Search Results (10)

The emergence of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) poses unprecedented challenges to homiletic practice, compelling a shift in focus from the textual proficiency of the machine to the ontological status of preaching itself. Through a theological-pastoral analysis anchored in sacramental dogmatics and in dialogue with digital religion, this article scrutinizes the validity of algorithmic mediation in the ministry of the Word. The study establishes a tripartite normative framework—assistance, delegation, and substitution—demonstrating that while technical support is legitimate in preparatory tasks, the syntactic success of generative models acts as a critical mirror, exposing a pre-existing crisis of frequently generic and standardized preaching. It concludes that, within a sacramental framework, the homily constitutes an unrepeatable liturgical and spiritual event, requiring the authority of an embodied subject vulnerable to their own message. Full article

This article explores the emergence of a new philosophical religion arising from the intersection of psychedelic ministry, transpersonal psychology, and participatory metaphysics. Framed within the evolution of Western consciousness and drawing from Friedrich Schelling’s participatory metaphysics, Stanislav Grof’s findings, and Jorge Ferrer’s participatory turn, this article joins the metaphysical and spiritual conversation rising within the psychedelic ecosystem. These needs include spiritual and metaphysical integration of some psychedelic phenomena as well as metaphysical foundations for a sacramental understanding of psychedelics. Arguing that psychedelics can function sacramentally and grant participatory access to the creative ground of reality, this article proposes transpersonal ministry as a framework that can meet the spiritual and metaphysical demands of psychedelics. In dialogue with Schelling’s vision of a philosophical religion and Ferrer’s participatory pluralism, transpersonal ministry offers churches, ministers, and congregants a shared language that unites experiential participation with metaphysical inquiry to provide a non-dogmatic framework for integrating transformative states. Full article

The Holy See is an absolute monarchy, both as a political and as a spiritual entity. The Second Vatican Council indicated, retrieving biblical terms and metaphors, a new way of giving value to the whole people of God, the laity (laos theou), constituted by baptism. Rather than a societas perfecta in a pyramidal system, the intention was to declericalise and in this sense democratise the church and its decision-making, not least seeking to secure its witness in an ever more secular world. Even if a sacramental and ontological difference is maintained, this indicates clergy are no longer a first class of believers against which the laity would be a second class; rather, they are rooted and stand with and within the whole people of God with their specific vocation and ordination. The notion of the royal and universal priesthood of believers, taken from 1 Peter 2:9 and emphasised by Luther and other reformers as they distributed power between ordained and not ordained leaders, was visible in the Second Vatican Council and finds new enactment in the synodality process which culminated in the Ordinary Synod in Rome, in October 2024. Based on his own theology of the people of God, developed during the dictatorship and economic oppression in Argentina, with strong cultural and religious connotations, Pope Francis seeks to further major involvement of the laity and especially of women in the church’s administration and transformation processes. Not surprisingly, this process has been receiving criticism both from those who find it is not going far enough and from those who believe the process has already gone far too far. Based on bibliographical and documental research, the intention of this article is to describe and analyse the notion of the people of God as proposed by Pope Francis and its forms of concretisation including its deficiencies, as well as, in dialogue with ongoing debates on populism, highlight the precariousness of any “people” as a concept and as a reality. A dynamic notion of “people” and a theological accountability of the people and the clergy towards each other, towards God and towards the world can do justice to both the ambiguities and the irreplaceability of the people as citizens of the church as well as the world. Full article

Celebrating the sacrament of penance or confession restores a state of grace in a person’s soul. This is vital for a life of faith to which all human persons are called, but only Roman Catholic believers can experience. Celebrating this sacrament requires a private and confidential conversation between an ordained priest and a baptized person. By reviewing sensory perceptions, we conclude that being in the “same location” is not necessary for two persons to celebrate penance. As the world adjusted to the recent COVID-19 pandemic, using distance technologies facilitated meaningful communications, including therapeutic conversations around mental health. We believe that using visual technologies can also help celebrate the sacrament of penance or confession. We suggest a pastoral adaptation may help bring absolution to persons from various locations seeking forgiveness. We believe our suggestions are ontologically probable and canonically adaptable. Full article

Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine can be recollected as a fossilized image of the first digital computer. It is essentially distinguished from all prior and analog computers by the transcription of the ‘mechanical notation’, the separation of the mnemonic ‘store’ from the cybernetic ‘mill’, and the infinite miniaturization of its component parts. This substitution of finite space for an accelerating singularity of time creates the essential rupture of the digital, in which a singular calculation of mechanical force stands opposed to the universal totality of space. Babbage’s criticism of Christian doctrine to preserve the mathematical consistency of mechanics and computing would result in the collapse of the Christian Trinity into a digital theology. This Arian subordinate difference of the Son to the Father would then be infinitely transcribed in a technical contradiction that would threaten to annul the metaphysical ground of any machine. Against digital and postdigital theologies alike, this rupture can only be repaired by a dialectical analysis of the digital into a hyperdigital grammar, which is created by Christ the Logos in a trinitarian ontology of computers. Digital computers can thus be vindicated from theological suspicion as incarnationally accelerated calculators of the sacraments, or ‘sacramental engines’ of the digital age. Full article

Much of the work surrounding the crisis of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church has focused on how the abuse remained simultaneously widespread while being kept private, but not how the effects of the abuse impact the liturgy itself. Paying particular attention to PTSD, moral injury, and moral distress, this article examines how systemic clergy perpetuated sexual abuse (CPSA) has damaged liturgical efficacy for both abuse survivors and Roman Catholic laity. Focusing on PSTD, moral injury, and moral distress frames the issue in a way that illuminates the church’s ongoing role in preventing the healing of survivors and limiting the potential for grace in the sacraments. In light of the exploration, we suggest that in order for widespread healing we must move towards a relational ontology that realigns with the survivors and reject language and practices that blame survivors for their discomfort in the church, instead affirming the dignity in the options to seek grace and relationship with God outside of the Roman Catholic tradition. Full article

This essay engages with some of the experiences and metaphysics of Indigenous peoples who are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormonism/LDS/the Church) by responding to their structural construction as “Lamanites”. Lamanites have been interpreted within Mormonism to be ancestors of various global Indigenous peoples of the “Americas” and “Polynesia”. This essay reveals how contemporary Indigenous agency by presumed descendants of the Lamanites, who embrace both an Indigenous and a Mormon identity, shifts the cosmology of the Church. Interpretations of TheBook of Mormon that empower contemporary Indigenous agency paradoxically materialize a divinely inspired cultural rebellion within the Church itself. However, this tension that is mediated by Lamanites in the Church is not framed as an exclusive response to the Church itself but, rather, to a larger global hegemony of coloniality to which the Church is subject. These Lamanite worldviews can be understood as a process of restoring ancestral Indigenous sacraments (rituals) through Mormon paradigms, which are found and nurtured in the cracks and fissures of both the material and ontological infrastructure of Mormonism’s dominant paradigm. When Indigenous Mormons assert autonomous authorship of their own cosmogony and metaphysics, the Church beliefs of restoring a ‘primitive Christian church’ and ‘becoming Gods’ is creatively transformed into a more relevant and liberating possibility here and now. Full article

How to deal with religious ideas in religious history (and in history in general) has recently become a matter of discussion. In particular, a number of authors have framed their work around the concept of ‘sacramental ontology,’ that is, a unified vision of reality in which the secular and the religious come together, although maintaining their distinction. The authors’ choices have been criticized by their fellow colleagues as a form of apologetics and a return to integralism. The aim of this article is to provide a proper context in which to locate the phenomenon of sacramental ontology. I suggest considering (1) the generation of the concept of sacramental ontology as part of the internal dialectic of the Christian intellectual world, not as a reaction to the secular; and (2) the adoption of the concept as a protection against ontological nihilism, not as an attack on scientific knowledge. Full article

In recent years, authorities in mainland China have renewed their call for the sinicization of Christianity through theological discourse. Given that Christianity is largely expressed in visible, worship-based ways, such as music (songs), rhetoric (sermons), rituals (sacraments), symbols (crosses, garments, banners, etc.), posture and gesture (genuflecting, lifting hands, etc.), one wonders at the implication of this development. Might there be an alternative approach to sinicization? This essay seeks to investigate the feasibility of sinicized Christianity from the ontology of musicking as purveyed through the practice of congregational song. Full article

I suggest that God’s life is the Spirit’s eternal interpretation of the Word as the perfect sign (representation) of the Father. Creaturely interpretations imperfectly mirror the perfect coherence of being and representation that is God’s life. When we respond to the incarnate Word we are adopted into the place occupied by the Spirit within the Trinity. By responding to the Word with the fullness of our being we are incorporated into the divine dynamic of truthful representation and loving response. Ontologically, this approach invites a retrieval of the idea of “vestiges of the Trinity in creation”. Epistemologically, it affirms that the basis of God’s self-communication (revelation) is the coherence of Being and Representation within God’s-self. Ethically, it challenges us to respond to suffering and injustice as these are illuminated by the incarnate Word, and to act as mediators for the incorporation of the whole creation into God’s life. The sacrament of the Eucharist is a sign that actualizes what it signifies, where what it signifies is the gift of participation in the divine life. Full article