This article argues for a broad compatibility between the Theology of Liberation and Catholic Social Thought. It can be argued that both of these discourses have been eclipsed in the post-conciliar period by the attention given to sexual ethics rather than the ‘social question’. Two possibilities are put forward as to how these discourses may re-connect with contemporary political and economic debates. Firstly, the notions of the ‘State of Exception’ and the homo sacer (advanced by Giorgio Agamben) have opened up new space for theological reflection centred upon the victim. Secondly, the search for a post-Rawlsian account of global justice, such as we find in the work of Amartya Sen, offers a possible version of a political ‘project’, to which both Liberation Theology and Catholic Social Thought can contribute.

A sacramental ontology, informed by a ressourcement of the Church Fathers, informs the theology of the mid-twentieth-century Catholic movement of nouvelle théologie. Rejecting the neo-Thomist separation between nature and the supernatural, the nouvelle theologians focused on the sacramental presence of supernatural grace in natural realities. To be sure, differences among these ressourcement theologians cannot be denied: de Lubac and Bouillard emphasized the a-scending character of human participation in divine grace, while Balthasar and Chenu stressed the de-scent of the Incarnation into the created realities of time and space. Nonetheless, the four theologians shared a deep appreciation for the Greek Fathers, which enabled them to counter the neo-scholastic separation between nature and the supernatural with a sacramental ontology.

In a recent stock-taking essay on the current state of the sociology of religion, Richard Fenn writes:

Later, Fenn goes on to assert that

Most of what I want to say accords with Fenn’s account of what has happened, but presents a case against the conclusions he draws.

For George Batailie (1897-1962) the world is ‘purely parodic'. Each thing we see is ‘the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form’ (Batailie 1985: 5). For Batailie, everything in the world is ultimately relatable to everything else, everything can be substituted for another thing, in a ceaseless process of metaphoric exchange. It is the circulation of language that makes this possible; and since it is possible in language it is possible in the world(s) that language constitutes. The coupling of words performs the copulation of bodies.

For Batailie, parody utterly eroticises the world, so that in the running of the ‘locomotive’s wheels and pistons’ he sees the world's ‘two primary motions’ of ‘rotation and sexual movement'. In the image of the steam engine's pounding pistons and turning wheels, he sees the coupling of animals and the movements of the planets, always moving from ‘their own position in order to return to it, completing their rotation'. These ‘two motions'—the thrusting of sexual frenzy and the circling of the stars—are ‘reciprocally transformed, the one into the other', so that the turning of the earth ‘makes animals and men have coitus’ and—since ‘the result is as much the cause as that which provokes it'—the coupling of animals and men turns the earth (Batailie 1985:6).

In this article I want to trace the similar parodying of the erotic in the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar. While Batailie couples the sun and moon with the sea, with clouds and plants, with the coitus of animals and the ‘amorous frenzy’ of men and women (Batailie 1985: 5)

The third volume of the Blackfriars Summa Theologiae, translated by Herbert McCabe, is entitled (I have always supposed by him) Knowing and Naming God. These words make a concise brief for the philosopher of religion. Of its two movements, knowing God seems at first glance the more demanding and critical, yet it is evident that for Aquinas and the Patristic tradition which preceded him, naming God was of equal difficulty and weight. In fact the two cannot be separated for to name one must, in some sense know which, for the early theologians, formed an almost insurmountable obstacle to our speaking of God.

Augustine is continuously occupied with how we can know God, and with how we can name Him. It is the problem with which he opens the Confessions, for if we do not know what or whom we address then how can we call upon our Lord? To call upon we need a name, and a name involves definition and definition risks idolatrously presuming to know the divine essence.

The primary Biblical text for the naming of God for Patristic and medieval readers alike was Exodus 3. 1-14, the story of Moses at the burning bush. Moses, herding his father-in-law’s sheep, is addressed by God and in the negotiations which follow Moses asks the Deity for a name,

Daphne Hampson:

Obviously the Christian church is better off with feminists than without feminists. Therefore if one is a feminist and a Christian one should stay in the Christian church and work for change. I do not underestimate what that means: how time and energy consuming, how discouraging and at times undermining it is. I remember well. We need feminists at every point in society, and I have no desire to criticise others who are holding the front at a point where I am not and cannot be. The only reasons for leaving can be that one is too desperately hurt, or that one no longer feels at home within the Christian church and religion. For me the break was not easy. As one thing after another fell away—going to the eucharist, reading the Bible, I came to wonder whether anything would remain. But prayer and a love of God, which were simply too deep in me, held. In some ways I have managed to rebuild. My religion is now more closely integrated with all else I believe about the world than it was before. I have prised apart Christianity and being a religious person—an effort which has taken time and thought and the help of others.

