How I came to choose Strasbourg as my destination for my Junior Year Abroad had a lot to do with theology. During three successive years, I had come under the influence of three teachers, each of whom helped to determine the direction that I would take intellectually. During my senior year at Good Counsel High School, the first of these axial professors was my senior religion teacher, Brother Meric, who was also the coach of our debate team, at a time when we tied for first place at the National Catholic Forensic League. Brother Meric foresook the traditional Catholic apologetics-cum-senior-prom-sex-lecture in favor of an ambitious survey of philosophical theology, beginning with an introduction to the proofs for the existence of God, followed by a narrative of the views of God from David Hume to Kant to Hegel. Meric's class awakened in me a sense of the power of rationalism, and, paradoxically, a greater allegiance to the Catholic Church.
The second teacher to shape my thinking and, indirectly, point me towards Strasbourg, was John Sexton, another theology teacher, but in many ways the polar opposite of Brother Meric. Sexton, whom I had met a year earlier in the National Catholic Forensic League (he was the coach of the St. Brendan's debate team, the leading girls' team in New York). With an energy to rival Meric's, Sexton sought to demolish the edifice my high school teacher had built: On the first day of class, he categorically proclaimed that there was no way to prove the existence of God. The first semester of Freshman Theology was devoted to introducing students to analytic philosophy as it encountered religion. The second semester introduced us to phenomenology of religion, Van der Leeuw and Mircea Eliade, as well as that most seductive of movements, the "God is Dead" movement. By the end of the freshman year, I was fascinated by the complexity and richness of issues which constituted theology, and I was determined to become a lay theologian.
Sophomore year, however, turned out to be a bit disappointing on the theology front. From my freshman class and my own reading, I had formed an image of theology as a stimulating field of free thinking, investigation and open-ended speculation, with not a little debunking of stale orthodoxy. When I began taking courses in the department, however, I discovered that the reality was a bit different. To begin with, the actual curriculum for a theology major at Fordham required a foundation in ancient Greek, a solid background in Old and New Testament, and acquaintance with Church history, Patristic theology and apologetics. I ended up taking two courses in the department, one on Christology, and one on Modern Atheism. The former I found somewhat dull, and the latter only marginally less so. The saving grace of the course on Modern Atheism was that it introduced me to Ludwig Feuerbach, which, somewhat later, introduced me to the Early Marx. But this course, far from the challenging iconoclasm of John Sexton's class, was taught by a senior Jesuit who seemed to be on a mission to save the world from atheism, and i just went throught the motions of enjoying it.
On the other hand, in the required curriculum, my sophomore philosophy class led me to the third of the axial influences of my pre-Europe development: Dr. Robert Kane. This slight, thin, bookish man from Yale came on the scene somewhat modestly, but his impact on me was enormous. The required philosophy sequence at Fordham included a semester of classical texts, and a semester of selected philosophical problems. Kane's explication of the Phaedo was my first experience of actual philosophical pain, a kind of mental headache which one experiences when one confronts arguments from every direction that challenge basic beliefs. The stimulation that arises from seeing the dialectic in action is replaced by repeated discomfort when you discover that every argument that you make has an answer. In the Phaedo, Socrates proves the immortality of the soul by four arguments, the most challenging of which is the theory of recollection, according to which certain knowledge, e.g. mathematical truths, is actually recollection from past lives, in which the immortal soul, having passed through other bodies in the past, brings previously acquired knowledge into the present world. This leads Socrates to a theory of reincarnation. The headache begins when, despite our confident dismissal of reincarnation as exotic superstition, it turns out to be supported by compelling logic, which, in the hands of Dr. Kane, is almost irresistible.
That was it! Between the mental calisthentics of Kane's class, which left me exhausted but exhilirated, and the fact that the Modern Atheism class was jointly offered by the Theology and Philosophy departments, I realized that the major for me was Philosophy, not Theology.
The second teacher to shape my thinking and, indirectly, point me towards Strasbourg, was John Sexton, another theology teacher, but in many ways the polar opposite of Brother Meric. Sexton, whom I had met a year earlier in the National Catholic Forensic League (he was the coach of the St. Brendan's debate team, the leading girls' team in New York). With an energy to rival Meric's, Sexton sought to demolish the edifice my high school teacher had built: On the first day of class, he categorically proclaimed that there was no way to prove the existence of God. The first semester of Freshman Theology was devoted to introducing students to analytic philosophy as it encountered religion. The second semester introduced us to phenomenology of religion, Van der Leeuw and Mircea Eliade, as well as that most seductive of movements, the "God is Dead" movement. By the end of the freshman year, I was fascinated by the complexity and richness of issues which constituted theology, and I was determined to become a lay theologian.
Sophomore year, however, turned out to be a bit disappointing on the theology front. From my freshman class and my own reading, I had formed an image of theology as a stimulating field of free thinking, investigation and open-ended speculation, with not a little debunking of stale orthodoxy. When I began taking courses in the department, however, I discovered that the reality was a bit different. To begin with, the actual curriculum for a theology major at Fordham required a foundation in ancient Greek, a solid background in Old and New Testament, and acquaintance with Church history, Patristic theology and apologetics. I ended up taking two courses in the department, one on Christology, and one on Modern Atheism. The former I found somewhat dull, and the latter only marginally less so. The saving grace of the course on Modern Atheism was that it introduced me to Ludwig Feuerbach, which, somewhat later, introduced me to the Early Marx. But this course, far from the challenging iconoclasm of John Sexton's class, was taught by a senior Jesuit who seemed to be on a mission to save the world from atheism, and i just went throught the motions of enjoying it.
On the other hand, in the required curriculum, my sophomore philosophy class led me to the third of the axial influences of my pre-Europe development: Dr. Robert Kane. This slight, thin, bookish man from Yale came on the scene somewhat modestly, but his impact on me was enormous. The required philosophy sequence at Fordham included a semester of classical texts, and a semester of selected philosophical problems. Kane's explication of the Phaedo was my first experience of actual philosophical pain, a kind of mental headache which one experiences when one confronts arguments from every direction that challenge basic beliefs. The stimulation that arises from seeing the dialectic in action is replaced by repeated discomfort when you discover that every argument that you make has an answer. In the Phaedo, Socrates proves the immortality of the soul by four arguments, the most challenging of which is the theory of recollection, according to which certain knowledge, e.g. mathematical truths, is actually recollection from past lives, in which the immortal soul, having passed through other bodies in the past, brings previously acquired knowledge into the present world. This leads Socrates to a theory of reincarnation. The headache begins when, despite our confident dismissal of reincarnation as exotic superstition, it turns out to be supported by compelling logic, which, in the hands of Dr. Kane, is almost irresistible.
That was it! Between the mental calisthentics of Kane's class, which left me exhausted but exhilirated, and the fact that the Modern Atheism class was jointly offered by the Theology and Philosophy departments, I realized that the major for me was Philosophy, not Theology.
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