My friend David and I attended the analogia entis conference in DC last week. (If we need proof, there’s this photo. I’m the bald one wearing a green jacket—a raincoat that came in handy in DC’s soggy Cherry Blossom Festival weather.) I wish I had known that other bloggers were there. (Of course, I’m such an infrequent and tardy blogger that I hardly fit the category.) I found out since coming home that Joel Garver was at the conference, as was millinerd, and so was MM from Theology of the Body (three posts). Their summaries and impressions are very good; all I would add from my perspective, as neither a Barthian nor a Roman Catholic, is that it’s very encouraging to see scholars coming from such different perspectives honestly trying to understand one another. There were sharp defenses against the suggestion of weak ecclesiologies and Christologies, sure, but I guess I wasn’t aware before of just how much difference the choice of a starting point (roughly, metaphysics/being vs. revealed theology/Christology) can make. Interestingly, that didn’t come out as clearly as I would have expected in a contrast of Eastern and Western approaches. David Bentley Hart seems quite at home among Roman Catholic scholars, if not quite as comfortable with Barthians.
So, while I’m thinking along these lines of difference, I fortuitously come across something that pushes such thinking one step further. This video of a Ted Talk from Jill Taylor (a brain scientist talking about her experience of having a stroke) is fascinating for many reasons, but particularly so as I think about
| Left Brain | Right Brain |
| Space and Time | Here and Now |
| Logic | Experience |
| Act | Being |
| Ordo salutis | Ordo relationis |
| noetic | ontic |
| empirical | metaphysical |
| Historie | Geschichte |
I may have confused some of these, and correction will certainly be welcomed, but I think there may be something here. And now for what interests me most: If I were to add a column between and arrows representing interaction across the great divide, would it primarily be about analogy, metaphor, paradox?
