Studying the other dimension

...Thus, like every other academic or intellectual discipline, religious studies treat a separate and specific sphere of human activity, a sphere which demands to be treated on its own terms...

...Of course, other sciences have authorities and orthodoxies of their own, many of them tyrannical and intransigent...

...if Lorenzo Valla had not drawn the consequences of philological analysis...

...And decision, the act of personal choice, oriented toward the future, always involves the willingness to put oneself in jeopardy...

...Here's no jackhammer jammed home ruthlessly but the yielding press of stamen under bee, glowing at the sweetness of us...

...But it was this same concern, mutatis mutandis, which marked the debates between Erasmus and Luther, which set Abelard and Bernard at odds, and which haunted the dreams of Jerome...

...A psychologist who studies tortured composers like Beethoven or Schumann or Mahler can also tell us a lot about the kind of expression their anguish found in music...

...For theology would have died a death of attrition had it not been stimulated - even profoundly challenged - by several other sciences down the centuries...

...I think that these painful episodes hold one comforting lesson: wherever religious authority has violated others' rights or exceeded its own competence, it has hurt itself badly...

...Within the ecstasies.and prayers and rituals of the faithful, there are rational elements and it is the proper task of theology to develop and explicate those elements...

...Religious studies can embody and convey those attitudes uniquely, by virtue of their specific material...

...This statement, although filled with religious significance, was not yet theological...

...For it conveys a notion of theological and religious studies as a series of propositions, and makes religion seem like a matter of intellectual assent...

...As the sources of revelation indicate, such study is highly differentiated and calls for various approaches...

...And so each venture is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate, With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of the imprecision of feeling Undisciplined squads of emotion...

...No matter how great the security of our science or the safety of the institutions we take for granted, they hold sway over us only so long as we hold faith in them...

...These two aspects will appear more clearly if I treat first the material of religious studies, and second the method - or rather one particular method - employed in religious research...

...It is that which is incomprehensible, not to be grasped, permanently and truly a mystery...

...After all, Erasmus spent his best energies demonstrating the relation of the studia humanitatis to the formal study of theology...

...In The Idea of a University, Cardinal Newman defined theology as "the science of God or the truths we know about God put into a system...

...Anyone who listens to a lot of symphonies written between 1750 and 1900 will notice a terrific amount of development going on...

...Their definition, pronounced in 451 at the Council of Chalcedon, was a masterpiece of theological reasoning as they proclaimed that Jesus Christ was the same perfect in Godhead and the same perfect in humanity, true God and true man, the same of a rational soul and body, consubstantial with the Father according to his Godhead, consubstantial with us according to his humanity . . . one and the same Christ, Son, and Lord, only begotten, in two natures unconfusedly, immutably, indivisibly, inseparably . . . Not a phrase, not a word of this definition can be understood without reference to the philosophy of the time, and the rationalizing attempts to wrestle with the implications of that simple utterance of the earliest Christians, "Truly this was a Son of God...

...They treat it as something which is really something else, and thus they patronize or even belittle the religious people they study...

...The one college course which most opened me to quiet wonder at the mystery of things was a required science course in the theory of genetics...

...This difference arises from a way employed by some in reflecting on questions of religion, a way not shared by the other disciplines, and a way which they often regard with misgiving, abhorrence, or even amusement...

...Does it mean that this crucified man shares the nature of God...

...Take mystery...

...In his treatise on The Idea of the Holy, Rudolf Otto explains that "by this (mystery) is meant not only that of which nothing can be predicated, but that which is absolutely and intrinsically other than and opposite of everything that (exists) and can be conceived...

...While I would agree with Newman on the need for such study, it seems insufficient for the purposes of a truly liberal education...

...The) exaggeration (of) this negation and constrast (is) the only means to open conceptual thought to apprehend the(mystery...

...It conveys not information, but attitudes essential to leading the good life whether one is religious or not...

...Thus, the first task of religious study and theology is to classify religious phenomena and to describe their specific developments...

...neatly met and heedful (clumsy) as we sweat...

...Instead, as the vagaries of history would have it, the liberal arts have achieved an established status and, after centuries of enlightened trust in the unaided powers of reason and the secularization of culture, it is the advocates of , religious study who are often on the outside pressing the claim to represent a legitimate academic discipline against the skepticism or suspicion of more established academic disciplines...

...This power is also perceived in some religions as the power sustaining the cosmic order, in some as the source of social morality...

...The need to understand this aspect of human experience should be clear in an education which proposes to equip man with an...

