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Public Theology as Civil Discourse: What Are We Talking About?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2014

W. D. Lindsey*
Affiliation:
Belmont Abbey College

Abstract

In recent years, American theologians have debated the outer limits of the church's competence to deliver specific ethical directives on issues of such sociopolitical import as the arms race or the structure of the American economy. In the American Catholic theological community, this discussion has focused on the two pastoral letters of the U.S. bishops written in the 1980s, The Challenge of Peace and Economic Justice for All. Ethicists critical of the public theology of these letters, including Dennis McCann and George Weigel, have expressed concern that the documents overidentify the American bishops with the political agenda of the American left. McCann and Weigel speculate that the process of wide consultation the bishops innovated as they composed these pastorals invited contributions of marginal groups who were allowed to dominate the conversation about the nuclear question and the economy and thus to skew the pastorals' conclusions in a radical direction not characteristic of the thinking of the majority of American Catholics. McCann and Weigel propose that public theology (and the consultative process underlying pastoral letters) employ “civil discourse” as the norm—that is, that all participants in the conversation speak the language of natural law, and that this language be taught by experts. The article critiques this proposal and argues that it envisages an ostensible pluralism which will, in fact, mute the voices of the marginal and protect the interests of the assumed center.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The College Theology Society 1992

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References

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8 Ibid., 54-56.

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