Word: thinker
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...believe in Christ has always been, as Kierkegaard put it, an inexplicable leap of faith. The most profound preacher of that mystery in the 20th century was Karl Barth, who died last week at the age of 82. Eulogized as the century's most significant religious thinker, Barth changed the course of Protestant theology in his lifetime almost singlehandedly. Though he abhorred theological systems, he produced, in his 14-volume Church Dogmatics, the most powerful exposition of Protestant thought since Calvin's Institutes...
...Thinker's Grappling. Despite his acknowledged eminence, Barth's masterwork, Church Dogmatics, is one of the least-read great books of the century, and Barthian neo-orthodoxy now seems almost as old hat as the orthodoxy it displaced. Yet Barth wanted no disciples-except, he said, for his own sons Markus, a professor at Pittsburgh Theology Seminary, and Christoph, a Biblical scholar at the University of Mainz, Germany-and he often told students: "Don't repeat what I have said. Learn to think for yourselves." He tried firmly to shun theological fashion, and his constant goal...
...matters of structure," says one official of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, "Paul is willing to modernize. But not on matters of faith and morals." Theologically, the Pope is not a progressive thinker. He has repeatedly referred to himself as a student of Jacques Maritain, the gentle French philosopher whose "integral humanism" was a sensitive rethinking of the insights of Thomas Aquinas. Maritain was a fresh and life-giving force within Catholicism during the '30s and '40s, most notably in his defense of political democracy against the charms of fascism (Paul, in his years...
...describe Vladimir Tallin as a product of Communism [Aug. 9] is incorrect. He was a rebel and a free thinker. I knew Tallin in the mid-thirties, in the days when Russian men of culture were slaughtered in the name of international Communism. I last saw him in his tiny one-room apartment in Moscow, which was dominated by a huge black and white canvas entitled The Fish Merchant and Fish. Neither merchant nor fish were in evidence-it was hardly an example of having "knuckled under" to Communist social realism. We drank tea and listened to Tallin playing...
Cioran's first book published in the U.S., The Temptation to Exist (Quadrangle; $5), presents his dark vision in a series of highly personal, paradoxical meditations that almost defy criticism and can only be categorically accepted or rejected. An unsystematic thinker who refers to his essays as "fragments," Cioran (pronounced Cho-ran) presents his arguments in ironic, aphoristic prose (see box). It is rather as if Dostoevsky had written Notes from Underground in the style of Pascal's Pensees. Although his gloom has affinities, with existentialism, Cioran is hard to pigeon hole; his eclectic thought contains echoes...