What's new in philosophy?

[Fist and Faith]

There are no new thoughts.

Where would you get such a demonstrably false idea? Oh yeah, perhaps here:

Most of what I know about what any philosophers said I learned from Northern Exposure.

It's a cliché to say that all of philosophy is merely footnotes to Plato and Aristotle. Like most clichés, there's a grain of truth to that, but philosophy is exploding beyond most people's ability to keep up, just like most areas of human thought. We have more philosophers alive today than ever before (just like scientists, engineers, etc.). Trust me, they are not merely recycling what dead people said.

Care to demonstrate? (I just noticed what an odd word that is. Demon strate?) Seriously. Has there been a truly new idea in the last, say, fifty years? I'd really love to know of such a thing. Sure, I'm skeptical. But I don't know anywhere near enough about philosophy to be able to argue about anything you might say. Not like I'll be saying, "Hey, isn't that just rehashing Mill's idea that yadda yadda?" Literally, the only thing I know about Mill is that, of his own free will, he got particularly ill on half a pint of shandy. I'll have no choice but to accept your word on this new thought, and hope to be able to discuss it to the smallest degree.

[Zarathustra]

FF, I'm not keeping up with the latest research. I'm not a professional philosopher by any means! But I can say this: claiming that "there are no new thoughts," especially in the context of a professional field with 1000s of working PhDs, is going to be false no matter which field you're talking about. It's like saying there are no new inventions, or no new mathematical theorems/proofs.

There are lots of examples in 20th century philosophy that no one in previous centuries could have imagined. Just think about the impact computers and AI have had on philosophy of the mind--even if you don't know the details, you can surely imagine how philosophers of the past who didn't have access to this concept couldn't possibly have invented the concepts we have today. Cognitive science wasn't invented yet. Neural science has only exploded in the last two decades, since the invention of the MRI. These all inform philosophy with new findings and thus new theories are invented to describe it. Debates about functionalism vs identity theory vs behaviorism--while decades old by now--were entirely new 20th century debates that wouldn't have been possible without the "new" model of mind-as-computer. Previous centuries had different models, like clocks. Thinking of the mind as software and the brain as hardware just wouldn't have occurred to anyone prior to the invention of the computer. And it has led to a flurry of debate and counterarguments, spawning "-isms" to capture all the nuances.

I can't get the link to work for some reason, but you can copy/paste:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functiona ... y_of_mind)

[Fist and Faith]

Yeah, the tech ideas were what occurred to me. I just read some scifi with Hashi's favorite idea of copying minds, which live in simulated reality of computers. And multiple copies, each living in its own simulated reality. I figure it's possible that this leads to thinking of our minds, or our true nature, in ways we never imagined.

Yeah, that link is annoying.

[ussusimiel]

I agree completely with Z (a very rare thing indeed! ), Philosophy has continued to develop and grow at a huge rate over the last 100 years. And it has done so in lots of different areas. It may be that Metaphysics has become less relevant, but if that's the case it has been to the benefit of many other areas.

Michel Foucault talks of the 'unfold' in understanding human existence/experience. In the modern era three writers have stood out as seminal in relation to such unfolding: Sigmund Freud, Max Weber and Karl Marx. Each in their own way, in psychology, sociology and economics, has demonstrated that what we thought it meant to be a human being was only a surface which covered over depths hidden in Foucault's 'unfold'. The unfolding of these depths (think of the Unconscious in psychology) has led to a revolution in our understanding of ourselves, and philosophy has been integrally involved in that.

That is not to even begin to talk about the explosion in the Philosophy of Language, which again is a totally modern phenomenon and still continues apace. People like Ferdinand de Saussure, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jacques Derrida have utterly changed how philosophers think about language, and so how we conceive of ourselves as human beings.

Post-structuralism, the area where Michel Foucault did most of his work, (along with post-Freudians like Jaques Lacan) draws on all of these advances to give us a picture of what it means to be a human being in a post-modern world. It isn't necessarily a very comforting picture. It provides very little in the way of certainty, and, in many ways, that is its strength. The contemporary world we live in is not one of certainties and absolute truths. It is one where uncertainty (and the anxiety that that brings) is a defining part of the post-modern human condition. Becoming more comfortable with uncertainty rather than looking for comfort in non-existent absolute truths is, for me, the main thing that can be taken from this sort of post-modern philosophy.

u.

[Wosbald]

+JMJ+

Exhibition on philosopher Maimonides in Jerusalem

Shrine of the Book at Israel Museum in Jerusalem


Original writings by greatest Jewish Medieval author


TEL AVIV -- The great 12th-century philosopher, scientist and Jewish religious figure Maimonides is featured in a major retrospective exhibition opening on December 11 and running through April at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

The show includes items on loan from the Vatican Apostolic Library, the British Library of London, the Metropolitan Museum of New York, and other important cultural institutions.

Titled "Mainmonides: A Legacy in Script", the show will display a collection of works by the author considered one of the most prolific and influential intellectuals of his time and in Jewish history.

Born in Spain, the life and work of Maimonides focused mainly on the Middle East, as well as Italy and France, but reached the furthest corners of the Medieval world.

His approach was that of merging secular studies and Torah -- the spiritual centre of Judaism -- to make Jewish law accessible to all. His encouragement on moderation in all aspects of life, his guidelines on nutrition and on preventative medicine, are still "studied and interpreted in various academies and popular circles", the show's organisers said.

[...]

Among the works on display are the original version, with corrections, of the Mishneh Torah, his code of Jewish religious law with his signature and his handwriting.

Those scheduled to participate at the show's inauguration on the evening of December 10 include: Archbishop Jose Tolentino de Mendona, archivist and librarian of the Catholic Church; Spanish Ambassador to Israel Mauel Gomez-Acebo; and Chief Rabbi of Israel Yitzhak Yosef.

[Wosbald]

+JMJ+


Thinking Faith @ThinkingFaith | Twitter

[Wosbald]

+JMJ+

German humanities scholars enlisted to end coronavirus lockdown [In-Depth]

Aristotle. (Credit: iStock)


In contrast to other countries, philosophers, historians, theologians and jurists have played a major role advising the state as it seeks to loosen restrictions.


In the struggle against the new coronavirus, humanities academics have entered the fray -- in Germany at least.

