Acedia, loneliness, and the mandatory celibacy of Catholic parish clergy: a theological-sociological exploratory analysis

This article utilizes the analytical concept of acedia as the fundamental theoretical framework and applies a systematic literature review of peer-reviewed materials and documents on spiritual sloth, spiritual dryness, Catholic clerical celibacy, social bonding and communal spirituality. This article explores how the Catholic parish clergy’s mandatory celibacy intensifies loneliness and facilitates the spiritual sloth of parish clergy or what is theologically known as acedia. Unlike religious priests who live in religious communities, parish clerics fundamentally live, work, and pray alone in the parish, without strong communal support from fellow priests, bishops, and lay parishioners; thus, making them prone to loneliness, a main component of acedia. This article argues that mandatory celibacy further deprives parish clerics of the social and spiritual support necessary to enhance diocesan clerical spirituality and strengthen spiritual resistance against acedia. It recommends a structural adjustment in the social and spiritual life of parish priests, creating small communities of priests situated in similar territory or districts to allow them to live and work as a team with strong social and spiritual support in the spirit of “living baptismally” to overcome priestly acedia.

The role of spiritual formation in the education of modern human beings: A European Christian perspective

One of the most considerable changes in the contemporary European educational mentality is a person’s disconnection from spiritual life. Christian formation has been replaced with religious pluralism, in terms of syncretism influenced by global economic ideologies. Some consequences are low resilience and low spiritual resistance to contemporary challenges, associated with mental traumas or social behaviour deficits. Is it possible to restore the modern person’s spiritual education? There is no evolution in the modern individual’s social life without a horizon of spiritual expectation and fulfilment, different from the strictly material one. Moreover, conscious education cannot deprive people of cultivating the spiritual part of their consciousness from which the real values of existence are born. A series of arguments for renewing the relation between school and the mature, Scripture-based Christian thinking in the spirit of the European pedagogy are revealed by the factual historical analyses. Both Eastern and Western European experiences have met after 13 years of evolving into two antagonist geopolitical spheres. Their lessons in the education field could be an appropriate model, academically applied at the cultural mentality and the European pedagogy level.Contribution: With this study, I want to highlight the historical and conceptual frameworks of the Christian religious education meaning in the context of the rediscovery of Orthodox Christianity by the international theological culture in post-communism. Orthodox Christianity, forgotten in dictionaries and syntheses by the Western theological elite, brings in a spiritualisation of education according to the Lord Jesus Christ’s Gospel and not of the ideological cultural interests.

Jesuits and Jews, and the way we dare to think: A Jesuit’s reflections on James Bernauer’s Jesuit Kaddish

This essay explores James Bernauer’s Jesuit Kaddish as an extended reflection on the centuries-long troubled relationship between Jesuits and Jews, with attention to egregious instances of moral failure on the part of Jesuits. It investigates too Bernauer’s highlighting of instances of Jesuit spiritual resistance both to evil and to the undue prudence of cautious institutions. Forthright in weaving his own intellectual journey into the book, Bernauer movingly renders himself a theme for reflection, a scholar’s life-long interrogation of his own religious community, as gratitude, loyalty, and critical distance stand side by side. The concluding statement of Jesuit Repentance perfectly marks the transition from understanding to a performative expression of responsibility for the personal and systemic failures to which we are heirs.

Of People and Protest: Spiritual Resistance in Newar Hymns

The spiritual and the political at times merge together in the formation of powerful voice of protest in quest of social harmony. This is also seen in Newari cultural landscape. Newari hymns present that the collective imagination poetically transcends beyond the earthly domain of control of authority and social structures, revolting against the prevalent social order. The paper studies two historical Newari hymns “Shitala Maju” and “Bijaya Laxmi” from the perspective of the cultural resistance. When the hymns that are still sung as integral cultural performance in social life of the Newari settlements are analysed to examine the nature of their spiritual quest, the hymns, in the form of devotional poetry, emerge as a sharp critique of the then power structure. This paper argues that the Newari hymns raise the voice of people against the atrocities of both the state and/or the King in the form of spiritual resistance in its inner core though such poems externally display devotion as their primary ethos.

