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New York Times
16-05-2025
- General
- New York Times
David Tracy, 86, Theologian Who Rejected Rome's Supremacy, Dies
The Rev. David Tracy, a leading liberal Catholic theologian who open-sourced his understanding of God, borrowing from Jews, Buddhists and great works of art and literature, and who rejected Rome as the sole authority on how to be a good Christian, died on April 29 in Chicago. He was 86. His death, in a hospital, was announced by the University of Chicago Divinity School, where he taught for nearly 40 years. Mr. Tracy (he was almost never addressed as 'Father Tracy') was an ordained Catholic priest who lectured widely, wrote nine books and was recognized as one of the most influential Catholic theologians of the late 20th century. His best-known book, 'The Analogical Imagination' (1981), argued that man's knowledge of the divine proceeds through analogies. Christ is an analogue for God, he wrote, but great works of literature and art also revealed God's presence. 'Religion's closest cousin is not rigid logic but art,' he once said. His independence from Roman Catholicism's top-down authority was manifested early, in 1968, when he and more than 20 other faculty members at the Catholic University of America in Washington were tried before a religious tribunal for rejecting the Vatican's ban on birth control. He was acquitted, though he left the next year when he was recruited by the University of Chicago Divinity School. He remained there through his retirement in 2007. He also served on the faculty of the Committee on Social Thought, a prestigious Ph.D.-granting program at the university. The writer Saul Bellow, a fellow committee member, liked to say that its faculty was composed mostly of 'highly conservative secular Jews — and the only leftist is a Catholic priest.' Mr. Tracy had been a student in Rome during the Second Vatican Council, seen as a significant moment of modernization in the church. He had a lifelong allergy to the idea of a papal monopoly on how to practice Catholicism. 'It is easy to get uniformity in religion,' he told The New York Times Magazine in a 1986 profile headlined 'A Dissenting Voice.' 'All you have to do is to remove the mystery. But if you remove the mystery, you destroy religion at the same time.' His objections to church authority were not generally over politics, social justice or cultural issues, but over more arcane matters of doctrine. He was an intellectual maverick in an age when theologians were no longer read by the wider public, as Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich were in the mid-20th century. Mr. Tracy 'never was designed to be a popular writer,' a colleague at the University of Chicago, Martin E. Marty, told Commonweal, the liberal Catholic magazine, in 2010. 'He influenced the influencers.' Mr. Tracy engaged in a three-year exchange of academic papers and discussions with Buddhist and Christian thinkers. He was one of the few Catholic priests elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in 1982. He also wrote an essay for a 2018 exhibition at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, 'Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination.' The curator, Andrew Bolton, called him 'the J.D. Salinger of the theological world.' The Rev. Richard P. McBrien, then the chairman of the department of theology at the University of Notre Dame, said of Mr. Tracy in The Times in 1986, 'More than any other theologian, he really does understand modern philosophy, literature and language, and he can see connections nobody has seen before.' An early book of Mr. Tracy's, from 1975, 'Blessed Rage for Order' (its title is from a line in a Wallace Stevens poem), embraced the pluralism of religions rather than claim that there was one true faith. Christianity, he said in a 2019 interview for Commonweal, 'has been for me the decisive, definitive way' to salvation and revelation, 'but there are other ways.' 'It's not the case,' he added, 'that Jews and Muslims and Buddhists do not have a way either of salvation in monotheistic traditions, or of enlightenment in the more mystically inclined religions like Buddhism and Daoism.' To critics, Mr. Tracy and other progressive Catholics who rejected the authority of Rome had lost their faith. 'Tracy isn't developing doctrine, he's denying it,' Msgr. George A. Kelly, president of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars, told The Times in 1986. 'The issue is really Christ, and Pope John Paul II speaks for Him. That is fundamental. I think some of these theologians have lost the faith. If I followed David Tracy and others, the end would be that I wouldn't be a Catholic. In fact, I wouldn't be anything.' David William Tracy was born on Jan. 6, 1939, in Yonkers, N.Y., one of three sons of John and Eileen (Rossell) Tracy. His father was a union organizer. No immediate family members survive. At age 13, David felt 'a very intense call' to the priesthood, he later said, and entered Cathedral College, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the high school seminary of the Archdiocese of New York. He went on to the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome in 1960, where the Second Vatican Council, which began in 1962, had a profound and lasting impact on his views. Ordained a priest in 1963, he was appointed to a parish in Stamford, Conn., where he recruited his parishioner William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of the conservative magazine National Review, to be a lay lector at Mass. Mr. Tracy spent only a year as a parish priest before returning to Rome, where he earned a licentiate of sacred theology in 1964 and a doctorate of theology from the Gregorian, as it is known. Over the last 25 years of his life, he was consumed with writing a final work on the ineffability of God, which would roll together theology, philosophy, mathematics and cosmology. But 'the God book,' as his admirers called it, kept expanding, being rethought, and was never done. 'Over several years, I'd ask him how it's going, and he'd say, 'At least another year,'' said Stephen Okey, a theology professor at Saint Leo University in Florida, who wrote a book about Mr. Tracy. 'The project was growing like an avalanche. It got too big.'