The Pope’s encyclical on Development, Populorum Progressio, has drawn attention to a man, Père Lebret, who is better known in many parts of the Third World than in Europe and particularly in the English-speaking world, but whose life is, nevertheless, expressive of one of the main trends that have marked the development of humanity and of the Church during the last decades.

In marking him out as one of the principal instigators of this encyclical, Paul VI knew better than anyone that he had not intervened in its detailed preparation simply as an expert, but that it was his experience and his life which had given him the essential inspiration for it. And those who knew him realize that his work and thought are one with his life; so much so, that if his writings were to pass away, in the way writings do, there would still remain the mark he has left on the history of his time and the direction which, largely thanks to him, some men and some commissions have given to their life and work.

In our present preoccupation with the problem of our relations with the Third World, it would, therefore, seem to be useful to recount the main stages of his life, in order to understand better some of the forces which determine the direction of history in the sense of an ever closer interdependence of nations.

Jean-Luc Marion, along with several other contemporary French phenomenologists-cum-theologians, represents a curious final shift in the course of twentieth-century theology. In the traditions of neo-orthodoxy and the nouvelle théologie, they seek to think God through the pure reception of his word, which alone gives to us God himself. This strictly theological talk requires no philosophical foundations, and presupposes no metaphysical categories, not even that of Being, which most of all insinuates a false necessity. And yet, such a thinking out of the resources of revelation alone is specifically seen by Marion and many others as according precisely with the demand of modern philosophy in its ‘phenomenological’ variant that we should accept nothing as true except according to the conditions in which a phenomenon presents itself to us in excess of any preceding categorical assumptions. One can even go a stage further not only does the God known from himself alone fall within the phenomenological understanding of ‘donation’ as the one transcendental condition for simultaneous existing and knowing; this God most of all fulfils the demand for pure phenomenality, for reduction to ‘the thing itself’, since in this instance solely it is impossible for anything in my experience, including my own subjectivity, to persist outside of the donating gift as the independent site of my reception of it. Hence God, whether announced through an ultimate ‘natural’ appearance, or else revealed through historical events, retains, against all conceptual idolatry, his absolute initiative, and yet operates as the phenomenon of all phenomena, the absolutely preceding call which ‘interlocutes’ us as subjects and provides transcendental permission for all other awareness.

Chenu is ninety. Although he may remain far less renowned in the English-speaking world than many of his juniors, such as Congar and de Lubac among his compatriots, not to mention Rahner, Lonergan, Hans Küng, and perhaps Hans Urs von Balthasar now, his intervention in the history of reading Aquinas, as well as the part that he played in the profound shift of Catholic consciousness that was precipitated by Vatican II, may well hold much greater promise of continuing significance.

What that significance might be is suggested by the republication, at the insistence of some of his friends, of the small book which he published in 1937, and which the Holy Office placed on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1942.

(As a young Dominican, in 1958, I remember being admonished by the librarian, the late Fr Cornelius Ernst, who had himself drawn my attention to it, that, although the book stood on the open shelves of the study-house library, I needed special permission to read it. The Index was abolished in 1966.)

To believe in the ‘infallibility’ of the Church is not to suppose that we are reliable, but that God is. It is to believe in the effectiveness of God’s act, God’s coming as Word and Spirit to the world he makes and, making it, makes his own, his dwelling-place, his temple. It is to believe that this effectiveness is un-failingly exhibited in the truthfulness of witness borne, in word and action, to this fact, this truth, this Word of life. But this is not easy to believe because the evidence surrounds us on every side that we have been given licence to corrupt, to falsify and to destroy—through egotism, carelessness, incompetence and greed—ourselves, each other, and the world.

We know what needs to be said: there is (for example) nothing obscure or unfamiliar about the Apostles’ Creed. But how to say what must be said in such a manner as to enable our contemporaries (and ourselves!) to hear, in our utterance of it, that one word for all seasons, one same surprising Gospel for every creature—and not some alien, strange, purely particular and puzzling tale, some kind of ancient folklore or science fiction—this is no easy matter. The difficulty of making sense, of making Christian sense, is the difficulty of so expressing the content of the Creed, in word and action, as effectively and properly to clarify, to throw some light upon, our various circumstances, responsibilities and predicament: our politics and science, our poetry and plans and hopes and fears, our private pains and public enterprises, our disease, and happiness, and tedium, and death.

