click picture for AYCARDUS website

click picture for AYCARDUS website
Meister Eckhart

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Projects and People

The past few days since my last post have been busy as projects started to get underway and a network of people took shape. While the AYCARDUS Project isn't a household word (still working on Google's crawlers to find it) it is taking shape in ways that will benefit Eckhartian Studies.
While the AYCARDUS Project examines the Dominican sources in Meister Eckhart, Eckhartian Studies ought not to overlook the ways in which Eckhart has been and is being received by 19th, 20th and 21st century thinkers. Their receptions can and do have an impact on how Meister Eckhart is understood or misunderstood. In order to better appreciate Eckhart we need to study his sources and his thought so that we may better evaluate the subsequent uses of Eckhart.
One excellent contact given me by one of our Project Consultors, fr. Rupert Johannes Mayer, O.P., was to another Dominican in Slovakia, fr. Peter Sajda whose work examines the reception of Eckhart's thought in German idealism and in the 19th century philosophy. I was delighted to receive a copy of his article on Eckhart and Hegel, and even more pleased to receive his permission to have it posted on our site. Does Hegelian Philosophy of Religion Distort Christian Dogmatics and Ethics? (The Debate on Speculative Mysticism) by Peter Sajda which first appeared in the Acta Kierkegaardiana 2009. Peter is one of the editors of the Acta Kierkegaardiana so we are grateful to that journal for allowing us to make this work available online.
I am please to say that two other projects have begun and I will share more on them in my next blog, but you can read about them at the AYCARDUS Project website.