la eutanasia


http://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousbench/2014/02/a-peripheral-vision/

In Catholic intellectual circles right now, the peripheral has become quite central.
Since his term in office began, Pope Francis has turned often to the concept of the periphery, a term that for him has a rich assemblage of meanings. You can expect to hear the word surfacing repeatedly in religious discourse – and weare only beginning to understand how radical some of the implications might be.
I have a special interest in this topic because much of my own writing concerns the relationship between core and periphery, in the sense of traditional and newer centers of growth and activity within Christianity. In a simple geographical sense, Francis himself comes from the periphery, in the sense of being thefirst non-European pope in many centuries. The shift in Catholic numbers and influence outside Europe and North America is very familiar within Vatican circles these days, and that accounts for one level of interest.
Francis, though, uses “peripheral” in other ways, always positive. He warns the church not become so fixated on the center that it neglects the periphery – those people who live on theedge of mainstream society, whether within the economically advanced nations, or globally. That “edgy” quality might result from poverty, from racial categories, or from sexuality and life-style. Although not calling for any kind of relativism, he urges the church to reach out to everyone.
When his papacy began, Francis was quoted as saying that
There is a tension between the center and theperiphery…. We must get out of ourselves and go toward the periphery. We must avoid the spiritual disease of the Church that can become self-referential: when this happens, the Church itself becomes sick. It’s true that accidents can happen when you go out into the street, as can happen to any man or woman. But if the Church remains closed onto itself, self-referential, it grows old. Between a Churchthat goes into the street and gets into an accident and a Church that is sick with self-referentiality, I have no doubts in preferring the first.
By the way, you may well see this and other quotes in variant forms, as they are given in multiple translations, some non-official.
In the statement Evangelii Gaudium, Francis writes that
Each Christian and every community must discern the path thatthe Lord points out, but all of us are asked to obey his call to go forth from our own comfort zone in order to reach all the “peripheries” in need of the light of the Gospel.
Francis also uses the concept of “existential peripheries”:
Evangelizing pre-supposes a desire in the Church to come out of herself. The Church is called to come out of herself and to go to the peripheries, not onlygeographically, but also the existential peripheries: the mystery of sin, of pain, of injustice, of ignorance and indifference to religion, of intellectual currents, and of all misery.
In a philosophical sense too, he cautions against seeing the world through the lens of one narrow ideological scheme. Flexibility is all. A wise thinker, he says, needs to see things from multiple perspectives, from theedges:
I am convinced of one thing: the great changes in history were realized when reality was seen not from the center but rather from the periphery. It is a hermeneutical question: reality is understood only if it is looked at from the periphery, and not when our viewpoint is equidistant from everything. Truly to understand reality we need to move away from the central position of calmness andpeacefulness and direct ourselves to the peripheral areas. Being at the periphery helps to see and to understand better, to analyze reality more correctly, to shun centralism and ideological approaches….
It is not a good strategy to be at the center of a sphere. To understand we ought to move around, to see reality from various viewpoints. We ought to get used to thinking. ….
This is really...