The experience of the many poor and of the many religions in today's world are two issues which this study addresses, from the perspective of human rights. Its thesis is that concern for the poor is not unique to Judaism and Christianity, but that all religions examined here contain an affirmation of the value of the individual person, as well as a compassion for the poor, which can lead to a universal concern for the rights of the poor and marginalized. Viewing human rights as a concept which expresses the aspirations of many religions, it examines their perceptions of human rights language and their concerns for the poor. In doing so, it rejects the postmodernist claim that all religions are incommensurable and cannot be compared on issues such as justice, human rights and concern for the poor, and argues for continuing efforts toward a global ethic.

Romano Guardini read Rilke's Duino Elegies as a compelling eschatological vision for the modern world, but one that must be rejected. I argue that in Rilke's writing, Guardini detected the secular analogue to the substantial image at the end of the Christian eschatological imagination—that is, the communion of saints. Rilke's vision is coherent in that the end he perceives follows from the beginning he assumes; therefore, understanding Rilke's end requires his commentator to see all that precedes that end, beginning with Rilke's own beginning. In a time of increasing loneliness, Guardini's response to Rilke rings with renewed contemporary relevance to guard against the ultimate erasure of the human person.

This exchange between ethicist Peter Gathje and one of the guests of Manna House of Hospitality (Memphis, Tennessee) points to the task of the public theologian. Gathje serves at Manna House, sharing meals and prayers with its guests. Through his blog Radical Hospitality he echoes and responds to the theology of the people he serves, and their deep questions about justice in our world. In this dialogical movement he enters the locations where he serves meals and prays with his “public,” who in turn ask for a justice that seems all too elusive from their vantage point. His “public,” the guests and others who pass through Manna House, are sources for theological imagination and critical questioning, shaping the way Gathje organizes his vision of the Christian story and the liberating truth it seeks to relate to the world.

Marxist analyses can contribute to Christian human rights thought in four areas. First, Marx's anthropology emphasizes process and sociality over fixed or determining human qualities. The species-being concept counterbalances cynical forms of Christian “realism” and secular, genetic determinism. Second, Marx's analysis of rights under capitalism engenders the claim that human rights begin with the right to a non-exploitative social structure. The Marxist critique reinforces the biblical injunction against identification with an unjust status quo. Third, current Marxist analysis of the historical failure of socialism generates hope based on learning from the past. The analysis can help Christians to hope and work for earthly embodiment of human rights short of the Kingdom. Finally, Marxism and biblical thought converge in pointing to the oppressed as crucial for obtaining human rights. Christians and Marxists have common criteria for a human rights agenda.

This article aims to integrate the biblical theological idea of the heart with Alfred North Whitehead's ideas concerning human selfhood. It begins with a biblical theological description of the heart, drawing to a focus upon Ezekiel's idea of God creating in us a new heart. It then interprets these ideas by correlating them with key ideas of Whitehead, such as actual entity, actual occasion, living person, historic route, the four phases of the actual entity, initial aim, and subjective aim. This correlation peaks in the idea that for process anthropology a new heart is created in us every new instant.

Nathan A. Scott, Jr. is identified as a leading figure in the development of the interdisciplinary field of theology and literature. This essay presents an interpretation of his methodology and scholarly development over a thirty-year period (1952-1981). Paul Tillich's theology of culture is understood as the major methodological and theological influence on Scott's early work. Martin Heidegger's philosophy (preeminently the essays on aesthetics) is the major influence in the development of Scott's mature scholarship. Scott's methodology has a seven-step structure and the textual analysis of his works is presented in a chronological manner. The central foci in the shift in Scott's inquiry are the type of literature he analyzes and his understanding of the role of the poet. The essay concludes with an evaluation of Scott's contribution to this field of study and suggestions for its future development.

The nuclear arms race and increasing possibility of nuclear destruction demands a fundamental recovery of the Christian spirituality of social justice. After discussing common misconceptions of this spirituality, as well as the dead end offered by atheism insofar as it undialectically negates God consciousness, I will show how recovery of the Christian spirituality of social justice offers the possibility of converting the human drama of history away from death and toward life. Such spirituality unites the Mystery of God with the mystery of human personhood and reveals the redemptive solidarity of God with the poor and oppressed victims of history.

