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Authors

Walter Brooks

Abstract

I would like initially to call attention to the terror of history as we who live in the latter half of the twentieth century experience it. I would like to call attention to a number of issues which all of us living at this historical moment are aware of and to which some of us, no doubt, have given a great deal of thought. These are issues that in one way or another threaten the planet that we live on, the quality of human life, the very survival not only of the human but of the evolutionary process itself. These issues include the population explosion, poverty, hunger, and environmental pollution.

We must take responsibility for what is ours and see whether the world view in question can be restructured, reconstructed so that it might work for us once again, so that it might once again become the focus through which we can understand our experiences, interpret them, and gain a fullness of life.

What I am suggesting is that all the stresses and strains that the theistic frame is experiencing today are not to be seen as a cause for despair. Rather these pressures represent a summons to accept our human responsibility. We must not abandon the frame nor simply reaffirm it blindly. Rather we must consider how the categories of the frame functioned in the past, how they can be reformulated so they can work again. We must try imaginatively to put the theistic frame together again, imaginatively put together a picture of the world and of human life based on our experience and try to see what sense it can make to speak of God.

An earlier form of this paper was presented as a lecture in the Sacred Heart University Honors Program in April 1988.

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