"pardon my metaphysics"
Can be read here. His answer to the first question is brilliant.
1. So, who is James Alison? What aspects of your life do you consider most central to your identity? What should people who are curious about you know?
James Alison is English, and therefore ontologically incapable of answering a question of this sort about himself.
One of the implications that could be drawn from the work of James Alison and Andrew Shanks (and also Theodore Jennings in Transforming atonement) is for the church to try to be a society or culture that is coherent and yet capable of maximum openness to disintegrative truth without disintegrating. To try to maintain a way of life and understanding that is as wise and truthful as it can see by its own lights, whilst being open to the possibility of other truths from other quarters. To try to be forgiving and open to all, universally inclusive. And yet in this way to be constantly on the verge of dissolving itself, because it is open to critique from others and from itself, open to changing its way of being depending on the influences it encounters. This would be an institutional embodiment of repentance and humility. Clearly extremely difficult. Shanks in fact thinks it is the most difficult form of society to create because it tries to hold together maximum space for and respect to dissidence with the coherency of a (malleable!) Sittlichkeit. I’m not sure any organization would want to claim to live up to this, and I’m not sure how far it’s even possible (how much patience do people have for the negative moment, bearing in mind this is a community open to those who will never read Hegel?!), and yet it seems to me to be a most worthy aim for a polity.
See links here.
Recent Comments