National Post
09-05-2025
- Politics
- National Post
Avi Benlolo: Universities are a wrecking ball against civilization
Article content Harvard's Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism released a sprawling 300-page report last week that attempts to confront the antisemitism festering on its campus. But beneath its ambition lies a troubling truth: antisemitism has become embedded in the ideological core of many universities. And the real question is no longer just how to address it — but whether universities can even be rehabilitated at all. Article content Article content Article content This crisis didn't begin on October 7, 2023. That day, when Hamas terrorists murdered and raped innocent civilians, merely revealed the moral decay that had taken root over decades. Since the early 2000s, university campuses have been infected by movements like 'Israeli Apartheid Week' and BDS — activist campaigns masquerading as academic inquiry, laying the groundwork for today's open hostility toward Jews and Israel. Article content Article content Back at Harvard, Rabbi David Wolpe, who served as a visiting scholar, shared his chilling experience in the Free Press. At a Sukkot celebration at the Divinity School, a speaker began by assuring the crowd that it was 'a safe space for anti-Zionists, non-Zionists, and those struggling with their Zionism.' In other words: not safe for Jewish students proud of their identity. Article content Article content Wolpe described Israeli students being mobbed and assaulted; Jewish students ghosted by friends; professors eliminating Israeli sources from their syllabi; and required readings teaching that Zionism is a manipulative colonial ideology. Incredibly, 'privilege training' was offered to Jewish students — not to support them, but to reframe them as oppressors. Article content It's hard to imagine that after the horrors of October 7 — murders, rapes, mutilations committed by terrorists wearing the keffiyeh — students today are proudly wearing that same garment as a symbol of solidarity. The keffiyeh, co-opted by Yasser Arafat — the lead terrorist of his time — has become a symbol not of heritage but of terror. Its normalization on Western campuses is no different than wearing swastikas in the 1930s. And yet, here we are again. Article content But this isn't only about Jews. The warning that 'what starts with the Jews doesn't end with the Jews' is more relevant than ever. The antisemitism on campuses today is the tip of an anti-Western, anti-democratic movement masked as social justice. It seeks to dismantle Judeo-Christian values, freedom of thought, and liberal democracy. Some call it wokeism. Whatever the name, its goal is clear: to destroy Western civilization from within.
