In the 20th century, both in the East, but mostly in the West, a genuine movement of patristic and liturgical renewal took shape, aiming to establish as to what degree the theological discourse and ...the liturgical life of the Church today corresponds to the spirit and the practice of the Church of the first centuries. In this spirit, the question was often asked if the generalization of infant baptism in the West (5th century), but also in the East (6th century), was influenced by the theory of “original sin” and the Augustinian “bogeyman” concerning the inevitable condemnation to hell of all who die unbaptized. In his book “Of Water and the Spirit”, Father Alexander Schmemann briefly touches, but does not fully develop the subject, and fails to reach any clear conclusions. In the current study we tried, as much as was possible, to follow the roots and dogmatical consequences of this theory, and also to discern its ensuing consequences on baptismal rites and texts, as well as other practical and canonical implications, like the importance of baptismal immersion.
In this article, I show how traditional Thomistic claims about the creation and fall of the first human beings—or “Adam”—are compatible with the claims of evolutionary science concerning human ...origins. Aquinas claims that God created Adam in a state or condition of original justice, wholly subject to God and so fully virtuous, as well as internally immune to bodily corruption, suffering, and natural death. In defense of “Aquinas's Adam,” I first argue that affirming that the prelapsarian Adam was internally immune to suffering and death does not require denying that these things predated his emergence within evolutionary history, or that he would have faced real challenges posed to him by his natural environment. Next, I rebut the claim that Adam must have been spiritually and morally fragile, given the traits he inherited from his evolutionary ancestors. Finally, I dispute the claim that Adam only could have fallen if he existed in a spiritually and morally fragile state.
Abstract The purpose of this work is to analyze, both in terms of interpretation and occurrence, the religious elements of Lucian Blaga’s volume “Poems of Light” (“Poemele Luminii”), namely the links ...between the figures of divinity and the individual, the latter being seen in its inferior, ephemeral condition, which in fact prevents him from identifying with the deity in question, but which does not stop him from aspiring to the absolute.
In this interview, conducted by issue editors Frank Bosman and Alexander D. Ornellain August 2022, Ken Wong discusses the relationship between video game design,video game aesthetics, religious ...imagery, and cultural storytelling. He discusses how(secularized) religious tropes, ideas, and images can become part of the game designand the story of the game, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously. Hediscusses how the ideas of “giving back”, atonement, and forgiveness can becomeelements of successful video games.
The purpose of this article is twofold. First, it explores and shows ways in which one important view of racism parallels the Christian doctrine of original sin. Second, it argues that this ...comparison helps to close the gap between the two main strands of Christian thinking about original sin. Philosophers and theologians are often asked to decide between Augustinian or Irenaean theories of original sin. An epistemology of ignorance, especially as applied in discussions of racism, helps us to see how this dichotomy may be short‐sighted. For virtually no one, in an epistemology of ignorance, matures into being a racist. Nevertheless, as Charles W. Mills famously argues, the epistemology of ignorance he terms the Racial Contract has a historical inception, namely, the period around the beginning of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. I close the article by discussing whether a model of original sin similar to an epistemology of racist ignorance might satisfy the dogmatic constraints of the Catholic tradition.
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