Conversation keeps turning to theology in London. Sometimes the mood is despondent, sometimes constructive and ambitious. How to begin? Now I appreciate this won’t interest the majority of you who are outside the UK. But it does seem as though the Brits have to talk to each other through the Americans – we are noticeably nicer to each other in the States for the AAR-SBL for instance.
Lesslie Newbigin said he read the US religious press because he believed that whatever started there would come here. But it also works the other way around, so I agree with George Weigel, that the US should watch out for this European secularism.
A couple of weeks ago I heard the term ‘Christian University’ used for the first time in the British context. There are such things in the States of course, and even more there are Catholic universities and colleges, but see Alasdair MacIntyre on The End of Education.
What should be the distinctive calling of the American Catholic university or college here and now? It should be to challenge its secular counterparts by recovering both for them and for itself a less fragmented conception of what an education beyond high school should be, by identifying what has gone badly wrong with even the best of secular universities. From a Catholic point of view the contemporary secular university is not at fault because it is not Catholic. It is at fault insofar as it is not a university….
To help me think about what a university is, and what a Catholic or Christian university is, I am going to post the conferences and the homepages of the theology faculties that look most promising, and occasionally post from the mountain of papal material on the subject (Fides et Ratio and Ex Corde Ecclesia).
From the UK I am most impressed Gavin D’Costa Theology in the Public Square: Church, Academy and Nation (see below). From London I have also found Jeff Astley, Andrew Walker et al The Idea of a Christian University: Essays on Theology and Higher Education. I think we have most to learn from Messrs Williams and O’Donovan.
