Sacramentum Mundi Online

Get access Subject: Religious Studies

Edited by: Karl Rahner with Cornelius Ernst and Kevin Smyth.
Advisor for the online edition: Karen Kilby, Durham University

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Sacramentum Mundi Online is the online edition of the famous six volume English reference work in Catholic Theology, edited (in 1968-1970) by Karl Rahner, one of the main Catholic theologians of the 20th century. Sacramentum Mundi: An Encyclopedia of Theology was originally published by Herder Verlag, and is now available online at Brill.

For more information: Brill.com

Taxation, Morality of

(981 words)

Author(s): Robert H. Springer
Taxation means the paying of money according to law for the support of government, or the levying of such payments. Tax laws range from municipal ordinances to the decrees of the supreme authority. 1. Authentic and false response. Response to taxation is commonly minimal compliance, if not outright refusal. Such a response is value-blind, understandable though not excusable. Tax structures are so complex that paying taxes has become totally impersonal, e.g., the routine filling of an income tax report. The citizen sees tax law as a…

Technology

(3,561 words)

Author(s): Alois Halder
1. General concept. The Greek word τέχνη embraces all “artificial” production of things by man, as opposed to their spontaneous, “natural” growth and development. Starting from this, technology can be taken as synonymous with “art” in the widest sense, in contradistinction to “nature”. It is one of the basic ways in which the world of nature is freely and consciously transformed into the world of man, a cultural process, therefore, which consists essentially in material production. Within this cat…

Temptation

(2,384 words)

Author(s): Waldemar Molinski
1. The nature of temptation is to be understood from the fact that man as a defective being is ordained to a perfection which transcends him. The impelling tendency to personal and therefore moral perfection is his mental orientation under the impulse of grace towards his fellow men and towards God. It comes to realization in the ordination of all human acts to the end of man, in proportion to his openness to the transcendent, that is, to the mystery of God, experienced though not capable of bei…