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.

In Chapter 3, I consider several ways in which philosophical discourse has become allergic to the concept of revelation. While Catholic theology is largely dependent on scholastic and, more recently, modern philosophy as it tries to articulate understandings of faith, philosophy has been part of shaping a modern and postmodern culture that is frequently hostile or simply indifferent to religious faith and its notions of divine revelation. Various philosophical approaches seek to exclude theology from the realm of academic discourse, either because revealed religion is seen to be partial and therefore detrimental to the pursuit of universal wisdom, or because it seems to articulate merely its own will to power, using a metaphysics that is oblivious to having founded itself. Bound up in metaphysical systems, all discourse potentially becomes (onto-)theological. 'Religion' has recently returned in philosophy only by means of its transformation: used in Levinas’ sense as the ethical relation with the other, it effects a powerful critique. Yet, excluding the very particularity of religious traditions is a totalitarian and secularising act.