Reflections on the first meeting

Good to meet you last night! As promised I've put up a hyperlinked copy of the handout: you'll find it (and future handouts as we go through the weeks) on the handouts link on the right hand sidebar.

As I said, I'm very happy to continue any discussions in the comment boxes here. It's funny how, when actually presenting a class, issues can take on a different shape from how you expected them to be: I've said in the past that sometimes I've only understood a subject after I taught it (and not even then!!). A couple of issues that stuck out for me after the class were:

a) Authority. The Catholic Church often looks to outsiders terribly authoritarian with long lists of does and don'ts that have to be obeyed or else. (On a personal note, I'd have to say that I've found it entirely an opposite experience: liberating rather than stifling -but that's perhaps something for another day.) As far as Catholic social teaching is concerned, it's clear that it's meant to be helpful rather than constricting: if we're going to live the best lives we can, then we should be thinking about the things we find in the teaching. To do that wisely, we need to understand it, particularly the reasons for it, and that involves the sort of critical engagement we're going to be attempting over this course.

b) Modernity. I suggested that one way of thinking about Catholic social teaching as it's developed since the Encyclical Rerum Novarum (summary and link at bottom of the screen here) is that it is the application of traditional Catholic principles to the new circumstances of modernity (and post-modernity). Now both of these are highly complex and disputed terms which rest on the claim that there is something qualititatively different about (modern) society now from (pre-modern) society in the past -and, arguably, that (post-modern) society now is different from (modern) society (say) before the 1960s. To be honest, I'm genuinely not sure what I think about such a claim! On the one hand, the human condition seems perennial: we can understand the lives of (say) the people around Jesus as having the same qualities as our own. (We are born, live and die. We love. We grieve etc.) On the other hand, features such as industrialization and the possibility of quick movement of goods and finance around the world have changed our lives.  Our expectations of Catholic social teaching may alter depending on how radical a break we see between our lives and those of previous generations. If, for example, we think there has been a genuinely radical break between the modern world and the pre-modern world, we may expect there to be an equally radical change in what the Church teaches. If, on the other hand, we think there is a great deal of continuity between the human challenges faced by previous generations and our own, then we may expect a less dramatic change in that teaching.

If you want to think about what modernity and post modernity might involve, you could try reading the Wikipedia articles on modernity (link here) and post-modernity (link here).