Lieven Boeve

• Professor (Full) at KU Leuven

Rather than choosing between either catholic identity, or openness to otherness, the catholic dialogue school envisages, through the dialogue with the other, to stir the (re)discovery of one’s own identity, and to introduce once again the Christian voice within the conversation. After introducing this project, I reflect more extensively on how to b...

This chapter introduces an interdisciplinary approach to the study of religious discourse, inspired by the observation that the tradition of negative theology, rediscovered by postmodern philosophy and theology, shares major points of interest with the cognitive theory of language. Its primary goal is an attempt to compare two epistemological syste...

How can we conceive of the role of the catholic school in today's post-Christian context? And in what way may a retrieval of Gravissimum educationis and Perfectae caritatis assist us in doing so? In Part i, I first discuss divergent appreciations of ge and pc, which already began at the time of the Second Vatican Council. Second, I mention some of...

In this article, the concept of “cognitive dissonance” is used to explain why Pope Benedict XVI resigned, indicating that a massive clash occurred between the theological ideas Joseph Ratzinger holds and the actual situation in which both the Christian faith and the church find themselves. For Ratzinger, the Christian faith is in the first instance...

Theological anthropology is being put to the test: in the face of contemporary developments in the spheres of culture, politics, and science, traditional perspectives on the human person are no longer adequate. Yet can theological anthropology move beyond its previously established categories and renew itself in relation to contemporary insights? T...

This introduction to the book presents its point of departure and structure. It evokes how theological anthropology is being put to the test: in the face of contemporary developments in the spheres of culture, politics and science, traditional perspectives on the human person are no longer adequate. Yet can theological anthropology move beyond its...

In a thoroughly changed culture and society, what is the place and statute of theology in the domains in which it has belonged from of old: the university, the Church, and society? This paper develops the assessment that theology, which has no longer a self-evident roll, but appears to have shifted to the margin of what happens in these domains, ca...

The author asks whether the criteria for Catholic theology presented by the International Theological Commission's Theology Today (2011) are meant to constitute ?walls? that seal out or ?windows? that open to the rich reality of God's dialogue with humanity through creation and history. Careful exegesis leads the author to conclude that the documen...

The Church has the duty in every age of examining the signs of the times and interpreting them in the light of the gospel, so that it can offer in a manner appropriate to each generation replies to the continual human questionings on the meaning of this life and the life to come and on how they are related. There is a need, then, to be aware of, an...

In our postmodern times, the question ‘where is truth’ and surely ‘truth with regard to religion’ (wherein truth and salvation are implicated with each other) appears to be answered especially with the reply ‘in particular traditions’. The combination ‘truth, particular tradition and salvation’, however, still leaves a number of avenues open.In the...

Long past the time when philosophers from different perspectives had joined the funeral procession that declared the death of God, a renewed interest has arisen in regard to the questions of God and religion in philosophy. The turn to secularization has produced its own opposing force. Although they declared themselves from the start as not being r...

In 1999, a new curriculum for Roman-Catholic religious education was introduced in Flemish primary and secondary schools, taking into account both the growing de-Christianisation and religious pluralisation of pupils in the classroom. Recently, this new curriculum has been subjected to diverging criticisms: first it is considered still too Christia...

For Roman Catholic systematic theology, any reflection on the relation between revelation, Scripture and tradition has to take into account the dogmatic constitution of the Second Vatican Council concerning this theme: Dei verbum. In this document, the dialogical nature of these fundamental theological concepts has been accentuated. Revelation, but...

In this paper, I first elaborate on Jean-François Lyotard's postmodern critical approach, which is concerned with the way we deal with irresolvable conflicts, especially our forgetfulness of the ternes that is at stake in such conflicts. The plea of this French philosopher to respect and bear witness to the event of heterogeneity, which accompanies...

Noting that belief in a life after death appears to be “in” once again, the present article proceeds from the conviction that belief in the Resurrection is central to Christian faith in Jesus Christ as the personal revelation of God as love. It considers the connection between faith in the Resurrection and the first disciples' witness concerning Je...

