{"id":4919,"date":"2006-02-03T13:46:20","date_gmt":"2006-02-03T13:46:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/02\/word-up-7.html"},"modified":"2006-02-03T13:46:20","modified_gmt":"2006-02-03T13:46:20","slug":"word-up-7","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/02\/word-up-7.html","title":{"rendered":"Word Up"},"content":{"rendered":"

Various interesting items from John Allen this week, <\/a>including this observation from an African cardinal, about the importance of Benedict and his specific background at this specific moment in history:<\/p>\n

\n
\n

Do you look forward to a day when a papal encyclical will begin by citing an African proverb rather than a line from Nietzsche?<\/strong> <\/p>\n

"I don’t see anything stopping the pope from citing African proverbs. This will come as we have some good Africans among the drafters of the encyclicals who are familiar with our traditional wisdom. \u2026 <\/p>\n

"When Benedict quotes Nietzsche and Descartes, these are the people with whom he’s familiar, and I don’t believe that’s an accident. We must start with the faith position that, apart from anything else, it’s the Holy Spirit who is behind who emerges as pope. As soon as this pope was elected, the first thing that came to my mind was that the greatest challenge facing the Catholic church today is how to restore the spirit of the church to this technological, advanced, powerful Western world. It’s as if the Holy Spirit chose somebody who can address the culture in its own language, drawing on its own philosophers, both good and bad. \u2026 <\/p>\n

"To be blunt, when Ratzinger critiques German theological currents or the European Union and its philosophical positions, it has an impact. If an African pope were to say the same things, people would say, ‘He’s an African, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.’ Even with John Paul II, there was sometimes an undercurrent of dismissal. People said he’s been in Poland all this time, he’s trying to force the church into a kind of Polish model. I don’t think that was true, but it was said. No one will be able to make such a case for Benedict XVI. <\/p>\n

"If this pope can find a way to help the Western world recover a sense of God, and to try to reflect it in public life, it would be a great blessing for Europe and for the rest of us." <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Various interesting items from John Allen this week, including this observation from an African cardinal, about the importance of Benedict and his specific background at this specific moment in history: Do you look forward to a day when a papal encyclical will begin by citing an African proverb rather than a line from Nietzsche? "I…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4919","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nWord Up - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/02\/word-up-7.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Word Up - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Various interesting items from John Allen this week, including this observation from an African cardinal, about the importance of Benedict and his specific background at this specific moment in history: Do you look forward to a day when a papal encyclical will begin by citing an African proverb rather than a line from Nietzsche? 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4919","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4919"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4919\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}