Arguably to a greater extent than has happened in the UK, France or the US, the country has enlisted the advice of philosophers, historians of science, theologians and jurists as it navigates the delicate ethical balancing act of reopening society while safeguarding the health of the public.

When the German federal government announced a slight loosening of restrictions on 15 April -- allowing small shops to open and some children to return to school in May -- it had been eagerly awaiting a report written by a 26-strong expert group containing only a minority of natural scientists and barely a handful of virologists and medical specialists.

Instead, this working group from the Leopoldina -- Germany's independent National Academy of Sciences dating back to 1652 -- included historians of industrialisation and early Christianity, a specialist on the philosophy of law and several pedagogical experts.

This paucity of virologists earned the group a swipe from Markus Söder, minister-president of badly hit Bavaria, who has led calls in Germany for a tough lockdown (although earlier in the pandemic the Leopoldina did release a report written by more medically focused specialists).

But "the crisis is a complex one, it's a systemic crisis" and so it needs to be dissected from every angle, argued Jürgen Renn, director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and one of those who wrote the crucial recommendations.

[...]

Germany's Ethics Council -- which traces its roots back to the stem cell debates of the early 2000s and is composed of theologians, jurists, philosophers and other ethical thinkers -- also contributed to a report at the end of March, warning that it was up to elected politicians, not scientists, to make the "painful decisions" weighing up the lockdown's effect on health and its other side-effects.

"We have a direct line to the ministers and decision-makers in parliament," said Joachim Vetter, the council's director. "You can ask the virologists in the beginning; but as you go on you need jurists, people from the economy, social scientists," he argued, as the impact of lockdown ripples through society.

Other European countries also have bioethics councils -- some of which have issued their own recommendations on the coronavirus -- but Dr Vetter argued that Germany had a particularly strong tradition of ethical debate. After the release of its report, the chair of the council appeared on a prime-time evening news programme. "You're really in the main news," Dr Vetter said.

[...]

While France has a tradition of public intellectuals, Professor Höffe said, in Germany, academic philosophers have a stronger history of involvement in political discussion.

Germany's involvement of the humanities in its coronavirus response appears to be the exception rather than the rule. In France, an 11-strong coronavirus scientific council assembled by the country's president, Emmanuel Macron, at the end of March is composed almost entirely of disease experts, epidemiologists, disease modellers and medics -- it features only a single sociologist and one anthropologist.

[...]

[Wosbald]

+JMJ+

Want a good job? Major in philosophy. [In-Depth]

Surveying the world from beneath the columns of the Academy of Athens, in Greece. (iStock/sarra22)


Reading about the closures of several philosophy departments has me worried that our centuries-old experiment of liberal arts education is ending. The United States has been trying to transform liberal arts education into pre-professional training for well over a decade, at least since the 2008 recession; and that desire has accelerated, with students and their parents demanding the expansion of programs and majors they believe will lead straight to well-paying, secure jobs.

Consider the jokes about what philosophy majors will do post-graduation. A typical example is a T-shirt that reads, "I have a degree in Philosophy: Why do you want fries with that?" This reveals a pervasive misconception about what philosophy is and what philosophical training prepares its graduates to do.

Philosophy, like any other bachelor's degree in the liberal arts, prepares graduates for a wide array of jobs, the kind that can lead to more skilled mid-level positions later on. Yet philosophical training seems to be understood as an example of what the philosopher Lisa Heldke calls "stupid knowing," which classifies someone as more stupid for having gained it. She points to cultural tropes of farmers as unsophisticated laborers whose farming knowledge somehow disqualifies them from higher-order thinking. Philosophy graduates are held to have these higher-order cognitive skills, but at the same time, the possession of those skills is cited as evidence of stupidity: How stupid do you have to be to pursue a "worthless" major that guarantees poverty?

However, the data suggests that we need more philosophy classes if our students' employment futures are a prime concern. We know, for example, that philosophy students do extraordinarily well on the GRE, LSAT and GMAT tests, showing that they are well prepared not just for further academic study but also for training in law and business. A study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in 2017 found that the net return on investment for a philosophy degree is equivalent to that of an engineering degree. Not only is philosophy education less expensive than other forms of education that lead to well-paying, respectable jobs, but philosophy graduates end up earning more over their lifetimes than graduates in any other humanities field and more than graduates of some STEM fields.

The more philosophy graduates demonstrate the falsity of the "useless major" trope, the more deeply entrenched it seems to become. Some have taken the claim "philosophy doesn't prepare its graduates for any single job" to mean that philosophy leaves its graduates without any job skills. The truth is in between: Philosophy prepares its graduates for many different jobs.

[...]

The promises of college and university mission statements -- like cultivating in students a thirst for lifelong learning and providing transformative education -- depend heavily on the skills promoted by a liberal arts education. This includes such "soft" skills as:

• discerning what is worthy of respect in social, moral and political opinions different from the ones you hold;
• understanding why multiple positions or potential solutions to a problem may all be strong (or weak), even when they are very different;
• reflecting on the extent to which our thinking may be biased and developing methods for reasoning well even as we know we can never be fully free from bias.

[...]

[Wosbald]

+JMJ+


Damon Linker @DamonLinker | Twitter



--> --> French philosopher Michel Foucault ‘abused boys in Tunisia’ [In-Depth]

[Fist and Faith]

That should be fun to watch.

[Wosbald]

+JMJ+

IMO, the following set of outline/notes from Fr. Bergolio's (now, Pp. Francis) 1987-88 critical interrogation of Marxian/Socialistic concepts is important — not only for its timely subject-matter — but also because Bergolio's thought is commonly characterized as "non-theological". Though I'd agree that he's not liable to be labeled "an academic" (inasmuch as he evidently prefers the fleshy reality of praxis and the personal touch of pastoral-guidance to the etherial flight of theoretics), to conclude therefrom that he's a theological and philosophical halfwit would be an overhasty simplification.

