In this essay the author rethinks the provocative remarks of Karl Rahner about the overall symbolic character of reality in his essay “The Theology of Symbol.” While conceding the inevitable differences in perspective between a Thomistic metaphysics of Being and process-relational philosophy, the author explains how Rahner's “theses” on symbolism likewise make good sense within the context of his own process-oriented metaphysics of intersubjectivity as developed in previous publications. Then he applies this Rahnerian/neo-Whiteheadian scheme to the analysis and explanation of Christian belief in the Incarnation of the Divine Word in the human nature of Jesus, the Real Presence of the risen Christ in the Eucharist, and the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ.

Thomas Sheehan has made the “atheological” charge that “Christianity's original sin is to think it is about God,” but there is a different lesson to take if attention is paid to the metaphoric dimension of the ways Aquinas, Rahner, Heidegger and even Sheehan himself think and speak about God. If there is an original fault from which Christianity must be saved, it has as much to do with the conception of what is happening when Christianity thinks and speaks, as it does with the conception of what this speaking and thinking is about.

“Spirit” is a more universally available religious symbol than “Christ,” found in various forms in most of the religions of the world. It helps to open Christian theology to a genuine religious pluralism, and, in the framework of the doctrine of the Trinity, provides a Christian way of construing this pluralism, relating it to the purposes, activity, and being of God. The pneumatic Trinitarianism proposed in this essay contrasts with the christocentric Trinitarianism recommended by advocates of an inclusivist theology of religions. The concrete incarnation of God in Christ is not lost but placed in a larger context. The Spirit proceeds not just from Christ but from the interaction of God and the world, including a diversity of religious figures and practices. The idea that a theology of the Spirit might serve as the basis of a pluralist theology of religions is tested by looking at the modalities of Spirit that are present in Hinduism and Buddhism, and that enrich a Christian understanding of the Spirit.

Because of how often Dorothy Day (1897–1980) was away, helping to co-found the Catholic Worker movement, her daughter Tamar nicknamed her, “Be-going.” Others have called Dorothy a neglectful parent. This article provides an overview of Tamar's life, and for each period of Tamar's life it examines what Dorothy wrote during that time about motherhood and her relationship with her daughter. It seeks to clarify to what extent Dorothy's efforts to serve the poor led to a neglect of her daughter, and if there was any change in how she balanced these different relationships over the years. It also explores whether or not Dorothy understood and experienced motherhood as a holy and sanctifying vocation.

This essay uses the lens of the “preferential option for the poor” to examine the unprecedented turn to poverty by religious movements in late twelfth and early thirteenth-century Western Europe. Three movements are selected from the many and various movements espousing poverty: the Humiliati, the Waldensians, and the Franciscans. The Humiliati developed a communal lifestyle that, in key ways, reflected the emerging urban working class. The Waldensians embraced a radical poverty that rejected all forms of property, but they were progressively marginalized from Catholicism and eventually became targets of the Inquisition. The Franciscans adopted a very similar sort of radical poverty, but their communities ultimately would be assimilated into mainstream Catholicism. The essay places these movements into a dialogue with the contemporary notion of the “preferential option for the poor” in order to discover the ways they might inform and illuminate one another.

Swami Abhishiktananda (Fr. Henri Le Saux, 1910–1973) was a French Benedictine who wrote a pioneering work in Hindu-Christian dialogue entitled Saccidānanda: A Christian Approach to Advaitic Experience. Therein he attempted an inclusivist integration of the theologies of Advaita Vedanta and Roman Catholicism. He later rejected aspects of Saccidānanda and argued that Advaita and Christianity are too different to be integrated in this manner. In place of Saccidānanda, Abhishiktananda developed two positions at the end of the 1960s which anticipated current Roman Catholic debates over the theology of religions. One was an experiential inclusivism which bears affinities with the pluralist position of Paul Knitter and others. The other was a “comparativist” position, similar to the one later developed by Francis Clooney and James Fredericks. This paper will examine how Abhishiktananda developed these various approaches to Hindu-Christian dialogue and the tensions between them.

Recent efforts to write the global history of Christianity respond to demographic changes in Christianity and use “global” in three ways. First, “global” suggests efforts at more comprehensive historical retrieval, especially to place the beginnings of Christian communities not within mission history but within the church history in those areas. Second, “global” can refer to the broader comparative perspectives on Christianity's history, especially the history of religions. Finally, “global” can indicate attempts to retell the entire Christian story from a self-consciously worldwide perspective. Recent works also raise new theological and pragmatic challenges to the discipline of church history.

A contemporary culture of market individualism in the United States today is increasingly marginalizing the lives of children. This situation requires Christian ethicists to raise once again, as in the historical past, the question of the larger meaning and purpose of child rearing as a serious disciplinary concern. This paper identifies fundamental issues of child rearing ontology, teleology, deontology, and practice, and maps out some newly emerging Christian ethical responses by communitarians, liberationists, and covenantalists. It then develops a larger social ethics of child rearing—drawing on a range of historical theological resources—able to speak to children's issues in a disciplinarily complex, publicly meaningful, and culturally transformative way. Its argument is that child rearing should be rescued from its increasing social privatization through a revised covenantal social ethic that strengthens the unique tasks of families but also places them within a larger interdependent nexus of community and state supports.

