Thursday, April 27, 2017

Book Review: God Matters by Herbert McCabe

I want to teach like Herbert McCabe writes. He takes the nearly-thousand-year-old ideas of Thomas Aquinas and sharpens them to fine points, then uses them to poke holes in all manner of shoddy thinking. He is a Dominican who writes so clearly about transubstantiation and the Immaculate Conception that they make sense to even this Protestant scientist. My understanding of sacraments, Holy Week, creation, even time itself was expanded by this book. The worst part is when other scholars write a chapter or so and he argues back and forth with them. These other scholars are good, but it's like sunspots, they look dark even though they're bright because they are against the backdrop of the sun itself. I find McCabe's politics challenging and (since most of this was written in the 80's) not quite as applicable, but still, it's a genuine loss for us that we don't have him around to comment on today's events.

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