>As an atheist in good standing I'm _still_ most thankful for the trends
in RC that C.G.E. is recounting. During the last 20 years almost all my
political comrades in B/N have been RC
I got no problem with that. I can even agree with Zizek about the revolutionary kernel of Christianity. But current movements in Thomism don't do it for me.
I also think when you're talking church history it's easy to slip into church apologist territory, especially for leftists.
And finding Locke in 19th century papal encyclicals is the kind of less than interesting question Carlo Ginzburg talks about. Here's something from an interview with him:
http://www.hindu.com/nic/ginzburg-interview.htm
S.S.: You have a strong interest in a kind of intellectual history, and your recent work on Hobbes is an example of this. However, you do not want this to be a rarefied exercise, and you have written that "to understand the present we must learn to look at it obliquely". What can reading a seventeenth-century author, even one as important as Hobbes, tell us about the present? Is it because he is summoned up as an ideological ancestor even for present-day actors?
C.G.: Hobbes has indeed been invoked as an ideological ancestor; but perhaps this is not his most interesting link with the present. Other possibilities point to the crucial distinction between questions and answers. Many people (including some historians) usually try to find in the past answers to questions raised by the present. But trying to understand the questions raised by the past is often more rewarding. We are dealing with dead individuals who did not write for us, did not think for us, did not live for us; they couldn't care less about us obviously. We have to learn their language, and listen for their voices. But inevitably we also have our agenda; we have our own questions, raised by the world we live in. This asymmetry between past and present (an asymmetry which is the result of a construction, not a given) generates the possibility of the oblique approach to the present I spoke about.