A Preview for 2012…

Greetings to you all on this Feast of the Circumcision which this year also happens to be known as New Year’s Day!  I hope the festivity is still going strong with you all as we still have a few more days left of Christmas.

As it is the beginning of the year, I thought I’d give you all a sneak peak into a new trajectory this blog is taking, one that is more structured than the random musings I’ve put up here since the blog’s inception.  I have set a goal to enter graduate theological education somewhere beginning in the Fall semester of 2013 which gives me the entirety of this year to prepare for the application process.  Of course, that includes a writing sample which I will be writing from scratch and using this blog as a sort of storyboard for the research and study I’ll be doing for it.

It would be difficult at this point to even detail a tentative topic but I do know that I’ll at least be looking into Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Jacques Maritain, and others perhaps juxtaposed with the development of modernity, nominalism, etc in the general realm of aesthetic theology.  Perhaps some discussion of apprehension vs. comprehension in relation to all those elements/people above.  So to kick it all off, here are the first two books on the docket waiting to be worked through:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here on the left is Imagination and the Playfulness of God: The Theological Implications of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Definition of the Human Imagination by Anglican Priest-in-Germany Robin Stockitt which is pretty self-explanatory given the title.  Over on the right is Yale’s Louis Dupre’s Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermenuetics of Nature and Culture which I first heard of on an interview of the Mars Hill Audio Journal wherein Ken Myers read this intriguing quote from the book that I penned down in my notebook as to not forget it.  To share the intrigue with you all, here is that quote:

“At the end of the Middle Ages, however, nominalist theology effectively removed God from creation.  Ineffable in being and inscrutable in his designs, God withdrew from the original synthesis altogether.  The divine became relegated to a supernatural sphere separate from nature, with which it retained no more than causal, external link.  This removal of transcendence fundamentally affected the conveyance of meaning.  Whereas previously meaning had been established in the very act of creation by a wise God, it now fell upon the human mind to interpret a cosmos, the structure of which had ceased to be given as intelligible.  Instead of being an integral part of the cosmos, the person became its source of meaning.  Mental life separated from cosmic being: as meaning-giving ‘subject,’ the mind became the spiritual substratum of all reality.  Only what it objectively constituted would count as real.  Thus reality split into two separate spheres: that of the mind, which contained all intellectual determinations, and that of all other being, which received them.” (3)

Whew.  Back to you all soon.

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