Interpreting Reality [In-Depth]

=========================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================

This previously unpublished text is a set of notes intended for further study. It can be dated between the end of 1987 and the middle of 1988, when Fr. Bergoglio was working on his thesis on Romano Guardini and was examining the use of Marxist analysis in the interpretation of reality, which he saw as an example of how obsolete categories are eventually superseded by reality.[1]

Bergoglio opens with a quote from an article by Alberto Methol Ferré on how the Church saw the issue of relations with the working class, which had come to the fore of its concerns with the coming of the industrial age and the French Revolution. At the beginning of the 19th century, with Philippe Buchez,[2] a Catholic form of socialism appeared that was swiftly suffocated by a pincer movement of intra-ecclesiastical integrism and atheistic Marxism. Methol Ferré proposed a return to the ethical and Christian origins of socialism, moving beyond both dogmatically atheistic Marxism and, with the help of the Second Vatican Council, the Church’s negative critique of the contemporary world, a critique that had been unable to recognize progress.

Bergoglio concentrates on the “failure of categories to interpret reality” noted by Methol Ferré, sketching out in these notes a “hermeneutics of reality” in which criteria and categories are not mere “patches” or temporary fixes. This concept, together with that of “the overflow” (“rebasamiento”), has become important following the Synod for the Amazon.[3]

Bergoglio’s text is of particular interest both for his method and the content. Perhaps some will be surprised by the complex style of argumentation, which is certainly not typical of Pope Francis. In terms of method, it allows us to catch a glimpse of Bergoglio’s personal style of thought, which is inspired by various authors but also reveals his own original thinking. As far as the content is concerned, we can see in his reasoning the application of his well-known “four principles.”[4] The idea that the best method is the one most congruent (“consonant”) with reality is inspired by Guardini, while the deployment of antinomy as a means of poetically expressing a reality that surpasses our intuition and our concepts, and so calls for creative explanation, is very much part of Bergoglio’s own thinking. Methol Ferré’s theory is valid when it comes to interpreting the voice of the people and embracing modernity in a way that is both traditional and new.

Many things can be found in these notes, but what stands out is the vigor of a thinking that is original and mature, moving ahead with freedom of spirit and creativity, in search of criteria to interpret reality that allow us to think and discern without falling into either rigidity or relativism.

Diego Fares, SJ

=========================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================

“With the exhaustion of interpretative categories that are no longer of any use for understanding the events of today, a perplexity has arisen. What is happening now surpasses existing ideas. They are therefore ideas that blind us, that do not let us see. For me, as far as we are concerned, the ‘Marxist Christians’ had jumped on a horse they supposed to be a winner, but which turned out to be drugged. As Claver[5] has pointed out: For fear of being the last Christians, Marxist Christians are actually the last Marxists.”[6]

[…]

[Wosbald]

+JMJ+

This will undoubtedly have limited interest on KW, but as I just learned yesterday to my shock and delight, CUA Press has announced the publication of "The English Critical Edition of the Works of Karol Wojtyła/John Paul II" which is projected to be, ultimately, a 20 volume set.

But, to focus on what's truly sparked my delight, I must say it is the first volume to be released which really has me geeking out:


Thomas Pfau @ThomasPfau3 | Twitter






Yes, the first release is Person and Act. And even though I've no immediate interest in reading the entire Collected Works, I must admit that my freak-flag flyeth solely with the appearance of this single, inaugural volume. I've been awaiting this day in hope and patience for quite a few years now. Happy Happy, Joy Joy.

Though the significance of releasing this volume is prolly not obvious, retracing the sad trail of its publication history in English should make things clearer. To put it simply, the original English translation of Person and Act (dubbed "The Acting Person") has — at least, according to those in-the-know — long labored in a swamp of both translation wonkiness and legal hurdles. As I understand things, Vatican interests have long been pressuring the English copyright-holders to allow the publication of a new, scholarly translation sensitive to the subtleties of Wojtyla's thought, but these overtures have been continuously stymied. But in a turnaround, it seems that their scholarly plaint has risen to the heavens with said hurdles finally being cleared.

For those few souls itching for more of the backstory, this except from one of George Wiegel's books on JP2 should add further context:

Person and Act is not a debate with other philosophers and is very light on such scholarly apparatus as footnotes, cross-references, and digressions on the work of others. But that did not make it an easy read. On the contrary, Person and Act is an extraordinarily dense work. Wojtyla asked his protégé, Father Styczeń, to review his first draft. The two took a hiking trip into the Tatras to discuss it, and when Wojtyla asked Styczeń what he thought, the younger man puckishly replied, "It’s a good first draft. Perhaps it could be translated first from Polish into Polish, to make it easier to understand for the reader — including me." A generation of Kraków clergy joked that the first assignment in Purgatory for priests who misbehaved would be to read Person and Act. This density was the result of many factors. Wojtyla’s distinctively circular style of thinking made for difficulties, as did the fact that he was writing such a complex work in his spare time. It is also not clear whether Karol Wojtyla has ever found the scientific language to express himself adequately. A close student of his poetry and plays, Anna Karoń-Ostrowska, suggests that the answer is, "No," for there is always something about the truth of things that escapes our ability to express it analytically.

Person and Act is very much a part of the unfinished symphony of Karol Wojtyla’s philosophy. Thirty years after its initial appearance, a definitive Polish edition had not been published, although the second and third Polish editions (edited by several of Wojtyla’s students and other philosophical colleagues) were major improvements over the first edition; the third edition included several articles by Wojtyla, developing themes in the original work. German (1981), Italian (1982), Spanish (1982), and French (1983) editions, of varying degrees of reliability, have been published. But the most serious problems were with the English translation and edition of the work.

Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, a former student of Roman Ingarden living in Boston and active in world phenomenological circles, had published several articles of Wojtyla’s in Analecta Husserliana, the yearbook of phenomenology edited, thus helping to bring his work to the attention of philosophers around the world. Much impressed by the first Polish edition of Osoba i czyn, she proposed publishing a revised and elaborated text of the work in English. Cardinal Wojtyla agreed and worked through numerous revisions and elaborations with Dr. Tymieniecka. The result, according to virtually everyone involved, was a much-improved text. This revised Polish text was then translated into English by Andrzej Potocki and sent to Dr. Tymieniecka in the United States for publication. Several knowledgeable persons close to the process claim that, at this point, Dr. Tymieniecka significantly changed the Potocki translation, confusing its technical language and bending the text toward her own philosophical concerns, to the point where the reader is, on occasion, not really in contact with Wojtyla’s own thought. These problems only surfaced after Wojtyla had been elected Pope. At that juncture, he had no time to check through hundreds of pages of text, and appointed a commission composed of Father Styczeń, his old friend Father Marian Jaworski, and Dr. Andrzej Poltawski (a Kraków-based philosopher and the husband of Dr. Wanda Poltawska) to review and correct the revised English translation text that had been prepared by Dr. Tymieniecka. But she refused to take corrections from anyone other than Wojtyla and, moreover, was eager to publish the book quickly to capitalize on the author’s election as Pope. Dr. Tymieniecka also claimed that she had Wojtyla’s agreement to publish her retranslation as the "definitive text of the work established in collaboration with the author by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka," although why a truly "definitive text" would (like the edition Dr. Tymieniecka proposed to publish) have two chapter sevens, one of which is labeled "unrevised," was not made clear. In any case, Dr. Tymieniecka went ahead with the publication of the text she had prepared, to the intense aggravation of many of Wojtyla’s philosophical colleagues and students. Years of private argument ensued between the Holy See’s publishing house, the Libreria Editrice Vaticana, which holds the rights to all of Wojtyla’s pre-papal work, and Reidel, the Dutch house that had published the English edition. The corrected edition was prepared but has never appeared. Dr. Tymieniecka continues to insist that hers is the "definitive" edition of Osoba i czyn, a claim that no serious student of Wojtyla’s work accepts. The author himself, whose relative indifference to the fate of his published work is as striking as his unfailing charity, insists, whenever the subject is raised, that Dr. Tymieniecka "must be given credit for initiating the translation."

The very English title, The Acting Person, suggests something of the problem with Dr. Tymieniecka’s work. Osoba i czyn is translated, literally, Person and Act: a title that retains the tension between subjective consciousness and objective reality in which Wojtyla is trying to work. "The Acting Person" places most of the stress on the subjective, or phenomenological, side of Wojtyla’s analysis — which is the criticism most frequently leveled against Dr. Tymieniecka’s reworking of the text. Every other language edition of Osoba i czyn retains the tension in the Polish original: thus the German Person und Tat, the Italian Persona e atto, the Spanish Persona y acción, and the French Personne et acte.

    — Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II, George Weigel, pp. 174-75

Judging by its canonical status within Wojtyla's ouvre, this seminal work of "Trinitarian Personalism expounded in a Husserlian key" should fit the bill as a spring/summer barnburner for philosophiles and theologophiles. Scheduled to be released in early May.

-->> Amazon link: "Person and Act" and Related Essays

[Skyweir]

You are such a brainwashed religious flunky Wos


do provide an objective critique of the alleged seminal work of "Trinitarian Personalism expounded in a Husserlian key" lol

[Wosbald]

You are such a brainwashed religious flunky Wos


[…]

=========================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================

The Crisis in Catholic Theology [In-Depth, Opinion]

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Editor’s note: This article is part of The Conversation, a new initiative of America Media offering diverse perspectives on important and contested issues in the life of the church. Read more views on this issue linked at the bottom of this article.

=========================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================


[…]

The current crisis

The gravitational pull away from theology at the undergraduate level has had direct, negative consequences for renewing faculty positions reserved for theologians. Since I began working in the theology department at St. Louis University in 2007, it has witnessed a drop to 22 from 32 full-time faculty positions, with most of the reduction coming from the pool of tenured positions. These trends are widespread at all but the most prosperous Catholic universities. Despite these alarming trends, there seems to be little concerted effort in the network of Catholic schools, and more particularly among the 28 members of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities, to collaborate and strategize about how to renew and invigorate theology on their campuses. At the very least, the roughly 215 non-doctorate-producing departments should engage in conversation with the dozen doctorate-granting Catholic universities about future hiring needs.

Within departments of theology and religious studies there looms a related crisis. What is theology for and how should a department be constructed? After the Second Vatican Council, many departments defaulted to instructional categories inherited from seminary faculties — Scripture, history, ethics or practical theology, and systematic theology. During the 1980s and 1990s, certain departments saw the need for religious diversity sooner than others, but now almost all departments offer the majority of their courses outside of the older categories and have hired faculty with proper expertise in these areas. Larger departments that provided advanced degrees felt compelled to maintain a faculty able to equip future catechists, teachers and professors with what were understood, in the broadest sense, as the necessary tools to perform the craft and to convey something of the mission of the Catholic tradition with integrity. These presuppositions are not a given today.

For all their differences, Father Lamb and Father O’Meara shared common characteristics. Both were clerics born in the 1930s who entered religious life before Vatican II and went on to study with leading theologians in northern Europe after the council. This may explain the significant agreement expressed in their pieces. Their point of departure was the sudden theological and institutional transformation instigated by the council. These changes can be best summarized by the term laicization. With fewer men and women religious and fewer clergy as faculty, Catholic universities lacked the financial and human resources necessary to provide competitive salaries for laypeople and to fund additional intellectual and spiritual formation hitherto provided by religious communities.

Challenges and opportunities

[…]

Safeguarding the tradition

Beyond money, however, theology departments require a corresponding commitment to Catholic identity. Father O’Meara was quick to explain that one cannot equate that identity “with orthodox catechisms and papal control,” but with “the general principles of Catholic interpretation of Christianity” and “the fields and traditions of a millennium of reflection upon faith.” Lamb, meanwhile, advocated the preservation of “Catholic memory” and found it imperative that “serious, long-term research projects into Catholic theological traditions, and their significance for our American culture, be more intensely fostered at Catholic universities.”

Father Lamb and Father O’Meara had been formed before the council and rejected a return to theology’s pre-Vatican II state. They had in mind a deep, wide retrieval that could be conversant with the pressing matters of the day. Something like this would require real and continuous cultivation.

The very mechanisms that led to the boom in lay theology also created unanticipated problems, including one that both mention in their discussion of graduate training. Father Lamb and Father O’Meara worried that the lack of first-rate programs at Catholic universities would lead the most promising theologians to Protestant or secular universities for study. “The trend,” Father Lamb wrote, “is for Catholic theology departments to hire more and more of their faculty from Protestant and state programs,” even when hiring in the opposite direction did not happen at the same rate.

