Occasioned by current challenges facing the Catholic Church, the article explores the role of lamentations and impasse in the life of the church. By drawing on resources in the Scriptures, Augustine’s Expositions on the Psalms, and classic texts in spirituality, the author advances the claim that ways must be developed in ecclesiology and pastoral practice

The article is a reply to one by Kenneth Himes and James Coriden published in our September 2004 issue. Except for minor sylistic changes, the article is published as it was received.

The author mines William Spohn’s notion of the grace of indirection as it relates to the potential impact of the arts on the moral imagination. The article moves beyond exposition of Spohn’s idea, first, by showing how the grace of indirection is a concept with deep connections to long-standing Christian convictions about God, Jesus, and

The article examines Maximus the Confessor’s reaction to the ArabMuslim invasion of the Byzantine Roman Empire. It also appraises Islam’s place in the 7th century as presenting a view of divinehuman relations as an alternative to the views of Christian confessions. The article concludes by advancing a hypothesis about the antithetical relationship between Islam and

An ethics of disinterested goodness governs the testimony of Auschwitz survivors Primo Levi and Jean Amery. For Emmanuel Levinas, ethical goodness such as we find in Levi’s and Amery’s disinterested testimony to the German people leaves the only possible trace of the divine. Levinas proceeds to dismiss mysticism as an interested, self-serving, a-ethical search for

How can Christian hope transform ecclesial life and in turn illumine contemporary culture? The articles by Richard Lennan and Dominic Doyle address this question from different perspectives. Lennan develops and spells out the implications of an ecclesiology based on the church as a sacrament of hope. Doyle examines the nature of hope with particular attention

The author traces the history of Catholic doctrine about the fate of infants who die unbaptized: (1) from Augustine’s teaching that they are condemned to hell where they suffer “the least of its pains“; (2) to the medieval doctrine of Limbo as the state in which those infants, although excluded from the vision of God,