Since the mid-1980s, the University of Dayton (founded by the Society of Mary) has bestowed the Marianist Award to a Catholic intellectual who, in Father James Heft's words, "has made a major contribution to the intellectual life." In Believing Scholars, Heft has published the Marianist lectures from 1996-2004.1 Recipients of the award were asked to "speak about their faith and how it had influenced their scholarship; and how their scholarship has influenced their faith." The ten Catholic intellectuals published here represent an interesting breadth of expertise, experience, and perspective.

In his introduction, Heft suggests that the voices in this volume represent three major developments among Catholic intellectuals since Vatican II: how the Church has recognized that it not only needs to teach the world, but to learn from it as well; how Catholic scholars have increasingly brought their Catholic faith to bear in their scholarly work; and how these Catholic scholars have dispelled the myth of the academy as an "ivory tower," cut off from practical commitments to truth and the common good. This bit of editorial framing of an eclectic set of voices provides the reader with a helpful interpretive lens.

The collection provides some moments of evident contrast in both style and tone. Consider, for example, the pairing of Peruvian Gustavo Gutierrez (1997), who unpacks in a straightforward and accessible manner each of the terms in the well-known formula, "the preferential option for the poor," and University of Chicago theologian David Tracy, whose lecture the following year on the "forms of divine disclosure" reported on current trends in professional theology as informed and inspired by postmodern philosophic currents. Where Tracy speaks of "the turn to the Other" in Christian theology, Gutierrez focuses on the Old Testament passages that concern Jubilee and their commands to "be open-handed with poor brothers and sisters."

Another contrastive pair is seen in the cheeky liberal Catholicism of Margaret and Peter Steinfels, who shared the 2003 award, versus the gravitas of Avery Cardinal Dulles in his 2004 lecture. Peter Steinfels in his pugnacious defense of liberal Catholicism quips that "liberal Catholicism is simply papal teaching a hundred years too soon," while the cardinal in his lecture speaks of how dissent "must for any good Catholic be rare, reluctant, and respectful." Both sets of examples serve to highlight how communities are always defined in part by the conflicts they express. We are, in no small degree, what we argue about.

But beyond this evident difference in style and tone, suggestive moments in these lectures offer themes that provoke reflection. One salient theme might be described as ambivalence toward the modern situation. Several of the more philosophic and theological lectures ponder the Church's situation in the modern world. On the one hand there is the celebration of the Church's contribution to the modern world with its focus on human rights and human liberty; on the other is the lingering concern whether the modern (or postmodern) world can preserve these good gifts.

This theme figures prominently in the lectures given by Charles Taylor (1996) and Mary Ann Glendon (2001). Thus for Taylor, "in modern, secularist culture there are mingled together both authentic developments of the Gospel, of the Incarnational mode of life, and also a closing off to God which negates the Gospel." Glendon, in celebrating the Catholic contribution to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, nevertheless worries; the more "Western groups promote a top-down, homogenizing vision of human rights," she suggests, "the more credibility they add to the charge of Western cultural imperialism." In these two lectures, one confronts again the sober realization of what Weber called "the ethical irrationality of the world," and how messy the Church's best efforts in it can be.

A second kind of ambivalence circles around the question of how the world shapes Catholic identity itself. Steinfels & Steinfels see liberal Catholicism as expressing the best of modernity's values, but for Dulles too much of its worldly doctrine has corrupted Catholic theology, bringing forth a "theology from below." By his account this "confines its vision to purely human and historical phenomena."

This ambivalence will surely resonate with many Protestant evangelicals. Even as they have achieved a kind of political ascendancy in the United States, there has developed among them a vigorous debate regarding their contribution to the GOP majority and thus their complicity in its worst excesses.2 Meanwhile the definitional boundaries of evangelicalism itself are themselves continually contested. These Catholic voices offer a cautionary tale for those within other communities of faith who think that—by means of right thinking or right method—conflict, debate, and disagreement can be definitively overcome. While it is certainly true that politics isn't everything, it is also true that everything is politics.

Operating also in this collection but at a different level and with a vastly different flavor is the theme of the contingency of grace and place. Here, in the more personal narratives, one learns from recipients' accounts of their own faith journeys and how their identities have been shaped by encounters with particular individuals and experiences of particular places. Gutierrez recounts a story from the life of Henri Nouwen and how Nouwen's trip to Bolivia and Guiterrez's own Peru recast his understanding of spirituality. Gutierrez describes Nouwen telling him: "For years I was working in spirituality, but seeing the poverty here has convinced me that true Christian spirituality must have a commitment to the poor." And historian Jill Ker Conway (1999) relates how her isolated childhood in rural Australia, with "much of that time spent alone herding sheep and cattle," gave her a visceral, "almost an Old Testament," existence. Such an experience (compounded by her frequent contact with Tribal Aboriginals and frequent natural disasters) "produced a powerful interest in questions of free will and determinism," themes in her youth that she now identifies as the religious presence in contemporary memoir writing.

Anthropologist Mary Douglas (2002), born in 1921, recounts how her childhood experience living with her grandparents and then attending convent schools formed in her an initial "feeling for hierarchy" that fundamentally shaped her subsequent professional anthropological career. Admits Douglas: "The interaction between religion as I was taught it and anthropology as I discovered it has been too continuous and intimate to be disentangled."

This turn to the contingent, the local, and the domestic is picked up also by both of the Steinfels. Margaret reminds her listeners how "life is not an ideology or a political agenda or conceptual framework but a continuing set of relationships and responsibilities … at the end of a day on the barricades everyone still has to go home and eat dinner." And Peter, at the end of his combative presentation, turns away from the struggle to call for a recovered sense of healthy heroism among the faithful. Such a recovery, he suggests,

will be found … in a zone of daily prayer, sacramental habits, household rituals, continuing study, and physical reminders and expressions of our faith… . Within such a zone, the heroism of every day life can be made manifest, the springs of joy refreshed, and the voices of authority can be heard and engaged in security.

To sit with this collection of lectures from Marianist Award recipients is to be exposed to the thrilling diversity that is the life of Catholic fides et ratio. The sympathetic non-Catholic listening in can glean much from this slim volume. At the end of the day, the world will remain the world, yet in it and through it all there remains the possibility of finding grace in all the right places.

Ashley Woodiwiss is professor of political science at Wheaton College.

1. David J. O'Brien, Loyola Professor of Roman Catholic Studies at the College of the Holy Cross, was the 2005 Marianist Award recipient. The 2006 award had not yet been announced at the time of this review.

2. For an example of such public evangelical soul-searching, see Charles Marsh, "Wayward Christian Soldiers" an op-ed in the New York Times, January 20, 2006 and the letters written in response to it.

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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