In May 2021, the Vatican announced that the Synod of Bishops (“For a Synodal Church: Communion, Participation, and Mission”), previously scheduled for 2022, would be postponed until October 2023. The delay is partly due to COVID-19, but, as Cardinal Mario Grech, the general secretary for the Synod of Bishops, stated, it also allows the synod

I remember being deeply moved when I first read Karl Rahner’s On Prayer, based on a series of meditations he had given in Munich after World War II. Moved and surprised: I had not associated Rahner’s writings with such power to affect the heart. Rational, persuasive, brilliant, insightful, yes, but not spiritually moving. I shouldn’t have

“One professor from MIT reports a new technology, a ‘book’ made of electronic paper which needs only to be plugged in and charged up with a text downloaded.” So wrote Michael Fahey, SJ, the late editor in chief of Theological Studies, in his December 1997 column. Those electronic pages have long ceased to be a wondrous

The Society of Jesus, along with its institutional partners and Ignatian colleagues, will participate in an “Ignatian Year” from May 20, 2021 through July 31, 2022. The year commemorates the 500th anniversary of the event that began Ignatius’s conversion (his injury via cannonball at the Battle of Pamplona) and is meant to invite participants into

Among the painful lessons of our COVID era is the reminder that however vulnerable sociality may be to the caprice of external forces, it always remains fundamental to our condition. We need relationships: the intimate bonds of friendship and closely-knit communities; the casually-sustained familiarity of good acquaintances; and the unpredictable resonances of quotidian encounters. We

In the course of this past year a tide of ominous and challenging events swept over and through the human family and the planet on which we dwell. Notable among these are: the Covid-19 pandemic, yet to be brought under control and continuing to have severe socio-economic consequences; a contentious US presidential election whose divisive

For more than a decade, a required reading for the undergraduate theology course I have most often taught, “Quests for God, Paths of Revelation,” has been Albert Camus’s 1947 novel, The Plague.1 The novel depicts the deadly unfolding of an epidemic of bubonic plague—the medieval Black Death—that strikes the Algerian port city of Oran, cutting

The initial drafting of this “From the Editor’s Desk” commentary for the current issue of Theological Studies began on January 28, the day on which the Latin Church now commemorates St. Thomas Aquinas. This coincidence is one that, on reflection, I have come to consider of import for the stewardship of this respected journal that, ad interim, has

Please find the December Editorial which focuses on hope in a time when our political and religious spheres are being eroded by cynical desires.

“…Christian faith looks at the world and sees not only chaos, destruction, and darkness, but also possibility: the conviction that out of death God draws life; from the void of annihilation a new creation. This hope, far from a mere wish, is rooted in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, whence arose the faith of which we speak.”