Part 3 on David Tracy’s Fragments, Chapter Two I’m returning to David Tracy and his new publication Fragments: The Existential Situation of Our Time. Two earlier posts on Fragments are here and here. In Chapter Two Tracy takes up two topics that most people associate with divinity–the invisible and the infinite. Questions on Tracy’s mind include: Do these concepts make sense, or are they just empty words when we apply them to God? Do these concepts apply to anything else... Read more
The dangerous use of analogy over protest marches People often resort to the literary technique of analogy when arguing about emotional issues. In fact, it’s unavoidable. Pure logic simply won’t do for the matters that are closest to the heart, like God, beauty, morality, politics and what we ought to hope for. To my elementary school students I taught what I had learned in college classes, namely, that these are all matters of opinion. I had learned wrong and... Read more
An on-the-spot reporter for Twin Cities WCCO TV thinks the country will look at Minneapolis and find an example of how to both protest and uphold the law. One can hope so. Last night Minnesotans demonstrated that there’s a big difference between protesters and rioters. After days of violent confrontation, Saturday and Sunday saw peaceful civil disobedience and well-organized, measured responses by police and national guard. I’m still waiting for clarity on the issue of outsiders vs. Minnesotans. In my... Read more
Do you sympathize with owners of looted stores? I do … but not too much. Friends and relatives are disputing back and forth on Facebook about the now-alleged murder and subsequent riots in Minneapolis. They include a son and daughter-in-law who live a mile from the site of the police killing. Others live far from my home state of Minnesota. Some express sympathy for the rioters and, of course, George Floyd and his family. They recall many other incidents of... Read more
Some tricky vocabulary in Tracy’s Fragments, Chapter One A philosophical dictionary or some background in phenomenology is useful in reading David Tracy’s Fragments. Like when he says, “It may well be, as several contemporary phenomenologists claim, that religion is the nonreductive saturated phenomenon par excellence.” (p. 20) It’s no secret that modern academic thought in general has not been particularly kind to religion. Tracy includes even some theological theories in that modern anti-religious, or better, anti-God sentiment. Much of the... Read more
On Fragments: The Existential Situation of Our Time, “Introduction” The first of David Tracy’s two new volumes of essays is about fragments and also a collection of fragments. As I begin this series of posts on Tracy’s latest published work, I have in mind a few key ideas. They are fragments, the other, and the infinite, topics among which Tracy’s more recent thoughts have wandered. At the moment I’m thinking mostly of fragments. Dangerous fragments I see three ways Tracy... Read more
Out This Year — Fragments: The Existential Situation of our Time and Filaments: Theological Profiles For a David Tracy fan, it’s been a long wait – 25 years since his last book. This year Chicago University Press published a two-volume collection of Tracy’s essays. Since his last book, On Naming the Present: God, Hermeneutics, and Church, the academic world has been waiting for the “God book” that Tracy has been promising. It doesn’t appear that these collections of essays are... Read more
Part 7 on Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire Economy, says William T. Cavanaugh in the final chapter of Being Consumed, is “the science that studies the allocation of resources under conditions of scarcity.” (p. 90) What happens when things, in fact, aren’t scarce? Say, in the United States, in an economy that produces everything in previously unheard of abundance? This economy continues to exist, and exist powerfully, by creating scarcity. This economy takes advantage of something philosophers have known... Read more
Common Prayer for Ordinary Radicals, in its May 3 entry, tells about one who was teacher, civil rights activist, and “grandmother of the civil rights movement.” I’m continuing my “Ordinary Radicals” series with Septima Poinsette Clark. Biography.com, Stanford’s King Institute, State University, and Wikipedia are my other sources. Septima Poinsette was born in Charleston, South Carolina in 1898. Her father, Peter Poinsette, had been a slave on the Poinsette farm. As house servant, he took children to and from school. After slavery... Read more
Stories from the Magazine of the Catholic University of America My copy of “Catholic,” the Magazine of The Catholic University of America arrived. This spring issue had a theme, and I found much more to read than usual. The theme was immigrants in the U.S. and university and student activism in that area. University president John Garvey’s lead-off essay told me something I never would have guessed. The first DREAM Act, in 2001, was introduced in Congress by Utah Republican... Read more
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