Process Thought and Roman Catholicism: Challenges and Promises ed. by Marc A. Pugliese and John Becker (review)

The Catholic intellectual tradition is a rich and multidimensional history of ideas. At the heart of the tradition is the ongoing challenge to show the integral and irreducible relationship between faith and reason. With the explicit intention to reconcile religion with that of contemporary scientific discoveries, Alfred North Whitehead constructed a metaphysical system in which he grounded the deeper implications of Einstein’s relativity theory, quantum indeterminacy, and biological evolution. Utilizing the salient features of Whitehead’s framework, many of the authors in this erudite collection of essays discuss how process philosophy can shed new light on theological concepts unique to Roman Catholicism. Twentiethcentury theologian Karl Rahner remarked that the principal task of theology is to present the Christian message coherently. Rather than simply reiterating what persons have thought the Christian message to be in the past, the theologian seeks to provide an interpretation of the Christian message that is relevant and meaningful to each new time, place, and circumstance. The greatest strength of this volume, therefore, lies in its constructive chapters, as they effectively “liberate Catholics from the fear that accepting the ideas of a recent thinker like Whitehead requires rejection of essential Catholic teaching by making it clear that profound Catholic thinkers who have paid attention to their Catholic experiences have come to similar conclusions” (p. xi). Ilia Delio, for instance, offers an incisive analysis of Duns Scotus’s philosophy of univocity and compares it to Whitehead’s idea of creativity as an ultimate principle. In a subtle way, she argues that Dun Scotus’s work prepared the way for Whitehead’s. As Catholic theology has generally been receptive to assimilating ideas from philosophy and science, as MariaTeresa Teixeria’s chapter reminds us, then the nonsubstantial character of Whitehead’s corpus should not be an obstacle to thoughtful interaction (p. 75). Teixeria urges Catholics instead to pay attention to his ideas and to reconsider them in ways that are faithful to the distinctiveness of the tradition. Concerned with the dimension of community as a Catholic priest and theologian, Joseph Bracken’s chapter proposes a shift in process metaphysics to focus more on systems thinking. As one’s relations to others are constitutive of oneself, Bracken calls our attention “to the kinds of entities (systems) that are generated and their role in shaping us who are members as well as the larger society” (p. xiii). In an effort to display agreement between Whitehead’s and Thomas