Academic literature on the topic 'Saint Peter Catholic Church (Saint Paul, Minnesota)'

Saint Mark the Evangelist (Cyrene around 10 AD – Alexandria April 25th 68 AD) was a member of the Jewish tribe o Levi. He is nephew of Saint Barnabas, close associate of Saint Paul and Peter to whom he was secretary. In the New Testament he is mentioned eight times and Mary mother of John called Mark is mentioned for the ninth time. The first Christian community in Jerusalem gathered in his mother Mary’s home. According to some sources Jesus ate his last supper in Mark’s mother Mary’s house. He is worshipped by: The Roman Catholic Church, The Orthodox Church, The Coptic Church, the eastern Catholic churches, the Lutheran Church. He is multiple patron. Worship of Saint Mark the evangelist in Croats’ Christian traditional culture is reflected in legends; cathedrals and churches consecrated to that evangelist; toponyms; chrematonyms; processions and blessings of fields, crops, vineyards; folk celebrations (fairs); helping the poor; cult shrines; folk divinations and sayings; bonfires; oral lyrical poems; prayers. The paper cites the results of field research conducted from the year 1997 until the year 2016. About fifty legends, prayers, customs, rituals, processions, divinations have been originally recorded among Croatian Catholics in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Serbia. The paper (re)constructs the life of Saint Mark the Evangelist on the basis of the New Testament, tales and legends. Further, the aim of the paper is to save from the oblivion the old legends, customs, rituals, processions, oral lyrical poems, prayers, divinations and to point out their social and aesthetic function using the multidisciplinary interpretation. Inductive-deductive method and methods of description, comparison, analysis and synthesis are used alongside the filed research work.

AbstractThroughout the second half of the twentieth century, Latin America became something of a dumping ground for U.S. priests suspected of sexual abuse, with north-to-south clerical transfers sending predatory priests to countries where pedophilia did not exist in any kind of ontological sense. This article, in response, engages the case of Father David Roney of the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota. After a career of accusations and payouts, with Roney entering and exiting Church-mandated therapy programs, Bishop Raymond Lucker retired this notoriously predatory priest to rural Guatemala in 1994. By placing Roney beyond the reach of psychiatrists, psychologists, and spiritual directors, the Roman Catholic Church leveraged a psychological and juridical difference between two geographical settings in order to render the pedophilia of this priest effectively non-existent, thereby insulating itself from further reputational damage and additional litigation. Given that the Roman Catholic Church has long been an empirical point of reference for studies of subject formation—from pastoralism and mysticism to ritual and the confession—this article adds that the Church also provides ample evidence of an opposite process: of unmaking people.

AbstractThe rise of the global market economy has advanced forms of centrist, corporatist and statist rule that are insensitive to local indicators that this novel social order is ecologically, and socially, unsustainable. For many political theologians, and for secular political ecologists, the related crises of species extinction and climate change, combined with structural economic crisis, require a fundamental relocalization of the global economy and of the harvesting of natural resources. The contest between the political economy of global ‘free’ trade and a relocalized economy and polity bears analogies with debates around the relation between the local and the universal in Christian ecclesiology. In the eucharistic body politics of Saint Paul Christian communion is focused in the eucharistic gathering. However, centrist tendencies in ecclesiastical polity emerged in fourth-century accounts of the universal church. The subsequent doctrine of the primacy of Peter gave a powerful push to centrist over localist accounts of the esse of the Church in the West, and the contest between local and universal in Anglican and Catholic ecclesiologies continues to this day. Orthodox theologians Zizioulas and Afanassieff, describe and fill out the doctrinal implications of a primitive ecclesiology in which ‘the eucharist makes the church’.2 This recovery of a local eucharistic ecclesiology offers valuable resources for thinking about the nature of communion between Anglicans in a Communion increasingly riven by controversy, and for thinking about the nature of the parish in a Church of England prone in the last forty years to centrist and managerial conceptions of the Church, and to the denigration of the local parish church as theesseof the ministry and mission of the Church in England.

The Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy (DPPL) upholds that Christian worship originates and is brought to completion in the Spirit of Christ, which dispenses truthful liturgical devotion and realistic manifestations of popular piety. A vigorous engagement of evangelization and culture is embodied in the Sabuaga Festival, an Easter Sunday celebration in Sto. Tomas, Pampanga. It is a collaboration of the Catholic Church (St. Thomas the Apostle Parish) and the Local Government Unit (Sto. Tomas). This paper argues how a true and fruitful harmony between liturgy and popular piety is achieved in the Sabuaga Festival. Hence, the researcher articulates the following, namely: First, the dimensions of the Sabuaga Festival that make it an expression of popular piety. Second, the principles offered by DPPL for the true and fruitful harmonization of liturgy and popular piety. Third, the pastoral action plan, entitled: “An Authentic Pastoral Action of the Liturgy: Towards Building upon the Riches of the Sabuaga as a Popular Piety,” which provides suitable catechesis for the harmonization of Liturgy and Popular Piety in the Sabuaga Festival. References Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis, “What Is ‘Liturgy’? Why Is It Important?” Accessed last March 29, 2021 from https://www.archspm.org/faith-and-discipleship/catholic-faith/what-is-liturgy-why-is-it-important/. Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth. Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection. London: Catholic Truth Society. Catholic Church. Catechism of the Catholic Church: Revised in Accordance with the Official Latin Text Promulgated by Pope John Paul II. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997. Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines. Acts and Decrees of the Second Plenary Council of the Philippines. Manila: CBCP, 1992. Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines. Catechism for Filipino Catholics. Manila: ECCCE Word and Life Publications, 2008. Robert E. Alvis. “The Tenacity of Popular Devotions in the Age of Vatican II: Learning from the Divine Mercy,” Religions 12, 1 (2021): 65. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12010065 Catholic Culture. “Catholic Activity: Liturgy of Easter Sunday and the Octave of Easter,” Accessed March 16, 2021 from https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/liturgicalyear/activities/view.cfm?id=1044. Chupungco, Anscar J. “Liturgical Inculturation: The Future That Awaits Us.” Accessed last 3 April 2021 from https://www.valpo.edu/institute-of-liturgical-studies/files/2016/09/chupungco2.pdf. Cole, Father. “St. John Damascene: Holy Pictures to the Rescue!” National Catholic Register. Last modified December 1, 1996. Accessed last March 31, 2021 from https://www.ncregister.com/news/st-john-damascene-holy-pictures-to-the-rescue. Coffey, David. “The Common and the Ordained Priesthood,” Theological Studies 58 (1997). Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments. Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy, Principles, and Guidelines. Promulgated on December 2001. Accessed from http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/ccdds/documents/rc_con_ccdds_doc_20020513_vers-direttorio_en.html Deguma, Jabin J. Melona S. Case, and Jemima N. Tandag. “Popular Religiosity: Experiencing Quiapo and Turumba.” American Research Journal of Humanities & Social Science Vol. 2, 6 (June 2019). https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337158384_Popular_Religiosity_Experiencing_Quiapo_and_Turumba Duggan, Robert D. “Good Liturgy: The Assembly,” America: The Jesuit Review. Last modified, 1 March 2004. Accessed last 4 April 2021 from https://www.americamagazine.org/issue/475/article/good-liturgy-assembly Ecclesia in Asia, Post Synodal Exhortation solemnly promulgated by His Holiness: John Paul II on November 6, 1999. Accessed last March 29, 2021 from http://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/apost_exhortations/documents/hf_jp- ii_exh_06111999_ecclesia-in-asia.html. Estevez, Jorge Arturo Medina. “Popular Piety And The Life Of Faith,” Catholic Culture. Accessed March 31, 2021 from https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=4614. Evangelii Gaudium. Apostolic Exhortation on the Proclamation of the Gospel in Today’s World of the His Holiness Pope Francis promulgated on 24 November 2013. Accessed last 4 April 2021 from http://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20131124_evangelii-gaudium.html#The_evangelizing_power_of_popular_piety Evangelii Nuntiandi Apostolic Exhortation, solemnly promulgated by His Holiness Pope Paul VI on December 8, 1975. Accessed last 30 March 2021 from http://www.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/apost_exhortations/documents/hf_p-vi_exh_19751208_evangelii-nuntiandi.html. Fifth General Conference of the Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean convened in Aparecida (Brazil), from May 13 to 31, 2007. 