From globalisation to planetarisation: the principle of interdependence as a vector for a new law of the earth: the lex anthropocenae

The principle of interdependence is the core of the idea of a Common Home, a notion introduced into the public debate by the encyclical Laudato si’, and one which is essential to overcome the anthropocentric narrowness of the ethical–legal normativity on which the Rule of Law is based. The theological contribution to the formulation of the principle of interdependence is embedded in a rich legal–philosophical tradition, which has in C. Schmitt a leading exponent. Thanks to the juridical spatial turn outlined by this author, we may recognize that law regulates not only inter-human relations but also inter-system relations between society and the Earth’s ecosystem. To implement a corresponding structural change, however, we need move beyond Schmittian reductionism, which univocally associates the idea of law with the physical dimension of the occupation of space and its rational inscription as property and sovereignty, a form of predatory appropriation and domination which has brought us to the threshold of the current global ecological and political disorder. Only by juridically implementing interdependence as a new regulator of the relationship between Earth and society and of the relations between peoples can we politically govern and solve the ongoing (ecological, health, social, and international) world crisis.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Tribal vs. integrative pluralism religious freedom: levee or driver of new fundamentalisms?

If the paradigm of secularization as replacement was falsified by the permanent vitality of the religious dimension on the world horizon and in the public sphere, the universalization of the paradigm of secularization as differentiation, on the contrary, turns out to be an essential guarantee of the maintenance and promotion of the rule of law and human rights. From an alternative perspective to both secularism and fundamentalism, public theology today is therefore called upon to reconstruct and argumentatively justify the function of religious freedom as a basic principle of democratic society, within the framework of cognitive and normative disjunction between religion and citizenship which rules modernity. It is urgent to theologically demystify the regressive manipulation of this principle, as a vector of a democratically disruptive tribal pluralism, in contradiction with its nature as a catalyst for an integrative pluralism essential for social cohesion and the common good.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Woman, it is thy badge of shame: when women are object to but not co-subject of social and religious jurisdiction

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) exposes the existentially destructiveconsequences of a patriarchal society and a clerical Church in which women are expelled from the public space as a normative subject and recipient and accepted into it solely as subject to (and eventually as transgressor of) a normativity established exclusively by man. This inequality is, however, not only detrimental to the social condition of women, but also to the general self-understanding of society and men in particular, by depriving their ethical, legal and religious elaboration of the hermeneutic resources peculiar to the female experience (especially that of maternity). The judicial constellation of norm, transgression, condemnation and punishment, ideologically overlaps the religious interpretation of guilt from the Christian point of view, making the evangelical constellation of commandment, sin, conversion and forgiveness incomprehensible, as well as the difference between punishment and expiation. Only in the ‘maternal’ perspective oriented towards the future which is generated by love and the assumption of responsibility towards the humanly ‘given to light’, does the openness to the gratuitousness of God’s redemptive love, whose justice is force of salvation and not of perdition, arise. This difference in perspective has relevant consequences on family morality, particularly in relation to remarried divorcees. In the behavior of the priest co-protagonist of the novel, of public concealment of his own guilt and of irresponsibility towards the individuals involved in it (the former lover and his daughter), the patriarchal mechanism of ‘clerical exceptionalism’ that is still diffused within the Church and is the basis of the morally wrong and historically bankrupt management of the phenomenon of abuse of minors and vulnerable people is exposed.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Tempos e terras de milagres

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Communities: living memories of democracy

