¹ See Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Harley, Robert (New York: Vintage, 1980), 101;Google ScholarFoucault, Michael, The Foucault Reader, ed. Rabinow, Paul (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 56;Google ScholarFoucault, Michel, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings: 1972-1977, ed. Gordon, Colin and trans. Gordon, Colinet al. (New York: Pantheon, 1980);Google ScholarBakhtin, M. M., The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Holquist, Michael and trans. Emerson, Caryl and Holquist, Michael (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 12, 279, 293, 346, 354;Google Scholar and Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans, and ed. Holquist, Michael (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 7, 69, 88–89, 91–94, 120–27, 162.Google Scholar

² On the link in classic Western philosophy between discourse legitimation and truth claims rooted in power relationships, see Lyotard, Jean-François, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Bennington, Geoff and Massumi, Brian (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 8–9.Google Scholar

³ See McCann, Dennis, “The Good to Be Pursued in Common” in The Common Good and U.S. Capitalism, ed. Williams, Oliver F. and Houck, John W. (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987), 157–78;Google ScholarMcCann, Dennis, New Experiments in Democracy (Kansas City, MO: Sheed & Ward, 1987);Google ScholarMcCann, Dennis, Polity and Praxis: A Program for American Practical Theology, with Strain, Charles R. (Minneapolis: Winston, 1985);Google ScholarNeuhaus, Richard John, The Catholic Moment (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987);Google Scholar and Weigel, George, Catholicism and the Renewal of American Democracy (New York: Paulist, 1989), esp. 8–9, 107, 118–20, 206.Google Scholar

⁴ See O'Brien, David, Public Catholicism (New York: Macmillan, 1989)Google Scholar, and “American Catholics and American Society” in Catholics and Nuclear War, ed. Murnion, Philip J. (New York: Crossroad, 1983), 16–29;Google ScholarMcBrien, Richard, Caesar's Coin: Religion and Politics in America (New York: Macmillan, 1987);Google Scholar and Dulles, Avery, The Reshaping of American Democracy (New York: Paulist, 1989), esp. 154–83, 207–26.Google Scholar

⁵ See Lindsey, William D., “Public Theology as Civil Discourse: What Are We Talking About?” Horizons 19 (1992): 44–69;CrossRefGoogle ScholarLindsey, William D., “The American Catholic Church and the Southern Experience: Is Integration Possible?” New Theology Review 5 (1992): 45–77;Google Scholar and Lindsey, William D., “‘The Problem of Great Time’: A Bakhtinian Ethic of Discourse,” Journal of Religion 73 (1993): 311–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁶ Brueggemann, Walter, The Prophetic Imagination (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978), 59;Google Scholar see also 26, 62, 65. For a similar proposal to read prophetic discourse as a transaction between a prophet and his or her community of discourse, see Overholt, Thomas W., Channels of Prophecy: The Social Dynamics of Prophetic Activity (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989).Google Scholar Though I agree with Overholt's insistence on understanding prophecy more in terms of its social dynamics than its message (4, 9, 11, 15), I have serious reservations about his claim that “the people choose their prophets” (71), because this appears to collapse the tension between prophet and resistant community that, in my view, is a constant feature of the prophetic interaction between prophet and community in those the Jewish and Christian traditions have discerned as authentic prophets.

⁷ Walker, Alice, The Color Purple (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), 176.Google Scholar

⁸ The citation occurs in Eusebius, ' Ecclesiastical History 5. 17.Google Scholar

⁹ Newman, John Henry, “Preface” in The Via Media of the Anglican Church, Illustrated in Lectures, Letters, and Tracts Written between 1830 and 1841, 3rd ed. (London: Longmans, Green, 1877), I:xv–xciv.Google Scholar

¹⁰ See Newman, John Henry, Sermons Bearing on Subjects of the Day (London: Longmans, Green, 1869), 52–62.Google Scholar It is interesting to compare Newman on this point with the recent encyclical of John Paul II entitled Veritatis splendor which, while appealing to Newman's development of doctrine principle and threefold office image, fundamentally distorts both. Though Veritatis splendor adverts to the fact that all Christians share in Christ's threefold office through baptism (see #107, 109), it also consistently collapses the priestly, prophetic, and governing offices into the papal-episcopal magisterium (see esp. #114). When the encyclical appeals to the development of doctrine principle, it does so to suggest that only the pastoral leaders of the church contribute to doctrinal development; in the view of the encyclical, the role of theologians is always ancillary to that of the episcopal-papal magisterial office, and the role of the laity is merely that of passively receiving teaching handed down by this office (see #4, 27-9, 53, and n. 8, 100). John Paul II's appeal to Newman thus fundamentally militates against the very idea Newman wished to stress: i.e., that the sensus fidelium and the Spirit's prophetic activity in both laity and theologians are a necessary balance and corrective to the tendency of the pastoral office to subsume all charisms within itself.

