Why theology is hard to read
Egan, Robert J.
WHY THEOLOGY IS HARD TO READ AND WHY YOU SHOULD DO IT ANYWAY ROBERT J. EGAN n old friend of mine complains that although she used to be an avid reader of good theology, she no longer reads...
...It can be troubling and confusing and discouraging sometimes...
...Yang has Alice relive her first encounter with her husband, there's no corny segue into flashback...
...Even this litany of names is misleading, for the issues are profound and urgent, and any one of the major figures could set an agenda for a lifetime...
...They are often written in a graceless, benumbing prose, under the unhappy influence of German (or more recently French) academic writing, a strange mix of ordinary language and several technical languages at once, criss-crossed by a thousand controversies...
...Now we all have to learn how to evaluate the ones we inhabit in the light of the whole Catholic tradition and in consideration of the contemporary questions people are asking about the reasons for our hope...
...In addition to these eight books, I would then add four more...
...Allen the writer merely set Allen the director a series of technical tasks that the latter then dextrously fulfilled...
...t is somewhat consoling to put this all in some historical perspective...
...The laws of academic life dispose people to produce texts mainly for their colleagues' admiration, and this inevitably affects theologians too...
...These projects do not fit neatly together...
...In the first place, contemporary theology in general is not very enjoyable to read...
...o to come upon a discussion among contemporary theologians is to walk in off the street in the middle of an argument--about Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, Kant and Hegel, Kierkegaard and Marx, James and Dewey, Nietzsche and Freud, Durkheim and Weber, Whitehead and Husserl, Wittgenstein and Heidegger, and, more recently, Gadamer and Ricoeur, Habermas and Foucault, Rorty and Derrida, Macintyre and Taylor--which, though unquestionably A path through the woods et's say you are convinced of the importance of reading contemporary theology, but you are uncertain how to begin...
...And in many such circles, being a "practicing Catholic" nowadays is really beyond the pale...
...We are used to treating theology as the virtuoso performance of solitary individuals...
...Why is this...
...in fact, there is a strong prejudice among some of our elites that no intelligent person can be both religious and sincere...
...It includes sections on recent church history, each of the major documents of the council, issues of institutional renewal, "unfinished business" and "aspects of church life," the effect of the council on world Catholicism by region, and ecumenical relations...
...Big Brain just for being in its audience, this adaptation of the le Carr6 book worked upon my midbrain like twenty extra-strength sleeping pills followed by a good mas158: Commonweal...
...This problem is not peculiar to theology, of course...
...Among the many recent studies of this movement by North Americans, I would recommend especially Arthur E McGovern's Liberation Theology and Its Critics: Toward anAssessment (Orbis Press, 1989), a thorough, fair-minded, and strongly argued book, which unlike some of the others pays serious attention to the real social and historical context of these theologies and to the scale of the human suffering they confront...
...The late Keye Luke makes a great farewell appearance as Yang: he barks with unchallengeable authority...
...In this way, if there is no consolidation of faith at a different level of reflection--what Paul Ricoeur calls a "second naivet6"--theology may erode the size of its own audience, becoming a halfway house on the journey to unbelief...
...or Mrs...
...Yang of Chinatown who provides magic herbs that grant her, by turns, sexual boldness, invisibility, contact with the ghost of a former lover, advice from a literary muse, and (disastrously) the power to enthrall every single male at a cocktail party...
...That's more than I cay say for The 4 Russia House...
...The disciples closest to Jesus were already complaining that they couldn't catch the drift of what he was saying...
...Reading about history, politics, economics, warfare, morality, and religion--not just reading for entertainment or selfimprovement--has become a duty of discipleship as well as of citizenship...
...Paul to their own ugly purposes...
...we grow accustomed to an ignorant, authoritarian, and moralizing religious fervor, a cartoon version of Christianity...
...Allen has become a technician of suave, easygoing power...
...Beyond this issue of style, theology is difficult in other ways...
...It is almost certainly better than we deserve...
...It must be educated by the rigorous questioning and conversation of the whole community, in its critical, creative, repentant, and obedient appropriation of tradition...
