Culture And The Thomist Tradition

The text discusses the crisis of Thomism as thrown into relief by Vatican II. It argues that Thomism's failure to specify the precise role of culture in moral formation is problematic in a multicultural age where Christians are exposed to a complex matrix of institutions and traditions both theistic and secular. If Thomism perceives cultural diversity as a space in which ethical doubt potentially thrives, its wider ambivalence to modernity also impedes its develpment.

Thomism's influence upon the development of Catholicism is difficult to overestimate - but how secure is its grip on the challenges that face contemporary society? This text examines the crisis of Thomism as thrown into relief by Vatican II, the 21st ecumenical council of the Roman Catholic Church.;Following the Church's declarations on culture in the document Gaudium et spes - the pastoral constitution on the church in the modern world - it was widely presumed that a mandate had been given for transposing ecclesiastical culture into the idioms of modernity. But, says Tracey Rowland, such an understanding is not only based on a facile reading of the Conciliar documents, but is flawed by Thomism's own failure to demonstrate a workable theology of culture that might guide the Church through such transpositions.;Thomism, which fails to specify the precise role of culture in moral formation, is problematic in a multicultural age where Christians are exposed to a complex matrix of institutions and traditions both theistic and secular. If Thomism perceives cultural diversity as a space in which ethical doubt potentially thrives, its wider ambivalence to modernity also impedes its devel