THE HEARTHS OF SCRIPTURAL REASONING (original) (raw)

My deep thanks to the editors of this symposium, Jim Fodor and Bill Cavanaugh, whose journal always serves as a home for hearth-to-hearth theological engagement. And my deep thanks also to the authors of these extraordinary response essays. Over the years, we participants in Scriptural Reasoning (SR) have spoken of SR sessions as giving birth to events of reasoning that are unique to the time, place, and participants of each session. When meeting to reflect on the reasoning of SR, we appear to participate in an additional mode of reasoning: a meta-reasoning that asks, "What is SR reasoning?" and that answers with analyses whose matter is our memories of individual sessions and whose form is something we construct, then and there, out of elements of our various intellectual disciplines. These rich and multi-leveled review essays suggest another type of meta-reasoning: a continuing process of reflecting on what participants might call the transcendental conditions of our practices of SR reasoning or, alternatively, on how shared scriptural study may engender unique practices of reasoning. 1 In this essay, I shall both celebrate each individual review essay and glean from it elements of some practice of SR meta-reasoning. In the process, I assemble an overall map of metareasonings that I label the Hearth of Hearths (HH). This assembly remains a play of imagination, of no value unless and until these authors subsequently join the play. In short, this essay is an experiment in multi-layered reasoning. There are scriptural texts (layer 1), received within traditions of scriptural commentary (layer 2), stimulating different individual readings around the SR table (layer 3) that stimulate dynamic processes of group reasoning (layer 4), which processes stimulate many kinds of meta-reasoning among SR thinkers (5+ layers), 2 including those displayed in Religion Without Violence, as reconstructed by the reviewers (layer 6). Reflecting on the reviews (layer 7), I try to imagine a resting place among these levels of reasoning, as if it were a final source and arbiter of SR meta-reasonings: what I call a "hearth." 3