This essay seeks in Tracy an account of dialogue as the first hope of post-war forgiveness and reconciliation, for the author’s own troubled setting of post-civil war Croatia. Despite Tracy not having written on reconciliation after conflict, ‘a Tracyean route to the hope of dialogue’ takes shape here via Tracyean emphases on ‘history’, ‘tragedy’, and ‘fragments’. Dialogue becomes theological here not solely on account of religious contexts widely present in Croatia, but also, after Tracy, whenever dialogue approaches its proper goals and reach. In ‘a practical-historical context of despair and violence’, recent works by Tracy helps by: (1) highlighting the value of a tragic sensibility within culture and Christianity; and (2) proposing hope around strong fragments (or ‘frag-events’). In an innovative application of Tracy, some of the most powerful Croatian fragments are those ordinary inhabitants whose lives are witness to the country’s collective failures in addressing ongoing experiences of extraordinary injustice and suffering. It is to them that dialogue must be exposed if Croatian society is to open itself towards a divine Infinity of hope and forgiveness.

This essay takes up David Tracy’s adjective ‘mystical-prophetic’ amid racialised North America. Since 1990 Tracy has employed the category to indicate the way concrete theological expression brings together the mystical-aesthetic-contemplative (and apophatic) and the prophetic-ethical-political (and apocalyptic) in tensive conjunction. Emphasising the hyphen, this essay applies Tracy’s term to hip-hop, elucidating the tension between hip-hop’s early overtly political character– ‘the sudden eruption of black and brown voices on to the stage of American life, a rumbling and riotous explosion of sound and self-expression’– and its later characteristically aestheticised (and commercialised) pleasures as primarily ‘renegade music, dance and art’. Those drawn to the politics may not rush past hip-hop’s multilayered artistic and participative exhilarations. Examining Childish Gambino’s powerful 2018 song and music video ‘This is America’, the author finds Tracy’s category relevant and applicable beyond religion narrowly defined, proposing ‘street theology’ as a form of public theology that emerges here as the genius of hip-hop is interpreted sympathetically as mystical-prophetic.

This essay introduces and explores David Tracy’s notion of ‘analogical imagination’ as something that prevents reason, theology, and social life from collapsing ‘into equivocation or else hopeless stupid conflict’. A capacious reflective reason, after Tracy, depends on imaginative habits and sensibilities that stay faithful to the discordant plurality and ambiguity of things while also acknowledging their analogies or ‘similarities-in-difference’. The essay argues that the continuing integrity and scope of Tracyean analogical imagination depends upon understanding that the negations that belong to apparently contrasting ‘dialectical imaginations’ reach ‘all the way down’ within analogical imagination itself. Aided by classic expressions of culture, furthermore, analogical imaginative possibility shades into contingent vision when organised by ‘focal meanings’ to fashion some global sense of the world. This is then brought into dialogue with Richard Kearney’s comparatively recent notion of ‘anatheism’, to help consideration of how Tracyean analogical imagination might maintain its imagination and ana- at the perilous point that it becomes also a matter of religious believing.

Tracy’s theology has often been well received in African contexts for its hermeneutical openness, but difficult distances remain between Tracy’s post-modern framing of theology and post-colonial imperatives. Tinyiko Sam Maluleke criticises universalising gestures in historic Christian theology, repeated in recent ‘public theology’, that efface the kinds of differences in power that follow from colonial domination. Few who abide in entrenched traditions of subjugation, Afro-pessimism, and Western supremacism will be willing, ready, or able to re-evaluate sufficiently their readings of ‘the classics’– despite Tracy’s hopes for such hermeneutical events. And yet, Tracy’s subsequent work: (1) parses classics as ‘frag-events … that shatter, negate, and fragment all totality systems … including Christendom’; and (2) emphasises the dialectical and apophatic seriousness of his commitment to thinking analogically. Perhaps Tracy could be received outside the limiting frame of Western post-modernity, in support of decolonising exchanges between subjugated African theological experience, on the one hand, and historically privileged perceptions stained by colonialism, on the other.

This article discusses David Tracy’s implicit and explicit reflection on the church as a community of Christian praxis. The church is both a social and a theological reality, just like its theological partner-reality ‘the world’. This means that no concrete expression of the Christian church may pronounce itself wholly or uniquely adequate to its theological field; neither can any boundary between ‘church’ and ‘world’ be rendered theologically determinate or fundamental. So Tracy’s thinking focuses on the centre of the church, not on its boundaries. As gift and sacrament, the church participates in God’s grace as disclosed in God’s self-manifestation in Jesus Christ. In bearing witness to this event, the church’s critical and self-critical praxis of love is borne upon mystical-prophetic discourses and dialogues with otherness without and within. Ecclesiology, therefore, emerges only in fragments and not as a closed system. Tracy’s ecclesiology is everywhere a function of an account of God and reality. A Christian church that learns a Tracyean route to naming God aspires actively, contemplatively, and fragmentarily to realise itself in answering fashion as an ‘institution of love’.

