Theological Journal – January 17 What’s the Difference between a Stone and a Kiss?
Our day and time is one in which approaches to religious or spiritual faith tend either toward some experience they regard as religious or spiritual (and it doesn’t matter what it is) or toward a retrenchment to faith as commitment to a cause or as a specimen logged in a book). The former is open-ended with almost no boundaries; the latter quite specific with the specter of political correctness/purity always near at hand (Andrew Root following Charles Taylor). Neither events without a history nor history without events will do theologically, however. These legacies of the 19 th and 20 th centuries have left us between a rock and a hard place. Or better, following physicist Carlo Rovelli ( Seven Brief Lessons on Physics), between a stone and a kiss. What does this mean? Stones are objects locatable in space and time with which one has at best an impersonal relationship. Even of one worships the spirit or deity of a rock it is not the rock itself one relates to but t...