Systematic Theology

George Gilmore, Spring Hill College (Alabama)
ggilmore@shc.edu 

The section of the CTS on Systematic Theology requests proposals dealing with any aspect of systematic philosophy/theology addressing this year's theme, “Human Families: Identity, Relationships and Responsibilities.”

Proposals could address the phenomenology of the constitution of the human person as individual, and/or as “Corporate Personality,” or as “People of God,” or as “Mystical Body of Christ.” Given the method of “deconstruction,” one could reverse the attention to “(re-)construction,” as both creation and as healing.

 Note that this could suggest an infrastructure for the formation of gender identity, the social dialectic of objectivity and subjectivity in the formation of the human person and the formation of family and society.

Proposals could configure such material to the meaning of “sacrament,” as contemporary Catholicism wrestles to “bring forth new things and old” as insights reframing traditions of sacraments such as Marriage (love and union between spouses, procreation) and Orders (leadership), or the wider inclusion of sacraments as “rites of passage” also in service to the articulation of social and individual human identity.

Much of this could be seen as establishing foundations for ethics. Moral issues such as artificial contraception, divorce/annulment and abortion are often built on reliance on natural law theory as well as reinterpretation/or fundamentalism addressing Scripture. What is the “truth” of Human Families: Identity, Relationships and Responsibilities, and how does such truth ground ethics?

Proposals should be submitted by December 15, 2019.