Catholic Hermeneutics

Vatican cardinal warns priests not to let humanity overshadow God :: Catholic News Agency (CNA)

This article, summarizing an address given by Cardinal Mauro Piacenza, offers a nice summary of a contemporary Catholic understanding of the place of sacred tradition and sacred scripture. "Scripture without tradition would be an historical book, and history tells us what others think, while theology seeks to tell us about God." I particularly loved this line from the Cardinal: "Nothing creates culture like the proclamation of the Word. In other words, it creates a new way of envisioning life, relationships, society, and even politics. The more evangelical this new way is, the more we discover how deeply and surprisingly it corresponds to the human heart."

Tribal Metanarrative

I include this video not for political reasons. I am no fan of Harry Belafonte - his music or his politics. I think that his viewpoint is caustic, dismissive, and laughable if it wasn't so racist.  I am also no fan of Henry Cain. I do typically vote conservative in most elections, but I simply don't know enough about Cain to have an informed opinion on him. I also don't believe that Belafonte represents the thoughts of most or even many African-Americans. His views are on the extreme fringe. The reason why I linked to this video is because of what it demonstrates. It demonstrates the dangers of the type of tribalistic thinking that often accompanies liberationist theologies. Tribalistic thinking allows us to handily separate people into "good blacks" and "bad blacks," "good women" and "bad women," "good evangelicals" and "bad evangelicals," etc. based on how faithful an individual is to the accepted narrative of their tribe. If you occupy a certain tribe (or rather, as is most often the case, if I have placed you into a certain tribe independant of your personal feelings), then you must think, act, and talk in a certain way in order to be "good." In this case, it turns blackness into nothing more than an ideology or dogma.

http://youtu.be/5fxjQ5h6Ri4