258-265. Gueguen, John. “Jesus of Nazareth from Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration Joseph Ratzinger-Pope Benedict XVI." Accessed last 14 March 2021, from http://my.ilstu.edu/~jguegu/BenedictXVIPart2.pdf?fbclid=IwAR2Ehr2_33BasxvvDnOGBEqaEz0VajyxpzfO2FYCq5Vi-j0et09a_St2PiU Graduateway. “Popular Piety: Emotive Christianity in Medieval Society Example.” Accessed last 11 December 2020 from https://graduateway.com/popular-piety-emotive-christianity-in-medieval-society/. Guardini, Romano. “The Spirit of the Liturgy.” Accessed last March 31, 2021 from https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/spirit-of-the-liturgy-11203. Ivan About Town. “Pampanga: Easter Sunday Salubong, Pusu-Puso, and Sagalas of Santo Tomas.” Last modified, 6 April 2010. Accessed last 5 April 2021, from https://www.ivanhenares.com/2010/04/pampanga-easter-sunday-salubong-pusu.html Keenan OP, Oliver James. New Series: Popular Piety,” The Dominican Friars – England and Scotland. Last modified 18 October 2013. Accessed last March 30, 2021 from https://www.english.op.org/godzdogz/new-series-popular-piety Krueger, Derek. “The Religion of Relics in Late Antiquity and Byzantium,” in Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics, and Devotion in Medieval Europe, eds. Martina Bagnoli, Holger A. Klein, C Griffith Mann, and James Robinson. London: The British Museum Press, 2011. Kroeger, James H. “Popular Piety: Some Missiological Insights,” Japan Mission Journal Vol. 70, 4 (Winter 2016). Lumen Gentium. Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, solemnly promulgated by His Holiness Pope Paul VI on November 21, 1964. Accessed last March 30, 2021 from http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19641121_lumen-gentium_en.html. McEvoy, Bernice. “Why Do Catholics Wear Medals, Scapulars & Venerate Relics?” St Martin Apostolate. Last modified July 8, 2019. Accessed last 4 April 2021 from https://www.stmartin.ie/why-do-catholics-wear-medals-scapulars-venerate-relics/. Mirus, Jeff. “Vatican II on the Liturgy: Particular Norms and the Eucharist,” Catholic Culture. Last modified 11 February 2010. Accessed last March 29, 2021 from https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/vatican-ii-on-liturgy-particular-norms-eucharist/. Musicam Sacram, Second Vatican Ecumenical Council Instruction on Music in the Liturgy solemnly promulgated on 5 March 1967. Accessed last 4 April 2021 from http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_instr_19670305_musicam-sacram_en.html Piotr, Roszak. and Sławomir Tykarski. “Popular Piety and Devotion to Parish Patrons in Poland and Spain, 1948–98” Religions 11, 658 (2020): doi:10.3390/rel11120658 Plese, Matthew. “A Catholic Guide to Relics: What Kinds Are There and Why Do We Honor Them?” The Fatima Center. Accessed last 1 March 2020 from https://fatima.org/news-views/catholic-apologetics-58/. __________. “The Importance of Kneeling and Prostrations,” The Fatima Center. last modified June 15, 2020. Accessed last 4 April 2021 from https://fatima.org/news-views/the-importance-of-kneeling-and-prostrations/. Pontifical Council for Culture, Towards a Pastoral Approach to Culture. Promulgated in 1999. Accessed last 4 April 2021 from https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/cultr/documents/rc_pc_pc-cultr_doc_03061999_pastoral_en.html. Ratzinger, Joseph Cardinal. God and the world: believing and living in our time: A Conversation with Peter Seewald. Translated by Henry Taylor. San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2002. __________. “Sacred Places: The Altar and the Direction of Liturgical Prayer,” The Institute for Sacred Architecture. Accessed last March 31, 2021 from https://www.sacredarchitecture.org/articles/the_altar_and_the_direction_of_liturgical_prayer/. Rosales, Daniel Montoya. “The Influence of the Missionary Heritage on Liturgical Forms.” International Review of Missions, 74, 295 (July 1985): 373-376. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1758-6631.1985.tb02595.x Sacramentum Caritatis. Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation on the Eucharist as the Source and Summit of the Church's Life and Mission, solemnly promulgated by His Holiness Benedict XVI on 22 February 2007. Accessed March 29, 2021 from https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/apost_exhortations/documents/hf_ben-xvi_exh_20070222_sacramentum-caritatis.html#Actuosa_participatio Sacrosanctum Concilium. Constitution on Sacred Liturgy, solemnly promulgated by His Holiness Pope Paul VI on December 4, 1963. Accessed last 1 April 2021 from https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19631204_sacrosanctum-concilium_en.html Saunders, William. “Icons and Sacred Images,” Catholic Exchange. Last modified January 19, 2017. Accessed last 4 April 2021 from https://catholicexchange.com/icons-sacred-images-2. Salvador, Ryan. “Some Reflections on Theology and Popular Piety: A Fruitful or Fraught Relationship?” HeyJ 53 (2012): 961–971. Scheuman, Joseph. “Five Truths About the Incarnation,” Desiring God. Last Modified 25 December 2013. Accessed last March 31, 2021 from https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/five-truths-about-the-incarnation. Sheehan, Peter C. “Role of Music in Liturgy.” Academia.edu. Accessed March 31, 2021. https://www.academia.edu/12569062/Role_of_Music_in_Liturgy. Stroik, Duncan G., and Barbara J. Elliott, James Fitzmaurice, et