Michel de Certeau's keys of political discernment in May 1968: The theological-spiritual assumptions that informed his tools of analysis

This article seeks to identify the theoretical tools that supported Michel de Certeau's political discernment during the crisis of May 1968 in France. De Certeau's ability to elucidate the novelty and complexity of this event is linked to the intertwining of his experiences as a historian, traveller (voyageur), and Christian (specifically a Jesuit). De Certeau's articulation of a 'theology of difference' allowed him to construct the intellectual and spiritual tools that enabled a lucid discernment of May 1968. Through this theology, derived from negative theology, de Certeau made the experience of faith operative at a moment of cultural crisis. The article also analyses possibilities involved in the ‘rupture’, that is, the fracture that is implied in modernity; in the notion of an event that highlights the deficiency of language, its incapacity to establish ‘a truthful communication’ in society; and the recognition of the poetic dimension of speech, which is capable of interweaving speech and action. The May 1968 event invites these elements mutually to redefine themselves.     

A Lawyer in the Counseling Center

Today's college students are finding an increasing need for legal information. At California State College, Los Angeles, a lawyer from the community was retained by the college counseling center to consult with students who had legal questions. During the academic year 1968-69, 302 students took advantage of this service. Although most of their questions dealt with selective service, other areas of concern included landlord-tenant matters, domestic relations, and criminal and civil law. Student reactions were sampled by means of a questionnaire. The general response was highly favorable, thus supporting the need for a legal counseling service on the college campus.     

ERNAN MCMULLIN ON CONTINGENCY,COSMIC PURPOSE,AND THE ATEMPORALITY OF THE CREATOR

This article reviews, and offers supportive reflections on, the main points of Ernan McMullin's provocative 1998 article, “Cosmic Purpose and the Contingency of Human Evolution,’’ reprinted in this issue of Zygon. In it he addresses the important science‐theology issue of how the Creator's purpose and intention to assure the emergence of human beings is consonant with the radical contingency of the evolutionary process. After discussing cosmic and biological evolution and critically summarizing recent solutions to this question by Keith Ward, John Polkinghorne, Arthur Peacocke, Alvin Plantinga, and others, who presuppose in different ways that God is subject to time, McMullin compellingly argues for the traditional position, that God is unconditioned by time, and this enables God to work purposefully through contingency, randomness, and chance just as easily as through law‐like regularity.     

THEOLOGY FROM A FRACTURED VISTA: SUSAN NEIMAN'S EVIL IN MODERN THOUGHT

Evil in Modern Thought, Susan Neiman's account of the intellectual trajectory of modernity, employs the trope “homeless” to articulate deep difficulties that affirmations of divine transcendence and of human capacities to acknowledge transcendence face in a contemporary context thoroughly marked by fragmentation, fragility, and contingency. The “hospitality” of the Incarnation, which makes a fractured world a place for divine welcoming of the human in all its contingency and brokenness, is proposed as locus for theological engagement with Neiman's appropriation of a Kantian sense of hope as the readiness to resist evil in a world seemingly bereft of welcome.