Fără Hristos spiritualitatea nu este decât o iluzie - interviu cu Jean-Claude Larchet
Interview by Pr. Georgian Păunoiu and translated by Ionut Marinescu
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Interview by Pr. Georgian Păunoiu and translated by Ionut Marinescu
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Jesus Christ, Son of God incarnate is an undesirable and disturbing person forthat time. Pharisees and Scribes suspects, monitor and seek to discredit Him in front ofthe masses. All this culminates in the act of crucifixion. Hostility toward Christcontinues after the Ascension, Jewish authorities and the Roman Empire trigger the tenpersecutions. Pagan intellectuals, religious leaders and Islamic mosaic attack virulent.Major outbreak of the attack begins with the Enlightenment, Humanism, Materialism,Darwinism, Atheism, and Communism, Nazism but not absent from Capitalism. Fr.Nietzsche manifests most radical position by his deceiver idea: "Übermensch"(Superman). In the modern world denial of God is essentially human denial.Jesus Christ, Son of God incarnate is an undesirable and disturbing person for that time. Pharisees and Scribes suspects, monitor and seek to discredit Him in front of the masses. All this culminates in the act of crucifixion. Hostility toward Christ continues after the Ascension, Jewish authorities and the Roman Empire trigger the ten persecutions. Pagan intellectuals, religious leaders and Islamic mosaic attack virulent. Major outbreak of the attack begins with the Enlightenment, Humanism, Materialism, Darwinism, Atheism, and Communism, Nazism but not absent from Capitalism. Fr. Nietzsche manifests most radical position by his deceiver idea: "Übermensch" (Superman). In the modern world denial of God is essentially human denial.
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At the heart of Pauline thinking is God and faith in God, a fundamental belief which is everywhere present in his epistles, faith that St. Paul did not try to explain in particular, precisely because it was the fundamental faith of his own tradition. Even if most people were convinced of the existence of God, by Pauline thinking and its Jewish heritage it was reinforced the idea that God is one, as opposed to the polytheism of Greco-Roman world. This One God is the creator of the world and its Judge taking care of all nations, deciding over the place and life duration of each nation. Finally, the Christianity taught by Apostle Paul tries to capture both the best aspirations of the Jews, entrusted by divine revelation and those of the Greek, known from human wisdom.
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Cyril of Alexandria (c. 378-444), known in antiquity as the sphragis ton pateron, the ‘seal of the Fathers’ is one of the most important of the all the Early Christian Greek theologians, and was a major protagonist in the great Christological crisis of the 5th century Church. The conciliar debate which he initiated at the Council of Ephesus (431) went on to determine the agenda of three following Oecumenical councils up to the seventh century. To this extent he is rightly regarded as one of the chief exponents of the Church’s Christology, though his work, of course, built upon important patristic predecessors. The doctrine of the Eucharist were thus the primary methods he used to assess the validity of theological speculation, renewing a pattern of procedure he had inherited from the earliest Fathers, and one which would endure after him as substantive to Orthodoxy. Cyril discusses the Eucharist as a paradigm of incarnate soteriology in several key passages, many of which have been neglected because they did not form part and parcel of his dogmatic controversial works.
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The Confession and defense of the true Orthodox faith means love and devotion to truth, love and fidelity towards the Church, the Body of Christ. One of the most fervent defenders of the true Orthodox faith, who fought against all doctrinal errors and false teaching issued in his day, who forever settled in the East the true faith on the Hesychast experience of the meeting between Man and Christ, in light, through prayers from the heart, but also the unity of God when speaking about his uncreated work, inseparable from his being, was Saint Gregory Palamas, the real torch of Orthodoxy, the foundation of the Church of Christ, invincible ally of theological clear teaching, great scholar of the Church of Christ and the Archbishop of Thessalonica. To begin with, we present in this study some biographical data and the spiritual profile of the one who managed during 14th century to integrate for centuries the tradition of contemplative teaching of the Church of the East, known as Hesychasm, the doctrine of Palamas, in all its aspects, which will be addressed in future issues of the journal Studia.
