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201 Epilogue These twelve essays have several things in common. For one, they are eminently original. The authors have plumbed their inimitable subjectivities in ways that make them accessible to the reader. This volume is a case of the multiplication of the loaves or, to mix metaphors, an instance of what can be produced when a haunting is moved by a hunting that can locate its catch with words. I read these authors through a theological lens and do so unapologetically. So I see their haunted hunting representing twelve unique cuts into the catholicity of the mind and its fecundity when it allows the elasticity of the spirit full play. Rather than settling for simply being “true to the faith,” all of these chapters forage beyond the initial faith their authors learned. Reason pushed them out in twelve different directions. Their forays could have had them evolve into being post-Christian or postmodern or just plain post wherever they were before they started. But they have made synthetic wholes of what would otherwise have been just an additional story built onto their individual habitats. It is one thing to continually appropriate one’s faith as one evolves and matures. It is another thing to break camp and go out into a no-man’s-land to try to bring something back that contributes to the development of faith. Why is this a good? Because Deus semper major. God is always greater! Foraging can of course be egoistical or ignorant or needlessly restless. But some of foraging can be charismed. When this is the case, the foragers are graced to contribute to the “more” by trying to be true to what is distinctively given to them for others. “To each a manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good” (1 Cor. 12:7). Each generation, wittingly or unwittingly, hands on some version of its faiths to the next generation. This passing-on can be lazy, meaning the generation hands on the faith clothed in the same worn, tired clothing in which it was received. That kind of transmission does not do justice to a living faith. A better scenario would involve handing on what has been confected through the hard work of deconstruction and reconstruction. There are syntheses here expecting, encouraging, and coaxing further syntheses out into the distant future. I see these chapters as forays in the Catholic intellectual tradition, as that phenomenon was described and analyzed in Where Is Knowing Going?1 The thesis there was that the Catholic doctrinal tradition is continually freshened by developments within an intellectual tradition generated by an authentic subjectivity, as that moves in the direction of an objectivity in one’s area of competence, whether that be academic or by self-appropriation. 202 Epilogue Note 1. John C. Haughey, Where Is Knowing Going? The Horizons of the Knowing Subject (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2009). ...

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