Father Lamb aptly describes this situation as “one-way ecumenism.” Father O’Meara notes the same trend, writing that denominational, nominally Protestant and public universities “are more or less closed to Catholics in any numbers.” Father O’Meara asked, if the best Catholic students are trained in Ivy or para-Ivy schools, will they “be introduced adequately either to the central theological areas or to the important theologians of Catholicism”? And if the future generation of Catholic theologians does not gain a deep understanding and vision of the task of theology, will they care whether that tradition is transmitted?

The common labor of a world church

For Father Lamb, the crisis was already manifest in 1990. The wider Enlightenment milieu of American culture disparages theological discourse, and in the Enlightenment’s wake, public discussion of religion offers only a stultified contrast of “conservatives versus liberals, progressives versus reactionaries.” Without a deeper engagement with the tradition, and without formation in practices that join the spiritual and the intellectual, departments of theology risk “producing more theological journalists than theological scholars,” whose arguments are “as predictable as some Catholic papers, known for their routine conservative or liberal stances.”

The generation of Father O’Meara and Father Lamb both experienced and broke free from waves of narrowness. In the old system, Catholicism was Roman Catholicism, theology was Thomism, and patristics was Western. Creating a new framework meant discovering a tradition deeper than what had been on offer. The story of 20th-century Catholic theology can largely be told as the story of this discovery, whose fruits were manifested in the liturgical, ecclesiological and ecumenical triumphs of Vatican II. Despite occupying very different locations on the landscape of theological and ecclesial politics, Father O’Meara and Father Lamb shared this story and wanted to ensure its next chapter.

The project succeeded in part because it did not just make the project of Catholic theology, memory and engagement with the modern world compelling to a range of future theologians, clergy and laypeople. There were also those on the outside looking in — a multitude of formerly Protestant theologians and graduate students who sensed something living and real in the Catholic tradition. The number of North American theologians and aspirants being received into the Catholic Church is inconceivable in most of Europe, and gives evidence of the renewal aspired to by Fathers Lamb and O’Meara.

The narrative was also shared by my mentor in Tübingen, Germany: Peter Hünermann (b. 1929), who was trained in the old “Roman system” and was intent on finding a new path forward in modern theology. He took seriously the claim (both empirical and normative) made by Karl Rahner, S.J., that the church was no longer European, and he spent significant time teaching in South America. When I was allowed to participate in his doctoral colloquium roughly 20 years ago, I sat around a table with students not only from Europe, but also from Africa and South America. They presented their research in German and English, but also in Spanish and French. They were writing dissertations about whether Europeans had brought salvation or merely religion to Africa, in addition to working out the implications of liberation theology and feminist theology for different doctrines.

I understood my own project on retrieving the 19th-century Catholic Tübingen School to be part of a common labor of a world church, made possible by the very best theologians and a longstanding financial commitment that enabled this. In the university town of Tübingen in southwest Germany, I got a sense of a global Catholicism, an experience that James Keenan, S.J., has fostered among ethicists in recent years. Yet despite the increasingly international network of Catholic theology, there has been little effort to make departments of theology in the United States look more like the worldwide Catholic Church, sub-equatorial and in contact with the poor.

[…]

Taking Catholic diversity seriously

[…]

Theology’s raison d’etre

Father Lamb and Father O’Meara worried that the new generation of lay students would lack training in basic theology and the languages needed for serious theological work. Today, the crisis seems to pivot on whether one really needs to spend time with basic sources and questions. Bernard Lonergan, S.J., spent years “reaching up to the mind of Aquinas,” and one senses that Hans Urs von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac, S.J., Karl Rahner, S.J., and Edith Stein felt a comparable sense of having really discovered something when they read early Christian sources. Many students today, however, receive the impression, often conveyed intentionally, that one survey course on pre-modern theology suffices.

Students are encouraged, explicitly or by suggestion, to integrate theological questions with methods (critical theory, ethnography) or fields (trauma studies, disability studies, environmental studies) adjacent to theology. In practice this is nothing new, and integrating these methods can have real theological payoff, much as did the application of philology and history to theological disciplines for previous generations. But two problems arise. First, doing this well requires time that cannot come at the expense of theological coursework. Otherwise the impression is given that the tradition can be had cheaply, or, even worse, that it is not worth the effort. Second, one needs to reconceive theology for the 21st century, as Johann Sebastian Drey of Tübingen did for his time in his Brief Introduction to the Study of Theology (1819), when the understanding of theology in relation to other disciplines was going through an analogous transformation.

If good philosophy and good history made for better theology, the same can be true for the impact on theology from fields like ethnography and disability studies. For theology to maintain identity and coherence, the application of supplementary disciplines and methods needs to be paired with an appreciation for theology’s historical achievements, which the faculty should embody and articulate through a palpable love of theology. Otherwise, departments risk losing their raison d’etre.

It is hard to disentangle what departments should look like from how they should hire. In my experience, however, there is almost no coordination among Catholic universities on this matter. If an international collaboration can help realize greater catholicity, national collaboration would help answer the ethical question about whether Catholic theology departments should be granting doctorates at all. If the dozen U.S. Catholic universities that grant doctorates in theology knew that the remaining universities were committed to hiring practices that would reward departments who trained students to retrieve and reimagine Catholic theology in creative and dynamic ways, it would be easier to justify continuing these programs.

To be clear, what is needed is not a renewed call for “Catholic hiring,” but for deliberate strategies to seek theologians and scholars of religion interested in continuing to think, remember and imagine with a broadly Catholic pattern of doing theology. The cohesion of a department relies on a coalition of members engaging in a common activity that can be recognized and named. The vitality of the common endeavor requires new colleagues who stretch and expand a vision of theology that claims to be Catholic. The schools most concerned with Catholic identity too often settle for a parochial identity instead of a vitally Catholic one. Such negative examples, however, should not dissuade more mainstream departments from taking steps to imagine their Catholicity in thoughtful and serious ways.

The practice of Catholic theology done largely by lay theologians at institutions outside of ecclesiastical control is relatively new, yet too many upper administrators treat the discipline of academic theology as if it were safeguarded from harm in today’s environment. Too many faculty members and chairs are content to follow trends that currently prevail in the academy, as if Catholic institutions have the same needs and ends as their secular counterparts. If theology departments are winnowed down to a variant of cultural studies, in which the discipline of theology is replaced by a medley of methods and fields, there is a real question whether lay theology will continue. Catholic theology may retreat to its traditional place, in the seminary, to be done by (mostly) clergy for (mostly) clergy. Such a move would be a great loss for the study of theology, for the life of our Catholic universities and for the Catholic Church as a whole.

