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The teaching and educational mission of the Church requires authority. The authority of the Church influences the effectiveness of its educational activities. The study presents the results of the research of questionnaire surveys and focus interviews conducted among students and academics of a Catholic university concerning their opinions about the foundations of the authority of the Church in Poland, the nature of this authority, the change (decrease) of the Church authority and the causes of this process, as well as opinions on how the Church can build her authority in order to be able to educate more effectively. Research has shown that in the opinion of the respondents, there has been a decrease in the authority of the Church and the reasons for that are complex. Young believers would like to deepen their relationship with the Church, but they expect the Church to be more open and respectful of their freedom.
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Wikipedia enjoys huge popularity and internet users consider it a great authority. In 2016, its Polish version was visited daily by the average of 1.1 million viewers. People read it looking for information on a variety of subjects, including the doctrine of the Church. The author of the article proposes a thesis that Wikipedia belongs to popular culture and represents authentic, although exceptional virtual entertainment. The author asks about the attitude of the Church to Wikipedia. He also looks for an answer to the question of whether or not Catholic teaching authorities (the bishops forming the Magisterium Ecclesiae, and, subsequently – under the authority of their Holy Orders or canonical mission – priests, deacons, theologians, and catechists) should become Wikipedians and edit articles in Wikipedia.
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The subject of the research is the model of religious education in the Province of the France of the Old Catholic Mariavites and in the Community of Sainte-Marie in Mont-Saint-Aignan. The research objective is to characterize the main areas of religious education of these religious communities; that is, pastoral counseling, liturgy and catechization. The research procedure was carried out using a set of pedagogical and theological research methods: interview (with the clergy), active (participant) observation, analysis of documents and historical-comparative method. The model of religious education, developed in these two independently existing Churches in France, indicates the response of Christian communities to religious needs in a secularized society. Through pastoral counseling, the recipients of which are not only members of these communities, but also Muslims, Jews, Hindus, agnostics or atheists, these communities have become known as places of spiritual support. A complementary element of counseling is catechization, and both these elements are aimed at introducing these subjects to liturgical life. However, it is not a closed model, focused on proselytizing, but rather an open one, aiming at restoring hope in secular and atheistic society.
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Review of: Iwona Jabłońska - Lidia Pietruszka, Magdalena Parzyszek, Narzeczeństwo. Droga, którą warto przejść, Towarzystwo Naukowe Katolickiego Uniwersytetu Lubelskiego Jana Pawła II, Lublin 2019, ss. 154, ISBN 978-83-7306-839-1.
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RESEARCH OBJECTIVE: The research aim of this article is to present the essence of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, their implementation in Ignatian retreats, and to show their meaning for the spiritual life of the Christian. THE RESEARCH PROBLEM AND METHODS: The research problem considered in this paper is the search for an answer to the question: what is the essence of the Spiritual Exercises and what is their meaning for the development of the spiritual life of the Christian? In the conducted research the method of analysis and synthesis of literature was applied. THE PROCESS OF ARGUMENTATION: The first part of the article explains the direct relationship between Ignatius’ conversion, his experience of many mystical graces, especially in Manresa, and the writing of the book of the Spiritual Exercises. The second part of the article presents excerpts from the testimonies of retreatants who have deepened their spiritual lives through the method and content of the Spiritual Exercises. RESEARCH RESULTS: The research results comprise a description of Ignatius Loyola’s conversion process that directly influenced the writing of the Spiritual Exercises, which have become a common tool to help many Christians in their spiritual development. This is evidenced by the testimonies of participants in Ignatian retreats from various social groups and professions who have experienced inner conversion through the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola. CONCLUSIONS, INNOVATIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS: Testimonies of retreatants given both centuries ago and today confirm that the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola appear an important tool for spiritual development. Although they were created almost five centuries ago as the fruit of the spiritual experiences of their author, they still bring up Christians to deeper relationship with God.
