Panel: CREATIVELY MOVING DAVID TRACY'S THEOLOGY FORWARD



1145.2 - DAVID TRACY'S (RADICAL, THEOLOGICAL) AESTHETICS OF "LETTING GO"

AUTHORS:
Chase C. (Manhattan University ~ Bronx, New York ~ United States of America)
Text:
"Theology is about the vision of life and a way of life." For Tracy, our ability to adequately frame this vision is forever being disrupted by two demands for our attention - the cries of those who suffer global inequalities and injustice, and the haunting call of the Impossible-Infinite. These demands require responses that, in turn, call on us to let go, in small and large ways, of our surety of the vision of life we presently hold to be true. "Letting go" allows us to go back to the radix, and open our eyes and our imaginations to what could or ought to be otherwise, including whom we could or ought to become. The suffering of whole peoples and the call of the Infinite (God) demand a change in our performed aesthetics: in our perception (of what is) and in our imagination (of what is unseen and/or what ought to be otherwise). This paper traces an aesthetics of letting go that runs through the ever-evolving theology of David Tracy, beginning with the seminal year 1968, his early claims of "limit," his notions of the "classic" and the analogical imagination, and his dialogic responses to the other, but, also, among his later notions of event, fragments, and filaments, and our shared need to forever discover anew the vision of life and way of life, through new and relevant connections, not only across infinite possibilities in the present, not only in infinite rediscoveries within the past, but towards infinite (at present, impossible) futures. Tracy's deep driving concern for human persons and whole communities victimized and rendered invisible is never more prescient than in our "now" moment. This paper concludes with hope: sparks of promise, fragments of possibility, from within an aesthetics of letting go, a gift from Tracy that may offer us clues of a way out of the seemingly never-ending injustices and inequalities generated by our current political, economic, and cultural systems.