We create for ourselves two equally limiting visions of life when we divide up the world into categories of “past” and “present.” First, we tend to valorize one and ignore the other. And second, the division is not true and cannot really be done. Those are the reasons this book needed to be written, and those are the reasons that it is important to read it.

When we succumb to the temptation to divide the past from the present, the far too common long-term effect is that concentrating on the past tends to shrivel the mind, to chain its insights, to narrow its vision.

On the other hand, when we act as if the world were created yesterday and is ours to define out of whole cloth, irrespective of where today came from, there is an equal danger. Knowing nothing about where our present ideas or ideologies came from, caring little about either the insights that underlie them or the ramifications they suggest, we will lack any vision for where we need to go now.

Neither position is tenable. Or as the wag wrote somewhere, the difference between conservatives and liberals is that “conservatives prefer foolishness hallowed by time while liberals prefer their foolishness fresh off the vine.” There is enough foolishness in both to go around. There is also enough wisdom in each to demand our awareness, to save us from the excess of both.

The wisdom of the world cannot simply be defined as only past or present because one leads to the other–the past has created the present. More than that, we need an understanding of the past in order to find our way through the limitations of the past to the best of the age that is dawning.

The fundamental truth is that the past has a great deal to teach us, if we will only interrogate it with the future in mind. And the present has a great responsibility to stretch the wisdom of the past in such a way that the best of it is kept and its time-roundedness culled. Otherwise the perspectives of the old, formed out of another time and place, might well smother the emerging gifts of the present.

This plaiting of time and circumstances and understandings of God in past times with the same God impulses in our own gives us the tools to deepen our present consciousness of God in tune with the consciousness of the ages before us. Like the binding of the proverbial shafts of grain, this connection to the past makes us stronger as we go, surer as we grow, and more truly faithful to the past as well as to the present, to the present as well as to the past.

—excerpted from the Foreword by Joan Chittister to Accidental Theologians: Four women who shaped Christianity by Elizabeth Dreyer (Franciscan Media 2014).