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Difference and Otherness: A Non‐Western Conversation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Andrew Dawson
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Extract

In the opening chapter of the book On Naming the Present, David Tracy engages with three “conversations” upon “difference and otherness” currently on stream in the West. Reflecting upon the “bourgeois subject” of modernity, the “communal subject” of anti-modernity and the “nonsubject” of post-modernity, Tracy concludes that the wealth of insight offered by these conversations still falls short of supplying the “Western centre” with the hermeneutical perspective necessary to a contemporary discernment of God’s presence among us. Holding such a perspective to be had subsequent to a multiplicity of conversations taking place, Tracy remarks upon the West’s need to “listen to other [i.e., non-western] conversations” which transcend the interpretative framework of our modern, anti-modern and postmodern narrative traditions. Only by opening ourselves to the discourse of those engaged “in the concrete struggle for justice against suffering and oppression and for total liberation” will we in the West be allowed “once again” to hear “the healing and transformative message of the Christian gospel.” (p. 18)

Responding to the findings of Tracy, and guided by his subject-centred focus, the following material endeavours to sketch the contours of a conversation currently under way among the Latin American community of liberation theologians. Focussing upon a theological understanding of the human subject as person, this particular conversation offers a valuable source of insight to those in the West who are concerned to ensure that the subjectivity which our own discourses narrate remains free from cultural solipsism and ever open to the novum by which the Divine is so often encountered in our own context.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 79 , Issue 929-930 , July 1998 , pp. 318 - 328
Copyright
Copyright © 1998 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

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References

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