...An individual might spend many years working out the implications for theology of the thought of Marx or Kierkegaard, while someone else is trying to imagine the meaning of theology after Freud, or after Wittgenstein, or after the encounter with Vajrayana Buddhism...
...Besides the issue of style, the possible dangers to faith, the personal failings of theologians, the limits imposed by academic institutions, and the dramatic recent changes in the practice of theology, there are still several other reasons why reading contemporary theology is hard...
...And in that minute-and-a-half we see Alice greet and deal with her husband, children, physical trainer, decorator, cook, maid, and a member of a parent pool who has come to drive the kids to kindergarten...
...How could it be otherwise...
...There are exceptions, but most theologians do not feel required to become good writers or to aspire to the standards of "a good book...
...captive audiences, especially ministry students...
...For instance, that reenacted first date with her husband-to-be I have praised for its avoidance of the clichts of flashback...
...Theologians as a group are perhaps too accustomed to addressing ROBERT J. EGAN, S.J., is assistant to the academic vice-president, and teaches fundamental theology and spirituality, at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington...
...There is an irony in this...
...This contributes to the difficulties of theology...
...Bernard J. Cooke's The Distancing of God: The Ambiguity of Symbol in History and Theology (Fortress Press, 1990) is a comprehensive, carefully considered survey of the whole history of Christian life from the perspective of one crucial question just what one might hope for from a"sacramental theologian"---of how symbols and practices mediated or failed to mediate the experience of God's redemptive and transformative presence...
...The intelligence, strong focus, and balance of these reflections, and the inherent importance of their basic themes and ideas---including our understanding of tradition, our narrative accounts of continuity and discontinuity, the crucial idea of ecclesial "reform," the variety of types of renewal in church history, and the distinctive character of the aggiornamento of Vatican II, as well as the evolving forms and expressions of ministry in the church, and the idea of priesthood as an analogical rather than a univocal one--make this book a very helpful and thoughtprovoking place to begin...
...As a practice, Catholic theology has changed enormously in the last thirty years---in its settings, its players, its goals and strategies, its intended audience...
...Most moderate and progressive theologians would want to support those movements in the church which insist that "the whole community is the church" and that "we are all responsible for the church," and yet their writing style imposes on their books a very high admission price, and leaves most of the poor People of God out in the cold...
...There has probably never been a time in the church's long history--think of it !--when these kinds of things were not being said about somebody else's theology...
...It's a big church...
...America, May 26, 1990...
...They will set out in different directions, to counter the influence of greed, or individualism, or positivism, or relativism, or "impression management" in their own cultural environments...
...The second volume has sections on recent British and North American theologies in the ecumenical mainstream, recent Orthodox and Evangelical theologies, "new challenges," and "religious diversity...
...We have begun to understand 8 March 1991:157 the centrality of "the eschatological" and "the messianic" in the early Christian movement, and the integration of the mystical and the prophetic which these categories require...
...In addition to this arduous philosophical conversation, there is the constantly growing body of specialized literature explaining and interpreting the New Testament...
...In my judgment we should be grateful for it...
...It seems cut off from their daily concerns and worries, their deeper feelings, their everyday hopes and fears and responsibilities, from the stories and images that shape their real experience...
...Of comparable importance, but closer to home, the feminist movement in its various aspects hasprofoundly affected our self-understanding, as well as our research and reflection across the boundaries of all the disciplines...
...Reading theology now requires making responsible judgments about the meaning of these texts...
...Some people, hungry for primary sources and scornful of commentary, will want to plunge head first into Hegel or Schleiermacher, or several volumes of Rahner's Theological Investigations...
...The first volume has chapters on Schillebeeckx, Kting, Rahner, Lonergan, Congar, and von Balthasar, as well as Barth, Bonhoeffer, Torrance, Jungel, Bultmann, Tillich, Pannenberg, and Moltmann...
...No amount of ignorance about it is too much...
...Our lives go on as they must, organized in the public categories and images of everyday thought and action, which in turn help shape the habits of our imaginations, while we are in some way "prescinding from our religious beliefs," which are thought to be bracketed (or kept in the private sphere...
