The Rev. David Tracy, a leading liberal Catholic theologian who open-sourced his understanding of God, borrowing from Jews, Buddhists and great works of art and literature, and who rejected Rome as the sole authority on how to be a good Christian, died on April 29 in Chicago. He was 86.
His death, in a hospital, was announced by the University of Chicago Divinity School, where he taught for nearly 40 years.
Mr. Tracy (he was almost never addressed as “Father Tracy”) was an ordained Catholic priest who lectured widely, wrote nine books and was recognized as one of the most influential Catholic theologians of the late 20th century. His best-known book, “The Analogical Imagination” (1981), argued that man’s knowledge of the divine proceeds through analogies. Christ is an analogue for God, he wrote, but great works of literature and art also revealed God’s presence.
“Religion’s closest cousin is not rigid logic but art,” he once said.
Mr. Tracy wrote nine books and many essays. He was widely recognized as a leading Catholic theologian.Credit…Crossroad Publishing
His independence from Roman Catholicism’s top-down authority was manifested early, in 1968, when he and more than 20 other faculty members at the Catholic University of America in Washington were tried before a religious tribunal for rejecting the Vatican’s ban on birth control.
He was acquitted, though he left the next year when he was recruited by the University of Chicago Divinity School. He remained there through his retirement in 2007. He also served on the faculty of the Committee on Social Thought, a prestigious Ph.D.-granting program at the university.