Avery the Seeker

Readers of this page will likely know that the American Church’s most distinguished theologian, Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., died last December.  A recent leisurely Sunday afternoon afforded me the opportunity to reread Dulles’ A Testimonial to Grace.  The book autobiographically recounts Dulles’ journey from his freshman year at Harvard – which he describes as “a wild and chaotic year, marked by an excess of drinking” – to his entry into the Catholic Church several years later.  The story told therein is as fresh and relevant now as when the book was first published in 1946.

We live an age marked by self-proclaimed religious “seekers.”  These men and women (often young people) might be characterized as people who have left the faith tradition in which they were raised and now belong to no organized religion.  They claim to be “seeking” the truth (perhaps “God”) in a process they frequently describe…