{"id":5868,"date":"2006-09-14T13:30:55","date_gmt":"2006-09-14T13:30:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/09\/an-analysis.html"},"modified":"2006-09-14T13:30:55","modified_gmt":"2006-09-14T13:30:55","slug":"an-analysis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/09\/an-analysis.html","title":{"rendered":"An analysis"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Thavis of CNS:<\/a><\/p>\n

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In talks in Munich and Regensburg, the pope developed a central message of his trip: that in a world where religions and cultures risk colliding, Christians must make sure their faith is firm and is reflected in their own culture.<\/p>\n

Other religions, he said, do not see a threat to their identity in the Christian faith but in the "contempt for God" and the "mockery of the sacred" in the West.<\/p>\n

That was an interesting approach to the issue of secularization. By distinguishing the church’s agenda from that of the dominant Western culture, the pope seemed to stake out new ground in the debate over the potential "clash of civilizations" — or, as the pope prefers to view it, the "dialogue of cultures."<\/p>\n

Although he is concerned about radical Islam, the pope was emphasizing that the church wants no part of a political crusade that would impose a materialistic, godless society on the rest of the world, under the banner of "enlightenment."<\/p>\n

But when he expanded on this theme in an address to academics in Regensburg, the pope discovered that some of his scholarly ideas were just too dense for the sound-bite culture.<\/p>\n

His main point in the speech was that reason and faith must be reconciled in the West, and his critique of the "de-Hellenization" of Christian theology was detailed and provocative.<\/p>\n

But he introduced it by quoting a medieval emperor on the errors of Islam and jihad, or holy war, which the press naturally found more exciting. The pope’s speech was not about Islam, but the headlines the next day were.<\/p>\n

Although the pope did not specifically endorse the 600-year-old criticisms of Islam that he quoted, he did not distance himself from them, either. Thus, the story quickly morphed into "Pope hits out at Islam" — an exaggeration, but one that might have been foreseen by a media-savvy pope.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Oh, I don’t know. Looking at it from my 20-degrees of separation, fairly uninformed perspective, I’m thinking the Pope is not stupid and given that there were a million other ways he could have introduced the subject, choosing a 14th century dialogue that critiques the presumptions and assumptions of Islamic concepts of God was not an accident.  Perhaps Benedict is indeed inviting us to take a closer look. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Thavis of CNS: In talks in Munich and Regensburg, the pope developed a central message of his trip: that in a world where religions and cultures risk colliding, Christians must make sure their faith is firm and is reflected in their own culture. 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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\/5868","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=5868"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5868\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}