The Second Vatican Council was an event of conversion for the participating bishops, and the council’s documents propose a vision for the conversion of the Catholic ecclesial imagination. The author argues that this ecclesial conversion entails a refashioning of the Catholic Church’s understanding of the divine-human relationship in history. This relationship includes the divine-ecclesial relationship

The article focuses on the idea of the “margins” and “peripheries” of the Church, as recently referenced in the speeches of Pope Francis, and connects this idea with the ecclesiology of Vatican II’s pastoral constitution, Gaudium et spes. A “rediscovery” of this constitution can inject new meaning into the sense of “marginality” of the Church

The article supplements the one by Ernesto Valiente published in the December 2012 issue of this journal. It adds information not covered by him, as well as first-hand observations on such matters as the impact of foreign religious on the region, Latin American contributions to Vatican II, the current standing of base ecclesial communities, the

The author asks whether the criteria for Catholic theology presented by the International Theological Commission’s Theology Today (2011) are meant to constitute “walls” that seal out or “windows” that open to the rich reality of God’s dialogue with humanity through creation and history. Careful exegesis leads the author to conclude that the document, while including

Conventional wisdom sometimes holds that selfishness pays off and is even necessary for survival in a competitive world. Joseph Bracken here challenges that view, arguing instead that self-giving love for others is the mainspring of human life and even of the cosmic process as a whole. Basing his argument on texts from Scripture, church tradition,

At the Second Vatican Council the bishops expressed their “earnest desire” that provincial councils should again flourish with renewed strength. This article describes the role provincial councils have played since the fourth century in choosing priests for appointment as bishops—a role that they had here in the United States with Rome’s approval from 1833 until

Racism/white supremacy is seemingly ineradicable, despite its contradictions to the gospel and American ideals. James Baldwin perceived the reason: whites’ fears of their own mortality. He did not demonstrate the truth of his claim, but Terror Management Theory (TMT) provides empirical confirmation for it. The Church has declared reconciliation to be the heart of its

The article proposes a Catholic ethical method for the 21st century. To that end, the authors first address the magisterium’s concerns with relativism and distinguish relativism from Bernard Lonergan’s perspectivism. After proposing perspectivism as an epistemological tool that accounts for a plurality of Catholic ethical methods, the authors explore virtue ethics, virtue epistemology, and a

Quantum anthropology looks to the image of particle/wave complementarity within the field of quantum mechanics as an analogy for body/spirit in Christian anthropology. Drawing on Karl Rahner’s concept of human spirit and on quantum mechanics’ concept of wave as probability, the author recasts the body/spirit relationship in terms of the self-actualization of infinite human potential,