The aim of this study is to evaluate the relationship of synodality and charisms in
Catholic teaching from a Pentecostal perspective. Although a consideration of the
charisms is implied in the discussion on synodality in Catholic documents, there
exists no comprehensive theology of the nature and function of charisms in their
contribution to the synodal journey. A critical identification of the role of charisms,
specifically in conversation with the role of hierarchical gifts, and brought into
dialogue with the new charismatic movements and communities within Catholicism
and Pentecostal Christianity, reveals an imbalance in the exercise of hierarchical and
charismatic gifts in the church that presents a foundational problem for the future of
synodality

Focusing on the Christian side, the author applies Bernard Lonergan’s three-fold structure of progress, decline, and redemption to Christian-Muslim history. The author identifies moments of each vector in the wider history—Arab-Christian apologetics (progress), demonization of Islam (decline), nonviolent witnesses (redemption). The author then highlights a twentieth-century example of development-progress and redemption, namely the cumulative insights of Charles de Foucauld, Louis Massignon, and Christian de Chergé, which led to and built upon the Vatican II statements about Muslims-Islam.

Signs of the times are best understood as significant historical transitions, motivated by social goods, which the church must discern and respond to in the light of the Gospel. The argument proceeds in three steps. First, Charles Taylor’s interpretive understanding of historical transitions is expounded. Second, Chenu’s and Vatican II’s understandings of the signs of the times are examined, and Taylor’s approach to historical transitions is applied to Chenu’s and Vatican II’s central insights about signs of the times. The third section considers the movement for gender equality as an example of a sign of the times.

Large-scale and widespread social and ecclesial upheaval results in the experience of “dislocation,” a feeling of homelessness flowing from the loss of certainty and stability. This article considers how dislocation might provide an opening to creativity and hope, especially in the life of the ecclesial community. Synodality can be an instance of such creativity and hope, even though, paradoxically, synodality itself can be a catalyst for dislocation. To make its case for synodality, the article highlights the church’s eschatological orientation, its graced pilgrimage of faith.

This article traces the development of Catholic ecological hermeneutics over fifty years, leading to Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’ (2015). Analyzing key church statements, it reveals the expanding biblical sources used and efforts to reinterpret them. The interdisciplinary nature of sustainability and Christian churches’ involvement in academic, ecumenical, and interreligious fora have driven this “hermeneutical effort.” Although not critically examining difficult passages or revising Scripture systematically, Catholic ecotheological reflection has integrated multiple sources into a fruitful dialogue with the Bible, contributing significantly to sustainability. This study underscores the evolution of Christian social thought, emphasizing its capacity to update biblical insights and adapt Catholic Social Teaching for public theology.

Christian Washburn has questioned my claim that the idea of a publicly heretical pope was formally excluded in Pastor Aeternus, by equating Bellarmine’s “fourth proposition” with the extreme Ultramontanist school of Albert Pighius. Washburn argues that Gasser had merely indicated that Bellarmine’s “fourth opinion” would be raised to dogmatic status, rather than the “fourth proposition.” I attempt to address this critique by demonstrating how Bellarmine’s own school of thought within the “fourth opinion” was markedly different from that of Pighius.

In a recent article, Emmet O’Regan has argued that the First Vatican Council not only defined dogmatically that the papal Magisterium is infallible under certain conditions but also “definitively excluded the possibility of a heretical pope” by elevating St. Robert Bellarmine’s “fourth proposition” to the “dignity of a dogma.” This article argues that when Pastor Aeternus is read in light of the official Relatio, it is clear that the council was not intending to exclude the possibility of a heretical pope, that is, the opinion of Albert Pighius. Instead, Gasser makes it clear that the council was intending to define what Bellarmine called the “most common and certain opinion,” which is “whether the pope is able to be a heretic or not, he is not able in any way to define a heretical proposition that must be believed by the whole Church.” O’Regan has misidentified which view of Bellarmine the council intended to define.

Contemporary interpreters of the mystical body movement in the early twentieth century often refer to works therein as mystical body “ecclesiologies” and tend to identify distinctions among them according to the author’s language or nationality. In this article, I argue that the differences among mystical body theologies in that era are better understood according to theological locus—of “mystical body” as either an ecclesiological or a christological-soteriological concept. This framework best explains the paradoxical evaluations of the mystical body movement more broadly, and the encyclical Mystici Corporis Christi in particular, as simultaneously too vague and too juridical.

This article analyzes the pastoral practice and ecclesiological vision of living base ecclesial communities (CEVBs) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo through a case study in the Diocese of Tshumbe. Contextualizing this within the broader history of Global South base communities, the author argues that CEVBs exemplify Vatican II’s people of God ecclesiology and Africa’s image of the church as the family of God. They also embody Pope Francis’s calls for a more synodal and dialogical church that empowers laity, provides opportunities for women’s leadership, and integrates faith and social concern.

The first part of this article offers a systemic comparison of Pope Francis’s “integral ecology” with the “technocratic paradigm.” The second part is devoted to an internal critique of the paradigm: (i) the primacy accorded instrumental causality in a “disenchanted world,” (ii) the technical reduction of prudence, and (iii) the consequent fragmentation of ethical systems. The critique supports key aspects of Francis’s ecological ethics: the option for the poor, intergenerational responsibility, and recognition of the intrinsic value of nonhuman nature. The third part shows how such an internal critique underwrites the uses of religious rhetoric in public reasoning: the re-enchantment of the world.

