The institutional model of the church has fallen into disfavor as a means for ecclesiological investigation because Avery Dulles, SJ, regarded it with suspicion because of its association with the notion that the church is a perfect state and the ways that institutionalism encourages clericalism. At the same time, there has been an ongoing debate as to the value of models for addressing the concrete reality of the church and for engaging the social sciences. Engaging economics as a dialogue partner, the author considers how the institutional model can be understood in terms of a fragile state instead of a perfect society to explain the persistence of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and to suggest a strategy for institutional reforms.

The Catholic Church notably condemns all forms of artificial birth control and advocates natural family planning as the only morally licit means of spacing births. This teaching is presented as the quintessential pathway to the fullness of human sexuality, but many Catholics struggle with it, and the magisterium itself recognizes that this path is not an easy one to follow. This article uses recent developments in Catholic moral theology around the notion of structural sin to examine the structural constraints complicating ordinary Catholics’ pursuit of their tradition’s vision for marital sexuality, demonstrating that larger structural forces can considerably affect the perceived viability of Catholic teaching on contraception. As a result, the article highlights the importance of linking Catholic sexual ethics and social ethics to provide a more credible vision for a more compassionate approach to married life.

In this article, I argue that iconographic pathography provides a transformational form of storytelling for ill persons and the communities around them. This work addresses the reduction of illness narration to clinical vocabularies. It targets often excluded communities—chronic and terminal narrators—as well as promotes ethical practices of creative and collaborative inclusion for ecclesial communities. I use Devan Stahl’s Imaging and Imagining Illness as an example of this distinctive form of pathography, first differentiating it from other narrative forms of the genre as well as contextualizing its decentralized narrational form with criteria drawn from icons’ emergence within early Christian art. I claim that such decentralized narration changes the trajectory of self-understanding for the ill person as well as the ethical response required for those who bear witness to such narratives.

The Modi dispensation provides a unique vantage for assessing the role, program, and self-understanding of the emergence of a local, indigenous style of theology within Roman Catholicism in India during the Nehruvian era. The style has often been linked to the internal history of Catholicism in the aftermath of Vatican II. In this article, the emphasis is rather located in the Indian context, and more specifically in the Nehruvian India. A special role in this relationship between Indian theologians and Nehruvian India was played by the category of difference that allows an appropriation of Western modes of thinking and yet marks a distance from them. I offer some consideration of the complex implications of this approach in theology.