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  • Theological Aesthetics and the Many Pragmatisms of Alejandro García-Rivera
  • Christopher D. Tirres (bio)

My first encounter with Alejandro García-Rivera was through a letter. In the late 1990s, I had applied to the doctoral program at the Graduate Theological Union (GTU), and a few weeks after having been accepted, I received a personal letter of invitation from him. In the letter, Alex (as I would be privileged to call him later) described the GTU as a promising new center for the study of theological aesthetics. I was intrigued by this phrase, “theological aesthetics,” for it was new to me. Moreover, I was deeply touched by the fact that Alex took the time to correspond with me personally. I felt honored that such a respected academic would go out of his way to reach out to me.

As things turned out, I ended up staying on the East Coast for my doctoral work. Fortunately, however, through the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States (ACHTUS), I eventually got to know Alex and many of his talented students. Over the years, I have been impressed to hear stories of how deeply Alex cared for them. Especially significant is the fact that Alex directed to completion the largest number of Latina Ph.D. theologians in the United States.1 By all accounts, he was a Doktorvater in the deepest and best sense of the word.

In what follows, I will reflect a little on Alex’s engagement with U.S. pragmatism, an area in which I do work as well.2 Let me say up front that my approach to pragmatism has much in common with Alex’s, but it also diverges from it in some respects. As for similarities, we both take everyday experience as a methodological starting point and ending point; we are both interested in offering a non-reductive account of reality; and we both take the question of aesthetics seriously. As for differences, one might point to the fact that Alex and I were introduced to pragmatism in two different intellectual settings. At Berkeley, and owing much to the influence of Don Gelpi and Frank Oppenheim, Alex gravitated toward the work of Charles Sanders Peirce and Josiah Royce. I, in turn, studied under Cornel West, Hilary Putnam, and David Lamberth, and, as a consequence, I read more William James and John Dewey.

Accordingly, when I read Alex’s work in pragmatism, I always feel stretched. He reframes pragmatism in ways that are refreshing and original and yet, at times perplexing and elusive. Throughout his many works, Alex draws on Peirce and Royce to shore up what he sees as a promising, yet still somewhat deficient, articulation of theological aesthetics in the work of Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar. As Alex explains, theological aesthetics should encompass more than Alexander Baumgarten’s classic articulation of aesthetics as the science of sensory knowledge. Instead, for Alex, theological aesthetics begs “a more profound question: what moves the human heart?” This question, he maintains, “brings us closer to the mysterious experience of the truly beautiful, an experience that transcends geological space and prehistoric time …”3 While Alex credits von Balthasar for restoring the ancient theological insight that we know God best through, he also shows how the semiotic logic and the metaphysics of relations, as developed by Peirce and Royce, can give philosophical clarity and depth to von Balthasar’s position.

As one charts the development of Alex’s thought from early to later writings, one sees that he adds John Dewey’s voice to his pragmatic repertoire. On numerous occasions, such as in A Wounded Innocence: Sketches for a Theology of Art (2003), Alex speaks glowingly of Dewey, who is widely recognized as one of the most important philosophers and social critics of the twentieth century. Yet, Alex’s appropriation of Dewey sometimes gives rise to moments of paradox and ambiguity. In what follows, I’d like to reflect on some of these moments in order see where Dewey’s pragmatism both fits, and does not fit, within Alex’s line of thinking.

One of Alex’s most explicit statements on Dewey is found in his...

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