Pope Francis imbued the ancient word parrhesia with new significance, framing “frank, bold, courageous speech” as a partner concept to his signature vision of a “listening church.” After tracing Michel Foucault’s genealogy of the term, I argue that Francis’s pneumatological turn is a creative ressourcement of parrhesia, one that would require major shifts for the present church to embrace. To illuminate the challenging intra-ecclesial dynamics of parrhesia, I analyze three case studies of figures from Vatican II whose frank, bold, courageous speech met institutional backlash. I conclude with implications for realizing a more parrhesiastic culture in a synodal church.

This article offers a comprehensive interpretation of the Council of Nicaea, in light of Eusebius of Caesarea’s role in the so-called Arian crisis. Given the historical-theological orientation of the study, it begins with hermeneutical caveats regarding the sources. It then examines the outbreak of the crisis, Eusebius’s theology before the controversy, the Ossius embassy, the Council of Antioch, and the Council of Nicaea itself. The article argues, first, that the key theological issue at stake was the strict eternity of the Son, which Eusebius of Caesarea denied; second, that Eusebius—not Arius—was the principal adversary of Alexander of Alexandria; third, that the Nicene theological discussions primarily revolved around Eusebius’s faith; and, fourth, that the homoousios implied the strict eternity of the Son.

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.

In the last two decades, marriage has become less central in Catholic family ethics. This recent development differs from the critical familism project led by Don Browning in the 1990s and early 2000s, which sought to reform and promote a Christian theology of marriage. The article traces three distinct but related decentering variations: accompanying the diversity of families in the church, acknowledging the potential for all families to thrive, and embracing radical possibilities for family life. While acknowledging important concerns underlying these moves, the author offers a critical retrieval of marriage that preserves its “complex centrality” and furthers its radical potential.

This essay challenges the claim that the practice of Mass intentions is a “Germanic” distortion, foreign to the biblical and patristic tradition. It frames the development of Mass intentions not as a decline narrative but as a natural outworking of the biblical witness to prayer as a divine-human synergy, tracing this development through Augustine, Dionysius the Areopagite, Carolingian liturgical legislation, and Thomas Aquinas.