This article reconsiders the problem of human freedom in the wake of David Bentley
Hart’s That All Shall Be Saved. It renews and reasserts the crisis of every human
freedom’s eternal destiny. With insights from Maurice Blondel, Bernard Lonergan,
and Hans Urs von Balthasar, the article makes a case for distinctive conceptions of
human freedom, divine agency, and the problem of hell. The article closes by reading
Theo-Drama as a map marking places for further theological exploration.

Pope Francis’s 2023 motu proprio, entitled Ad Theologiam Promovendam (“To Promote Theology”), calls for theology to be rethought methodologically and epistemologically in light of existential wounds. In response, I argue that the developing field of ethnographic ecclesiology presents one important theological method for studying the synodal church in a more synodal manner. By reorienting the ethnographic habits of participation, reflexivity, and listening to the synodal vision of communal discernment, the theologian is better able to perceive the trinitarian imprint that shapes the witness and discipleship of distinct ecclesial contexts that constitute the global church in via.

This article shows how Pope Francis’s notion of “synodality” brings together central tenets of the comprehensive vision of the Second Vatican Council. The article proposes that the roots of synodality can be found, above all, in Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum.

The year 2023 marks the sixtieth anniversary of the March on Washington that featured civil rights leader, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This article focuses on King’s critique of racism, poverty, and militarism, and his commitment to justice, love, and hope.

Because of his hostility to pure nature theory, Henri de Lubac has typically been viewed as opposing Francisco Suárez’s metaphysics. His proximate target was the neo-Suárezianism to which he was exposed during his Jesuit formation. Suárez was the Jesuit order’s intellectual founding father and his ideas continued to shape Jesuit philosophy and theology, sometimes in opposition to neo-Thomism. Although de Lubac contested Suárez’s promotion of new and modern theology, Suárez positively informed his approach to key topics: appetite and its end; nature, desire, and the supernatural; the perfection of nature; essences as unique existents; eclecticism; and political resistance.

This essay dwells on a crucially important dimension of the church’s synodal renewal: personal renewal. First, I suggest that, to bring out the notion’s full weight, it is helpful to link it to the Second Vatican Council’s teaching on the universal call to holiness and its transformation during the council. Second, I suggest that synodality enriches the council’s teaching by being more specific about what holiness entails and that it may provide the reception of the council’s teaching on holiness with a fresh impetus. In the conclusion, I suggest that thematizing personal renewal balances conceptual and spiritual approaches to ecclesiology.

This article argues that the Council of Nicaea, which has borne responsibility for moving the church away from a primarily scriptural mode of speaking, is, in fact, thoroughly grounded in what we might call “the symbolic universe of Scripture.” The events and documents that preceded, were contemporaneous with, and followed Nicaea all chart their own ways through that universe, even when they appear to have departed it. Today, the council beckons and helps guide the church, in particular its theologians, to live again in the world that Scripture produces.

Two theological models, which John Roberto has labeled the theological-maturity and the liturgical-initiation models, have dominated twentieth- and twenty-first-century interpretations of confirmation. Each is successful in explaining part of confirmation’s complex history and one or more of the various contexts for its practice in the Roman Catholic Church today. In this article, a new look at the theological significance of the early precursors of confirmation in North Africa, Iberia, Rome, and early medieval Europe is used to develop a third theological model. The ecclesial-anamnetic model posits that confirmation sacramentally proclaims the baptized person’s participation in the eschatological mission of the church. In North Africa, Spain, Gaul, and Rome, local contexts and tensions influenced the practices that became confirmation, but in each case, ecclesial visibility was at stake. As contexts emerged in which the visibility of the larger church was obscured at baptism, anamnetic methods for “citing” one’s baptism by means of a gesture used after baptism became important for manifesting ecclesial membership. In fact, a deeper theological examination of anamnesis can ground a model that adequately accounts for both the historical development of confirmation and its many pastoral modes today.

This article argues that Modernism was the pivotal “ghost” at Vatican II. Evocations
of Modernism and anti-Modernist doctrinal documents on the council floor were
numerous and often heated. Such evocations occurred in virtually every debate
where the development of doctrine was at stake. The council majority’s dismissal,
indeed rejection, of the anti-Modernist paradigm constituted a kind of revolution of
theological methodology. Understanding how anti-Modernist doctrinal documents
were evoked at Vatican II sheds important light on the council and its achievements,
compromises, and failures.