Throughout the Homo Sacer series, Giorgio Agamben takes seriously the political and philosophical significance of Christian ritual in his archaeology of Western political discourse. In Opus Dei, Agamben argues for the sacrifice of the Mass as the paradigm for the ontology of effectivity, an ontology he sees as still regnant in the West. This ontology depends on the discourse of duty or office, and it begins with the priestly office. The priest’s duty is to be an “animate instrument” in the (...) Mass. However, Agamben’s archaeology contains a massive gap between scholastic theology and Enlightenment political theory—the Protestant Reformation. I argue that Agamben’s hypothesis requires attending to the reformation of the Mass. Examining the works of Luther and Zwingli, I show that in spite of their rejection of the priesthood, the discourse of duty and operativity not only persists but expands through their respective sacramental theologies. (shrink)

This article considers what St. Augustine has to say about administration in The City of God, as well as in The Rule of St. Augustine and in Of the Work of Monks. Rather than focusin...

In this article the author argues that nursing is best understood as a vocational occupation. Using Blum’s model of vocations it is argued that such occupations are socially expressed within practices embodying traditions, norms and a range of meanings: industrial, social, personal and moral. Vocational workers are those who identify in certain ways with these traditions, norms and meanings. One problem with the vocational model, as it has historically applied to nursing, is that it has been articulated through concepts of (...) motherhood. Nursing was a vocation precisely because the character of the nurse was identified as feminine. The author argues that the vocational model for nursing can be conceptually disentangled from its identification with ideals of motherhood and femininity. It is nursing work and the identification with the moral and social meaning of nursing that give nursing its vocational status, not the feminized character of the nurse. (shrink)

: This paper has three aims. First, it provides the historical background necessary to understand the nature of academic systematic theology as it is currently being pursued in Nordic countries. Second, it questions whether the current methods of analytic theology are able to fulfill the desiderata of Nordic academic systematic theology. To this end, I suggest a specific methodological solution. Lastly, I assess if analytic theology can remain theological when using this methodology.

ABSTRACT This essay explores the possibility for a phenomenology of Christian vocational calling through conversation with Jean-Paul Sartre’s existential-ontology. By demonstrating how Sartre’s account of nothingness comports with a Rahnerian understanding of God as absolute mystery and how Sartre’s account of bad faith further opens up an understanding of ontological self-identity as a turn away from God, we can establish a phenomenology of Christian vocation as one’s owning each finite situation in terms of its divinely available possibilities rather than simply (...) its given conditions. Divine call thus occurs where one’s possibilities for boundless becoming are freely recognized in any situation and are further apprehended in light of the character of God to become the possibilities for the freedom and calling of others. (shrink)