I'm sad to hear this! I used his work in my own dissertation, and as you know, I relied heavily on your book on his thought to help me get my head around his opus.
Thank you for this tribute. It does capture David’s personality. As a student of his in the 1980’s I keep thinking back to how genuinely funny he could be — in my doctoral exams he stated “I just found it so fascinating that you could come to this interpretation of Rahner that is the opposite of what most scholars have argued. I’m not saying you are wrong but it is truly fascinating.” To which I responded “I’m really not wedded to that interpretation.” With a wonderful twinkle in his eye David said “how very wise.” I did pass the exams!
Thank you, Stephen, for this touching memorial. I had the honor of being a student of his in the ‘80s, and he was on my committee for a dissertation on Schleiermacher and Spinoza; later, I was honored to count him as a friend (along with hundreds or thousands of others because of his generosity, both personal and professional); and we were so honored when he gave the Costan Lecture in Early Christianity here at Georgetown University. He was indeed a ‘beautiful soul’: so good, so generous, so committed to contemplation (and practice) of the true and the good. Your book was wonderfully illuminating in providing an overview of his thought as it dug into the intricacies. I am filled with gratitude for his life and scholarship. He embodied the spirit of Vatican II.
“May the angels lead him into paradise; may the martyrs receive him at his arrival and lead him to the holy city Jerusalem. May choirs of angels receive him and with Lazarus, once (a) poor (man), may he have eternal rest."
Steve, Thanks for this wonderful tribute as well as the information about new works. I just now remember that Tracy bought me lunch when he came to Rome for a conference in my student days. His work was always very stimulating and far reaching "as you know" so well. :)
In the seminary, I had to study David Tracy, and learned a lot about him from one of my professors who was his student. I too heard what a generous and kind man he was, but I am going to be critical of his theology. In many ways, he was the Kamala Harris of theological scholarship with the caveat that he was infinitely brighter and more creative than the presidential candidate. Much of his book The Analogical Imagination, is a word salad, almost totally incomprehensible to people, and indeed, to most scholars. One might conclude that I was simply not equipped enough to understand what he was saying, and that could very well be true. But it was also the opinion of most of those I dealt with. That does not mean his ideas were poor or unresearched or badly reasoned. In fact, he may have been one of the most brilliant minds theology has seen since Lonergan and Rahner. But if nobody can understand, you, your influence will be narrow and not very influential. He seemed unable to translate his ideas into words that could be understood by people who would really like to know what he was trying to say. There are some who did understand him, but I’m afraid that when you can’t translate your ideas into ordinary language your ideas are not going to live forever. In all honesty, I do not think his work will stand the test of time. Nor do I think he will ever be accepted as a Catholic theologian, and perhaps he didn’t want to be, but again if you cannot dialogue with the Catholic Church, your ideas will simply not be deemed worthy of standing alongside Aquinas, Ligouri, Rahner, or Ratzinger, to name a few of the greats. May he be blessed with eternal life and rest in peace. May God look lovingly upon him and give him a or full immortality with his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
I would affirm what you say about him being difficult at times to read, and that does come up in the Gibson profile I mention in the post. I don't think Analogical Imagination is a word salad, though, and it is in fact a fairly widely cited and engaged text (certainly his best known). His discussion of Academy, Society, and Church was an important frame for thinking about theology as a public discipline, and that framing continues to show up fairly widely in theology (and it public writing on the Church). It's not an easy text, sure, but I would disagree with you here.
The longer question - will his work stand the test of time - I have no idea. None of us can today.
I guess I'm a little unclear if you have a substantive critique of his thought or if it's just the readability question. I'm not sure I'd hold up Lonergan or Rahner as comprehensible to most people, for example. I'm also unclear on questioning whether "he will be accepted as a Catholic theologian" - this certainly wasn't a question for him, and I'm not sure who it is a question for.
What may have been word salad to me long ago is no longer so. I picked these words at random from AI just now and they raise me up:
"In authentic Christian self-understanding, we are commanded because we are first enabled and empowered. We are gifted, in creation and redemption, in world and in church, by a grace that is radical and universal. That grace does not wait upon our designs. It invites and empowers us to decision, As a single one, each theologian finally must decide on her or his own.But if that decision is not to be merely arbitrary, if its consequences are not to encourage further moves to privateness, the drive to authentically public discourse on the part of theologians must be encouraged." Analogical Imagination, p. 30
I am not a professional theologian, but I am grateful that David Tracy was the generous mentor of so many who are so badly needed in today's Catholic Church.
