Healing Theological Fractures
Readers in Theology would have come across the name and works of the Australian theologian Professor Tracey Rowland, who is currently the John Paul II Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame Australia. Rowland’s book, Culture and the Thomist Tradition, has been included in the Radical Orthodoxy anthology of theological texts published by Routledge. In 2014, She was also appointed by Pope Francis to be part of the International Theological Commission.
I had the privilege of having Prof. Rowland as one of my supervisors during my doctoral years and, now that my workplace, Vianney College has now become a campus of the Catholic Institute of Sydney, which is in turn aligned to the University of Notre Dame Australia, we are now colleagues (even if somewhat at a remove).
Some time ago, I also received the kind invitation by Prof. Rowland and my colleague at CIS, Dr Peter MacGregor, to make a contribution to a text they were editing.
The volume, Healing Fractures in Contemporary Theology, consists of essays which looks at specific areas which, over the decades, have become construed as being separate from the theological task. In some circles, these areas have even been construed to be at odds with the theological task entirely.
The areas covered in this volume include, just to name a few, spirituality (covered by Peter MacGregor), philosophy (by Stephen Hackett and DC Schindler), ethics (by Paul Morrissey), liturgy (by David Fagerberg), preaching and apologetics (by James Baxter).
Regular readers might have picked up my dabbling in social theory, so it should not come as a surprise that I was invited to make a contribution in the area of social theory, and that chapter looked at the borders between these two areas of study, the terms by which these areas are crossed, and also the limits of each respective discipline. The key, I argued, in delineating the borders between theology and social theory, and discerning when it is a good time to cross these borders, lay in staying true to the task of engaging reality in all its dimensions.
In addition to this, the volume has also looked at fractures between the people who are engaged in the theological task. These include the divides between “Gen-X” Catholics and their millenial counterparts (by Helenka Mannering), and theologians and the Church’s magisterium (by Nigel Zimmermann).
I am pleased to say that Healing Fractures in Contemporary Theology was published earlier this year by Wipf & Stock and is now available wherever books are sold.
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