Vulnerable to the Holy: In Faith, Morality and Art

Well-known theologian, Enda McDonagh, describes his new book as a series of exploratory probes into areas in which he has been engaged intellectually, emotionally, and practically over the years since his retirement from teaching. These pieces illustrate how the Other may be primarily holy-making if one accepts the grace of openness and vulnerability. The first section considers "the strange richness and the poverty of the Church today." The author offers some suggestions about how in its people, leaders and structures the Roman Catholic Church can be vulnerable to the holiness of the wider church and world and render them in turn vulnerable to the holiness, which for all its deformities, it continues to bear witness to. The next section focuses on the moral issues which have been of particular theological and pastoral concern in recent times. In the following section the author describes how he gradually became vulnerable to the otherness in beauty of a wide range of artistic objects. Fr McDonagh concludes with a section on The Vulnerable Self.