Business Recorder
21-04-2025
- Politics
- Business Recorder
The perils of Harvard-gate
This past week, President Donald Trump's monumental confrontation with Harvard University cast a stark light on the precarious position in which America's higher education institutions now find themselves. It's a showdown that transcends partisan politics and raises urgent questions about the future of academic freedom, institutional independence, and the essence of higher learning itself. In an audacious move, the Trump administration sent Harvard a five-page letter accusing the university of failing 'to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment.' The list of demands was sweeping and authoritarian: a restructured governance model, revamped admissions policies, an external audit of several schools – including the Divinity School and the School of Public Health – and the dissolution of support for student groups that express pro-Palestinian views. The university was instructed to submit quarterly compliance reports through at least 2028 – or face the loss of federal funding. This is not a routine policy disagreement. This is a threat to the very foundation of higher education in America. What's at stake isn't just funding – it's the intellectual autonomy of institutions, the ability of students and faculty to pursue knowledge free from government interference, and the survival of academic spaces where inquiry and dissent are not only tolerated, but essential. Harvard, to its credit, rejected the administration's demands. Its legal team responded with a firm letter stating that the government's conditions violated the law. 'The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,' it said. 'Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government.' President Alan Garber made the stakes crystal clear: 'No government – regardless of which party is in power – should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.' To comply, he said, would be to betray the mission of any institution 'devoted to the pursuit, production, and dissemination of knowledge.' In rejecting the government's ultimatum, Harvard became the first university to take a principled stand – one made possible, in part, by its $53 billion endowment, which cushions the potential loss of $2.2 billion in federal contracts and grants. Contrast that with Columbia University, which presents a cautionary tale. It was the first target of Trump's crackdown, and it chose a different path: compliance. Yet the reward for capitulation was not the reinstatement of its $400 million in federal funding. Instead, Columbia merely secured the right to negotiate with the administration – negotiations that reportedly include the possibility of direct federal oversight. That's not a partnership, its a takeover. Ivy Leagues, so-called 'anti-semitism' and the US The lesson here is painfully clear: appeasement is not a strategy. It invites further erosion of autonomy, not protection from it. The idea that surrendering core values will safeguard funding or institutional standing is a myth. In this climate, where political opportunism and authoritarian impulses go unchecked, resistance isn't just admirable – it's essential. Let's not forget why universities receive federal funding in the first place. It's not a favor. It's an investment – one that powers groundbreaking research, cultivates innovation, and helps train the next generation of scientists, as well as future leaders and thinkers. From public health crises to climate change, from food insecurity to technological advancement, the future depends on vibrant, independent centers of knowledge. Trump's mandate threatens to unravel all of it. This is more than a policy fight. It's a cultural reckoning. It's a moment of truth for every university that now stands at a crossroads: bow to political pressure or stand firm in defense of its mission. Harvard chose the latter. More institutions must follow suit. Because what's truly at risk isn't just federal funding. It's the essence of higher education itself. The article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Business Recorder or its owners
Business Recorder
21-04-2025
- Politics
- Business Recorder
The perils of Harvard-gate: Why resistance not appeasement must guide higher education
This past week, President Donald Trump's monumental confrontation with Harvard University cast a stark light on the precarious position in which America's higher education institutions now find themselves. It's a showdown that transcends partisan politics and raises urgent questions about the future of academic freedom, institutional independence, and the soul of higher learning itself. In an audacious move, the Trump administration sent Harvard a five-page letter accusing the university of failing 'to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment.' The list of demands was sweeping and authoritarian: a restructured governance model, revamped admissions policies, an external audit of several schools – including the Divinity School and the School of Public Health – and the dissolution of support for student groups that express pro-Palestinian views. The university was instructed to submit quarterly compliance reports through at least 2028 – or face the loss of federal funding. This is not a routine policy disagreement. This is a threat to the very foundation of higher education in America. What's at stake isn't just funding – it's the intellectual autonomy of institutions, the ability of students and faculty to pursue knowledge free from government interference, and the survival of academic spaces where inquiry and dissent are not only tolerated, but essential. Harvard, to its credit, rejected the administration's demands. Its legal team responded with a firm letter stating that the government's conditions violated the law. 