Autor: McCarthy, Michael

Buch: Workshop Rome 2001

Titel: Theological Reflection and Christian Renewal

Stichwort: Vorherrschaft einer säkularen (kirchenfeindlichen) Mentalität; Massenmedien; 20. Jhdt: Verlust d. Unschuld

Kurzinhalt: Secularization of the Academy (George Marsden), abnehmender Einfluss d. Kirchen bei:, Zeitungen, Massenmedien; practical consequences of 'the death of God': absurdity, nihilism, divertissement, consumerism; decline d. säkularen Kräfte

Textausschnitt: However, a dramatic cultural change has occurred since the second half of the nineteenth century. ... The directive and critical influence of religion is greatly curtailed within the modern academy. ... If secular universities and research institutions have become the principal source of independent thinking and criticism in the West, and if religion and especially theology have become marginal forces within the academy and the scholarly world, then the Church's ability to exercise cultural and moral leadership through the practice of theological reflection is gravely in doubt.
()
Universities and think tanks, of course, are not the only source of public leadership. Technological innovation and artistic creativity are an important source of original ideas. But technological inventions are rarely religiously inspired, and the creative communities in the contemporary West are often hostile to, if not aloof from, institutional Christianity. Cultural analysis and criticism also shape public opinion and taste. This process of informal education occurs through influential journals like the New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement, or in prominent public forums where the leading ideas of the specialized disciplines are exchanged and debated. But the spirit and substance of these journals and forums is also relentlessly secular, even when they deal with matters of genuinely religious concern.
()
The mass media have probably the greatest direct influence on our attitudes and beliefs and on our affective and moral dispositions. Yet contemporary advertising, profit-driven journalism and popular entertainment ... genuinely foster a vision of human existence and the human good radically at variance with that of the gospel.
()
The common theistic horizon that unified Western culture from the conversion of Constantine until the French Revolution has been replaced, especially among creative artists and in the most influential centers of cultural analysis and criticism, by a self-consciously secular mentality that is often hostile to the Church and incompatible with the Christian moral vision.
()
The scientific community has legitimate doubts about the Catholic commitment to freedom of inquiry; artists fear its restraint on creative expression. The cultural left views Christianity as a conservative force supporting the conventional status quo; and post-modernists distrust the Christian reliance on authority and its commitment to universal ethical norms. In the face of these momentous historical challenges, is contemporary Christianity still able to provide significant public leadership for its own members?
()
The forceful modern assertion of human freedom and dignity since the Renaissance contains a considerable measure of truth. We are collectively responsible for the world we bequeath to posterity. Yet that ethical truth has often received one-sided expression. Modern historical consciousness has, in fact, been tainted by a secularist bias that tends to treat human beings as the only source of insight and moral energy, and the good that humans achieve as the only basis for temporal hope. The practical consequences of 'the death of God' have not been innocent as the sad record of the twentieth century clearly shows.
()
The distrust of religion and the rejection of theology have steadily narrowed the sources of knowledge and moral energy on which Western culture can draw. Since the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, several important elements in the Christian cultural synthesis articulated by Thomas Aquinas have been abandoned. First, the truth of divine revelation was rejected by rationalists like Spinoza; then the directive power of human reason was denied by skeptical critics like Hume.
()
This mood of political and cultural pessimism coincides with a resurgence of classical liberalism that celebrates the economic efficiency of the commercial marketplace. But global capitalism only deepens existing inequalities within and among nations ...
()
The profound lesson of the twentieth century, I believe, is that the age of innocence is over. The great secular ideologies, liberalism, Marxism, nationalism, have been forced to confront the intractable problem of evil and moral impotence. In creating and sustaining a just human society, there is no evading the demand for authenticity, personal, institutional and cultural. But authenticity is incompatible with egoistic, group and general bias, with the refusal of repentance and conversion, with the denial of God. It is also incompatible with the scapegoat 'solution' of locating the source of injustice and evil in the other, whether the other is a government official, an entrepreneurial capitalist or an ethnic, racial or religious adversary. Genuine conversion always starts with oneself, with one's own community,