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Questions of life and death are in the news as never before. Literally millions of human embryos are being created and destroyed in laboratories throughout the world, to perfect and produce in vitro fertilization procedures and to provide embryonic stem cells for research purposes, with the hope of devising therapies for neurological and other diseases. At the other end of life’s spectrum, patients and medical teams are opting increasingly for euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, in order to avoid a painful and drawn-out death. These are bioethical issues of major importance that pose extraordinary challenges in the “postmodern” world. In the past few years, biomedical technology has grown immensely, providing new possibilities for healing as well as new threats to our well-being. With these recent developments come a host of bioethical challenges that the Church must not only face but respond to in a strong, clear voice. Most of us, of course, have no formal medical training. Yet as priests and concerned laypersons, we are called upon to offer guidance – to patients and their families, and to the general public – regarding the moral consequences of biomedical research.
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This essay aims at highlighting the missionary implications of the Christian Church in the world in order to achieve perfection of human life. By Christian mission we understand sending the Church in the world for preaching and universalization of the Gospel and integration of people into the kingdom of God, founded by Jesus Christ's saving work, inaugurated as the anticipation of it in the Church by descending of the Holy Spirit, Kingdom that will manifest in its fullness at the second coming of Christ in glory. Understood this way, the Christian mission has its deep foundation and starting point in the eternal communion of the Holy Trinity itself, in the love of the Father for his Son and for the world, a communion full of divine love plenary discovered within the Church. In this sense the Church is the communion of all those who believe in Jesus Christ, adhering to His life full of grace and salvation being in a constant state of mission. For the mission is a dimension and an essential part of the Church. If the Church was founded visibly as a concrete historical community in which the communion of God with men is achieved, or as a sacrament of God's kingdom on earth, by descending the Holy Spirit over the Apostles, the other people share the salvation offered by God in Jesus Christ through Church's missionary activity, becoming permanent the sending of Christ into the world and people sharing the Son of God made a Man in order for all of us to achieve perfection.
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The beauty of our liturgical worship song brings an essential contribution to the Orthodox Church. She has a strong influence on the strength of the faithful soul. Christian Church granted at first, attention and a special place in its worship, religious chanting. During that time the place and importance of music has increased so that today the Orthodox worship uses a rich, varied and valuable production of sacred songs and hymns, many home Bible (Psalms and some songs, like the Virgin Mary in Luke 1, 46- 55) and others, the most numerous books that make up today's ritual content created by Christian musicians and VI century before, such as Roman Melodul (VI century), St. John of Damascus and Cosmas Melodul (VIII century), Saint Joseph and Theodore Studite (VIII-IX century), Andrew Cretanul († 726) and others.
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This study highlights the reality that the media is a huge challenge for the sincere Christian, desirous of spiritual life. If in order to live spiritually, the Christian strengthened by grace must bear the fight with evil impulses of a character paralyzed by sin, the media pushes him in the exact opposite direction, that of a true deep passion. The more we appeal to media and the more complex the media is, the stronger is the negative impact being an illusion and a utopia to believe that someone may be invulnerable. The postmodernism in a multimedia society is a major threat to the mission and life of the Church of Jesus Christ. Also, desacralization, relativization and secularization is an attempt on life and human being aimed at transforming the human being into a profane and profaned or profanatory reality, self-sufficient and in a permanent search for just the earthly fulfillment.
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The first three centuries of the Christian Church are the period in which the numerical growth, the geographical expansion and the impact of Christ’s Church, were extraordinary. Given the more than precarious conditions and the obstacles that stood against the development of the Church, we can state that surely this has been the golden age of Christianity. The protagonists of pre-Nicaean mission (our Savior Jesus Christ, the Holy Apostles and apostolic disciples, church hierarchy and common Christians) carried out a plenary assumed mission even though, for most of them, realizing that they were indeed missionaries didn’t stand as a major priority. They practiced their faith by doing charity, giving aid to orphans and widows, by giving hope and spiritual assistance to prisoners, by organizing collects and above all by attending to the Holly Liturgy, followed by the so called „love feasts”.
