Loyal Dissent is the candid and inspiring story of a Catholic priest and theologian who, despite being stripped of his right to teach as a Catholic theologian by the Vatican, remains committed to the Catholic Church. Over a nearly fifty-year career, Charles E. Curran has distinguished himself as the most well-known and the most controversial Catholic moral theologian in the United States. On occasion, he has disagreed with official church teachings on subjects such as contraception, homosexuality, divorce, abortion, moral norms, and the role played by the hierarchical teaching office in moral matters. Throughout, however, Curran has remained a committed Catholic, a priest working for the reform of a pilgrim church. His positions, he insists, are always in accord with the best understanding of Catholic theology and always dedicated to the good of the church. In 1986, years of clashes with church authorities finally culminated in a decision by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, headed by then-Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, that Curran was neither suitable nor eligible to be a professor of Catholic theology. As a result of that Vatican condemnation, he was fired from his teaching position at Catholic University of America and, since then, no Catholic university has been willing to hire him. Yet Curran continues to defend the possibility of legitimate dissent from those teachings of the Catholic faith—not core or central to it—that are outside the realm of infallibility. In word and deed, he has worked in support of more academic freedom in Catholic higher education and for a structural change in the church that would increase the role of the Catholic community—from local churches and parishes to all the baptized people of God. In this poignant and passionate memoir, Curran recounts his remarkable story from his early years as a compliant, pre-Vatican II Catholic through decades of teaching and writing and a transformation that has brought him today to be recognized as a leader of progressive Catholicism throughout the world.

Curran provides historical record and interpretation of his controversy with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith over the legitimacy of theological and practical dissent from noninfallible hierarchical teachings on a number of issues primarily in sexual ethics.--Introd.

Faithful Dissenters tells the stories of people who took risky stands and sometimes paid heavily. Yet the benefits of their dissent have unquestionably enriched the church and all of us. They include: -- Catherine of Sienna -- Thomas Aquinas -- Matteo Ricci -- Hildegard of Bingen -- John Henry Newman -- Mary Ward -- Yves Congar All of these men and women had one thing in common: they loved the church. And the church they helped change now holds all of them in high esteem.

The education provided by Canada’s faith-based schools is a subject of public, political, and scholarly controversy. As the population becomes more religiously diverse, the continued establishment and support of faith-based schools has reignited debates about whether they should be funded publicly and to what extent they threaten social cohesion. These discussions tend to occur without considering a fundamental question: How do faith-based schools envision and enact their educational missions? Discipline, Devotion, and Dissent offers responses to that question by examining a selection of Canada’s Jewish, Catholic, and Islamic schools. The daily reality of these schools is illuminated through essays that address the aims and practices that characterize these schools, how they prepare their students to become citizens of a multicultural Canada, and how they respond to dissent in the classroom. The essays in this book reveal that Canada’s faith-based schools sometimes succeed and sometimes struggle in bridging the demands of the faith and the need to create participating citizens of a multicultural society. Discussion surrounding faith-based schools in Canada would be enriched by a better understanding of the aims and practices of these schools, and this book provides a gateway to the subject.

Considers dissent, its theological analysis, and place in Catholic life. +

This book takes the concept of repetition beyond older anthropological debates over habit, structure, or cultural continuity and demonstrates its value in attempts to comprehend the temporal, spatial and ideological fields in which contemporary social scientists must operate. Repetition has an ambiguous value in human societies. It may contribute to desired social and cultural reproduction or, equally, represent experiences of being trapped in cycles of routine and stasis. In this book, six anthropologists demonstrate the capacity of repetition to open up fertile areas of comparative ethnographic and historical work. Focusing on religious case-studies drawn from around the world, contributors ask when and how repetition is observed by interlocutors or fieldworkers. In the process, they explore the ethical, political and experiential dimensions of repetition as it operates at numerous scales of activity, ranging from intimate ritual, to forms of religious dissent, to haunting forms of historical recurrence. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of History and Anthropology.