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49 david emmons 3 Homecoming: Finding a Catholic Hermeneutic Early in the fall of 1990, I got a call from Albert Borgmann, a University of Montana professor of philosophy and one of the university’s most distinguished scholars. The call was to invite me to the faculty’s Philosophy Forum, a healthy mix of the solemn and the hilarious and one of the university’s more durable and useful traditions. The topic for that October forum would be my recently published book The Butte Irish: Class and Ethnicity in an American Mining Town, 1875–1925, an account of the rambunctious and conspicuously Catholic Irish who dominated the world’s greatest mining town. A number of faculty from various departments who had read the book were there, along with many other interested faculty and students. They all wanted a word with me about the book’s deeper meanings, including, I came to learn, some meanings unknown to me.1 After a lively and generally favorable discussion, Albert handed down his philosophical verdict. The book, he said, was a result of a “hermeneutic of affection.” I remember nodding my head knowingly; the Philosophy Forum is not a good place to display even partial ignorance. When the forum ended, I hurried back to my office to look up “hermeneutic.” I wasn’t entirely certain what it meant and I knew I had not consciously employed one. Borgmann meant the word in the usual way as the art or craft of interpreting the world through its various texts. But all historians do that. The more important word was “affection.” I came to understand it better when I was introduced to its opposite, the hermeneutic of sus- picion, and the uses to which those two words, affection and suspicion, have been put. The affectionate construct and retrieve past lives; the suspicious deconstruct and recast them. Borgmann believed that I was predisposed to the former; that I couldn’t be suspicious of the Butte Irish without being suspicious of myself. Selfanalysis , including a healthy suspicion of one’s own motives, may not be an inherently bad thing. But the deconstructor self-deconstructed is circular to the point of dizziness and in this instance, as in most, is the kind of thing historians are better off leaving to others. Albert hadn’t said I had a Catholic “analogical imagination.” I came later to wish he had. It would have meant that, analogically, I was in communion with these Irish and with God, that I shared some kind of traditional lore, almost in the sense of tribal culture, with the Irish and that both they and I saw God as “present in the world, disclosing Himself in and through creation.” That kinship would have given me special access to the Irish’s interior worlds. It would also have left me unwilling—perhaps totally unable—to engage in any reductionist theorizing when I gained that access , which strikes me as a very good thing indeed. In all events, I had become in ways I had not entirely understood a very active participant in my historical retelling.2 Hermeneutic is far too grand a word for all this. It also is one that implies a consciousness of purpose that simply was not there while I was reading and trying to interpret my various texts. There was no art or craft in what I was doing; there was only what I’d rather call a triggering mechanism, an actuating cause without material form or substance. For those not squeamish about these sorts of things, I would call it my animating spirit. I was only vaguely conscious of it at the time, which is the way with the immaterial parts of a person. My affection was not, then, a hermeneutic—unless such can be unconscious. It was merely my way of choosing my historical “friends”; that is, those for whom I felt an affection, and whose lives I wished to intrude upon and retrieve. After the forum, I recall wondering if perhaps I hadn’t been too active a participant —and too affectionate and unsuspicious a one. Were there conscious interpretive strategies I should have used? Should “affectionate” have been among them? Certainly there was nothing about that particular approach that guaranteed success. I was relieved when Borgmann concluded that, on balance, my personal involvement had served me well. But it was not so much whether my way of going about it had yielded good history or bad that interested me; it...

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