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

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