Loss of a sense of creaturehood and of members has occurred across the lines of divided churches in a secular context. The author explores the question whether green experience of nature can be a path toward a renewed sense of creaturehood. Bernard Lonergan’s distinction between faith and belief allows for identifying a primordial faith that

Angelo Roncalli believed in the Church’s potential, from Christ and the Holy Spirit, to become ever again rejuvenated. This came from his prolonged work editing the records of Metropolitan Archbishop Charles Borromeo’s 1575 visitation of his own diocese of Bergamo. The visitation applied Trent’s reform decrees and renewed a large diocese by imposing new standards

Engaging Nietzsche’s genealogy of religion from a liberationist perspective, the author argues that despite Nietzsche’s valuable insights on theology’s potential for limiting human freedom, a Christian theological anthropology is preferable to Nietzsche’s naturalistic view of humanity. The author offers a challenge to Nietzsche scholarship by demonstrating how Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity as a morality of

In a previous article the author noted the role of Lonergan’s four-point hypothesis in unpacking the order of grace in the grace–nature distinction. Here he demonstrates how the hypothesis can be used to resolve classical tensions within the grace–nature debate, arguing that any genuine resolution to those tensions must evoke something like Lonergan’s four-point hypothesis.

Giuseppe Dossetti was an important figure not only in Italian politics, in the reform of historical studies, and in the history of new monasticism, but also at Vatican II. One topic in particular—poverty—was at the core of his contribution to the activity of Cardinal Giacomo Lercaro, archbishop of Bologna, at the council. The article analyzes

The author first explains that the pope and bishops exercise their teaching authority definitively and infallibly when they oblige the faithful to give their irrevocable adherence of faith to a revealed truth, or firmly to accept and hold a truth that is necessarily connected to revelation. He then discusses the replies that Joseph Ratzinger has

The author considers the ongoing significance of the grace–nature distinction for systematic theology, the role the distinction has made historically, and current debates on its validity. He proposes that two developments advanced by Bernard Lonergan, the scale of values and the four-point hypothesis, can reinvigorate the distinction and ground new developments in systematic theology for

Lonergan makes unique, balanced contributions to the debates on the relationship between the natural and supernatural and on the grace–freedom dynamic (the de auxiliis controversy), particularly in his critique of Bañezianism. His understanding of the human intellect in relation to the supernatural order and his defense of the natural integrity of created freedom are remarkably

The concept of vicarious representation (Stellvertretung) is central to Joseph Ratzinger’s thought. He uses it, with its correlative concept of pro-existence, to develop a theology in which “the few” are the starting point from which God saves “the many.” This article examines the concept’s influence on Ratzinger’s soteriology, Christology, and ecclesiology. It concludes by exploring

Monika Hellwig’s 1982 history and theology of the sacrament of penance, Sign of Reconciliation and Conversion, is representative of the expectations that theologians and pastoral ministers had for expanded forms of the sacrament. Pope John Paul II’s 1984 exhortation, “Reconciliation and Penance,” produced a contrasting history to assert private confession to a priest as the