While many elements of Benedict XVI’s Caritas in veritate subscribe to the logic of earlier social encyclicals, the absence of a connection drawn between the social realities, the economic structures, and ideology sets this encyclical apart. Like its predecessors, however, it is marked with the seal of intransigence. In the face of modern culture (judged

The historiography of Modernism has concentrated on the doctrinal issues raised by partisans of reform and their condemnation, to the relative neglect of social and political aspects. Where such connections have been made the linkage has often been extrinsic: those involved in social and political reform subscribed to theses articulated by historical critics and critical

Fruitful interreligious encounter is the meeting of human beings, and calls for a metaphysics, a common humanum in order to proceed to dialogue. Rahner’s transcendental method could serve as an important tool for entering into interreligious encounter. It offers a metaphysics that in its apophatic aspects has resonances with some forms of postmetaphysical thought, particularly

For Bernard Lonergan and Karl Rahner, grace is a reality that can be not only professed in worship or inferred through metaphysical analysis but also experienced in the depths of consciousness. Here the author uses a Lonerganian hermeneutic to study the evolution of the theology of grace from the writings of Augustine through the Scholastic

The article argues that the debate over continuity/discontinuity at Vatican II is hindered by the descriptive nature of the categories under consideration. To move beyond description and into explanation one must adopt an “ontology of meaning.” The nature of such a shift is illustrated with reference to the work of John Henry Newman, Alasdair MacIntyre,

The article presents interventions by certain expert-consultants (periti) just before and during Vatican II’s opening weeks in 1962. Discovering mediocrity in passages of the prepared schemas on God’s revelation, Joseph Ratzinger, Pieter Smulders, Karl Rahner, and Jean Daniélou formulated criticisms and framed alternatives that this article reviews. In time, several key conceptions of their alternative

Although the much-postponed subject of papal primacy in the ecumenical dialogue between the Catholic and the Orthodox Churches finally got to a formal start in 2007, it was set in a wider framework of synodality or conciliarity. Thus the Roman primacy is theologically twinned with the ecumenical councils. In this context the article draws attention

Responding to a question of Pope John Paul II on what light evolution can throw on creation in the image of God, this article first considers how the creation of humanity in the image and likeness of God (Gen 1:26–27) has been variously understood. It then examines how sociobiology seeks to explain the origin and

The author argues that humans have a right to beauty, and that the poor, often immersed in ugliness, have a particular and urgent need for and claim upon this right. Beauty provides a contemplative and self-transcending rest essential to human flourishing, while the encounter with beauty enables human persons to realize their vocation as cocreators.