...She asks me to explain this...
...Doug simply appears in Yang's office and the couple create the reality of the past with words and glances as the doctor looks on...
...Some of it is arrogant and merely fashionable, no doubt, but much of it is deeply intelligent, brilliantly imagined, and very admirable...
...The ethos of these places with its own peculiar strengths and temptations, has now become the primary horizon of theology's way of thinking...
...James P. Mackey's Modern Theology: A Sense of Direction (Oxford University Press, 1987) is a brief, thoughtful, more personal discussion of the whole range of recent theology, with attention to both contemporary philosophy and New Testament studies, and their beating on our ordinary lives...
...In a pluralistic, historically conscious, politically awakened, and ecologically challenged world, in a world of too much suffering, and too much poverty, devastated by war after war, and darkened by the alienation between thought and spirit, Catholic theology continues to speak of faith and forgiveness, of God and more abundant life, of reason and love, of community and human solidarity, of the importance of worship and the symbolic imagination, of the demands of justice, and of hope for victims of oppression, even of hope for the dead...
...We know more than we ever have before about our own history as a church with all its diversity, grandeur, ambiguity, and terrors...
...And besides all this, there is church history: the reception, practice, and transmission of Christian religion and of reflection on its meaning, in the perspectives of intellectual history, of institutional history, but also of social and cultural history...
...We canriot simply leave it to the clergy or to'the experts...
...A further reason has to do with the intellectual frameworks it employs...
...All of these conversations are going forward at the same time, and nobody could possibly keep up to date in all of them simultaneously...
...They are still far out ahead of us...
...When he introduces us to the hyper-yuppie couple, Alice and Doug Tate, in their East Side New York apartment, he does so in a single shot that lasts about ninety seconds...
...It can seem merely a big, blooming, buzzing confusion...
...It isn't that she's lost her faith or her commitment to the intellectual life, yet she no longer enjoys curling up on a cold winter's night with a new theology book...
...Furthermore, it is difficult to relate this sprawling, austere, complicated, and disorganized enterprise to our reallife experiences today and to our struggles to keep the faith...
...WHY THEOLOGY IS HARD TO READ AND WHY YOU SHOULD DO IT ANYWAY ROBERT J. EGAN n old friend of mine complains that although she used to be an avid reader of good theology, she no longer reads much theology at all...
...Then, work your way, a chapter at a time (though in almost any order), through the revised edition of Christian Theology: An Introduction to Its Traditions and Tasks, edited by Peter C. Hodgson and Robert H. King (Fortress Press, 1985), an ecumenical collaboration among outstanding scholars, including contributions by the editors, David Tracy, Langdon Gilkey, Edward Farley, Carl Braaten, John B. Cobb, Jr., Sallie McFague, and several others, and organized by traditional topics (e.g., God, revelation, method, sin and evil, Christ and salvation, the church), providing historical background, an overview of contemporary debates, and selected bibliographies...
...Many of my Catholic friends do not read much theology, much less feel the need to stay abreast of the field or to take stands on issues of current controversy...
...In addition, theologians must offer not only strong and persuasive re-interpretations of the tradition of the faith in these new and unprecedented circumstances, but also intelligent and compelling interpretations of the contemporary situation itself...
...the subject matter of theology has to do with the ultimate mysteries of our existence...
...Of all the developments or movements of theology in these last twenty-five years, none is morally or religiously more important or challenging than the "theology of liberation" which emerged from the churches of Latin America, and which has found resonance among many groups in our own country and in many other nations as well...
...I would then recommend the two more recent volumes edited by David F. Ford, The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Christian Theology in the Twentieth Century (Basil Blackwell, 1989...
...And theology is a fully public conversation...
...In fact, no amount of ignorance about religion in general is considered embarrassing in public nowadays, even for very well educated people...
...It is the only serious thinking we have on the subject...
...When the ghostly lover, Ed, appears, he doesn't just crudely materialize h la Topper...
