A survey of recent Christian literature on the dialogue with Buddhism reveals a conversation which is new in both spirit and content. This article summarizes these new directions in five areas: (1) the methodology of dialogue; (2) the nature of the Ultimate and of religious language; (3) religious experience as an experience of selflessness; (4) the value and need of acting in the world, and (5) the unique, salvific mediation of Jesus and Gautama. In each of these areas, suggestions are offered as to how the new insights from the dialogue with Buddhism might aid in clarifying questions and incoherencies in present-day Christian doctrine and practice.

Recent social studies have show that there are, especially among young American Catholics, different conceptions of what constitutes a Catholic. Factors contributing to this new understanding of Catholic identity include religious pluralism and the divergent conceptualizations of catholicity and Catholicism in contemporary theology. As a consequence, different criteria are used to define what it means to be a Catholic. These variations pose serious challenges to religious educators whose task is to shape the religious identity of the students.

The study begins with a survey of the history of the concept of catholicity as well as of the criteria for Catholic identity. In view of the variations in the understanding of catholicity, the work discerns four challenges for religious education with its task of fostering Catholic identity: how to maintain a fruitful balance between Vatican II's recognition of the ecclesial nature of non-Catholic Christian communities and its claim that the Catholic Church possesses the fullness of the means of salvation; between Vatican II's call for dialogue with non-Christian religions and its insistence on the distinctiveness of Catholic beliefs and practices; between the legitimate concerns of “communal Catholics” and the necessity for all Catholics to participate fully in the Catholic symbol and ethical system; and between the spiritual and institutional, the invisible and visible elements of the church. The article concludes by suggesting an indirect method to develop and strengthen Catholic identity by means of the “deep structures” of the Catholic faith, with particular focus on Christian doctrines.

A number of religious thinkers have uncritically made use of psychoanalytic object relations theory. I argue that this uncritical appropriation is dangerous to religious thought because object relations theorists tend, implicitly, if not explicitly, to deny the reality of the object of religious faith or Mystery. I analyze the defenses against Mystery in object relations theory in order to uncover what is denied by them. This critical analysis allows object relations theory to be reappropriated by religious thinkers as a valuable source of insights into the ways Mystery manifests itself in human life.

After brief explanations of constructive postmodern science and its epistemology, and the most widely accepted cosmological theory, the Big Bang, this essay explores their potential for theological reflection on the Christian God of creation. Attention is given to the Christian doctrine creatio ex nihilo; concordism of it with the Big Bang is ruled out. The potential for consonance of postmodern Big Bang cosmology with the Christian God of creation is examined. In a revisionist move, an abstract, unipersonal theism is rejected as not true to Christian trinitarian revelation and therefore inappropriate for an exploration of consonance with Big Bang cosmology. Consonance of major elements of cosmic process, made intelligible by postmodern cosmology, with the exocentric Trinity “immanent to the world” is proposed.

This article will evaluate five comparatively recent books dealing with fundamental moral theology. Anthologies or books treating specific topics in special moral theology will not be discussed. The purpose is to consider various contemporary approaches to fundamental moral theology and to evaluate these works both in themselves and in their utility as textbooks. The authors to be considered are: O'Connell, Maguire, McDonagh, Häring, and Böckle.

As might be expected there are strengths and weaknesses in all these works. The primary interpretive key to be employed in this article is the Sitz im Leben of the book. The particular Sitz im Leben of each author helps to understand better what the book is trying to accomplish and at the same time serves to indicate some of the strengths and weaknesses of the particular volume.

Theology of religions, which grounds a theological approach to non-Christian traditions, has become widely dismissed recently as irrelevant, and even challenged to be inimical to authentic dialogue. This article addresses the critiques and defends the viability and even necessity of a theology of religions. It does so by showing how postmodern insights provide the key to break the deadlock previously constraining theologies of religions.

The pastoral constitution Gaudium et Spes of Vatican II represents a significant shift for the church, not only ecclesiologically but also intellectually, with deep consequences for the culture of the church and especially for Catholic institutions of higher education. This change has clear implications for the core curriculum of a learning Catholic Church—and of every learning Catholic. In the “modern cosmopolitan culture” of the church of Vatican II, the liberal arts have a central place. The ability to make a judgment on “the signs of the times” requires a cultural awareness that is the opposite of utilitarianism. Care for the “common good” requires “core knowledge” because the world—as it is presented in Gaudium et Spes—is nontransparent, ambiguous, and ever changing. In this sense the pastoral constitution is an antipositivistic manifesto for humanization that needs to be rediscovered.

