MDI International Summer School for Religious Educators and Graduate Students: 'Religion and Belief in a Secular Age'

Professor Michael Paul Gallagher, Gregorian University, Rome

Public lecture: 'Translating Taylor: pastoral and theological implications.'
Abstract: Charles Taylor's reading of the history of secular sensibility offers many insights into the spiritual crisis of our culture. This presentation will seek to 'push' his approach towards more specifically theological and pastoral themes. It hopes to make explicit what remains implicit, and even shy, in his religious explorations, putting him in imagined dialogue with some major theologians. One goal of the lecture will be to make Taylor accessible and pertinent for religious education.
Biography: Michael Paul Gallagher is an Irish Jesuit priest, who entered religious life at the age of 22, having studied literature at universities in Dublin and Caen (France). He went on to studies in literature and theology at Oxford, Johns Hopkins and Queen’s University, Belfast. From 1972 to 1990 he lectured in modern English literature at University College, Dublin. He moved to Rome in 1990 to work in the Vatican, first in the Pontifical Council for Dialogue with Non-Believers and later in the Pontifical Council for Culture. He then became professor of fundamental theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome, where from 2005 to 2008 he was dean of the faculty of theology. He is the author of about ten books of spiritual and fundamental theology, including Dive Deeper: the human poetry of faith (London, 2003), Clashing Symbols: an introduction to faith and culture (2nd edition, London and New York, 2003), and The Disturbing Freshness of Christ (Veritas booklet, Dublin 2008).

Professor Ruth Abbey, University of Notre Dame

Title of Paper: 'A Secular Age: the Missing Question Mark'
Abstract: In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor experiments with a number of formulations in his attempt to articulate what is distinctive about the contemporary conditions of religious belief and experience in westernized societies. These include: 1) the quest for Religious Authenticity; 2) the phenomenon of Cross Pressures and Fragilization; 3) the Three Cornered Contest between Exclusive Humanism, the Immanent Counter-Enlightenment and Religion; 4) the Ideal of Fullness; and 5) the Immanent Frame. This paper examines these approaches in turn and poses some unanswered questions about both the meaning of each and their relationship to one another. The paper goes on to ask how secular contemporary westernized societies really are, and concludes that Taylor's own framework can be used to show that religious belief is not as marginal as many of his remarks suggest.
Biography: Professor Ruth Abbey researches and teaches in the areas of contemporary political theory, history of political thought, and feminist political thought at the University of Notre Dame. She is also Center Faculty Fellow (2008-2009) at The Murphy Institute, Tulane University. She is the author of Nietzsche's Middle Period (Oxford University Press, 2000) and of Charles Taylor (Acumen Press and Princeton University Press), which was selected as one of the 2002 Outstanding Academic Titles by Choice Magazine. She is the editor of Contemporary Philosophy in Focus: Charles Taylor (Cambridge University Press, 2004). Professor Abbey has also written a number of journal articles on topics ranging from contemporary liberalism to conceptions of marriage to animal ethics. She received a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship and a research fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, as well as a number of smaller research grants. Her current research project belongs to the general area of cyberdemocracy; it looks at seniors who are politically active to explore their experience of and relationship to new information and communication technologies.