A democracia não se mantém e não se regenera sem um ethos público amplamente partilhado que dá vida a regras e instituições no corpo de uma cultura política, dá coesão social e dá responsabilidade pessoal e coletiva. O ethos público não se mantém e não se regenera fora de tradições culturais, religiosas e axiológicas em que se transmitem e se reproduzem códigos simbólicos e identitários eficazes a nível individual e coletivo. As tradições não se mantêm e não se regeneram apenas em termos de processamento individual, precisando de comunidades de práticas, – epistémicas, de valores, de crença - para se instalar socialmente. A tensão entre o pluralismo axiológico e cultural de que as comunidades são portadoras e a convergência num ethos comum, necessária à democracia, é discutida neste artigo à luz da força universalizadora do princípio de inclusão, como critério de legitimação da pertença comunitária, que filtra normativamente critérios axiológicos inerentes às tradições, incompatíveis com a função social de inclusão. Com o princípio de inclusão, como expressão comunitária da noção fundadora da dignidade humana que complementa a sua formulação no plano individual, temos uma categoria básica adicional de articulação da diferença e a necessária interação entre critérios de legitimidade definidos pela comunidade política (as leis) e os critérios de legitimidade definidos pelas comunidades religiosas, epistémicas, valoriais. Na peça de Sófocles, Antígona, encontramos um testemunho tão antigo quão atual do necessário mútuo reconhecimento entre estas duas ordens de legitimidade, cuja contraposição leva à tragédia da pública desordem ética e à crise da democraciaDemocracy does not keep up and is not regenerated without a widely shared public ethos that gives life to rules and institutions in the body of political culture, social cohesion and personal and collective responsibility. The public ethos does not keep up and is not regenerated outside cultural, religious and axiological traditions in which symbolic and identity codes are transmitted and effectively reproduced at individual and collective level. Traditions do not keep up and regenerate themselves in terms of individual processing alone, necessitating communities of practice - epistemic, of values, of belief - to settle socially. The tension between axiological and cultural pluralism of which communities are carriers and convergence into a common ethos, necessary for democracy, is discussed in this paper in the light of the universalizing force of the principle of inclusion as a criterion for legitimizing community belonging, which normatively filters inherent axiological criteria of traditions, incompatible with the social function of inclusion. The principle of inclusion, as a community expression of the founding notion of human dignity that complements its formulation at individual level, introduces a basic additional category of articulating the difference and the necessary interaction between the criteria of legitimacy defined by the political community ( the laws) and the criteria of legitimacy defined by religious, epistemic, and axiological communities of practice. In Sophocles' play Antigone one finds a testimony as old as topical of the necessary mutual recognition between these two orders of legitimacy, whose opposition leads to the tragedy of ethical public disorder and to the crisis of democracy.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Redemption and deformity: the poetics of strangeness as the theological discourse of modernity

O processo psicológico da identificação emocional com o herói é o paradigma domi-nante da civilização literária ocidental desde a sua descrição na Poética de Aristóteles como mecanismo básico da receção da obra por parte do leitor/espetador, e a sua adoção como vetor primário daquela edificação moral prezada na antiguidade clássica e na tradição cristã como função antropológica essencial da literatura.Gesto fundador da modernidade literária a partir, pelo menos, do fim do século XIX, numa inovação que seria teorizada sistematicamente na dramaturgia do estranhamento de Bertolt Brecht, a rutura com este paradig-ma implica uma mudança radical não apenas do discurso antropológico veiculado pela lite-ratura e da interpretação do seu papel como agente moral, mas também do discurso te-ológico por ela implícita ou explicitamente desenvolvido. Com referência final à obra de duas escritoras símbolo desta evolução como Flannery O Connor e Clarice Lispector, focalizar-se-á o núcleo teológico da poética do estranhamento, de desativação da identificação empática com o protagonista: é através da intolerável, repugnante, deformidade (moral e estéti-ca) do ser humano que a redenção se manifesta como ocorrência, imprevisível e humanamente impossível, da Graça, como abismo incompreensível em que a transcendência se abre caminho, derrubando todo o raciocínio, toda a expetati-va, toda a lógica. Porque a redenção é Graça, não Lei.The psychological process of emotional identification with the hero is the dominant paradigm of Western literary civilization since its description in Aristotle’s Poetics as the basic mechanism of reader’s/spectator’s reception of works, and its adoption as the primary vector of that moral edification praised in classical antiquity and in the Christian tradition as an essential anthropological function of literature.Founding gesture of literary modernity from at least the nineteenth century, through an innovation that will be theoretically formalized in Bertolt Brecht’s dramaturgy of estrangement, the break with this paradigm implies a radical change not only in the anthropological discourse conveyed by literature and in the interpretation of its role as moral agent, but also in the theological discourse implicitly or explicitly developed by literature.With final reference to the work of two writers symbolizing this evolution, such as Flannery O’Connor and Clarice Lispector, the essay focuses on the theological core of the estrangement poetics, with its blocking of the empathic identification with the protagonist: it is through the intolerable, repulsive deformity (moral and aesthetic) of a human being that redemption manifests itself as the unpredictable and humanly impossible occurrence of Grace, as an incomprehensible abyss in which transcendence makes her way, overthrowing all reasoning, all expectation, all logic. Because redemption is Grace, not Law.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Figura Huius mundi : figuras líricas da temporalidade na poesia de E. Dickinson

