The Uncertain Center: Essays of Arthur C. McGill

Arthur McGill did not write very much but what he did write is as theologically suggestive and startling today as it was when it was written in the 1960s and 1970s. He was not well known during his lifetime but those who cared about the work of theology knew Arthur McGill. Writing during the ascendency of the Death of God theologies McGills words have a freshness that the more widely known theological writing of that time has lost. McGill wrote only two short books during his life and just a handful of scattered essays often published in obscure places. We are fortunate that Kent Dunnington has collected and introduced those essays here. The essays reveal a theologian with an uncanny and intrepid resolve to make theological claims illumine and unsettle our lives. As Stanley Hauerwas writes in his afterword to the collection To read McGill is to discover a way to do theology without fear. God knows from where he came but McGill as the chapters in this welcome and important book demonstrate had the ability to make theology do work so that we might better negotiate the imponderable reality we call our life. Latent beneath the topical occasions of these engaging texts lies a disposition that is not so revolutionary as it is a welcome return to patristic wisdom a recovery of the life-giving conversation of which we are but a part if an essential part. If ever we are to know who we are and who we are called to become it would be because we also know those whose lives of prayer preceded ours. --Scott Cairns author of The End of Suffering and Slow Pilgrim From Descartes forward the West has equated truth with the acquisition of certainty. Scientists and fundamentalists alike assert it. Laypeople look to experts to convert their uncertainties into certainty whether in the boardroom or the hospital bedroom. McGill brilliantly breaks the thrall of certainty and fixes attention on the Christ who shoulders uncertainty on our behalf. A gifted writer McGill lets readers venture out beyond their decentering securities and attend to the center that holds. --Bill May Retired Cary M. Maguire Professor of Ethics Southern Methodist University Kent Dunnington is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Greenville College in Illinois. He is the author of Addiction and Virtue (2011).