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RESEARCH OBJECTIVE: The paper is an attempt to articulate the defining features of Ignatian Leadership and to clarify what might distinguish it from other brands of leadership without lapsing into motherhood statements and worn-out clichés. THE RESEARCH PROBLEM AND METHODS: The Ignatian leadership style that is presented is grounded in Ignatian spirituality, which is a source of the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola. Hence, the research problem was formulated: how can Ignatian leadership be implemented in everyday practice? The method of critical analysis of sources was applied. THE PROCESS OF ARGUMENTATION: The paper argues that Ignatian Leadership is, in fact, a radical form of servant leadership, since the Ignatian Leader is at the service not only of the Community, but also–and for Ignatius of Loyola, even more fundamentally–of the Mission entrusted to that Community. RESEARCH RESULTS: Concretely, it proposes a conception of Ignatian Leadership as a threeway relationship among the Leader, the Community, and the Mission, in the process, illustrating what magis and cura personalis might mean in one’s exercise of leadership, but also, spelling out, in light of these relationships, the key functions of the Ignatian Leader. CONCLUSIONS, INNOVATIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS: Ignatian leadership is a form of servant leadership insofar as Ignatian Leaders ought to prioritize serving the Community that they lead over their own interests. However, what distinguishes Ignatian Leadership from servant leadership is its explicit and non-negotiable prioritization of service of the Mission as well.
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RESEARCH OBJECTIVE: The aim of the article is to recreate the ways of understanding Christian values as one of the aspects of spirituality, established in the linguistic consciousness of young Europeans – Poles, Russians and Germans. THE RESEARCH PROBLEM AND METHODS: The research problem was formulated as questions: What are the Christian values today for young European citizens? Are they equally important for the followers of Catholicism, Orthodoxy and Protestantism and do they carry identical content and messages for them? In order to obtain linguistic data, a psycholinguistic research tool was used – the test of free verbal associations to stimulus‑words wartości chrześcijańskie, christliche Werte, xристианские ценности. The method of concept profiling, worked out on the basis of cog‑nitive linguistics, and the frequency analysis method were used to analyze the empirical material. THE PROCESS OF ARGUMENTATION: The argumentation begins with the justification of the choice of the problem of Christian values and showing the specificity of the essence of spirituality and its relations with axiology. Then, the methodology of collecting and analyzing linguistic data was presented. The third part discusses the results of the free verbal association test and conclusions. RESEARCH RESULTS: In the opinion of the respondents, the Christian values are mainly hidden by the ideas contained in the Decalogue, followed by the generally understood morality. They are symbolized by the cross, the Bible and the icons. The transmission and cultivation of values are the tasks belonging to church. In the linguistic consciousness of the German and Polish respondents, the evaluation of Christian values is rather negative, the Russian respondents have an ambivalent attitude towards them. CONCLUSIONS, INNOVATIONS AND RECOMMENDATIOS: Christian values are an axiological category firmly established in the linguistic consciousness of representatives of three ethnic communities. The exploration of the associative fields shows that the profiles of Christian values differ both in the degree of complexity, saturation and frequency, and in linguistic shape, as well, revealing, however, the similarity in the semantic range delineated by associations.
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RESEARCH OBJECTIVE: The purpose of the presented research was to reveal the predictors and moderators of the sense of abandonment by God as one of the religious-spiritual experiences of Catholics.THE RESEARCH PROBLEM AND METHODS: The primary research question was to determine what relationship, if it really exists, appears between age, level of declared faith, frequency and in- tensity of daily religious-spiritual experiences and the sense of abandonment by God.THE PROCESS OF ARGUMENTATION: The article discusses the psychological conceptualization of the sense of abandonment by God and its operationalization in research tools, as well as the importance of this issue for research on the struggles with divinity.RESEARCH RESULTS: As a result of statistical verification of the hypotheses, the relationships between variables were examined and predictors and moderators of the relationships among explanatory variables were established.CONCLUSIONS, INNOVATIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS: Although all the accepted hypotheses were statistically confirmed, so that it was possible to identify a predictor and moderator of the feeling of abandonment by God, the article points out the limitations of the present study and directions for further research.
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This paper will analyze the status that various religious communities enjoyed in the Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska; hereafter NDH), focusing on the legal status and relations, both practical and financial, these communities enjoyed with the Ustasha movement and state authorities. The religious question was a key political problem in the NDH: the treatment of different religious communities serves as a paradigm of the character of the NDH as a state. Numerous studies have been written on the participation of Catholic clergy in the atrocities of the Ustasha movement and the NDH with the earliest being published immediately after the end of the war in 1945. The persecution of the Serbian Orthodox Church has been well documented in a number of important studies. Instead, this article will focus on legal and administrative issues and financial exchange between various religious communities and the NDH authorities as well as the state’s program of mass religious conversion since these illustrate the authentic intentions of the Ustasha regime and the Roman Catholic Church in Croatia, as the dominant social and political forces in the state, regarding state religious policy. The article is largely based on primary archival sources drawn from the Croatian and Serbian state archives.
