Author Description

"David Tracy is widely considered the most important Catholic theologian in North America, and his two-volume "Selected Essays"-his first books in over twenty years-will be a major event. Long a vital fixture in the University of Chicago's intellectual community, Professor Emeritus Tracy is known for his work on the pluralistic context of theology and his embrace of ambiguity as a necessary and enriching facet of religious life. His work is unusual for its disciplinary breadth, drawing on science, literature, the arts, Continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, and non-Western religious traditions. The first volume gathers Tracy's most important essays on broad theological questions-notably the problem of suffering and the category of the Infinite. The second is devoted to profiles of significant theologians, philosophers, and religious thinkers. The title of volume I, "Fragments: The Existential Situation of Our Time," refers to the potential of fragments (understood both as concepts and events) to shatter closed systems and open us to difference and Infinity. The range and erudition of Tracy's essays arc breathtaking. Issues addressed in volume I alone include "the invisible" as employed in mathematics, physics, philosophy, myth, religion, and theology; the relation of psychoanalysis to religion in the work or Freud (which Tracy reads as prophetic) and Lacan (construed as mystical); and the category of "sunyata" (emptiness) as a central contemplative category in Buddhism. Other essays elaborate a contemporary hermeneutics constituted by retrieval, critique, and suspicion, exploring how, hermeneutically understood, fragments of art and religion reach beyond their particular origins to achieve public and, at the limit, universal effect"--