As a young Catholic scholar-priest, Christopher Ryan was dean of St Edmund’s House, Cambridge. In 1986, he became an Anglican, leaving Cambridge to teach Italian studies full-time. In 2002, he returned to be dean of King’s College. He was the first man to be dean of both a Catholic and an Anglican college at Cambridge University since the Reformation. About 1990, he gave a sparkling paper in the divinity faculty at Cambridge. He argued that Dante’s theology, though indebted to Aquinas, was distinctive and different as it was inherently more optimistic about human nature. Others, notably Kenelm Foster, had suggested this might be the case, but Ryan made the theme his own. He worked on it for 15 years until his untimely death in 2004, when he left behind a series of sketch
12 October 2013, The Tablet
Dante and Aquinas: a study of Nature and Grace in the Comedy
Serious theology
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User Comments (1)
An overall thoughtful and excellent assessment by Pope Francis of the world at present. It is sobering to recall the UN address made nearly 50 years ago by Pope Paul VI calling for peace and an end to war. The Vietnam War had begun and the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and in the Balkans and Africa and now the Ukraine have followed. And the endless Middle East conflicts continue.
It is far more difficult to end wars than to start them. Scientists cannot even agree on the extent to which global warming threatens Earth. Interested parties cannot agree on whether freeing convicted terrorists from Guantanamo is prudent (an unknown number have been shown to strike again). And many disagree about whether a sincere "rapprochement" with Cuba is prudent and has been reached when Fidel Castro's crimes are recalled.
The world is a tinder box. Space exploration now seems designed to exit Earth and for colonization, because fall-out shelters won't work once a thermo-nuclear war renders Earth uninhabitable. But will wars then be fought in outer space among the stars?