A partir da leitura de um amplo leque de poemas de Emily Dickinson, este trabalho visa discutir e corroborar algumas teses fundamentais: 1) A experiência temporal é aporética, cognitivamente fracturada pela contradição entre as suas dimensões tão complementarmente necessárias quão incompatíveis (nomeadamente a contradição entre duração e sucessão, entre contínuo e descontínuo; a clivagem entre aqui e agora e a consequente indeterminabilidade teorética da presença no quadro da experiência perceptiva). 2) Este seu estatuto aporético inviabiliza uma descrição teorética da experiência temporal como um todo, tornando necessária uma abordagem expressivo-interpretativa que se produz como um discurso figural sobre o tempo de cariz plural e não totalizador, cuja primeira relevante atestação se encontra nas epístolas paulinas. 3) Na pluralidade de registos figurais que focalizam a experiência temporal, um papel insubstituível deve ser reconhecido à figuralidade lírica. Reconstruindo esta forma de discurso como uma modalidade de expor a experiência interior por meio da experiência exterior, de articular o intencional por meio do perceptivo, pode ser evidenciada a sua eficácia em interceptar e expor os aspectos sincrónicos-perceptivos da experiência temporal e a sua contraditoriedade. O registo lírico combina-se assim com os outros registos figurais (reflexivo-fenomenológico, cosmológico-científico, narrativo, dramático, hermenêuticoperformativo) de processamento expressivo-interpretativo da experiência temporal, sem lhes poder ser assimilado.A wide selection of Emily Dickinson’s poems is discussed and interpreted in this work in order to support the following main theses: 1) Temporal experience is aporetical, cognitively fractured by the contradiction among dimensions that are both necessary and incompatible (such as the contradiction between duration and succession, between continuous and discontinuous; the gap between here and now and the resulting theoretical indeterminability of presence in the frame of perceptive experience). 2) Its aporetical character makes impossible a theoretical description of temporal experience as a whole, and requires switching to the expressive-interpretative approach of a plurality of figural discourses about time. Neither homogeneous nor totalising, this discursive panoply finds a first significant attestation in Paul’s writings. 3) In the plurality of the figural registers that frames temporal experience, a unique role has to be recognised to lyrical figurality. By reconstructing this discourse form as a modality of exposing the inner experience through the outer experience, of articulating the intentional by the perceptive, its efficacy in intercepting and exposing the synchronical-perceptive aspects of temporal experience and its contradictory character may be highlighted The lyrical register hence combines with, without being assimilated by, other figural registers (such as the reflexive-phenomenological, cosmological, narrative, dramatic, hermeneuticalperformative) of expressive-interpretative processing of temporal experience

Fátima – the mystical fable and the role of literature

A leitura da produção literária relacionada com o tópico Fátima, publicada em Portugal entre 2015 e 2017, em ocasião dos 100 anos dos acontecimentos na Cova da Iria, oferece a oportunidade de refletir sobre o papel do dispositivo literário no seio do discurso eclesial, evidenciando que ele é tanto mais espiritualmente e sapiencialmente eficaz, quanto mais autónomo na sua racionalidade estética. Afirmando-se como um dos possíveis vetores expressivos da conversão simbólica da visão em aparição (no sentido hermenêutico do termo), a palavra poética resulta especialmente recetiva em relação à dimensão mística que constitui o segredo guardado em Fátima e que institui a sua força de atração para tantas almas, crentes ou não. Uma curta panorâmica analítica das obras lidas encerra a reflexão.The analysis of the literary production on the subject of Fátima, published in Portugal between 2015 and 2017 on the occasion of the centennial of the events in Cova da Iria, is an opportunity to reflect on the role of the literary device within the ecclesial discourse, showing that the more autonomous in its aesthetic rationality, the more spiritually and sapientially effective it is. Affirming itself as one of the possible expressive vectors of the symbolic conversion of vision into apparition (in the hermeneutical sense of the term), the poetic word is especially receptive to the mystical dimension that constitutes the Fátima secret, and its force of attraction for so many souls, be they believers or not.Finally, this paper provides a short overview of the works analysed.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The snake and the calf: idolatry as a symbolic pathology. A Biblical point of view