...Religion still holds sway over a vast number of human lives...

...The devout faithful, swept aloft by the grandeur of the Psalms, will hardly find such sweetness in the subtleties of Paul Tillich or Karl Rahner...

...Some hail this as hypostasis...

...As compared with students ten or fifteen years ago, religiously oriented students today are more spontaneously active in social service, both in their free time and in their life goals...

...When this is stifled by prejudice, whether hostile or favorable, or worse yet by apathy, it is the teacher's first office to call forth that openness which guarantees the liberality of the liberal arts...

...Given the painful association of the examples I have just cited, I must emphasize that theology's need for the contribution of the other disciplines is not a superficial or a cosmetic one...

...But I would be untrue to my deepest commitment as an educator were I not to conclude with a simple but forcible human consideration, not merely on the role of religious studies, but on the vital need for them if an education is to train and to bring to maturity the powers of discernment, analysis, and judgment...

...For theology cannot be a disinterested survey of religious phenomena...

...And the rationalist fails to perceive the theologian's task to criticize the faith...

...IT SHOULD BE clear from this rough sketch that religious study involves more than theology in the strict sense...

...if root, tender, a root-bud, just unshut...

...Niebuhr describes the central difference between theology and the other sciences when he insists that As an effort of disciplined thinking in this context, (theology) cannot easily be classified under one of the current great categories of human inquiry: as a science, or as one of the humanities, or as history, or as Geistes-wissenschaft, or as a critique or a philosophy...

...There is some form of faith manifest in almost every human activity, in the love of a friend, the choice of a spouse, the loyalty to a nation or a political party or a candidate for public office...

...The farther that I climbed the height The less I seemed to understand The cloud so tenebrous and grand That there illuminates the night...

...These tensions between religious studies and the other humane disciplines remind me, however, of the border disputes in the Balkans which were so chronic and so superficial...

...But they are not identical...

...understanding of his heritage, his potential, and his destiny...

...For he who understands that sight Remains forever, though knowing naught, Transcending knowledge with his thought...

...When religion has tried to undo the rights of others, it has ended up working its own undoing...

...JAMES MICHAEL WEISS is assistant professor of historical theology at Boston College...

...as if what we have to make in making love is love...

...Was he even a man at all, or a god in human form or a man who turned into God...

...But only the musicologist can tell us about music as music: about different uses of harmony, theories about the sound of woodwinds and brass, the development of sonata form, and so forth...

...Theology, I maintain, would be much worse off even though its less perceptive exponents at that time hounded each of the above men into clarifications or apologies which today embarrass the most orthodox believer...

...These are, I think, too often the senses intended by religion teachers too tired or too ill-prepared to tackle the subtleties of hypostasis, transubstantiation, or Trinitarian perichoresis...

...But as my sketch suggests, religion and faith are rarely matters of formal proposition...

...Theorists such as Rudolf Otto and Mircea Eliade call this the sphere of mystery as it is disclosed to man, and as man in turn makes it the object of worship, and takes this mystery as the ultimate source of truth and value in all his other activities...

...THE ROLE OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES IN A LIBERAL EDUCATION Studying the other dimension JAMES MICHAEL WEISS FOR MANY EDUCATORS in religion or in the humanities, the relations between religious studies and the liberal arts may seem necessary and self-evident...

...When this mysterium tremendum et fascinans appears on Sinai in Exodus 19 and dwells there some days before giving the Law to Moses, the Hebrews respond to both these aspects...

...but none of that explains to me what religion in the sixteenth century was about, what it felt like, and how it worked...

...We all know some sociological theory which claims that religious communities are really a matter of social control systems...

...Even) the irreligious (person) still behaves religiously, even though (he is) not aware of the fact...

...Thus, religious and theological study is far from a propositional matter, as the too-often-cited model of dogmatic theology misleads us to think...

...For it was not so taken in Erasmus's day, nor is it in ours...

...They give up on religion in the same way they give up on hopscotch and Mother Goose and necking behind the barn...

...For unless religion is treated on its own terms, the other disciplines will be burdened with material they are not in a position to interpret...

...With mere language, as Eliot reminds us, we are Trying to learn to use words and every attempt Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure Because one has only learnt to get the better of words For the things one no longer has to say, or the way In which one is no longer disposed to say it...

...And the human response to this encounter is one of ritual, by which men adore and even share in the absolute mystery through cults which sanctify special places, seasons, natural occurrences, objects, or gestures...