[Wosbald]

+JMJ+

The liberal/conservative divide is hurting theology departments. The way forward won’t be popular. [Opinion]

Photo by Ken Theimer on Unsplash


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Editor’s note: This article, a response to “The crisis in Catholic theology” by Grant Kaplan, is part of The Conversation, a new initiative of America Media offering diverse perspectives on important and contested issues in the life of the church. Read more views on this issue here, here and here.

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Grant Kaplan suggests that his real question does not so much regard Catholic theology’s future in the United States per se, but the survival of its laicized forms. In a pessimistic scenario, he warns us that Catholic theology in the United States could retreat to seminaries, virtually overturning theology’s postconciliar declericalization and central place in Catholic university life. Universities may well continue offering programs in Catholic theology, but such programs will be Catholic in name only. Lacking appreciation for thinking, remembering and imagining in a Catholic way, they will fail to contribute meaningfully to the education of future Catholics and so will lose their raison d’être.

[…]

But the truly valuable aspect of Dr. Kaplan’s insight should not be overlooked. Transcending the parochial is vital for retaining Catholic identity, whether this is manifested in a theology department’s faculty-hiring strategies, national and international collaboration, exchange programs, investments in scholarship or curricula of studies.

Though largely concurring with Dr. Kaplan’s concerns, I wonder if what needs to be transcended is not just a parochial identity but also an ideological polarization. The latter is perhaps of even greater importance for the future vitality of Catholic theology in the United States. Though the liberal/conservative dialectic in Catholic theology is far from new, it seems that a growing polarization along the same lines is now only one step removed from what Walter Burghardt, S.J., called an “intramural internecine hostility.” The liberal tendency to reject the old in favor of the new and the conservative dismissal of new questions, ethical concerns and interdisciplinarity are equally disconcerting. What is needed, I think, is the cultivation of the capacity to be at home with both the old and the new. As Bernard Lonergan, S.J., once suggested, this entails claiming one’s place in the “not numerous center” that is ready to work patiently through the necessary transitions and refuses any half-measures. Entering this center space is not likely to make one popular. But acquiring a capacity for doing so seems necessary for remaining Catholic, at least if kata holon also means “both-and”: both old and new, grace and nature, faith and reason.

Theology departments could foster this capacity by strategically creating occasions for conversations across dividing lines and, even more important, by integrating rigorous intellectual training with new forms of spiritual formation. No doubt reclaiming scholarly excellence over against “theological journalism,” focusing on “a broadly Catholic pattern of doing theology” and addressing the methodological disarray in theology will play an important role. But the key to fostering a vibrant Catholic theology seems to lie in a creative reintegration of intellectual and spiritual formation. After all, the unity of minds and hearts is a matter of not only intellectual but also moral and religious conversion. Though challenged by the laicization of Catholic theology, this integration seems to be re-emerging in at least some of the theology departments in the United States, such as my own at Boston College.

[Wosbald]

+JMJ+

The Trinity: On Loving Love Loving [Explainer]

‘The name we give to God, The Trinity, marks the depth and height of the Christian knowledge and experience of who God is.’ In anticipation of the celebration of Trinity Sunday, 30 May, James Hanvey SJ considers how we might begin to think and speak about the loving relationship between Father, Son and Spirit into which we ourselves are welcomed.


[…]

The name we give to God, The Trinity, marks the depth and height of the Christian knowledge and experience of who God is. It is completely unique to Christianity. Too often our understanding and experience of God as Trinity is dismissed as a mystery or presented as some sort of paradox or conundrum: ‘three persons, one God.’ Now, of course, God is the absolute mystery of our lives and because we, as finite creatures, have only very limited ways of expressing the transcendent glory of God’s Trinitarian life, we have to remember that our language must be humble, partial and inadequate. If it were not then it could not speak truthfully of the reality of God who cannot be contained within our speech. The point of our attempting to put this luminous, holy reality into the poor rags of language is not to obscure but to point the way — the way from thinking and speaking to the life of the mystery itself. So, when we speak of the Trinity as a mystery we do not mean that we should not think or speak about it but rather that its meaning is inexhaustible. On the contrary, then, we can never be done thinking and speaking and coming to an adoring wonder that we have been given such an extraordinary vision of God’s own life. So what do we mean when we say ‘three persons, one God’? Well, we’re not talking arithmetic. If we are then, clearly, we’re going to get into trouble and our Trinity will seem nonsensical.

A helpful way of coming to understand what we mean is to think of the three primary colours: red, yellow and blue. If you divide a piece of paper into three sections and paint each section a different primary colour, then spin the paper very quickly it will appear white. It is a simple illustration of oneness and threeness. It makes the point that the ‘oneness’ is dynamic but does not diminish the three. In the long struggle to speak about the Christian experience of Israel’s God one of the great insights was that God’s oneness is also a unique oneness. It entails and indeed requires the living relationship of Father, Son and Holy Spirit: oneness cannot be thought without these relationships and vice versa. We always have to think them together.

But that opens up another problem about the word ‘person’. When we use it in the special context of the Trinity it doesn’t mean what we normally mean by person. Even Augustine had to admit that when we spoke of ‘person’ in the Trinity we really had no understanding of what we meant. The best we can do is be clear about what we don’t mean: we are not speaking of three individual centres of independent consciousness and wills, and, of course, we are not speaking of three ‘bodies’. If we thought this way, it would not be a Trinity but a club — a very exclusive club! Yet once we’re clear about what we don’t mean we can begin very tentatively to glimpse something profound: that ‘person’ in the Trinity points us to the eternal relationship of Father, Son and Holy Spirit and that these relationships both distinguish them from each other but simultaneously open up a union in which each dwells in the other. The Trinity is a sort of ‘communion’ (co-union).

