This essay introduces and explores David Tracy’s notion of ‘analogical imagination’ as something that prevents reason, theology, and social life from collapsing ‘into equivocation or else hopeless stupid conflict’. A capacious reflective reason, after Tracy, depends on imaginative habits and sensibilities that stay faithful to the discordant plurality and ambiguity of things while also acknowledging their analogies or ‘similarities-in-difference’. The essay argues that the continuing integrity and scope of Tracyean analogical imagination depends upon understanding that the negations that belong to apparently contrasting ‘dialectical imaginations’ reach ‘all the way down’ within analogical imagination itself. Aided by classic expressions of culture, furthermore, analogical imaginative possibility shades into contingent vision when organised by ‘focal meanings’ to fashion some global sense of the world. This is then brought into dialogue with Richard Kearney’s comparatively recent notion of ‘anatheism’, to help consideration of how Tracyean analogical imagination might maintain its imagination and ana- at the perilous point that it becomes also a matter of religious believing.

This introductory essay to the volume sets out the volume’s form and purpose, and then provides advance introduction of each of its component essays in turn. Since the volume comes together as a tightly organised and cumulative introduction to David Tracy, this essay forms its own concerted introduction to Tracy parallel to the performance of the book as a whole.

David Tracy’s theological formation and work stretch across more than five decades of his emergent ‘theology-in-culture’. Diachronically, this essay highlights: (1) the influence of Bernard Lonergan; (2) how Blessed Rage for Order (1975) articulated a ‘critical not dogmatic’ theology turned towards a ‘twofold crisis’ of Christian meaning in post-Christian times and modern meaning in post-modern times; (3) how The Analogical Imagination (1981) clarified this ‘mutually critical’ reading-together of historical tradition and contemporary situation, opening it to radical problematisings of interpretation and culture; and (4) how this then has led Tracy to identify cultural and religious classics as ‘fragments’ and ‘frag-events’. Taken as a whole, Tracy’s theology-in-culture follows ‘an analogical paradigm’ that regards the human creature as having a transcendentally driven grace-informed nature, in spite of tragedy and sin. Hence, art and conversation remain theological hopes for Tracy, and when the noble endeavours of modernity yield to post-modern fragmentation even this remains hopeful for Tracy, because humans inhabit an invisible infinity which exceeds the visible world.

This essay begins with a close reading of Tracy’s recent programmatic formulations concerning: (1) the ‘strong fragments’ of culture that ‘shatter, fragment, negate any closed totality system’; and (2) those ‘most powerful fragments’ that ‘show themselves not as substances but as events and positively open to liminal Infinity’. If some cultural fragments are mere ‘period pieces’ without enduring truth or transformative power, and others are dangerously nostalgic, these fragments, Chase suggests, can act strongly when collaged into some ‘new form of witness against any false whole or claim to completeness’. T. S Eliot’s The Waste Land is an ambiguous example here. The pinnacle of the fragment for Tracy, however, is the ‘frag-event’ that opens towards the creative liminality of an invisible Infinity. ‘Marxist-Kabbalist’ Walter Benjamin is ‘the projective force’ behind Tracy’s forays into the fragment. The essay proposes the role of assemblage or collage for both fragmenting fragments and the Tracyean frag-event, stressing the role of edges and unexpected connections, and concluding by wondering how far Christian theology is really ready to think in such a manner of collage.