'The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,' it said. 'Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government.' President Alan Garber made the stakes crystal clear: 'No government – regardless of which party is in power – should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.' To comply, he said, would be to betray the mission of any institution 'devoted to the pursuit, production, and dissemination of knowledge.' In rejecting the government's ultimatum, Harvard became the first university to take a principled stand – one made possible, in part, by its $53 billion endowment, which cushions the potential loss of $2.2 billion in federal contracts and grants. Contrast that with Columbia University, which presents a cautionary tale. It was the first target of Trump's crackdown, and it chose a different path: compliance. Yet the reward for capitulation was not the reinstatement of its $400 million in federal funding. Instead, Columbia merely secured the right to negotiate with the administration – negotiations that reportedly include the possibility of direct federal oversight. That's not a partnership, its a takeover. Ivy Leagues, so-called 'anti-semitism' and the US The lesson here is painfully clear: appeasement is not a strategy. It invites further erosion of autonomy, not protection from it. The idea that surrendering core values will safeguard funding or institutional standing is a myth. In this climate, where political opportunism and authoritarian impulses go unchecked, resistance isn't just admirable – it's essential. Let's not forget why universities receive federal funding in the first place. It's not a favor. It's an investment – one that powers groundbreaking research, cultivates innovation, and helps train the next generation of scientists, as well as future leaders and thinkers. From public health crises to climate change, from food insecurity to technological advancement, the future depends on vibrant, independent centers of knowledge. Trump's mandate threatens to unravel all of it. This is more than a policy fight. It's a cultural reckoning. It's a moment of truth for every university that now stands at a crossroads: bow to political pressure or stand firm in defense of its mission. Harvard chose the latter. More institutions must follow suit. Because what's truly at risk isn't just federal funding. It's the essence of higher education itself. The article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Business Recorder or its owners
CBS News
03-03-2025
- General
- CBS News
Martin Marty, renowned religious scholar and University of Chicago professor emeritus, dies at 97
University of Chicago professor emeritus the Rev. Dr. Martin E. Marty, once described by Time Magazine as "the most influential interpreter of religion in the U.S.," died last week. Marty died Tuesday, Feb. 25 at the Minneapolis care community where he had most recently lived. He was 97. Marty earned his Ph.D. from UChicago, and was on the faculty at the university's Divinity School for 35 years, UChicago noted. The U of C said Marty's understanding of Protestant Christianity and fundamentalism "still frame the view of modern American religion." The U of C added that historian L. Benjamin Rolsky called Marty "arguably the public intellectual of the 1980s," while biographer Grant Wacker suggested Marty belonged with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Billy Graham, and 18th-century revivalist and preacher Jonathan Edwards on the "Mount Rushmore of American religious history." A native of West Point, Nebraska, Marty attended Concordia Seminary and Chicago Lutheran Theological Seminary before he earned his Ph.D. from the U of C Divinity School in 1956, the university said. Marty became the founding pastor of the Lutheran Church of the Holy Spirit in the northwest Chicago suburb of Elk Grove Village in 1958, the U of C said. Marty joined the faculty of the University of Chicago Divinity School in 1963, and wrote more than 450 books, and 5,000 articles, essays, and other documents in that role, the U of C noted. He was also editor of the newsletter Context, and served as an editor for The Christian Century magazine for 50 years. As a practicing pastor, Marty also marched for civil rights in Selma, Alabama, with Dr. King in 1965, and served as a Protestant observer during the Second Vatican Council the year before, the U of C noted. A published obituary noted that Marty also traveled extensively to deliver thousands of lectures, sermons, and commencement speeches. UChicago cited the six-year "Fundamentalism Project" — a scholarly effort that spanned from 1988 until 1994 — as one of Marty's "most significant Scholarly achievements." The project, which Marty directed with his onetime advisee R. Scott Appleby, examined the role of conservative religious movements in societies around the world, the U of C said. The result was five volumes of case studies and analysis that the U of C said "quickly became the standard works in comparative political religion." Marty was also the founding president and later the scholar-in-residence at the Park Ridge Center for the Study of Health, Faith, and Ethics. The published obituary said Marty may be known best for the study of "public theology," a phrase Marty himself coined "to describe the critical engagement of religious and cultural issues that can foster the common good." "His rich interest in pluralism allowed him to be conversant in different genres and among diverse audiences," Marty's obit read. Marty retired from the Divinity School faculty on his 70th birthday in 1998. Marty married Elsa E. Schumacher in 1952, and they had four sons along with two permanent foster children, his obit read. After Elsa died of cancer in 1981, Marty reconnected with Harriet Meyer, the widow of a seminary classmate, and married her in 1982, his obit noted. Marty's son, Peter W. Marty, is now editor and publisher of The Christian Century and also served as a Lutheran pastor. The junior Marty wrote about his father in the magazine last week. "He encouraged those he met to love God from the top of their head and the bottom of their heart. Grace gave him the conviction that nobody was beneath him, just as the music of Bach reminded him that angels hovered just above him," Peter Marty wrote of his father. "In between was his own confident place in the lap of God. Forever grounded in the life of the church and anchored in hope, he took the happy simplicity of his childhood on the Nebraska prairie as his road map for life." A memorial service will be held at Central Lutheran Church in Minneapolis on Saturday, March 29, and will be live-streamed via the church's website. The U of C said a campus memorial service for Marty will be held at a later time.
