This article assumes that there is a profound crisis of credibility in the Catholic Church today. This is distinct from the issue of the credibility of Christian faith or the credibility of theism, for many who believe, indeed many Catholics, are affected by this sense that the Church, as a public actor, lacks credibility. Moreover, while it would be a mistake to seek the roots of this lack of credibility within general appeals to “modern unbelief,” so it would also be a mistake to imagine that it is purely a matter of “image” or as a direct result of the revelations about clerical child-abuse and its cover-up. It argues that modern society has evolved, through painful experience, a healthy scepticism about large organisations and with this has developed a set of social values (e.g. mutual responsibility and transparency) that are at odds with many of the values (e.g. hierarchy) that the Church has inherited from its past. Far from seeing these developments as part of a pathology of modernity, they can be seen as the work of the Spirit and a challenge to the Church to embrace new ways of being a witness to the truth and new ways of embodying the Christ in its living.

This article, working within a sociological framework, discusses the issues and challenges arising at the church-culture interface, which are of central importance for ecclesial credibility, many of which came up in the 2012 Synod of Bishops on the New Evangelization. It suggests that, while there are evident problems with postmodern culture, the key problem lies within the Church itself, in the disconnect between contemporary modes of cultural production and the dominant mode of transmission of the Christian faith. The remedy would be a presentation of the gospel and an ecclesial witness that is deeply respectful of individuals searching for authentic ways of living and that invites and enables them to find in a renewed church the path to true freedom.

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.

The paper discusses three theological ways of responding to modernity, all of which rely in some way upon the analogy of the church as a culture. First, Friedrich Schleiermacher represents the turn to the subject and the turn to the church. Second, Stanley Hauerwas's rejection of the turn to the subject is shown to require a sharper turn to the church. Third, David Kelsey's recent work is used to present a modification of that turn substantial enough to constitute a third way. Kelsey's analysis of various theological logics and how they are often conflated in modern theology, together with his account of church practices, is used to integrate a more traditional theocentric theological approach with a more contemporary focus on the church's practices. Some conclusions are then drawn for critical congregational study of enactments of church practices.

This paper aims at delivering a definition of modernity as offered by modern Jewish theology: a theological capturing of the modern era as an epoch possessing its own unique and positive religious characteristics. This positive theological evaluation of modernity seems to derive uniquely from the Jewish perspective which sees in modernitas a hopeful repetition of the narrative of Exodus: the story of liberation and autonomous self-constitution of man helped by God who wished his subjects to stop being just subjects, but also wanted to offer them freedom. This emphatically affirmative definition of religious modernity has only one equivalent in Christian theology: the millenarist notion of a “new age” – die Neuzeit, or modernitas – as the third age of the spirit, which greatly influenced the most ambitious strain of modern philosophy: German Idealism and Hegel in particular. In referring to the writings of Jacob Taubes (most of all his Occidental Eschatology) I will attempt to show that the twentieth-century Jewish messianism tends to perceive modernity, also in its Christian version, as an epoch of the reawakening of the original spirit of the Hebrew revelation, conceived most of all as the emancipatory event of Exodus.

How credible is the Catholic Church's teaching on Islam in the light of some modern appreciations of Islam? Does the teaching about Islam at the Council, welcomed by so many, represent a discontinuity of magisterial doctrinal teaching? This paper argues that Pope Benedict's hermeneutic for the Council can be tested using this question. It is argued that the discontinuity at Vatican II lies at the level of historically contingent circumstances, with continuity at a doctrinal level. Hence, the Church retains credibility in looking at a new issue and developing a “new” response, discerning the signs of the times, without contradicting previously held doctrinal teachings.

While the emergence of “new Movements” characterise the pontificate of John Paul II, Benedict XVI's time is marked by the Catholic Church's use of new media. It began with Catholic websites and has moved on to blogging and tweeting. This is how the Church must communicate with younger people, until these are replaced by newer digital systems. Most blogs are dominated by a conservative version of Catholicism, but this may be what appeals to those young people who are still drawn to the Church. The disposability and built –in obsolescence of devices like tablets can be a problem compared with the comparative longevity of what they are replacing, namely books.

The article considers some of the factors relevant to the question of the credibility of Christian faith. It argues that atheism is a product of a certain kind of Western Christianity: when you exceed the boundaries of what can be said about God and create “religion”, at the same time you create the conditions for disbelief in that religion. Nietzsche is a point of reference for various aspects of the question which centres on the status of “God” in relation to religious narratives that have lost power. How might Christians conduct themselves in the “Courtyard of the Gentiles” that Pope Benedict proposes?