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There is a longstanding and widely held view, often associated with Catholicism, that intrinsically nonprocreative human sex acts are intrinsically immoral. Some philosophers who hold this view, such as Edward Feser, claim that they can defend the view on purely philosophical grounds by relying on the perverted faculty argument. This paper argues that Feser's defense of the perverted faculty argument does not work because Feser fails to recognize the full implications of the species-dependence of natural goodness. By drawing on the work of Peter Geach and Philippa Foot, this paper presents a view of natural goodness that adequately accounts for the species-dependence of such goodness. Using this adequate account, the paper argues that at least some intrinsically nonprocreative human sex acts contribute to human flourishing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an ancient Christian tradition of a 'good and holy death'. That tradition has largely been forgotten in the medicalization of death, which regards death solely as an enemy to be defeated at all costs. This paper examines the tradition of a holy death through the lens of Margaret Edson's play W;t, with particular attention paid to the use of John Donne's poetry in the play. The paper then uses theologian Allen Verhey's writings on the Christian art of dying as a means to understand the play in a Christian context, with special attention paid to the way in which it portrays Vivian Bearing, the play's protagonist, as a victim as much as a beneficiary of modern medicine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eileen Fagan's and Janice Thompson's thoughtful and provocative call for papers in the Mysticism and Politics section of the 2021 College Theology Society (CTS) Annual Meeting prompted me to think anew about the complex legacy of the Friendship House (FH) movement in the United States. Fagan and Thompson invited papers that would help CTS members reflect on how we might "approach our world with a 'mysticism of open eyes' and an 'attitude of encounter'" and to "think of and act on behalf of a future that shows Christianity embracing human dignity and common good for all God's people." A look to the past can help us work more effectively in the present for that kind of future. The history of Friendship House, a mid-twentieth-century Catholic interracial movement, combined spirituality and action for justice in ways that merit a closer look. More specifically, the archival and published material from the Friendship House movement in the 1940s illustrates the legacy of one Catholic action initiative centered on racial justice that combined spirituality and political action for the common good. This history can help contemporaries track ways that Catholics have been involved in such movements and might be engaged in similar efforts today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the public relations battles in the US media over Mexico's Unión Nacional Sinarquista (UNS), an explicitly Catholic social movement founded in 1937 that aimed to restore the Church to its traditional role in Mexican society and to reject the reforms of the revolutionary government. The sinarquistas shared many of the features of fascism and Nazism, the major global antidemocratic movements of the time, including a strident nationalism, authoritarian leanings, an emphasis on martial discipline and strict organizational structure, and a militant aesthetic. Both its ideological leanings and rapid growth (as many as 500,000 members by the early 1940s) led many US writers to suggest that the UNS represented a dangerous fifth-column threat to both Mexico and the United States. Others, particularly in the Catholic press, saw the UNS as an anticommunist organization that could actually help foster democracy in Mexico. For their part, UNS leaders defended themselves vociferously and sought to build relationships with influential US Catholics who could advocate for them in the press. By analyzing this debate, this paper both underscores the transnational characteristics of the UNS and highlights the crucial role of US public opinion in Mexican politics during the 1940s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers in detail the choosing of a language for the liturgy and sermons in Roman Catholic parishes in Belarus. The choice of the Belarusian language is part of a deliberate nation-building policy by the Catholic Church. Moreover, a whole network of local peculiarities, historical stereotypes, and political attitudes is concealed beneath the unified cover of a preference for the use of the Belarusian language. Based on interviews with clergy and religious activists, the article shows that the Roman Catholic Church repeatedly works out compromise solutions that allow it to adapt to the pressures of the state and believers going through a process of contradictory and conflicting nation-building. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines T. F. Torrance's engagement with Catholicism. It uncovers the breadth and depth of his ecumenical spirit, while concurrently shedding light on his own theological development. The article reveals an evolution in Torrance's posture toward Catholicism, moving from fierce criticism to critical praise, with the Second Vatican Council as a watershed in his thinking. His criticism was provoked by what he considered the fundamental problem with Catholicism (namely, the 'Latin heresy' in its theology); while his praise was elicited by the evangelical, christocentric, and ecumenical spirit of the Council. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Belarus is one of the least religious societies of the former Soviet Union. Nevertheless, two Christian denominations – the Belarusian Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church – do have a specific impact on social discourse, be it through facilitating the discourse on conservative moral values or linking their political and societal strategies to their Russian or Polish mother churches. However, neither of the churches has actively participated in civil protests criticizing the political regime. The protests before and after the Belarusian presidential election in August 2020 affected the churches and seriously challenged their self-perception. This article shows how the churches turned out to be heterogeneous structures with different levels of theological awareness in political crisis, civil self-consciousness, and the ability to mobilize. These findings and the fact that religion became a visible element of the 2020 protests significantly questions the concept of the church as a homogeneous and state loyal institution. Combining both empirical and theological approaches makes it possible to reassess the role of religion in post-Soviet social and political processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the grounds on which the Anglican philosopher and theologian Eric Mascall opposed the ordination of women, in a series of influential publications from the 1950s to the 1970s. It explores their basis in Mascall's understanding of the Church, the Incarnation and the ontological status of the sexes. It also considers the particular atmosphere of the Anglo-Catholicism of the period, convulsed by ecumenical advance at the Second Vatican Council and (as Anglo-Catholics understood it) the danger of moves towards the Protestant denominations in England. Whilst Mascall allowed that women priests might one day be embraced by the worldwide church, acting together, the peculiar atmosphere of the period seemed to make it the least auspicious time to make what would be a unilateral and far-reaching decision. The article also situates Mascall's interventions in the context of a wider realignment of conservatives, both evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics, within the Church of England. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the eulogy given by George Bell, then bishop of Chichester, at the London remembrance service held in July 1945 for Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bell's eulogy offers a unique form of marking a death. On the one hand he presented a traditional biography of Bonhoeffer, whilst at the same time he depicted Bonhoeffer's life as not over, but as having moved into a stage of glorified martyrdom. The article explores how Bell argued that Bonhoeffer's death offered the potential for life to a post-war Europe, raising issues with van Gennep's understanding of the relationship between the living and a dead person who had had no proper funerary rites. The article thus seeks to explain how Bell marked Bonhoeffer's death by presenting him as a man, a potential assassin and a martyr, in an attempt to secure an eternal earthly legacy for a man Bell believed had offered the world life through his death. The article is followed by an edition of the text of Bell's eulogy in full. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the priest's sick call in Irish folklore. The sick call normally involved the hearing of the dying person's confession; the administration of extreme unction, the last sacrament that a Roman Catholic was expected to receive; and (if possible) the reception of holy communion, viaticum, food for the journey. Drawing from the large body of stories in the Schools' Collection (gathered in 1937--8), the article shows how the greatest concern in the popular mindset was ensuring that the priest arrived in time to perform his duties. However, all manner of difficulties awaited him in the exercise of this ministry, from diabolical apparitions to the wiles of other humans, including other priests, who purposefully attempted to thwart his path. In this sense, Irish folk tales dramatize the administration of this sacrament into a rite of passage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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International discussions regarding the environment have too narrowly focused on contributions by secular actors. The Catholic Church, recognized for its influential role in the democratization processes of the 1990s, also has a long-standing position regarding climate change, yet remains understudied. How can the Church contribute to the international community's debates regarding the environment and climate change? Using the framework of constructivism and Jurgen Habermas' concept of institutional translation, I argue that the Church is a norm entrepreneur that promotes a foreign policy of human/integral ecology. The most recent articulation of this foreign policy is Pope Francis' encyclical Laudato Si' , which was referenced by the Holy See at the 26th UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in 2021. The Church's participation at COP26 was the latest animation and application of the Church's foreign policy; I examine the Church's efforts to change the narrative on the environment toward a shared, global responsibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Challenging the Eurocentric belief that abolitionism was a top-down process issued by colonial powers, this article explores the emergence of personal and group strategies for the emancipation of Black enslaved people in Libya. During the late Ottoman period, Italian antislavery activities operated in Libya and established a mission in Benghazi to host manumitted children referred to as 'Moretti ' ('little Moors'). The goal was to make these Moretti a group of local people close to the Catholic Church and the Italian government. The failures of the missionaries to accomplish these aims reveal the strategies and trajectories of Moretti as they negotiated their role in society, especially after Italian occupation in 1911. Historical sources reveal an informal web of solidarity using antislavery societies and creating forms of urban and social autonomy. This article details actions of solidarity among Black enslaved persons that took place in late Ottoman and Italian colonial Libya, which challenges Eurocentric antislavery narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reexamines the life of Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza, a Spanish noblewoman who traveled to London in 1605 hoping to be martyred in service of the Catholic faith. By placing her at the intersection of a series of international, intra- and interconfessional tensions created by the sustained religious division of post-Reformation England, Carvajal emerges as a sophisticated political actor. She offers not only a unique account of female Catholic agency and opposition in early Stuart England, but also a lens through which to view the nature of religious identity and division in a period of Anglo-Spanish peace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Esme Cleall observes that for nineteenth-century British missionary families ill-health was constructed as being 'reflexive of and contributory to a specifically missionary identity'. This article argues that while this was a persistent theme, a new and significantly different discourse emerged emphasizing missionary families' health. Children were central to this discursive shift. The article focuses on missionary children's health, using selected Anglo-American cases. There was an uneasy overlap of religiously motivated rhetoric that still expected illness and death to be part of missionary childhood experience, and a professionalized discourse that redefined missionary families as sites of health and well-being. This culminated in medical and academic literature within religious and missionary circles that constructed missionaries' children as a new category. Thus churches responded both to the development of the medical profession and to the development of modern child-centred thinking and practices, in the process developing a new missiological or theological response to childhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does religion motivate and intensify nationalism, or does religion moderate and even suppress nationalism? Six kinds of relationships between nationalism and religion are critically reviewed: nationalism as a modern religion in competition with traditional religions; religious origins of the "Chosen People" as the mythomoteur of nationalism; religious exclusion as nation-building; religious influences on national policies; influence of religious observance on national identification; and religiously based "civilizations" transcending nationalisms. Western Christian experience with nationalism is not generalizable due to the institutional autonomy and supranational organization of the Catholic Church. Western European nationalisms were premised on religious sectarian homogeneity, and the homogenous "confessional state" served as the template of European nation-states. Furthermore, I argue that the late medieval eradication of Muslims and Jews across Western Europe prefigured sectarian and ethnonational purges of the following centuries. Finally, I argue that different configurations of religion and nationalism depend on two critical conditions: the degree to which the dominant religious tradition is doctrinally supraethnic and institutionally transnational, and the religious identity of the main adversary in the constitutive conflict that culminated in national statehood. The crises of Marxism and liberalism provide the context for the resurgence of religion and nationalism at present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Trans-Universal Zombie Church of the Blissful Ringing is a religion that emerged in the context of a period of political uprising in Slovenia in 2012–13 and later consolidated into a church that now claims 12,000 members. We use the lens of invented religion and interviews conducted with observers and participants in 2017 to demonstrate ways in which the Zombie Church has been an unusually effective actor in contemporary Slovenian political discourse and, indeed, has broken ground by spotlighting challenges in the young republic's negotiation of the legal and cultural relationships between church, state, and civil society. Part 1 explores the context that led to the mobilization of Zombie as a multivalent symbol for political critique. Part 2 looks at the church's tenets, its success in compelling changes in Slovenia's registration process, and the challenge is its advocates raise to Slovenian church-state structures and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]