Living Theological Humanism
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of goods that permeate life (pleasure, pain, and sympathy; recognition, shame, and benevolence; innocence, guilt, and justice; participation, alien-ation, and empathy). Our lives transpire in this field of feelings and passions that motivate action and also the profound desire for the integration of
life. Freedom is the ability to inhabit that field with responsibility for its integrity.existence, discloses that in spite of sorrow, pain, and agony, human life is Disciplined attention to this “field,” this affective location of human
nevertheless saturated with worth and is driven, moved, to draw together that goodness into a complete life with others and for oneself. At the root of theological humanism is therefore a deep sensibility of affirmation for life, a yes to existence, despite its loss and terror. It has been said by Socrates
and many others that philosophy is learning to die. Theological humanism is learning to live in freedom. If this “yes” to life wells up through the com-plexity of one’s existence, if one has – to put it differently – a sense for the integrity of life construed as the being of God, then theological humanism
articulates that which one already knows and already loves and desires. There is a human capacity for a relation to the divine. Theological human-ism thereby aims to provide a way to inhabit experiences of transcendence. One views existence from within the light of the world, not the abyss of
death. One hears the call to respect and enhance the integrity of life as the freedom to endorse existence in one’s own life and community and others as well.The sensibility of a “yes” to life within the various tensions found in
human beings as “things in between” is not the only reason for being a theological humanist. A theological humanist is also someone who has heard the call of conscience as the claim of the integrity of life on personal actions and social relations. The “yes” to life that characterizes the sensibilities of a
theological humanism is rooted in a primary claim and permission and man-date for life. The cultivated conscience is the sense that one is claimed at the core of one’s being to labor for the integrity of life and that, paradoxically enough, this claim is also freedom, a permission to live, and it entails a man-
date for life, a mandate formulated in the imperative of responsibility. The dictate of conscience – its claim, permission, mandate – can be heard through the voice of another human being, in the realm of art, through the beauty or terror of natural events, in religious practice. We have charted the appearance
of that dictate in part two of the book.religious rite, or the beauty and sublimity of nature. Here too human beings The dictate of conscience is not limited to other people, a work of art, a