...If theology is serious thinking about our lives with each other at their deeper levels, the effort (borrowing a phrase from Hannah Arendt) "to think what we are doing" together, then we all need to be reading and thinking and praying and talking about this together...
...The problem may be this: none of Alice's magical transformations revealed her past or her mental life for me, and, without such revelation, her final conversion carries little weight...
...In the past, it was possible for systematic theologians to quote their favorite biblical passages and leave the technical work to other scholars...
...Rather, his body seems to seep into a dimly lit room from some reality beyond our reality...
...R.J.E...
...It has chapters from the editors, Monika Hellwig, Joseph Komonchak, Justin Kelly, Pheme Perkins, John Langan, David Hollenbach, and several others...
...We have created a conversation among ourselves in which the claims of exegetes, historians, and philosophers can be brought forward thoughtfully and their implications for faith and self-understanding considered from different perspectives...
...Even intellectuals who do take religion seriously may find it easier to speak of it with indirection, in large generalities, with allusions to several traditions, than to turn to the shamelessly direct discourse of theology...
...I believe that if readers, alone or with a group of friends, were to work their way through, say two-thirds of these books, over a period of a year or two, that they would have a solid basis for entering theological conversation at least in systematic and fundamental theology...
...and the Second Letter of Peter complains, for the record, that the theology of St...
...Yes, all this must be admitted...
...These arguments require from us a disciplined (and inevitably disturbing) investigation of what we mean or think we mean by God or self, by truth or or history, by being certain or being free, or by the true end of our hearts' desire, which is asking rather a lot on an ordinary weekend...
...In the same letter of Peter, we hear complaints of "cleverly devised myths," "false teachers," "destructive heresies," "waterless springs" and "mists driven by storms," "slaves of corruption," "scoffers," and people both "ignorant and unstable" who "twist" those hard-to-understand teachings of St...
...We live inside a "theology" one way or another...
...I pretend to be surprised, to sound slighily disapproving...
...We bid them Godspeed...
...But for the others who might like some preliminary overviews and brief surveys, with notes and good selective bibliographies, I conclude with mention of sixteen books which could lead you through the initial dark of the woods and, hopefully, into some cleating...
...This shouldn't surprise us...
...Yang declares that Alice now has a better understanding of who she is, I'm afraid that I could only respond, "But I don't !"Alice has the strange distinction of being the least vivid good movie of the year...
...If religion is marginalized, then theology is crowded to the very edge...
...For range, details, first acquaintances, and for reference, begin with the fourth edition of John Macquarrie's Twentieth-Century Religious Thought (Trinity Press, 1988), with its excellent twenty-third chapter on the more recent developments...
...The bigger problem, I want to argue, is that religion itself does not seem related to "real life" in this country...
...When Dr...
...Hundreds of tirades, warnings, and satires have been written on the prose styles of contemporary academics...
...Also--one must admit it--theologians themselves are frail mortals with limited abilities...
...Next I'd recommend Faithful Witness: Foundations of Theology for Today's Church (Crossroad, 1989), edited by Leo J. O'Donovan and T. Howland Sanks, which is topically organized like the Hodgson and King collection, including chapters on faith, revelation, Scripture, church, method, and Christology, with good notes and short bibliographies, but written from within the perspectives of North American Catholicism...
...But still--yes, yes--there are problems...
...This single shot staging isn't just economical...
...In fact, I'm stuck with the impression that Allen wrote this script very quickly and too enthusiastically, with great enthusiasm for its magical devices but little insight into his own characters...
...I know of no easy way around this problem...
...If no one expects faith to be intelligent, or intelligence to be devout, why would anyone read theology...
...just brushed out...
...Still, none of this, I think, is really an adequate reason for educated Catholics to bow to the /P' 156: Commonweal prevailing plausibility structures or to excuse themselves from their responsibility to read theology...
...Contrast these scenes with the sisterly get-togethers in Hannah and Her Sisters where the siblings listen and don't listen to each other like particular women from a particular family...
...The case is the same for Alice's scenes with her sister: generic sibling needling and reconciliation...
...Paul is "hard to understand" (2 Peter 3: 15-16...
