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53+ Works 1,594 Membros 9 Reviews

About the Author

Matthew Levering (PhD, Boston College) is the James N. Perry Jr. and Mary D. Perry Chair of Theology at Mundelein Seminary. He has written numerous books, including Engaging the Doctrine of Revelation and Engaging the Doctrine of Creation.
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Obras de Matthew Levering

The Oxford Handbook of the Trinity (2011) — Editor — 98 cópias
Vatican II: Renewal within Tradition (2008) — Editor; Contribuinte — 70 cópias
Dying and the Virtues (2018) 31 cópias
Aristotle in Aquinas's Theology (2015) — Editor — 19 cópias
Mary's Bodily Assumption (2014) 18 cópias
Paul in the Summa Theologiae (2014) 12 cópias

Associated Works

Aquinas on Doctrine: A Critical Introduction (2004) — Contribuinte — 28 cópias
The Providence of God: Deus habet consilium (2009) — Contribuinte — 28 cópias
The Blackwell companion to Paul (2011) — Contribuinte — 23 cópias

Etiquetado

Conhecimento Comum

Sexo
male
Educação
University of North Carolina (BA)
Duke University (M.T.S)
Boston College (PhD)
Ocupação
Professor of Theology
Organizações
Roman Catholic Church
Nova et Vetera
Assembly: A Journal of Liturgical Theology
Academy of Catholic Theology
Evangelicals and Catholics Together
Society of Biblical Literature
Pequena biografia
Matthew Levering is a Roman Catholic theologian and Professor of Theology at the University of Dayton. He previously taught for nine years at Ave Maria University in Naples, FL. Levering earned a B.A. from the University of North Carolina, an M.T.S. from Duke Divinity School, and a Ph.D. from Boston College. He is an expert on the theology of Thomas Aquinas.

Membros

Resenhas

Summary: An analysis of the moral theology of twenty-six recent theologians tracing the rise of conscience-centered moral life, considered problematic by the author.

Matthew Levering, a theologian teaching at Mundelein Seminary near Chicago, believes Catholic moral theology has come to place far too great an emphasis on conscience in the moral life of the Christian. This work traces both the theological developments that led to this over-emphasis or “abuse” as well as the critiques of biblical and Thomistic theologians. He does this by analyzing the moral theology of twenty-six twentieth century theologians divided into four parts.

First, he considers eight theologians under the heading of conscience and the Bible: George Tyrrell, Hastings Rashdall, Rudolf Bultmann, C. A. Pierce, Yves Congar, OP, Johannes Stelzenberger, Philippe Delhaye, and Richard B. Hays. Tyrell and Rashdall see the church and Christ forming a collective conscience. Pierce, by contrast, limits the role of conscience on New Testament grounds. Bultmann argues that conscience constitutes the real self in obedience to God. Congar, Stelzenberger, and Delhaye represent a spectrum of responses from strong critique to strong support of conscience centered approaches. Hayes, by contrast, doesn’t mention conscience, but focuses on how the cross, community, and the new creation shape moral theology.

Then Levering looks at a group of theologians who are grouped under conscience and the moral manuals: Austin Fagothey, SJ, Thomas J. Higgins, SJ, Michael Cronin, Antony Koch, and Dominic M. Prümmer, OP. This approach seeks to address all the moral issues Catholics may confront in life, seeking to form the conscience to respond morally, and represents for Levering a step toward conscience-centered moral theology, away from the virtues, including prudence, communion with Christ, and the grace of the Holy Spirit.

Third, Thomist theologians on conscience are considered: Benoît-Henri Merkelbach, OP, Michel Labourdette, OP, Eric D’Arcy, Reginald G. Doherty, OP, and Servais Pinckaers, OP. Labourdette and Pinckaers both offer critiques from a Thomist perspective. D’Arcy offers a distinctive defense of religious freedom based on an exposition of Aquinas on conscience. Doherty offers an argument why prudence is actually more central than conscience.

Finally, Levering explores the development of existentialist, self-actualizing accounts of conscience in the pre- and post conciliar theology of the German theologians: Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Karl Barth, Karl Rahner, SJ, Josef Fuchs, SJ, Bernard Häring, CSsR, and Joseph Ratzinger. He particularly traces the post-conciliar development of the thought of Rahner, Haring, and Fuchs.

