Wounded by the Arrow of Beauty -- draft

What is needful is to wed a practice of reason which is truly humble and open to reality, to a faith like that that of Paul, willing to submit to the demands of reasonableness, though there will always be honest disagreement about whether Paul did in fact succeed in meeting them. A job for the Jesuits, you might well think, and indeed the Canadian Bernard J. F. Lonergan, S. J., did as good a job as any in the last century, with an early monumental volume, Insight, on the ways of the mind, and a later incisive work, Method in Theology, on what Anselm called faith seeking understanding. Indeed, in the last named book Lonergan lays out what he calls the transcendental imperatives of the unrestricted desire to know, imperative as well for those of us who are not theologians: be intelligent, be reasonable, be responsible. Again, while there is plenty of room for disagreement about how these work out in practice, I expect there is little disagreement that these are the values that need to guide us. ( Read more... )

© 2006 FP Purcell

The Conversation Killers -- draft

Our civilization has been well called the Civilization of the Dialogue, and the Christian faith grew up, providentially, in that civilization, accepting from the very beginning the worldly authority of a secular, indeed, even of a Pagan empire. Arising outside the rule of Caesar, Islam has always had an ambiguous relationship to civilization based on an seeming inability to recognize the religious legitimacy of the secular state. Catholic Christendom, at least since Petrarch, has realized that our culture is a symphony in which the voices of Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem, and, we might now say, other cities then unknown, have their voices. The Reformation, in some ways, took us back to Muhammad, so that many Christians saw themselves as an elite remnant saved from a damned world; but this was not the way of Jesus, nor of the historical Church. ( Read more... )

©2006 FP Purcell