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
Part 6 on Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire A few years back a Presbyterian pastor gave a sermon on thin places. I hadn’t heard that term before but have several times since. Thin places are places “where the distance between heaven and earth collapses and we’re able to catch glimpses of the divine, or the transcendent….” That’s how a New York Times article describes them. Travel brochures say there are a lot of thin places in Ireland and Scotland. ... Read more
One of the reasons I like national public radio is that it recognizes that religion is a part of America’s life and treats religious beliefs without ridicule or cynicism. Saturday it was about butterflies, the afterlife, and an experiment on what happens to a caterpillar’s memory in the pupa stage. Since it’s Easter time and we’re talking butterflies (actually moths in the experiment), the symbolism concerning life after death was just below the surface. The radio presenters didn’t hesitate to... Read more
People used to say, “I’m from Missouri, show me” — and you didn’t even have to be from Missouri. We still hear about the skeptical age that we’re supposedly in. When it comes to social media, however, gullible is more like it. Where is St. Thomas when we need him? In John’s Gospel Jesus appears to the disciples Easter Sunday evening. Thomas was not with them and refused to believe their story. A week later Jesus again appeared. Thomas was... Read more
A New Zealand parish priest has an interesting take on the Church’s liturgical response to the coronavirus pandemic. Father J. P. Grayland says our clerical bias is showing. What is the place of the baptized lay faithful, Father Grayland wonders, when the Church’s public liturgy can happen without lay people present? Grayland describes himself as “pastor of three parishes in a small rural diocese in a small, secular country.” A priest for 30 years, he has written books, including Catholics.... Read more
An Imaginative Economic Venture This is a strange economic time, this time of the covid-19 pandemic. Republicans who criticized Obama for spending hundreds of billions to pull the economy out of a recession are now spending trillions to accomplish the same thing. The super rich are coming under pressure to donate some of their billions to researching a corona cure and to charities combating economic devastation. Debt relief on the personal and national levels is a prominent discussion topic among... Read more
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