Theologians have recently been criticizing the notion of an immanent Trinity as idle speculation and focusing their attention exclusively on the economic Trinity. The change thus proposed is at once too radical and not radical enough. It is too radical in that it seems to set aside almost two thousand years of careful theological reflection on the reality of God as derived from Scripture and Tradition. It is not radical enough in that it does not grasp the deeper issues involved here. For, what is really needed is not a move away from ontology toward phenomenology, but rather a conscious shift in ontologies, a move, in other words, from a metaphysics of being to a metaphysics of becoming as the appropriate conceptuality for an understanding both of the doctrine of the Trinity and of the God-world relationship.

This article is an effort toward practical, pastoral, theological correlation, an effort to bring together the American cultural tradition and the Christian theological tradition. Its argument develops in four cumulative theses to be explicated: (1) there is a crisis of family in the United States today; (2) what is said of family in both First and Second biblical Testaments is of no direct help in that crisis; (3) what makes a family Christian is not the slavish following of some biblical saying about family but the following of Jesus confessed as the Christ; (4) the Christian family has an important contribution to make in the contemporary crisis of family in the United States. Each thesis is developed in turn.

This paper looks back over the eight books of John S. Dunne as forming a unified theological project in two phases, each comprising four books. Dunne's first phase is a “journey of the mind,” in which Dunne is concerned with knowing and unknowing, with understanding and insight, and his basic epistemological stance is developed. His second phase is a “journey of the heart,” in which he moves from the basic loneliness of the human condition, to the “heart's desire” for God, to the presence of God in the desiring. Several changes in Dunne's understanding of the human relationships with God, others, and self are traced here. Dunne's most recent book adds a “pilgrimage of the soul” to those of mind and heart, so this paper moves to a discussion of the meaning and development of Dunne's idea of “soul.” It concludes by considering Dunne's work as spiritual writing and as theology.

Traditionally, works that have formed part of the history of Christian spirituality have been produced by authors engaged in and committed to their subject matter. How can this 2000 year-old characteristic of Christian spirituality be incorporated into the contemporary identity of the discipline in a manner congruent with critical scholarly methodology and in a manner that can be communicated to scholars in other disciplines?

Theologians and philosophers of religion have argued for the importance of participatory knowledge for full understanding of the transcendent and of the rituals and practices of religions that claim to have a transformative effect upon the life of persons. Based on these arguments, this essay suggests that scholars' engagement in the practice of spirituality is an important source of knowledge and that it is a source of knowledge that can contribute to critical reflection.

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.

Certain proposals to construe American Catholic public theology as civil discourse assume that public theological discussion needs to be disciplined to prevent “interest groups” from imposing their agendas on all participants. These proposals urge that all parties be required to employ the language of natural law, which is to be taught to all by theological experts.

Though American Catholic public theology traditionally seeks to avoid sectarianism by employing the philosophical language of natural law, and though civil discourse would presumably reinforce this anti-sectarian tendency, it has a significant shortcoming. Requiring public religious discourse to prescind from all specific interests would rule out prophetic contributions to public theology. Prophets always speak perspectivally and reflect the interests of their historical situations. The interests of religious speakers need scrutiny, but this scrutiny should not exclude from hand prophetic discourse arising out of experiences of oppression.

The essay provides a foundation for this thesis by examining what is at work in prophetic speech. It locates prophetic discourse at the intersection of the prophet's need to proclaim and the community's need to control. The argument of the essay moves to the conclusion that American Catholic theologians need to give more attention than previously to the rhetorical dimensions of public theological discourse.

Can the Catholic Church be fundamentalist? Contemporary scholarship has shown that fundamentalism can take other forms than scriptural literalism. It consists in a rationalizing of traditional certainties in the face of pluralism and change. Its Catholic form could be described as “morphological,” residing in the structures of authority and power. Protestant reactions to Dominus Iesus missed the fundamentalist logic implicit in its synthesis of christology and ecclesiology. They praised the reaffirmation of Christocentrism but were dismayed that Methodists and Muslims were portrayed as inferior for essentially the same reasons. The document not only fails to reflect Vatican II's program for decentralizing authority but also overlooks the implications of Nostra Aetate 4 for interfaith dialogue. Its assertion of soteriological and theological superiority raises ethical questions. Dialogue is a religious act of welcoming the Stranger. Its refusal contains a potential for violence.