Perhaps the greatest lesson of the hermeneutic revolution is that the reader brings their world to bear on a text, and that when that reader is authentic, their readings may guide others to greater authenticity. The essays skillfully arranged in the recently published Fragility of Consciousness reveal their author, Frederick Lawrence, to be such a reader. As exercises in “dialectics,” the essays model the slow and generous reading of diverse, interdisciplinary sources that Lawrence has taught to more than four decades of students at Boston College, and they ask no less from their reader.

In part 1, Lawrence contextualizes Heidegger's originary achievements in Being and Time in relation to Augustine, whose influence grounded the “postmodern hermeneutic revolution … based on the realization that the interpretation of the originative classics of Western culture intimately affects and is affected by human beings’ concrete solution to the problem of living together” (11); however, Lawrence argues, Heidegger later “[conflated] fallenness with human finitude” and succumbed to his own “methodological atheism” (19–20). For Lawrence, Gadamer debunks these dubious notions of some particular “language of metaphysics … because at root any language is dialogical … and even the so-called language of metaphysics only makes sense in the actual past usages of it, and so in light of those questions being asked and answered in it” (32–33). Gadamer thus liberates language, grounding hermeneutics in phronesis and rejoining philosophy to its ethical and political foundations. Lawrence suggests that Lonergan advances further still by showing how the postmodern “concern with authenticity pushes hermeneutic philosophy to the threshold of theology” because, for societies no less than the persons who comprise them, “the question of truth cannot be fully answered without raising the issue of conversion” (70). The remainder of part 1 tests the viability of this theological and political hermeneutics against three alternative models: Leo Strauss’ humanism, the classically informed political philosophies of Gadamer and Voegelin, and the competing models of discourse evinced by the debate between Benedict XVI and Habermas.

Though Lawrence advocates a theological solution, he is far from Pollyannaish about the universally distorting effects of sin. In perhaps the strongest essay in this collection, the titular “Fragility of Consciousness,” Lawrence turns to Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, and Deleuze to interrogate and ultimately vindicate the hermeneutical/political approach to theology and its use of “subject” and “consciousness” language. Lawrence praises the deconstructive/genealogical movement for its overriding ethical concern for the other (251–56) and decentering of the (Cartesian) subject, but he warns that if their “instinct for the non-systematic becomes a basis for overlooking statistical, genetic, and dialectical methods, as well as for just debunking all classical intelligibility, it is not really taking contingency seriously. It is just glorifying the aleatory” (260). Ultimately, though, Lawrence concludes that “the hermeneutical strategy of Gadamer is too undifferentiated, while the deconstructionist and genealogical strategies are too dialectically flawed” (276) to ground contemporary liberation and political theologies, and instead presents a compelling picture of Lonergan as what he has elsewhere described as “the integral postmodern.” What emerges perhaps most clearly, however, is Lawrence's thoughtful and mature development of Lonergan's thought into a more thoroughly articulated political-hermeneutical theology.

The essays that follow this present some of the concrete achievements wrought from this conceptual basis: the formation of a specifically theological and political curriculum for the perspectives program at Boston College; an exposition of Lonergan's Macroeconomic Dynamics, which Lawrence coedited, as a genuine development of Catholic social teaching; and an analysis of the role of languages in mediating personal and cultural authenticity, or, as is the case for much of modernity, unauthenticity. The penultimate essay, “Grace and Friendship,” responds to this crisis of unauthenticity, but it eschews postmodernity's suppression of reason in favor of an “unequivocal Other” (362) and instead emphasizes theology as political, which communicates the healing effects of “the conversational God's communication of trinitarian Self-meaning,” known in charity as friendship with God. In the final essay, divine friendship is shown to ground a deeply Christological spirituality that sees the world through the “eyes of being-in-love with God” and so is lived out in hope (384ff.). In all, these essays bring to a broader audience Lawrence's staggeringly deep and broad learning; more so, they manifest the profoundly generous and deeply religiously converted reader that generations of his students and colleagues have come to know.

This collection demonstrates that the practice of dialectics is an intentional recognition of our place in a conversation that speaks us as we speak it. It is not a preparatory task but an active disposition propelled by a desire to always know better. Any serious-minded person who has accepted the dual risk of honestly engaging with contemporary thought, on the one hand, and of living into the intellectual, moral, and religious inheritance of the broad Christian tradition, on the other, will find a friend and a guide in these essays. While the erudition of these essays places them beyond most undergraduates, decades of students, fellow theologians, and every library will find something new and vital here.