Repositório RCAAP

Given the current situation in the Islamic world, the wave of terrorist attacks and the global refugee crisis, it is worth questioning History without bias to avoid simplistic or ‘essentialist’ analyses and fostering confrontation between peoples, religions and cultures. By addressing periods of coexistence, conviviality and cultural exchanges between Christians and Muslims (as well as Jews) in the Iberian Peninsula and the Middle East, we aim to measure the degree and scope of those historically-documented interchanges.

The evangelist Saint Luke, who presents himself as a historian, dedicates his two works to his “Excellency Theophilus”. Who is this ‘illustrious’ figure? Are we dealing with a fictitious character, as was the custom in Greek literature, or a concrete historical person? In this text, new elements are presented with a view to answering this important question.

No summary/description provided

The university, a mediaeval foundation, cultivated theology from the outset, demanding scientific characteristics derived from Aristotle’s Organon, taking from there what was compatible with the revealed Word. But if the university has never disappeared, theology, with changing trends in society and with the progressive formalization of knowledge, has lost its privileged position both in the constitution of knowledge and in the university, deserving attention almost exclusively in private institutions of ‘Religions of the Book’. With the current crisis in the sciences that calls for a new knowledge, it is legitimate to propose the return of theology, including the theologies arising from religions, whose presence in cultures is inextinguishable.

The university exists in the context of the public space. Thus, the present text also approaches religious matters outside Faculties tied to religious traditions. These two approaches are different, but not incompatible; each envisions a specific aim. At the university, religious matters are: 1) a whole to be known and incorporated into organized knowledge; 2) a phenomenon to be interpreted as a symptom of a given social situation (for example, today, religious radicalism and certain compensatory uses of religion); 3) a field that enables us to think about fundamental human questions and social issues that are repressed in our homogenizing postmodern societies. This article develops these three lines of inquiry. Lastly, it advocates a vindication of differences and heterogeneity, through reflection on religious and social matters.

Based on the operative category of mediation, this article aims to explore the meaning of the Church for theology and vice versa. First, it presents the Church as a mediation comprising multiple mediations. Among these, theological mediation takes upon itself the position of being reflective, hermeneutic and critical. Thus, it is mediation of Scripture and of the world to the Church, and of the Church to itself; at the same time it is mediation of the Church to the world. In all these dimensions, theology sees itself as a theoretical and practical science, immersed in the ecclesial fabric and at the same time as its interpellator.

This article studies the teaching of moral theology at the Theological Faculty of Coimbra, beginning with the Pombal reform, which brought with it a new scientific methodology, up to the end of the ‘decadent school’ (1772-1910), at a time of confrontation of theological currents. It looks at the curricula, describing the concrete and detailed indications for the teaching staff, both for method and content. It proceeds to analyse the teachers and textbooks, completing an overview of the Faculty with the publications of contemporary Portuguese theologians (18th and 19th centuries) and comparing them with the most outstanding European authors in the Portuguese context.

In Portugal, from 1910 to 1968, there was no Faculty of Theology recognized by the Catholic Church. This did not mean that there was a complete absence of reflection and teaching of theology. This is evident from the example of the Centre for Catholic Culture of Oporto, founded in 1964, which had considerable impact on the renovation of the Church. Cases like the Instituto S. Tomás de Aquino (St. Thomas Aquinas Institute – ISTA) or the Instituto Superior de Estudos Teológicos (Higher Institute of Theological Studies – ISET) are good examples of a particular ‘style’ of doing theology. But it is also evident from the numerous publications that were being supplied from this ‘peripheral’ theological reflection. A thorough survey and study have still to be made, but a few steps have already been taken. This article is made up of brief notes that are echoes of these first steps.

The Humanities are thus designated because they derive from an anthropocentric conception of culture, knowledge and education predicated upon the human being. Enhanced by the biblical image of man created in the likeness of God, this idea prevailed in medieval thought and in Christian Renaissance humanism. Nowadays the Humanities are deemed essential to the construction of Europe in documents governing the European Higher Education Area. For more than two millennia (and notwithstanding the challenges faced by Humanities courses) educational institutions, and in due course universities, have been guardians of humanistic tradition and have promoted knowledge in all its facets.

Epigon of Martin Luther, John Calvin adhered to the Reformation, taking on the role of exegete and of theologian. As an exegete of the Scriptures, for him they are permanently the textual space where he learns to spell out the glory of God and the humanity of mankind. As a theologian, he feels connected to the ancient tradition of the Church, whose Fathers he visits as an attentive reader. Made a Genevan by the Genevans, it is from Geneva, as a figure facing two ways, that he contemplates his France and the Swiss cantons. It is a view that, combining reason and sentiment, takes a contemplative stance: how can the glory of God be made visible in people’s lives? It is also from there that he thinks of oikoumene as the means of overcoming all sectarian factionalism.

The unfinished journey that led to contemporary democratic regimes was unleashed both by the institutional systems created in ancient Athens as by the vision of inclusion generated in ancient Israel, a datum omitted in conventional narratives about democracy. Thus, theological and philosophical categories of the Judeo-Christian matrix are as indispensable as political categories to understand what is vision and what is system in the world of democracy. Without that Judeo-Christian matrix, any criticism of socialism degenerates into plain neo-liberalism and any criticism of liberalism turns into ideological socialism, two variants of uniform thought without a dialogical dimension.

