David Goa focuses on deepening the capacity of the faithful to think through the gifts of the Christian tradition: the spiritual life, the theological traditions, and our responsibility to the public world.
The themes below are central to David’s thought. Each theme can be further explored through the associated publications and/or podcasts.
Sermons & Meditations
I grew up with weekly sermons. Occasionally they were moving. Occasionally they were illuminating. More often than not they were trite, misleading, or bizarre. Yet, the sermon form has a long and distinguished history inviting us to bring our own experience and understanding into dialogue with the rich tradition of revelation and wisdom. When I have been invited to give such reflections it is the poetic dimension of such an engagement that I have sought as my port of call.
Word Made Flesh
In the early 1990s I was asked by editor Glen Argon of the Western Catholic Reporter, a broadly circulated weekly, to write brief reflections on the Sunday Lectionary Readings. Once a month over a five-year period I would attend to an appointed set of texts, Hebrew Bible including a Psalm, Epistle reading culminating in a reading from the Gospel.
Religion & Public Life
The study of religion and public life is too important to be left to the professoriate. The secularist thesis of the 1960s has been shown to be a misstep as the eminent sociologist Peter Berger came to understand in midlife. In our century we live in a living laboratory of such questions.
Occasional Essays
I have been invited to speak to a variety of issues and themes to an even greater variety of communities and interest groups. These reflections roam widely and have provided me with opportunities to engage in thinking beyond my usual ken.
Genius of Christian Thought
For over half a century the Christian church has been subject to serious examination. Such critical work has been important and has challenged religious leaders and thinkers, at least the best of them, to face the limitations and missteps that have all too often been harmful. While “traditionalism is the dead faith of the living” I have come to appreciate the enduring place of “tradition as the living faith of the dead”, a well-spring of insight, knowledge and sensibility.
Museums & The Arts
Saint John Chrysostom said that “the arts are given to us so we might hold life together.” While I hold no speciality in the study of the arts it is clear to me that the arts speak profoundly to the human engagement in the questions of meaning at the centre of culture both ancient and modern, themes the arts explore in ways more illuminating than precious ideologies making “all things new.” Museums and art galleries, at their best, are forums of engagement, a public university inviting all who come to consider “what they did not know they knew.”
Studies in Religion
My interest in questions of tradition and modernity and what is at work in modern culture shaping the human spirit opened an opportunity to do field research work in a wide variety of religious communities. Walking these pathways with devout women and men gave me the privilege of glimpsing how those I came to hold in friendship understood both the particular genius of their faith and our common enduring ultimate questions.