A Postmodern Paradigm Shift? Ecumenism, the Second Vatican Council and the Sense of Tradition. A Never-Written Chapter of Contemporary Intellectual History (original) (raw)

Advance Access publication January 11, 2006 ARTICLE Theology in Modernity’s Wake

2016

When Jacques Derrida died I was called by a reporter who wanted to know what would succeed high theory and the triumvirate of race, gen-der, and class as the center of intellectual energy in the academy. I answered like a shot: religion. —Stanley Fish (2005) AS A CONSTRUCTIVE FEMINIST THEOLOGIAN whose work focuses on “the triumvirate ” and draws on “high theory ” including that of Jacques Derrida, this comment from Stanley Fish in a recent issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education caught my eye. I position my comments against that backdrop. We are said to have arrived at the end of moder-nity, a turn of the cosmic clock supposedly marked by such milestones as the death of the subject, the demise of metanarratives, and the loss of con-fidence in reason. Jacques Derrida, among other continental thinkers, is often touted as a harbinger of “postmodernity, ” one mark of which is (ironically, perhaps, given the supposed demise of metanarratives) pur-portedly the return of the religious. ...

The Confrontation between Religious and Secular Thought

2007

I the first thirty years after World War II (1945–1975), the Catholic and secular [laica] cultures in Italy lived in a regimen of separation. This does not mean that no relations occurred between the two sides. What was missing, however, was mutual acknowledgment, the conviction that the other side’s issues and theoretical proposals were meaningful and relevant. Secular culture tended to consider religion as a topic of confessional interest, and thus it excluded it from the issues worthy of discussion, whereas Catholic culture lived somewhat as if it were in a separate enclosure. This was mirrored also in the modes of circulation of culture because the important publishers and most well-known bookstores offer mainly secular products, whereas religious, philosophical, and theological themes are confined in a separate and marginal space. This situation is a legacy of Italian history. The country had been unified in 1870 with the capture of Rome, a move against the temporal power of th...

The Idea of an American Catholicity

Almost a thousand years of Papal peace had slipped into the mists of history with the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in the early 19 th century. Likewise, the "Pax Britannica" has similarly disappeared, and the "Pax Americana" is rapidly coming to an inconspicuous close upon the stage of a new, secular, global village of modernity. As these political unities have dissolved, so too have the ecclesiastical unities, which have, so often, been coterminous and codependent upon mere human political patronage, foundered upon the shoals of secular science and modern mores. Ideas of catholicity indeed, of Christendom itself, have become unrealistic, romantic excursions into nostalgic myths of medieval universalisms. This paper argues for The Church Idea as presented by William Reed Huntington, over 150 years ago.