by GSR Staff
Take and Read" is NCRonline's newest blog series. It started last week and features a contributor's reflections on a specific book that changed their lives every Monday. Co-editors Congregation of St. Agnes Sr. Dianne Bergant and Michael Daley say that good books, "can inspire, affirm, challenge, change, even disturb."
Click here to read this week's pick by Sr. Sandra Schneiders:Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning by Paul Ricoeur (Texas Christian Press, 1976). Here's an excerpt:
How does one who has been avidly reading books of every variety for more than half a century, even if limiting the choice to books read as an adult in an academic and/or ministerial context, select one as the "most important book I ever read"?
Obviously, one has to add some further qualifiers, so I refined the question by asking myself what book (besides the Bible) is related most significantly to the most — quantitatively and qualitatively — significant aspects of my life? Surprisingly, one book immediately "leaped out" of the stack, namely, Paul Ricoeur's Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning, a collection of lectures which Ricoeur delivered in 1973 at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas, published in 1976.
Coincidentally, 1976 was the very year I began my professional life as a theologian at the Jesuit School of Theology and the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, having received my doctorate from the Gregorian University in Rome just a month before, in December 1975.