Christian Belief in a Postmodern World/Quest
Imbelli, Robert P.
Called Crisis of Christianity"), he looks to those who have faith to reinspire Western culture. Most of the essays are fairly easy to read and sparkle with wit. The most humorous is a satire...
...168: Commonweal...
...However important thinking and reflection are to faith, believers are called to action: to interaction with God, to reconciliation with neighbor, to doing justice for all...
...Supposedly only eight books have survived the calamity...
...He hopes to help us recognize the dependence of the temporal on the eternal...
...Foremost among these exigencies is the willingness to be changed...
...Bonaventure's spiritual classic, The Journey of the Mind to God...
...ADMISSION Admission is limited to full-time students in the Fall semester only...
...I have underlined the classical and, 166: Commonweal indeed, Bonaventure-like character of Allen's project...
...Rather, contemporary physics itself gives solid intellectual grounds for affirming the existence of God as real possibility...
...The most humorous is a satire titled, "The Emperor Kennedy Legend...
...It is, blessedly, a spirituality given substance by its reflective underpinnings and rendered unsentimental by its sense (stemming, perhaps, from its author's Presbyterian tradition) that the human need is acute and that true salvation is won only at tremendous cost...
...QUEST The Search for Meaning Through Christ Diogenes Allen Walker, $14.95, 119 pp...
...His passion is for both philosophy and spirituality...
...The journey is quite lengthy," he states simply, "because we need to be reshaped in so many ways to conform to the likeness of God in Christ...
...Among them is one titled Creative Gardening...
...And the paradigm for the believer's action is God's own action in Christ who is God's new creation, making possible a new, supernatural life of forgiveness and self-giving generosity...
...His enterprise, therefore, might be termed "apologetics...
...Contact with Christ cannot bypass the cross...
...Those pursuing the journey of the mind and heart to God in late twentieth-century America will find in the work of Diogenes Allen wonderfully illuminating guidance for the quest...
...The three parts of the book are titled: "The Book of Nature," "The Book of Scripture," and "Christianity and Other Faiths...
...And his "authorities" are those who have similarly united the speculative and the practical: Plato at the very origin of the West's philosophical tradition...
...Nonetheless, he has a sharp eye for discerning how much of the contemporary appeal to "experience" is distorted by a narcissism that revels in the superficial "feelings" of an ego that resists transformation...
...Having found in the book of nature pointers to God's existence (Bonaventure's vestigia), Allen then consults the book of Scripture, the privileged witness to God's providential purposes, for signs of God's intentions...
...In a time when much "spirituality" either focuses on the public ministry of Jesus as warrant for a liberationist agenda or on a gnostic savior-figure as validation for the most disparate life-options, Allen joins Jesus and the Christ by the infrangible bond of the cross...
...Indeed, direct encounter (he speaks of "contact") with Christ seems required for mature Christian faith, lived with the full wealth of conviction...
...He thus seeks to steer a very Catholic course between a fideism that speaks indiscriminately of "the leap of faith," making faith appear willful and arbitrary, and a rationalism that evacuates faith of its distinctive substance...
...But the key in which it is composed is a consciously postmodern one...
...Application deadline is April 1. FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE Research assistantships, tuition scholarships, and a limited number of fellowships are available to new and continuing students...
...PROGRAM in THEOLOGY with specializations in New Testament & Early Christianity and Christian Ethics PROGRAM The curriculum focuses on the distinctive resources of the Roman Catholic theological tradition and places them in an ecumenical dialogue with the faith and theology of other major Christian traditions...
...Like Bonaventure, Allen's work is pervasively Christocentric...
...This is exacerbated in a consumerist society that sells "experience" as one more marketable commodity...
...It displays a rich and cumulative argument in an outwardly simple and straightforward guise...
...ffI read Allen correctly, he is not unwilling to speak of experience of God or Christ...
...In so doing we move from Pascal's "order of the intellect" to his "order of the heart" which has its own logic and exigencies...
...However, LOYOLA UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO announces the opening of a Ph.D...
...Robert P. I m b e l l i '-"-~ iogenes Allen, Presbyterian _9 minister, professor of phiI~ losophy at Princeton ~ , , A , . Theological Seminary, and author of eleven books, is not well-known to Catholic readers...
...Read in tandem with Christian Belief, it illustrates how one might, after critical investigation, re-read the gospel story with a second naivet6 that speaks anew to the heart...
...Again, however, this Christocentricity assumes a postmodern guise...