...The longing for more abundant life at the heart of human beings is repressed...
...This set also gathers together a group of talented contributors writing on the theologies of the century, but the articles are not on topics, but on individual 154: Commonweal stimulating, is far removed from the comfortable neighborhoods of anybody's current common sense...
...These ideas--by the great masters of suspicion--more and more influence the general intellectual climate within which Christian theology itsel]" is done...
...A good number of people out there keep buying books by Karl Rahner, Raymond Brown, Hans Kting, Avery Dulles, and Richard McBrien, and presumably reading them...
...Theology is mostly absent from their conversations at work, from their arguments with friends, from their table talk with family...
...Their desire to understand their lives continues to be nourished by poetry and anthropology, biography and history, psychology and social theory, and an endless flow of serious little journals and daily newspapers, but for the most part no longer by books and articles by theologians...
...Theology is having trouble getting its voice heard in the current conversation of humankind...
...As a serious intellectual discipline, theology has become more and more pluralistic, more and more specialized, and more and more technical...
...and Robert Schreiter and Mary Catherine Hilkert, eds., The Praxis of Christian Experience: An Orientation to Edward Schillebeecl~r (Harper & Row, 1989...
...But that is, alas, its main virtue...
...These other disciplines also include the wider histories of religious belief and practice, like those of Mircea Eliade, and the study of the great intellectual and spiritual traditions of Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism...
...If we are practicing some theologies everyday, then the urgent questions are: What is their quality...
...As the camera pans back and forth in the huge, flesh-toned apartment (that has a hall as big as a hotel corridor) the employees and acquaintances seem to spring out of the woodwork...
...Here, given the complexity of the age, different theologians, of course, have made different decisions and chosen different emphases, one pointing more to historicity, another more to cultural pluralism, another more to the suffering of the poor...
...Anne E. Carr's Transforming Grace: Christian Tradition and Women's Experience (Harper & Row, 1988) is a good general introduction to its implications for theology and church life...
...onsciously or unconsciously, we are always practicing one theology or another: in our parishes, schools, chancery offices, and retreat houses of course, but even in our kitchens and bedrooms and living rooms, in our courtrooms and factories and offices, in our songs and ceremonies, our politics and our conversations with friends...
...In addition, there have been worries from the beginning about the actual dangers to faith and virtue posed by the arguments of theologians...
...This tendency in the popular culture becomes an object of faith among many intellectuals...
...F'mally, any one of these topics and many more can be pursued further in The New Dictionary of Theology, edited by Joseph Komonchak, Mary Collins, and Dermot Lane (Michael Glazier, 1987...
...Added all together they are very impressive indeed, but there is something else, one more, one final factor that makes the needed effort seem futile...
...Reading--regular, disciplined, reflective, honest, humble reading--has becomes one of the most important ascetical practices for adult faith in our time...
...or my friend, for many of my friends, theology does not seem related to real life...
...In either case, it always depends in some ways on developments in both philosophical analysis and historical scholarship...
...I know this is not the whole picture...
...Theologians might as well acknowledge this at once, and confess to all the charges ! Still, I want to argue that all these difficulties do not excuse us from our responsibility to read theology, to think through the 152: Commonweal meaning of the faith we practice, to be accountable for the claims we make in the version of Catholicism we live...
...but now it would be hard to do systematic theology without gaining some competence, however qualified, in New Testament research...
...Their texts are often long, complex, unshapely, and badly in need of good editing...
...William Hurt has always had fatuousness as a color on his actor's palette...
...First, I'd encourage everyone to read John W. O'Malley's Tradition and Transition: Historical Perspectives on Vatican H (Michael Glazier, 1989), which sets the council in the long view of Christian history...
...Appropriately, he dips his brush deeply into it for the part of Alice's heel of a husband...
...No theologian encompasses all of these questions, much less answers all of them carefully...
...There are good reasons of course to prefer secular societies to the usual alternatives, but there is a price to pay...
...We all need to be in on the conversation...
