This article concludes our formal series commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Vatican II. The author inquires about the idea of human dignity that inspired Dignitatis humanae, the Declaration on Religious Freedom. The idea is grounded in the fact that human beings are created in the image of God; they are intelligent and free, replicas of

This article is a revised and expanded version of the talk given by Johann Baptist Metz after being awarded the Salzburg University Week Theology Prize (2007). It offers a picture of the new political theology, of how he seeks to describe and construe a theology “facing the world.” He begins by acknowledging his debt to

The article provides an overview of the three distinct approaches to the exegesis of theophanies documented in the surviving works of Justin Martyr. It argues, contrary to previous scholarship on Justin Martyr, and in agreement with Larry Hurtado, that the argument from theophanies precedes its use by Justin, and suggests that the Dialogue and the

The author helps redress the absence of serious theological thinking on the biblical and church doctrine of hell and indirectly contradicts current mythological caricatures. He first evaluates diverse views from history up through the twentieth century. He then argues that an orthodox contemporary theology could understand hell as the eternally loving presence of God, Christ,

The author argues that the thought of American polymath Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) offers a coherent, adequate, and versatile framework for understanding the eucharistic species as “signs.” Specifically, the historical analyses in the first and second parts of the article provide a conceptual grammar for showing the usefulness of Peirce’s sign theory to interpret the

The field of theological anthropology has experienced something of an impasse in recent decades as a result of the critical challenges that have arisen from developments in feminist theory and poststructuralist philosophy. This article explores the possibility that an approach to theological reflection on the human person rooted in the philosophical and theological innovations of

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