al. “The Church Building as Sacred Place: Beauty, Transcendence & Eternal,” The Imaginative Conservative. Last modified August 13, 2019. Accessed last 4 April 2021 from https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2013/02/the-church-building-as-sacred-place.html. Synod of Bishops XIII Ordinary General Assembly The New Evangelization for the Transmission of the Christian Faith, Instrumentum Laboris" promulgated in 2012. Accessed last March 30, 2021 from http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/synod/documents/rc_synod_doc_20120619_instrumentum-xiii_en.html. Szylak, Paweł. “Popular Piety: Processions,” The Dominican Friars – England and Scotland. Last modified 14 January 2014. Accessed March 31, 2021. https://www.english.op.org/godzdogz/popular-piety-processions. Theodula and Popular Religiosity. “Liturgy and Popular Religiosity: Historical Perspective,” accessed last 4 April 2020 from https://theologicaldramatics.wordpress.com/popular-religiosity/02-popular-religionreligiosity-and-official-liturgy/notes-mark-francis-csv/ Theodula and Popular Religiosity. “Debosyon.” Accessed last 4 April 2021 from https://theologicaldramatics.wordpress.com/liturgy-popular-piety-religiosity-in-the-magisterium/ Thompson, O.P Augustine. “The Dominican Venia and Kissing the Scapular.” New Liturgical Movement. Last modified 5 July 2008. Accessed March 31, 2021 from http://www.newliturgicalmovement.org/2008/07/dominican-venia-and-kissing-scapular.html#.YGQCrZMzbe0. Appendix: SC- Sacrosanctum Concilium CCC- Catechism of the Catholic Church DPPL- Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy YOUCAT- Youth Catechism EG- Evangelii Gaudium

Photograph by Gonzalo Echeverria (2010)“I must plunge again and again in the water of doubt” (Wittgenstein 1e). The Holy Grail in the phenomenology of religion (and, to a lesser extent, the sociology of religion) is a definition of religion that actually works, but, so far, this seems to have been elusive. Classical definitions of religion—substantive (e.g. Tylor) and functionalist (e.g. Durkheim)—fail, in part because they attempt to be in three places at once, as it were: they attempt to distinguish religion from non-religion; they attempt to capture what religions have in common; and they attempt to grasp the “heart”, or “core”, of religion. Consequently, family resemblance definitions of religion replace certainty and precision for its own sake with a more pragmatic and heuristic approach, embracing doubt and putting forward definitions that give us a better understanding (Verstehen) of religion. In this paper, I summarise some “new” definitions of religion that take this approach, before proposing and defending another one, defining religion as non-propositional and “apophatic”, thus accepting that doubt is central to religion itself, as well as to the analysis of religion.The question of how to define religion has had real significance in a number of court cases round the world, and therefore it does have an impact on people’s lives. In Germany, for example, the courts ruled that Scientology was not a religion, but a business, much to the displeasure of the Church of Scientology (Aldridge 15). In the United States, some advocates of Transcendental Meditation (TM) argued that TM was not a religion and could therefore be taught in public schools without violating the establishment clause in the constitution—the separation of church and state. The courts in New Jersey, and federal courts, ruled against them. They ruled that TM was a religion (Barker 146). There are other cases that I could cite, but the point of this is simply to establish that the question has a practical importance, so we should move on.In the classical sociology of religion, there are a number of definitions of religion that are quite well known. Edward Tylor (424) defined religion as a belief in spiritual beings. This definition does not meet with widespread acceptance, the notable exception being Melford Spiro, who proposed in 1966 that religion was “an institution consisting of culturally patterned interaction with culturally postulated super-human beings” (Spiro 96, see also 91ff), and who has bravely stuck to that definition ever since. The major problem is that this definition excludes Buddhism, which most people do regard as a religion, although some people try to get round the problem by claiming that Buddhism is not really a religion, but more of a philosophy. But this is cheating, really, because a definition of religion must be descriptive as well as prescriptive; that is, it must apply to entities that are commonly recognised as religions. Durkheim, in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, proposed that religion had two key characteristics, a separation of the sacred from the profane, and a gathering together of people in some sort of institution or community, such as a church (Durkheim 38, 44). However, religions often reject a separation of the sacred from the profane. Most Muslims and many Calvinist Christians, for example, would insist strongly that everything—including the ostensibly profane—is equally subject to the sovereignty of God. Also, some religions are more oriented to a guru-pupil kind of