Welcome to Theological Studies
Founded and sponsored by the Society of Jesus, Theological Studies is a Catholic scholarly journal that serves the Church and its mission by promoting a deeper understanding of the Christian faith through the publication of research in the theological disciplines and through reviews of noteworthy books. The journal has been in continuous publication since 1940.
About This Website
In keeping with the Society of Jesus’s commitments to serve the global Church, the journal is pleased to provide this site as a resource for scholars who do not have ready access to our journal. It contains articles and book reviews from 1940 up to the last five years, which can be accessed here free of charge. Articles or reviews published in the last five years are available by subscription, or a per article charge, at SAGE Journals. Article submissions by authors must be made via SAGE, where you will also find the latest formatting and style guides. For your convenience, they are also available on this website.
In the Current Issue
From the Editor’s Desk
The journal’s readers are likely aware of the controversy created by Vice President JD Vance’s defense of the Trump administration’s “America First” policy. In an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity,1 he appealed to the idea of an ordo amoris (introduced by Augustine and developed by Aquinas). Some Catholic voices defended Vance’s interpretation,2 while others criticized it as misguided, particularly in regard to how it ignored the priority that Christianity gives to the urgency and desperation of our neighbors’ needs. As Stephen Pope put it, “No true Catholic ethic relegates mass numbers of distant suffering neighbors to the outer periphery of our moral concern.”3
Daring After Hart: Lonergan, Blondel, and Balthasar on the Problem of Human Freedom
This article reconsiders the problem of human freedom in the wake of David Bentley
Hart’s That All Shall Be Saved. It renews and reasserts the crisis of every human
freedom’s eternal destiny. With insights from Maurice Blondel, Bernard Lonergan,
and Hans Urs von Balthasar, the article makes a case for distinctive conceptions of
human freedom, divine agency, and the problem of hell. The article closes by reading
Theo-Drama as a map marking places for further theological exploration.
The Ghost of Modernism: Evocations of Anti-Modernist Doctrinal Documents at Vatican II
This article argues that Modernism was the pivotal “ghost” at Vatican II. Evocations
of Modernism and anti-Modernist doctrinal documents on the council floor were
numerous and often heated. Such evocations occurred in virtually every debate
where the development of doctrine was at stake. The council majority’s dismissal,
indeed rejection, of the anti-Modernist paradigm constituted a kind of revolution of
theological methodology. Understanding how anti-Modernist doctrinal documents
were evoked at Vatican II sheds important light on the council and its achievements,
compromises, and failures.