...I THINK, HOWEVER, that the deepest suspicion against theologians in the academic community is not against faith, but against the authority which claims control over their work and to which they, at one point or another, must be willing to submit their judgment...

...When religious authority refuses to listen to other competent authority, the verdict of history has been to go and do likewise to religion...

...For the power of the religious impulse both to good and to evil, the depth of religious reflection, the richness of religious ritual, the shaping influence of religious forces to acts of consummate charity as well as to acts of bleakest violence - this power has not been a random but a dominating aspect in the human enterprise, whether we consider the primitive or the sophisticated branches of the family of man...

...But the question of faith should not be made more complex or mystifying than it deserves...

...and still retains a large stock of camouflaged myths and degenerate rituals...

...And indeed, since the first university chair of History of Religions was established at Geneva in 1873, followed by the foundation of the first scholarly journal in this field at Paris in 1880, the study of religion has developed apace and flourished...

...The faithful who consider theology an impious rationalism miss theology's responsibility to explicate the faith...

...Try as he might to use sociological or psychological explanations, there will always be too much left over to explain...

...some scorn it as schizophrenia...

...Just as one with natural musical gifts uses advanced musical training to criticize music, so does the theologian function, in the words of H. Richard Niebuhr, as a critic of faith...

...It is the same in religious study...

...What person could free himself from his own prejudices and engage in mature discourse if the last he read in literature or history or political science or mathematics or psychology were read in the eighth grade...

...But once helped by historians, theologians in turn have been able to instruct historians in the limits of factual material in a theological or philosophical argument...

...This is where theology comes in, for theology is the attempt to reason precisely about faith, to examine its content, and to draw out its implications by the use of reason...

...And if one object that the strength of this influence has waned in the West since the eighteenth century - that is, when the educated classes turned skeptical and the working classes turned secular and established religion began to lose its public status - if one should raise such an objection to the inclusion of religious study in a university curriculum, then perhaps he should reflect further...

...As obtuse as religious authorities may appear from time to time, it can involve considerable anguish both to guarantee the freedom of theological opinion and also to guard the integrity of a received tradition of faith, an anguish I think very visible if one looks at the life of Pope Paul VI, and an anguish which we in the academy tend to overlook...

...We fill them with good things in so much else, but in this crucial area, we send them empty away...

...Similarly, theology would have been much poorer if Abelard had not taken seriously the internal structures of logic...

...But as long as such authorities remain open to reasoned argument, their role can be a fruitful and supportive one...

...On the one hand, many sciences have a healthy suspicion of religion based on the arrogance shown to them by its advocates in previous ages...

...Religious experience and religious expression of their very nature raise questions which only reason can treat...

...The sociologist who surveys this can point out that musical entertainment was moving from small salons of the aristocracy to large concert halls of the rising bourgeoisie, which explains the larger orchestras and the longer playing times...

...one among many objects of human devotion rather than with the faith that is directed toward the One...

...What about the Galileos, the Giordano Brunos, the Spinozas, the Henri de Lubacs - not to mention the very founders of the colony of Rhode Island and the Providence Plantations, Anne Hutchinson, Roger Williams, and Samuel Gerton...

...In our day it is often the same, only that the tables have been turned...

...Indeed, they should give up religion if all they have is the religion they had before they had hardly reached puberty...

...The ridicule and indifference paid to such authority is often only the reflection of its own behavior...

...The first task of religious study, then, would be the comparison of religions which allows them to be classified and analyzed according to their own inherent properties...

...For they are eager to receive the Lord's message, yet they know that if they approach too near Him, they will perish utterly...

...no piercing cut...

...Perhaps a few observations may offer us food for discussion...

...But upon further consideration, it seems best not to treat this interdependence as an obvious matter...

...One of the enduring struggles of theology as theology, as least in the Christian tradition, has been to define the limits of its own competence and the nature of its relation to the other sciences...

...hand-small, it fits any woman well...

...IN GENERAL, this mystery appears to the religious person or the religious society as a transcendent power, overwhelming by its terrible awesomeness but also by its irresistible allure...

...I would expect, for example, any political scientist attempting to figure out the situation in Iran not to issue some blanket generalization about religious sects being fanatic and not to assume that Northern Ireland, Jonestown, and Iran can all be lumped together...

...The act of religious faith, as a response to the goodness or the beauty or the saving power of God, should not seem so unusual, even if the object of religious faith is by definition a mystery...

...The fault is that instead of explaining religion, they try to explain it away...

