Küng's case for the relevance of Christianity and his program for dialogue with other religions include claims for the exclusive uniqueness and normativity of Christ. This article raises the following questions: (1) Are such claims necessary for personal commitment to Christ and for fidelity to the New Testament witness? (2) Do they allow for genuine dialogue with other religions? (3) Are they even possible in the light of prevalent norms for theological and historical-critical methodology?

Feminist theologians claim that women's experience is the key to both their critical and constructive theological endeavors. This article is first an effort to sort out the ways women's experience has been named and used for theological reflection particularly through the lens of gender constructs as these have been called to our attention in relation to social location, language, and the quest for human wholeness. Second, it explores the implications of this work on women's experience for constructive feminist theology.

While unfamiliar to many today, the Song of Songs was once one of the most frequently interpreted books of the Bible. This article seeks to counter the current lack of familiarity by highlighting the significance for the classroom of pre-modern exegesis of the Song. As course content, it provides a starting point from which to examine Christian thought and practice over the last two millennia. In particular, it supplies evidence that Christians (and Jews) have expressed some of their most profound insights into spirituality in terms of the erotic poetry of the Song. This essay concludes with an examination of method. How can pre-modern exegesis contribute to contemporary debates about interpretation, particularly of biblical texts?

Throughout much of the history of Catholic social teaching, the question of wage-earner justice has been of central import. In response to the condition of workers who do not receive sufficient compensation to maintain a decent livelihood for themselves and their families, a theory of just wage has evolved. There is wisdom to be gleaned from the tradition that can enrich the contemporary debate on just wage. The challenge lies in discerning what is normative from that which is socially and culturally biased. It will be informative to explore the meaning of just wage from a wide spectrum of perspectives, including the sometimes forgotten voice of women. This article examines the contributions of several levels of the Catholic faith community and retrieves essential insights that can contribute to a revitalized just wage discourse.

The intensified efforts in recent years to bring definitional clarity to the field of religious education involve not simply elucidating the role of theology but also exploring the function of religious studies. A proposal is made in this essay that both theology and religious studies make different and necessary contributions to religious education, though neither subsumes it. The context for this argument is established by means of an initial review of the literature of religious education regarding the varied perspectives on the role of theology and then by attention to the relationship of theology and religious studies. The concluding section consists of three propositions specifying a conceptualization of the field of religious education with distinct functions for theology and religious studies.

The historical conditions surrounding the processes of forming a canon are rarely examined directly, yet it is these processes that govern the realm of religious representations and identity constructions. In light of recent critical scholarship, it is imperative to address theologically the role that the canon plays within a religious tradition. This article demonstrates the cultural necessity of canonical forms despite their “monotheistic tendency” to subdivide the world into binary oppositions. By utilizing a scale of violence to determine the impact of the canonical form on culture, this article offers an account of canons and their role in forming religious identities over and beyond the violence they are said to provoke. Through this clarification, an alternative perspective on canons can emerge that reveals the violence at the core of cultural-canonical norms, thus identifying a valuable distinction between differing (violence-concealing or violence-revealing) canonical forms.

Many pressing issues facing the church today require a deeper appreciation of Vatican I, marking its one hundred and fiftieth year. We can now return it to its context and accept its “incompleteness” rather than insist upon its “wrongness.” The distance provided by time shows that its teachings are not as rigid or extreme as they are often perceived to be, but rather stand open to significantly broader interpretations. Pastor Aeternus has faced Vatican II, the social leveling brought about by democracy and the mass media, and an erosion of confidence in hierarchical institutions. Yet the council cannot be left behind. This essay's goal is to contextualize Vatican I's voice so that we can hear what it intended to say in its own day and see how it might contribute to some of our own most urgent conversations today.

Clifford Geertz is acclaimed today to be one of the most important theorists in the anthropology of religion. He has approached the subject-matter of religion from the perspective of a humanist seeking to come to an analytical understanding of the nature of culture as an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in a complex of symbol-systems. This approach, i.e., defining anthropology as a science of meaning-analysis, nurtures the study of culture as a meaning-system. Religion, too, says Geertz, is a cultural system and necessarily conveys meaning. Therefore, both culture and religion are meaning-systems and, we can conclude, both anthropology and theology attempt to analyze systematically these meaning-systems. The interfacing of the disciplines of anthropology (systematics of culture) and theology (systematics of religion) is made possible by the utilization of the category of “meaning” as a hermeneutical key to the understanding of both religion and culture as meaning-systems.

In the encyclopedic poetry of one of Islam's most prominent mystics, Jalāl ad-Dīn Rūmī (1207-73), one can discover a great deal about the main lines of classical Islamic cosmology and psychology. Conceiving of all of creation as a mirror with two sides, both of which have their reflective values, Rūmī describes both the macrocosm and the microcosm as theaters of divine revelation. In the end, one must come to know God's reflection in the intimacy of the solitary heart; but the cosmos will do for a start. Through his classic understandings of space, time, causality, the evolution of consciousness, and the attractive power of like beings in creation, Rūmī tells of Creation's potential for making known the Creator. And in his images of body, spirit, intellect, and heart, the poet limns the outlines of the essentially human. In the process, he proceeds from macrocosm to microcosm and back; for just as the heart of the individual is the locus of God's reflection in the person, His prophets are as Heart to the Body of the cosmos, in their function of revealing the divine presence and word.

The sacraments represent some of the ordinary activities involved in sustaining daily life, activities which are understood to contain meaning and therefore power. These activities are for the most part the province of women in human societies, probably because of the biological role of women in procreation. One of the ways that men have responded to the connection between women and life sustaining activities is to claim the sacramental reenactments of those activities for themselves, and to maintain that the sacramental reenactments, not the ordinary activities, contain meaning and power. The task for the church is to reconnect sacraments with ordinary life by involving men in direct nurture of life and involving women in sacramental administration, so as to demonstrate the reality of divine meaning and power in life.