The Catholic Social Imagination: Activism and the Just Society in Mexico and the United States Book

Altogether I found this to be a moderately interesting interesting book -- a somewhat dated exchange taking place in the 90's between Charles Taylor and various academics in the context of the publication (and major tome), Sources of the Self , as well as the pontificate of John Paul II.


I'm going to admit as well that I have found frustrating at times the manner in which Taylor speaks in the self-neutered, all-too-diplomatic and second-guessing tones of academia, wishing that as a Catholic (which he genuinely is, I have little question) he could perhaps be more overtly so in his profession. In response to George Marsden's challenging his reference to Mateu Ricci as a model for modern Catholic engagement, he admits as much:[Marsden]: "Like Ricci dressing as a Confucian scholar, do we always have to dress our views in terms already acceptable to the contemporary academy?" Yes, we do a lot of that, obviously too much. The reasons are many, including not very admirable ones to do with the advantages (reputation, tenure, promotion) of conformity.

Underlying all that is the remarkable fact that academic culture in the Western world breathes an atmosphere of unbelief. …Taylor elaborates on the nature of his approach in his concluding response, where he attends to the topic of philosophizing in an atmosphere of exclusive humanism and ' by way of example ' addressing modern moral philosophy's myopic construal of morality as "finding the principle or principles from which we can derive what we ought to do":All this leads me to believe that the most important thing Christian scholars should attempt is to change the agenda, open it up. This may mean bringing back issues that may not immediately, on their face, relate to Christian faith'like this question of the place of the quality of the will in moral philosophy.We have to think of the ways in which our whole debate with modernity, our friendly yet adversarial exchange, is impeded and stifled by a drastically foreshortened intellectual agenda and then move to widen this. If we can get to the point where mainstream people have to defend the narrow focus we will have succeeded.

This is the second book I've read by Taylor, the other (The Ethics of Authenticity) being written in the same fashion of unpacking the contemporary "ethics of authenticity" and posing various insightful and challenging questions.

Reading between the lines, I've come to appreciate his subtle manner of questioning, which is both genuinely self-critical (in terms of appraising his own tradition of Catholicism and what he has inherited) as well as challenging the bastions of the exclusively humanistic academia that he inhabits in his profession. Case in point, a section (pp. 110-114) where he exposes the insufficiencies of understanding human moral relations strictly in terms of "individual assent" and the protection of the "veto-exit" option, especially in its failure to appreciate marital love and the functioning of family and community.

Likewise, for a book published two decades ago, there were specific passages which for me still spoke volumes to our tumultuous times (where dialogue has practically broken down and partisan politics has descended into a cacophony of shrill voices shouting past each other). Consider
We have seen it with Jacobins and Bolsheviks and today with the politically correct left and the so-called Christian right. We fight against injustices that cry out to heaven for vengeance. We are moved by a flaming indignation against these: racism, oppression, sexism, or leftist attacks on the family or Christian faith. This indignation comes to be fueled by hatred for those who support and connive with these injustices, which, in turn, is fed by our sense of superiority that we are not like these instruments and accomplices of evil. Soon, we are blinded to the havoc we wreak around us. Our picture of the world has safely located all evil outside us. The very energy and hatred with which we combat evil prove its exteriority to us. We must never relent but, on the contrary, double our energy, vie with each other in indignation and denunciation.

Another tragic irony nests here. The stronger the sense of (often correctly identified) injustice, the more powerfully this pattern can become entrenched. We become centers of hatred, generators of new modes of injustice on a greater scale, but we started with the most exquisite sense of wrong, the greatest passion for justice and equality and peace. [pp. 32-33]
And also:When I hear an exclusivist humanism waxing indignant about the crimes and errors of the church in history, I often partly agree. We all feel this today at some point; who defends the Inquisition? My feelings are divided, complex. But I also see a complexity in my interlocutor, who has an important moral point but is also resisting something: resisting the insight that the love of God is something bigger and more important and more powerful than all this human bumbling and evil.

But then that makes us brothers under the skin. We all ' believers and unbelievers alike ' spend a lot of energy resisting God. It takes a lifetime of prayer to melt the resistances, and even then. . . . And one thing we can immediately see, from our own case as well, is that anger, righteous anger, is a great weapon of resistance. Our modern Western world is awash in righteous anger, reciting litanies of abuse and obloquy. The point is often well taken, in that the abuses are or have been real and crying.

Beyond this, what the anger is often doing for people is stopping their moral and spiritual growth because it's a tremendously effective resistance against it. For one thing, I feel good about myself because, whatever my minor imperfections, they pale into insignificance in face of the horrible deeds of those (communists or capitalists, white males or feminists, etc.). For another, I certainly don't need to bother about any insights I might gain from those unspeakable enemies of humanity, God, or whatever.
We have to be more aware of what anger is doing for us, as resisters ' and therefore against us, as lovers of God. [p. 124]