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1、NOTREDAMELETTERSLETTERS FROM NOTRE DAME IN AN AGE OF FAITH1953-1954“If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness, lon
2、g since cut off from the person of Christ, that is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror.”Flannery OConnor, Mystery and Manners (1969).PROLOGUE2003-2004Fifty Years LaterFrom the beginning, the history of civilization in America ha
3、s been a dialogue between faith and culture, between the religious and the secular dimensions of life. It is an inevitable and necessary dialogue because faith and culture are realities endemic to the human condition. Neither can replace the other. Ofteneven usuallythe dialogue occurs in an atmosphe
4、re of tension and even of conflict, as the two sides strive for control, but until recently it has presumed on both sides a respect for common sense and right reason. Both faith and culture tell us what to do with our lives. They establish and enforce obligatory norms, personal and social. The deman
5、ds of faith and culture have clashed throughout our history because faith claims to be a gift of God as authoritatively nourished by his shepherds, while the general culture is a gift of the men who have preceded us in this world, with all their characteristic strengths and weaknesses. For many reas
6、ons, it is rare when men and God agree about the basic rules of life; when it is clear to all or to most what are “the things of God” and what are “the things of Caesar.” This tension is located first of all within each believer, because both faith and culture are part of uswhether in a positive or
7、a negative way: if they are not accepted, they are rejected. From us this tension extends to families, communities, social institutions, and customs.Students of American culture can distinguish different “ages” when faith shaped the culture, and when secular culture broke free of faithidentifiable p
8、eriods (usually brief) when one or the other was predominant. Some of those periods were well enough identified to receive names, such as “The Great Awakening,” or “The Gay Nineties,” or “The Roaring Twenties.” Secularizing influences normally flourish in periods of prosperity and self-confidence, a
9、s in these early years of the twenty-first century when the United States exercises a preponderant influence in the world, politically, militarily, economically. But older Americans can remember a very different national spirit in the forty years between 1929 and 1969, under the influence of the Gre
10、at Depression, the Second World War, and the Cold War. As the cultural historian might expect, most Americans experienced that period as an “age of faith.” Organized religion prospered and exercised an influence on the popular culture. It came to be widely expected that family, church, school, and e
11、ven popular entertainment and the mass media would, by and large, convey the same religiously based moral messages. Prominent churchmen shared the spotlight with entertainers and political leaders.A combination of domestic and international developments in the late 1960s suddenly brought this period
12、 to an end in what scholars are coming to accept as a “Cultural Revolution” with sweeping implications for individuals and for all sectors of society. The chief catalysts of this abrupt cultural shift were racial (the Civil Rights Movement) and military-industrial (the Vietnam War). For American Cat
13、holics there was the additional impact of the Second Vatican Council and a simmering disaffection, mostly among clergy and members of religious orders, which it brought into the open. Within a surprisingly short time, a new set of secular imperatives established itself in the most influential sector
14、s of society (courts of justice, universities, editorial boards, chanceries) and rapidly filtered down through schools, churches, and community agencies to families and individuals. Religious leaders and institutions began to send messages dictated by a new orthodoxy in public opinion, and to margin
15、alize and even repudiate their earlier traditions.With all this in the background, the reader is invited to re-enter the “age of faith” that seemed so firm and secure just fifty years ago but nowin an age of skepticismseems so remote. Readers of these “Letters from Notre Dame in an Age of Faith” can
16、 find source material for a comparative exercise yielding fresh insight into the age-old rivalry of faith and culture. The letters are presented with a touch of nostalgia as heirlooms and even monuments to a time when people had access every day to a living culture in direct contact with the enduring tradition of Christendom.Dr. John A. Gueguen, professor emeritus of political philosophy,Illinois State Universit
