Recent emphasis on the continuity of Vatican II with the Catholic tradition runs the danger of slighting the aspects of the council that were discontinuous. Among those aspects are the literary genre the council adopted and the vocabulary inherent in the genre, different from that of all previous councils. Examination of these aspects yields tools

The article examines the thought of the fifth century theologian, Vincent of Lérins, particularly his claims that there is great progress and development in Christ’s Church, and that this progress and development must be in fundamental continuity with what preceded it (eodem sensu eademque sententia). The author argues that Vincent’s hermeneutical principles have been theologically

In his epochal work, L‘Évangile et l’Église, Alfred Loisy claimed to offer a purely historical refutation of Adolf von Harnack’s Das Wesen des Christentums (1900). Harvey Hill demonstrates that Loisy drew L‘Évangile et l’Église from a larger unpublished work, “Essais,” that combined history, apologetics, and a reform agenda, and shows that, Loisy’s claims to the

The author’s survey of the writings of moral theologians over the past five years shows a deep concern about both the nature of moral theology and the role of moral theologians. A certain urgency animates much contemporary reflection calling the moralist to be challenged by the vocation to serve the Church and to explore better

[To provide order to the welter of metaphors employed in Christian soteriology, the authors study them within their underlying systems or “models.” The “prophetic” model, in which salvation is effected within history through human instruments, appears in Isaiah and Luke as well as in Irenaeus. In the “liturgical” model, the divine presence is safeguarded by

[Christian belief in bodily resurrection is implicitly challenged by contemporary natural science with its empirical evidence for the interdependence of mental and bodily functions and their effective cessation at the moment of death. The author argues that only a new philosophical understanding of the relation between spirit and matter in which neither is intelligible without

[Philosophers have struggled with value theory as one of the most recalcitrant problems for environmental ethics. Theologians can benefit from their efforts when retrieving and reworking notions about the goodness of creation in patristic and medieval texts, particularly those by Augustine, John Chrysostom, and Thomas Aquinas. This process yields a religiously motivated rationale for intrinsic-instrumental

[Ecclesiologists have long acknowledged a possible role for the social sciences in their discipline. The author examines the difficulties theologians face in utilizing the social sciences, given the diversity of approaches in that area, and the more profound issue that the social sciences can never be theologically neutral. It concludes that the only way of

[The author demonstrates how Ghislain Lafont looks “through” the critiques of meta-narrative and ontotheology for an appropriate ground for theology. Lafont appeals to sacramental memorial as the starting point for a response to postmodern critiques, a response that is shown to be both balanced and faithful. When presented in relation to the works of two