If greater intelligibility is to be achieved in the study of religious figures, the work of symbol in the life of individuals should be probed. Method grounded in sociological and psychological theory holds this possibility. Three considerations center this approach to understanding: (a) the religious figure is formed as he intersects with a symbol system, a process of creative resymbolization; (b) the religious figure is differentiated from others and understood within one of many distinct fields of experience, each field having significant psychological effects on spiritual development; (c) the understanding one achieves is contained by the questions brought to the datum. When more personalistic questions are raised of the religious figure within his symbol system, important differences in meaning result. Taken together, these meanings may approach integral understanding.

Poetry, understood the way Icons are, teaches its readers and writers how words make relationships, put people, places, things in one another's presence. In the relationship called religious, poetry takes on a very crucial task, that of mediating an experience, the human of the divine, the divine of the human, in the various traditions, like the Icon in Orthodoxy. Poetry creates nonreligious relationships too, but uses the same manner of making someone present to something or someone. Poetry becomes anti-presence in religious traditions that deny experience of God. In Christianity of a sacramental kind, poetry is the Icon of language, beauty/truth inseparably set out, the loss of one jeopardizing the existence of the other, language refusing to be idolatrous, and equally, refusing to be inane. Religious understanding in sacramental Christianity requires the poetic Icon.

Matthew's adroit use of the summary passage at critical junctures in his Gospel to provide the reader with christological and ecclesiological insights has long been noted and the most important of these passages studied. However, for a number of reasons Matthew 15:29-31 has not been extensively probed. Ryan views this summary as the third in a triad of summary passages found between Matthew 11:2-16:20 concerned with the healing activity of an already rejected Jesus and the prophesied obduracy of the religious leadership which will culminate in the death of the Messiah-Son of God.

Catholic colleges and universities are faced with the imperative to address the multifaceted aspects of justice education. Existing curricula offerings which do not specifically deal with these issues can be broadened or restructured to this end. A course entitled “Prison Spirituality” is discussed as an example of this approach.

The present article suggests one way a college teacher might finesse some of the pedagogical problems surrounding the autobiography of Augustine by raising a set of interrelated questions calculated to draw the student into the experiential heart of the Confessions. Attention to the literary contexts within which Augustine locates the account of his conversion allows the teacher to relate the theological significance of the work to the life experience of the student.