finally finished the book I've been reading for literally two months! kept feeling bad about how slowly I was reading vs my normal, but like, here's a sample:
Rather, the overriding curricular weakness of Catholic theology throughout the era of ultramontanism from the aftermath of the French Revolution to the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s was both institutional and intellectual: its isolation in seminaries, and its narrow focus on philosophical issues at the expense of attempting to understand the church's teachings in relationship to the exponential increase in new knowledge. Still, the emergence of neo-Thomism in the mid-nineteenth century brought with it a critique and rejection of post-Cartesian epistemological assumptions in ways that partly adumbrated the thought of the later Wittgenstein, whereas other German theologians (and some French theologians, such as Louis Bautain) had in the manner of a handful of German Benedictines beginning in the 1780s accepted the terms of post-Kantian philosophy as setting supposedly inescapable intellectual boundaries for Catholic theology.
don't get me wrong! well written and well reasoned, even when I disagree, but boy howdy
the footnotes in this book are also really good and really thorough and comprise 38% of the page count. I've so many cool new things to read in them.
the book in question is The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society by Brad S. Gregory. I recommend it, but prepare for density.