...Here, I think, we do students a grave injustice to leave off their religious education as we do with the level attained at the age of twelve...

...To take a simple example, the average secular historian will be ill able to grasp such phenomena as the Crusades or the Jansenist movement without some preparation in religious study...

...though worm a word of yes and asking blessing, though hole a blessing asking mouth of yes, as one soft-tissued muscle noses plumply through other muscles, their lax loop drawn...

...Finally, to conclude with a word not on the general student, but on the student who, like the musically gifted or the mathematically gifted, has some personal instinct in religion: I think we have today a kind of student who has deep personal enthusiasm but little sense of mooring in the history and teachings of his denomination, and thus is ill prepared to outlive the stimulation of a recent conversion experience and the brief glow of fervor...

...indeed, he will think that they prattle too much where reverent silence is due...

...On the other hand, the common-sense scientist or secular humanist regards the talk about "ground of being" or "transcendental horizon" as a poor substitute for measurable data or serious social action...

...Let me take an example from a different but related field, that of aesthetics...

...nor can it fight free of faith without becoming, in Max Weber's phrase, "religiously tone-deaf...

...I am referring, of course, to the way of faith...

...But in those cases, at least in principle, authority must base itself on the principles of reason or tests of verification...

...Religious study, then, like the other forms of discourse, introduces students to a certain kind of knowledge and gives them a further measure of wisdom...

...or we have heard some psychologist explain all religious behavior in terms of one or another of the psychological theories which go in and out of fashion...

...The fault of these approaches is not their desire to understand religion with the help of the humane or the social sciences...

...For one thing, differing religious traditions define and exercise their authority so differently that generalizations are practically useless...

...Second, the role of that authority is itself a difficult one...

...Whoever with its steep could vie Though knowing nothing, would transcend All thought, forever and without end, The gift that leaves men knowing naught, Yet passing knowledge with their thought...

...And when skeptics mock at religious belief, or more often just yawn, they are usually only mocking at some caricature they dreamed up in college - in other words, exactly at the age when they were ready for a deeper grasp of the complexity of the Bible, the insecurity of the faith commitment, and the marvelous rigor of religious study...

...Marie Ponsot Defusing the Usual Criminal Metaphors Pity the idle who (though daily our lives must make room for those who use clubs guns knives) speak as if a penis were, when erect, a tower of hard...

...Finally, take the symbolic dimension...

...If we did this in any other field, our folly would at once be put to rightful scorn...

...But without faith, he cannot, in Niebuhr's words, "distinguish between the high and the low (points in the life of faith), between genuine and spurious experiences and expressions, between symbol and meaning...

...And it is this dual function of theology which finally separates it from the rest of the arts and sciences...

...In somewhat less academic form, St...

...This is perhaps the central question of contemporary theological debate, the question, that is, of theological method...

...As long as authority in the arts and the sciences is in principle susceptible of reasoned correction, there can be no question of scandal on intellectual grounds...

...And for good reason, many have not forgiven...

...When a Marxist political scientist or a feminist literary critic lose their academic position, it is a moral scandal, not an intellectual one...

...Here religious study joins with literature and the arts in demonstrating the symbolic nature of expression, the fact that we can only express a fragment of the truth we perceive, and that we must always reach beyond words to gesture, ritual, rhythm, and color to suggest in part what we can never speak as a whole...

...Other disciplines may awaken an awe in students...

...At this point, we can begin to assess the differences and relations between religious studies and the liberal arts...

...Jocktalk of huge dongs grown trenchant as they swell stands in, to hide the messy evidence of our true brute force...

...It does not mean some dogmatic proposition which defies logical sense...

...Thus every step is a step into the void, guaranteed ultimately not by serene certainties but by our faith in the face of ambiguity and doubt...

...This attitude toward religious studies, and in particular toward theology, is not altogether unfounded...

...For all the pathos and grandeur of secular man, it is especially the secular man who must come to see religion on its own terms if he is to sense the fullness of humanity, and if he is to define the secular enterprise precisely in terms of its secu-larity...

...In my own studies of Erasmus and the history of modern Christian liberal education, for example, I have come to take such relationships for granted...

...It must develop its own methods in view of the situation in which it works and of the object with which it deals, without becoming the vassal of methodologies developed by rational inquiries directed toward other objects . . . neither queen nor vassal among such inquiries, (theology) must pursue its own way in service of the God of faith and His servants...

...These are questions of active human reason, and it took the Fathers of the church, schooled in all the subtleties of antique philosophy, four centuries to come to a definition on these matters...