...Allen contends that "the end of the modem world" affords new possibilities for exhibiting the intellectual strength of the Christian faith, thus allowing believers to affirm their faith with "the full wealth of conviction...
...For Part Three of Christian Belief initiates a dialogue between distinctive Christian faith and the world religions...
...Applications for these awards are due by February 1. LOYOLA lmlWRSrrY ~ CHICAGO For More Information, Please Write To: Director of Graduate Programs Department of Theology Loyola University of Chicago 6525 N. Sheridan Rd...
...ROBERT P. IMBELLI, a priest of the Archdiocese of New York, is director of the Institute of Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry at Boston College...
...Quest: The Search for Meaning Through Christ represents his latest effort in this genre...
...REVIEWERS DIOGENES ALLEN is Stuart Professor of Philosophy at the Princeton Theological Seminary...
...The following sentence represents a central motif of all Allen's work: "We must be changed in order to receive the good God intends us to have...
...His writing manifests the clarity and disciplined intensity of his favorite poet: the Anglican priest, George Herbert...
...He very much deserves to be...
...Authentic encounter with God through Christ results in a liberation and transfiguration of the self that is not attainable without suffering...
...Part One of the book shows with care and precision that the much misconstrued "warfare" between science and religious belief no longer holds the field...
...Kolakowski is a person who has become wise...
...His contention is that developments in both science and philosophy conspire to break through the barriers that the reductive rationalism of modernity erected against an intellectual affirmation of Christian faith "with full conviction...
...Here the distinctive Christian conviction about the crucifixion of God's Incarnate Word provides the key perspective, making possible a genuine appreciation for the revelatory capacity of non-Christian religious traditions, as well as a respectful case for their recapitulation in Christ...
...As you'can imagine, Kolakowski has great fun presenting the absurdities of Structuralist, Freudian, and Marxist anthropological efforts to explain on the basis of such material the Kennedy era...
...not in the neutral mode of philosophy of religion, but in the theological mode of"A Christian Theology of ()ther Faiths...
...but an apologetics addressed as much to those within as to those outside the household of faith...
...In Christ God's fullness is made flesh...
...But, borrowing from the insights of Simone Weil, he locates the distinctive focus of Christian revelation in the crucifixion...
...what are the obstacles that impede and practices that foster renewal in the image of Christ...
...Pascal challenging an age of increasingly and harmfully onesided rationalism...
...Christian Belief in a Postmodern World is Allen's most comprehensive work to date...
...Very much like Bonaventure, Allen's project unites mind and heart, the intellectual and the affective...
...All God's grace in creation and redemption is cruciform...
...From this dialogue with the philosophical-religious tradition Allen fashions a statement at once rigorous and heartfelt, austere and concrete...
...He seeks to help us become more wise in an age that is increasingly given over to a concern with means, because it has lost faith in its temporal ends...
...Faith is reasonable and is patient of our best intellectuai efforts...
...Allen's is an apologetics in the classical sense of reasoned discourse recommending the truth of the faith...
...Chicago, IL 60626 8 March 1991:167 some of his books may more readily be catalogued as "spirituality": the concrete depiction of the actual living of Christian faith...
...Simone Weil and Austin Farrer amidst the upheavals and horrors of our own century...
...For the project he has been pursuing over the past twenty years is, in my estimation, a uniquely important one: nothing less than a contemporary restatement of St...
...For here the self-renunciation of God, that makes creation itself possible, inaugurates the new creation, the establishment of perfect justice before God and among humans...
...I I CONSENTING TO CONVERSION CHRISTIAN B~.~" IN A POSTMODERN WOBLD Diogenes Allen Westminster/John Knox, $15.95, 238 pp...
...Part of Allen's special gift, as I have indicated, is his capacity to unite the reflective and the practical...
...In doing so, it also helps to undermine the philosophical barricades of Hume and Kant that had long cast a spell of skepticism and agnosticism over any effort at philosophical theology...
...In Quest, Allen employs a mode of communication that is less overtly philosophical and abstract, more explicitly narrative and imaginative...
...For, though it is the risen Lord whom we encounter, he always hears in his body the marks of his Passion...
...faith moves beyond reason, for it requires a willingness to be changed: to consent to God's call to conversion...
...He addresses concretely the classical issues of spirituality: how to realize in our lives the presence of God...
...It purports to report a meeting of an Academy of Science many centuries after "the Great Calamity" (nuclear war...
Vol. 118 • March 1991 • No. 5
