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Issue of Communio on the Nature of Experience

[1]The latest issue of Commnio: International Catholic Review [1] is a special issue on the ‘Nature of Experience’, containing articles by: David L. Schindler, Reinhard Hütter, Antonio Lopez, Conor Cunningham, D. C. Schindler, David S. Crawford, Steven A. Long, José Granados, Joseph Atkinson, Margaret Harper McCarthy, Michael Maria Waldstein, and Martin Rhonheimer. From the Introduction [2]:

The Summer, 2010 issue of Communio is devoted to “The Nature of Experience.” In December of 2009, the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family sponsored a conference on the theme “The Nature of Experience: Issues on Culture, Science, and Theology.” The aim of the conference was to reflect on the meaning of experience and to clarify some of the assumptions underlying modern empirical methods and accounts of subjectivity. Communio is pleased to publish the papers from this conference. If one of the hallmarks of contemporary theology is the “appeal to experience,” it is remarkable how little attention is given to the meaning of the concept of experience itself. As David Schindler suggests, the real problem with contemporary thought is not simply the uncritical appeal to experience, but the absence or “forgetfulness of experience in its original, or most basic and catholic, meaning.” Only when experience is understood as open to the whole of reality, including the mystery of God, is it possible to receive the witness of the New Testament: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life — the life was made manifest, and we saw it, and testify to it, and proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father and was made manifest to us” (1 Jn 1:1–2).

Table of contents and PDFs of select articles (by David L. Schindler, Reinhard Hütter, Antonio Lopez, Conor Cunningham, and D. C. Schindler) may be found here [1].

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