This is the newest installment in the publisher’s “Engaging Theology: Catholic Perspectives” series, acclaimed teaching resources on theological and doctrinal subjects. Paul Lakeland, the Aloysius P. Kelley Professor of Catholic Studies at Fairfield University, and director of the Center for Catholic Studies there, is an award-winning author of books on the role of the laity in the contemporary church. Building on these previous works, he here offers an approach to ecclesiology that is “resolutely inductive.” He offers a fresh, new reading of the traditional four “marks” of the church and adds a fifth: eternity.
“Because of the commitment to an inductive method,” the author explains, “much of what the reader might expect to find in a Catholic ecclesiology” is missing here. His emphasis, rather, is on the shape of the community of believers and the internal as well as external challenges they face now and will face in the future. Among these are identity and commitment, the religious formation of the young, women in the church, and the church and political life. In the vein of Avery Dulles’s brilliant and original analysis, Models of the Church, Lakeland proffers the following ecclesiological models for the American church today: the church as hospice, as pilgrim, as immigrant and as pioneer.
Church is a learned, stimulating and forward-looking book that will engage both scholarly and general audiences. The author calls for those engaged in parish ministry, and especially church leaders, to re-vision the concept of “church,” practice discernment and be open to change. “The future of the Catholic Church,” Lakeland stresses, “cannot just be the clerical church of the past,” for the church is a living communion whose reach “extends to the whole world.”
Purchase Church: Living Communion (Engaging Theology: Catholic Perspectives)
This article appears in December 21 2009.
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