Levering, in charting the way forward introduces two more theologians: James F. Keenan, SJ who represents the conscience-centered approach and Reinhard Hütter represents a return to Thomistic theology. One thing that is apparent in this survey and the concluding chapter is that Levering believes moral theologians have erred in placing the weight of moral life on the conscience. He argues for the centering of moral life “with God and beatitude at the center, and thus with Christ and the grace of the Holy Spirit at the center, healing and elevating the powers of human nature in accord with God’s law” (p. 207). Conscience is subject to these rather than the center, intended to serve prudent action.

I was struck that Levering traces how people can say, “I’m at peace with my conscience” in acting in ways contrary to the teaching of scripture and the Christian community. He puts his finger on how, because of this, moral reasoning became detached from any foundation of universal norms. He does a work of retrieval in recalling us to scripture, the commands of God, the virtues of the Christian life, and the living of a Christ-formed, Christ-centered life, and the aim to strive for a clear conscience, not in reference to self, but to these things.

This was meaty reading on a subject of vital concern to the training of the church’s pastors, which is the work in which Levering is engaged. Will the life of God’s people be shaped by following Christ, revealed in scripture, through the church’s teachers, and communed with in the Eucharist, or will they be shaped by a radically individualistic and autonomous conscience, through which all else is evaluated? According to Levering, we are far down the latter road, abusing what the conscience was made for. His work here is a call to repair, retrieve, and restore.

____________________________

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.
… (mais)
 
Marcado
BobonBooks | May 3, 2022 |
Abstract: "This book serves as an introduction to natural law theory. The Introduction proposes that natural law theory makes most sense in light of an understanding of a loving Creator. The first chapter then argues the Bible sketches both such an understanding of a loving Creator and an account of natural law that offers an expansive portrait of the moral life. The second chapter surveys the development of natural law doctrine from Descartes to Nietzsche, and shows how these thinkers reverse the biblical portrait by placing human beings at the center of the moral universe. Whereas the biblical portrait of natural law is other-directed, ordered to self-giving love, the modern accounts turn inward upon the self, with reductive consequences. The final two chapters employ theological and philosophical investigation to achieve a contemporary doctrine of natural law that accords with the biblical witness to a loving Creator. These two chapters interact creatively with the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. The book revives discussion of natural law among biblical scholars while also challenging philosophers and theologians to re-think their accounts of natural law".… (mais)
 
Marcado
ajgoddard | Jun 4, 2020 |
Controversy about the Catholic priesthood is nothing new. Just like laity, priests (including bishops and popes) have always been sinners. Some priests, like some laity, have caused grave scandal throughout the 2000-year history of the Church. Two questions arise from this reality. Why did Jesus Christ establish a ministerial priesthood for his Church, if the priesthood would sometimes cause scandal—what did he intend for the priesthood? Second, what has the Catholic Church in past times done about scandal in the priesthood—how has the Church corrected its priests and encouraged priests to lead lives of holiness? Amidst the noisy din of talking heads and self-proclaimed experts, this book offers solid warnings and directions about the priesthood from 15 saints of the past two millennia. On the Priesthood serves as a readable guide for priests, seminarians, and educated readers seeking to learn more about the simultaneous unworthiness and dignity of the priesthood. Always challenging and penetrating, the selections unite around one key point; the need for holiness.… (mais)
 
Marcado
StFrancisofAssisi | Mar 19, 2020 |
Summary: An exploration of scripture, theological resources, and contemporary writing that considers the virtues that help the Christian believer to both live and die well.

Death is something we don't like to talk about and much of our culture lives in a conscious effort to deny that all of us have a terminal condition. Sooner or later, we will die. From exercise to diets to medical breakthroughs to transhumanism, we are trying to extend our lives. Sometimes, we just keep ourselves too busy to think about it. Yet the refusal to face our deaths leaves us and our families unprepared when the time comes. More than this, it leads us to neglect important virtues important for both how we live and when we die.

This last is the focus of Matthew Levering's book. Levering, a Catholic theologian, explores nine virtues through multiple lenses of scripture, theological writing, and contemporary sources: love, hope, faith, penitence, gratitude, solidarity, humility, surrender, and courage. I found time and again that his explorations brought fresh insights to familiar passages, and new perspectives I had not previously considered.