This task, of saying simply what needs simply to be said, this teaching task, this ‘magisterium’ that is the Church’s mission, can only properly be executed in the measure that, always and everywhere, we are attentive, listening before we speak, inquiring before we answer, watchful. This is not a recommendation to regress to pre-critical patterns of interpretative practice. There is no going back upon the lessons learnt in the experiment of modernity, the freedoms (in principle) secured. It is, rather, an invitation to move towards post-critical maturity and, in so doing, to find fresh sense in ancient truth.

While the Christian emphasis on creation as a free and gracious gift is often juxtaposed with Neoplatonic notions of world-production as the emanation of being from the First Cause, I argue in this essay that there is no obvious contradiction between the doctrines of creation ex nihilo and emanation ex deo in Aquinas's thought. This is partly because the Christian teaching that the world is created ‘from nothing’ was never intended to deny that it was from God, but to deny that it was made from anything other than God. By drawing on the Liber de Causis to support his explanation of creation as the emanation of all being from the universal cause, Aquinas provides us with a way to foreground a doctrine which belongs to the foundations of Christian faith but which rarely receives sufficient attention in systematic theology – namely, the omnipresence of the God who is in everything.

Esoteric and often frustratingly organised, his utopian philosophy has been dismissed, by Christians and Marxists alike, as a confused and idiosyncratic amalgam of heresies. Yet within his writings, which span half a century (born in 1885, he died at nine-two), there can be shown to be a remarkable unity of thought. Furthermore, themes and perspectives can be discerned which arguably continue even today to be of relevance to both Christianity and Marxism and to the dialogue between them, and which make Bloch a philosopher of more than just historical interest.

Emancipating Saint Paul from both his imagined “spiritual” prison and interpretations that cast him as Nietzsche's venomous priest, Alain Badiou reads Paul as providing the resources necessary for standing in the face of the endless flows of global capital that characterize the geopolitical landscape at “the end of history.” Read against the background of the apparent triumph of political and economic liberalism I will argue that the most compelling aspect of Badiou's reading is that he finds in Paul a universalism that resists the rampant automatisms of capitalism. Moreover, I will be primarily interested in the extent to which Badiou's reading of Paul radically calls into question the conclusions not only of those self-proclaimed prophets of the ethics of alterity but also of those theologians that are finally unable to give up the desire to control outcomes and master contingency. In this way I will argue that, despite his proclamation of Christianity as a fable, Badiou can be helpfully read as a profound theological resource that points toward the shape of a radical ecclesiology that refuses to be defined on the artificial terrain of modernity and struggles instead in all its fragility to remain faithful to the resurrection.

This essay examines the Dominican influences on the Catholic philosopher G.E.M. Anscombe while an undergraduate at Oxford University between 1937–1941. It focuses on three Thomists who formally instructed Anscombe and how one Dominican, Victor White, likely instructed her on a radically Catholic perspective regarding the morality of warfare, which would not only influence her 1940 co-authored pamphlet, ‘The Justice of the Present War Examined’, but would shape her writings on war and murder for her entire academic career.

This essay accompanies the republication of Anscombe's ‘I am Sadly Theoretical: It is the Effect of Being at Oxford,’ her earliest known published essay. She wrote this article in response to a public invitation from the Catholic Herald for Catholics between the ages of 18 and 25 to make their voices heard by their fellow Catholics. In this teenage apologia, Anscombe outlines the goals for her life, and what it means for her as a Catholic to be a witness.

What follows is the text of the 2010 Aquinas Lecture delivered at the church of St Vincent Ferrer, New York. The lecture indicates what makes the so‐called new atheism new. It then offers some defense and critique of three authors: Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens. The chief criticism leveled against them is that their dismissal of theism is based on an ignorance of classical theistic thinking and the mistaken impression that ‘theism’ and ‘creationism’ are equivalent.

This article explores the crisis in the Catholic Church in Ireland in light of the child-abuse scandals exposed in recent reports and outlines some of the theological responses to that crisis. It suggests that it is necessary to examine not just the crimes of the perpetrators of abuse and the inadequate response of individual church leaders but also the structural sin within the Church that is at the root of the crisis. It is argued that the collusion between Church and State in modern Ireland that emerges from these reports can be defined in terms of Hiberno-Christendom, drawing from Charles Taylor definition of “Christendom”. In the midst of the crisis, the ongoing revelations of clerical abuse and the accompanying analysis, there is still pastoral vibrancy and people are trying to cultivate hope. The Catholic Church in Ireland may need to learn how to become what Juan Luis Segundo calls a “creative minority”, re-imagining the parameters of its power and developing a new political theology.