I think you make my point. For most people to understand this quote, you will have to re-translate it into ordinary English. Only in that way will most people figure out why his thought meant so much to you.
I understand your point, Monsignor, but let me ask you a question: you didn't understand a passage like that when you were a seminarian, but do you understand it now? You notice that the people responding to Stephen's post understand it. If you and I understand it, what makes you think many more people do not? I think you are underestimating the capacities of many people in the Church. Do theologians have to be understood by everyone to have lasting influence?
You misunderstand me. I comprehended the quote back then and now despite the fact that Tracy’s book, “the analogical imagination”, is over the top compared even to Rahner’s penchant for obscuring the clarity of his own ideas. It’s just that Tracy‘s use of language is far more difficult than it needs to be and it is truly a brain drain to have to wiffle through the word salad, as I call it, in order to understand what he’s saying. If his ideas are that difficult to express in communicable language, and I truly believe they are, many people are simply not going to make the effort to understand what he’s trying to say. Aquinas, Newman, Ratzinger, all their works are quite easy to read and understand. They undertook scholarly efforts at the same level or even above and beyond what David Tracy did and remained intelligible to the average educated reader. Was it really that difficult for Tracy to do the same?
Early in Analogical Imagination, he notes that all theology is directed to one of three different publics: the academy, the culture, or the church. And each public has its own kind of discourse, rules of engagement, terminology, etc., and what might be adequate for one of them is not adequate for another. Tracy's work is decidedly aimed at the public of the academy, and so it is not a limitation that it doesn't resonate in ecclesial chambers. Additionally, we have so rarely had theologians who can be in productive conversation with secular thinkers like Derrida. This was his great gift, and why he was such a gift to the church.
By choosing the academy and only the Academy, I believe he made a dreadful mistake. Why? Because the academy is the elite, a closed system that when left by itself, simply promotes itself, encourages itself, and pridefully thinks it has the answer to anything outside of its domain. No one, as far as I know, and if I’m wrong, perhaps you can enlighten me, has bothered to translate his theory to practically apply to the culture or to the church. His books sit on library shelves, virtual or physical, and are mainly the playground of those who are doing similar inscrutable research into topics that make absolutely no difference to ordinary human beings. The love of the Academy, which I think gave rise to the moniker “living in ivory Towers,” gave us liberal Protestantism, which has thoroughly destroyed mainline Protestant churches and driven evangelical Protestantism into an anti-intellectual stance. When I was in graduate school and doing my own research, I vigorously fought that strand of intellectual elitism, because I believed then as I believe now that it would lead to the destruction of Catholicism. Now I may be wrong on all of this, But can you or anyone name one practical effect or improvement that Tracy‘s work has given to Catholicism or Christianity as a whole. If there is one, I’ve never heard of it. Perhaps instead of calling this intellectual elitism it would be better to call it intellectual Gnosticism. Ideas that exist simply in the realm of ideas with no real reference to lived experience, and are content to stay there, are really just a new form of the gnostic heresy. I think the reason that David Tracy hasn’t gotten into more trouble in this area is because his verbiage is so inscrutable and his thoughts so fluid that most Catholic scholars don’t feel the need to really study him in depth not because they do not understand him but because they don’t see his theories influencing modern Catholicism. They see little danger of ordinary faith-filled people being influenced by his thought or his views having much weight in the realm of Catholic experience. Few people, a handful at most, really care if anyone can dialogue with Derrida. You know this to be true. And if Tracy was truly able to dialogue so well with secular thinkers, what is the actual result of that which will make the world a better and more beautiful place? Pope St. John Paul the Great, himself a noted philosopher as well as Pope Benedict, himself a profound theologian, knew Derrida and others of his secular ilk well. They were profoundly horrified and saddened at the nihilism such secular thinkers gifted to the Western world. My friend Bishop Barron this morning wrote a very nice tribute to David who was his former professor. Bishop Barron is himself a very good philosopher, and I know that he is so much better equipped to understand and appreciate what David Tracy was trying to do so I do not want my criticism to be an overarching condemnation. Instead, it stands as an outpouring of my frustration with what has ended up happening to Tracy‘s thought instead of what could have been. In a paraphrase of Galadriel’s words to Frodo in Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings,” I believe his words and theories“will diminish and go into the West.”
