THE KNUCKLEHEAD
'
S GUIDE TO COVENANTAL THEOLOGY
81
[ Stand with your favorite irrational belief over here ]
< - - - and also, stand over here,
"borrowing" modern scientific
understandings to establish a
'critical distance' from it.
(But are you over here?)
(or over here?)
The question just below the now-familiar formulation is the one
New Class Catholics can not answer, even for themselves. The
question -- and particularly, the fact that New Class Catholics
themselves can give no coherent answer to it -- defines "why bother?"
Catholicism.
And so, of course, the project of New Class Catholicism reduces to
Catholicism as one of Mr. Minsky's vanishing middle boxes:
[Cause
]
[ Catholicism ]
[Chance]
It is even easier to see the self-defeating character of the project of
New Class Catholicism if we peer a little deeper into the "Catholicism"
box in the middle:
[Cause]
[ Catholic professors of "theology" and "religious education" ]
[Chance]
If New Class Catholicism ever stopped "borrowing" and actually
became what it says it wishes to be, truly modern, it would commit
suicide. The project amounts, not only to the progressive evacuation of
any actual content to Catholicism, but also to the progressive
evacuation of any actual content to the jobs of 'professional' New Class
Catholics. By its own intellectual and scientific commitments, New
Class Catholicism will never have anything intellectually or
scientifically serious to do -- except go out of business.
The distinction that is fudged by New Class Catholicism, but which
is in fact crystal clear, is this. New Class Catholics may indeed do
academically "serious" things, but the only academically "serious"
things they may do, by their own standards, they do as
"anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists," and nothing they will
ever do as "Catholic theologians" or "Catholic religious educators," by
their own intellectual and scientific commitments, will ever be
intellectually or scientifically serious. As an intellectual or scientific
project, New Class Catholicism, by its own standards, is inevitably,
and will always be, a complete waste of time.
Yet New Class Catholicism is in fact highly 'successful' -- in terms
of its power and influence, particularly within the current Catholic
academy. Not only do New Class Catholics run nearly all the
N.B. This is an html-ized copy of a page from the pdf file, The Knucklehead's Guide to Covenantal Theology.