This has two important consequences for us. First, if they ‘indwell’ in each other then they also reveal each other: to know one is to know all and to know each in their distinctness and in their communion. Second, we know that these relationships are relationships of love. The Trinity is the revelation that God is Love. Now we get Love wrong if we think of it as a ‘thing’ — something we can possess or control. It is a relationship and it is a verb — we can only ‘have’ love by loving, by participating in a relationship of love. So, the Trinity is Love Loving — dynamic, unfathomable, inexhaustible, eternally complete and creative. Yet, here is the great wonder. We only know this because the Father gives Himself to be known in His Son and the Son gathers us into this eternal self-giving through and in the Spirit. In other words, the fact that we can speak at all about God as Trinity is already a sign that we are beginning to participate in God’s Triune life: we know and experience that the Trinity is Love Loving us. This is what we call grace. The whole of the Church’s liturgy lives out of this knowledge. It is our act of love, both a confession and a proclamation — ‘a great cry of wonder’ — that in loving us the Trinity takes us into these relations of life, so that we learn again how to love by participating in Love. Literally, by ‘being-in-Love’.

In this way we can see that the life of grace is a Trinitarian life and that grace is itself a relationship through which and in which we learn love. The Trinitarian Life of God is our school of Love and by loving we come to Love loving and that is our sanctification.

[…]

[Wosbald]

+JMJ+


Gabriel Gottlieb @xgabegottliebx | Twitter



--> --> Jewish Studies @ CUL: Spinoza’s Death Mask, and Reflections on Working at the RBML

[Avatar]

I can't believe I never commented on how wordy Foucault is in response to an earlier post. One of his books I read had a single sentence that was nearly 100 words, and contained 3 separate ideas...ONE SENTENCE.

--A

[Wosbald]

+JMJ+

Marshall McLuhan, the Catholic thinker who predicted the internet, spent his last days with a Jesuit

Marshall McLuhan at New York University's Loeb Center, June 14, 1966 (AP Photo/John Lindsay)


Marshall McLuhan, the pop culture sage of the electronic world and a Catholic convert, spent the final days of his life with Frank Stroud, S.J. During those last days of 1980, they read, laughed, drank wine, smoked cigars and prayed together — a fitting end to a life shaped by faith and anchored in the Ignatian tradition.

During the height of his influence, McLuhan was the most public of intellectuals. He toured the United States and Canada, appeared on television and radio shows, chatted with John Lennon and Yoko Ono and was the subject of feature articles in magazines as varied as Esquire, Vogue and Harper’s. The New York Times ran 27 articles about him in 1967 alone.

The entertainment, media and academic worlds of his heyday had good reason to miss the Christian foundations of his theories, for there is evidence that McLuhan, sly rhetorician that he was, made subtle his religious sensibility. Yet it is telling that some of his earliest and most vocal defenders and explicators were Jesuit priests, intellectuals equally comfortable wading through esoteric theology as they were moving among the secular masses.

McLuhan’s Christian belief and worldview are no mere biographical footnote. They offered him pliable metaphors for the intersection of the material and the spiritual, engendered in him the confidence and determination of a religious adherent and compelled him to react to the rapidly changing electronic world around him. Any honest and thorough analysis of McLuhan’s paradigm-changing views must not merely begin with these religious considerations; it must also examine how his belief sustained the development and dissemination of these theories. McLuhan’s vocation was to understand how the environments created by media shape our perception of the world.

Bearing Witness

In 1967, John M. Culkin, then a Jesuit teaching at Fordham University, wrote an essay for the Saturday Review magazine that sought to make McLuhan’s ideas understandable to a mainstream audience. “McLuhan’s writings abound with aphorisms, insights, for-instances, and irrelevancies which float loosely around recurring themes,� the priest wrote. McLuhan, he noted, was an observer of current trends, not a creator of them: “[H]e is merely trying to describe what’s happening out there so that it can be dealt with intelligently.� After all, when “someone warns you of an oncoming truck, it’s frightfully impolite to accuse him of driving the thing.� McLuhan was bearing witness.

Culkin recruited McLuhan to Fordham. “Oracle? Genius? Carnival Pitchman?� — the front page headline of the Fordham Ram debated whether McLuhan, the school’s new $100,000 visiting professor, was worth his salary. The Jesuit university in the Bronx bet that McLuhan’s short tenure would be both prestigious and provocative. On Sept. 18, 1967, in front of the 178 students enrolled in Communication Arts 141, Father Culkin said it was “the age of McLuhan.� His students cradled copies of his books. Press at the event pined for interviews. The student writer of the article quipped that McLuhan was the “public relations coup of the year.�

Embarrassed by the fawning, McLuhan ambled through a 25-minute free associative debut lecture about television, attention spans and how “we do everything we can to hide from the present.� His mind traveled whatever routes it desired, and the audience — captive and captivated — followed. A year earlier, he had offered a pithy explanation of his rhetoric and pedagogy to The New York Times: “I don’t want them to believe what I say. I just want them to think.�

He could afford to be evasive. By that point, McLuhan was an international media star with a healthy sense of humor. During his opening lecture, he joked that the most Canadian thing about himself was how he mispronounced “either� and “process.� Afterward, one student concluded, “It was a good show. All the students were perplexed to some extent, but they’ll catch on.� Sadly, McLuhan’s health declined during that year, and Culkin himself compelled his friend to seek medical attention — leading to surgery to remove a brain tumor.

A Final Visitor

Roughly a decade later, a stroke would render McLuhan unable to read and write, and largely unable to speak. His mind and soul stirred, though, with the arrival of a past acquaintance — Frank Stroud, S.J. The two originally met in 1974, but had been out of touch until December 1980, when Stroud was invited by John Culkin to a film seminar in New York City. Also present was McLuhan’s daughter Teri, a filmmaker who told Stroud that he should “visit her father.� Stroud originally was going to wait until the semester break in January. Instead, “a God-given push� compelled him to travel to Canada in late December. He would be McLuhan’s final visitor.

Stroud would later note of their time together that “God literally lifted me up from Jersey City and planted me down in Wychwood Park Toronto to complete the Jesuit connection.� Stroud said Mass at the McLuhan home, and “from that moment on Marshall seemed not to want me to leave his side.� They walked together around Wychwood Park. They talked about the many letters and miscellaneous gifts that McLuhan received, including a cartoon sketched by Tom Wolfe. McLuhan listened as Stroud read him selections from articles and books. The last book McLuhan read in his life, or rather listened to, was Ignatius of Loyola, by Karl Rahner, S.J., an illustrated biography of the Jesuit founder.

