ABSTRACT
Times were changing for the conferences on literature and theology. In 2000 the conference, by under the auspices of the International Society for Religion, Literature and Culture, met in the Dutch University of Nijmegen, within the interdisciplinary Heyendaal Institute for Theology, Science and Culture, and under the watchful eye of Eric Borgman. Radical Orthodoxy has a quite different sense of the times, and also a sense of theology that is finally rooted much more deeply in a tradition that refuses to acknowledge the disruptions of the Enlightenment and its tragic consequences in the twentieth century. But John Henry Newman, the Catholic churchman, is ultimately deriving this from Coleridge and the fiduciary sense of language, which perceives within the very form of the words themselves the impulse of theology. It was S. T. Coleridge who struggled with Christian theology as it encountered the inescapable demands of Enlightenment criticism, never avoiding the critical issues.