Dancing in War. Perception of Theater in Wartime Sarajevo: Pippo Delbono, Giorgio Strehler and Peter Schumann

„When I went to Sarajevo, I met a boy“, Pippo Delbono tells us. They talked, and suddenly the boy told him, „I saw an entire city in anger. I’ve seen people become monsters“. And Delbono replied, „And I’ve seen people look at me like I’m a monster. And all the things that turn into monstrosity“. Traveling, for Delbono, is a life experience that turns into a theatrical one at the same time. In 1998, Delbono created a play called War. The story of the boy he meets during his trip to Sarajevo is an introduction to Delbono’s magical world of theater through which he expresses the need to present a life that is born from suffering, illness, war, but in which we still „dancing“. Danzare nella guerra, „dancing in the war“, for Delbono means to oppose the war to the beauty, joy, and poetics of the movement. In 1995, Strehler directed a play called Mother Courage of Sarajevo based on the text written by Bertolt Brecht. For Strehler, Mother Courage of Sarajevo is not just a play, it is a symbol, a political act that portrays war as a human failure. Strehler based his vision of theater on Brecht’s epic theater. One year before, in 1993, with his puppet troupe, The Bread and Puppet, Peter Schumann came to Sarajevo to provide his support. In the first place, we want to show how Delbono’s conception of theater and experience during his trip to Sarajevo intertwine with the primary goal of Sarajevo theater in those years, as „spiritual resistance“, „spiritual needs“, „call to heal wounded souls“, a „super theater“, as Izudin Bajrović calls him, in which theater and life were the same. Through Strehler’s theater, his relationship with Sarajevo, and the breaking of the „fourth wall“, we will talk about theater as research of those eternal human values, but also returning to humane theater. In the third place, through Schumann’s work, we will show how the external theatrical reality intertwines with the internal one as a feature of strong political engagement.

Shaping the Noosphere: Geoethical values and spiritual resistance in Terres de l’Ebre, Catalonia, Spain

The concept of the Noosphere is of great importance when looking at the values underpinning the technocratic artifacts and technocracies (human physical technological objects and knowledge processes) by which Humans relate to the Geosphere through other human beings. In this sense, the Noosphere may inform geoethics as an environmental, social, and spiritual praxis and thinking aiming at ecological justice. The concept of the Noosphere represents the coexistence and coevolution of Humans and the Geosphere, overcoming the dichotomy between instrumental materialistic and intrinsic ecocentric values but considering the meaning of a constitutive dimension. Thus, the Noosphere becomes a concept for reconnection with the human community, the natural world, and the Divine, and develops into an ecological mysticism that, in turn, unfolds in resistance in hope as a kind of spiritual activism. The theoretical framework is illustrated with the case study of the Terres de L’Ebre in Catalonia (Spain).

JEWISH RESISTANCE IN AMERICAN HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE HOLOCAUST IN THE XX CENTURY: SOCIOCULTURAL ASPECTS

В статье анализируется эволюция представлений о понятии еврейского сопротивления Холокосту в американской историографии - от понятия исключительно вооружённого восстания, единственно признаваемой формы в 1960-70-е гг., до духовного сопротивления, ставшего предметом более детального изучения с начала 1980-х гг. Рассматриваются социокультурный контекст осмысления этой проблемы в США, а также позиции ключевых американских исследователей по интерпретации проблемы еврейского сопротивления, в том числе его значения. Делается вывод о специфике отражения еврейского сопротивления в американской историографии XX в., основывающейся как на личных взглядах исследователей, так и особенностях источниковой базы и развития исторической науки в США, что в конечном счёте повлияло на восприятие проблематики Холокоста в целом. The article analyzes the evolution of the concept of Jewish resistance to the Holocaust representation in American historiography - from the concept of an exclusively armed uprising, the only recognized form in the 1960s and 1970s, to spiritual resistance, which has become the subject of more detailed study since the early 1980s. The socio-cultural context of understanding this problem in the United States, as well as the positions of key American researchers on the interpretation of the problem of Jewish resistance, including its meaning, are considered. A conclusion is made about the specifics of the Jewish resistance reflection in the American historiography in the 20th century, based on both personal views of the researchers, the peculiarities of the source base and development of historical science in the United States, which ultimately influenced the perception of the Holocaust issue as a whole.

Righteous Among the Nations: Honoring Spiritual Resistance in a Time of Pandemics

Telling the stories of people who risked their lives to save victims of the Holocaust through music is the focus of a project called The Garden of the Righteous. This project was introduced in a recent article in the Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies, called “Righteous Among the Nations: Music Without Borders” (Eisner et al., 2019). This piece provides an update on the evolution of the project during a time of pandemics.