Martin Marty on the soul and tradition…

Also heard on Bill Moyer, Martin Marty, the influential Protestant thinker and writer:

The soul is not a pilot on a ship

The soul is not a ghost in a machine.

The soul is the integrated vitality of an organism that is open to the future..

Thanks, Bill. You’re forgiven.

Update:

And I had to add this from an interview with Marty:

“I think my own development through the years, both spiritually and intellectually, is to keep one part of the soul or foot on the ground of a tradition and on the other you feel free to roam and find ways to integrate other experiences and deal with the other. And, in a sense, I try to propagate that notion. I mean, Gandhi was really steeped in his tradition, and he could take Jesus with him. And Martin Luther King was a black Baptist pastor, and he could take Gandhi’s non-violence into it. The Pope, John XXIII, you can’t get more Catholic, and he could take it right into the community of the Jews. Thomas Merton, the Catholic mystic, is talking to Buddhist and Hindu monks the day he dies; he doesn’t stop being Catholic, but he enriches there…..”

Advertisement