Your reference here to Bishop Barron I think is helpful, but it maybe adds to my confusion about your position. He says specifically "I have often said that I received a good deal of my theological and philosophical education through reading the sparkling footnotes of Tracy’s magisterial books. Formed in Rome as a young priest by the great Bernard Lonergan, Tracy became a touchstone for many aspiring theologians of my generation."
Does this not suggest that Tracy might actually have been an influence on many Catholic thinkers of the last forty years? That they might have found their engagement with him fruitful?
Moreover, is there no value in figures whose work is primarily in the academy? Doesn't their work in the academy also mean students who learn from their work and find their own ways to make it useful and applied? Is not Bishop Barron an example of that? (I say primarily in the academy here because, while it's not the best known feature of Tracy, he was also a well-regarded homilist who preached often at St. Thomas the Apostle in Hyde Park.)
Again, it's reasonable to find his writing obscure or difficult, and it's reasonable to critique him for that. It's also reasonable to highlight specific, substantive disagreements with positions he held, although I have not seen you do that here. But it seems like there is more going on for you, and I'm not clear on what that is.
Beyond all that, what confuses me the most is I cannot for the life of me figure out why you saw a post that is part obituary, part remembrance of someone others thought highly of as the proper venue to vent about how much you hated the deceased's writing. Did you respond to Bishop Barron's post with similar qualms about his theology? I'd appreciate a screenshot of that if so. Is this something you occasionally work into preaching at funeral masses - the things you did not like about the deceased?
I owe you an apology for misinterpreting the purpose of your post when I first saw it it seemed to be an announcement of a famous theologian‘s death, and as such people were commenting about that. In the beginning, I did not realize that it was really a tribute post to him, and for that I am truly sorry. When I saw it, it simply refreshed my memory of his contribution to what I would call the deconstruction of Catholic theology. You have to remember that he came on the scene when a new wave of seminarians were entering graduate school. My class was the first to publicly ask the question of why we were throwing the baby out with the bathwater when it came to Catholic theology. This was a time when Joseph Ratzinger was ridiculed in the halls of the Academy as outdated outmoded and irrelevant. Many of us thought that was ridiculous, particularly since he was understandable. He had no difficulty in putting great and deep thoughts into perfectly understandable language. And so, yes, I was one of the ones who viewed David Tracy with contempt because I saw him as doing a grave disservice to Catholic theology. I felt he was on the forefront of a movement away from doctrine into abstract theory with no perceivable rootedness in real human experience. Now I’m sure you’re going to disagree with me on that and I understand that. I’m trying to explain to you what my feelings were for his work at the time and please note this has nothing to do with his personality which as I’ve said before seems to be really quite wonderful and caring. But I only knew him through his work and I think my critique of him has remained valid through these years. It is good that he has a great supporter like you who will help to keep his work alive because I see his star fading and I do not think it will rise again. At Catholic University, which I attended with Bishop Barron, Lonergan was still somewhat relevant, although even the professors who taught his ideas to us, admitted that he was not as relevant as he once was. Bishop Barron is a philosopher and loves ideas and just the process of thinking in philosophical terms gives him a great deal of enjoyment. I think his gift, and it’s a gift that David Tracy did not have, is that Bishop Barron can take those immensely complicated ideas and thoughts And translate into evangelical ways that bring people closer to God. There is absolutely no problem and understanding that Bishop Barron, with his creative and penetrating mind, still remains an extremely orthodox Catholic thinker.That is why I have the highest praise for the Bishop. I don’t know if that helps but I’m sure my explanation has probably hurt you even more than I did before and so again I apologize for that. If my comments are deemed inappropriate, please feel free to delete them. I will understand.
Monsignor, I'm asking both you and Stephen for a favor here: would you please read Stephen Okey's 2018 book A Theology of Conversation: An Introduction to David Tracy. Then, if Stephen agrees, I think we could have a conversation about the value of Tracy's work using the language that Stephen uses. For example, we could say what each of us as Christians believe our relation to the world to be. In my diocese at the moment that question causes a very painful polarity. It is not a purely academic matter. See what I mean?
I'm sad to hear this! I used his work in my own dissertation, and as you know, I relied heavily on your book on his thought to help me get my head around his opus.
May he rest in peace.
