Fragmentation and Memory

With a question from the traditional and stodgy-seeming Baltimore Catechism as the epigraph of each chapter, this book addresses religious questions traditionally dismissed by philosophy. It consists in a series of questioning reflections, which maintain that we both begin and end in questions and not in answers, in fragments and not in totalities-more precisely, in a fragmentation paradoxically integral to wholeness. Individual chapters take up the issues of the one and the many, original sin, forgiveness, love and its connection to mortality, the relics and bodies of saints, and the doctrine of bodily resurrection. These chapters are framed by considerations of fragmenting and re-collecting as central to the time of writing. The theological considerations presented here lead not to the security of an everlasting, indivisible soul dwelling comfortably in the presence of a paternal deity but to a more complicated, less neatly bounded, and perpetually peculiar and paradoxical life in the flesh.