Liberation And Authority

Liberation and Authority: Plato's Gorgias, the First Book of the Republic, and Thucydides provides a comparative treatment of Plato’s Gorgias, the first book of the Republic, and Thucydides’ History, arguing that they share similarities not only in the oft-noted “natural justice” of Callicles, Thrasymachus, and the Melian Dialogue, but also in a development that runs through the whole of each work. Nicholas Thorne argues that all three works give an account of the collapse of the authority of an older ethical order, out of which a subjective spirit arises that strives to liberate itself from all limits on its own activity. The readings of Plato give a new account of each work that shows how the logic of the arguments is inextricably bound together with the literary detail, including each work’s structure. The account of Thucydides argues for certain new interpretive concepts, such as the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, while also providing a new look at a number of familiar theses, such as the three-step structure running through the whole. Taken together, these works provide complementary reflections on a development profoundly relevant to our own time.

Pieris confronts two of the most urgent and complex questions facing Christians today - so many poor people and so many religions. He believes that the approaches of the Christian Churches to these questions will determine whether Christianity will continue to have any relevance for Asia or not.

The Moment of Liberation in Western Europe, 1943-1948, regards the final two years of World War II and the immediate post-liberation period as a moment in twentieth century history, when the shape and contours of postwar Western Europe appeared highly uncertain and various alternatives and conflicting visions were up for grabs. After close to six years of total war, Nazi terror, and brutal occupation policies, a growing number of Europeans were no longer content solely to fight for national liberation from fascist control. Having staked their lives in military and civilian resistance to Nazism and Italian fascism across the continent, surviving activists were aiming to ensure that such a political and social catastrophe would never befall Europe again. In the closing moments of World War II, hundreds of thousands of antifascist activists had begun to identify with the famous quote penned by the exiled German social theorists, Max Horkheimer, who had boldly proclaimed in early September 1939: 'Whoever is not prepared to talk about capitalism should also remain silent about fascism.' The economic and political elites in prewar societies were increasingly regarded as co-responsible for war, fascism, and occupation policies, from which many had benefited significantly and often enthusiastically. There were extensive popular social movements at work in almost every single state which aimed to construct postwar societies in which grassroots democracy and the free association of rank-and-file activists would replace the profit principle and the top-down Jacobin orientation by traditional elites. This study for the first time reconstructs the parameters of this contest over the shape of postwar Western Europe from a consistently transnational perspective.

Why the furor over this book? Why was Church: Charism and Power the subject of a Vatican inquiry? The reason, ironically enough, has little to do with its alleged use of Marxist thought, but rather with its critical understanding of the church in the light of the gospel. Church: Charism and Power is a provocative, devastating critique of the ways in which power, sacred power, is controlled and exercised in the Roman Catholic Church. It is a militant book, a radical book, but it is by no means defective in orthodoxy. In fact, with all its criticism it offers a brilliant defense of the historical claims of Roman Catholicism. Its central thesis argues that since the fourth century the church has fallen victim to a kind of power that has nothing to do with the gospel and everything to do with the dynamics of power with all of its inevitable abuses. This historical reality, enshrined in the monarchical model of the church, was undermined at the Second Vatican Council and replaced by that of the church as people of God. This 'laical' model is closely allied in Boff's exposition with the notion of the church as sacrament of the Holy Spirit: the church as "sign and instrument of the now living and risen Christ, that is the Holy Spirit." A pneumatic ecclesiology such as this would lead the church back to its primitive dynamics of community, cooperation, and charism. It would create a church in which everyone shared equally and where flexible and appropriate ministries conformed to needs as they arose. Is such a church possible? Is it not simply the utopian dream of idealists and sectarians down through the ages? No, says Father Boff, given the incredible growth throughout Latin America of comunidades eclesiales de base, base communities, where the people express and achieve their desire for participation and where the hierarchy divests itself of its titles and ecclesiastical baggage, creating a common desire for community and equality. This model of the church has acquired an unexpected historical possibility: the new church is in the process of being born. This church, the church being born from the faith of the poor, has rediscovered for itself--and for the church universal--the living presence of the dangerous memory of Jesus Christ.

This book draws attention to certain significant changes in the way in which power has been defined and it also examines some of the critical responses which those changes have evoked. The objective is not to try and evolve a universally acceptable and comprehensive definition of power, and of realted terms like authority and influence. The argument of the book is that, that would be an impossible project since social and political theories themselves constitute an intervention into political discourse of a society and they may implicitly or explicitly embody a political perspective.