...In this incorrect sense, mystery is used to mean something which defective human reason cannot grasp fully, but which one can try to understand to some degree and which is, in any case, a matter of intellectual assent...

...Although such study can remain on the level of a facile relativism, it can also prepare the student to appreciate the specific character of a given religious system and thus, if he choose, to grasp even more deeply the unique significance of his own tradition...

...And the superficial quality of their mutual suspicion keeps them from appreciating the deeper differences which truly and necessarily distinguish religious studies from the liberal arts...

...Now such a perception, such a declaration creates joy, trepidation, anxiety, consolation - and it also creates a lot of intellectual curiosity...

...The sources of revelation claimed by the major religious systems of the West indicate that knowledge of God is embodied in legal and literary texts, in military and erotic poetry, in the development of institutions, in the observance of cults, and in the lives of certain venerable individuals...

...The heart, he insisted, has reasons which reason does not know...

...Only at a later stage, sometimes very soon, sometimes never, does homo religiosus proceed to rationalize these experiences in a system of dogma, or to moralize them in a distinct ethical code...

...And so they are less restless when they sit down to an examination of the intellectual problems of religion - less informed perhaps, but also less feisty...

...But he also reminds us of the fructifying dialogue between theology and all the other disciplines when he adds, The way of theology though an independent one, cannot be the way of isolation, unless the theology in question be concerned with some constricted divisive faith, directed toward a little god...

...It is no wonder so many people give up on religion...

...Until this point, I have used the terms "religious study'' and "theology" interchangeably...

...But theology cannot shake loose of reason without becoming mysticism or fanaticism...

...But only religious study concerns mystery as such: the ineluctable truth that experience and reality always exceed what we can say or think or do about them...

...I have read economists on the peasant wars in the Reformation and psychologists on Luther's potty training...

...As I indicated at the outset, and as my description of religion suggests, the materials involved in religious study invite analysis and collaboration by all the arts and sciences...

...I would expect our hypothetical political scientist to find out what the Moslem religion says about aggression and passive resistance, what it preaches on social progress, material prosperity, the roles of the sexes, the function of prophets and kings, the nature of true happiness...

...It is no longer the powerful faculties of theology which reject the liberal arts...

...More crucially, the so-called secular man is a distinct minority in the human community, if we tally up its participants from all epochs and cultures...

...here's no plow, ramrod, sword...

...if Galileo hadn't pursued his astronomy...

...Instead, they are being made, but made irresponsibly, imprecisely, or superficially...

...And so I shall take another cue from Erasmus, this time to imitate his irenicism...

...At the moment of Jesus's death, as the sky darkened, the earth quaked, and the graves of the dead burst open, a simple Roman centurion with little religious education suddenly perceived a supernatural significance to the moment and cried out, "This truly was a Son of God...

...And still he was ignored, attacked, and rejected by leading theological faculties of his day...

...Only through the perfection of historical methods, accomplished more or less independently by historians, has it been possible to refine our sense of Scripture...

...This need on the part of religious studies for the methods and materials of the other disciplines raises the question of what religious studies in turn can contribute to the other disciplines...

...Beyond these matters of simple professional competence, I would argue that religious study makes a larger contribution...

...For, as Newman pointed out, when the specific tasks of theology are not openly recognized, that does not mean that theological statements are not being made...

...If my hunch is right, this is a sign of that openness of mind in students which is a condition of any learning, and which, if it is there at the outset, considerably eases the teacher's task...

...Perhaps it is this task of mediation between faith and reason which makes theology such an unloved stepchild...

...For all its efforts, it often ends up pleasing nobody...

...For the chronic nature of inherited misunderstanding undermines the numerous common interests which unite religious and humane studies...

...Without reason, he cannot begin to raise or solve these questions...

...Like a piece of music which always reveals new depths, or like a friend who is more a mystery the more we love him or her, the experience of mystery in religion does not decrease as we become familiar with it, but becomes more a mystery the more we encounter it...

...These are, among others I might mention, primarily the attitudes of mystery, of faith, and of symbolic expression...

...or if Darwin hadn't described his findings in genetic biology...

...It does not mean a puzzle whose answer is deciphered by initiates, priests, or prophets...

...What person can consider himself educated if he learns his last bit of scientific information at the age of twelve...

...And as Eliade is fond of demonstrating, "non-religious man in the pure state is a comparatively rare phenomenon...

...But this is not mystery in its true religious sense...