This essay argues that undergraduate theological education at Christian colleges and universities ought to concern itself with the spiritual and moral formation of undergraduate students, and suggests ways that the use of edifying stories can be especially conducive to that end. The meaning of the term “edification” is unpacked by reference to its use in Christian scripture, and especially by reference to a delightful story told by Palladius about two Desert Fathers, Pachomius of Tabennisi and Macarius the Alexandrian. Then two crucial qualities of spiritually edifying story-telling are delineated: (1) the story chosen must invite students to engage in candid self-examination. (2) the teacher must embody the virtues that her story illustrates, but at the same time tell the story in a way that does not draw attention to herself. One who seeks to edify others must avoid all self-promotion, even while exemplifying one's lessons in one's conduct.

At the 2003 Annual Convention of the College Theology Society in Milwaukee, Sandra Yocum Mize presented some of her research for a history of the Society. I greatly appreciated her investigation of our Society's origins and its progress. She reminded me of things I had forgotten and told me much that I have never known. Let me add a few reminiscences that may be helpful to those who are new in the profession or relatively so.

The Korean War consumed the last two years of Harry Truman's second term as president, when Dwight Eisenhower was elected to succeed him. After the unsuccessful effort to contain Communism on the entire Korean peninsula at the cost of many lives on both sides, the eight Eisenhower years, 1952–1960 were largely a matter of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Eisenhower was basically a retired general, on the basis of which he had been named president of Columbia University in a kind of travesty of academic life. His brother Milton who might have made a better chief executive rose in academia to become president of the Pennsylvania State University, well before Joe Paterno brought the Nittany Lions to another kind of eminence. The Eisenhower years were a lull of sorts in U.S. life bringing prosperity to the few, Republican style, and a scandal over his chief of staff who had accepted a gift of an alpaca coat. Days of innocence! Catholic college enrollments were still very much on the increase in the mid-1950s as a result of the G.I. Bill granting full tuition and books, not only for undergraduate and graduate study but even for any theological seminary of a veteran's choice. Many a convent motherhouse's instructional situation was being transformed into a bachelor's degree-granting institution in those years, at first for the religious students only but then shortly for adult lay women in the surrounding areas. The teachers of religion in Catholic colleges and in the few universities of the mid-1950s were priests with a seminary education—no religious brothers, sisters or lay persons as yet.

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.

The historian remains in many an imagination nothing more and nothing less than the purveyor of facts about the past. The historian's task appears simple, straightforward—to report the facts accurately. According to the logic of this image, once one has “the facts” about a selected topic, then the history nearly writes itself. Fortunately for the historian, even the most focused historical study demands more than setting the events in their proper order. I write “fortunately” because if the historical task were as straightforward as just described then a single history written by no particular historian would suffice on any given topic, and historian unemployment rates would rise even higher than they are now. Though most contemporary academics know the subtle and complex influences of social location, those whose work is other than historical tend to exempt history from such influences. They have little reason to ponder the many variations possible in constructing a historical narrative nor to consider the merits of each variation. The historian, on the other hand, must consider as many variations as possible in trying to figure out what story to tell about the given subject and how best to tell it. Even writing on a relatively focused topic like the fifty-year history of the College Theology Society requires careful reflection on exactly what story is to be told and numerous choices on how best to tell that story.

To convey to students what writing history entails, I often ask them to imagine producing a history of the preceding day as each of them lived it. Most immediately understand that even to write such a limited history would demand choices not only in terms of details to include and omit but also in terms of organizing those details within a framework selected to provide a particular view of the day. A single event or a special relationship might frame the narrative. Then again, a series of interconnected events organized conceptually might create the intended effect. Audience shapes these choices. Students admit that their narratives would change if the audience shifted from peers to parents.

In the wake of the Second Vatican Council there were remarks about the Decree on Religious Freedom being a time bomb, because its views on freedom of conscience would have revolutionary impact if applied to the life of the church itself. There was more general recognition of the fundamental shift in ecclesiology that was implied in Lumen gentium and Gaudium et spes. As for Sacrosanctum concilium (SC), the document on liturgical revision, it obviously pointed to important shifts in Catholic liturgical activity, but it was not seen as a theologically innovative document. It may well be, though, that SC will prove to have the most radical and revolutionary effect on the thought, the life, and the structure of the church.

That SC effected an important shift in the church's thinking and liturgical practice has been undeniable. However, like so much that was achieved in the Council, the profoundly revolutionary implications of the document are only beginning to be realized. To the extent that it is understood and implemented, the Constitution on the Liturgy points to a reversal of eighteen centuries of thinking about the church and its sacramental rituals. Clearly, this is an audacious statement, but basically what is asserted is that the understanding of sacramental liturgy is moving away from the notion of instrumental causation and towards appreciation of the effectiveness of ritual as such. There was not, of course, a formalized theology of sacramental liturgy eighteen hundred years ago that explicitly employed the idea of instrumentality. However, already in the second century there was a noticeable move away from the communitarian outlook that characterized the liturgies of early house churches. In its place the up-and-down view of liturgy's effectiveness in which the ordained person stands between God and the assembly, channeling prayer upwards and blessing downward, is expressed in the prayer for the ordination of a bishop in the third-century Apostolic Tradition.

