The Future of Catholic Biblical Scholarship: A Constructive Conversation

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“Catholicity can be expressed as a preference for the conjunctive more than the disjunctive. To be Catholic is to think inclusively rather than exclusively. Catholics tend toward the ‘both/and’ more than they do toward the ‘either/or.’” (Page 5)

“Scripture has a narrow focus. It is much concerned with law and morality. It has little interest in romance and affection. It is unconcerned with science and does not pay much attention to visual beauty.” (Page 120)

“Catholics also have a high tolerance for paradox!” (Page 5)

“For Christians to ‘seek to become wise’ meant not the acquisition of knowledge but the changing of their outlook and behavior. It meant the healing of the passions by good teaching. It meant battling vice and learning to practice virtue. Like Plutarch a century earlier, Origen saw the philosophical life as a progressive transformation of the soul.³⁸ As I will try to show, Origen’s spiritual reading of Scrtipture had very little to do with a platonic realm of forms, but had everything to do with moral conversion.” (Page 77)

“From the middle of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century, the phrase ‘Roman Catholic biblical scholarship’ would have been regarded by many as oxymoronic: it may have been Roman Catholic, but was it really scholarship? At the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century, however, the phrase is equally oxymoronic: no one doubts the quality of the scholarship, but in what sense is it any longer ‘Catholic’?” (Page 4)