Word: theologian
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...magical opportunity. It's persuasive, far reaching and clandestine. And for better and worse, it frees the imagination from the everyday world. "I think that the online context can remove people from a proper understanding of reality and of the proper tests for truth," says Douglas Groothuis, a theologian and author of The Soul in Cyberspace. "How do you verify peoples' identity? How do you connect 'online' with real life...
...Richard McBrien feels that we have quite enough heaven now, thank you. McBrien, a liberal Catholic theologian at the University of Notre Dame who has skirmished on occasion with the Vatican but whose theological and historical grasp few would question, believes that before the Vatican II reforms of the mid-1960s, his church had slipped into the lazy role of using heaven and hell as "stories meant to encourage and frighten." Catholicism's once vivid otherworldliness had devolved into a sort of rote board game, in which preoccupation with involved scenarios of the life to come became an excuse...
Pelikan lovingly tracks successive Marian personae, such as Second Eve, Paragon of Chastity, Queen of Heaven and Blessed Mother, through to the present. He is fascinated with what the Victorian-era Cardinal and theologian John Henry Newman called the "development of doctrine"--the process, infuriating to traditional Protestants, whereby Catholic Popes and bishops continued promulgating articles of Christian faith long after the last biblical word was written. Mary is a prime example: her scant treatment in the Gospels left a vacuum that the church, often preceded and probably influenced by popular belief, has been gradually filling over the centuries...
...addressing a point on which Pius was emphatic: that a particular man named Adam must have been our ancestor. Any other theory, Pius maintained, was inconsistent with the doctrine of original sin. But the teaching about Adam has also been superseded, says Father Richard P. McBrien, a liberal theologian at the University of Notre Dame. "No Scripture scholar today would say we are literally descended from two people." To such scholars, and John Paul, the evolution of our bodies matters much less than the evolution of our souls...
EXONERATED. DIETRICH BONHOEFFER, influential Lutheran theologian hanged in 1945 for high treason against Germany; by a Berlin court, which ruled that a 1946 law nullifying Nazi-era judgments formally overturned the death sentence an SS tribunal had imposed. Bonhoeffer, whose writings held up the suffering Christ as a model of submission to God's will, had denounced Hitler as the "anti-Christ." He died at 39, one month before Germany surrendered...