• Mysticism and dialectic share a willingness to suspend the certainty and comfort of dogmatic pronouncement for better things. Mysticism refuses to degrade the divine by insisting that one apparently mutually exclusive truth disproves another, while dialectic refuses to degrade the human by insisting on the hegemony of one discourse. Consequently, the outcome of mysticism and dialectic is humility and openness, the utility is the maintenance of the intellectual virtues (prudence, justice, fortitude, courage, liberality, magnificence, magnanimity, and temperance), and the purpose is deeper dependence on God for all things.
• Mysticism is not: mistiness, laziness, fear of analysis, or feelings triumphing over thinking.
• Mysticism is: the courageous, industrious, rigorous pursuit of the more-than-superficially aporetic aspects of faith in the spirit of prayer. In other words, it is the study of and respect for mystery from a posture of openness.
• Mysticism is a theological dialectic.
• Mysticism and dialectic draw the world into the love of God by openness and example rather than by arbitrarily determining lines of election and placing individuals on one or another side of those lines. This is their response to the criticism of the apologist and the evangelist: they are all of those and none of those.
• Dialectic is not: relativism, an indefinite posture of critique, unwillingness to “take a stand,” or a malicious attempt to derail the convictions of others.
• Dialectic is: the courageous, industrious, rigorous pursuit of the aporetic in whatever subject is at stake.
• Dialectic is the necessary precursor to any important problem-solving. Ignoring this is the ultimate practical and policy failing of ideology.
• Prayer, as both the active and passive posture of openness requisite for mysticism and dialectic, has to do both with practice and with a certain character. “Pray always.”

Discuss.