Fragmentation and memory : meditations on Christian doctrine / Karmen MacKendrick.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

MacKendrick, Karmen, 1962-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Baltimore catechism.

Catholic Church--Doctrines.

Catholic Church.

Physical Description:

x, 196 pages ; 24 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Fordham University Press, 2008.

Summary:

Philosophers have long and skeptically viewed religion as a source of overeasy answers, with a singular, totalizing "God" and the comfort of an immortal soul being the greatest among them. But religious thought has always been more interesting-indeed, a rich source of endlessly unfolding questions.

With questions from the 1885 Baltimore Catechism of the Catholic Church as the starting point for each chapter, Karmen MacKendrick offers postmodern reflections on many of the central doctrines of the Church: the oneness of God, original sin, forgiveness, love and its connection to mortality, reverence for the relics of saints, and the doctrine of bodily resurrection. She maintains that we begin and end in questions and not in answers, in fragments and not in totalities-more precisely, in a fragmentation paradoxically integral to wholeness.

Taking seriously Augustine's idea that we find the divine in memory, MacKendrick argues that memory does not lead us back in time to a tidy answer but opens onto a complicated and fragmented time in which we find that the one and the many, before and after and now, even sacred and profane are complexly entangled. Time becomes something lived, corporeal, and sacred, with fragments of eternity interspersed among the stretches of its duration. Our sense of ourselves is correspondingly complex, because theological considerations lead us not to the security of an everlasting, indivisible soul dwelling comfortably in the presence of a paternal deity but to a more complicated, perpetually peculiar, and paradoxical life in the flesh.

Contents:

The one and the many

The sin of origin

From trauma to revelation : forgiveness

Poppies and rosemary : love

Dismembered divinity : saints' relics

Eternal flesh : the resurrection of the body.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 179-187) and index.

ISBN:

9780823229499

0823229491

9780823229505

0823229505

OCLC:

230802008