Religion & Law

Randall Smith asks, here, asks what taking John Paul II's important encyclical Fides et ratio seriously would mean for Catholic universities.  A taste:

One of the greatest popes in history writes a remarkably nuanced and intellectually profound encyclical ? one basically exhorting Western civilizatpes in history writes a remarkably nuanced and intellectually profound encyclical ? one basically exhorting Western civilization not to lose its faith in reason ? and a dozen years later the response from the halls of the academy is still a collective yawn: ?We can?t be bothered with this. We?re much too busy doing cutting-edge scholarship.? Cutting-edge scholarship that very few people read, much less care about, and that is largely subservient to the categories of modern thought, rather than a challenge to them.

Like the modern corporate executive who is too busy doing whatever it is he does to ask why he is doing it, or to think more broadly about how what he does contributes to the larger goals of the corporation (let alone society) as a whole, so too the modern corporate Catholic university is much too busy doing whatever it does (raising money, seeking greater levels of prestige, sucking up to secular counterparts) to engage the kind of fundamental issues that Pope John Paul II is asking be considered in Fides et Ratio.esponse from the halls of the academy is still a collective yawn: ?We can?t be bothered with this. We?re much too busy doing cutting-edge scholarship.? Cutting-edge scholarship that very few people read, much less care about, and that is largely subservient to the categories of modern thought, rather than a challenge to them.

Like the modern corporate executive who is too busy doing whatever it is he does to ask why he is doing it, or to think more broadly about how what he does contributes to the larger goals of the corporation (let alone society) as a whole, so too the modern corporate Catholic university is much too busy doing whatever it does (raising money, seeking greater levels of prestige, sucking up to secular counterparts) to engage the kind of fundamental issues that Pope John Paul II is asking be considered in Fides et Ratio. . ..

Thoughts?