...the demographic transition in Catholicism from the West to the Southern hemisphere is producing a new generation of leaders from Africa, Asia and Latin America, where Judaism generally does not have a large sociological footprint. This Southern cohort didn't live through the Holocaust, and they generally don't feel historical responsibility for it -- seeing it as a Western, not a Christian, atrocity. Relations with Islam, however, are a front-burner priority, since many of these southern Catholics live cheek by jowl with large Muslim communities...The old models of "Christianity as a means of Western imperialism" are dead--and in fact were dead before they were thought up, because the Christian communities of the Middle East predated any such hints of imperialism. When I am studying side by side with African missionaries sent to evangelize the pagan West, I find it hard to take seriously certain myopic forms of historical/cultural analysis which remain blind to the reality of a growing, determinedly orthodox Third World Church which follows Vatican II within the hermeneutic of continuity and at the same time does a lot of work towards inculturation and is incredibly irritated at times by the Western neuroses of modernity that some of the ailing religious orders keep trying to export.
"The great storm is coming, but the tide has turned." Culture, Catholicism, and current trends watched with a curious eye.
Saturday, November 6, 2010
Christianity of the Global South
A fascinating thought from a fascinating piece:
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1 comment:
You got Mark-Shea'd. Nice!
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