¹¹ “Preface,” Via Media, xxxix. On this, see Bergeron, Richard, Les abus de l'Église d'après Newman (Tournai: Desclée, 1971), 16, 101–06;Google Scholar and Lash, Nicholas, Theology on Dover Beach (New York: Paulist, 1979), 89–108Google Scholar, and Easter in Ordinary: Reflections on Human Experience and the Knowledge of God (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1988), 137–39.Google Scholar Other references to the idea in Newman, are in The Arians of the Fourth Century (London: Longmans, 1919), 227–28;Google Scholar and Via Media, I:304.Google Scholar

¹² Newman, , Sermons Bearing on Subjects of the Day, 55;Google Scholar on the three offices as Christ's, see 52-54; on the offices as left by Christ to the church, see 55. On the ongoing nature of prophecy in the church, see Rahner, Karl, “Prophetism” in Sacramentum Mundi, ed. Rahner, Karlet al. (New York: Herder & Herder, 1970), 112–13;Google ScholarBenoit, Pierre, "Prophet,” trans. Bracken, Joseph A., in Dictionary of Biblical Theology, ed. Dufour, Xavier Léon, 2nd ed. (New York: Seabury, 1973), 473;Google Scholar and R. P. R. Murray, who notes that Max Weber's Sociology of Religion posits a sharp tension between the prophetic and priestly roles in religious movements, and who thinks that the Vatican II document collapses this tension by subsuming prophecy into the teaching and evangelizing role of the entire church: “Prophecy” in The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Theology, ed. Richardson, Alan and Bowden, John (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1983), 275, 474–75.Google Scholar

¹³ de Bovis, André, “Participer à la mission prophétique du Christ,” La Vie spirituelle 541 (1967): 276–88Google Scholar, and “Le peuple de Dieu et sa mission prophétique,” La Vie spirituelle 542 (1967): 275–88.Google Scholar On prophecy as constitutive of New Testament Christianity, yet often overlooked, see Boring, M. Eugene, The Continuing Voice of Jesus: Christian Prophecy and the Gospel Tradition (Louisville: Westminster, 1991), 16–17;Google Scholar on the “general ‘prophetic’ character” of the early Christian community, see 42, where he notes that the prophet in the New Testament and post-New Testament Christian church was not so strictly marked off from the rest of the community as in the Old Testament and in Judaism; in the view of the Christian Scriptures, Boring thinks, every member of the community had “prophetic potential” (42).

¹⁴ Adams, James Luther, The Prophethood of All Believers, ed. Beach, George K. (Boston: Beacon, 1986), 57.Google Scholar

¹⁵ See Schildenberger, Johannes, “Prophet” in Sacramentum Verbi, ed. Bauer, Johannes B. (New York: Herder & Herder, 1970), 2:716;Google ScholarAdams, , Prophethood of All Believers, 99;Google Scholar and Murray, , “Prophecy,” 473–74.Google Scholar

¹⁶ On the “management mentality” of the center, which the prophet's speech directly confronts, see Brueggemann, , Prophetic Imagination, 42.Google Scholar

¹⁷ On the distinction between an institution and a conversation, in that the former requires constraints and boundaries for all statements which make some things unsayable, see Lyotard, , Postmodern Condition, 17.Google Scholar

¹⁸ For representative descriptions of carnival in Bakhtin, , see Dialogic Imagination, 58–61, 72, 77Google Scholar, and Speech Genres, 135.

¹⁹ See Boff, Clodovis: “When wolf meets sheep, no one must be deceived as to the ideological value of calls for ‘cooperation’ or ‘dialogue’ or ‘pluralism’” (Boff, Clodovis, Theology and Praxis, trans. Barr, Robert B. [Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1987], 48).Google Scholar On the threat posed by the stigmatizing tendencies of the center to the voice of otherness, see Tracy, David, Plurality and Ambiguity (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), 20, 26, 78–79.Google Scholar

²⁰ For a classic statement of the eschatological orientation of prophecy, see Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Theologiae, IIa–IIaeGoogle Scholar, q. 173.

²¹ My argument here parallels Carter's, Stephen in The Culture of Disbelief (New York: HarperCollins, 1993).Google Scholar Carter maintains that American liberalism's stress on cold rationality yields procedural rules for dialogue in the public square that are neither welcoming nor just. These rules require that participants in public dialogue “bracket” their particularity and “remake themselves” in liberal images before they enter the public square (54-55). In Carter's view, American liberalism needs to develop a respect for “epistemic diversity” that fosters respectful listening: “What is needed, then, is a willingness to listen, not because the speaker has the right voice but because the speaker has file right to speak” (230).

