Filaments theological profiles

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Ancients, medievals, moderns. Augustine our contemporary : The overdetermined, incomprehensible self ; Augustine's Christomorphic theocentrism ; Trinitarian theology and spirituality : Retrieving William of St. Thierry for contemporary theology ; Martin Luther's Deus theologicus ; Michelangelo and the Catholic analogical imagination --Mentors. Reinhold Niebuhr : God's realist ; "All is grace" : Karl Rahner, a rooted radical ; Paul Tillich and contemporary theology : The method of correlation ; Bernard Lonergan and the return of ancient practice in philosophy and theology -- Conversation partners. Fragments of synthesis : the hopeful paradox of Louis Dupré's modernity ; The strength of reason : Franklin Gamwell's philosophical theology and moral theory ; Lindbeck's new program for theology : a critical reflection ; Jean-Luc Marion : phenomenology, hermeneutics, theology -- Prophetic thought. Feminist theology : the unexampled challenge ; Arthur Cohen : the Holocaust as the tremendum ; Gustavo Gutiérrez and the Christian option for the poor ; James Cone and African American thought : a discovery of fragments -- Seekers of the good. Simone Weil and the impossible : A radical view of religion and culture ; Simone Weil : The mask, the person ; Iris Murdoch and the many faces of Platonism ; T. S. Eliot as religious thinker : Four Quartets.

"Long a vital fixture in the University of Chicago's intellectual community, David Tracy (b. 1939) is also widely considered the most important Catholic theologian in North America. He is known for his work on the pluralistic context of theology and his embrace of ambiguity as a necessary and enriching facet of religious life. Tracy's work is unusual for its disciplinary breadth, drawing on science, literature, the arts, Continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, and non-Western religious traditions. This second volume of his "Selected Essays" is devoted to profiles of significant theologians, philosophers, and religious thinkers. The first volume (already transmitted) gathers Tracy's most important essays on broad theological questions. The title of volume 2 refers to Walt Whitman's "filaments," which are thrown out from the speaking self to others (ancient, medieval, modem, and contemporary) in order to "catch somewhere, O my soul." Tracy's essays on these individual interlocutors are arranged in rough chronological order from ancient theology (Augustine) through medieval (William of St. Thierry) to early modem (Martin Luther) to modem and contemporary (Bernard Lonergan, Karl Rahner, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, et al.). Taken together, these essays can be understood as a partial initiation into a history of Christian theology, defined by Tracy's key virtues of plurality and ambiguity. These two volumes of essays--Tracy's first books in over twenty years-will be greeted as a major event for Catholic theology and religious studies more generally"--