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It is obvious that for achieving the unity of faith, for fulfilling our Lord Jesus Christ’s wish „that all be one” (In 17, 21), a first step would be to get to know each other by the seen presentation of the faith of our denominations, by liturgical acts, forms of worship, liturgical and spirituality, leaving to the theologues the understanding and the approaching of the knowledge to the faith and dogmas. Each religions denomination certainly has its characteristics, which give its identity and uniqueness. The Orthodox Church has its own characteristics and randomly chosen, there would be some of theme: the way of practicing the prayer: “the prayer of the heart”, the cult - tradition and symbol – Vespers and liturgical reconciliation, the painting of the churches, monasteries, icons – „windows to heaven”, the Mystery of the Confession- the role of the confessor.
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Philanthropy has more and more the meaning of divine kindness towards people, that is, of God's love towards people, as Saint Paul teaches us, who writes: ‘...the kindness and love of people of our Savior God have been shown’ (cf. Titus 3,4), but also the more usual meaning, that of the man who loves people, of the good man - who out of Christian love helps his fellow men to save them from hardships, pains, dangers and even from death. In other words, ‘philanthropy’ is both the manifestation of God's perfect love for man, carried to the ultimate sacrifice and revealed by Jesus Christ, for the purpose of our divine salvation, and a form of human solidarity based on a religious doctrine with moral-factual application manifested by the mutual help of the fellow beings, by almsgiving, by diakonia. In the tribute year of the pastorate of the elderly in the Romanian Patriarchate, we aim to highlight in this study the purpose and importance of divine-human philanthropy as we find it in the practice, worship and teaching of the Church of the East, from its origins until today.
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Of great significance for the cultural history of Maramureş are the beginning moments of literature written in Romanian. Many contributions have been made to establish the place and date of the first inscriptions in Romanian. Historiography and linguistics explained them only based on external, religious causes: Hussite, Catholic or Lutheran propaganda. But a change of such magnitude can only be caused by internal circumstances. The removal of the Slavonic language, the cultured language of the feudal lords, and its replacement by the language of the people could only be the result of the struggle for national affirmation. The way in which the liturgical books circulated in this area, shows us the uninterrupted connections of the people of Maramureș with the other Romanian regions.
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Characterized by the phenomen of secularization, desacralization, and globalization, contemporary society lifts the curtain on the religious feeling impregnated in human nature, facilitating the staging of a role play depicted in the forms of syncretism, relativism, and gnosticism. Specifically, 15% of Romania's population did not declare their religious affiliation in the 2022 population census. In other words, 2.7 million Romanians refused to answer the questionnaire in which they were asked to express their spiritual identity. This statistical picture opens up the opportunity to express pertinently, without falling into judicial extremism, what could be the factors that led to this demographic religious decline.
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Părintele Profesor Dr. Vasile Stanciu, fost decan al Facultății de Teologie Ortodoxă din Cluj-Napoca, actualmente director al Școlii doctorale „Isidor Todoran” din cadrul Universității Babeș-Bolyai, nu are nevoie de o prezentare deosebită, reprezentându-l zecile de generații de preoți și cântăreți bisericești pe care i-a format, precum și mulțimea cărților și a studiilor pe care le-a alcătuit.
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Cercetătorul binecredincios, dr. în filologie, profesorul de limba și literatura română, Ioan Dorel Todea, este recunoscut în spațiul Maramureșului voievodal și nu numai, în cultura și spiritualitatea românească regională și națională, ca fiind un redutabil om de cultură, poet și critic literar, jurnalist radiofonic, autor a mai multor volume de cărți științifice, monografii, volume de versuri și memorialistică, poeme și epigrame, dar și literatură și istorie culturală, recunoscut fiind ca un bun cunăscător al valorilor nemuritoare ale artei, culturii și spiritualității maramure șene în special și române ști, în general.
