Leading Theologian to Speak at Rice

Leading Theologian to Speak at Rice
BY PHILIP MONTGOMERY
Rice News Staff
March 26, 1998

Making sense of the relationships between individuals and God in a world where
daily life bears witness to both beauty and cruelty and freedom and entrapment
will be the topic of a lecture at Rice by a leading Catholic theologian.

David Tracy, a professor of theology at the University of Chicago and the author
of numerous books, will deliver the Burkitt Foundation Lecture on Christian
Thought at 7 p.m. April 6 in the Kyle Morrow Room of Fondren Library. His talk,
"Religious Fragments: The Spiritual Situation of Our Day," is sponsored
by the Department of Religious Studies and is free and open to the public.

"David Tracy is, according to many people, the leading living post-Vatican-II,
Catholic theologian," said Gerald McKenny, associate professor of religious
studies at Rice. "I think, in part, his stature is due to his ongoing effort
to make bridges between the Catholic tradition and various contemporary academic
and cultural trends that he finds important. I think he has done theology in
very interdisciplinary ways using insights from a lot of disciplines in order
to articulate the Catholic contemporary society. He has also articulated what
he thinks are certain cultural factors that condition how any religious tradition
is going to be received today."

Tracy is also the Andrew Thomas Greeley and Grace McNichols Greeley Distinguished
Service Professor of Roman Catholic Studies at the University of Chicago.

His book publications include "The Achievements of Bernard Lonergan"
(1970), "Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism in Theology" (1975),
"Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutica, Religion and Hope" (1987,
Harper and Row), "Dialogue with the Other" (1990), and "On Naming
the Present" (1995, Orbis Books).

He has also been the co-author, editor or co-editor of numerous other books
on a variety of topics such as medieval religious heritage, cosmology and theology,
the Holocaust, and the challenge of psychology to theology. In addition to his
published articles in scholarly journals, he has published in New Republic,
the New York Times Book Review, Commonweal and Christian Century.

"In contemporary theology there have been two options," said McKenny,
who is one of Tracy’s former students from the University of Chicago. "One
option tries to articulate the uniqueness of the Christian tradition. [A second
option gives] cultural and intellectual trends much more of a role in rearticulating
Christian beliefs and practices. In other words, the effort is to mediate between
Christianity and other cultural trends. David Tracy has been a leader in that
second school."

Tracy is trying to articulate the major trends of the day that have significance
for Christian faiths and how Christians should respond to those trends. The
two factors he has focused on are plurality and ambiguity. Plurality simply
means that scholars recognize that texts, such as the Bible, have multiple interpretations
based upon gender, race, ethnicity, culture and politics.

"Although he is coming out of the Catholic tradition, Tracy has found
himself at odds with some traditional Catholic understandings of the teaching
authority in the Catholic church," McKenny said.

Regarding ambiguity, Tracy has been influenced by post-Holocaust thinking,
McKenny said. Many cherished traditions have given rise to both beauty and evil.
For example, prior to the Civil War in the United States, the Bible was sometimes
used in the South to justify slavery, while in the Northern states, the same
book was used to argue against slavery.

"In the Christian tradition, Tracy is very aware that Christian texts,
both Biblical and others, have been the source of profound moral and religious
insights, but have also been used to justify anti-Semitism," McKenny said.

For more information about the lecture call the Department of Religious Studies
at (713) 737-5612.

For related information visit the following Web site:
Rice Department of Religious Studies: www.ruf.rice.edu/~religion/