A perspetiva bíblica sobre o estatuto epistemológico e ético do simbolismo mimético e da sua pertinência – e impertinência – artística e religiosa é discutida a partir da análise cruzada de duas narrativas maiores do Pentateuco (adoração do bezerro de ouro [Ex 32: 1‑20; Dt 9: 15‑29] e exibição da serpente de bronze [Nr 21: 4‑10]). Ao descartar como reducionista a contraposição tradicional entre iconoclastia judaica e iconofilia cristã, evidencia‑se que o tabu bíblico das imagens do divino não é recusa absoluta do mimetismo (como conversão analógica dos conteúdos da experiência na sua representação), mas condenação da sua degeneração idolátrica (que ocorre no caso do mimetismo fetichista, pseudodenotativo, incapaz de distinguir entre significado e referente, entre conteúdo semântico e realidade) e mitológica (na sua assunção como discurso exclusivo e totalizador, substitutivo do saber teorético da verdade). O artigo apresenta os seguintes traços fundamentais da significação simbólica reconstruídos pelo texto bíblico, que a reflexão teológica pode implementar como critérios vinculantes de escrutínio do simbolismo religioso e artístico, num exercício crítico‑hermenêutico valioso, não apenas para a experiência de fé mas também para a autocompreensão das artes: complementaridade de imagem e rito (conexão semanticamente vinculante da representação mimética e do seu efeito performativo); articulação do simbolismo como estratégia de descentralização da experiência originária e diferenciação crítica do lugar do sujeito na sua finitude; inconsistência epistemológica e ética da idolatria (como infidelidade por parte da experiência religiosa e artística à «santidade» do próprio objeto, à mútua transcendência de real e sujeito).The biblical point of view on the epistemological and ethical status of mimetic symbolism and its artistic and religious pertinence – and im‑ pertinence – is discussed here on the basis of the crossed analysis of two major narratives of the Pentateuch (adoration of the golden calf [Ex 32, 1‑20; Dt 9,15‑29] and exhibition of the bronze serpent [Nr 21, 4‑10]). By discarding the traditional opposition between Jewish iconoclasm and Christian iconophilism as reductionist, it is highlighted that the biblical taboo of images of the divine is not an absolute refusal of mimesis (as an analogical conversion of the contents of experience in its representa‑ tion), but a condemnation of its degeneration, both idolatrous (which occurs in the case of fetishistic, pseudo‑denotative mimesis, unable to distinguish between meaning and referent, between semantic content and reality) and mythological (in its assumption as an exclusive and to‑ talizing discourse, substituting the theoretical knowledge of the truth). The paper presents the following fundamental traits of symbolic signif‑ icance reconstructed by the biblical text, which theological reflection can implement as binding criteria for the scrutiny of religious and ar‑ tistic symbolism, in a valuable critical‑hermeneutic exercise not only for the experience of faith but also for the self‑understanding of the arts: complementarity of image and rite (semantically binding association of the mimetic representation and its performative effect); articulation of symbolism as a strategy of decentralization of the original experience and critical differentiation of the subject’s place in its finitude; epistemo‑ logical and ethical inconsistency of idolatry (as infidelity on the part of religious and artistic experience to the ‘sanctity’ of the object itself, to the mutual transcendence of the real and the subject).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Helium nanodroplets as an efficient tool to investigate hydrogen attachment to alkali cations

9 pags., 10 figs. -- This article is part of the themed collection: Stability and properties of new-generation metal and metal-oxide clusters down to subnanometer scaleWe report a novel method to reversibly attach and detach hydrogen molecules to positively charged sodium clusters formed inside a helium nanodroplet host matrix. It is based on the controlled production of multiply charged helium droplets which, after picking up sodium atoms and exposure to H2 vapor, lead to the formation of Nam+(H2)n clusters, whose population was accurately measured using a time-of-flight mass spectrometer. The mass spectra reveal particularly favorable Na+(H2)n and Na2+(H2)n clusters for specific “magic” numbers of attached hydrogen molecules. The energies and structures of these clusters have been investigated by means of quantum-mechanical calculations employing analytical interaction potentials based on ab initio electronic structure calculations. A good agreement is found between the experimental and the theoretical magic numbers.This work was supported by the Austrian Science Fund, FWF (project number P31149) and the Spanish MICINN with Grants FIS2016-79596-P and PID2019-105225GB-I00 (JB, JHR); PID2020- 114654GB-I00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033, 2021-2024 (TGL,MB) and PID2020-114957GB-I00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 (JCM, MIH). Collaboration has also been supported by the CSIC under i-Link+ program LINKB20041. Allocation of computing time by CESGA (Spain) is also acknowledged.Peer reviewe