COMMENTARY: Seeing God in Ourselves, and in Each Other

c. 2007 Religion News Service (UNDATED) The Templeton Foundation announced the winner of the $1.5 million Templeton Prize for spirituality the other day, the same award given to Mother Teresa, Billy Graham and the late Brother Roger of the Taize community. Lately, it’s gone to intellectuals who foster dialogue between the war zones of religion […]

c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) The Templeton Foundation announced the winner of the $1.5 million Templeton Prize for spirituality the other day, the same award given to Mother Teresa, Billy Graham and the late Brother Roger of the Taize community. Lately, it’s gone to intellectuals who foster dialogue between the war zones of religion and science.

The 2007 winner is a Catholic: Professor Charles Taylor of Northwestern University in Chicago, a philosopher of substantial academic standing. Taylor argues for the spiritual in every understanding of political and social life.


His basic argument goes something like this: The person cannot be understood as a social being without accepting the spiritual. That, in turn, he says, is the key to ending violence.

Taylor was never really a “Catholic” academic, although he says he was influenced by the documents of Vatican II in the 1960s. But when he received the Marianist Award from the University of Dayton in 1996, Taylor entitled his award lecture: “A Catholic Modernity?”

It’s a very, very dangerous thing for an academic in the secular arena to be known as a Catholic. Did I say dangerous? How about suicidal? (I have a teaching evaluation from a secular university that questions whether a believer can be an effective teacher.)

Taylor, who was born in the densely Catholic city of Montreal, won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford. The questions of his major works _ “Sources of the Self” and “The Ethics of Authenticity” _ were of the spiritual nature of the person.

In his Dayton lecture, Taylor for the first time definitively used the language of Catholicism. As a Catholic, he asked the pressing questions of modernity:

_ How we can respond to a world that is both progressive and horrific?

_ How do we comprehend the advances in the face of the declines?

_ How can we live in a world that brings forth both Amnesty International and Hiroshima?

The answer, he said, is not in secular humanism, which rejects religion. In fact, without Christianity’s input, Western culture would have only self-serving solutions to problems. That translates into jumping on the bandwagon of the cause du jour because it feels good.


Nor, he said, is the answer a theocracy _ a religion-based political system. That also runs the risk of self-serving solutions, where assistance or even membership in the society requires a religious test. Europe flirted with that idea and ended up with the Inquisition.

So neither secular humanism nor theocratic despotism works. Though Christianity is no longer the enforcer it once was, Taylor invoked Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire to show how gospel values have pervaded political discussion and social action. He wonders aloud if the gospel is more effective now, even though its values can be misappropriated.

Taylor’s answer is distinctly spiritual. The solution to the problem of modernity lies in understanding ourselves as beings in the image of God _ no matter how we understand God, whether as Christians or Buddhists or through some other faith. What is critical is that we must understand ourselves _ and all people _ as in the image of God.

That is the brilliance of Taylor’s solution to the problem of modern culture, and makes what he calls “a Catholic modernity” possible. Catholicism, he says, should come to the modern world like an explorer to a foreign land. Rather than attack it, Catholicism can adapt to the culture without changing Catholic belief. Catholicism can still stand outside and criticize, but can it also look for common ground.

Eastertide is upon us, and the world is filled with violence. Taylor said at Dayton that “redemption happens through incarnation, the weaving of God’s life into human lives.” Would that all people would take Taylor’s advice, and see God’s image in each other.

(Phyllis Zagano is senior research associate-in-residence at Hofstra University and author of several books in Catholic Studies.)


KRE/LF END ZAGANO

Editors: To obtain a photo of this columnist, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.

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