relationship, rather than a church community.Weber tried to argue that religion should only be defined at the end of a long process of historical and empirical study. He is often criticised for this, although there probably is some wisdom in his argument. However, there seems to be an implicit definition of religion as theodicy, accounting for the existence of evil and the existence of suffering. But is this really the central concern of all religions?Clarke and Byrne, in their book Religion Defined and Explained, construct a typology of definitions, which I think is quite helpful. Broadly speaking, there are two types of classical definition. Firstly, there are substantive definitions (6), such as Tylor’s and Spiro’s, which posit some sort of common “property” that religions “have”—“inside” them, as it were. Secondly, functionalist definitions (Clarke and Byrne 7), such as Durkheim’s, define religion primarily in terms of its social function. What matters, as far as a definition of religion is concerned, is not what you believe, but why you believe it.However, these classical definitions do not really work. I think this is because they try to do too many things. For a strict definition of religion to work, it needs to tell us (i) what religions have in common, (ii) what distinguishes religion on the one hand from non-religion, or everything that is not religion, on the other, and (iii) it needs to tell us something important about religion, what is at the core of religion. This means that a definition of religion has to be in three places at once, so to speak. Furthermore, a definition of religion has to be based on extant religions, but it also needs to have some sort of quasi-predictive capacity, the sort of thing that can be used in a court case regarding, for example, Scientology or Transcendental Meditation.It may be possible to resolve the latter problem by a gradual process of adjustment, a sort of hermeneutic circle of basing a definition on extant religions and applying it to new ones. But what about the other problem, the one of being in three places at once?Another type identified by Clarke and Byrne, in their typology of definitions, is the “family resemblance” definition (11-16). This derives from the later Wittgenstein. The “family resemblance” definition of religion is based on the idea that religions commonly share a number of features, but that no one religion has all of them. For example, there are religious beliefs, doctrines and mythos—or stories and parables. There are rituals and moral codes, institutions and clergy, prayers, spiritual emotions and experiences, etc. This approach is of course less precise than older substantive and functional definitions, but it also avoids some of the problems associated with them.It does so by rethinking the point of defining religion. Instead of being precise and rigorous for the sake of it, it tries to tell us something, to be “productive”, to help us understand religion better. It eschews certainty and embraces doubt. Its insights could be applied to some schools of philosophy (e.g. Heideggerian) and practical spirituality, because it does not focus on what is distinctive about religion. Rather, it focuses on the core of religion, and, secondarily, on what religions have in common. The family resemblance approach has led to a number of “new” definitions (post-Durkheim definitions) being proposed, all of which define religion in a less rigorous, but, I hope, more imaginative and heuristic way.Let me provide a few examples, starting with two contrasting ones. Peter Berger in the late 1960s defined religion as “the audacious attempt to conceive of the entire universe as humanly significant”(37), which implies a consciousness of an anthropocentric sacred cosmos. Later, Alain Touraine said that religion is “the apprehension of human destiny, existence, and death”(213–4), that is, an awareness of human limitations, including doubt. Berger emphasises the high place for human beings in religion, and even a sort of affected certainty, while Touraine emphasises our place as doubters on the periphery, but it seems that religion exists within a tension between these two opposites, and, in a sense, encompasses them both.Richard Holloway, former Bishop of Edinburgh in the Scottish Episcopal Church and arch-nemesis of the conservative Anglicans, such as those from Sydney, defines religion as like good poetry, not bad science. It is easy to understand that he is criticising those who see religion, particularly Christianity, as centrally opposed to Darwin and evolution. Holloway is clearly saying that those people have missed the point of their own faith. By “good poetry”, he is pointing to the significance of storytelling rather than dogma, and an open-ended discussion of ultimate questions that resists the temptation to end with “the moral of the story”. In science (at least before quantum physics), there is no room for doubt, but that is not the case with poetry.John Caputo, in a very energetic book called On Religion, proposes what is probably the boldest of the “new” definitions. He defines religion as “the love of God” (1). Note the contrast with Tylor and Spiro. Caputo does not say “belief in God”; he says “the love of God”. You might ask how you can love someone you don’t believe in, but, in a sense, this paradox is the whole point. When Caputo says “God”, he is not necessarily talking in the usual theistic or even theological terms. By “God”, he means the impossible made possible (10). So a religious person, for Caputo, is an “unhinged lover” (13) who loves the impossible made possible, and the opposite is a “loveless lout” who is only concerned with the latest stock market figures (2–3). In this sense of religious, a committed atheist can be religious and a devout Catholic or Muslim or Hindu can be utterly irreligious (2–3). Doubt can encompass faith and faith can encompass doubt. This is the impossible made possible. Caputo’s approach here has something in common with Nietzsche and especially Kierkegaard, to whom I shall return later.I would like to propose another definition of religion, within the spirit of these “new” definitions of religion that I have been discussing. Religion, at its core, I suggest, is non-propositional and apophatic. When I say that religion is non-propositional, I mean that religion will often enact certain rituals, or tell certain stories, or posit faith in someone, and that propositional statements of doctrine are merely reflections or approximations of this non-propositional core. Faith in God is not a proposition. The Eucharist is not a proposition. Prayer is not, at its core, a proposition. Pilgrimage is not a proposition. And it is these sorts of things that, I suggest, form the core of religion. Propositions are what happen when theologians and academics get their hands on religion, they try to intellectualise it so that it can be made to fit within their area of expertise—our area of expertise. But, that is not where it belongs. Propositions about rituals impose a certainty on them, whereas the ritual itself allows for courage in the face of doubt. The Maundy Thursday service in Western Christianity includes the stripping of the altar to the accompaniment of Psalm 22 (“My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me”), ending the service without a dismissal (Latin missa, the origin of the English “mass”) and with the church in darkness. Doubt, confusion, and bewilderment are the heart and soul of this ritual, not orthodox faith as defined propositionally.That said, religion does often involve believing, of some kind (though it is not usually as central as in Christianity). So I say that religion is non-propositional and apophatic. The word “apophatic”, though not the concept, has its roots in Greek Orthodox theology, where St Gregory Palamas argues that any statement about God—and particularly about God’s essence as opposed to God’s energies—must be paradoxical, emphasising God’s otherness, and apophatic, emphasising God’s essential incomprehensibility (Armstrong 393). To make an apophatic statement is to make a negative statement—instead of saying God is king, lord, father, or whatever, we say God is not. Even the most devout believer will recognise a sense in which God is not a king, or a lord, or a father. They will say that God is much greater than any of these things. The Muslim will say “Allahu Akhbar”, which means God is greater, greater than any human description. Even the statement “God exists” is seen to be well short of the mark. Even that is human language, which is why the Cappadocian fathers (Saints Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory Naziansus) said that they believed in God, while refusing to say that God exists.So to say that religion is at its core non-propositional is to say that religious beliefs are at their core apophatic. The idea of apophasis is that by a process of constant negation you are led into silence, into a recognition that there is nothing more that can be said. St Thomas Aquinas says that the more things we negate about God, the more we say “God is not…”, the closer we get to what God is (139). Doubt therefore brings us closer to the object of religion than any putative certainties.Apophasis does not only apply to Christianity. I have already indicated that it applies also to Islam, and the statement that God is greater. In Islam, God is said to have 99 names—or at least 99 that have been revealed to human beings. Many of these names are apophatic. Names like The Hidden carry an obviously negative meaning in English, while, etymologically, “the Holy” (al-quddu-s) means “beyond imperfection”, which is a negation of a negation. As-salaam, the All-Peaceful, means beyond disharmony, or disequilibrium, or strife, and, according to Murata and Chittick (65–6), “The Glorified” (as-subbuh) means beyond understanding.In non-theistic religions too, an apophatic way of believing can be found. Key Buddhist concepts include sunyata, emptiness, or the Void, and anatta, meaning no self, the belief or realisation that the Self is illusory. Ask what they believe in instead of the Self and you are likely to be told that you are missing the point, like the Zen pupil who confused the pointing finger with the moon. In the Zen koans, apophasis plays a major part. One well-known koan is “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” Any logical answers will be