Levering begins with Job and the fundamental fear and objection Job raises--that God would annihilate the existence of one who loves him. In God's answer, really, God's questions, Job understands that a God who can so create and order and sustain the world may be trusted, against the horror of death, to lovingly sustain him, inviting to live lives of love. He goes on in chapter two to consider sources from Susan Sontag and David Rieff to Josef Pieper and Robert Bellarmine and how they address the existential questions death poses of meaning in our lives, where we find the will to live, and how we might live in hope, believing and meditating on the unseen realities both of the souls we possess and the promises of our future state. Chapter three, then, focuses on faith through exploring what it is that dying people want through the work of a doctor and a hospice worker who describe the longing for closure, for reconciliation with oneself, with people, and for some, with God. Jesus, whose life and death make reconciliation and communion possible, calls us to meet him, and find in him these deep longings through faith.

I had never thought of Stephen's sermon in Acts 7 as a speech of penitence but rather one of indictment. He invites us in chapter four to see instead Stephen speaking prophetically in deep penitence for Israel's sins as well as in gratitude for the grace that is greater than our sins. He then turns (chapter five) to the dying gratitude of Macrina, sister of Gregory of Nyssa. He writes:

"Gregory and Macrina complicate this notion of 'dignity' and of 'hope.' Macrina shows that 'who has lived in dignity, dies in dignity.' But dignity does not reside in our achievements and merely human relationships. Macrina's 'dignity' consists primarily in her participation in the church's liturgical life, through which the people of God offer themselves in Christ as a sacrifice of thanksgiving, and which extends itself in works of mercy. Prayerful praise and thanksgiving stand at the core of Macrina's conception of human dignity" (p. 98).

Her participation in this rich liturgical worship both enables her to live with thankfulness in life but with gratitude that she shares in the resurrection to come. Our identification with Christ and his people in both penitence and gratitude leads us into solidarity (chapter six), the experience of finding comfort in our own suffering in our solidarity with the sufferings of Christ, and compassion for the sufferings of others through our communing with Christ's sufferings.

But why does death so often involve suffering, sometimes severe? While many of us long for a peaceful passing, this is often not granted. In chapter seven, he looks at Mark 10:45 and the idea of ransom as a kind of tribulation by which Jesus delivers Israel out of the exile that was a consequence of her prideful rejection of God. Levering explores Aquinas and how suffering, both the humbling of Christ, and the stripping us of the things by which we find honor, call us into a "new exodus" of humility that is the way of salvation. Humbling leads to surrender (chapter eight), the readiness to offer up our lives to God, a surrender we often fiercely fight. The sacrament of the anointing of the sick helps us in this in reminding us of the healing work of Christ in us, to which we surrender ourselves in death that we may be raised up in Christ. Finally, in chapter nine, Levering considers the courage involved in bidding goodbye to life as we know it. He considers the work of Richard Middleton and Paul Griffiths, one emphasizing the continuities of our future state with this life, the other the discontinuities. Courage is to face this fear of this unknown future and to "boldly go" in the promise of Christ.

Levering's argument throughout this book is that we do not merely need these virtues in our dying hours, but that these are the virtues Christians are meant to live by. Throughout, he articulates a vision of these found in union in Christ and nourished by the liturgical and sacramental life of the church, as we live into the story of scripture, finding our own story in its pages.

While some aspects of Levering's treatment are distinctively Catholic, as would be expected of a Catholic theologian, the existential questions he explores through secular as well as Christian writers remind us of the stark realities with which all of us must deal. His focus is one all who name Christ can affirm, our union with Christ, our fundamental belief in a God who is love, and the virtues that follow. Levering opens up a conversation we desperately need to have in the church: what does it mean to die well in Christ? It is needed not only to aid us in our final days, but also because we cannot truly understand what it is to live well in Christ, until we have understood what it is to die well in Him. The conversation has been going on for centuries, even millenia. In the pages of Levering's book, we join those from Job to Aquinas to Mother Theresa who have wrestled with these realities and lived virtuously in the face of death through their faith in God and union with Christ.
____________________________

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.
… (mais)
 
Marcado
BobonBooks | Apr 16, 2018 |

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Estatísticas

Obras
53
Also by
6
Membros
1,594
Popularidade
#16,183
Avaliação
4.1
Resenhas
9
ISBNs
142
Idiomas
2

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