Thanks to MacIntyre, I had an intense post-liberal phase, but it was defanged in many ways by Stanley Hauerwas’ personal sanctity. And then my Thomism was mediated by Lonergan, who had a hermeneutic of charity for modernity, so I managed to find some likeminded folks & get off on a side street.

A little help via Lonergan: if you can think of a relevant question that the putatively certain person hasn’t asked and/or can’t answer, then you know for sure their certitude is premature.

Even just in us as psychological subjects, arguably-premature-certainty creates a terrible tension. It implies that we are dithering in judgment, & insofar as such judgments are “my own,” that we are being irresponsible in addition to irrational. A real bullseye on our sense of self worth

He said sometimes he wanted readers & students to be able to trust their own minds, and I think this is one of the signs of that trust: you can tolerate the process that leads to knowing even as you feel the tension of not-knowing-yet

We seem to find it enormously difficult to say things like “I’m certain I don’t understand this completely, but I’d like to. I have both some questions, but also some hunches” and then just sit with that for as long as it takes.