Browse posts tag by Poverty

DECLARATION “DIGNITAS INFINITA” ON HUMAN DIGNITY

April 10, 2024 By dwayman
Declaration of the Dicastery
for the Doctrine of the Faith
“Dignitas Infinita regarding human dignity”
04.08.2024

On the 8th of April, 2024, the Vatican presented to Christendom and to the world their five year study on Human Dignity.  In this document, written in seven languages (Italian, French, English, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Polish), the introduction explains:

“On 2 February 2024, a new and significantly modified version of this text was sent to the Members of the Dicastery ahead of the Ordinary Session (Feria IV) on 28 February 2024. The letter accompanying the draft included the following clarification: “This additional drafting was necessary to meet a specific request of the Holy Father: namely, he explicitly urged that more attention be given to the grave violations of human dignity in our time, particularly in light of the Encyclical Fratelli Tutti. With this, the Doctrinal Office took steps to reduce the initial part […] and to develop in greater detail what the Holy Father indicated.” The text of the current Declaration was finally approved during the above-mentioned Feria IV of 28 February 2024. Then, in the Audience granted to me and to Monsignor Armando Matteo, Secretary of the Doctrinal Section, on 25 March 2024, the Holy Father approved this Declaration and ordered its publication.

The five-year course of the text’s preparation helps us to understand that the document before us reflects the gravity and centrality of the theme of dignity in Christian thought.

BT. Roberts’ Up-to-Date Vision of Earnest Christianity

June 11, 2021 By dwayman
  1. T. Roberts’ Up-to-Date Vision of Earnest Christianity

© Howard A. Snyder [Used by Permission]

Author, Populist Saints: B. T. and Ellen Roberts and the First Free Methodists

Visiting Director, Manchester Wesley Research Centre

Manchester, England

Roberts Wesleyan College – September 21, 2016

Introduction

Benjamin Titus Roberts always insisted that the mission of the Free Methodist Church was “twofold—to maintain the Bible standard of Christianity, and to preach the Gospel to the poor.”[1] He never lost sight of this throughout his many years of life and ministry.

I invite you this morning to consider the relevance of this mission for our lives personally and for the church today.

  1. B.T. Roberts and the Free Methodist Church were in a broad sense part of the Holiness Movement within American Methodism. This movement was committed to the doctrine and experience of entire sanctification as taught by John Wesley and as interpreted by leaders in the nineteenth-century Holiness Movement.

Roberts shared this concern with sanctification—that is, holy living in every dimension of life. Not everyone in the Holiness Movement however shared Roberts’ particular concern with the poor. In general, early Free Methodists embraced a more radical understanding of holiness as well as a more radical commitment to the poor. Sociologically speaking, the energy that powered early Free Methodism was somewhat separate and distinct from that of the broader Holiness Movement which in the 1860s,