...Among the voices of all the different disciplines and traditions, Christian theologians, in their own distinctive contexts, must struggle to understand the age we live in, and then to give utterance again, in a language that is fresh and honest, to the fullness of the meaning of the gospel...
...Yet theology must be undertaken on many fronts at once, for it seems only natural that some Christians should be Augustinians or Thomists, He'gelians or Whiteheadians, while others are Heideggerians, Gadamerians, or Habermasians, or students of Sufism or the Dharma...
...Where do they come from...
...For all these reasons, reading theology is difficult...
...Within the academy, theology is a vast, disorganized, and complicated field, incorporating biblical studies, church history, fundamental and philosophical theology, systematic or doctrinal theology, moral theology, social ethics, spiritual and mysI 8 March 1991:153 tical theology, and pastoral theology, or practical theology, as well as various entanglements, as we've seen, with philosophy of religion, the sociology and psychology of religion, the history of religions, and various theological excursions into literature, the social sciences, and many other things...
...What are their grounds...
...If so much in the film is good, why doesn't it reverberate within me...
...8 March 1991:155 history and Hebrew scriptures, of the nature of prophecy and the meaning of covenant, of the diversity of Second Temple Judaism and of the milieu of the early Jesus movement, and the whole subsequent history of Jewish-Christian relations and definition, the deformations of anti-Semitism, and the context of the contemporary Jewish-Christian dialogue, which is changing our understanding of ourselves...
...Finally, any consideration of recent Catholic theology will come eventually to the towering figures of Karl Rahner, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Bernard Lonergan, and Edward Schillebeeckx...
...Whether by osmosis, or paradoxically through debate itself, they create frameworks of assumptions and impressions, "plausibility structures," which may create further difficulties for a lively, heartfelt faith and devotion...
...A good case can be made for saying that we are living through a rebirth of Catholic theology in the second half of this century that is one of the richest periods in our entire history...
...At the conclusion of the scene, I knew no more of why Alice had been drawn to this particular man than before it started...
...and we're more and more a well educated people, living mostly in large urban settings...
...She goes to a Dr...
...Now we have to conceive it as a social process...
...Farrow has, as many have noticed, picked up some of her significant other's vocal patterns but these she uses with confidence and the sort of control that the more furtive Allen could never manage...
...We are praying to some power, sacrificing at some altar, offering our lives in the service of some god, interpreting our basic trust in some way...
...9 ut, at least while you're actually looking at it, _9 Alice lives...
...The place is infested with affluence and the mousy Alice can't really deal with such hectic comfort...
...Much of the magical stuff is accomplished delightfully...
...Meanwhile, the world mediated by the mass media is one in which a serious, intelligent practice of religion has been almost completely erased...
...Alongside it, I would recommend Modern Catholicism: Vatican II andAfter (Oxford University Press, 1990), edited by Adrian Hastings, a large book of generally high quality, with a team of good contributors, including Gerald Fogarty, Joseph Gremillion, Enda McDonagh, Rosemary Ruetber, Brian Wicker, and over thirty others...
...They are sometimes baffled, sometimes tired, sometimes out of sorts, sometimes guilty of evasion or grandstanding...
...In many academic and artistic (and some political) circles, these days, it would require some nerve to acknowledge that one took religion seriously, much less that one actually believed in God...
...In the last few decades, it is not only philosophy and history and biblical studies which inform theological reflection, but also various psychologies and sociologies, cultural anthropologies, political and social theories, linguistic and literary-critical theories, feminist theories, and more and more, the physical and life sciences...
...Christian theology must also include a serious study of Israelite theologians or schools...
...Next, place on your reading table six books...
...we inherit a strongly intellectual and argumentative tradition...
...But, at the film's conclusion, when Dr...
...Mantegna's rough amiability suits well this role of a basically decent guy with strains of seediness and irresponsibility in his character...
...In our culture today, outside the ministry, no one is required to know anything at all about theology...
...In the United States fight now, theology is housed almost entirely in academic institutions...
...Touted by its advertisers and by D some of the critics as the quality movie of the Christmas season, the film most likely to make you feel like Mr...
