By now readers are quite familiar with the clerical sexual abuse crisis that is still unfolding. The precipitating matter is the sexual abuse of minors by priests, but it is impossible to abstract this issue from a plethora of others which have been mentioned many times: clerical culture, episcopal cover-ups, lack of reporting mechanisms, the

The church is much on our minds these days, and many are asking how we arrived at this place in our history. Some blame the Second Vatican Council. Despite firm papal leadership, beginning with Pope Paul VI himself, it seems that for some in the church, the council was a mistake that needs to be

This issue, the first of volume 80, marks a milestone. This year, 2019, is the 80th anniversary year of the journal’s founding in 1939. Actual publication began in 1940. As my predecessor David S. Schultenover will recount in an upcoming article, Theological Studies was founded at a relatively inauspicious time. The Great Depression was still underway, yet,

As we go to press, the crisis besetting the Roman Catholic Church continues to unfold. The magnitude of the developments presents a challenge to comprehending not only the fact of unspeakable crimes against youth, but the sheer number of them, the majority having been committed by priests publicly vowed to chastity. Add to this the

A major North American theologian, James Hal Cone, died in April of this year. In 1968, when Gustavo Gutierrez was penning his proposal for a theology of liberation, Cone published a groundbreaking essay, “Christianity and Black Power.” In that essay, Cone limned a theology of structural sin that implicated the churches in the white supremacist ideology

Amidst the chatter and gossip that often pass for substantive ecclesiastical discourse are occasional utterances by the pope or by the magisterium that go unnoticed. In early January, Pope Francis delivered an address at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile on the topic of university education. While the speech spotlighted the peculiarities of the Chilean

Not too long ago, while attending a conference on the future of systematic theology, one theologian opined to me privately that the era of systematic theology is finished. The conditions for its very existence are no longer in place: a doctrinal consensus, a common philosophical palette, and, perhaps left unsaid, patience among readers and many

Over the course of many conversations with younger theologians, it has become clear to me that publishing in a major theological journal can be a daunting undertaking. Some institutions, like Theological Studies, can intimidate even if they do not wish to. Many of us know the fear of putting our work out there for blind

As I write this editorial, I am attending a joint meeting of the Academy of Hispanic Catholic Theologians in the United States, and the Black Catholic Theological Symposium. The integrating topic for these theologians is incarceration and the fact that vastly disproportionate numbers of Black and Latino people are ushered into the “prison-industrial complex.” The

Theological water cooler talk not infrequently circles around the lament that the age of the “giants” has passed. There are no Barths, Tillichs, Rahners, Lonergans, Congars or Balthasars on the horizon, the narrative goes; most theologians at work today are lesser lights, and their theology is derivative. Systematic theology in particular has lost its way.