Category Archives: Quotes

Root on Transformation vs. Change

“Modernity,” according to Root, “is the constant process of speeding things up.”1  Under the accelerating forces of modernity, human beings and communities are constantly scrambling to keep up with the rapid rate of change, leading to increasing levels of anxiety and depression.  Root illuminatingly contrasts change with transformation: Continue reading Root on Transformation vs. Change

  1. Andrew Root, The Church in a Secular Age: Keeping Sacred Time against the Speed of Modern Life (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2021), 14.

Performance of Identity

I had a wonderful week last week with the Doctor of Ministry cohort at Providence Theological Seminary teaching a course called, “Thinking and Interpreting Theologically.”  The students read several insightful texts in preparation for our time together.  The one that seemed to generate the most conversation was Andrew Root’s The Congregation in a Secular Age: Keeping Sacred Time against the Speed of Modern Life (Baker, 2021).  It is the third volume in Root’s Ministry in a Secular Age trilogy.  In the trilogy Root is dialoguing with the work of the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, in particular Taylor’s seminal A Secular Age.  At the heart of Root’s project is the concern for developing ways for Christians to speak about and recognize the presence of divine action within the midst of a “social imaginary” that has reduced its vision to the “immanent frame.”1 Continue reading Performance of Identity

  1.   These are terms Taylor introduces in A Secular Age.  I briefly engage with Taylor around some of these themes in For the Life of the World (215-216).

Pope Benedict on the Innermost Simplicity of Christianity

“Here we have reached a point at which the innermost unity and simplicity of Christianity show themselves for what they are.  I may declare that the heart of Christianity is the Paschal mystery of death and resurrection.  Or I may say that this midpoint really consists in justification by faith.  Or, again, I may affirm that the center of it all is the triune God, and therefore, love as the alpha and omega of the world.  These three statements are, in fact, identical.  In all three the self-same truth is indicated: sharing in the martyria of Jesus by that dying which is faith and love.  Such faith and love are simultaneously God’s acceptance of my life and my will to embrace the divine acceptance.  And all this is from the God who can be love only as the triune God and who, in thus being love, makes the world bearable after all.”

  •  Joseph Ratzinger, Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 1988), 100.