One major source of conflict in contemporary sexual ethics (e.g., artificial contraception and abortion) is the implicit difference in the worldviews represented by the terms “pro-life” and “pro-choice.” Those who are pro-life support the notion of human personhood as a fixed and unchanging reality from conception to death; those who are pro-choice, in contrast, support the notion of human personhood as developmental, never fully realized. The pro-life position basically reflects the worldview of classical metaphysics; the pro-choice position is logically grounded in process philosophy and theology. The aim of the present article is to compare and contrast these two worldviews so as to see whether or not there is unexpected common ground between the two that could logically justify a consensus position on the more specific moral issues.

This essay, an autobiographical narrative reflecting on my awareness of racism and white privilege in my theological journey, has not been an easy paper to write. In the last few years, I have become somewhat educated about racism and white privilege. I have to face the reality that I barely recognized the problem of racism in my own somewhat extensive writings and was blithely unaware of my own white privilege.

The references to racism in my writings are very few, and there is never any concentrated discussion of the issue. This lack is especially telling in a moral theologian who often dealt with social ethics. Other theologians because of the focus of their discipline might not have the same opportunities to discuss and evaluate racism.

In my 1982 monograph, American Catholic Social Ethics: Twentieth Century Approaches, I analyzed and critiqued the writings of five figures in Catholic social ethics. The index has seven references to race discrimination and racism. The two most extended discussions (at best, a few pages each) deal with Paul Hanly Furfey and John A. Ryan. Looking back now on what I wrote then, I am both embarrassed and uncomfortable.

This essay presents an argument for the inherently ascetic nature of education in theology when considered in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States. Using a specific undergraduate theology course on Christian and Muslim responses to war and violence as a test case, the essay describes ascetic education as creating an epistemological “space” in which the capacity to engage complexity is intentionally enlarged and transformed. This enlargement, in the course under discussion, occurred principally through the students' encounter with diverse historical Christian responses to the question of participation in war, along with the comparison of Western and Muslim notions of “just war” as differentiated by historical, political and cultural factors. After presenting some highlights of how course themes and methods engaged the central ascetic tensions in the post-9/11 situation, three dimensions of asceticism vis-à-vis education are presented: ascetic disposition, conversation and action.

In Laudato Si’, Pope Francis links environmental degradation and the poor, writing that “the poor and the earth are crying out.” Appalachia complicates the pope's claim, however, because it is an area that suffers from environmental degradation but also supports the Trump administration's dismantling of environmental regulations. Thus, Pope Francis’ understanding of the poor in Laudato Si’ needs development in three ways. First, he needs to explore how environmental degradation causes spiritual harm in addition to physical harm. Second, the pope needs to note that spiritual harm often causes the poor to cry out in ways that are sexist, racist, homophobic, and hostile toward the environment. Finally, the pope should note that the voices to be heeded in responding to environmental degradation are those voices marginalized within poor communities because they are most likely to address the spiritual harm and avoid scapegoating others.

In recent years, American theologians have debated the outer limits of the church's competence to deliver specific ethical directives on issues of such sociopolitical import as the arms race or the structure of the American economy. In the American Catholic theological community, this discussion has focused on the two pastoral letters of the U.S. bishops written in the 1980s, The Challenge of Peace and Economic Justice for All. Ethicists critical of the public theology of these letters, including Dennis McCann and George Weigel, have expressed concern that the documents overidentify the American bishops with the political agenda of the American left. McCann and Weigel speculate that the process of wide consultation the bishops innovated as they composed these pastorals invited contributions of marginal groups who were allowed to dominate the conversation about the nuclear question and the economy and thus to skew the pastorals' conclusions in a radical direction not characteristic of the thinking of the majority of American Catholics. McCann and Weigel propose that public theology (and the consultative process underlying pastoral letters) employ “civil discourse” as the norm—that is, that all participants in the conversation speak the language of natural law, and that this language be taught by experts. The article critiques this proposal and argues that it envisages an ostensible pluralism which will, in fact, mute the voices of the marginal and protect the interests of the assumed center.

The religious epistemology of John Henry Newman offers an avenue, unexplored by scholars, for interpreting moral doctrine today. Although he did not write any work on moral theology, a systematic account of the interaction between conscience and moral law in his writings can illumine foundational concerns about personal morality and episcopal authority in the Roman Catholic Church. In reaction to the rationalism of the Enlightenment Newman had remarkable confidence in the capabilities and trustworthiness of the personal, historical reasoning of individuals and ecclesial communities alike—a type of reasoning that he recognized as the driving force for the genesis and the application of moral law. Not surprisingly, his concern for historical moral consciousness, with its emphasis upon subjectivity, generated a significant shift from abstractness to concreteness in theological method, a shift that would later influence the thought of Bernard Lonergan. To illustrate the contemporary relevance of Newman's commitment to personal reasoning in theology, his explanation of the legitimate authority of conscience and doctrine provides the basis for an instructive critique of the document On the Interpretation of Dogmas (1989) from the International Theological Commission.