Ignatian Humanism: A Dynamic Spirituality for the 21st Century: A Dynamic Spirituality for the Twenty-first Century - Softcover

Modras, Ronald

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0829419861 ISBN 13: 9780829419863

Verlag: LOYOLA PR, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order, is one of a mere handful of individuals who has permanently changed the way we understand God. In this vividly written and meticulously researched book, Ronald Modras shows how Ignatian spirituality retains extraordinary vigor and relevance nearly five centuries after Loyola’s death. At its heart, Ignatian spirituality is a humanism that defends human rights, prizes learning from other cultures, seeks common ground between science and religion, struggles for justice, and honors a God who is actively at work in creation.

The towering achievements of the Jesuits are made tangible by Modras’s vivid portraits of Ignatius and five of his successors: Matteo Ricci, the first Westerner at the court of the Chinese emperor; Friederich Spee, who defended women accused of witchcraft; Karl Rahner, the greatest Catholic theologian of the twentieth century; Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the scientist-mystic; and Pedro Arrupe, the charismatic leader of the Jesuits in the years following Vatican II.

“Ignatian Humanism puts into perspective our contemporary search for a spirituality that responds both to our search for meaning and desire for God.”
—John W. Padberg, S.J., director, Institute of Jesuit Sources

 

“Modras integrates fascinating history, contemporary theology, and inspiring spirituality with consistent focus on central issues for our day.”
—Joann Wolski Conn, associate professor of religious studies, Neumann College

 

“A stunning book! Modras has profiled a number of Jesuit thinkers and activists as role models for our time—revitalizing humanism as a model for moderns.”
—Leonard Swidler, professor of Catholic thought and inter-religious dialogue, Temple University

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ronald Modras is professor of theology at Saint Louis University. He is the author of five other books, including Paul Tillich's Theology of the Church: A Catholic Appraisal and The Catholic Church and Antisemitism: Poland, 1933–1939.  He lectures throughout the United States, England, Israel, and Germany. He currently resides in Webster Groves, Missouri. Additional information about his work can be found at www.RonaldModras.com.

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“Ignatian Humanism puts into perspective our contemporary search for a spirituality that responds both to our search for meaning and desire for God.”
—John W. Padberg, S.J., director, Institute of Jesuit Sources

“Modras integrates fascinating history, contemporary theology, and inspiring spirituality with consistent focus on central issues for our day.”
—Joann Wolski Conn, associate professor of religious studies, Neumann College

“A stunning book! Modras has profiled a number of Jesuit thinkers and activists as role models for our time—revitalizing humanism as a model for moderns.”
—Leonard Swidler, professor of Catholic thought and inter-religious dialogue, Temple University

 

Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order, is one of a mere handful of individuals who has permanently changed the way we understand God. In this vividly written and meticulously researched book, Ronald Modras shows how Ignatian spirituality retains extraordinary vigor and relevance nearly five centuries after Loyola’s death. At its heart, Ignatian spirituality is a humanism that defends human rights, prizes learning from other cultures, seeks common ground between science and religion, struggles for justice, and honors a God who is actively at work in creation.
    The towering achievements of the Jesuits are made tangible by Modras’s vivid portraits of Ignatius and five of his successors: Matteo Ricci, the first Westerner at the court of the Chinese emperor; Friederich Spee, who defended women accused of witchcraft; Karl Rahner, the greatest Catholic theologian of the twentieth century; Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the scientist-mystic; and Pedro Arrupe, the charismatic leader of the Jesuits in the years following Vatican II.
 

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Ignatian Humanism

A Dynamic Spirituality for the Twenty-First CenturyBy Ronald Modras

Loyola Press

Copyright © 2004 Ronald Modras
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780829419863
INTRODUCTION

Ignatian Humanism: A Spirituality for the Twenty-first Century

Book titles commonly call for some explanation. This title all but cries out for one. Virtually every word of it raises questions. First, Ignatian. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, a humanist? If humanism implies anything, it implies a high regard for human freedom. Wasn’t it Ignatius Loyola who wrote something to the effect that what he sees as white he will believe to be black if the Catholic Church hierarchy says so? That hardly sounds humanistic. Putting together the words Ignatian and humanism is curious, to say the least. What do I mean by humanism?

Or by spirituality, for that matter? Doesn’t spirituality have to do with escaping from life’s temptations and challenges by going off someplace where people pray all day? What does that have to do with life in the twenty-first century? Don’t Ignatius Loyola and the Jesuits go back to the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation, when they battled Protestants as part of the Catholic Counter-Reformation? Most Catholics and Protestants have risen above those old quarrels. What does the sixteenth century have to say to the twenty-first? Answers to some of these questions simply raise more questions.

