Friday, October 01, 2010

The contours of twenty-first century belief

As they manifest themselves at secular universities. From The Theology of Dad on a post regarding homosexuality:

The issue is essentially about how to understand the relationship between the search for the truth and the things that cannot be doubted. In this a true Catholic University is ahead of its secular counterparts precisely because it is upfront about its orthodoxies, and allows the investigation of them for sake of greater clarification. The problem with the secular school is that it does not know how to express its orthodoxies coherently [just like most people!], how to think about them clearly, how to feel comfortable with their scrutiny. I will never accept that Christ was only God or only man, but I will enjoy studying Arius', or even Hans Kung's, negations of His divinity. Yet because the secular school clings to vague ideals (since, paradoxically, it clings to postmodernism and rejects an objective worldview) it cannot identify the boundaries of its own beliefs, and so it protects them with paranoia, not with reason.