The present overview of current Christian-Jewish dialogue shape firstly specifes the dialogue and its partners concept meaning applied to the relations between religious societies. It draws our attention to the polarisations within the Christianity and Judaism as well as to the differencies in dialogue advancement between bodies keeping the dialogue and the general public. It points out the different motivation prompting Jews and Christians to keep the dialogue and the infuence of this on understanding the sense, the choice of its representatives and the theme of the dialogue.
The deepening mutual cognition along with the growing awareness of both; chances and limits of consensus in the dialogue, are indicated among the previous achievements. From the side of the catholic church, irreversible will of the dialogue along with the appropriate directions of doctrinal clarifcations of the Church Teaching are strongly emphasized.
The theological questions are raised that on the Christian side develop from the acknowledgment of irremovability of the covenant between God and Israel. The questions refer to the contemporary situation and the eschatological perspective of existence of two communities considering themselves as continuation of the covenant between God and Abraham, as well as their relation towards Israel Land. The article at its conclusion stipulates the deepening of the awareness of the mystery whenever resuming the religious topics in the dialogue.
The purpose of the article is to systematize the main issues related to the encounter of Christianity with Latin American cultures. The study is based on both Latin American theological publications and various documents of the Roman Catholic Church. In the first part the problem of Christianity’s encounter with cultures of this region from historic perspective is discussed by pointing out to its negative, ambiguous and positive aspects. The second part is devoted to classification of culture circles, significant from the point of view of evangelization and inculturation (cultures of urban agglomeration, rural regions, Indian and Afro-Latin American cultures, poverty, elites, cyber culture and popular culture). In the final section we paid attention to the issue of up-coming culture and its trends (modernism and postmodernism, secularism, socio-political ideologies, the role of mass media, the tensions between globalization process and appreciation of local traditions).
Religion has two functions: a social one (it consolidates a group of followers) and a personal one (psychological). In modern times, the social function of religion has been taken over by ideologies. Socialism is one of such ideologies. The creators of Marxism called their version of socialism scientific socialism, but their vision of the course of history (‘from capitalism to communism’) has become the foundation of a new religion and a new church. The author calls this church ‘Marxo-Leninism’. The text shows similarities between the Catholic Church and the Marxo-Leninism (or the Stalinist church), as well as the analogies between the Jesuit order and the ‘Len-Party’ (i.e. the Leninisttype party).
In this article, the imperial idea and civilising missions in the Habsburg Monarchy, mainly of the nineteenth century, are refracted through the prism of the legacy of enlightened absolutism. The article tries to dispel mythologies about its demise around 1800, and about those who could subscribe to its programme throughout the nineteenth century. It questions templates of national history writing which too unanimously connect the Enlightenment to the origins of the various national revivals of the early nineteenth century, and discusses concrete examples of enlightened absolutism’s civilising impulses, among them law, Roman imperial patriotism, and the Catholic religion.