The aim of this article is to rethink the way scholarship conceives Gregory of Nyssa’s so-called mystical theology by directing attention to his account of hostile powers in the Homilies on the Song of Songs. In recent decades, debates on “divine darkness” have governed scholarly readings of Christian progress in the homilies. However, through his allegorical commentary, Gregory also provides an extensive account of the history, ontology, and activity of the devil and demons, while also instructing Christians on how to defeat them. According to this account, only Christ is victorious in the proper sense. Therefore, believers must participate in Christ’s victory by journeying the way of the Homilies on the Song of Songs. This begins with baptism and continues with self-knowing, prayer, pure thoughts, and correct worship. Therefore, these homilies—communicating Gregory’s vision of “divine darkness”— also provide an extensive account of how to overcome adversarial powers whose goal is to prevent the bride’s union with God.

This article asks why matters of sex and gender are the nexus of theological and ecclesiological battles to the point of being church-dividing issues. I utilize Mary Douglas’s grid-group theory—her framework for correlating social form, body symbolism, and ritual density—to demonstrate that the body is a symbol of the social world and that different views of the body correspond with different ways of organizing a society. Thus, I argue that gender diversity is being perceived by the Catholic Church as a threat to ecclesial structure as well as to the church’s ritual life.

In their response to the declaration Fiducia Supplicans, many African bishops used culture as an argument to reject the possibility of blessing same-sex couples. This article probes and shows the extent of the inconsistency of the appeal to culture by the African bishops. It uses the issue of polygamy as a point of contrast: appeals to African culture are never used to justify this widespread practice among Africans or any pastoral flexibility toward it. The article also compares Vatican II’s understanding of culture (Gaudium et Spes) with that of the African bishops. It shows that the African bishops’ understanding of culture tends to be narrow and focused on the past. Finally, the article looks at culture as a source of Christian morals and demonstrates that culture can be only a secondary source.

While the writings of Robert Doran exhibit significant ecological awareness, the
present paper argues that the corpus of Bernard Lonergan and Doran’s own work
have overlooked an ecological dialectic that arises naturally from Lonergan’s approach.
This article suggests there is an anthropocentric bias operating that prevents its
recognition, which needs to be identified and overcome if we are to address our
current ecological crises. To that end, this article identifies a double dialectic operating
in the social order. The first dialectic, as identified by Lonergan and expanded by Doran,
is that between intersubjectivity and practical intelligence; however, this dialectic is
embedded in a second larger dialectic between the social order itself and the order of
the nonhuman processes from which the social order itself emerges. The appreciation
of this dialectic has been blocked by our neglect of cosmological meanings and values,
as exemplified by the Indigenous peoples of our world.

This article parallels Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream for civil, economic, and racial equality in the USA with Julius K. Nyerere’s unrelenting liberation struggle for the emancipation of Southern Africa from colonial shackles. I write this article fully cognizant of King’s belief that what united the minority and colonial peoples of America, African, and Asia was the struggle to overcome the legacy of colonialism and racial injustice. I therefore argue that King’s dream was a shared dream, which I analyze through the prism of liberation theology.

This article argues that Ignatius Loyola, in proposing the “hierarchical Church” as norm for judgment and feeling, meant to evoke and commend aspects of the Dionysian tradition—especially its principle of hierarchical mediation and its affective portrait of spiritual perfection. Supporting this interpretation are considerations of the world behind the text (the reforming Dionysianism abroad in Ignatian Paris), the world of the text (the culminating position and concerns of the “hierarchical Church”), and the world in front of the text (its reception by Peter Faber and Jerome Nadal). Interpreted against a Dionysian backdrop, Ignatius’s hierarchical church becomes a charter for ecclesial mysticism.

This Note recaps highlights of the 2024 US presidential election from a Catholic perspective. It is not this article’s aim to pronounce an authoritative postmortem on reasons for the election result, and post-inauguration actions of the second Trump administration are also outside its scope. Instead, this Note lifts up perspectives from recent theological work that shed light on major issues in the campaign. It will reflect on the key events in the election cycle and identify some similarities between the candidates’ positions before assembling theological work dealing with two issues where the candidates markedly differed: abortion and religious nationalism. It will close with some reflections on the semiotics of the candidates’ public personae that point toward calls for future moral-theological work.

Dignitas Infinita highlights “the indispensable nature of the dignity of the human person in Christian anthropology” and warns of “ambivalent ways in which the concept is understood today.” Among those “ambivalent ways” are plural definitions of human dignity in official Catholic teaching. There is ambivalence in definitions of Catholic sexual human dignity and Catholic social human dignity, which lead to inconsistencies in the foundation and justification of moral doctrine. In this article, we first present Catholic definitions of social and sexual human dignity. Second, we explain Pope Francis’s anthropological nuances that provide an alternative definition of human dignity, which we label holistic human dignity. Third, we evaluate and describe the harm deriving from statements in the document and by Pope Francis, a harm that results from inconsistent definitions of human dignity in doctrinal teaching.