Thank you for this tribute. It does capture David’s personality. As a student of his in the 1980’s I keep thinking back to how genuinely funny he could be — in my doctoral exams he stated “I just found it so fascinating that you could come to this interpretation of Rahner that is the opposite of what most scholars have argued. I’m not saying you are wrong but it is truly fascinating.” To which I responded “I’m really not wedded to that interpretation.” With a wonderful twinkle in his eye David said “how very wise.” I did pass the exams!
Lovely reflections on a brilliant theologian, Steve! You captured his humanity delightfully! Thank you!
Thank you for this memorial tribute.
Thank you, Stephen, for this touching memorial. I had the honor of being a student of his in the ‘80s, and he was on my committee for a dissertation on Schleiermacher and Spinoza; later, I was honored to count him as a friend (along with hundreds or thousands of others because of his generosity, both personal and professional); and we were so honored when he gave the Costan Lecture in Early Christianity here at Georgetown University. He was indeed a ‘beautiful soul’: so good, so generous, so committed to contemplation (and practice) of the true and the good. Your book was wonderfully illuminating in providing an overview of his thought as it dug into the intricacies. I am filled with gratitude for his life and scholarship. He embodied the spirit of Vatican II.
“May the angels lead him into paradise; may the martyrs receive him at his arrival and lead him to the holy city Jerusalem. May choirs of angels receive him and with Lazarus, once (a) poor (man), may he have eternal rest."
As a student at CTU I loved his Sunday Mass and Sermons. R.I.P.
MEMORY ETERNAL! 🕯️
Steve, Thanks for this wonderful tribute as well as the information about new works. I just now remember that Tracy bought me lunch when he came to Rome for a conference in my student days. His work was always very stimulating and far reaching "as you know" so well. :)
Thanks for this post, Stephen. How fortunate we all are to have had him among us and to have him now with us in glory.
In the seminary, I had to study David Tracy, and learned a lot about him from one of my professors who was his student. I too heard what a generous and kind man he was, but I am going to be critical of his theology. In many ways, he was the Kamala Harris of theological scholarship with the caveat that he was infinitely brighter and more creative than the presidential candidate. Much of his book The Analogical Imagination, is a word salad, almost totally incomprehensible to people, and indeed, to most scholars. One might conclude that I was simply not equipped enough to understand what he was saying, and that could very well be true. But it was also the opinion of most of those I dealt with. That does not mean his ideas were poor or unresearched or badly reasoned. In fact, he may have been one of the most brilliant minds theology has seen since Lonergan and Rahner. But if nobody can understand, you, your influence will be narrow and not very influential. He seemed unable to translate his ideas into words that could be understood by people who would really like to know what he was trying to say. There are some who did understand him, but I’m afraid that when you can’t translate your ideas into ordinary language your ideas are not going to live forever. In all honesty, I do not think his work will stand the test of time. Nor do I think he will ever be accepted as a Catholic theologian, and perhaps he didn’t want to be, but again if you cannot dialogue with the Catholic Church, your ideas will simply not be deemed worthy of standing alongside Aquinas, Ligouri, Rahner, or Ratzinger, to name a few of the greats. May he be blessed with eternal life and rest in peace. May God look lovingly upon him and give him a or full immortality with his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
I would affirm what you say about him being difficult at times to read, and that does come up in the Gibson profile I mention in the post. I don't think Analogical Imagination is a word salad, though, and it is in fact a fairly widely cited and engaged text (certainly his best known). His discussion of Academy, Society, and Church was an important frame for thinking about theology as a public discipline, and that framing continues to show up fairly widely in theology (and it public writing on the Church). It's not an easy text, sure, but I would disagree with you here.
The longer question - will his work stand the test of time - I have no idea. None of us can today.
I guess I'm a little unclear if you have a substantive critique of his thought or if it's just the readability question. I'm not sure I'd hold up Lonergan or Rahner as comprehensible to most people, for example. I'm also unclear on questioning whether "he will be accepted as a Catholic theologian" - this certainly wasn't a question for him, and I'm not sure who it is a question for.