...All too often, of course, the other disciplines are not so much burdened by religious questions as they are tempted by them - tempted to pretend that these matters require no special understanding, tempted to exaggerate the claims of their own pet methods and pet hypotheses, tempted at last to deny any legitimacy to religious and theological claims in the sphere of disciplined intellectual research...

...Theology is the reflection upon questions from a position of some personal religious conviction, or at least on the basis of a specific religious tradition taken as normative...

...On the other hand, when the theologians are not on their high horse, they just as often grovel to prevailing academic fashions as if they had nothing of their own of which to be proud...

...So FAR, I have dealt with academic concerns...

...But it contained the seeds of a powerful theological development, for it raised such questions as, does the Son of God mean the same as God...

...It would be a great mistake to think that theology could accomplish its tasks in splendid isolation...

...The part comes on hopeful, nudging, nuzzling, tip bent damp and rosy toward a soft eclipse...

...For brevity, I shall take it for granted that the other disciplines look for expert opinion when they need it to interpret religious data...

...Take faith...

...No one has forgotten the fate of Giordano Bruno, the treatment of Galileo, or the attacks on Darwin...

...WHILE I HAVE sketched out the way in which the material of religious studies sets up an interdependence between them and the liberal arts, I would like to touch on another way in which they are qualitatively different...

...I cannot hope to offer any solution to such an intricate matter...

...Especially in the Christian fathers, in Augustine, Tertullian, and Origen, this question about religious study and other studies becomes part of the larger drama of religion and the larger cultural milieu on which it draws and to which it contributes...

...This summit all so steeply towers And is of excellence so high No human faculties or powers Can ever to the top come nigh...

...But both these positions fail to appreciate the distinctive nature of theology...

...it is greed, not sex, that we secrete to feed, till it infects the whole life, not the part, with rape-like impotence...

...For, to suggest a correlation, I believe that the interdependence of religious and liberal studies emerges by considering the materials they confront together, while the disjunction between them results from the different methods they may employ...

...First, inasmuch as a theologian is responsible to a community of faith, he is, like it or not, responsible to that community and, for good or for ill, to its authorities...

...If we are successful in the ultimate goal of that study, then we will also provide the students with a wisdom which can ultimately render them, like the disciples returning from Emmaus, or like the shipwrecked travelers arriving in this "brave new world" at the end of The Tempest, or like the students in a colloquy of Erasmus, either speechless before the mystery of this wisdom, or eloquent in its praise...

...In his anguished search for certainty, the religious genius Pascal could only call the mathematical certainties of his fellow philosopher Descartes "useless and uncertain...

...John of the Cross expressed this absolute mystery after a mystical ecstasy: I entered in, I know not where And I remained, though knowing naught, Transcending knowledge with my thought...

...Finally, what about the authority which embarrasses and scandalizes by its impervious or arrogant attitude...

...For I would like to treat of religious studies and the liberal arts in terms both of their interdependence and of their disjunction...

...But when the Missouri synod of the Lutheran church or the Vatican Congregation of Doctrine dismiss theologians, it is for many an intellectual scandal precisely speaking because the bodies in question do not hold themselves accountable to the same principles of free inquiry...

...I do not, however, want to dwell on divisions...

...This term mystery is a technical one and should not be confused with other common uses of the term...

...For while faith is not an act of reason, it is not thereby unreasonable...

...Religious study as such must constantly remind the other disciplines that our thought and our action are not entirely the result of secure scientific proof but require a decision, in other words that facts and values cannot be separated...

...In short, the difference between religious studies and theology is the difference between the pure life of the mind and fides quaerens intellectum...

...But this does not mean, I hope, that they give up on play and poetry and the quest of love...

...That is, the authorities who thwart them can be charged with moral failure to live up to principles of intellectual freedom to which they are accountable and which they must acknowledge...

...By mystery, theorists of religion mean that dimension of existence which is beyond our grasp, not because our grasp is limited but because that dimension in itself is wholly other...

...Let us take a simple example...

...The dear part we inspect is always quick to shrink from violence...

...In fact, when other disciplines do advance such explanations of religion, they end up assuming one or another theory of religion implicitly, or taking one or another model of spirituality and theology without being aware they are doing so...

...Here, we two make touch our second sight as, no longer blind, we each bring a self-big bones, guts, thoughts, heartsto local focus, trusting the ease we find in discovery of our nervous secret parts (as if hot trust might disinfect our minds and its oils ease the human kind in us to be in public as in private generous with exchanges larger than the ease we're thinking of...