instruction of the Roman Missal (in nos. 13 and 85) clearly recommend that the assembly partake of elements consecrated at the Mass in question.  What is the practice at your parish?

Timothy Brunk, Associate Professor of Theology

One aspect of Christian living is marked by a specific tension which is often summated as the “already/ not yet” distinction (first made explicit by Geerhardus Johannes Vos, an American Calvinist theologian writing in the 20^th century). “But in fact, Christ has been raised from the dead” says Paul (1 Cor. 15:20). Already, Christ has come into the world to save sinners, to call broken persons into wholeness, to show humanity the Face of the Love which draws us. But here we find ourselves, an imperfect people in an incomplete world. Salvation, our soteria (deliverance) from the ability to sin and experience the effects of sin, is not our present condition. We still wade in dubious waters, susceptible to moral reprehensibility, to spiritual regression, to doubting God’s covenant with his people. In essence, we are still, on a daily basis, vulnerable to rejecting our proposed identities as “participants in the divine nature” (2 Pet. 1:4).

In Augustine’s words, “We do not yet possess a present happiness” (De Civitate Dei, XIX.4).  Now, true “happiness” for Augustine is the beata vita, the blessed life, which he equates with the aeterna vita, the eternal life promised to us in Christ. Only in eternal life, a life in which we always freely choose to love God and his creatures ordinately, can we be truly and perfectly “happy.” So how should a Christian approach the “in-betweenness” of salvation in mortal life? How do we live in the “already/ not yet” of salvation, wherein sinning is possible, but not completely inevitable? Paul’s proposition for understanding this tension is subtle but substantial: “For in hope were we saved” (Rom. 8:24). But what does it mean to be saved “in hope”? First, a word on what that does not mean.

In his 1935 essay “On Hope,” the popular German Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper addressed two kinds of hopelessness. The first is praesumptio, “a perverse anticipation of the fulfillment of hope.” Presumption marks a sort of psychological disposition wherein persons anticipate the completion of God’s salvific work for humanity without patience. This lack of patience can lead to much of the apocalyptic rhetoric floating around about the imminent end of the world, and a particular feature of “apocalypticism” is the self-assurance that humans have complete knowledge about the manner and time in which God will effectuate the redemption of his people. But Paul speaks against this error, saying “Hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen?” (Rom 8:24b). To presume the end of the world is to prefigure the scope of God’s ability to transform the world for good beyond our imagination. Presumption is idolatrous thinking; thus, it is not hope.

The second type of hopelessness is despair, “a perverse anticipation of the non-fulfillment of hope.” Despair is a pronouncement that things will ultimately not turn out well for us. Although it carries the aspect of anticipation, it is dissimilar from hope in that hope pertains only to good things. To despair is to reject the promise of salvation as even a plausible outcome. Like presumption, despair is the mark of a person who has prefigured the scope of God’s ability to transform the world for good.

So true hope pertains to what is good. But what is good – what is the “object” of hope for Christians?  The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews states that “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1). Faith gives us the content of what is to be hoped for – faith in Christ and the redemption of the world. But we do not possess a full understanding of how the redemption of the world will be effectuated. As Paul states, “Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known” (1 Cor. 13:12b).

So here we find ourselves, the heirs of a promise not fully brought to fruition, which cannot be fully effectuated by our own doing, in part because it is not fully known. Does hope, then, merely consist in waiting around for the eschaton? In the Old Testament, the prophet Jeremiah states that, “It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the LORD” (Lam. 3:26). Certainly, patience is a constitutive virtue of Christian life – Paul lists it as one of the “Fruits of the Spirit” (Gal. 5:22). But hoping is more than waiting. Waiting can be done disinterestedly; I can wait in a doctor’s office for a check-up, half-heartedly playing the “find the dissimilarities in these two pictures” game of a Highlights magazine, without really being cognizant of my reason for being there. But to hope is to desire something – to be excited about the real possibility of a future event, and to anticipate the coming-to-be of that future event with joy. Moreover, it is to take active steps in tending toward that possibility – to strive toward structuring our lives to resemble the hoped-for event.

So how do we proceed in the moment of hope? Aquinas says that “Hope precedes love at first; though afterwards hope is increased by love. Because from the fact that a man thinks that he can obtain a good through someone, he begins to love him: and from the fact that he loves him, he then hopes all the more in him” (ST I-II, Q. 62, Art. 4, ad. 3). When we encounter the promise of Christ’s love for us, we should desire to grow further into the types of people that Christ calls us to become. Loving Christ and the salvation offered to us, in turn, should increase our hope that we are not forever stuck in the mire of sin. The fallen person is not completely confined to deterministically repeat his or her sins (as Professor MacIntyre indicated in his Civitas Dei Medal speech), and the hopeful person acts upon this understanding. Hope, then, materializes in charity – the desire to share our hope with other persons, to grow in virtue, and to “usher in” the kingdom of God in small places and in small ways, without any pretense that we can effectuate the full work of salvation for humanity. To truly hope for the Christian is merely to acknowledge the state of the world, to realize that it could be another way, and to act upon that understanding. We should hope in the promise of Christ and desire to tend toward inhabiting that promise in daily life; perhaps, in trying to inhabit that promise, we will more fully realize what it means to be “saved in hope.”

AJ DeBonis

Alasdair MacIntyre gave a talk at Villanova on September 27 in acceptance of the first Civitas Dei Medal. The medal, initiated under the auspices of Dr. Barbara Wall, the vice President of the Office for Mission and Ministry, recognizes Catholics whose work has contributed greatly to the Catholic intellectual tradition. Several former students of Professor MacIntyre, now at Villanova, spoke first about MacIntyre’s tremendous influence in their lives and thinking. Among them were Dr. Michael Moreland, Vice Dean and Professor of Law at the Law School and Dr. Thomas Smith, Associate Dean of the Honors Program.

So, what exactly is the Catholic intellectual tradition? The speakers highlighted 3 primary characteristics:  1) The human being is a being that is always searching for wisdom; 2 )faith enlivens reason; and 3) It believes in hope as distinct from optimism. Optimism may wish that things turn out well, but it is curiously detached from the outcome and processes that enable them to. Hope, by contrast, is invested in the process and grounded in the truth in Christ, that well is how things are meant to be. MacIntyre  noted that stories of fallenness are not stories of hopelessness. They are infused with the hope that fallenness is beneath who we are meant to be. Fallenness is all too real, but it is not the full truth of being human. We were and are meant for more wholeness and so we search. A striking comment by MacIntyre was his insistence that “to be Catholic is not to be something else.”  It is, he said, to deny scientific naturalism and, to deny hopelessness.  He emboldened us to deny hopelessness and by extension the cynicism all around us, and that is a genuinely hopeful gift.

Carey Walsh, Associate Professor of Theology