What may have been word salad to me long ago is no longer so. I picked these words at random from AI just now and they raise me up:
"In authentic Christian self-understanding, we are commanded because we are first enabled and empowered. We are gifted, in creation and redemption, in world and in church, by a grace that is radical and universal. That grace does not wait upon our designs. It invites and empowers us to decision, As a single one, each theologian finally must decide on her or his own.But if that decision is not to be merely arbitrary, if its consequences are not to encourage further moves to privateness, the drive to authentically public discourse on the part of theologians must be encouraged." Analogical Imagination, p. 30
I am not a professional theologian, but I am grateful that David Tracy was the generous mentor of so many who are so badly needed in today's Catholic Church.
I think you make my point. For most people to understand this quote, you will have to re-translate it into ordinary English. Only in that way will most people figure out why his thought meant so much to you.
I understand your point, Monsignor, but let me ask you a question: you didn't understand a passage like that when you were a seminarian, but do you understand it now? You notice that the people responding to Stephen's post understand it. If you and I understand it, what makes you think many more people do not? I think you are underestimating the capacities of many people in the Church. Do theologians have to be understood by everyone to have lasting influence?
You misunderstand me. I comprehended the quote back then and now despite the fact that Tracy’s book, “the analogical imagination”, is over the top compared even to Rahner’s penchant for obscuring the clarity of his own ideas. It’s just that Tracy‘s use of language is far more difficult than it needs to be and it is truly a brain drain to have to wiffle through the word salad, as I call it, in order to understand what he’s saying. If his ideas are that difficult to express in communicable language, and I truly believe they are, many people are simply not going to make the effort to understand what he’s trying to say. Aquinas, Newman, Ratzinger, all their works are quite easy to read and understand. They undertook scholarly efforts at the same level or even above and beyond what David Tracy did and remained intelligible to the average educated reader. Was it really that difficult for Tracy to do the same?
Early in Analogical Imagination, he notes that all theology is directed to one of three different publics: the academy, the culture, or the church. And each public has its own kind of discourse, rules of engagement, terminology, etc., and what might be adequate for one of them is not adequate for another. Tracy's work is decidedly aimed at the public of the academy, and so it is not a limitation that it doesn't resonate in ecclesial chambers. Additionally, we have so rarely had theologians who can be in productive conversation with secular thinkers like Derrida. This was his great gift, and why he was such a gift to the church.
By choosing the academy and only the Academy, I believe he made a dreadful mistake. Why? Because the academy is the elite, a closed system that when left by itself, simply promotes itself, encourages itself, and pridefully thinks it has the answer to anything outside of its domain. No one, as far as I know, and if I’m wrong, perhaps you can enlighten me, has bothered to translate his theory to practically apply to the culture or to the church. His books sit on library shelves, virtual or physical, and are mainly the playground of those who are doing similar inscrutable research into topics that make absolutely no difference to ordinary human beings. The love of the Academy, which I think gave rise to the moniker “living in ivory Towers,” gave us liberal Protestantism, which has thoroughly destroyed mainline Protestant churches and driven evangelical Protestantism into an anti-intellectual stance. When I was in graduate school and doing my own research, I vigorously fought that strand of intellectual elitism, because I believed then as I believe now that it would lead to the destruction of Catholicism. Now I may be wrong on all of this, But can you or anyone name one practical effect or improvement that Tracy‘s work has given to Catholicism or Christianity as a whole. If there is one, I’ve never heard of it. Perhaps instead of calling this intellectual elitism it would be better to call it intellectual Gnosticism. Ideas that exist simply in the realm of ideas with no real reference to lived experience, and are content to stay there, are really just a new form of the gnostic heresy. I think the reason that David Tracy hasn’t gotten into more trouble in this area is because his verbiage is so inscrutable and his thoughts so fluid that most Catholic scholars don’t feel the need to really study him in depth not because they do not understand him but because they don’t see his theories influencing modern Catholicism. They see little danger of ordinary faith-filled people being influenced by his thought or his views having much weight in the realm of Catholic experience. Few people, a handful at most, really care if anyone can dialogue with Derrida. You know this to be true. And if Tracy was truly able to dialogue so well with secular thinkers, what is the actual result of that which will make the world a better and more beautiful place? Pope St. John Paul the Great, himself a noted philosopher as well as Pope Benedict, himself a profound theologian, knew Derrida and others of his secular ilk well. They were profoundly horrified and saddened at the nihilism such secular thinkers gifted to the Western world. My friend Bishop Barron this morning wrote a very nice tribute to David who was his former professor. Bishop Barron is himself a very good philosopher, and I know that he is so much better equipped to understand and appreciate what David Tracy was trying to do so I do not want my criticism to be an overarching condemnation. Instead, it stands as an outpouring of my frustration with what has ended up happening to Tracy‘s thought instead of what could have been. In a paraphrase of Galadriel’s words to Frodo in Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings,” I believe his words and theories“will diminish and go into the West.”
