This book confronts the challenges that hermeneutics brings to ethics and education by thematizing the critical influence which ethics and contemporary educational theory and practice have on the self-understanding of philosophical hermeneutics. In the hermeneutic spirit of commitment to cultivating lifelong habits of critical thinking, moral reflection, and articulate expression, the book presents many voices that illuminate a rich cultural diversity with the profound hope of nurturing the full-flourishing of human beings. The hermeneutics of education calls for diverse ways of thinking about education, which deeply cares for the common good of individuals, communities, and nations. This diversity promotes a genuine interest in different approaches to the event (Ereignis) of education. (Series: International Studies in Hermeneutics and Phenomenology - Vol. 8) [Subject: Hermeneutics, Ethics, Education]

This comprehensive study investigates the role that Ignatian spirituality has played in the renewal of academic theology using three prominent Jesuits as case studies. Over several centuries, spirituality has come to define a field of concerns and themes increasingly treated separately from those of academic theology, as if the latter had little relation to the former. This raises the question for us today: How is spirituality related to the practice of theology? In Renewing Theology, J. Matthew Ashley provides an answer by turning to Ignatian spirituality and three prominent twentieth-century theologians who embraced its spiritual resources: Karl Rahner, Ignacio Ellacuría, and Jorge Mario Bergoglio—that is, Pope Francis. Ashley begins his investigation by considering the historical origins of the widening separation between spirituality and academic theology in the Christian West. He provides an initial overview of Ignatian spirituality, focusing on the openness and multidimensionality of Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, presented here as a text in which the conditions of modernity that defined its author’s world are present, at least incipiently. Ashley then offers three case studies in order to show how each Jesuit—Rahner, Ellacuría, and Pope Francis—responded to the challenges of modernity in a way that is uniquely nourished and illuminated by themes constitutive of Ignatian spirituality. Their theologies, Ashley suggests, evince a particular clarity and force when the Ignatian spirituality that animates them is foregrounded. Providing new and productive avenues into understanding the theologies of these three individuals, this sophisticated and enlightening book will interest scholars and students of systematic theology, as well as readers who are interested in the future of theology and spirituality in a fragmented age.

This book is the first comprehensive analysis of the thought of Ignacio Ellacuría, the Jesuit philosopher-theologian martyred for his work on behalf of Latin America's oppressed peoples. While serving as president of the Jesuit-run University of Central America in the midst of El Salvador's brutal civil war, Ellacuría was also a prolific writer. His advocacy on behalf of the country's persecuted majority provoked the enmity of the Salvadoran political establishment. On November 16, 1989, members of the Salvadoran military entered the university's campus and murdered Ellacuría, along with five other Jesuit priests and two women. Kevin F. Burke, SJ, shows why Ellacuría is significant not only as a martyr but also as a theologian. Ellacuría effectively integrated philosophy, history, anthropology, and sociopolitical analysis into his theological reflections on salvation, spirituality, and the church to create an original contribution to liberation theology. Ellacuría's writings directly address one of the most vexing issues in theology today: can theologians account for the demands arising from both the particularity of their various social-historical situations and also the universal claims of Christian revelation? Burke explains how Ellacuría bases theology in a philosophy of historical reality—the "ground beneath the cross"—and interprets the suffering of "the crucified peoples" in the light of Jesus' crucifixion. Ellacuría thus inserts the theological realities of salvation and transcendence squarely within the course of human events, and he connects these to the Christian mandate to "take the crucified peoples down from their crosses." Placing Ellacuría's thought in the context of historical trends within the Roman Catholic Church, particularly Vatican II and the rise of liberation theology in Latin America, Burke argues that Ellacuría makes a distinctive contribution to contemporary Catholic theology.

In the past one hundred years alone, more than 200 million people have been killed as a consequence of systematic repression, political revolutions, or ethnic or religious war. The legacy of such violence lingers long after the immediate conflict. Drawing on the author’s experiences of his native El Salvador, Liberation through Reconciliation builds on Jon Sobrino’s thought to construct a Christian spirituality and theology of reconciliation that overcomes conflict by attending to the demands of truth, justice, and forgiveness.

This book comprises various chapters which explore a variety of topics related to the manner in which ideological and epistemological changes in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries shaped the Spanish language, literature, and film, among other forms of expression, in both Spain and Latin America, and how these media served the purpose of spreading ideas and demands. There are articles on ideological representations of linguistic differences and sameness; linguistic changes associated with loan words and the ideas they bring in modifying our communicative landscape; the role of the Catholic religion on the construction of our dictionary; analysis of some political discourses, ideologies and social imaginaries; new visions of old literature (a return to the parody in the Middle Ages to analyze its moderness) and postmodern narrative; discussions on contemporary Spanish poetry and Central American literature; a new return to the liberation philosophy by analyzing Ellacuría´s work; and several studies about concepts such as capitalism, patriarchy, identity, masculinity, homosexuality, globalization, and the Resistence in several forms of expression.