Finding the Treasure: Locating Catholic Religious Life in a New Ecclesial and Cultural Context (Religious Life in a New Millennium) - Softcover

Schneiders IHM, Sandra M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0809139618 ISBN 13: 9780809139613

Publisher: Paulist Press, 2000

Synopsis

Does religious life still make sense today? Controversial author Sandra Schneiders asks the question, does being a religious still make sense in today's world? Her answer is yes, that religious life has a future full of hope but that it must be rethought and remodeled within the radically new context of post-Vatican-II postmodernism. Situating religious life both within a historical-cultural setting and within the Catholic Church, Schneiders addresses major questions of meaning, identity, and boundaries that have arisen over the past decades. With tremendous cohesion, she examines issues about celibacy, permanent commitment, formation, community, vows, and prayer, as well as issues of particular concern to women: patriarchy, feminism, the role of women in the Church, and female ordination. The years since Vatican II, she says, have been a "Dark Night of the Soul" for religious life; she uses this paradigm to make sense of what has happened, the purification and transformation of religious life from dinosaur to songbird. Schneiders' book is both deeply exciting and genuinely consoling for North American Roman Catholic women religious. Yet this sweeping multidisciplinary work has a crucial message as well for brothers, women religious in other countries or denominations, and anyone interested in the state of the church today. †

About this title

About the Author

Sandra M. Schneiders, I.H.M., teaches at the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, California. She's the well-known author of The Revelatory Text: Interpreting the New Testament as Sacred Scripture and of Paulist Press's New Wineskins: Re-Imagining a Religious Life Today and Beyond Patching: Faith and Feminism in the Catholic Church.

Reviews

In her earlier book, New Wineskins, Scheiders (a Catholic Sister who teaches at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley) was concerned with the revisions of the daily way of life that members of religious orders of women might expect in light of Vatican Council II. In this book, the first volume of a proposed two-volume work, she analyses the entire institution of religious orders of women (the Catholic term for this institution is religious life) as these orders intersect and interact with postmodern culture. She situates religious life as a human phenomenon and then considers it in its specifically Christian context. Against this background, Schneiders sketches the emerging contemporary form of religious life in the First World, which is "truly Religious and contemplative without being cloistered and ministerial without being clerical." Though addressed primarily to members of religious orders of women, this may have a broader audience among those who are interested in the contemporary institutions of the Catholic Church. Recommended for academic libraries, particularly at Catholic institutions.DDavid I. Fulton, Coll. of Saint Elizabeth, Morristown, NJ
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Paulist Press
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0809139618
• ISBN 13: 9780809139613
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 480