Online theology conference to discuss "Deus caritas est"

The Vatican has organised an online videoconference of leading theologians to discuss Benedict XVI’s encyclical, Deus Caritas Est. You’ll be able to follow the conference live (in Real Player) via the website of the Congregation of the Clergy, and the texts of the addresses will be posted later on the site.

For more details, see ZENIT.

The meaning of freedom

(I wrote this post yesterday for Lyn Perry’s “Daily Brew” column, and I’m reproducing it here.)

In the history of the church, human “freedom” has often been understood simply as the ability to choose between alternative options. I can choose either A or B, and therefore I am “free.” But such an understanding of freedom is absurd: merely standing at a crossroads does not make me free. Freedom is not the abstract ability to choose between two paths—rather it is the concrete choice of one particular path.

Indeed, the mere ability to choose can lead to unfreedom. Just think of our consumer culture, our supermarket shelves lined with a thousand possibilities. I may experience such possibilities not as an enlargement of my personal life, but as a confinement—I may find myself paralysed by choice. In this case, the ability to choose between alternative options has become enslavement, paralysis, unfreedom.

But according to the New Testament, true freedom is not an abstract ability to choose. It is not the state of the consumer in a supermarket of possibilities; it is not the motionless state of a traveller at the crossroads. Rather, freedom is a specific movement of my personal life—it is an act in which my whole self goes out of itself towards the other. Or, to put it simply, freedom is love—not love as a static possibility, but love as an act and movement of my life in one very specific direction, in relationship to another person.

I am not free in relation to my wife if I am standing at the crossroads, able to say either “Yes” or “No” to her. I am free in relation to her only when I go out of myself towards her with a decisive and unqualified “Yes.” Similarly, freedom before God is not the ability either to choose God or to reject him. Freedom before God is the movement of life in which my whole being responds to God with an unqualified “Yes.” As long as this “Yes” is merely one possibility alongside others, I am not yet free. Only in the act of saying this “Yes” do I enter into the life of freedom.

This is the freedom of self-giving obedience, the freedom of joyful service, the freedom of love.

Ash Wednesday

Today is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. Pope Benedict XVI has exhorted believers to face the Lenten season “not ... with an ‘old’ spirit, as if it were a heavy and tedious obligation, but with the new spirit of the one who has found in Jesus and his paschal mystery the meaning of life, and feels that everything must make reference to him.”

There are also some valuable reflections on the meaning of Lent over at utownchurch.

Ten propositions on prayer

This wonderful list by Kim Fabricius has been posted previously at both Connexions and utownchurch. There is enough here to write a whole book on prayer—but, better still, there is perhaps even enough here to prompt us to pray.

1. There is no more outrageous and presumptuous idea than that we ought to be able to pray. Prayer is an impossible possibility. Prayer is miracle, prayer is resurrection from the dead.

2. Prayer is a completely useless activity, a total waste of time (Herbert McCabe). To ask if prayer “works” is to reduce it to a kind of magic. Prayer is not in the least bit necessary; it is more than necessary.

3. We never begin to pray, we always enter into prayer that has already begun before us and without us, the prayer of the church. We may pray alone, but we are never alone when we pray. “Our Father...”

4. Prayer is a dangerous activity. In prayer we do not enter the kitty’s basket but the lion’s den. Prayer is a transformative activity. In prayer we are changed—and change hurts.

5. Prayer is not a private activity; indeed prayer is the most political activity in which a Christian can engage. “To fold your hands in prayer is to begin an uprising against the world” (Karl Barth).

6. It is nonsense to suggest that prayers of thanksgiving trump prayers of petition. We are children of God. What would you think of your own child if she always went about thanking, never asking, pestering? You would think, “What an obnoxious little goody two-shoes!”

7. Yet prayer does not begin with the mouth, prayer begins with the eyes. Prayer begins with simple attentiveness.

8. It is also nonsense to ask whether or not God answers prayer. The Father is the object of prayer, the Spirit is the subject of prayer, the Son is the predicate of prayer. How then can God not answer his own prayers? If God seems silent, it is only because he is listening—and thinking about his answer. And as for those answers, William Temple said, “When I pray, coincidences happen.”

9. Do you have arid times of prayer? What else! Wherever did we get the idiotic and disabling idea that prayer must be a richly rewarding experience?

10. Ultimately, the question of prayer is the question of God: What kind of God do I believe in?

God is beautiful

“The most elementary statement of theological aesthetics is that God is beautiful: not only that God is beauty or the essence and archetype of beauty, nor even only that God is the highest beauty, but that ... God is beauty and also beautiful, whose radiance shines upon and is reflected in his creatures.... God’s beauty is delight and the object of delight, the shared gaze of love that belongs to the persons of the Trinity.... True beauty is not the idea of the beautiful, a static archetype in the ‘mind’ of God, but is an infinite ‘music,’ drama, art, completed in—but never ‘bounded’ by—the termless dynamism of the Trinity’s life.”

—David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), p. 177.

Essential culture for theologians

Over the past weeks I have thoroughly enjoyed this series of “essential culture for theologians.” The posts in this series have covered everything from films to philosophy, from paintings to poets, from architecture to rock-and-roll. I think the best aspect of the series was the participation of so many different people: guest-contributors included Kim Fabricius, Joanna C., Joe Cathey, Stephen Cox, Tim Hormon, Chris Tessone, Jim West, and Tyler Williams.

Thanks to all of you who contributed and commented throughout the series—here is a full list of the 14 posts (please remind me if I have forgotten any of them!):

• Essential paintings for theologians
• More essential paintings for theologians
• Essential ikons for theologians
• Essential novels for theologians
• Essential poets for theologians
• Essential plays for theologians
• Essential philosophy for theologians
• Essential history for theologians
• Essential compositions for theologians
• Essential popular music for theologians
• Essential films for theologians
• Essential spiritual and devotional writings for theologians
• Essential travel for theologians
• Essential buildings for theologians