In 1987 the College Theology Society held its annual meeting at Loyola College in Maryland. The cicadas were then at the end of their appearance and crunched underfoot as we walked from the dorms to the sessions. That was the first annual meeting I had attended and the cicadas made a lasting impression on me. As the College Theology Society celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of its annual meetings, the cicadas have come and gone again. Since the planning for the Society began, they have come four times, just four times out of their thousands of years of life. As they return to their burrows to begin a new cycle of life, CTS celebrates fifty years of life completed and looks forward another cycle of its theological life already on the horizon. When the cicadas emerge again, seventeen years from now, what will they notice about CTS that is different from today? In other words, will the trajectories of growth present in CTS in 2004 flourish and, if so, what might the returning cicadas see?

Several persons who have described the beginning of the College Theology Society have pointed out that until the middle of the nineteen fifties, theology in the liberal arts colleges consisted largely of apologetics taught by persons of intelligence and good will, often priests, who seldom possessed an earned doctorate in the field. Professors with doctorates were usually assigned to the seminaries. A group of liberal arts college professors in theology became aware that they did not enjoy the same credibility in their institutions as professors in other disciplines, in part because the criteria for teaching theology were different and lower than for other departments.

When Dorothy Day decided to write a history of the Catholic Worker movement she drew for inspiration from the writings she knew and loved intimately: the novels of Charles Dickens; the radical reportage of activists like Carlo Levi (Christ Stopped at Eboli), George Orwell (Down and Out in Paris and London), and Danilo Dolci (Report from Palermo). She also loved Ignazio Silone's antifascist novel Bread and Wine. Towering over all of these writers, however, were the Russians and more particularly the late Leo Tolstoy of Resurrection and the profound, fictive world of Fydor Dostoevski whose “fool for Christ” (Prince Myshkin of The Idiot) and the saintly Aloysha of the Brothers Karamazov were iconic. Day was a follower of the Gospel but her human horizon was nourished by her life long love for literature.

Who knows the mystery of God's attracting grace but if the old scholastics had it right in their axiom that grace builds on nature one would have to say that the four persons whom Paul Elie chronicles in his recent brilliant work on the American Catholic Church in the middle of the twentieth century were attracted to a vigorous life in Catholicism on nature as made concrete in literature. What all four had in common was a profound love of literature and, more to the point, the fact that there was a common thread in their devotion to The Brothers Karamazov and other seminal works of literature. In fact, one can play a little mind game while reading this capacious study: what were they all reading as their adult lives matured?

The four persons at the heart of Elie's book were writers but of a decidedly different stripe. Flannery O'Connor, whose life was cut short by a debilitating case of lupus, wrote slowly and with an exactitude that demands an equally slow patient reading even when the stories are clear but the meaning allusive.

Yves Congar, O.P. (1904–1995) is widely considered the most important Roman Catholic ecclesiologist of the twentieth century and one of the most influential theologians at the Second Vatican Council. His personal diaries Journal d'un théologien 1946–1956 and Mon journal du Concile, recently published posthumously in France, enhance our appreciation for the character and spirituality of this extraordinary theologian. These journals testify to the passion for truth that inspired and sustained Congar's theological vocation through both his difficult years of censure and the exhilarating conciliar period. The witness and example Congar offers can be instructive to our own continuing practice of the theological discipline.

The celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the College Theology Society naturally turns our focus to what has transpired in these fifty years. In terms of Roman Catholic theology, the two most significant historical realities are the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) and the now twenty-five-year pontificate of John Paul II as Bishop of Rome.

In my discipline of moral theology, Vatican II and its document on the training of priests called for the renewal of moral theology with a special emphasis on its Scriptural bases. “Special care is to be taken for the improvement of moral theology. Its scientific presentation, drawing more fully on the teaching of holy Scripture should highlight the lofty vocation of the Christian faithful and their obligation to bring forth fruit and charity for the life of the world.”

John Paul II as pope has written and taught extensively in the area of morality. In the light of the Vatican II mandate to renew moral theology through a greater appreciation of its scriptural roots and bases, this essay will critically evaluate John Paul II's use of scripture in his teaching on morality.

On the occasion of my retirement from Xavier University, and at the request of some long-time friends I have the opportunity to reflect on what has happened to me during these forty years of trying to combine my vocation as a Catholic theologian with what I felt was a “call” (therefore, also a vocatio) to take persons of other religions seriously and to dialogue with them. The “vocation of an interreligious theologian” is really the meeting and, as it were, mating of two vocations, two calls that make very real and definite and often contrasting claims on the same person. What follows is a “retrospective” on how I have attempted to walk one path in response to two calls—to be a Catholic theologian and to be an interreligious dialoguer.