This essay inquires into the unique intersection of Erich Przywara and John Henry Newman and explores the re-imagined notions of divine transcendence and the supernatural in their works. Przywara found in Newman a source of inspiration for a more lively presentation of Catholic thought and a model for illuminating the path toward a new Catholic intellectual culture. Newman’s work highlights the actively inquiring disposition of faith, an active search for the meaning of its doctrines, a progressive and unceasing journey that comprises the entirety of one’s life. By showing the changing Catholic responses to modernity and the evolving theological approaches that would come to characterize later twentieth-century Catholic thought, the paper emphasizes how Przywara and Newman contributed to a more vibrant form of Catholicism and a renewal of Catholic intellectual culture that anticipated the Church’s wider opening to the world.
The relationship between religious faith and public reason has occupied an increasingly central role in Jürgen Habermas’s mature work. Yet this recent engagement with questions of religious meaning also illuminates a significant area of development in Habermas’s thought. While his earlier writings emphasized a need to subordinate religious beliefs to rational critique and to translate religious truth claims into publicly accessible forms of reasoning, his later writings signal a shift to a more cooperative understanding of religious faith and critical reason that highlights the ongoing potential of religion to advance rational discourse and social criticism in the public sphere. This essay traces this growing recognition of the irreducibility of religious meaning in Habermas’s writings, and it attends to the non-translatable dimension of religious faith as a source of its ongoing contemporary significance.
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