Introduction: Commemorating Fides et ratio
Fall 2023
Commemorating Fides et ratio
The Sacramental Character of Truth
Rudy A. te Velde“In the self-giving of truth, truth retains a transcendence in relation to reason, not because it remains irrational but because truth here has the character of personhood, that is, it presents itself in its own light and makes itself known in a personal relationship.”
Philosophizing in Mary: The Test Case of Anselm’s Argument
Michaël Bauwens“Can we not indeed say that ‘we can truly know’ God because Mary has contingently brought him forth through her own body, within the order of creation, in a way that is epistemically vastly superior to (though perfectly compatible and ultimately identical with) the god of the philosophers as enabled by the old metaphysics?”
With What Must We Begin?
Chad Engelland“Denying nature denies the portals of one’s own flesh, leaving one’s understanding without a hold on reality; it severs the relation of things and affectivity, and thereby it severs the bond that invests our words with the weight of meaning.”
The Delivering Word: Dialogue as Coauthorship of Reality
Erik van Versendaal“The embodied act of thinking together in the differentiated communion that is the dialogical exchange allows, then, for the complete exposition of what things are, and, in that sense, it is here that the truth belongs.”
A Modern Genealogy of the Metaphysics of Information
Marco Stango“[T]he ultimate outcome of the project of mastering nature is not simply to humanize the world but more deeply to remove any reference to transcendence from the horizon of history.”
On Psalm 45
Robert Spaemann“God is no undifferentiated, self-satisfied unity, but rather an event, an eternal celebration of emergence from another and of loving unification of nonidenticals, a wedding.”
Retrieving the Tradition
The Latent Resources in St. Augustine’s Thought
Maurice Blondel“[T]rue doctrines are never embalmed, like mummies, in the past, and, wherever there is a plenitude of Christian spirit, oppositions are only so many stimulations to a more perfect knowledge of the one truth, ever ancient and ever new.”