Archive

St Paul in Athens declares openly what his audience worship unknowingly. In this lecture, we shall look at some of the places in our contemporary culture where assumptions are made about our human environment which point towards a transcendent context. There is the question of universal and ineradicable human dignity, in all circumstances; and there is also the less-discussed issue of how we assume that we can make sense of other humans, even strangers, and that we can come to share language with them. This latter question will be examined with the help of St Edith Stein's famous monograph on "empathy". A third, more complex area is the circumstances where people are driven to make a stand in the name of something "sacred" - that is, something other than the calculated and functional management of the world. Etty Hillesum's reflections on this subject will be a starting point. The lecture moves towards a conclusion about the nature of "logos" in the world and its theological resonances.