Communio Circle of the Diocese of Hamilton

Introduction: The transformation of stones
In the past few postings, I have been approaching the theology of nature and grace through Anglicans: John Milbank first, who explicitly outlines contemporary theology’s indebtedness to Catholicism; then Rowan Williams, a wonderful expositor of the nature-grace question with reference, in part, to the aesthetics of Jacques Maritain; and thirdly, C.S. Lewis, with his gently insistent Thomism. I’d like now to take stock of some of the theological principles that it is difficult but helpful to hold together to achieve a working understanding of the nature-grace question. Like juggling or, as I’ll discuss below, like building an arch, getting a sense of the nature-grace question has an “all-or-nothing” feel to it and seems to require a “knack.” It can be off-putting if one feels “uninitiated.” One can wonder if it’s worth the bother, like being able to impress nieces and nephews at their birthday parties. I obviously think it is. Through a working understanding of the nature-grace question lie approaches to cultural apologetics, including possible responses to the initiative “The Courtyard of the Gentiles.” Continue reading →

In a posting of several months ago (“Romantic Orthodoxy, Militant Atheism, and a Question of Style,” December 27, 2010), I suggested that Rowan Williams models an attractive style of Christian engagement of secular culture. Here I would like to flesh out that claim by outlining three simple but powerful principles that animate the Archbishop of Canterbury’s recent writings in the areas of literature, art, and culture. These commitments in turn reveal a rich, though subtle, theology of nature and grace informing his approach. Williams could be as powerful a resource for intelligent engagement of the arts as C.S. Lewis once was and it’s important that culturally engaged Christians avail themselves of such help. Continue reading →

Introduction
Any Christian who aspires to be a student faces two great temptations: the belief that their studies must “add up” to something or that their creative power, either to redescribe or to expose and “deconstruct,” is absolute. Often these two go together! C.S. Lewis’s spirited defence of the intellectual life in his address “Learning in War-Time” provides a contrasting vision. Many Christians have found in it a source of tremendous joy and freedom. The English don wrote as an “ordinary layman of the Church of England.” Many of his readers identify with him as a member of a Reformation church and as someone interested in the recovery of classical or “mere” Christianity from that perspective. Yet Lewis’s own outlook is very broad as concerns reformational commitments; his vision in this essay of the intellectual life for the Christian is attractive in no small measure because he refuses to make distinctions along reformational party lines. Rather, he distinguishes between classical Christianity and the spirit of modernity. In this essay readers can thrill to an intellectual and cultural outlook rooted in an ancient commonplace and given Christian expression in the high Middle Ages. The resources of the Christian tradition held in common give contemporary Christians the rationale one sometimes needs to pursue the intellectual life without distraction. They point one to practices in which we resonate with the life-giving joy of a universe sustained by a Word from God, free likewise from the bonds of grim utility and the weightlessness of the arbitrary imposition of creative will. Continue reading →

An ecumenical address
for Huron University College and
St. Peter’s Seminary, London, Ontario

Introduction
Anyone interested in engaging contemporary culture for the sake of advancing a timely Christian apologetic, as you undoubtedly are, has for some time had to wrestle with postmodernism. This very broad movement covers a philosophical outlook and cultural attitude that generally implies an attack on rationalism and humanism. As such, postmodernism has done a lot of good in the world. It has helped Christians and non-Christians alike to appreciate the limitations of the various systems of thought put in place to explain reality without remainder.

More recently, the anti-humanist edge to postmodernism has dulled. This change is one sign that we have moved on to the next thing, post-postmodernism or what you will. For instance, already in the 1990s the American pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty called the French deconstructionist Jacques Derrida a humanist. A few years later, the authors of an influential cultural studies book called Empire (2000) strove to rehabilitate Nietzschean thinker Michel Foucault as a humanist, though they had to ask the following question:

How is it possible that the author who worked so hard to convince us of the death of Man, the thinker who carried the banner of anti-humanism throughout his career, would in the end champion these central tenets of the humanist tradition? (Hardt and Negri 91)
Continue reading →