Didieji Dabarties Klausimai
Antanas Maceina; Dr. Juozas Girnius (Boston, Mass., JAV); Kun. dr. Jonas Gutauskas (Delhi, Ont., Kanada); Kun. dr. Titas Narbutas (Dayton, Ohio, JAV); Kun. Stasys Yla (Putnam, Conn., JAV); prel. dr. Vytautas Balčiūnas (Thompson, Conn., JAV); Prof. dr. Antanas Maceina (Muenster, Vokietija); Simas Sužiedėlis (Brockton, Mass., JAV)
1971
Introduction
Didieji Dabarties Klausimai (The Great Questions of the Day) is a 1971 philosophical-theological work by Antanas Maceina, one of the foremost Lithuanian Catholic thinkers of the twentieth century, published in Chicago by the diaspora series Krikščionis Gyvenime. The volume addresses three major intellectual challenges confronting mid-century Christianity: the secularization of the world, the demythologizing of the Gospels, and the relationship between evolution and religion, with sustained engagement with Teilhard de Chardin. It stands as a landmark of Lithuanian diaspora intellectual life, demonstrating the community's capacity to produce rigorous, internationally oriented theological scholarship while in exile.
Community and publication context
Community and publication setting
Context and significance
Significance
Antanas Maceina (1908-1987) was one of the most significant Lithuanian philosophers of the twentieth century, and this 1971 volume represents his mature diaspora-period engagement with the central theological debates of the post-Vatican II era. By grappling seriously with Bultmann's demythologization program, Teilhard de Chardin's evolutionary theology, and the sociology of secularization, Maceina positioned Lithuanian Catholic thought within the mainstream of European intellectual life—at a moment when Lithuania itself was under Soviet occupation and such discourse was suppressed. The Krikščionis Gyvenime series of which this is the sixth volume constituted one of the most sustained efforts in Lithuanian diaspora publishing to maintain a tradition of serious Catholic intellectual inquiry, drawing on an editorial board spanning the United States and Canada. The volume also testifies to the multilingual scholarly world of the Lithuanian diaspora: its footnotes move fluently across German, French, and Lithuanian sources, and the presence of an English title page reflects an awareness of broader academic audiences. For communities who could not access Lithuanian Catholic scholarship from Soviet-occupied Vilnius, books like this served as a vital lifeline connecting diaspora readers to living philosophical tradition.
How this record carried memory
Diaspora scholarly publishing; Lithuanian-language intellectual series maintaining Catholic philosophical tradition and high-register academic Lithuanian prose outside occupied Lithuania.
Record connections
People, places, and institutions linked in the catalog