Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 June 2004
I am very grateful to Amy Pauw for the careful and forceful way in which she has applied her considerable theological acumen, and the fruits of her long engagement with the church, to an interpretation and cautionary commentary on my book. Her remarks are a gift to me even as they chasten and redirect my efforts to expand the arguments of this book into a larger one. As I mention in an aside at the end of Chapter 3, the give and take of intellectual life, at its best, is an intimation of the community of mutual fulfillment which I believe the gospel calls us to realize everywhere. In writing the book I could only hope that faults in my arguments would be remedied and their good points developed, beyond anything I could achieve alone, by fine theologians such as Pauw taking up those arguments and offering them back to me transformed. This very exchange reflects the way a community of mutual fulfillment need not be community at a remove from disagreement, conflict, and the temptation to hubris among fallible, morally weak individuals (such as myself). In a fallen world of finite creatures, a community of mutual fulfillment often just is in this way a community of argument (of the sort I discuss in Theories of Culture) – a community that is agonistic, prone to deep disagreement about matters of shared concern, but a community held together nonetheless by the shared admission of fault and the consequent recognition that the true and the good can be had by anyone only through open engagement with all.