For Sapiential Literacy

Abstract

These two quotations, it would seem, represent two very different approaches to fundamental questions of meaning and value. Thomas not only argues for the necessity of theology, as a sacred science, but also claims that theology is the noblest of the sciences, to which all others are ordered. Marx, on the other hand, treats religion as, without remainder, a human social product. And yet both, I would like to argue, take for granted something which has largely been forgotten by the modern university: that an engagement with religion is central–is the premise even–of any serious intellectual engagement whatsoever.