Part I of this note assesses recent developments in embryonic stem cell research and HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention in light of two recent magisterial texts: Dignitas personae on Certain Bioethical Questions of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical, Caritas in veritate. Part II explores the implications of these

The war in Iraq has generated a vast amount of commentary, popular and scholarly, on a broad range of topics. This note reviews literature on three issues of particularly great moral significance that have arisen from the experience of U.S. military action in Iraq. There is the jus ad bellum question of the legitimacy of

Whether intentionally or not, Catholic tradition frequently fails to take account of, or to remember, beliefs, practices, or objects previously received by the tradition. Such forgetting proves unavoidable, but it can actually help the tradition as a whole to perdure in continuity with its origins. The theories of Yves Congar, John Thiel, and Kathryn Tanner

Karl Rahner uses the language of attunement (Gestimmtheit) in his Christology and in his theological anthropology to describe human nature’s relationship to grace. An analysis of this term’s use prior to Rahner, especially in the thought of Martin Heidegger, illuminates the meaning of this key term in Rahner’s thought.

The human freedom of Christ is a test case for how genuinely we admit the reality of Christ’s humanity. This article presents Christ’s freedom in light of Bernard Lonergan’s later theology. A defining influence on the matter in this period was Lonergan’s developing understanding of intentionality analysis. The article explains this complex notion and then

The author discusses a theology of religious pluralism in light of the Trinity-Christ relationship. As the Trinity is the paradigm for interpreting religious diversity from a Christian perspective, so the significance of Christ as mediating center of a relational God is explored. Bonaventure’s coincidence of opposites helps break open the Christ mystery as one that

The author argues that embarrassment over references to divine wrath in more recent times reflects a similar embarrassment or at least ambivalence among writers, pagan and Christian, in Late Antiquity. Patristic writers were especially sensitive to the ways human rage could inform Scripture readers’ understanding of divine wrath. Although insisting that God’s indignation was a

Vatican Il’s Gaudium et spes sees the church-world relationship in dialogical terms. This article argues that conceiving the church-world relationship as a dialogue is an important element in the council’s recognition of what Charles Taylor calls the “modern social imaginary.” The article defends the council’s view of dialogue against the argument that contemporary Western views

Building on an episode in Uganda, the author considers ethical issues facing missionaries due to race-based privileges. He uses the notion of white privilege to consider how missionaries should negotiate the default racialization found in missionary settings where race operates differently than it does where white privilege is usually found. Racial privileges intensify the competing

The heuristic of retributive punishment on which theology has often relied to explain the Crucifixion, argues the author, does not help us understand how this event was responsive to the wounds of the violated. A heuristic of empathetic identification, however, enables us to develop a theology of redemption that appreciates how God’s loving embrace of