Hans Urs von Balthasar’s teaching on the beatific vision has been drawing scholarly attention. By building upon the works of Thomas Dalzell, Aidan Nichols, and Anne Carpenter, I advance the discussion by demonstrating that the dramatic and artistic-poetic grounding of Balthasar’s theo-drama shapes the way he understands the beatific vision. In his later work, Balthasar transposes the Catholic understanding of the beatific vision according to the art form and logic of drama. Specifically, using the notions of the visio immediata Dei and the visio mortis, he transposes the meaning of the beatific vision such that the divine essence is understood as a union of love in conversation with the Thomistic perspective of an immediate knowledge of God.

This article presents the work of Czech theologian and priest Tomáš Halík as a theology for the post-secular. The first section outlines three general post-secular themes woven throughout his corpus: the blessedness of spiritual seeking, a receptivity to the critical insights of atheism, and the affirmation of doubt and uncertainty as an integral feature of Christian faith. The second section then demonstrates what is distinctive about Halík’s contribution: his engagement with themes of both plurality and uncertainty in a single theological schema. I argue this is an apt response to the post-secular dynamics of the nova effect—as outlined by Charles Taylor and others—that is otherwise lacking in the literature to date.

Debates within ecclesiology on the nature and possibility of ecclesial sin have regained interest in the midst of rising awareness of the church’s historical wrongs. Most theologies and metaphors of a sinful church, however, fail to consider the theological identity of the “sinned against” within the church. This article reads Andrew Sung Park’s theology of han (a Korean concept denoting a complex sense of woundedness) as the underside of sin against Karl Rahner’s theology of a church of sinners to point toward a vision of ecclesial han that attends to the woundedness within the church and its healing.

This article demonstrates the overlooked similarity between Scheeben’s and Rahner’s accounts of God’s self-communication to the human person through uncreated grace. It then argues that though Scheeben’s conception of God’s universal offer of grace evinces similarities with Rahner’s “supernatural existential,” Scheeben differs from Rahner by emphasizing the distinction between nature and grace. This study can help theologians to better situate Scheeben’s theology amid its current renaissance and to reappropriate Rahner’s basic insight about divine self-communication.

This article revisits the debate leading to the inclusion of the notion of a “hierarchy” of truths in the Second Vatican Council’s Decree on Ecumenism to show that it not only concerns the presentation of Catholic doctrine in ecumenical dialogue but that it extends to all of Catholic teaching and practice and ought to serve as a guiding principle in the assessment of ecumenical agreements. Further, it argues that the soteriological criterion or horizon for properly weighing the truths of faith has yet to be fully received. The recent recognition of consensus on the basic truths relating to the doctrine of God’s saving grace between Lutheran, Anglican, Methodist, Reformed, and Catholic Communions represented by the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification has brought us into a new context, one that invites a more intentional application of this principle for the mutual recognition of shared faith.

Directing attention to what has become an arctic winter for truth, this article explores a distinctly Christian understanding of truth, utilizing biblical accounts, the Christian mystical tradition, and theological anthropology. Considering truth as existential, as something that emerges within life commitment to Christ, the article presents a group of strategies from theological and secular realms that prove practically suggestive for contemporary discipleship in an increasingly post-truth era.

This comparative theological article expands on John Thiel’s article on aporias in theological method. Through an Islamic theo-poetics, it complements the import of hermeneutics in theological method with poetics. In an Islamic theo-poetics, aporias are inverted: they are not impassable walls, but “liminal spaces” through which creative imagination and revelation emerge. Reading Eriugena’s Periphyseon through two Persian love lyrics by Ḥāfiẓ (and a later commentary) draws out the poetics of the former, a dialogue often described as an exercise in dialectical reasoning. Attention to the poetics of aporetics offers another way to understand the role of aporia in theology: to cultivate (infinite) desire for God. Theology is a theo-poetic reflection on the mystery of our communal theo(poïe)sis. Along the way, I indicate how theology construed as poetics—not merely hermeneutics—makes theological aesthetics possible, underscores the role of affective knowledge, and reveals how Eriugena the poet shaped Eriugena the dialectician.

Divine providence, as traditionally conceived, keeps historical time subordinate to
God’s sovereignty so that the divine plan for it is fulfilled. This article argues that
the starting point for theologizing about providence ought to be the logic of radical
generosity in play when the divine Thou creates historical time as a reality unto itself
by giving it an unprecedented future. Providence does not protect the historically
conditioned universe from this future; it draws the universe into it. The human
experience of grace offers us a paradigmatic example of this.

During the prelude to the First Vatican Council, the idea of a heretical pope was
used as the primary argument against the solemn definition of papal infallibility.
The medieval canonists and conciliarists had allowed for the notion of papal heresy
by making a strict distinction between the apostolic seat itself and the individual
occupants of the throne of Peter. However, when we examine the text of Pastor
Aeternus in light of the contents of the official Relatio, which was drawn up at the
council to explain the meaning of this document, we find that the above distinction
used by the conciliarists was formally proscribed with an anathema. This article will
argue that in doing so, the Council Fathers definitively excluded the possibility of a
heretical pope.

While the writings of Robert Doran exhibit significant ecological awareness, the
present paper argues that the corpus of Bernard Lonergan and Doran’s own work
have overlooked an ecological dialectic that arises naturally from Lonergan’s approach.
This article suggests there is an anthropocentric bias operating that prevents its
recognition, which needs to be identified and overcome if we are to address our
current ecological crises. To that end, this article identifies a double dialectic operating
in the social order. The first dialectic, as identified by Lonergan and expanded by Doran,
is that between intersubjectivity and practical intelligence; however, this dialectic is
embedded in a second larger dialectic between the social order itself and the order of
the nonhuman processes from which the social order itself emerges. The appreciation
of this dialectic has been blocked by our neglect of cosmological meanings and values,
as exemplified by the Indigenous peoples of our world.