“Go in peace!” With these words, Jethro, Moses’ Midianite father-in-law, says goodbye to his son-in-law, when Moses decides to go back to Egypt, along with Zipporah his wife and his children in order to check whether his Hebrew brothers, oppressed by the Pharaoh, are still alive. Moses had taken refuge in Midian, since the Pharaoh sought to kill him because he had mortally wounded an Egyptian. His process of integration in a foreign land was successful, especially because of his Midianite wife and the children that she gave him in Midian. Why return, then, to this society in turmoil? And how could this return be peaceful for Moses and his family? In this article, we will analyse exegetically the short narrative in Exodus 4.18-20. Although it is embedded in the larger story of the return of Moses to Egypt (Ex 4.18-31) and the macro-narrative of the exodus, it has a force of its own which gains its strength from both its literary configuration and the theological reflection that it promotes.

Taking Gn 2-3 as its point of departure, understood as an origin myth which does not, therefore, describe an ‘original sin’, this article puts forward a consequent new interpretation of Rm 5,12-21, a text cited at the 5th session of the Council of Trent, in the decree about original sin (17.6.1546). The exegesis that proposes it reads Paul’s text not as dogmatic theology, but as midráš, the Jewish method that explained canonical sacred text by searching for anthropological and theological sense for present situations. By reading the text as midráš, recourse to the uniqueness of ’ādām appears simply as a springboard to illustrate the universalist vision of the historical sinful condition of humanity before Jesus and, above all, to affirm the need – then – for gratuitous universal salvation mediated by Jesus. It is not a theology of ‘original sin’, but of redemption.

In 1928 Carl Dreyer directed The Passion of Joan of Arc, investing time in the representation of the faces of every character. It enabled the viewer to see into the soul of each of them in the stylized images of reality. Later, other directors like Robert Bresson and Andrei Tarkovski also used time as a means of revealing the t(T)ranscendent in the image in movement. In the early 2000s, a new genre of cinema appeared – expanded cinema – which has also made use of time as a form of resistance to consumer cinema, and which seeks to express the mystery of the world through its banality, which is also its beauty.

Even though ‘wisdom of the heart’ is both a biblical and a spiritual theological theme, this study articulates certain positions taken by St. Thomas Aquinas with certain others taken from recent philosophical reflection. For Aristotle wisdom is the theoretical intellectual habit that considers things in the light of ‘ultimate causes’. ‘Wisdom of the heart’ is practical and affective but also theoretical, for it maintains a reference to ultimate causes, to ‘divine things’, approaching the original sense of Philo-sophia. An essential point is that which refers itself to its ‘subject’: is it reason, is it the heart, or both? The solutions vary, it being for each of us to choose. First to be addressed is knowledge, the activity of ‘the power to be rational’, secondly, love, the driving force of ‘active life’, and, lastly, the chiasma between the two of them, stressing the range and the limits of feeling and of the ‘affective life’. This chiasma is not a simple one, for there are ‘things more loved than known’ – above all God, maximally loveable and incomprehensible.

The present article seeks to consider the multidimensional character of the believer’s life, taking as its starting point the metaphor of the heart, as an expression of mercy realised in manifold ways in the piety and rationality of the believer, but especially in devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Indeed, faith and piety cannot do without the contribution of cordial reason for a spirituality that transforms and leads to Christ. The text begins by stressing the Christian and incarnational realism of the “heart of Mary”, with its Biblical and anthropological bases, going on afterwards from devotion to theology and mysticism. In this way it seeks to show how devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary takes on the incarnation possible in the here and now, bearing witness to the silent drama of so vast a humanity that has lost its hope and its heart.

This text begins with a brief study of the concept of ‘heart’ in Holy Scripture, followed by an equally brief examination of this notion in the Holy Fathers and Middle Ages, with a view to coming to an understanding of how an authentic spirituality around the symbol of the Heart of Jesus open on the Cross came about; it then goes on to study the modern issue, from the development that it underwent from the 17th century to Vatican II, and the crisis from which this devotion has suffered since this Council. If finishes by putting forward forms of renovation, such as through a ‘semantic’ of the Heart, proposed by K. Rahner, and by setting out certain elements for a spirituality that might be valid in the Church of today.

The spear of the soldier that pricked/pierced the side of the Crucified reached His heart, committing the greatest trespass of all times. Human suffering passed through the heart of Christ until it reached up to God and divine compassion passed through the heart of the same Christ until it reached down to human suffering.

The present article, after a short introduction to the course and context of St. Augustine’s life, aims to set out a succinct note on the meaning of ‘heart’ for this author. After referring to the biblical and Christian sources that preceded St. Augustine, it goes on to consider how he sees the heart as the place of passage from the inner man (homo interior) to the spiritual man (homo spiritalis). Finally, after brief remarks on the Augustinian semantics of the word ‘heart’, the article concludes with the illustration of two biblical passages from the Gospel of St. Matthew, namely: “Blessed are the pure in heart” (5, 8) and “Learn from me, for I am meek and lowly in heart” (11, 29), in the light of texts resulting from the pastoral activity of St. Augustine’s preaching.

The aim of this essay is to develop a theological reflexion with a view to articulating what can be gathered from the New Testament about the heart of Mary with what is to be found in the Message of Fatima centred on the Immaculate Heart, and on the practical appeals to a repairing participation in the appeal that it has been making to the Church ever since the wedding of Canaan, so that all, just like the servants at the wedding, might do whatever he says (cf. Jo 2,5). This invitation is made concrete in the great promise, which is the indication of a simple way that a person of contemplation might follow in the practice of the prayer of the heart, the individual or family prayer of contemplation of the mysteries of the life of Christ in the recitation of the Rosary.