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P r e f a c e a n d Ac k n o w l e d g m e n ts Philosophical hermeneutics has as one its central features an awareness of the effective history that moves under and through every conversation, so it seems appropriate that I identify the effective history that runs under and through this project. The motive force comes from my first sustained encounter with Karl Barth in a graduate course with the late George Schner at Regis College in Toronto. After much warning about how hard it was to understand Barth when reading alone, I found it surprisingly easy to absorb Barth’s rhythm of expression. I did not grow up in the Reformed tradition, so this was puzzling to me. I had received other such warnings about other philosophers and theologians, and did indeed have trouble understanding them without some guidance. It was only later that I realized that I consistently used the hermeneutical language of Ricoeur that I had acquired as an undergraduate when trying to articulate what I thought Barth was saying. This in turn led me to recall that I had had a similar experience with Ricoeur, and I realized that my natural affinity for Ricoeur came from my reading, under the guidance of Gary Madison, a great deal of Gabriel Marcel before reading any of Ricoeur. Marcel had been a revelation to a young philosophy major raised in a Canadian evangelical tradition that suffered from many of the effects of what Wheaton’s Mark Noll has eloquently described as “the intellectual disaster of fundamentalism.” That someone who was committed to his Christian faith could do that kind of philosophy gave me hope that intellectual sophistication and Christian faith were not mutually exclusive concepts. Schner was an oddity as a theologian, a Jesuit postliberal, and his distaste for Tracy’s theological model shone through brightly. But amongst the postliberals, I saw similar hostility toward Ricoeur’s hermeneutics, and could not figure out why. The things they objected to in Tracy’s revisionist theology seemed to have nothing to do with Ricoeur’s philosophical hermeneutics as such, which I eventually came to see that they neither understood nor cared to understand, content to dismiss it as a general theory of interpreting texts x | Preface and Acknowledgments that threatened orthodox biblical interpretation. Their commitment to an ad hoc approach, with a view to restraining philosophy’s influence on theology, struck me as a serious impediment to doing any constructive Barthian theology , for such conceptual work cannot avoid a philosophical vocabulary. An ad hoc approach to that task can result only in either incoherence or an implicit but still operative philosophical vocabulary that had not been properly vetted. In this case, the postliberals seemed to teeter between incoherence and the philosophy of Wittgenstein, which stifles Barth’s voice in its being unable to account for his strengths in narrative, history, and dialectic. I concluded that both Barth’s theology and Ricoeur’s philosophy were being less than ideally served in the North American theological conversation, but that Ricoeur’s philosophy could be of great service to Barth’s theology. A hermeneuticist should be the last to claim to have accomplished something alone, and there are a great many people to thank. The Jesuits at Regis College in Toronto, particularly Ron Mercier and Ron Barnes, and the theological ethics faculty at Boston College, particularly Jim Keenan and David Hollenbach, gave a headstrong graduate student a great deal of much-appreciated support and freedom to pursue his own questions. This has continued with the encouragement and support of the late Stephen Duffy, Denis Janz, and others at Loyola University New Orleans. Also, my peers such as Sean McGrath, Jeremy Wilkins, Martin O’Malley, Brian Treanor, Grant Kaplan, and Joe Berendzen have been very helpful in conversations and in simple intellectual friendship, both of which are appreciated. A special thanks goes to Andrzej Wiercinski, who is the very definition of hospitality, both physical and intellectual, and who has for a decade helped me in developing the courage to think the necessary. And finally, thanks to Richard Kearney, who graciously agreed to direct the out-of-department dissertation that formed the nucleus of this book and who has been unstinting in his support ever since. To my wonderful children, Gracelyn and Avery, who have already learned that if Daddy has not made eye contact he may well not be listening: you give me the joy and...

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