Christian-Marxist Dialogue: On Continuing to Read Phil McShane

[Hugh Williams]

Christian-Marxist Dialogue: On Continuing to Read Phil McShane

Phil McShane who I’ve come to regard as a revolutionary Lonerganian despite the fact he usually rejected the attribution of being a Lonerganian, said in his final years that the necessary transition period ahead of us demands for most of us a commitment to think and point, and to even teach beyond our own present competence.

He added that a major problem in our present culture is that the vast majority of those teaching in the humanities and the sciences were/are not prepared for the shocking cultural lift involved in Lonergan's GEM methodology ….

To give content to this very general claim … McShane would return repeatedly to the problems of financial capitalism as, for him, the worst-case illustration of cultural decline for our time. It is a situation that emerges in the light and darkness of dialectic crying out for cosmopolis, for some alternative methodological order. Despite such ‘cries’ this ‘business’ … this ‘finance’ is not about the science of economics or economy but about ‘gambling-casino’ possibilities.

Some ‘painful transition’ is required and necessary here – is it not? … some transition having to do with the regulation and control over money as a public utility?

This I suggest was the materialist heart of McShane’s strange little booklet “The Road to Religious Reality” (Axial Publishing, 2012) ….

Does John and Pierre’s text – “Attentive, Intelligent, Reasonable, and Responsible” have a position on this?

Hugh