Field Hospital: The Church's Engagement with a Wounded World

by William T. Cavanaugh

Overview

Compelling social perspectives from a prominent Catholic scholar

Pope Francis in a 2013 interview famously likened the church to a field hospital. In this book William Cavanaugh adopts Pope Francis’s metaphor to show how the church can help heal both the spiritual and the material wounds of the world.
 
As he examines the intersection of theology with themes of religious freedom, economic injustice, religious violence, and other pressing topics, Cavanaugh emphasizes that the church cannot condemn the evils of the world from a position of superiority. Rather, he says, its practices of solidarity with humanity must be based on a profound recognition that the church shares in the guilt of human sin.
 
Cavanaugh’s Field Hospital provides guideposts for a church that is willing to go outside of itself onto today’s battlefields — both metaphorical and literal — not to inflict wounds but to bind them up and heal them.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802872975
Publisher:	Eerdmans, William B. Publishing Company
Publication date:	02/14/2016
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	276
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

William T. Cavanaugh is senior research professor at the Center for World Catholicism and Intercultural Theology and professor of Catholic studies at DePaul University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments viii

Introduction 1

I Markets and Bodies

1 Are Corporations People? The Corporate Form and the Body of Christ 13

2 Westphalia and Back: Complexifying the Church-World Duality 32

3 Orthodoxy and Heresy in Departments of Economics 55

4 Actually, You Can't Be Anything You Want (and It's a Good Thing, Too) 74

II Dispersed Political Theology

5 The Mystical and the Real: Putting Theology Back into Political Theology 99

6 "Dispersed Political Authority": Subsidiarity and Globalization in Caritas in Veritate 121

7 A Politics of Multiplicity: Augustine and Radical Democracy 140

8 What Constantine Has to Teach Us 157

III Further Explorations in Religion and Violence

9 Religious Violence as Modern Myth 177

10 Political Theology as Threat 200

11 Secularization, Violence, and Idolatry 219

12 Are We Free Not to Be a Religion? The Ambivalence of Religious Freedom 234

13 "We Are to Blame for the War": Dorothy Day on Violence and Guilt in the Mystical Body of Christ 249

Permissions 264

Index of Names and Subjects 265

Editorial Reviews

Canadian Theological Review
“An important work that deserves to be read not only by specialists in political theology and Christian social ethics but by all who value a compassionate and careful engagement with the world.”

William A. Barbieri
— Catholic University of America
"William Cavanaugh's adoption of Pope Francis's stirring metaphor of the church as field hospital is apt for his own theological work, which he continues here in a vein reminiscent of the doctors in M*A*S*H — unblinking, subversive, mordantly witty, and always deeply humane. He clearly diagnoses the pathologies of consumerism and violence that afflict our culture and takes his scalpel to the myths and idolatries that undergird them. . . . In this book's interconnected interventions Cavanaugh once again displays the insight, acuity, and compassion that make him one of the leading theologians of these times."

Emmanuel Katongole
— Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame
"Political theology at its best. Field Hospital confirms Cavanaugh as one of the most lucid, innovative, and interesting theological voices of our time. He has that rare ability to take complicated philosophical arguments and ideas and present them in simple and clear ways for both an academic and a general audience."

Matthew Levering
— Mundelein Seminary
"Richly instructive. . . . Bill Cavanaugh intrepidly goes where few theologians dare to go, and his questions and answers remain resolutely theological against the strongest temptations to bow to the accepted discourses of our age. Those seeking to understand the perspectives that inspire Caritas in Veritate and Evangelii Gaudium need search no further: this is the book to read."

Joseph L. Mangina
— Wycliffe College, University of Toronto
"Field Hospital sets forth an utterly unsentimental vision of the church as imperfect and vulnerable, her 'power made perfect in weakness.' Cavanaugh shows again why he is one of contemporary Catholicism's most important thinkers."

From the Publisher