[In this initial segment of this year’s “Notes on Moral Theology,” the author provides a survey of the literature centering on fundamental moral theology published over the last three years or so. He focuses in part one on a variety of Festschriften honoring major ethicists; in part two he addresses writings on God, sin, virtue,

[Both the Bush administration’s national security strategy and the war with Iraq have provoked wide-ranging reaction and comment. Questions of how to assess the Bush doctrine and/or the Iraqi conflict provoke a reconsideration of the just war tradition. New grounds for just cause are being proposed as well as developments in other areas of just

[Like theology and ethics generally, bioethics has increasingly developed a global consciousness. Controversies over AIDS research and access to affordable AIDS treatment have generated new awareness about the importance of international collaboration as well as the difficulty of achieving moral consensus across economic, political, and cultural divides. Advances in scientific and medical knowledge through initiatives

[The author provides a summary history and theological survey of the contribution of the Faith and Order movement to the goal of full communion, with special emphasis on the participation of Catholic theologians. He addresses methodological issues and ecclesiological developments. Studies on the sacraments, the apostolic faith, Scripture and Tradition, and a variety of contextual

[Today theologians are as often lay as cleric. Vatican II reshaped the nature of this vocation as a charism located with the prophetic office of the people of God. Originally theologians were bishops, then monks, then Scholastic thinkers. Prior to Vatican II, changes in theology affected the theological vocation: a shift in the understanding of

[Jonathan Edwards perceived the natural world as a school of desire. He thought that by carefully attending to the sensory splendors (and terrors) of creation, believers learn to apprehend God’s glory, which is itself more sensory than anything we can imagine. The human task of bringing the world to a consciousness of its beauty in

[The author examines the response to educational reforms in France at the end of the 19th century by Pope Leo XIII, modernist Alfred Loisy, and liberal Protestant Auguste Sabatier. He argues that Loisy resembled Sabatier more than Leo in his specific reactions to these educational reforms, but that he also exhibited a “mystical faith” in

[The author notes that serious discrepancies apparently exist between Rahner’s initial and later formulations of his theology regarding the supernatural existential. Such a conclusion, if correct, would present a problem because Rahner’s first formulation has commonly been deemed to be a corrective to a serious weakness in de Lubac’s theology which underpinned the nouvelle théologie