Liberal Catholic authors/writers?

[smoothrose]

Hi,

I've been looking through amazon and my local library and bookstores to see what liberal Catholic authors there are out there writing about the Catholic Church today (I already have found enough conservative writers and theologians as it is so I'm curious to see what liberals have to say and to learn from their point of views). So far, I've found a few:

Gary Wills
Hans Kung
Daniel C. Maguire
Rosemary Radford Ruether
Angela Bonavoglia

Any others? Thanks

 

[Martinius]

Smoothrose:

Depending on what specific topics you want to explore, I can come up with a few dozen. The ones you list are fine, although I am not real familiar with Bonavoglia; I have read Kung extensively and just about everything Wills has written. I highly recommend them both.

Here are several more:

Elizabeth Johnson, Richard McBrien, Robert McClory, Pierre Hegy, Donald Cozzens, Gerald O'Collins, Ilia Delio, Eamon Duffy, Margaret Farley, Peter Phan, Michael Crosby and Michael Morwood are some I have read in the past few years that come to mind.

For the views of several noted bishops on the state of the Church check out Geoffrey Robinson and Carlo Martini, and Pedro Casaldaliga, Dom Helder Camara and Oscar Romero for liberation theology. Authors that will provide some historical background to church doctrines and scripture would include Raymond Brown, John McKenzie, Thomas Rausch, David Stagaman and Jaroslav Pelikan (not a Catholic, but Orthodox and formerly Lutheran, Pelikan provides a clear and well-balanced study of Christian doctrines).

There are more, some going back to the days of Vatican II and earlier. If you want more authors or suggestions for specific topics, start a conversation on my profile page.

The best current stuff is coming from our Pope, so read his apostolic exhortation and/or his encyclical, or check out his talks and homilies that are available on the Vatican website.

 

[smoothrose]

Thank you!!!!

 

[FaeryChild]

would Luke Timothy Johnson be considered to be "liberal"?

 

[Martinius]

He would be on the liberal side and is a noted Catholic biblical scholar. Good thought.

Marcus Borg, who died recently, is an excellent author and presents ideas and arguments very clearly and fairly. He was not Catholic but was not biased against Catholicism, and appeared to think along the same lines as Catholic scholars mentioned above, and quoted some of them in his works.

 

[FaeryChild]

I've never been certain as to whether or not to include LTJ as a conservative or a liberal. On the one hand, he is pro-gay but on the other he is vehemently against the Jesus Seminar (Borg, Crossan, Funk, etc.).

 

[Martinius]

I've never been certain as to whether or not to include LTJ as a conservative or a liberal. On the one hand, he is pro-gay but on the other he is vehemently against the Jesus Seminar (Borg, Crossan, Funk, etc.).

I know what you mean. But theological liberals can be in disagreement with the Jesus Seminar, which focuses on Bible interpretation and the historical Jesus. I wrote that Johnson would be on the "liberal side", but that does not mean he is a flaming radical. It is not black and white, but rather a quite complex spectrum. That is why I dislike it when people on these forums want to place others in only one of two buckets; there is a lot of artificial polarization occurring here, just as it does in politics and elsewhere.

Overall I would classify Johnson as moderate, but others might consider him very liberal due to some of his positions.

 

[FaeryChild]

That makes sense to me. I've noticed that when we often have rigid categories of liberal / conservative it often ends up meaning that everyone who is not a radical fundamentalist ends up in the liberal bin where the only consistency in the liberal camp is that they failed to achieve absolute conformity.

That's a shame. Especially when the truth is someway in between.

 

[Aelred of Rievaulx]

I've never been certain as to whether or not to include LTJ as a conservative or a liberal. On the one hand, he is pro-gay but on the other he is vehemently against the Jesus Seminar (Borg, Crossan, Funk, etc.).

That's because he's a scholar. The Jesus Seminar had some conceptual and historiographical issues which many scholars are critical of.

 

[FaeryChild]

The "Jesus Seminar" is full of revisionist non-sense.

 

[Aelred of Rievaulx]

The "Jesus Seminar" is full of revisionist non-sense.

There's nothing essentially wrong about revisionism. At times historical reconstruction can revise what we thought we knew about the past. I'm sceptical about the extent to which the Jesus Seminar was capable of discussing the historical Jesus, I would prefer to think of it less as the reconstruction of a supposed historical Jesus and more a reconstruction of the earliest Palestinian traditions. I don't think we can go back further than that with very much degree of certainty and I think that religious movements are social movements so the rise of Christianity can be explained by social science.

 

[Godlovesmetwo]

a lot of reading ahead , if I have to cover all those. This is all new to me. But I'm glad I'm not the only one who feels the traditional catholic church is too conservative. I'd like to think there are more people out there like Martinius who are bravely following their own conscience.