Directing attention to what has become an arctic winter for truth, this article explores a distinctly Christian understanding of truth, utilizing biblical accounts, the Christian mystical tradition, and theological anthropology. Considering truth as existential, as something that emerges within life commitment to Christ, the article presents a group of strategies from theological and secular realms that prove practically suggestive for contemporary discipleship in an increasingly post-truth era.

This article sketches the global ethic proposed by Hans Küng and how Pope Francis’s writings on a culture of encounter help advance it. Religious nationalism impedes the development of this global ethic. Küng’s global ethic resists this nationalism and Francis’s approach provides guidance on whether the local or the global should take priority in concrete circumstances. The contributions of Küng and the pope are complementary and together can advance the ethic needed for greater justice and peace in a globalizing world.

This article examines the relationship between children and the Eucharist at Trent by studying the Acta of Sessions XIII and XXI and by historically and theologically contextualizing Session XXI. It argues that Trent’s teachings on children and the Eucharist are motivated more by concerns about what is necessary for salvation than by reflection on children’s spiritual growth or membership in the church. While the council adequately articulates the requirements for salvation, it does not offer a comprehensive eucharistic theology, which could lead to deeper reflection on children’s relationship with the Eucharist.

Karl Rahner famously proclaimed that Vatican II marked the beginning of a new Christian epoch, that of the “world church” (Weltkirche). He also proposed that the Catholic Church develop a global pastoral-strategic plan for the world church. This recommendation needs updating. This can occur through conversation with theologians engaged with Christianity in the Global South: Lamin Sanneh and Gemma Tulud Cruz. They offer ideas regarding the translatability and emerging inclusivity involved in the concrete, localized performances of ecclesial life that constitute the world church. Combined with Rahner’s rendering of the nexus between Christology and ecclesiology, these ideas can impel and guide attempts to think through and live out the church’s catholicity today.

Feminist activists and women’s studies scholars have referred to moments where women understand the impact of sexism on their lives as clicks. Karl Rahner’s account of witness will help us identify why such clicks are theological. In turn, analysis of these clicks in conversation with feminist epistemology will illuminate what it will require to become hearers of the Word. A feminist theology of testimony calls us to facilitate theological inclusion and the development of theological subjects.

Karl Rahner acknowledged freely that “the anonymous Christian,” as a category, could be problematic. His interest, he stressed, was not in the term but in understanding the universality of God’s grace and the access of all people to grace. Reception of Rahner’s theology of salvation, however, has often neglected this broader framework to focus on the term itself. This article, which engages Rahner’s theology of grace in both its ecclesiological setting and its universal reach, argues that this theology can be an asset to dialogue even in the context of religious pluralism.

This article critiques Enrique Dussel’s use of the conversion of Bartolomé de Las Casas to ground his argument for a clear correspondence between Christian economic and eucharistic participation. Portraying justice as the result of an epiphanic conversion, Dussel implies a sudden and enduring ethical purity that undermines the justice he wants to call forth. I argue that a closer reading of the life of Las Casas offers a more truthful way to account for eucharistic practice under the pervasive structures of late capitalism.

Anger over long-standing systemic dysfunction in the Roman Catholic Church has led to a disenchantment with the church’s institutional reality. However, for those committed to church reform, a more productive way forward lies with ecclesiology’s constructive engagement with sociology. This article defends the legitimacy of a critical appropriation of sociology in ecclesiology, then proposes the critical realist school of social analysis as particularly well suited to assisting ecclesiology in the development of a concrete program for institutional reform.

The isolation and perceived interchangeability of agricultural laborers places them at risk for trafficking, and coercion often plays a significant role in keeping them at work under unjust circumstances. However, the concept of coercion is narrowly conceived in the public response to trafficking. Coercion is in fact culture-, race-, and gender-specific, and laborers often fall into intersectional forms of exploitation that deeply impinge upon their agency. This article probes the dimensions of agricultural exploitation and more specifically coercion. In so doing, it draws upon conceptions of labor justice and structural sin to reframe the understanding of moral agency implicit within the anti-trafficking conversation.

Health-care systems use AI-driven data analytics to target high-cost patients for early interventions. Many ethicists see these programs as enacting a preferential option for the poor. Ethnographic studies, however, find that their data analytic framework emphasizes efficiency, cost containment, and constant evaluation of patients. Ongoing evaluation and surveillance can undermine other goals of Catholic health care like personal encounter and accompaniment. While targeted care programs can be implemented well, the use of AI in data analytics to serve the poor creates dangers of depersonalization.