Receptive Ecumenism and the Call to Catholic Learning

Abstract

This book has a fresh strategy for looking at ecumenical engagement — ‘Receptive Ecumenism’ — that is fitted to the challenges of the contemporary context and has already been internationally recognised as making a distinctive and important new contribution to ecumenical thought and practice. Beyond this, the book tests and illustrates this proposal by examining what Roman Catholicism in particular might fruitfully learn from its ecumenical others. Challenging the tendency for ecumenical studies to ask, whether explicitly or implicitly, ‘What do our others need to learn from us?’, this book presents a radical challenge to see ecumenism move forward into action by highlighting the opposite question, ‘What can we learn with integrity from our others?’ This approach is not simply ecumenism as shared mission, or ecumenism as problem-solving and incremental agreement but ecumenism as a vital long-term programme of individual, communal, and structural conversion driven, like the Gospel that inspires it, by the promise of conversion into greater life and flourishing. The aim is for the Christian traditions to become more, not less, than they currently are by learning from, or receiving of, each other's gifts.

In search of wisdom and its blind spots: Catholic reflections on Swami Vivekananda’s 150th birth anniversary

“…So too, Catholics themselves increasingly question the meaningfulness of viewing their own community as "church" in the proper sense while reserving for other community's the inconvenient designation of "ecclesial communities." A recent development known as "receptive ecumenism" has gained momentum in Catholic circles in the North Atlantic by asking not what Catholicism can teach other churches, but where and how other churches can therapeutically address weaknesses and woundedness in Catholic tradition and forms of governance (Murray 2008;Murray 2011;Lakeland 2011). Catholic views of the other as opportunity rather than threat are both more adequately Christian and more adequately honest to the experience of many Catholics today who find their communion to be a broken communion in ways that may not be sufficiently remediable through recourse to the tradition's own internal sources, but may stand in genuine therapeutic need of the insights of others.…”

Formation in the Margins

“…It is evidenced for me in some of the ecumenical hospitality which part residential training has offered which illustrates what we might learn from Paul Murray's work when he asks, ''What can we learn, or receive with integrity from our various others in order to facilitate our own growth into deepened communion in Christ and the Spirit?'' (Murray, 2008: ix-x, original emphasis).…”

Religious literacy in the context of Theology and Religious Studies1

“…As regards church and academy, Durham's relationship with more than one church is in line with being home to the Receptive Ecumenism movement, one of the most promising Christian ecumenical developments of recent decades (Murray, 2008 See the Department's web page at https://www.dur.ac.uk/theology.religion/ .…”