S
Shonkin
Guest
First, I must out myself as not being a Catholic, though as someone currently a refugee from the Evangelical tradition I find much comfort in Catholic writers.
Please, folks, do not do your own cause damage by attacking existentialism. The fact is that the Catholic church has some of the great existentialist voices within its ranks. Blaise Pascal, that great mystic / philosopher, is known as perhaps the first true existentialist. And then comes a wave of French Catholics: Gabriel Marcel my favorite, Emmanuel Mounier and his “Personalism” that so affected Peter Mauren (and thus Dorothy Day) of the Catholic Worker, Georges Bastide, and others!
I strongly suspect that Jean Vanier, a Catholic writer to whom my own faith community in Chicago owes so much (and who has visited us more than once), has also been profoundly affected by these existentialist voices within the church.
Don’t cut off your own arm in seeking to do apologetics. I watched so many Evangelicals do this, and the resulting search for that ever-elusive “purity of doctrine” is often to cut the heart right out of the Gospel.
Blessings.
Please, folks, do not do your own cause damage by attacking existentialism. The fact is that the Catholic church has some of the great existentialist voices within its ranks. Blaise Pascal, that great mystic / philosopher, is known as perhaps the first true existentialist. And then comes a wave of French Catholics: Gabriel Marcel my favorite, Emmanuel Mounier and his “Personalism” that so affected Peter Mauren (and thus Dorothy Day) of the Catholic Worker, Georges Bastide, and others!
I strongly suspect that Jean Vanier, a Catholic writer to whom my own faith community in Chicago owes so much (and who has visited us more than once), has also been profoundly affected by these existentialist voices within the church.
Don’t cut off your own arm in seeking to do apologetics. I watched so many Evangelicals do this, and the resulting search for that ever-elusive “purity of doctrine” is often to cut the heart right out of the Gospel.
Blessings.