Identity Crisis By John R. Dunlap (John R. Dunlap teaches in the Department of Classics at Santa Clara University)

And so the Augustine course takes a peculiar toll of a sort I didn't precisely anticipate back when I agreed to teach it. It casts the secularization of an erstwhile Catholic university into a relief of painful clarity. Think of it. In just over a generation, a great many influential American Catholics, inscrutably, have traded a heritage of nuanced and soaring thought for a pottage of murky bromides and gummy jargon.

Honestly, I'm not just rabble-rousing. But this article seems to suggest how profoundly liberal PC thinking (or whatever) has influenced the Catholic Church and its teachings. While the books of St. Augustine of Hippo gather dust on library shelves it seems so does an understanding of your own faith by a great many Catholics � at least according to Mr. Dunlap.

TRY THIS, FOR EXAMPLE, AS A QUICK taste of the Augustinian worldview: The moral order is absolute, woven into the very fabric of creation. Personal sin, therefore, is never merely a private psychological event; owing to ignorance or stupidity or an idiotized upbringing, the sinner may be subjectively without blame, but the sin itself has objective consequences that claw at the well-being of the sinner and of others around him and of still others yet to be after him.

Imagine juggling such thoughts, day after day, with a class of bright 20-year-olds marinated all their lives in a culture of moral relativism. For most of them, the course seems to be their first encounter with the feebleness of their own culture. They don't necessarily buy into all of Augustine (predestination, anyone?), but they respect him, and they want to talk about these ideas they had never before heard of.

My gut instinct is that a lot of revisionism, of whatever sort that it was, went too far. It seems that the age of an idea is now a measure of its worthiness. Out with the old. In with the new. Why have we become so disrespectful of that which has come before us and why have we developed the belief that we can create a perfect and untarnished new order on the basis of our own wisdom? Is there some belief that people are now more infallible than they ever have been? I wonder how much our world views � political, social and moral � are influenced by the technological age in which we leave where every year the new is replaced by the old which then sits dusty and useless on some shelf like the books of St. Augustine.

Yes, this is a problem, Brad, and that article puts its finger on some of the issues. It's one reason why Jim and Tyra Arraj and I are doing a project on the Christian mysteries. There's an attitude out there which seems to hold that those older truths and understandings have somehow become passe'

Jim has accounted for some of this trend by noting how abusive the teaching methods of the past often were in transmitting the tradition. People were force-fed Augustine and the syllogisms of St. Thomas without making the relevant connections between these teachings and life experience. This was especially aggravated by the largely existential/empirical context of the 20th century. Vatican Council II was a movement to attempt to relate the old and the new, but, alas, some of that momentum seems to have been lost, with a widening gap between essentialistic and existentialistic approaches to morality dividing the Church, and society as well.

Good topic!