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Since the mid-1980s, the University of Dayton (founded by the Society of Mary) has bestowed the Marianist Award to a Catholic intellectual who, in Father James Heft's words, "has made a major contribution to the intellectual life." In Believing Scholars, Heft has published the Marianist lectures from 1996-2004.1 Recipients of the award were asked to "speak about their faith and how it had influenced their scholarship; and how their scholarship has influenced their faith." The ten Catholic intellectuals published here represent an interesting breadth of expertise, experience, and perspective.
Believing Scholars: Ten Catholic Intellectuals
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In his introduction, Heft suggests that the voices in this volume represent three major developments among Catholic intellectuals since Vatican II: how the Church has recognized that it not only needs to teach the world, but to learn from it as well; how Catholic scholars have increasingly brought their Catholic faith to bear in their scholarly work; and how these Catholic scholars have dispelled the myth of the academy as an "ivory tower," cut off from practical commitments to truth and the common good. This bit of editorial framing of an eclectic set of voices provides the reader with a helpful interpretive lens.
The collection provides some moments of evident contrast in both style and tone. Consider, for example, the pairing of Peruvian Gustavo Gutierrez (1997), who unpacks in a straightforward and accessible manner each of the terms in the well-known formula, "the preferential option for the poor," and University of Chicago theologian David Tracy, whose lecture the following year on the "forms of divine disclosure" reported on current trends in professional theology as informed and inspired by postmodern philosophic currents. Where Tracy speaks of "the turn to the Other" in Christian theology, Gutierrez focuses on the Old Testament passages that concern Jubilee and their commands to "be open-handed with poor brothers and sisters."
Another contrastive pair is seen in the cheeky liberal Catholicism of Margaret and Peter Steinfels, who shared the 2003 award, versus the gravitas of Avery Cardinal Dulles in his 2004 lecture. Peter Steinfels in his pugnacious defense of liberal Catholicism quips that "liberal Catholicism is simply papal teaching a hundred years too soon," while the cardinal in his lecture speaks of how dissent "must for any good Catholic be rare, reluctant, and respectful." Both sets of examples serve to highlight how communities are always defined in part by the conflicts they express. We are, in no small degree, what we argue about.
But beyond this evident difference in style and tone, suggestive moments in these lectures offer themes that provoke reflection. One salient theme might be described as ambivalence toward the modern situation. Several of the more philosophic and theological lectures ponder the Church's situation in the modern world. On the one hand there is the celebration of the Church's contribution to the modern world with its focus on human rights and human liberty; on the other is the lingering concern whether the modern (or postmodern) world can preserve these good gifts.
This theme figures prominently in the lectures given by Charles Taylor (1996) and Mary Ann Glendon (2001). Thus for Taylor, "in modern, secularist culture there are mingled together both authentic developments of the Gospel, of the Incarnational mode of life, and also a closing off to God which negates the Gospel." Glendon, in celebrating the Catholic contribution to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, nevertheless worries; the more "Western groups promote a top-down, homogenizing vision of human rights," she suggests, "the more credibility they add to the charge of Western cultural imperialism." In these two lectures, one confronts again the sober realization of what Weber called "the ethical irrationality of the world," and how messy the Church's best efforts in it can be.
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