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Abstract
This article explores the contingency of the encounter between Jesus of Nazareth as representative of YHWH and Mary Magdalene that occurs at Jesus’s tomb. It interprets two important passages from the Gospel of Mark (Mk 16:1–8) and the Gospel of John (Jn 20:11–18) in order to reflect upon the Absolute which arises from this encounter. In Mark’s Gospel, the result of the encounter is the reference to a never-derivable and unrepresentable beginning, on which the text of Mark is built. The Gospel of John, which refers to Mark, concretizes this as the beginning of love and the covenant partnership between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. It is a contingent encounter because there is no external necessity for it. The crucial point is that the event of God only manifests itself in unforeseen encounters. Therefore the experience of an encounter which sets a new beginning in motion and the existence of God are inextricably linked.
Abstract
This article explores how Revelation’s Jewish Diaspora negotiated the Roman colonial situation of Asia Minor through their stance on idol food. Scholars have suggested that John wrote to Christians suffering imperial persecution under Domitian. Still, others have proposed a perceived crisis, a prophetic rivalry relating to Greco-Roman society, or a summons to a holy war. However, some of these mostly depoliticizing trends presuppose the so-called partying of the ways and neglect to explore the centrality of ritual food and its association with Roman imperial authority. Drawing on Frantz Fanon’s analysis of colonial situations and sociological notions of food and eating, I map how John and the inscribed Jewish Diaspora communities of Revelation turned idol food into a locus for negotiating Roman colonial authority in Asia Minor circa 100 C.E.
Abstract
Global Catholicism is a way of studying as well as a field of study. Global Catholic studies are practical theological, offering both theological and sociological insight, and more besides. At the dawn of its third millennium, the Catholic Church credibly reflects the world, whether in spaces where Global Catholicism has a significant presence or where it is simply a dialogue partner. The new quincentenary of church life cannot be predicted any more than previous quincentenaries. Certain realities are likely: dramatic population explosions and transitions will be a thing of the past. Religious change correlated with Global Catholicism is a way of studying as well as a field of study. Global Catholic studies point the way to a lived ecclesiology and renewed missiology. The reception of the Second Vatican Council, precursor of an emerging cosmopolitan Catholicism, will continue.
Abstract
The reshaping of Catholic institutional life by global Catholic regions and the re-imagination of Global Catholicism is matched by developments and disruptions in global Catholic governance. Centralization following the European model was possible when the Church was primarily a European church with a global reach and even when it transitioned toward a Euro-Atlantic core. Internal and external pressures have exhausted that model but the precise outlines of the emerging one remain unclear. Previously, a kind of symbolic imperium combined with the blunt instrument of permitting or forbidding, and by the late nineteenth century the now taken-for-granted centralized naming of bishops. The power and appeal of the sacramental economy allowed for a shared theological culture even where actual cultures differed dramatically. Mutual understanding of distinctive contexts and values was not critical as long as leaders shared Roman training and ordinary members responded to the call to “pay, pray, and obey” within the sacral system. The “sign of the times” is the exhaustion of this model and the potential emergence of new ones based on mutual self-recognition. The call and logic of catholicity remains but becomes more challenging when it needs to be explicit. This is at the heart of the Second Vatican Council, debates regarding the Council, and the global leadership of the Church from the first Synod of Bishops in 1967 through the Synod on Synodality of 2023–24 and beyond.
Abstract
Since the Second Vatican Council, the basic functioning of ecclesial institutions around the world has been unchanged. What has changed is the global operation and distribution of ecclesial capacity. This simple and massive fact has dramatic implications and underlines the need for a new field of study: Global Catholicism.