BirthStrike Movement to Dissolve Next Week

Last updated on: February 13, 2023 at 8:38 am By Jack Hartjes

An article by The Guardian’s liberal columnist George Monbiot could have been written by any of the last several popes. It explains why a movement to limit births had a change of heart. BirthStrike was founded by women who want the world to focus on impending environmental collapse. Their attention-getting strategy was to announce their intention not to have children. Next week the group will dissolve itself. Founders Jessica Johannesson and Blythe Pepino explain that they had “underestimated the power... Read more

Suffering: No Why’s, No Theodicies, but a Crucified God Suffers with Us

Last updated on: July 15, 2020 at 7:09 am By Jack Hartjes

On Tracy’s Fragments, Chapter 4, Christianity and Suffering Suffering looms large in Tracy’s recent thought, so it’s disappointing that the chapter on “Christianity and Suffering” is the shortest in the book. This chapter also demonstrates a quality almost inevitable in a collection of essays written at different times in an author’s career. It repeats themes found elsewhere in the book without expanding on them much. Central realities of suffering Tracy lists five “central realities,” things we need to say about... Read more

Ancient Greek Tragedy, a Response to Horror and Suffering

Last updated on: October 28, 2021 at 11:45 am By Jack Hartjes

On David Tracy’s Fragments, Chapter Three Suffering and tragedy has been an important theme for David Tracy’s theology for a long time. It appears in many places in Fragments and in the titles of two chapters. The chapter presently under consideration intensifies the idea of suffering with the addition of “horror.” The Christian response waits for Chapter Four. In Chapter Three, “Responses to Horror and Suffering,” Tracy considers the human, pre- or extra-revelation responses to suffering and horror. He finds... Read more

The Infinite: Tracy Says a Concept Ancient Greeks Despised is Behind All Naming of God

Last updated on: October 28, 2021 at 11:26 am By Jack Hartjes

Part 4 on David Tracy’s Fragments: The Existential Situation of Our Time, Chapter Two Continued Modern Christians easily think of God as infinite – Infinite power, infinite love, limitless patient endurance. But it wasn’t always this way. Christianity grew from Jewish roots but quickly absorbed Greek ways of understanding their experience of God through Jesus. And for centuries before and after Jesus, Greek philosophers wanted nothing to do with the concept of infinity. But Tracy goes so far as to... Read more

Invisible Things and the Ultimate Infinite Invisible

Last updated on: October 28, 2021 at 11:13 am By Jack Hartjes

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

Religion, Non-Reductive and Saturated, Gains Respect in Post-Modern Academic World

Last updated on: October 28, 2021 at 10:55 am By Jack Hartjes

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