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Faith becoming culture: theological perspectives
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
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On 20 May 1982 Pope John Paul II signed a letter founding the Pontifical Council for Culture. In it he spoke of human destiny itself being at stake in the field of culture, and he stressed that “living culture” constitutes the “ethos of a people”. Then he went on to express a key challenge for faith horizons today: “A faith which does not become culture is a faith which has not been fully received, not thoroughly thought through, not fully lived out.”.
Kieran Flanagan’s The Enchantment of Sociology could be regarded as a long footnote to that claim (which he does not quote). Even though he is suspicious of much of the discourse of inculturation, he is passionately concerned about how faith embodies itself within culture by constructing its own “habitus”—a favourite term he borrows from Pierre Bourdieu. In this respect he engages in some running battles with theologians who have misread the power of the “living culture” and whose “liberal” options for “relevance” have undermined the power of religious belonging and of the sacred. Even the Second Vatican Council’s important document (issued in 1965) Gaudium et spes, on the Church in the modem world, is accused of naivety over the question of culture, or, more particularly, of ignoring sociological insights concerning the complexity and power of culture as a product. As a result it fell into excessive optimism about the hoped-for dialogue with contemporary culture and is criticised for playing down the necessity of religious distance from the deceptions of culture.
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- Copyright © 1997 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
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