Thursday, February 01, 2007

My Contemporary Situation

Well, I'm sorry to say it, but I'm exhausted. I know I raved and bragged about the baby sleeping through the night, but it turned out to be a big cheap lie. He did sleep, about 2 or 3 nights, and then was back to screaming again. Thing is, the sucker weighs 15 lbs. There is absolutely no reason on earth or in heaven for him to eat his pudgy way through the night. So now, for many nights, we have lain awake, staring out the window at the cloudy, blue dark (as Aedan calls it) night sky, listening to him scream his guts out.

In other words, I'm tired. I'm short tempered. I can't think of anything interesting to write. I haven't, horrors of horrors, even been able to finish reading the features on Stand Firm without dozing off. On top of all this, I'm supposed to be reading reams of Bernard Lonergan, a Catholic Theologian of whom I had not heard before but am now hearing plenty. To put it in a nut shell, Lonergan, rather than seeing theology as an intersection between Tradition and the Contemporary Situation (that is us), first to disentangle the two, then to put them back together, instead puts all his stock in the theologian. As long as the theologian is 'reasonable, intelligent, reasoning and in love with God', that theologian will come up with good and true theology. Either way I think you end up in a ditch. Who can really trust the individual theologian to be sensible? And certainly, when you mix Tradition and Contemporary Situation together you can get any amount of Muck. God help us all. Neither of them deal with Matt's epistemological challenge to, God Helping Us, OVERCOME KANT. They haven't done it. Barth hasn't done. Nobody has done it! Rise up. Someone. And make it possible for us to know things as they really are in themselves. Until then, I will go and lie sleeplessly, knowing that the screaming down the hall, is, in fact, coming from a live, red, slightly cross eyed but mostly very cute baby. Goodnight.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I quite like 'blue dark' Lovely expression.

I don't think you can trust a theologian to be sensible any more than you can trust anyone to be sensible. Possibly less so, as the theologian thinks he is correct and actively tries to convince others. Who can say?

~R