Also, in Rowlands' "Introduction," she says, "In truth, a social encyclical is not a 'how to' guide, although they do wish to inspire action; they are not generationally comprehensive documents. Rather, the task of the papal social tradition is to shape a social imagination: to foster the questions about value, virtues, and capacities that lie at the heart of the difficult issues we face. Its most consistent, although not uniformly adopted, approach has been some version of a see, judge, act method. A reading of the signs of the times is produced by the biblical and philosophical tradition and through the use of human reason. This structured reflection on embodied realities, of being in the world, in turn inspires a new form of practice, a renewal action focused on the telos of the good" (p. 13). In Rowlands' "Acknowledgements" (pp. xiv-xvi), she characterizes this as "an agonistic praxis" (p. xiv).
Now, the classic study of agonistic tendencies in Western culture is Johan Huizinga's book Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (1950), based on the 1944 German edition - which Rowlands does not happen to advert to explicitly.
Now, the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955) first discussed the psychodynamic that Huizinga refers as the play-element in culture, as polemic in his seminal 1967 book The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (Yale University Press; for specific page references to polemic, see the "Index" [p. 354]), the expanded version of Ong's 1964 Terry Lectures at Yale University. Subsequently, however, Ong was persuaded by Huizinga's book to switch his terminology for this psychodynamic and refer to agonistic tendencies in his 1981 book Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality [Gender], and Consciousness (Cornell University Press), the published version of Ong's 1979 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University.
Perhaps I should also mention here that Yale's late literary critic Harold Bloom (1930-2019) published the book Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (Oxford University Press, 1982).
Even though Father Ong was a Jesuit priest, I do not know of any of his 400 or so distinct publications (not counting translations and/or reprintings as distinct publications) in which he explicitly discusses Catholic social teaching.
In any event, in the last sentence of Rowlands' "Introduction," she says, "For a list of the key documents that are generally agreed to compose the CST [Catholic social teaching] tradition, see Appendix 1 [pp. 303-305]" (p. 14). Even though I found this "Appendix" helpful to have, I want to point out here that her book does not include a composite bibliography of the various other secondary references she makes throughout her book - which remain buried in her footnotes. Yes, the "Index" (pp. 306-315) does include information about footnotes. But a composite bibliography would have been a welcome addition to her book.
After Rowlands' "Introduction," her learned book unfolds through the following twelve parts:
Chapter 1: "The emergence of modern Catholic social teaching" (pp. 15-46);
Chapter 2: "Human dignity: Philosophical and theological trajectories" (pp. 47-72);
Chapter 3: "Human dignity and (forced) migration" (pp. 73-92);
Chapter 4: "Human dignity and the question of social and structural sin" (pp. 93-109);
Chapter 5: "The common good: The long tradition in context" (pp. 111-124);
Chapter 6: "The common good: Patristic and medieval context" (pp. 125-150);
Chapter 7: "The common good: The encyclical tradition" (pp. 151-175);
Chapter 8: "The body politic: Political community in the social encyclicals" (pp. 177-213);
Chapter 9: "Subsidiarity: A principle of participation and social governance" (pp. 215-237);
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