dismissed, like Thomas Aquinas’s statements about God, until the pupil gets beyond logic and achieves satori, or enlightenment. Probably the most used koan is Mu—Master Joshu is asked if a dog has Buddha-nature and replies Mu, meaning “no” or “nothing”. This is within the context of the principle that everything has Buddha-nature, so it is not logical. But this apophatic process can lead to enlightenment, something better than logic. By plunging again and again in the water of doubt, to use Wittgenstein’s words, we gain something better than certainty.So not only is apophasis present in a range of different religions—and I have given just a few examples—but it is also central to the development of religion in the Axial Age, Karl Jaspers’s term for the period from about 800-200 BCE when the main religious traditions of the world began—monotheism in Israel (which also developed into Christianity and Islam), Hinduism and Buddhism in India, Confucianism and Taoism in China, and philosophical rationalism in Greece. In the early Hindu traditions, there seems to have been a sort of ritualised debate called the Brahmodya, which would proceed through negation and end in silence. Not the silence of someone admitting defeat at the hands of the other, but the silence of recognising that the truth lay beyond them (Armstrong 24).In later Hinduism, apophatic thought is developed quite extensively. This culminates in the idea of Brahman, the One God who is Formless, beyond all form and all description. As such, all representations of Brahman are equally false and therefore all representations are equally true—hence the preponderance of gods and idols on the surface of Hinduism. There is also the development of the idea of Atman, the universal Self, and the Buddhist concept anatta, which I mentioned, is rendered anatman in Sanskrit, literally no Atman, no Self. But in advaita Hinduism there is the idea that Brahman and Atman are the same, or, more accurately, they are not two—hence advaita, meaning “not two”. This is negation, or apophasis. In some forms of present-day Hinduism, such as the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (commonly known as the Hare Krishnas), advaita is rejected. Sometimes this is characterised as dualism with respect to Brahman and Atman, but it is really the negation of non-dualism, or an apophatic negation of the negation.Even in early Hinduism, there is a sort of Brahmodya recounted in the Rig Veda (Armstrong 24–5), the oldest extant religious scripture in the world that is still in use as a religious scripture. So here we are at the beginning of Axial Age religion, and we read this account of creation:Then was not non-existent nor existent: there was no realm of air, no sky beyond it.Death was not then, nor was there aught immortal.Darkness there was: at first concealed in darkness this All was indiscriminated chaos.All that existed then was void and form less.Sages who searched with their heart's thought discovered the existent's kinship in the non-existent.Who verily knows and who can here declare it, whence it was born and whence comes this creation?The Gods are later than this world's production. Who knows then whence it first came into being?He, the first origin of this creation, whether he formed it all or did not form it,Whose eye controls this world in highest heaven, he verily knows it, or perhaps he knows not.(Rig Veda Book 10, Hymn 129, abridged)And it would seem that this is the sort of thought that spread throughout the world as a result of the Axial Age and the later spread of Axial and post-Axial religions.I could provide examples from other religious traditions. Taoism probably has the best examples, though they are harder to relate to the traditions that are more familiar in the West. “The way that is spoken is not the Way” is the most anglicised translation of the opening of the Tao Te Ching. In Sikhism, God’s formlessness and essential unknowability mean that God can only be known “by the Guru’s grace”, to quote the opening hymn of the Guru Granth Sahib.Before I conclude, however, I would like to anticipate two criticisms. First, this may only be applicable to the religions of the Axial Age and their successors, beginning with Hinduism and Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism, and early Jewish monotheism, followed by Jainism, Christianity, Islam and so on. I would like to find examples of apophasis at the core of other traditions, including Indigenous Australian and Native American ones, for example, but that is work still to be done. Focusing on the Axial Age does historicise the argument, however, at least in contrast with a more universal concept of religion that runs the risk of falling into the ahistorical homo religiosus idea that humans are universally and even naturally religious. Second, this apophatic definition looks a bit elitist, defining religion in terms that are relevant to theologians and “religious virtuosi” (to use Weber’s term), but what about the ordinary believers, pew-fillers, temple-goers? In response to such criticism, one may reply that there is an apophatic strand in what Niebuhr called the religions of the disinherited. In Asia, devotion to the Buddha Amida is