On Dec. 30, Stroud again celebrated Mass — this time “using a bottle of fine Burgundy a colleague of McLuhan’s had brought back from France.� McLuhan and the priest had cigars and then went down to the basement, where McLuhan kept his television set. He had moved it there a few years earlier: “I did not want it invading my home.� The two watched the 11 o’clock news, then went back upstairs. Before Stroud left they hugged. McLuhan went to bed and was found dead the next morning.

Always more artist than scholar, more poet than academic, McLuhan would likely appreciate that his final act occurred as the year turned to its close. Those last days of the calendar year are often bittersweet: hope for the next year tied inextricably to the melancholy final hours of December; the great joy of Christmas followed by the protracted, almost metronomic waiting of New Year’s Eve. Even our best years never feel quite good enough.

A lover of hymns, perhaps McLuhan had gone to bed humming his favorite selection, “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory of the Coming of the Lord.� Hours earlier during Mass, Stroud had intoned the Nunc dimittis, the Song of Simeon. The priest had lifted his hands as if holding the Christ Child and said, “Lord, now you are letting your servant depart in peace, according to your word.� Simeon, now that he had seen the Savior of the World, finally could rest in peace.

[Wosbald]

+JMJ+

Don't skip to Catholicism's answers: First teach youth to ask philosophical questions [Opinion]

(Credit: Pixabay/Gerd Altmann)


As the American Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once quipped, "nothing is more absurd than the answer to a question that is not asked."

It has become common practice for Catholic secondary school religion curricula in the United States to begin with the life of Christ before exploring the universal human needs and questions that he claims to be the answer to. Is it any wonder that so many young people leave the faith behind once their natural inquisitiveness starts to rear its head?

For this reason, and others such as mass secularization and the influx of non-Catholic students attending Catholic high schools, Catholic educators need to teach young people to ask philosophical questions before urging them to accept our faith as the answer.

[…]

n my own experience, I've noticed how much high school students are more immediately receptive in my philosophy classes than they are in my religion classes, where they tend to come in with a kind of protective shield. Students light up upon finding out that a philosopher from as far back as 2,500 years ago asked the same questions that they find themselves asking today.

It's often the case that students who take my philosophy elective before taking my required religion classes are much more interested in learning about theology than the others. In philosophy, the soil of reason is tilled to receive the seeds of faith more openly.

I've also observed that students who come from devout families that discourage asking questions about their religion are often disposed to abandoning their faith altogether. One very intelligent and inquisitive student, who was raised with strict Catholic parents who recently immigrated to New Jersey from Latin America, was discouraged from asking questions, in part to protect her from losing her cultural traditions and moral values. Little did they realize that stifling her questions would have the reverse effect, discouraging her from delving deeper into her faith and cultural heritage.

But after studying philosophy, this student — and many others like her — found she was able to formulate coherent and decisive questions that enabled her to enter more deeply into the reasoning behind certain beliefs and practices. More importantly, philosophy fosters in students a sharper awareness of the intrinsic needs and questions in their own hearts that most religions claim to respond to.

Philosophy has also helped my Muslim and Hindu students explore their own traditions, while also enabling them to better appreciate what they learn in Catholic theology classes.

Further, I've seen students who didn't grow up with any religious background start becoming curious about God after studying questions about metaphysics, ultimate truth and life's meaning.

From a classical point of view, philosophy explores "natural" human questions, while theology explores the "supernatural" response to those questions revealed to us through Christ and the sacramental life of the church. As Aquinas understood well, God's grace builds on human nature, and our development of supernatural virtues like faith, hope and charity depend on the natural virtues of prudence, temperance, justice and fortitude.

The Scholastic method of theology that Aquinas developed engaged directly with "virtuous pagan" philosophers like Aristotle and Plato, whose vigorous use of reason enabled them to intuit greater truths that would soon be revealed by God. One may here think of Plato's "prophecy" of the truly just man, "God's equal," who would inevitably be "scourged and crucified," or of Paul's sermon in the Areopagus in front of the altar to the unknown god.

As distinct from more pessimistic modes of Protestant theology, Catholic theology acknowledges that the gift of reason was not totally destroyed by the Fall, and thus is not exclusive to those who have encountered Christ. Engaging philosophically with those who may not come to the same conclusion that Jesus is the son of God — but who share the same questions about truth, ethics and meaning — enables us to broaden our own sense of reason and to further develop our conscience. Thus the reason seminarians study at least two years of philosophy before moving on to study theology.

Jesus himself prioritized engaging the reason of those he encountered and fostering questions in them before revealing who he was. Think of when he asked John and Andrew what they were looking for, rather than starting off by telling them that he is the one they should be looking for, and why he asked Peter who he says that Jesus is, before revealing who he is.

The church, says Pope Francis, "is called to form consciences, not to replace them."

The Pharisees, who may have had all the "right" answers, were the object of Jesus' condemnation due to their refusal to make use of their consciences. Their understanding of laws and doctrines were totally disconnected from the questions, needs and desires at the depths of their hearts, thus rendering their answers — as correct as they may have been — flat and meaningless.

Studying philosophy can also serve to deepen student's general curiosity and desire to learn for learning's sake, making their experiences in other classes more engaging and meaningful. And the tools it affords students in terms of using logic and critical reasoning are essential in our politically divided culture where arguments are more often than not fueled by emotions and "groupthink."

Leaders in the church talk about how to keep young people in the fold amid growing waves of secularism. Unfortunately, most of this talk turns quickly into evangelizational models that look more like marketing schemes that aim to obtain a desired "result," rather than doing the actual work of forming young people's consciences and walking with them as companions on the journey of faith. Teaching young people to think philosophically is more conducive to the latter approach to evangelization.

Other methods, like the ones used within many classical Catholic high schools, are also worth considering. Take the Chesterton Schools Network, which, starting from students' freshman year, integrates study of philosophy alongside theology, "braided together" with other humanities courses in an "integrated curriculum."

It shouldn't be of any shock to educators and clerics that teaching young people what to believe rather than teaching them how to think about life and to arrive at the conclusions themselves usually has the reverse of the intended effect. While it may require us to deviate from methods we've grown accustomed to, it's time to, as Francis says, "open wide the doors" to the ways philosophy can help young people understand their faith more deeply.