Leading theologian David Tracy to give Humana lecture

RELEASED: March 27, 2008

DANVILLE, KY— David Tracy, a Roman Catholic theologian who teaches at the University of Chicago, will give the 2008 Humana Visiting Scholar Lecture at Centre College on Monday, March 31 at 7 p.m. in the Vahlkamp Theater on campus. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Tracy's books "Blessed Rage for Order"(1975) and "The Analogical Imagination"(1981) established him as an important revisionist theologian. He continues his work to revise Christian categories into modern categories of thought and has taken his work in a new direction, focusing more on the mystical and Neo-Platonic traditions of thought.

Says Tracy, "I study two forms in the Christian tradition that have been rather marginal; namely the apocalyptic form (focusing or defining God based on cryptic revelations and interventions) and the apophatic mystical (defining God by what he is not)."

Both of these "fragments," as Tracy calls them, are incomprehensible—they can never be totally understood. "The real conversation about God intellectually should be with the category of the impossible," Tracy says.

However, he adds, "Modern God-talk reflects concrete experiences," and as a result "can be understood by way of persuasion and argument.

"When you shift to God-centeredness, however, you shift to the mystical and prophetic approaches," he says.

Tracy currently is in the process of writing a three-volume work discussing ways to use these gathered fragments to enable discussion and study of what he calls the hidden and incomprehensible God.

For more information on Tracy, click here.

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