Cardijn

Interdisciplinary dialogues find researchers seeking better understandings of theories and concepts, such colonialism and capitalism, and the means through which these concepts impact both local and global cultures. The results of explorations such as these raise the question of how to translate the theories that are created by these dialogues into practice. Moreover, they ask where we can take these conversations, how can we focus them toward specific aims, and how can we effectively enact them as one collective group. This article introduces and proposes Joseph Cardinal Cardijn's See–Judge–Act method as a possible framework to better enable these discussions to move from theory to praxis. It proposes that such a theory may also allow the theoretical portions of these interdisciplinary dialogues to happen without any discipline ceding or 'shaving away' the core principles that respectively identify each discipline. The article begins by exploring Cardinal Cardijn's original articulation of the method. Then, it describes how the liberation theologians Leonardo Boff and Clodovis Boff employed the method in their development of a theological framework. Finally, this article explores how the See–Judge–Act method might be useful for other disciplines, such as African thought and philosophy, and critical theory. The issues of economic, social, and political inequality clearly span across writing genres and academic discourses. This is seen throughout this special issue, and especially in its subtitle: 'African Thought, Critical Theory, and Liberation Theology in Dialogue'. Indeed, each of these disciplines approach the concept of inequality from specific and important angles: African thought/philosophy employs a critical deconstruction that decolonizes prevailing socioeconomic systems that persist in controlling how Africans should think and live. Critical theory's socioeconomic analysis likewise attempts to uncover the presumed structures of society that promote and legitimize the hegemonies targeted by African thought's decolonizing efforts. Liberation theology, in turn, takes these critiques and analyses, and employs them through a praxis-based theology in pursuit of not just material liberation, but a spiritual one as well. The scope of this special issue is to bring these disciplines together to create an encounter from which future discussions may arise. This encounter was premised by the notion that each discipline focuses upon oppression and possible liberation: oppression resulting from a myriad of events that become conceptualized through colonialism, capitalism, and social hegemony. Furthermore, it was also premised by the idea that we need to bring together these disciplines because these issues cannot be solved by a lone theory or discourse; we need to band together ideas and concepts from various discourses to address these mammoth problems. Yet this banding together, as it were, raises a new problem: how should we proceed as an interdisciplinary group without talking past each other? Where can we take these conversations, how

Soon after classes resumed at Stanislas (University) College, Paris, in the autumn of 1893, a group of students led by Marc Sangnier began to meet in the college basement to discuss and take action on social issues.
Two years earlier, Leo XIII had published his landmark 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum, on the “worker question.” And in 1892 he had specifically addressed the French people in his encyclical Au milieu de sollicitudes, which called on them to abandon the mirage of restoring the pre-Revolutionary monarchy and instead work to animate the recently established French Republic with Christian values.
Inspired by Leo XIII, Sangnier and his young colleagues set out to educate their student peers and reach out to Paris’s burgeoning population of young workers. Abandoning the “doctrinal” approach of traditional study circles, they began by studying the facts revealed in social enquiries tackling issues of concern. Meditating weekly on the Gospel, they sought to develop action responded to the needs they had identified.
And when they graduated from Stanislas and went to work and study elsewhere, they took their ideas and methods with them. In 1898, they launched a campaign to promote the development of more study circles. Soon these study circles adopted the name of their bimonthly magazine, Le Sillon, (The Furrow).
These “Sillonists” encapsulated their task of social education in a new definition of democracy as the social system that maximised “the conscience/consciousness and responsibility” of each person.
But the Sillon’s ideas and methods were too radical for their time, causing Leo XIII’s successor, Pius X, to issue another letter to the French bishops, condemning the Sillon’s conception of democracy and calling on Sangnier and his colleagues to resign. Loyal to the Church, they did indeed winning admiration for their sacrifice.
This sacrifice was not in vain, however, because across the border in Belgium, their example had inspired a dynamic young priest, Joseph Cardijn, who adopted and developed the Sillon’s methods, transforming them into the iconic see-judge-act method of the Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne or Young Christian Workers, the first of what would become the “Specialised Catholic Action” movements.
Later still, Pope John XXIII, who had heard Marc Sangnier speak in 1904, would endorse this method in his 1961 encyclical, Mater et Magistra. And Vatican II Council Fathers would adopt the method for the redaction of the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the World of Today, Gaudium et Spes, while the Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity, Apostolicam Actuositatem, promoted the see-judge-act as a method of lay formation.
And while no document of Vatican II mentions the word “democracy,” we find the Sillon’s “consciousness-responsibility” binomial embedded in the many references in Gaudium et Spes to raising awareness and promoting a sense of responsibility.

The Religions special issue, " Transforming Encounters and Critical Reflection: African Thought, Critical Theory, and Liberation Theology in Dialogue, " addresses the concern over the present postcolonial context in which African persons and societies find themselves. The issue attempts to gain a further understanding of this context through a dialogue between these three disciplines, but what emerges from this attempt? As a critical response to the issue as a whole, this article will reveal that each author presents different yet converging perspectives on the questions: 'what is liberation and from what are we being liberated?' This article begins by phrasing this question through Frantz Fanon's critique on the postcolony, where he sees that the same logic—what Schalk Gerber's article calls 'the logic of the colonizer'—is still employed in the postcolony. This article unpacks the entanglement created by this logic and how each author addresses it in different ways. Importantly, this is not a review of each article; rather, it seeks to reveal the narrative created by this interdisciplinary dialogue in order to further the conversation on oppression and liberation in an African context. In so doing, it reveals how each author addresses the concept of liberation or freedom and where they partially (or perhaps provisionally) agree that liberation entails embodied communal responsibility as being-with others, the importance of transparent dialogue, the need for new rationalities to enter the discussion of African self-determination, while also highlighting the dangers of appropriating these new rationalities when bringing them into an African context or when moving theory into praxis.