Flourishing

Mike Higton gives a lovely account of the kind of theology I am especially interested in. It is one that

concerns itself with giving an account of human flourishing, of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Christian theology . . . cannot talk about human flourishing without talking about God; . . . it cannot talk about human flourishing fully without thinking about the broadest and deepest possible contexts for that flourishing.

I think that persons with halos are most certainly to be counted amongst The Flourishers, don't you?

Of course, one need not be a believer to subscribe to and fully appreciate the good, the true and the beautiful, but the tradition is a gift I was born to, have come to love, find interesting and rather good company. And I'm sure that it must be true that there are 'certain foundational commitments [which] foster rather than obstruct such paying of attention to the world.'

Higton reminds us that theological truth is, or at least should be, "conversational" in the sense that 'theological claims must remain, above all, open to judgment: open to the possibility that something else might be the case.' He adds that theology is, importantly, 'not primarily about the defense of a single voice, but rather about the practitioners of different forms of life taking one another seriously, holding one another to account.'

These insights have my attention as I have recently been quite engrossed by a question Paul Ricouer posed to his students: D'où parlez vous? Literally, from where do you speak? Or, more colloquially, perhaps, where are you coming from? It is a question that I am finding, the more I stay with it, intriguing and rather central to my situation. More forthcoming.