O tema é importante, mas continua a ser ignorado, pelo menos em Perdizes. Ate quando, não sei. O texto do Francis Cardinal George, O.M.I., é um bom ponto de partida para esta discussão.
"We are at the end of the Church’s celebration of the Mystery of
the Incarnation where we see what St. John tells us he saw and
touched and we celebrate in the liturgy the central truth of our
faith: “God so loved the world that he sent his only Son” (John 3:16).At the heart of the Incarnation, therefore, is God’s loving embrace,in Christ, of the whole cosmos, that is to say the world of nature and the realm of human culture. The Council of Chalcedon reminds us that the joining of divine and worldly natures takes place without mixing, mingling, division or confusion, therefore without compromising the distinctiveness of God or the distinctiveness of the world. This means that God’s presence is never a competitive one. God’s proximity, far from threatening or overwhelming the worldly, raises it up and enhances it, bringing it to fullness of expression.In this noncompetitive proximity of God is the ground for the Catholic love of nature and confidence in cultural expressions and the Church’s being at ease in universities.
From the earliest phase of faith, incarnational theologians such as Justin, Origen,Ambrose, and Augustine borrowed liberally from philosophical sources in their articulation of Christian faith. It was Origen who employed the metaphor of the Jews’ plundering of Egypt to explain the Christian willingness to take what is true,
good, and beautiful in the non-Christian cultures that surrounded them. In the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas, despite the opposition of some of his contemporaries, utilized the science and philosophy of Aristotle, a pagan, the metaphysics of the Muslim thinkers Averroes and Avicenna, and the Jewish mysticism of Moses Maimonides in the presentation of an altogether distinctive Christian theology. Of course, in doing that, he transformed them rather dramatically, but nonetheless he used them because he knew that the Logos of Christ did not suppress the logoi of the culture. On the contrary, Christian theology can assimilate insights from other sources and bring them to richer expression. It is what Ad Gentes, the missionary document from Vatican II, speaks of as the semina Verbi, the seeds of the Word, the Logos, in every culture, which have to be looked for and respected.
Now how does this incarnational confidence shape our attitudes toward today’s world and toward the kind of secularism that may be the regnant ideology in a university? It first compels us to affirm the values of the secular culture, neither demonizing it nor fleeing from it. Christians therefore are the friends of science, literature, philosophy,drama, and song precisely because we are to be bearers of the Word—the divine Word that is present implicitly in all those disciplines. Christians are celebrators of the saeculum and the secular, therefore, because God has made it good and has celebrated and redeemed the saeculum in Christ Jesus the Lord. Accordingly, there is no retreat behind walls of defensiveness and no exclusion of the secular from the arena of the Church’s legitimate concern."
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