Loaves and fishes
Schroth, Raymond A.
of western Consciousness, as if he were guide for a 20th century version of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. There were no fixed shrines here; it was eminently the world of historical consciousness,...
...Peirce, James and Dewey...
...Many of his peers found him suspect, alarming...
...While in Cambridge, for a time he had been tutor to Emerson's greatgrandchildren...
...Pollock's thesis here is still largely unexplored and vastly significant--especially if he was right in asserting that Perry Miller never understood the Puritan mind...
...For many of us, it was this eccentric Fordham professor who took us into this world of relativity and process, future shock and revolution, and made us feel, at once, both awed and at home there...
...He loved to turn your world upside down, and then give you new eyes with which to see a wider, richer one...
...There was a line of descent, he atgued, from the Christian naturalism of Scotus Erigena and Bernard of Clairvaux's individualism down to Jonathan Edwards and Emerson, up through C.S...
...She had some tubes in her;, and her bed, one of six in the room, was nearest the door...
...H E WAS born, Jewish, in Glasgow, Scotland...
...we could unmake it, remake it...
...We humans had made this world...
...with all this she was still generous enough tc help me as a faculty FATHER RAYMOND A. SCHROTH, S.L...
...She was, more than ever, as one student said, "like a basket of loaves and fishes that never emptied once you started giving it away...
...This puts poetry at the heart of things, and demands that scientists be mystics...
...He then moved to Toronto's Medieval Institute, and worked under Gilson, for his Ph.D...
...RAYMOND A. SCHROTH 2 February 1979:49...
...it was eminently the world of historical consciousness, the world of Einstein and Whitehead and Teilhard, of Marx and Freud, and cybernetics and the sociology of knowledge, of Auschwitz, of jazz and Jackson Pollock (no relation) and revolutions...
...Emigrating early to Chicago, he did his undergraduate work at Harvard, studying with Alfred North Whitehead and William McDougall, and also took an M.A...
...Pollock had a mother's wisdom with fragile new things--or was it the child's heart...
...she was leaving the Dominican order to marry (with an unbounded joy she was so anxioiJs to share) Jack Becker who was leaving the Jesuits...
...is associate professor of communications at Fordham and an editor of Commonweal...
...Her cancer was inoperable, but she was hoping for a remission--determined to return to the classroom by January...
...In our last conversation--concerning one of my former students who was facing the same fate as Claire and wanted to know how to spend her remaining time-she told me she had never been happier in her life...
...I may recall him most fondly, though, for understanding what few intellectuals seem to: how gentle and respectful one must be toward new ideas when they come into this world ill-fitting, inarticulate, passionate and one-sided...
...Somewhere in this process he would develop his own distinctive interpretation of medieval and classic American philosophy...
...He would teach briefly at Notre Dame, for thirty years at Fordham's graduate philosophy department, and at various times held appointments at Manhattanville, Pace University, The New School and Seton Hall...
...Commonweal readers know her as a regular poetry reviewer and contributor to the Commonweal Papers #5: Faith: The Struggle to Believe (November 15, 1974) where she wrote, in her article on culture and belief, that, "Perhaps if we look steadily enough at this emerging face of contemporary man we can learn to love and compassionate his image and hear the Word spoken in time...
...I kissed her as I left, thinking I might never see her again, but knowing she had liberated me from some less important suffering of my own...
...Hundreds of Fordham students knew and loved her as the infectiously dynamic, enthusiastic and witty teacher who began to teach them about Chaucer and Yeats and ended teaching them--by the manner in which she faced death-the beauty and richness of a life lived fully no matter what the pain...
...She lived to teach for three more years, to go on writing, to encourage other writers, to win promotion in the English Department (which meant a lot to her), to show her students--even when she could hardly pull herself along the hall and had to teach sitting down, and told her class (wrongly) 'Tm not as much fun as I used to be"-that the greatest sin was i~ waste life...
...I volunteer with the Open Curriculum, an experimental independent study community, and also to teach at night for three years at Malcolm-King College in Harlem...
...Our friendship began when I first arrived at Fordham eight years ago, when Claire was going through a particularly critical period in her life--one which in some ways mirrored the broader struggles of the church: her illness had been diagnosed...
...A few years later, in October 1975, when I was feeling worn down by a number of things, including an impending, prolonged, public tenure battle of my own, I visited Claire in New York Hospital...
...I will always remember how radiantly beautiful she appeared, as she told me how in suffering she had renewed her own faith and had liberated herself from the pain of her earlier life experiences...
...For one thing, he was a defender of Marx and Marxist social analysis (of the Frankfurt School type) when this was scarcely popuLOAVES AND FISHES REMEMBERING CLAIRE HAHN T ills IS a good time to say a personal word about Claire Hahn who died of cancer last summer...
...in psychology and philosophy there...
...she was worried about coming up for tenure...
Vol. 106 • February 1979 • No. 2
