When
the Enlightenment Hit the Neighborhoods
Thinking
Your Way Out of Faith; Thinking Your Way Back In
The Enlightenment has finally hit the neighborhoods—reason
and evidence have eclipsed faith as the primary means to
understand the world. If you’ve thought your way
out of faith, seeing it as a ridiculous undertaking
fit
only for the weak, the misused or the unhinged, you’re
not alone.
In this site (and in a book in progress) I explore the
experience of the Enlightenment hitting the neighborhoods
and its effect on the Catholic Church from a single
point of view—mine—which is that of a Chicago
Irish Catholic baby-boomer who grew up during it and raised
kids in its wake.
There are many baffling conundrums to figure out:
How in one generation—mine—did reason and evidence
eclipse faith and cause the great obliteration of the religious
tradition I once knew? Why was
my experience of faith as a child so completely different
from that of
my
children? Why did the people’s
trust in the hierarchy collapse? How did Catholicism become
tame? Why is it now so poor at
drawing people into itself, especially young people? Why
is there such a disconnect between the hierarchy and the
faithful?
Why
has the sexual
abuse crisis remained unresolved for so long? Finally,
what are we going to do about it?
There's
a blog, an outline and summary of
the thought of Aquinas (alive and thinking the last time
reason crashed
into faith in a big
way) and the first chapter of
the book.
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