Becca Self, Staff Writer

Addressing a standing-room only crowd in Geddes Hall’s Andrews Auditorium, distinguished Dominican priest-scholar Reverend Timothy Radcliffe presented his lecture “Can Christianity Touch the Imagination of Our Contemporaries?”

Professor John Cavadini, director of the Institute for Church Life, introduced Fr. Radcliffe as a priest and scholar of Catholic Christianity whose written works “wear their erudition lightly.” That is also true of Fr. Radcliffe’s speaking style. He was simultaneously a witty, profound intellectual and a simple father-figure, addressing his family about matters of great importance.

Fr. Radcliffe proposed that the call to be disciples and witnesses is “not so much an intellectual challenge as an imaginary one.”  He recounted his recent attendance at a debate between Richard Dawkins and Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury. In his opinion, the debate “never quite took off” because, while Williams could agree with most of what Dawkins said, the renowned atheist scientist seemed “incapable of entering the Christian imagination” and so had no room to find common ground with a more expansive worldview than his own.

Fr. Radcliffe’s nuanced discussion of the Christian imagination included references to film, music, and drama.  Many people today recognize and imbibe John Lennon’s famous lyrics, “Imagine there’s no heaven; it’s easy if you try,” or Madonna’s “Jesus Christ will you look at me, don’t know who I’m supposed to be.”  Fr. Radcliffe asked, “how do we reach them?” and taught that the use of ‘us versus them’ language—calling non-Christians “them,” for example—was counter-productive to the goal of evangelization. One must do more than repeat “God is love” and “Christ died for our sins,” because religion is “boring if abstract.”
Fr. Radcliffe echoed Pope Benedict XVI in stressing that the “scandal of particularity” is what touches hearts: “We need to remind people of the proximity of God in this world of insecure identities.”  Fr. Radcliffe proposed the paradox of death and resurrection as the only fulfillments of human imagination.

As Pope Benedict wrote at the beginning of his encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, “Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.” Fr. Radcliffe illustrated this concept beautifully with stories of people he has known over the years as they encountered truth, goodness, and beauty. One leitmotif of his lecture referenced the film Of Gods and Men about 20th century Catholic martyrs in Algeria. After viewing the film with a group of atheist and agnostic friends at Oxford, Fr. Radcliffe said he “would bet that everyone in that cinema saw some sort of paradoxical victory of goodness.” The power of that film, according to Fr. Radcliffe, lay in the “victory of the nonviolent man.” He asserted that our duty as disciples is to communicate Christian truth “dramatically but nonviolently, because the beauty of doctrine makes no sense apart from the drama of death and Resurrection… We need to be the most creative artists of our time.”

Fr. Radcliffe criticized many current popular films. “We still don’t get it,” he said, as popular films such as Avatar and Sherlock Holmes demonstrate how the good guys squash the bad, and yet lack a satisfying end because new bad guys will inevitably show up. Fr. Radcliffe challenged his audience to ask the hard questions which provoke one to “take the next steps into the mystery” where the incarnate God “rules from the cross.”

When Christ encountered people in the Gospels, He frequently asked such questions as “what do you seek?” or “why are you weeping?”  Fr. Radcliffe encouraged every Christian to ask similar questions during his encounters with non-believers.  “All preaching springs from listening,” he said. As one of the French martyrs in Algeria wrote in his last testament, Christ is “not a stranger” to the challenges we face in this life. The particularity of the Incarnation, which lies near the heart of Christianity, is every Christian’s responsibility to share with his fellow man. Fr. Radcliffe succeeded in uniting imaginations and intellects for just an hour in this talk but his message certainly will resonate for weeks and months to come in the hearts of those who heard him.

Becca Self is an English and Business major in the First Year of Studies.  She is realizing that as an aspiring writer, it is important to know whether people enjoy reading her work or not. Please contact her at rself@nd.edu with any scornful or laudatory comments.