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Review of: Dubravka Preradović, ed., Ermil i Stratonik. Sveti ranohrišćanski mučenici beogradski [Hermylos and Stratonikos. Early christian martyrs of Belgrade]. Belgrade: Institute for Balkan Studies SASA, 2022, 216 p.
More...How our belief system defines our health
What if our spiritual beliefs make us a negative character? What if we hurt ourselves and our loved ones by clinging too tightly to what we believe? What if, at the end of life, when we meet God, He asks: "How was Heaven"? What if we are wrong? There are so many spiritual paths now, so much information, so much Knowledge to absorb, and so much fake knowledge to differentiate. Each time the inner barometer of discrimination gets overwhelmed, the current beliefs become stronger, even if they are flawed. The lack of mental and spiritual flexibility can slowly take the shape of ignorance and somatization. The physical body is the meeting point between the spiritual and the material and as a result, symptoms of confusion may occur in the physical body. This paper aims to emphasize the connection between spiritual beliefs, relationship with God, and somatoform disorders using a narrative review. By accepting the unacceptable and opening the belief system, one may be able to relieve the somatic symptoms and regain control of the body.
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The article deals with the document ‘Male and Female He Created Them: Toward a Path of Dialogue on the Question of Gender Theory in Education’, published by the Congregation for Catholic Education in June 2019. The document is a guideline for Catholic schools, which they can apply to control and moderate the discussion on gender issues at the level of local churches and educational institutions. The article presents several worldwide responses to the document chiefly in the Catholic media, and then provides a rhetorical analysis and critique of its content. The analysis reveals some of the text’s rhetorical devices, including labelling, the self-referentiality typical of Church documents, and inconsistencies arising from attempts to balance its message, reflecting the conflicting loyalties of representatives of the church hierarchy since the Second Vatican Council. The article then carries out a more general critique of the Roman Catholic discourse on gender, which plays a significant role in fuelling the contemporary culture wars. This critique reveals the Church’s lack of self-reflection on its position and the arbitrary nature of its interpretations of gender related phenomena. Finally, it also highlights the political nature of the Church’s gender discourse, which seeks to uphold the status quo of the Church’s power structure.
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In the following paper on the ecofeminist dimension of the considerable work of the feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether, I will limit myself to questions and themes that are not purely theological, but which at the same time resonate with the themes and questions addressed in contemporary (eco)feminist philosophy, which revolve around issues of structural inequality and structural or systemic violence on the one hand, and the interdependence of lives, precariousness, and vulnerability on the other. Of the classic questions of systematic theology, two seem to me particularly relevant in this regard, namely the question of structural sin and the very understanding of who God/dess is. Structural sin is the subject of the first part of this paper. God/dess in an ecofeminist perspective is the subject of the second part. The third part focuses on theological ethics and specifically on the articulation between the ethics of the ‘preferential option for the poor’, based on liberation theology, and the ethics of ecological sustainability. Finally, I devote the fourth and final section to examples of the concrete everyday spiritual practices of lived Christian ecofeminist spirituality.Keywords: Rosemary Radford Ruether, ecofeminist theology, God/des, sin, vulnerability, ecofeminist spirituality, sustainability
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This work of constructive Jewish ecofeminism argues for an expanded category of the poor to include nature, as both nature and the poor have similar states: they are in need. After a survey of the Torah and the tannaim, the author concludes that both sources do not define the category of the poor as anything more than those in need, thus we are well within our means to make the change. In addition, the current state of the environment, detailed by the most recent IPCC report, illustrates just how much the environment is in need. In this expansion of the category of the poor, the author also critiques traditional Jewish models of what constitutes care and suggests instead Carol Gilligan’s ethics of care as a starting point towards a more holistic, feminist understanding of the care. This argument to expand the category of the poor is not possible without also a survey of traditional Jewish understandings of nature and embodiment because how Jews understand the divine is related both to our bodies and to how we treat nature. As part of this, the author examines contemporary Jewish scholarship, both ecofeminist and not, in search of various models for understanding the relationship between humanity, nature, and the divine, which lend themselves towards a more ecofeminist Judaism
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Sexual subjectivity in women together with sexual agency and empowerment have been receiving growing attention in sex research in recent decades. In this article we highlight the conceptual uncertainty and challenges research field, mostly in the context of #MeToo initiatives and the current discussion around understanding sexual violence in Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic. We propose a conceptual map, in which we show the key role of sexual subjectivity for sexuality research, in contrast to other terms, such as sexual self--concept or sexual self-schema. We demonstrate how the important conceptual components of subjectivity, sexual agency, and empowerment have been misunderstood in the postfeminist and neoliberal discourse and have brought new forms of oppression to female sexuality – in the forms of the agency imperative and pseudoempowerment. The article offers an integrated conceptual framework for female sexual subjectivity based on a critical reflection of existing sexuality research from the perspective of second-order psychology as opposed to mainstream positivist approaches. We propose adopting approaches to sexual subjectivity that (1) allow us to reflect on the dynamics of intrapersonal and interpersonal scripting rooted in normativesocial and cultural contexts, while (2) allowing for the authentic experience of lived, selfgenerated,and diverse subjectivities.