Most of this book is devoted to five Jesuit humanists. In that case, why not just call it Jesuit Humanism? Or, if it’s about spirituality, why not Jesuit Spirituality? Why Ignatian? Again, for that matter, why Humanism? Most of these questions will be addressed in the chapters that follow. Some will take the entire book to answer adequately. Others, like the last, can be dealt with at the outset.

A book with Ignatian Humanism in the title will not, I hope, mislead librarians into cataloging it next to Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, or Jean-Paul Sartre. This book assumes, on the contrary, that humanism is more encompassing than its narrower, purely secular subspecies. And it makes dual claims. One is that Ignatian spirituality is rooted not in the Catholic Counter-Reformation conflict with Protestantism but in sixteenth-century Renaissance humanism, indeed that its humanistic features are so numerous and intrinsic as to justify calling it a form of humanism. The second claim is that those humanist features make it exceptionally relevant for anyone—not just Roman Catholics and maybe not just Christians either—looking for a way to live a responsible spiritual life at the dawn of a new century, in which the only constant seems to be change. For a clearer understanding of the two foregoing claims, the reader deserves some immediate explanation of what I mean by three words under discussion here: spirituality, humanism, and Ignatian. The first two have evolved from ideas that reach back deep into the history of Western culture. They have come to acquire disparate, sometimes competing definitions, necessitating the addition of modifying adjectives that point to their particular historical provenance. The third word is one of those adjectives.

 

Spirituality

Spirituality is a word moderns tend to identify with matters otherworldly and exotic. It conjures up images of hermits in deserts and gurus on mountaintops. When modified by Catholic adjectives like Benedictine, Carmelite, or Trappist, it brings to mind clicking rosary beads and silent cloisters. In the early 1960s, Protestant theologian Paul Tillich lamented that the words spirit and spiritual had lost any meaning for modern Western culture. Books surveying the religious landscape spoke of secular cities and the death of God. Spirituality was associated with matters pious and churchy. Anyone could see that the churches were in trouble and that the 1960s were anything but pious.
If he were alive today, Tillich would express pleasant surprise at the comeback spirituality has made in the last thirty years in North America— but then quickly add, he knew we couldn’t do without it. Bookstore shelves are crammed with titles ranging from the classics of Western spirituality to Eastern mysticism, Blessed Mother Teresa, and New Age. Without much reflection on the difference, people—the younger generation in particular— identify themselves as being spiritual but not religious. Though church life is in decline, interest in spirituality is thriving—which is not to say that the moguls of popular culture acknowledge it as something central to the human enterprise. The mass media still tend to see spirituality as a fringe phenomenon best ignored except at Christmas and Easter or at times like the 9/11 terrorist attacks when “God bless America” came so easily to the lips.

The resurgent interest in spirituality merits reflection, if only because it tells us something important about ourselves. At the same time that science and technology are creating new forms of life and already have the basic knowledge and skills to clone human life, we are experiencing a need to talk about ourselves in terms other than DNA molecules and genes. When biologists demonstrate how little genetic difference there is between human beings and higher primates, when anthropologists discover the bones of ancestors that we share with those primates on our evolutionary family tree, we are drawn to focus on that difference. There is something at our core that resists being reduced to merely bigger brains and clever thumbs.

The word spirit is how we talk about that core. The English—along with the Italian and Spanish—goes back to the Latin spiritus, which, like its Hebrew and Greek counterparts, has to do with wind, the air we breathe, and, as a result, life. Spirit is what the prescientific ancients saw as the difference between a living person and a corpse. In German, Geist links spirit to the Geisteswissenschaften, the “sciences of the spirit” that study the full range of human endeavor and its achievements. The French esprit suggests that spirit has something to do with being fully alive. All these cognates give us some idea why spirit and spirituality resisted being swept into the dictionary’s dustbin for obsolete words. They point to something inalienable and central to who we are. They point to that difference, that something more, that makes it possible—how did someone put it?—for the rubbing of horsehair over gut to come out as Beethoven’s First Violin Sonata. They point to that which makes us unique . . . which makes us human.

It is also in that dimension we call the human spirit that we experience what we in the West, under the influence of the Judeo-Christian tradition, call the Holy Spirit. That familiar but confusing compound is translated more prosaically as holy wind or holy breath. Because the Hebrew for holy (qadosh) refers to that which is out of the ordinary, Holy Spirit became the way the Hebrew and Christian scriptures talk about God not far off in some seventh heaven but as a mysterious power (like the wind) that is beyond the ordinary and yet experienced as a presence (like the breath we inhale and feel deep within us).

Spirituality is about the experience at the core of our beings of something— a power, presence, drive, longing—that is beyond...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: LOYOLA PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2004
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0829419861
• ISBN 13: 9780829419863
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 346
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland