On Herbert McCabe and "God, Christ, and Us"
I came to the work of the late Herbert McCabe in typical oblique fashion: somewhere in the notes to one of the Terry Eagleton books I reviewed last year, McCabe is identified as being an influence on certain elements of Eagleton’s thinking. To my mind any point of intersection between a Marxist critic and a Catholic philosopher is intriguing and deserving of investigation: hence, God, Christ and Us, published in 2003 by the worthy and essential Continuum Books.
The book is a collection of Father McCabe’s sermons on topics ranging from “Poverty and God” to “Christian Unity,” which on the whole are un-sermon-like in the extent that they are witty, erudite, conversational, and yet searchingly profound. McCabe has a marvellously easy way to his prose, and yet the ideas he explores, about the nature of faith, the meaning of the Crucifixion, and so on, are actually often dauntingly abstract, even knotty. The result is extremely interesting in that way that hidden depths of understanding barely glimpsed often are. With an introduction by Brian Davies, OP.