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This paper provides an overview of different understandings of the concept of freedom in classical and contemporary Islam. In classical Islam dominates dichotomy of legal and moral freedom. In the first case, freedom is defined as the opposite of (legal) slavery, and in the second, as freedom from desires and worldly interests. In Muslim modernity, freedom implies mostly negative freedom: freedom from the colonial boot, and later from various local despots. In Islam, as in other monotheistic traditions, the concept of freedom is understood as “the submission of the individual to divine law and order.” This is a characteristic monotheistic “paradox of freedom”: only those who obey God are free. Hence, “the Islamic concept of freedom differs from the Western concept, both in terms of assumptions and content.”
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Freedom of speech has different scientific, logical and international definitions and it is one of the main foundations of human rights. On the international level, the question of human rights and freedom of speech is mentioned in different documents from which common indicators may be identified such as the unrestricting through restrictions, and unrestrictedness not even in the case of insulting and useless speech as long as it does not cross the allowable boundaries of freedom, etc. However, some limitations are emphasized in international documents when it comes to freedom, such as the explicitness of law in the prohibition of actions by which the rights and freedoms of others are endangered. In discussion of the recent desecration of the sanctity of Muslims in Europe and the repetition of those actions, exactly this question is used as a basis for the non-confrontation with the burning of the Qur’an and the repetition of that action. That happens despite the fact that it is logical that freedom of speech cannot lead to insults and the bringing of harm to others. Excluding the rational, religious and ethical observations in judging the desecration of the sacred, especially of a great religion such as Islam, which can lead to the prompting of hatred, encouragement to violence and discrimination, in international documents every type of action which leads to prompting, discrimination, animosity and violence is forbidden, but on the other hand, the practice of some European countries to forbid the question of burning the Qur’an can become grounds for canonical systems of other countries to proclaim the prohibition of this act. As a result of that, in the canonical sense and in the voluminous form it is proclaimed and accepted that if the application of the laws of freedom of speech function as a threat to the general good and common interests, it is the duty of countries to intervene and to act so that they may limit these foundational rights. With this in mind, the principle of support of “the common good” and “universal ethics” are the interests which may be used to limiting the freedoms of speech and human rights. It cannot be the case, that while expressing worry out of the indefinity of the category of limiting the freedom of speech which bends towards dictatorship and repression, that the definitive category of human consciousness and logical ethic is to be ignored, as well as that the duty of respect towards the convictions of others and the respect of humanity to be disregarded.
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Fiqh works, in general, mention the goals and intentions of Sharia in the form of preserving and protecting universal values, especially religion and life. However, we do not find independent works, at least not in our area of speech, which put these two universal, protected values into correlational links. For this reason, we tried to define the first two fundamental protected values in the Sharia, namely the religion of Islam and human life, using the descriptive method and the method of citing traditional texts with analysis, comparison and their evaluation to explain their mutual, correlational relationship.
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A bank guarantee is an instrument of protection against the risk of non-performance or irregular performance of obligations arising from a specific contract. This paper defines the concept of bank guarantee, indicates its subjects and types, and then presents the legal nature of bank guarantee in Islamic law. Modern scholars have linked the bank guarantee with classical contracts, such as suretyship, agency and mortgage, and on this basis have taken a position on the legal status of the bank guarantee in Islamic law. The paper critically analyzes and compares their arguments and draws conclusions.
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