Year: 2019
Type: article
Abstract: This session explored millennial, post-post-conciliar theology as developed, and expressed, in a digital age.In his opening paper, "Faith and Hope in the Ruins: Millennial Theology in a Shattered Church," Daniel A. Rober highlighted the social, cultural, political, and religious fragmentation-and increasing religious disaffiliation-in which the millennial generation of US Catholic theologians have come of age.In keeping with the CTSA convention theme that "another world is possible," he argued that a key task for millennial Catholic theology is to articulate and live out the possibility of a new vision of the church that goes beyond the institutional, bringing the teaching of Vatican II to unpack what it means to truly believe in "one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church" as a mystery of faith rather than as a strong, visible institutional church with clearly delineated lines of authority.Current trends and events are arguably reaping the fruits of this vision, in which a crisis of the institution becomes almost automatically a crisis of belief and affiliation.Rober reflected on the experience of the different millennial cohorts, particularly the lack of a "first naïveté" among young millennials and their different relationship to the church in light of having been raised in the church following 2002.The paper concluded by proposing a more robust Catholic engagement of the Lutheran concept of the invisible church as an antidote to over-identification of the church with its institutional aspects.Stephen Okey followed with "Reconsidering Public Theology in a Digital Age," in which he argued that the changing media landscape requires a reconsideration of David Tracy's three publics and the theological claims that underpin them.Tracy's publics to which the theologian is responsible are the academy, the church, and the society.Theologically, per Tracy, the church is the sacrament of the world, and thus it mediates between God and the world (the world being a theological construct that includes both academy and society).In his challenge to this vision, Okey engages the work of Stig Hjarvard, who argued that the media have become an independent and largely consolidated social institution on which other social institutions such as religions, governments, and corporations are increasingly dependent.As such, these institutions, especially religions, conform themselves to the fundamental logic of the media in order to communicate their message.This conformity has had significant impact on the formation, dissemination, and reception of religious meaning and value within society.Okey investigated four possible approaches to engaging the question of the digital within Tracy's public theology.First, it is possible that the digital age simply extends
Author: Mary Beth Yount
Language: English
Subfield: Religious studies
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2982601547