BlogJune 17, 2022
Rixon
PONTIFEX MINIMUS BLOG: PRESIDENTIAL REFLECTIONS ON THE CATHOLIC INTELLECTUAL TRADITION
By Dr. Michael W. Higgins, President and Vice-Chancellor of Corpus Christi-St. Marks at UBC
In “A Slain Lamb Standing: Remembering the Future of Religion in Post-Secular Canada,” delivered at the Centre for Christian Engagement on St. Mark’s campus yesterday evening, Jesuit theologian Gordon Rixon evocatively and synthetically wove several threads into an intellectual and spiritual canvas that strikes us as true and unnerving, wrenching and yet suffused with hope.
Rixon explores “shame and confusion” as well as “liberating sorrow” when examining our riven community, specifically but not exclusively in light of the moral crisis around Canada’s Indigenous legacy.
I was reminded, yet again, of the frightful fragmenting of our socio-political and ecclesial realities. How atomized we have become, how indifferent we have become to the communal as we desperately elevate the private and personal, and at what accelerating costs for us all.
The pandemic, of course, has exacerbated all these divisive dimensions in our lives. And we are not sure how to rightly re-enter onto a forbidding, no longer recognizable, landscape.
Live streaming has been a boon, but it has become a crutch for many—as much a way of evasion as encounter.
Working in solitude can be fulfilling, but it can also magnify the dangers of isolationism.
The trumpeting of private rights over community-centered values is a toxin now deeply embedded in our political consciousness.
Eucharist via Zoom mediation is not the Physical Presence, whatever else it may be.
Time for some serious thinking as we continue to re-surface following our years of plague.
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