In the 1910s and '1980s new theologies, called “liberation," and "local" or "contextual" theologies, erupted where the Enlightenment theologies of Europe and North America failed to respond to people's needs. Now, "globalization" sweeps over the world with technologies that compress time and space, where cultures homogenize even as new particularisms arise. Following on his widely-acclaimed CONSTRUCTING LOCAL THEOLOGIES, Robert J. Schreiter's THE NEW CATHOLICITY takes a close look at this complex and rapidly-changing
environment and traces the issues that are reshaping theology today. Encompassing recent developments in anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and communication theory THE NEW CATHOLICITY explores the many aspects of globalization that challenge Christianity as it enters into its third millennium.
In Schreiter's view, a deep irony, perhaps even a paradox, is concealed within the riddle of globalization. Such forces as feminist, liberation, ecological, and global theological movements find their counterparts in antiglobalism, ethnification, and primitivism. Liberation thought in a post-Soviet world seeks to be more realistic about economics but finds "reformist gradualism" a bitter pill to swallow. Intercultural theologies find analogous difficulties when they attend to "integrated" as opposed to "globalized" concepts of culture . The seeming polar opposition of [bad] "syncretism" and [good] "synthesis" in the context of changing religious identities end up much less amenable to simple value judgments than they once appeared to be.