...Joe Mantegna brings to the part of Alice's musician-lover what he couldn't summon for his gangster in The Godfather III: a sustained, centered understanding of the man he plays...
...And "theology" is serious thinking about the religion we ourselves are practicing...
...She dominates the supernatural visitors and special effects by never seeming too surprised by them...
...We can only choose to be knowledgeable about it or ignorant...
...For Catholics, the watershed was Vatican II...
...The dialogue in it is nothing but generic courting conversation that could have been written by any apprentice playwright for any pair of cardboard lovers...
...Eventually it becomes necessary, then, to try to make sense out of contemporary theology...
...Matthew Lamb has asked recently: "Will Catholics succumb to the tendencies in American culture that secularize institutions of reason and fundamentalize institutions of faith...
...So sometimes theologians are lovely people, and sometimes they may be, for the devout soul, something like a winter gale...
...This is the most obvious difficulty...
...T. Clark, 1986): Vernon Gregson, ed., The Desires of the Human Heart: An Introduction to the Theology of Bernard Lonergan (Paulist Press, 1988...
...There is no wide agreement about how to organize the field, how to conceptualize its tasks and methods, how to determine its subdivisions, where to house it, how to teach it, or how to relate it to biblical studies, philosophy of religion, comparative religious studies, or other related investigations...
...SCREEN EMPTY HOUSES 'ALICE' & 'RUSSIA HOUSE' oody Allen's Alice is an anomaly: a cleverly written, fluently directed bit of fluff about a woman's spiritual transformation...
...To be a responsible Catholic today, our thinking itself must be awakened by faith, grounded in faith, shaped by the imagination of a faithful heart...
...John Riches, ed., The Analogy of Beaut)': The Theology of Hans Urs yon Balthasar (T...
...Bad enough, but since at least the time of Plato, and especially since the Enlightenment, ways of interpreting religion have been available to intellectuals which have the effect of distancing them from the religious imagination of ordinary people and calling into question the reasonableness and coherence of popular religion as a whole...
...it's meaningful and funny...
...I would recommend starting with two books about the council...
...In order to "think what we are doing," from now on, we must all be involved in a renewed practice of theology...
...It is not just whatever we wish or imagine it to be...
...Such speaking is bread of life for all of us, good food for our souls...
...We know much more today about the New Testament, the world out of which it came, its theological complexities and literary strategies, the significance of the preaching and the parables of Jesus, the pluralism of the early church, and many other things concerning our origins...
...So for all of its difficulties, complexities and dangers, for all its distance from our everyday lives and ordinary languages, there is still a sense in which theology is inescapable for us...
...It is going on "out there" whether we are paying attention or not...
...Catholic theology is mediated by both philosophy and history--sometimes more by one, sometimes more by the other...
...There are good collections of introductory essays on their work: Leo J. O'Donovan, ed., A World of Grace: An Introduction to the Themes and Foundations of Karl Rahner ~ Theology (Seabury Press, 1980...
...The very range and vitality of the secular culture creates an aura of implausibility around any expression of religious seriousness...
...And there is always a large audience for devotional works and popular spirituality...
...Hiring, promotion, and tenure in our universities are not based on depth of sanity, emotional maturity, poetic intuition, pastoral sensitivity, or warmth...
...In a second article, which will appear later this Spring, I will return to these matters...
...But here we should note that these changes, positive in themselves and life-giving in many ways, add to the difficulty of understanding what theologians are doing...
...Allen again demonstrates his flair for using familiar actors in slightly eccentric ways...
...Beyond the personal failings of theologians, there are the limitations and demands imposed by the institutional settings and cultural locations of theology...
...Of particular interest for our purposes here is the article, "Catholic Theology in the Post-Conciliar Period" by John McDade, the editor of The Month...
...We live more and more in a prison house of banality...
...And, as everyone knows, even the most brilliant professors are sometimes--often--very weird...
...But frankly---one must admit it--she is not alone in this neglect...
...She's uneasy and there is an ache in her lower back that no expensive drug or massage can alleviate...
Vol. 118 • March 1991 • No. 5
