What is Truth From the Academy to the Vatican [Hardcover]

Rist sets out a vision of constantly developing truth that incorporates all that is good.Is truth unchanging? Can it develop over time? To what extent may the Catholic community jettison or modify earlier beliefs? Should it embrace insights from other cultures? Rist argues that dyamism rather than rigidity is essential to avoiding fundamentalism or anarchy, and to promoting the dignity of the human person.Is truth unchanging? Can it develop over time? To what extent may the Catholic community jettison or modify earlier beliefs? Should it embrace insights from other cultures? Rist argues that dyamism rather than rigidity is essential to avoiding fundamentalism or anarchy, and to promoting the dignity of the human person.Is Christian truth unchanging? Can it develop over time? To what extent may the Catholic community jettison or modify earlier beliefs? Should it embrace insights from other cultures or revise its views on matters such as the status of women or church-state relations? In this wide-ranging and provocative book, John Rist brings his expertise in ancient philosophy, theology and history to bear on these questions as they relate to Roman Catholicism and to human society at large, both in the early Christian centuries and in our own times.Introduction: partial and universal truth; 1. The human race: or, how could women be created in the image and likeness of God?; 2. Divine justice and man's 'genetic' flaw; 3. Divine beauty: nature, art and humanity; 4. The origin and early development of episcopacy at Rome; 5. Caesaropapism, theocracy or neo-Augustinian politics?; 6. The Catholic Church in 'modern' and 'post-modern' culture; 7. Looking at hopes and fears in the rear mirror.'& learned and provocative &' The Heythrop Journal