A School of Friendship and Wisdom: The Catholic University as the Space of Global Resistance to Globalization (original) (raw)

Globalization is a deeply ambivalent phenomenon, involving both widened horizons of understanding and the commodification of natural and human resources. The Catholic university's engagement with our new global situation needs to keep this ambivalence very much in mind. We should remember and renew our sense of ourselves as standing within an institution, the Catholic Church, that is one of the few truly multicultural global institutions on the planet, with a long history of both success and failure in global exchange. In this way, we may have resources to " think globally " in alternative ways that opt out of or resist the commodification of global interest. This essay will use Matteo Ricci as a model and attempt to distinguish analogically between those modes of global engagement that emerge from and then renew the deep roots of our own identity and those modes that deracinate. Our task for the last gathering of this " class " of the Boston College Roundtable is to reflect on, variously, " the role of the academy in the world " or " the global impact of Catholic higher education. " I want to take advantage of my ignorance here—I find it difficult to think in a programmatic way about our role in the midst of these complex, interlocking, and often conflicting forms of commerce and exchange that we group under the heading " globalization. " I'd like to use my own inadequacy to the task as an opportunity to do what I can—to name some of the threats and opportunities that we encounter as we are drawn, ever-more-inexorably, into these various networks of global Kevin L. Hughes is an associate professor of theology and religious studies and chair of both the Humanities department and Classical Studies program at Villanova University. His research specialties are in ancient and medieval Christian theology, spirituality, and history. Among his books are Augustine and Liberal Education; Constructing Antichrist; and Church History: Faith Handed On. His articles have appeared in journals such as Modern Theology; The Heythrop Journal; Theological Studies; and Franciscan Studies.

The Full has Never been Told: Theology and the Encounter with Globalization.

My thesis, The Full Has Never Been Told: Theology and the Encounter with Globalization, is an investigation of the encounter between religion and globalization. Rastafari reggae performer Buju Banton's song, Untold Story (Banton, 2002) recounts a variety of injustices and sufferings inflicted on 'low-budget people', each concluding with the refrain, "I could go on and on, the full has never been told." The full has never been told is the hermeneutical orientation of my research that encapsulates the suffering of the wretched of the earth as they encountered the oppressive forces of globalization and the hope that inevitably emerges from this encounter. My research begins with an understanding of globalization not as a clash of civilizations, but as a clash of symbols and metaphors. An important insight I have investigated is the theoretical significance of the 'deterritorialization' of symbols as a primary, long run driving force of economic, political, and social globalization and globalizations encounter in the developing world as a boundary situation. The Caribbean's experience of transatlantic slavery, colonization/decolonization, the in-migration of indentured labour, and the continued out migration of West Indian's through-out the globe represents the first clash with the boundary situation of globalization. Paul Ricoeur identifies boundary situations as encounters with "war, suffering, guilt, death and so which the individual or community experience as a fundamental existential crisis." In the Caribbean, these boundary situations require solutions beyond purely political, economic or technical means. They demand, as Ricoeur notes, "we ask ourselves the ultimate question concerning our origins and ends: Where do we come from? Where are we going? In this way we become aware of our basic capacities and reason for surviving, for being and continuing to be what we are." These questions and contradictions are at the core of theology's encounter with globalization. The hypothesizes that I sought to prove is: if leading social scientific theorists of globalization are correct in their assessment of the importance of communication and symbolic exchanges to globalization then a hermeneutic of the productive imagination that is attentive to symbol and myth is a critical analytic tool for reflection on globalization. Such a hermeneutic has the advantage of locating globalization as both the text and context of theological and social scientific analysis. Rastafari contributes to reflections on this encounter through its interpretation of the symbolic importance of word, sound and power thus situating it as a grassroots example of a hermeneutic of liberation in praxis that recharges theological language through the re-enactment, re-enforcement and re-embodiment of symbol and myth. This project employed an interdisciplinary methodology using Paul Ricoeur's phenomenological hermeneutic of the productive imagination, Niklas Luhmann and Peter Beyer's social theory of the communicative characteristic of global society and Rastafari's interpretation of word, sound and power in their encounter with globalization. The theoretical framework of my project follows Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutic arc. The first moment of the arc, pre-understanding, introduces the historical framework of globalization and religion. In the second moment of the arc, configuration, this framework is configured with Ricoeur's presentation of the productive imagination to present a hermeneutic model for understanding and explaining the symbolic and mythic encounter of globalization. In the final moment of the arc, application, the Rastafari hermeneutic of word, sound and power emerging from the Rastafari experience of globalization shows itself as an exemplar of an ontology of hope that has passed through despair. This interdisciplinary methodology has sought to bridge the gap between theological reflection and social scientific theory. These theories complement one another as they draw our attention to the surplus of meaning inherent in any text, discourse, or meaningful action. Ricoeur, Luhmann, and Beyer start from the centrality of meaning to human existence recognizing that meaning is set against a foreground, or horizon of possible meaning. This is the surplus of meaning that Ricoeur's hermeneutics attempts to make sense of and the conceptualization of society in terms of meaning-processing systems of communication advanced by Luhmann and Beyer. Communication is at the heart of Luhmann and Beyer's theory of social systems and communications are ultimately symbolic exchanges that "can be conceptualized as a kind of self-excitation that inundates the system with meaning" (Luhmann, 1995, 171 ). Getting at this surplus of meaning is the central task of Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutics and Rastafari reasoning through word, sound and power. The reconfiguration ofthese theoretical perspectives has yielded valuable insights into the interpretation of the symbols and discourse of globalization making a unique contribution to theological knowledge.

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