This essay approaches David Tracy’s theme of conversation (‘which animates … the whole posture and method of Tracy’s career’) primarily as social and civil practice. Tracy’s Plurality and Ambiguity (1987) is brought into conversation with present-day cultural critic Sherry Turkle regarding how digitalised communications magnify the ‘interruptions’ of plurality and ambiguity that Tracy suggested mark all conversation. Some early critics suggested that Plurality and Ambiguity: (1) insufficiently considered the ambiguities of one’s interlocutors in conversation; and (2) ignored imperatives for some participants to resist powerful others’ framings of the rational task. Here, our digital situation can help highlight how deep down plurality and ambiguity stretch within any given conversation; as well as how socially fragile and crucial this phenomenon of conversation is. The world of deliberately designed digital platforms highlights how there is always some particular design to ‘the table’ at which conversation participants convene. Theology must learn the necessity of building a culture of genuine theological conversation by means of deliberate and detailed design decisions.

This introductory essay to the volume sets out the volume’s form and purpose, and then provides advance introduction of each of its component essays in turn. Since the volume comes together as a tightly organised and cumulative introduction to David Tracy, this essay forms its own concerted introduction to Tracy parallel to the performance of the book as a whole.

This chapter begins with an essay of David Tracy’s from 1991 that celebrates how feminist thinkers insist on contextualising all thought and experience while still pressing universal demands for justice. Many feminist theologians then add further religious layers of material contextualisation and theocentric universalisation, rendering their work, in Tracy’s eyes, ‘the unexampled challenge’ for all theology. Bingemer’s own Roman Catholic feminism is related to liberation theology and its ‘option for the poor’ in a Latin American continent where women often find themselves ‘doubly poor’. Tracy’s favoured selection of European women mystics– from Angela of Foligno to Madame Jeanne de Guyon– are explored as practising and contemplating, in Tracy’s expression, a divine–human ‘excessive love’, for God and often also the poor. Finally, the essay draws Dorothy Day and Simone Weil– two remarkable twentieth-century women valued by Tracy and yet placed by many outside the canons of feminism– to the side of more recent theological feminism, for the hope for a church and a future in which divine–human love and desire for justice challenges patriarchy, sexism, and all oppressions of the poor.

David Tracy’s work invites readers generously into ever-widening conversations while Tracy himself pursues a precise theological ‘pointilism’ calling for lengthy rumination. Tracy’s concept of the ‘classic’– cultural, religious, theological– is endlessly fruitful for theology amid plural and ambiguous history. Tracy’s work may be viewed as an attempt at ‘making the future of theology now’, adumbrating theological possibility in a complicated and complicating present. Tracy’s major early works– Blessed Rage for Order (1975) and The Analogical Imagination (1981)– quite radically reconceived theology for greater present-day self-awareness, yet equally Tracy’s concept of analogical imagination calls to mind the ‘third way’ between cataphasis and apophasis that Dionysius the Areopagite pretended to have written as his Symbolic Theology. Tracy’s recent essay collections, Fragments and Filaments, reprise the theological experience of reading Tracy. As fragments and filaments (‘ever unreeling … ever tirelessly speeding’– Walt Whitman), these mutually resonating essays quicken into theological events for readers who learn to read well, with Tracy, to ‘make the future of theology now’.

David Tracy’s theological formation and work stretch across more than five decades of his emergent ‘theology-in-culture’. Diachronically, this essay highlights: (1) the influence of Bernard Lonergan; (2) how Blessed Rage for Order (1975) articulated a ‘critical not dogmatic’ theology turned towards a ‘twofold crisis’ of Christian meaning in post-Christian times and modern meaning in post-modern times; (3) how The Analogical Imagination (1981) clarified this ‘mutually critical’ reading-together of historical tradition and contemporary situation, opening it to radical problematisings of interpretation and culture; and (4) how this then has led Tracy to identify cultural and religious classics as ‘fragments’ and ‘frag-events’. Taken as a whole, Tracy’s theology-in-culture follows ‘an analogical paradigm’ that regards the human creature as having a transcendentally driven grace-informed nature, in spite of tragedy and sin. Hence, art and conversation remain theological hopes for Tracy, and when the noble endeavours of modernity yield to post-modern fragmentation even this remains hopeful for Tracy, because humans inhabit an invisible infinity which exceeds the visible world.