Moving beyond the neuroanatomy of religious experience: a commentary on McNamara’s thoughts on personalism, technology, and the Eschaton

Abstract

Social Structures and Culture: A Primer on Critical Realism for Christian Ethics (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2020). 5. Robert Schreiter, The Ministry of Reconciliation: Spirituality and Strategies (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1988). Cf. McNamara on p. 144, on the “dream-like intuition of the ideal commonwealth, but is experienced as uncannily tangible and real in moments of ritual practice, prayer and meditation... . It is what we strive to realize and it is what we celebrate as coming to be within and without us in the present moment.” 6. The cultivation of interiority/privacy/solitude in groups that promote eschatological personalism sets “political limits on state intrusion into personal life” (p. 178). 7. “That shifting of identity from the current to the blessed age is slowly accomplished over time with the help of the tradition Christian ascetical, ritual, sacramental, and ecclesial practices... Entry into the blessed age is accomplished through participation in the Christian community” (p. 85). 8. Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity, trans. William Dych (New York: Crossroad, 1995), 131. 9. For the inspiration of this formulation, see Robert Sokolowski’s essay on “Phenomenology and Eucharist” in his Christian Faith and Human Understanding (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2006), 70.