Your reference here to Bishop Barron I think is helpful, but it maybe adds to my confusion about your position. He says specifically "I have often said that I received a good deal of my theological and philosophical education through reading the sparkling footnotes of Tracy’s magisterial books. Formed in Rome as a young priest by the great Bernard Lonergan, Tracy became a touchstone for many aspiring theologians of my generation."
Does this not suggest that Tracy might actually have been an influence on many Catholic thinkers of the last forty years? That they might have found their engagement with him fruitful?
Moreover, is there no value in figures whose work is primarily in the academy? Doesn't their work in the academy also mean students who learn from their work and find their own ways to make it useful and applied? Is not Bishop Barron an example of that? (I say primarily in the academy here because, while it's not the best known feature of Tracy, he was also a well-regarded homilist who preached often at St. Thomas the Apostle in Hyde Park.)
Again, it's reasonable to find his writing obscure or difficult, and it's reasonable to critique him for that. It's also reasonable to highlight specific, substantive disagreements with positions he held, although I have not seen you do that here. But it seems like there is more going on for you, and I'm not clear on what that is.
Beyond all that, what confuses me the most is I cannot for the life of me figure out why you saw a post that is part obituary, part remembrance of someone others thought highly of as the proper venue to vent about how much you hated the deceased's writing. Did you respond to Bishop Barron's post with similar qualms about his theology? I'd appreciate a screenshot of that if so. Is this something you occasionally work into preaching at funeral masses - the things you did not like about the deceased?
I owe you an apology for misinterpreting the purpose of your post when I first saw it it seemed to be an announcement of a famous theologian‘s death, and as such people were commenting about that. In the beginning, I did not realize that it was really a tribute post to him, and for that I am truly sorry. When I saw it, it simply refreshed my memory of his contribution to what I would call the deconstruction of Catholic theology. You have to remember that he came on the scene when a new wave of seminarians were entering graduate school. My class was the first to publicly ask the question of why we were throwing the baby out with the bathwater when it came to Catholic theology. This was a time when Joseph Ratzinger was ridiculed in the halls of the Academy as outdated outmoded and irrelevant. Many of us thought that was ridiculous, particularly since he was understandable. He had no difficulty in putting great and deep thoughts into perfectly understandable language. And so, yes, I was one of the ones who viewed David Tracy with contempt because I saw him as doing a grave disservice to Catholic theology. I felt he was on the forefront of a movement away from doctrine into abstract theory with no perceivable rootedness in real human experience. Now I’m sure you’re going to disagree with me on that and I understand that. I’m trying to explain to you what my feelings were for his work at the time and please note this has nothing to do with his personality which as I’ve said before seems to be really quite wonderful and caring. But I only knew him through his work and I think my critique of him has remained valid through these years. It is good that he has a great supporter like you who will help to keep his work alive because I see his star fading and I do not think it will rise again. At Catholic University, which I attended with Bishop Barron, Lonergan was still somewhat relevant, although even the professors who taught his ideas to us, admitted that he was not as relevant as he once was. Bishop Barron is a philosopher and loves ideas and just the process of thinking in philosophical terms gives him a great deal of enjoyment. I think his gift, and it’s a gift that David Tracy did not have, is that Bishop Barron can take those immensely complicated ideas and thoughts And translate into evangelical ways that bring people closer to God. There is absolutely no problem and understanding that Bishop Barron, with his creative and penetrating mind, still remains an extremely orthodox Catholic thinker.That is why I have the highest praise for the Bishop. I don’t know if that helps but I’m sure my explanation has probably hurt you even more than I did before and so again I apologize for that. If my comments are deemed inappropriate, please feel free to delete them. I will understand.
Monsignor, I'm asking both you and Stephen for a favor here: would you please read Stephen Okey's 2018 book A Theology of Conversation: An Introduction to David Tracy. Then, if Stephen agrees, I think we could have a conversation about the value of Tracy's work using the language that Stephen uses. For example, we could say what each of us as Christians believe our relation to the world to be. In my diocese at the moment that question causes a very painful polarity. It is not a purely academic matter. See what I mean?