Stephen Joseph O'Leary and the Return of Correlationist Theology

In the long silence since the last of David Tracy’s major volumes, a Catholic correlationist theology that is truly ecumenical and open to other religions, fully embraces the contemporary moment, values religious experience, but also recognizes that experience is necessarily linguistically and symbolically mediated, has lacked a champion. With Irish theologian Joseph O’Leary’s book, “Conventional and Ultimate Truth,” a correlationist theology has, arguably, found its champion. The book is a disciplined, sophisticated, and eloquent construction of a fundamental theology largely in the phenomenological and hermeneutic key of the early Tracy, and like Tracy convinced of the value of philosophical expertise and the necessity of theological method, and persuaded that a way forward in our contemporary situation must be found for a Christianity whose dogmatism, authoritarianism, and identity anxiety has essentially made it a mausoleum.