Word: boccaccio
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...Freeman, another graduate student at Harvard who reiterated the value of non project-based work. “The whole point is to ramble about on a sort of intellectual adventure,” said Freeman, who spent his time visiting churches and reading a lot of Boccaccio. Freeman said that the fellowship for graduate students is aimed at people who are not primarily Italian specialists. “I think the point is to sort of tempt people over to the Italian side of things,” he said. “And it works...
Benedict pointedly called it a "scandal" that a majority of us favor even limited legalized abortion. Yet we're not the Da Vinci Code heretics the Vatican suspects. We look instead to the Boccaccio Code, especially in the wake of the abuse crisis. We've learned to conform to the Catholic faith instead of the Catholic hierarchy. And if the Pope's visit and its aftermath indicate anything, it's that we aren't likely to change that stance until the church, with deeper structural and doctrinal reform, changes its own. As the Pope returns to Rome, a common question...
Whenever someone asks me why I'm still a Roman Catholic in spite of the pedophile scandals and the retro dogma, I usually reach for Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron and its story about a Catholic trying to convert a non-Catholic friend. The friend insists on visiting Rome so he can observe the Holy See himself. This being the 14th century, when church leaders were about as saintly as Enron executives, the Catholic fears that his pal will return home appalled. And so he does - but he declares he's ready to become a Catholic anyway. The reason: he figures...
...Boccaccio knew this in the era of Catholic thinkers like Aquinas, who reconciled Augustine and Aristotle, just as my generation received it from the likes of John Courtney Murray, who defended democracy against doctrine. Aquinas and Murray figure prominently in books like Faithful Dissenters, by Robert McClory, which chronicle how such independent souls have not only questioned the church but helped save it from the kind of glaring errors - like its acceptance of slavery, a stance that Pope Leo XIII finally ended in 1888 - that underscore what a human and fallible institution the church...
...never again be unconditional. It has to be earned, and simply wearing a collar or a habit won't do the trick anymore. Pope Benedict XVI took some positive steps toward earning it last week. But he needs to realize that his American flock, as good Catholics like Boccaccio did before us, follows a religion more than it follows a church...