Faith and the Life of the Intellect

Rating:
Summary: rational people can believe
Review: When I was a graduate student in philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley, one of my teachers was David Rynin, a protégé of the logical positivist, Moritz Schlick. In class once, Rynin characterized religion as "metaphysics with pictures." For several semesters, I cherished the conviction that he would change his views on religion if only he could meet an impressive scientist or philosopher who was also religious. However, that conviction evaporated when one day he spoke in class of a visiting physicist who happened to be a Dominican priest: "During the week he observes electrons and on Saturday afternoons he hears confessions. He must be a schizophrenic."
Considerations such as the above make an anthology like Faith and the Life of Intellect necessary reading for Christian intellectuals as well as much needed reading for secularists and Christian fundamentalists. The glory of an anthology is that, like the Sea of Homer, it has many voices. But it is a glory of possibility, not inevitable fact; for it is not unknown for the essays that comprise the anthology to be of uneven merit. Not so the essays that Curtis Hancock and Brendan Sweetman have managed to assemble. Each is first-rate.
Although all the essays address what the book's title promises -- an inquiry into the relation between faith and the intellectual life, each is distinctive, and as a whole, range from a predominantly autobiographical style after the manner of Augustine's Confessions, to the autobiographical in the tradition of Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua insofar as they provide personal histories of the authors that influenced their reconciliation of philosophy and faith, and finally to other essays that confine themselves to an impersonal theoretical discussion of the subject. Moreover, while nine of the essays accept the premise of Thomism, three are postmodernist. The end-result is a richly varied yet coherent totality.