Cardinal Newman Rescues Germany

Tracey Rowland is a prominent Catholic theologian. An Australian and barrister by training, she is author of a number of books aligned with the theological sensibility of Pope Benedict XVI. Beyond Kant and Nietzsche: The Munich Defence of Christian Humanism documents the intellectual context for the thinking of Benedict, Catholicism's preeminent living theologian. This foray into the Munich School might be read as Rowland deepening her background knowledge of Benedict. However, the ambition of this accessible, short book is much grander: the Munich School, she contends, is core reading for the biggest problem besetting Catholicism, namely, how to theorize the link between history and ontology. How can the Church speak to a culture bathed in Romanticism, where identity is experienced as shaped by history, when its core dogmas, like original sin, and doctrines, like natural law, are fixed?