For Joseph Ratzinger, elected Pope Benedict XVI in 2005, modernity has transformed Europe into a continent without God. As a result, Europe's self-understanding is flawed. This outcome puts serious doubts on the Church's resolution, expressed in Gaudium et spes, to dialogue with the modern world. Moreover, the present pope was among the first to wa...

Because of its commitment to the Incarnation and the Resurrection, Catholic theology is impelled to deal productively with the issues of embodiment and particularity. These have been noticeably absent in postmodern discussions of religious experience, which tend to be abstract, "dis-embodied," and dismissive of specific religious traditions. This s...

The category of detraditionalization, in combination with the category of pluralization, it is argued, offers a conceptual framework to think anew the 'transformation of religion' in so-called postsecular Europe. Subsequently the impact of this transformation on Christian faith is investigated, and what the appropriate theological response may be....

In a critical-constructive dialogue with Richard Kearney's philosophical hermeneutics of religion, Lieven Boeve sketches the panorama of continental philosophy's turn to religion, and comments on it from a theological-epistemological perspective. After some initial theological comments on Kearney's poetics of a possible God, Boeve analyzes the intu...

L'A., partant d'un article de Jean-Marc Ferry, entreprend de determiner la place que peut prendre la religion chretienne dans la societe contemporaine. L'A. suggere de depasser la dichotomie christianisme/secularite pour y introduire des schemas de pluralite au sein desquels il devient possible de penser l'alterite. La theologie doit alors decouvri...

In the interaction of contextual experience and traditional interpretation, religious language originates and shifts. In this contribution the author investigates whether cognitive linguistics can offer some interesting ideas and though patterns for a recontextualisation of theological epistemology in our current postmodern condition. Cognitive sem...

In the interaction of contextual experience and traditional interpretation, religious language originates and shifts. In this contribution the author investigates whether cognitive linguistics can offer some interesting ideas and thought patterns for a recontextualisation of theological epistemology in our current postmodern condition. Cognitive se...

The first reactions to the encyclical Fides et Ratio ranged from cautiously positive to critical disapproval. Many observers pointed to the ambiguity which they perceive in the encyclical, probably due to the several hands which participated in its writing process. This ambiguity functions as a starting point to develop two different keys to read t...

Dans le contexte postmoderne, la narration moderne retrouve une plausibilite contextuelle dans la recontextualisation et la reconstruction en tant que narration ouverte. La sacramentalite de la vie, clarifiee et celebree dans les sacrements n'est pas une participation a l'Etre divin mais une tension qui procede de l'irruption du divin dans les narr...

To clarify our present-day postmodern context and to ascertain the critical consciousness of our time, we present a number of main lines of thought in the work of Wolfgang Welsch, Jean-François Lyotard and Richard Rorty. Each one of them has emphasized an aspect that perhaps is characteristic for the postmodern time. Welsch identifies the postmoder...

To clarify our present-day postmodern context and to ascertain the critical consciousness of our time, we present a number of main lines of thought in the work of Wolfgang Welsch, Jean-François Lyotard and Richard Rorty. Each one of them has emphasized an aspect that perhaps is characteristic for the postmodern time. Welsch identifies the postmoder...

Summary J.-F. Lyotard is well known as the french philosopher who coined the vocabulary of postmodernity. According to him, we live in a postmodern condition, where the master-stories of modernity proved themselves to have failed and lost relevance. There is no possibility left for them to reduce all plurality into one, mastering, hegemonic story a...

Schepping of evolutie? Reuzenoesters in de Andes Nu en dan worden fossielen van waterdieren op grote hoogte aangetroffen, of ontdekt in lagen van slib-of zandafzettingen. Wetenschappelijke verklaringen zijn al uitgebreid aan bod gekomen in dit boek; ze wijzen op de botsingen tussen de continentale platen die bergketens hebben doen oprijzen uit de o...