particularly popular among the poor, and this involves a transformation of the idea of anatta—no Self—into an external agency, a Buddha who is “without measure”, in terms of in-finite light and in-finite life. These are apophatic concepts. In the Christian New Testament, we are told that God “has chosen the foolish things of this world to shame the wise, the weak to shame the strong…, the things that are not to shame the things that are” (1 Corinthians 1:27). The things that are not are the apophatic, and these are allied with the foolish and the weak, not the educated and the powerful.One major reason for emphasising the role of apophasis in religious thought is to break away from the idea that the core of religion is an ethical one. This is argued by a number of “liberal religious” thinkers in different religious traditions. I appreciate their reasons, and I am reluctant to ally myself with their opponents, who include the more fundamentalist types as well as some vocal critics of religion like Dawkins and Hitchens. However, I said that I would return to Kierkegaard, and the reason is this. Kierkegaard distinguishes between the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious. Of course, religion has an aesthetic and an ethical dimension, and in some religions these dimensions are particularly important, but that does not make them central to religion as such. Kierkegaard regarded the religious sphere as radically different from the aesthetic or even the ethical, hence his treatment of the story of Abraham going to Mount Moriah to sacrifice his son, in obedience to God’s command. His son was not killed in the end, but Abraham was ready to do the deed. This is not ethical. This is fundamentally and scandalously unethical. Yet it is religious, not because it is unethical and scandalous, but because it pushes us to the limits of our understanding, through the waters of doubt, and then beyond.Were I attempting to criticise religion, I would say it should not go there, that, to misquote Wittgenstein, the limits of my understanding are the limits of my world, whereof we cannot understand thereof we must remain silent. Were I attempting to defend religion, I would say that this is its genius, that it can push back the limits of understanding. I do not believe in value-neutral sociology, but, in this case, I am attempting neither. ReferencesAldridge, Alan. Religion in the Contemporary World. Cambridge: Polity, 2000.Aquinas, Thomas. “Summa of Christian Teaching”. An Aquinas Reader. ed. Mary Clarke. New York: Doubleday, 1972.Armstrong, Karen. The Great Transformation. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.Barker, Eileen. New Religious Movements: a Practical Introduction. London: HMSO, 1989.Berger, Peter. The Social Reality of Religion. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.Caputo, John. On Religion. London: Routledge, 2001.Clarke, Peter, and Peter Byrne, eds. Religion Defined and Explained. New York: St Martin’s Press. 1993.Durkheim, Emile. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Free Press, 1995.Holloway, Richard. Doubts and Loves. Edinburgh: Caqnongate, 2002.Jaspers, Karl. The Origin and Goal of History. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1977.Kierkegaard, Søren. Either/Or. London: Penguin, 1992.———. Fear and Trembling. London: Penguin, 1986.Murata, Sachiko, and William Chittick. The Vision of Islam. St Paul, Minnesota: Paragon House, 1994.Niebuhr, H. Richard. The Social Sources of Denominationalism. New York: Holt, 1929.Spiro, Melford. “Religion: Problems of Definition and Explanation.” Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion. Ed. Michael Banton. London: Tavistock, 1966. 85–126.Touraine, Alain. The Post-Industrial Society. London: Wilwood House, 1974.Tylor, Edward. Primitive Culture. London: Murray, 1903.Weber, Max. The Sociology of Religion. Boston: Beacon Press, 1991.Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough. Nottingham: Brynmill Press, 1979.

Chapter 2 examines Grace’s undergraduate years at the College of Saint Catherine during the mid–late1920s and then her gradual conversion to socialism during the 1930s. Included among the various factors that led to this shift were her experiences at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where she went in 1929 to pursue a doctorate in psychology. Grace maintained her commitment to social justice that she had developed in her youth as a working-class Catholic in St. Paul, but now channeled it in a revolutionary direction in a new city. Both her encounter with the 1934 Minneapolis Teamster strikes and her first job as a vocational rehabilitation counselor in the Minnesota Department of Education that she began in 1935 intensified Grace’s evolving view that a socialist society was the only way to address the needs of workers and the exploited. In 1938 Grace entered the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) as a delegate to its founding convention. By September 1940, she left her job at the Minnesota Department of Education—in part because of red baiting during the “little red scare”—to work full-time for the party, leaving the Church (and her husband Gilbert, whom she had married in 1934) behind.