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This article argues that De Trinitate’s often neglected soteriological arc contains resources for a constructive and pastorally fruitful retrieval of Augustine’s theology of original sin. While De Trinitate presupposes the historical, causal, and hereditary dimensions of original sin elaborated in Augustine’s anti-Pelagian writings, its distinctive contribution lies in its phenomenological depiction of the inherited sinful condition as that in which each is complicit, that for which God became human to heal, and that from which Christians are progressively renewed. Consonant with recent Catholic magisterial and theological reflection, original sin emerges as a primordial wound knowable in light of its overcoming by Christ’s gracious descent.

In the last two decades, marriage has become less central in Catholic family ethics. This recent development differs from the critical familism project led by Don Browning in the 1990s and early 2000s, which sought to reform and promote a Christian theology of marriage. The article traces three distinct but related decentering variations: accompanying the diversity of families in the church, acknowledging the potential for all families to thrive, and embracing radical possibilities for family life. While acknowledging important concerns underlying these moves, the author offers a critical retrieval of marriage that preserves its “complex centrality” and furthers its radical potential.

That individual members of the faithful become a corporate worshiping subject in liturgical celebration is a mainstay of Catholic liturgical ecclesiology, but how corporate subjectivity is established in liturgy has not been specified. This article investigates some key scientific factors contributing to the cohesion of the corporate worshiping subject and theorizes that corporeality ideally leads to prosociality. It points to theological underpinnings of liturgical corporeality and studies how the Holy Spirit may shape the corporate bond utilizing affective and neurophysiological mechanisms, particularly emotional contagion, postural and gestural mirroring, synchrony, and hormones.

Classical accounts of beauty that emphasize harmony, unity, and radiance have come under sustained moral criticism in modern theology and philosophy, particularly in light of historical atrocities. After Auschwitz, such conceptions of beauty have been accused of moral escapism or irrelevance, prompting a turn toward cruciform accounts that seek to secure beauty’s moral salience by locating the paradigmatic manifestation of beauty in the cross of Christ: The cross of Christ reveals a deeper, darker beauty that can subvert the deformity of evil by assuming it into itself. This article uses Jeremy Begbie’s account of beauty as a case study to argue that at least some cruciform accounts of beauty risk conceptually and metaphysically entangling beauty with evil, thereby aestheticizing it. Against this backdrop, the article proposes a rehabilitation of formal beauty understood in classical terms. It argues that formal beauty can be morally salient in a horror-torn world through what is termed contrastive aesthetic insight. Rather than absorbing evil, formal beauty stands over against it, allowing evil to appear more clearly as deformity, lack, and violent disruption of the peace of being. This contrastive function sharpens moral perception and informs agents’ practical and attentional orientation to the world. Beauty, on this account, remains fragile and demanding yet capable of orienting moral vision in a world marked by horror.

This article draws upon the theology of Johann Baptist Metz, placing it into discussion with insights from theological aesthetics and political ecology. It does so to examine how it is that evil comes to appear as glamorous, giving particular attention to the evil shaping and sustaining the contemporary planetary emergency. The first part of the article considers the obfuscating and trivializing power of evil. The second part reflects upon the distortions of affection caused by the lust for domination. The article concludes with a reflection on the potentiality of hope to interrupt the mastery of sin.

In response to the essay by members of the KU Leuven project “Dissenting Church,” I argue that they overlook the metaphysics underlying much of the church’s twentieth-century thought on tradition, leading to unnecessary dichotomies, such as whether tradition changes or is unchanging.

In our response to Fischer’s concerns, we clarify the metaphysical intuitions underlying the original article. We further contend that both classical metaphysics and framing of tradition in Fischer’s response may bring more problems than they solve as they reinforce the purity discourses criticized in the original piece.