²² Williams, Raymond, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 57–60.Google Scholar

²³ Lasch, Christopher, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York: Norton, 1991), 466–68.Google Scholar

²⁴ For a development of this argument, see Lindsey, “American Catholic Church and Southern Experience.” On the hegemony of a liberal imagination in North American cultures, see the classic work of Hartz, Louis entitled The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1955).Google Scholar

²⁵ On such use of the Orient in Orientalist studies, see Said, Edward, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978), 65.Google Scholar On the need to “entertain the claims to attention of local, discontinuous, disqualified, illegitimate knoweldges against the claims of a unitary body of theory which would filter, hierarchise and order them in the name of some true knowledge and some arbitrary idea of what constitutes a science and its object” see Foucault, , Power/Knowledge, 83.Google Scholar

²⁶ The soft underbelly of post-Enlightenment progressivist, Utopian ideology is its tendency to repress others in the name of progress. As an example: though I find Richard Rorty's description of a liberal Utopia dominated by contingency, irony, and solidarity in some respects enormously seductive, I also have strong suspicions about its curious homelessness. I wonder who lives there in liberal Utopias except those whose social interests are apotheosized as progress tout simple, and who repress the cultural particularity of others in order to fabricate utopia (see Rorty, Richard, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989]).CrossRefGoogle Scholar For a very different, nonliberal, imagination of Utopia, one noting that the culturally marginal do not find terms such as “community” and “home” hopelessly aprogressive but who envisage a Utopia that does not demand detachment from cultural particularity (see Williams, Raymond, What I Came to Say [London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989], 59–60).Google Scholar

²⁷ On the prophet as one who faces a “coalition of callousness and established authority” in the community confronted by prophetic speech, see Heschel, Abraham Joshua, The Prophets: An Introduction (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), I:16.Google Scholar

²⁸ In this analysis, authentic prophecy would be akin to what Frank Kermode calls powerful textual criticism: in Kermode's view, the powerful critic is one who moves from the margins to the center, and successfully shows us that what we have taken as the center is less illuminating of the text than the margins (see Kermode, Frank, Forms of Attention [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985], 36Google Scholar). If we pursued this analogy, we might conclude that authentic prophecy is not that which purports to be prophecy, but which engages the classic text in a way that, without departing from the text, makes us see what we have not seen in it previously. On the classic as the norma normans of all theological conversation, see Tracy, David, The Analogical Imagination (New York: Crossroad, 1981).Google Scholar

²⁹ Brueggemann, , Prophetic Imagination, 90Google Scholar, see also 75, 77–78, 95, 103. On prophetic speech as not cryptic, not suspended between God and humanity, see Heschel, , Prophets, I:6–7.Google Scholar

³⁰ On the prophet as one who proclaims a hope that activates a possible imagination in a society, one not fully future or present, see Brueggemann, , Prophetic Imagination, 66.Google Scholar See also Benoit, , “Prophet,” 470–71.Google Scholar

³¹ On “dialectical negation” as a pattern not uncommon in prophetic discourse, see de Vaux, Roland, Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961), 428f., 454–56Google Scholar, and Vawter, Bruce, “Recent Literature on the Prophets” in Concilium, vol. 10, The Human Reality of Sacred Scripture, ed. Benoit, Pierre, Murphy, Roland, and van Iersel, Bastiaan (New York: Paulist, 1965), 115.Google Scholar

³² The phrase “epochal thinker” is from Adams, , Prophethood of All Believers, 100.Google Scholar

³³ On hope as the refusal to accept the reading of reality of the hegemonic consciousness in a society, see Brueggemann, , Prophetic Imagination, 67.Google Scholar

³⁴ Foucault, , Power/Knowledge, 79, 82–83.Google Scholar

³⁵ On the non-distinterestedness of prophecy, see Brueggemann, , Prophetic Imagination, 30;Google Scholar on prophets as those who never see under the aspect of eternity, but always situationally, see 25; on prophetic utterance as setting forth a single perspective, ad hoc, ad hominem, see Heschel, , Prophets, I:23.Google Scholar

³⁶ The Sharon Olds statement is from a recent unpublished lecture to writers in Charlotte, NC.

As the unsigned editorial preface to Concilium, vol. 37 entitled “Prophets in the Secular City” notes, for Martin Buber the prophet is unlike the apocalypticist in that the former is “constantly in an attitude of dialogue,” whereas the latter is involved in monologue: see Concilium, vol. 37, Prophets in the Church, ed. Aubert, Roger (New York: Paulist, 1968), 141Google Scholar, citing Buber, Martin, “Prophetie und Apokalyptik” in Werke II (Munich, 1964), 930–36.Google Scholar

³⁷ In his plenary address to the Catholic Theological Society of America in 1992, Gustavo Guttiérrez noted the dangers that Jesus' coherence posed for the privileged of his social milieu; Gutiérrez argued that Jesuanic theology must always aim at coherence, at keeping together, via hermeneutic bridge, orthodoxy, and orthopraxis. This argument parallels my argument about prophecy in the preceding paragraph. See Gutiérrez, Gustavo, “Theology from the Experience of the Poor,” CTSA Proceedings 47 (1992): 26–33.Google Scholar

³⁸ Dussel, Enrique, “Discernment: A Question of Orthodoxy or Orthopraxis?” trans. Burns, Paul, in Concilium, vol. 19, Discernment of the Spirit and of Spirits, ed. Floristán, Casiano and Duquoc, Christian (New York: Seabury, 1979), 48.Google Scholar On prophets as those who do not employ concepts and construct systems, but avail themselves of symbols and deeds that have ideological import and arise out of ideological stances, see Chenu, M. D., “Un peuple prophétique,” Esprit 35 (1967): 602–11.Google Scholar