
In this collection of essays, distinguished Australian theologian Tracey Rowland takes up the relationship of Christ and culture, broadly understood. She contrasts the principles undergirding what St. John Paul II called a “culture of death” with those required for the flourishing of a humanism that flows from the grace of the Incarnation.
Rowland returns frequently to the theological insights of Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI, to whose thought she is deeply indebted. Drawing upon the Augustinian and Thomist traditions of political theology, she offers a trenchant theological critique of liberalism in all its forms, with attention to our modern attraction to false utopias and accommodationist impulses.
The nine essays in this volume engage such perennial topics as the place of natural law, the theological status of the “world,” and the nature of true humanism, along with timely topics such as the retrieval of the sources of Catholic resistance to Communism and what is now commonly called cultural Marxism. Rowland's inimitable voice, keen wit, and penetrating insight into the distinctiveness of Catholic truth make this book a landmark volume as the Church today revisits anew its relationship to the world.
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Tracey Rowland (PhD, Cambridge University; STD, Pontifical Lateran University) is the St. John Paul II Chair of Theology at the University of Notre Dame (Australia) and a member of the editorial board of Communio: International Catholic Review. From 2014 to 2019, she was a member of the International Theological Commission and is currently a member of the Pontifical Academy of the Social Sciences. In 2012, Rowland was awarded the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland, and in 2020, she was awarded the Ratzinger Prize for Theology. She is the author of Ratzinger’s Faith: The Theology of Benedict XVI, The Culture of the Incarnation: Essays in Catholic Theology, and Beyond Kant and Nietzsche: The Munich Defense of Christian Humanism, among other books.