The thing that struck me most about the new encyclical is that (for the first time in a papal encyclical that I can recall), Pope Francis supports his teaching with statements from various Bishops' conferences from around the globe. He has Paraguay, New Zealand, and South Africa in there.
Not only does this confirm that we are indeed the Church Universal, it also brings to fruition an important component of Vatican II reform that has, until now, gone un-tried: genuine collegiality.
UPDATE***
This just in: John Allen Jr. beats me to the punch!
http://www.cruxnow.com/church/2015/06/20/the-encyclicals-footnotes-say-a-lot-about-this-pope/
Only he chalks it up to other motives.
6/22/2015
Collegial Pope
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Reasons to believe Jesus is alive in a new life with God can be found in quotes from two prominent atheists and a biology textbook. There is nothing wrong with the Sartre quote, and it proves that the Nagel quote is dishonest. The Nagel quote proves that the textbook quote is ignorant, unintelligent, and irrational:
Thus the passion of man is the reverse of that of Christ, for man loses himself as man in order that God may be born. But the idea of God is contradictory and we lose ourselves in vain. Man is a useless passion. (Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, New York: Washington Square Press, p. 784)
Among the traditional candidates for comprehensive understanding of the relation of mind to the physical world, I believe the weight of evidence favors some from of neutral monism over the traditional alternatives of materialism, idealism, and dualism. (Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, location 69 of 1831)
And certain properties of the human brain distinguish our species from all other animals. The human brain is, after all, the only known collection of matter that tries to understand itself. To most biologists, the brain and the mind are one and the same; understand how the brain is organized and how it works, and we’ll understand such mindful functions as abstract thought and feelings. Some philosophers are less comfortable with this mechanistic view of mind, finding Descartes’ concept of a mind-body duality more attractive. (Neil Campbell, Biology, 4th edition, p. 776 )
David Roemer
http://www.newevangelization.info
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