Anne Carpenter Episode — Beatrice Institute

How can a modern Christian honor tradition without unreflectively clinging to the past?

In her classes, Anne Carpenter encounters students who think tradition is like a game of telephone, where a phrase is handed down the line. Inevitably, the phrase gets garbled and people forget the original message. Anne’s challenge is getting students to imagine historical people as intelligent and communal. Her goal is to guide them to a deeper understanding of tradition, concretely pulling them into a historical imagination where tradition is the community dealing with its experiences of Jesus Christ. For Anne, tradition is about more than just keeping things; it’s about living.

Drawing upon early-twentieth-century French theologians, especially those of the Nouvelle Théologie, Anne distinguishes between history and historicism. Historicism sees the actions of the past as inevitable. It forgets that history is made of people, who don’t know everything, making decisions. For Anne, the French ressourcement movement challenged Christians to look to the past to come up with a tradition that's more human and more alive by “resourcing” it, reaching into the tradition to do it all over again, but better. Ressourcement is interested in bringing to theology a new life through old figures.

Anne Carpenter joins Ryan to discuss the intersection of history, tradition, art, and theology. What is the difference between ressourcement and genealogy? Are art and theology the same thing? What can video games teach us about theology? How can everyday Christians contribute to renewing the theological tradition? Anne is associate professor of theology at St. Mary's College of California and has recently completed Nothing Gained Is Eternal: A Theology of Tradition, forthcoming from Fortress Press.

Tradition is the community dealing with its questions
History approximates human life, but it’s not human life
Historicism is not history; it forgets that history is made of people making decisions and they don’t know everything
Ressourcement is interested in bringing to Catholic theology a new life through old figures
Genealogy is interested in describing how we got here
Ressourcement thinkers creatively asked new questions
We live in a cosmos that has many horizons
Theology is always enriched by adopting the polyphony of the cosmos God has made
Metaphysics is a framing device that allows theological speculation to be braver
Metaphysics is not everything; it just points at everything
Péguy sees the human struggle as a continual beginning again whose only source can be God
Balthasar says that if the universe is in love with God, it is not indifferent to individuals
“I wanted to know what happens to Catholic tradition when it faces questions it hasn't asked yet.”
Anything we humans generate can also be used to understand ourselves
“If you punch me in the face, I don't yet know what that means.”
Video games are trying to tell me something about what it means that I hit a button
Theology requires a lot of practice to do and be good at
“Christians will need something better than YouTube channels that say angry things about the Mass in English.”
The central contribution we all make to Christian tradition is trying to be ourselves before God