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.

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.

In terms of their interests and methodologies, Bernard Lonergan and Henri de Lubac seem at first blush to be incommensurable worlds apart. Closer examination shows their basic positions on the theology of history to be not only compatible but also complementary. Both place Christ’s redemptive act as the constitutive meaning of history, with all that follows as the expansion of this act through Christ’s Mystical Body. De Lubac’s account of Christ as the bestower of novel meaning provides a more intensive christological focus to Lonergan’s construal of the unified continuity of human agency. Lonergan, in turn, provides greater theoretical controls of meaning to the Lubacian account.

The concept of purely penal law, as developed by the Spanish Jesuit Francisco Suárez in the early seventeenth century, argues that promulgated law is neither morally binding upon the citizen nor conceived as a moral requirement by legislators. Rather, the law is strictly punitive in its intent and function. The theory, which grants the individual the right to determine law’s rational and moral significance, touched off a heated debate that has been renewed at various times in history yet has not resurfaced since the mid-twentieth century. This article argues for the veracity and legitimacy of the concept in light of contemporary legal and penal dynamics. It also argues that the Catholic Church should take notice of its insights in its understanding of the relationship between church and state.

This article reflects on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech delivered
sixty years ago in Washington, DC. It begins by pointing to the concept of “dream”
as it is understood in current language and how Dr. King used it in a theological way.
Next, the essay compares this with what Pope Francis has frequently said about
dreams, including his own. Reflecting on King’s words and the sense that the dream
he spoke about is still not a reality but a horizon of hope that stimulates struggle,
the article presents a comparative study of racism in the United States, according
to King, and Brazil, where structural racism permeates the whole society, delaying
indefinitely the dream of equality and justice. I also show how liberation theology has
been a helpful element in the struggle to keep the dream of equality alive. I