This book explores how Catholics should speak about sin and grace in a world where structural injustice holds sway causing violence and harm. Bray brings diverse voices into creative dialogue to explore why unjust social situations can properly be called sin from a Catholic theological perspective, and how this sin can be understood to impact one’s agency, freedom, and historical condition vis-à-vis God.
Discussing disparate thinkers such as John Paul II, Judith Butler, Thomas Aquinas, and key Latin American liberation theologians, Bray deepens and constructively develops the Catholic understanding of social sin. She argues that the language of social sin presents us with an idea more theologically profound than just the identification of structural injustice; it depicts the power of collective human sinfulness to shape our lives and environments in ways which harm our relations with God, one another, and the rest of the created world.
Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Introduction Chapter 1: Social Sin in the Thought of Pope John Paul II 1.1 Social Sin in the Writings of Pope John Paul II 1.2 Digging Deeper: The Pope’s Wider Theology of Sin 1.3 The Pope’s Reasoning 1.4 The Pope’s Underlying Theology: How Can the Human Person Resist Sin? 1.5 Concluding Thoughts 1.6 John Paul II's Dynamic Account of the Human Person: Towards an Alternative Construal of the Human Condition, Freedom and Sin Chapter 2: Liberation Theology: Contributions from the Margins 2.1 The Methodology of Liberation Theology 2.2 The Liberationist Theology of Sin 2.3 Accountability Beyond Blame 2.4 Social Sin and Personal Sin 2.5 The Poor as Mediators of Christ’s Salvific Grace 2.6 The Ecclesial Model of Response 2.7 Concluding Thoughts Chapter 3: Continuing the Conversation: Insights from Thomas Aquinas and the Council of Trent 3.1 A Disruption to the Moralistic Narrative: Original Sin 3.2 Humanity’s Historical Condition vis-à-vis God: Original Sin, Guilt, and Culpability 3.3 The Effects of Original Sin on the Human Person: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly 3.4 Human Freedom, Grace, and the Possibility of Repentance 3.5 Concluding Thoughts Chapter 4: Human Vulnerability and the ‘Constitutive Sociality of the Self’: Rethinking Social Sin in Dialogue with Judith Butler 4.1 Introduction to Queer Theory 4.2 Judith Butler on Interdependency and Vulnerability 4.3 Social Norms and the Formation of Subjectivity 4.4 The Violent Effects of Social Norms 4.5 The Complex Relation Between Social Norms and Individual Agency 4.6 Butler’s Theory of the Acting Individual 4.7 Queer Theology and Theological Appropriations of Queer Theory 4.8 Concluding Thoughts Conclusion Bibliography
Charlotte Bray is the Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Lincoln Theological Institute, University of Manchester, UK.
Reviews for Sin and the Vulnerability of Embodied Life: Towards a Catholic Theology of Social Sin
This book makes a significant contribution to filling a serious gap in recent Catholic scholarship: the need for a mature, creative and wide-ranging theological discussion of social sin, a debate that has remained a source of unreconciled difficulty in Catholic teaching since the intense debates at the end of the last century. Bray's book is a gift to those wishing to move those debates forwards. * Anna Rowlands, Durham University, UK *
