The legacy of the Shoah invades christology as one of its most basic postfoundationalist challenges in the demise of modernity. Fackenheim heuristically amplifies the rupture of the metaphysical narratives of soteriology by the radical evil and sufferings in Auschwitz. As a representative instance of reorienting theological discourse through exposure to the trauma of the Shoah and the testimony of its Jewish survivors, Metz grounds practical christology in the biblical memory of suffering and an eschatological delimitation of time. Lévinas' phenomenology of the self counters residual issues in Metz and mediates a postfoundationalist framework for re-visioning christology after the Shoah. The phenomenological transposition of the notion of substitution to the ethical order rehabilitates Metz's practical christology and articulates the messianic significance of human agency as a sociopolitical responsibility for the sufferings of the broken and the dead.

Reaction among conservatives to Pope Francis' Evangelii Gaudium has most often been negative. Ross Douthat, however, in his 2013 New York Times op-ed, has offered a more nuanced critique. Our four Roundtable authors respond to Douthat's implied invitation to a discussion by responding from the viewpoint of Catholic social thought.

The core of this article consists of a critical rethinking of the classical “see-judge-act” methodology of liberation theology. The article contends that this method threatens to install a dualism between a universal, secular experience of oppression and a Christian interpretation of it, thereby creating a hierarchical relation that reduces the complexity of the experience of poverty. The author investigates this issue by focusing on liberation theology's understanding of the “preferential option for the poor” (part 1) and the way in which the see-judge-act methodology affects this understanding (part 2). The article gradually moves on to alternative epistemologies, starting with a discussion of a hermeneutical approach (C. Boff and Schillebeeckx) and the method of “historicization” (Ellacuría), and eventually proposing a new phenomenologically and materially informed methodology for liberation theology that is called “cartography” and is grounded in a “new materialist” metaphysics as articulated by Deleuze, Braidotti, and Barad (part 3).

In the last decade a number of publications have appeared regarding the life and work of the French Dominican Yves Congar. The present essay presents the “young Congar” of the 1930s, in particular his vision of what Catholic theology should be. The author defends the thesis that it is Congar who initiated the “program” of (the first phase of) the so-called nouvelle théologie (“new theology”). After a general survey of the central features of the nouvelle théologie and its development, the author gives an overview of the three ways in which Congar is to be understood its pioneer and representative.

There is increasing pressure on religious thinkers and leaders to construct theologies thoroughly grounded in the particularities of a faith tradition but truly appreciative of religious pluralism. This essay argues that a significant contribution towards articulating a Roman Catholic theology of religious diversity can be advanced by explicitly integrating developments in pneumatology and sacramental theology. Pneumatology has obvious pluralistic implications insofar as Catholic theologians and the magisterium itself have emphasized the universal presence of the Holy Spirit. The sacramental tradition is more ambivalent. On the one hand, the sacramental principle and sacramental nature of human existence would seem to endorse the authenticity of religious pluralism. On the other hand, sacramental theology in the West has historically been shaped by a Christomonism which necessarily tends toward exclusivism. This tendency can be overcome by understanding sacraments in light of a Spirit Christology from below.

This essay examines the methodological relationship of social doctrines of the Trinity and ecclesiologies of communion. The Theologies of Gisbert Greshake and Leonardo Boff represent theologians arguing that ecclesiology must be based on a doctrine of God which they present from a social (or psychological) perspective. The goal of the essay is to expose some of the methodological assumptions made by ecclesiologists and the value of social approach to the Trinity can have in an ecclesiology of communion.

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.