A
amarischuk
Guest
Hello everyone,
Before I get into the titled purpose of this thread, allow me a brief introduction please. My name is Adam Marischuk, and I am a very messed up person. I recently withdrew from a seminary near Chicago where I was studying philosophy as a associate (I received a BA from a Canadian University in Medieval History and Medieval English Literature so I only required more philosophy credits).
I used to frequent internet apologetics sites but gradually became disillusioned with the often superficial character of the scholarship (there is a great deal of irony in my posting this rant). Not that apologetics on the internet was/is useless, quite the contrary. I learnt an enormous amount from in the internet regarding my Catholic faith and developed a key ability to formulate an argument. However, thanks (name removed by moderator)art to a study stint in Europe, I developed a passionate interest in actually reading scholarly books instead of spending countless hours roaming the net. Hilair Belloc went out the window (I still read Chesterton, having read in no particular order: St. Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox, St. Francis Assisi, Everlasting Man, Brave New Family, Heretics, Orthodoxy, Do We Agree? (with GBS), The Thing, The Innocence of Fr. Brown, Autobiography) and I began to read more scholarly authors like Etienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain, Frederick Copleston, Josef Pieper, Marie-Dominique Chenu, Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar, Josef Jungmann, Theodor Klauser.
But this scholarship did not lead me to a great respect for the faith. To be honest I have all but lost my faith. Perhaps I am the only agnostic Thomist on earth. I am not really looking for an argument here but a quiet ear, some helpful reading suggestions and hopefully I will encourage some people to move beyond the internet for information on their faith.
Perhaps here is a good opportunity to bring in Mr. Karl Keating (whose only book that I have read was Controversies, which I would gladly recommend). Unlike Mr. Keating’s repeated claims of a dawning “new spring” for Catholicism in his e-letters, I am much more pessimistic. At the seminary (where truly the number of “conservative” vs. “liberal” students weighted only slightly more towards the “conservative” side than did the representative priestly population) my experiences have not led me to a great appreciation of the futur.
As the reader can clearly tell, I am dancing around the central issue so please allow me to spell it out:
Apologetics= shallow scholarship → conservative Catholics
Academia=deeper scholarschip → faith crisis
Now this formula does not hold fast in all cases, infact some of the most remarkably stupid people I ever met where at University (including professors). However, especially regarding some “hot topics” such as contraception, the place of Thomistic philosophy, the state of marriage or the liturgy I have taken a remarkably “liberal” and often agnostic position (St. Puis X’s Pascendi being a remarkably enbarrasing piece of literature).
I am afraid that Catholic scholarship will disappear with this new wave of conservativism. Gone are Lord Acton and John Henry Cardinal Newman, Etienne Gilson, Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar, Karl Rahner, Edward Schillebeeckx and worst of all, it seems that no one is rising to take their place. The rise of the sedevacantist and traditionalist movements, even those connected to the Church such as Opus Dei (of which I had two years of contact and during which I lost nearly all respect for the traditional Catholic movements) is to me a clear indicator of the bankrupcy of Catholicism and the now seemingly very real threat that Catholicism will become another fundamentalist denomination fighting battles long over, reminiscient of the Scopes Monkey trials.
Thank you for hearing my rant and I am interested in hearing other people’s opinions on the subject. Perhaps this doesn’t belong in “apologetics” but then again, perhaps apologetics itself needs an apologist.
Before I get into the titled purpose of this thread, allow me a brief introduction please. My name is Adam Marischuk, and I am a very messed up person. I recently withdrew from a seminary near Chicago where I was studying philosophy as a associate (I received a BA from a Canadian University in Medieval History and Medieval English Literature so I only required more philosophy credits).
I used to frequent internet apologetics sites but gradually became disillusioned with the often superficial character of the scholarship (there is a great deal of irony in my posting this rant). Not that apologetics on the internet was/is useless, quite the contrary. I learnt an enormous amount from in the internet regarding my Catholic faith and developed a key ability to formulate an argument. However, thanks (name removed by moderator)art to a study stint in Europe, I developed a passionate interest in actually reading scholarly books instead of spending countless hours roaming the net. Hilair Belloc went out the window (I still read Chesterton, having read in no particular order: St. Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox, St. Francis Assisi, Everlasting Man, Brave New Family, Heretics, Orthodoxy, Do We Agree? (with GBS), The Thing, The Innocence of Fr. Brown, Autobiography) and I began to read more scholarly authors like Etienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain, Frederick Copleston, Josef Pieper, Marie-Dominique Chenu, Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar, Josef Jungmann, Theodor Klauser.
But this scholarship did not lead me to a great respect for the faith. To be honest I have all but lost my faith. Perhaps I am the only agnostic Thomist on earth. I am not really looking for an argument here but a quiet ear, some helpful reading suggestions and hopefully I will encourage some people to move beyond the internet for information on their faith.
Perhaps here is a good opportunity to bring in Mr. Karl Keating (whose only book that I have read was Controversies, which I would gladly recommend). Unlike Mr. Keating’s repeated claims of a dawning “new spring” for Catholicism in his e-letters, I am much more pessimistic. At the seminary (where truly the number of “conservative” vs. “liberal” students weighted only slightly more towards the “conservative” side than did the representative priestly population) my experiences have not led me to a great appreciation of the futur.
As the reader can clearly tell, I am dancing around the central issue so please allow me to spell it out:
Apologetics= shallow scholarship → conservative Catholics
Academia=deeper scholarschip → faith crisis
Now this formula does not hold fast in all cases, infact some of the most remarkably stupid people I ever met where at University (including professors). However, especially regarding some “hot topics” such as contraception, the place of Thomistic philosophy, the state of marriage or the liturgy I have taken a remarkably “liberal” and often agnostic position (St. Puis X’s Pascendi being a remarkably enbarrasing piece of literature).
I am afraid that Catholic scholarship will disappear with this new wave of conservativism. Gone are Lord Acton and John Henry Cardinal Newman, Etienne Gilson, Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar, Karl Rahner, Edward Schillebeeckx and worst of all, it seems that no one is rising to take their place. The rise of the sedevacantist and traditionalist movements, even those connected to the Church such as Opus Dei (of which I had two years of contact and during which I lost nearly all respect for the traditional Catholic movements) is to me a clear indicator of the bankrupcy of Catholicism and the now seemingly very real threat that Catholicism will become another fundamentalist denomination fighting battles long over, reminiscient of the Scopes Monkey trials.
Thank you for hearing my rant and I am interested in hearing other people’s opinions on the subject. Perhaps this doesn’t belong in “apologetics” but then again, perhaps apologetics itself needs an apologist.
