(Download) "Life Support (The Public Square: A Continuing Survey of Religion, Culture, And Public Life) (Catholic Identity of Health-Care Institutions)" by First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Life Support (The Public Square: A Continuing Survey of Religion, Culture, And Public Life) (Catholic Identity of Health-Care Institutions)
- Author : First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life
- Release Date : January 01, 2010
- Genre: Religion & Spirituality,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 72 KB
Description
In zoology, the limicoles are a class of birds that dwell on the shoreline--on that half-liquid and half-solid place, that jellied world between the water and the land. The word is an old metaphor, coined in French and derived from the Latin limbus. As an adjective, it means occupying the edge--and that is what the best-known Catholic institutions in America have always done: dwelt in that strange middle ground between the Church and the American state. The Catholic schools, for instance--together with all the health-care facilities and Catholic charities--are not churches, but they operate at the edges of the Church, from which they feed spiritually and financially, all while serving the larger social ecosystem. The closing of St. Vincent's Hospital this year may mark something: As the well-known chronicler of Catholic New York, Terry Golway, remarked, the loss of St. Vincent's means that there is no longer a single Catholic hospital on the island of Manhattan. But, generally speaking, the Catholic institutions still populate the American scene, and they are, for the most part, still recognizably Catholic. Despite cultural, financial, and political incentives to secularize, they have not yet entirely done so--which is why the Catholic limicole institutions still provide much of the infrastructure necessary for Catholicism to occupy its current place in American civil religion.