Bogoslovska smotra, Vol. 93 No. 3, 2023.
Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.53745/bs.93.3.4
Crisis of Spirituality or Spirituality for Crisis Situations
Mladen Parlov
orcid.org/0000-0002-7248-3959
; Catholic Faculty of Theology, University of Split, Split, Croatia
Abstract
In the opening remarks, the author outlines the reasons why the Church, that is, Christian spirituality, which he identifies with Christian culture in the broadest sense, must be permanently in crisis, as it stems from the very nature of the Church and her mission. The author then provides a brief account of the development of the crisis of spirituality in the West, concluding that the time of neo-paganism in the form of cosmic pantheism, i.e., ecology as the new religion of modern Western man, has come. Neopaganism has entered legislation and has become present in all spheres of Western social life. The author proceeds to describe some of the features of a society in which paganism reigns again: individualism, relativism, environmentalism, moral and spiritual disorientation, fear of death, profit above all, etc. In the last part of the article, the author presents the answers offered by some theologians to the existing crisis (J. B. Metz and J. Ratzinger) and then argues that in practice there are three answers that Christianity offers to the current crisis: escape, fight, cooperation. The author offers a fourth possible answer: conversion and return to Jesus Christ and the clarity of his message, that is, a call to once again place God at the centre of Christianity and the message it offers to the world.
Keywords
spirituality; crisis; Christian culture; world; ecology; conversion
Hrčak ID:
311237
URI
Publication date:
12.12.2023.
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