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Interreligious dialogue, recognized as a democratic instrument with the potential to foster respect and cooperation, occupies a pivotal role within the general democratic framework. Despite its significance,international organizations have not prescribed a specific framework for conducting interreligious dialogue. Instead, a diverse range of option sexists, from ad-hoc to institutionalized formats, involving various stakeholders from religious leaders to local communities. This review study addresses the evolution and conceptual foundations of interreligious dialogue, while also exploring its integration into the democratization process. The first section of the study defines key terms within an interreligious dialogue framework using a conceptual framework from the social and political sciences. The avoidance of “conceptual stretching”, as articulated by Giovanni Sartori, is emphasized to elucidate commonalities between religious freedom (Freedom of Religion or Belief – FoRB) and interreligious dialogue, highlighting the crucial role of FoRB in governinginterreligious discourse. The subsequent sections of the study delve into the multifaceted nature of interreligious dialogue, examining its formats,benefits, and the role of the State in promoting it. The study identifies diverse formats, from theological exchanges to non-hierarchical cooperation,emphasizing the importance of common goals and avoiding the imposition of individual perspectives and politicisation. In conclusion, this study systematizes the core elements of interreligious dialogue and underscores the importance of inclusivity, de-politicisation, neutrality, and dialogue over debate, ultimately contributing to a contemporary democratic model for interreligious dialogue that upholds the values of freedom and cooperation within diverse societies.
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This is a translation of the text written by Czech theologian Josef Zvěřina, originally published in 1969, republished: Zvěřina, Josef. 1995. “Můj přítel nevěrec.” In Pět cest k radosti [The five ways to joy], edited by Jolana Poláková, 79–80. Prague: Zvon.
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Today, when plots, buildings and items in virtual universes are put up for sale, the question of whether the universes inhabited by real individuals can be produced is being debated. Many philosophers and scientists think that if technology continues to advance at its current rate, we will soon be able to produce universes similar to ours in the virtual environment. This point is the starting point of the famous simulation hypothesis. According to this theory, which many philosophers find reasonable, if we can produce virtual universes, it is highly probable that conscious beings in these universes can create their universes. But this situation also suggests the opposite: How can we be sure that we are not living in a simulation? Based on this argument, Nick Bostrom, an Oxford University philosopher, argues that we are almost certainly in a simulation. Because if most of the existing universes are simulations, it is much more likely that we are living in one of the virtual universes rather than the real one. Well, if the universe we live in is one of infinite universes and was brought into existence and designed by conscious beings in other universes, what would this mean for theism? From the perspective of classical theism, this universe was created and designed by God. For example, proponents of the cosmological argument claim that the universe had a beginning, while advocates of design proof argue that God designed this universe. Some assume that the idea that there are an infinite number of universes other than the one we live in is contrary to theism. Again, in many studies, we come across that the theory of multiverses is handled as an understanding of the universe in opposition to theism. While this study does not aim to defend the truth or falsity of the simulation hypothesis, it suggests that if this theory is assumed to be true, there will be no serious danger to theism. While doing this, the discussions in the context of the theory of multiverses and theism will be mentioned, and it will be argued that simulation universes do not contradict the existence of God.
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Review of: The Muslim Difference: Defining the Line between Believers and Unbelievers from Early Islam to the Present, by Youshaa Patel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022), 341 pages, ISBN: 978-0-300-24896-8 Fulfilling the orders and prohibitions of Islam will make Muslims different. Performing ablution and praying five times a day affects the daily routine of Muslims. The fact that fasting Muslims wake up and eat at night and abstain from eating, drinking, and having sex during the day is an essential factor in the difference between Muslims and non-Muslims. For Muslims, performing the pilgrimage constitutes the pinnacle of their similarity to each other and their differentiation from members of other religions. The prohibition of waste established by Islam requires Muslims to adopt a simple lifestyle and clothing style that is away from ostentation. It primarily prevents silk clothes from being worn by men and creates a difference between cultures that use silk extensively in their clothes. When we evaluate these differences together, we can say that the difference in Islam is not a goal but a result. Commands that act on difference are not commanded to create difference. For example, fasting is effective on difference; however, commanding Muslims to fast is not to make them different from other people. The Prophet Muhammad’s approach to silk clothes is also within this framework. He said that this was the clothing of those without a share in the afterlife. The aim is not to create a difference but to prevent waste and ostentation. The difference that occurs when religious obligations are fulfilled is not abnormal. This is within the scope of freedom of belief; however, when Muslim difference is transformed from a consequence of Islamic commands and prohibitions into a direct goal, it will cause artificiality and alienation of Muslims from their society. There is no doubt that this supports Islamophobia.
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