Responding to a recent article by Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, the author argues that evolution of the world and life, through random processes rightly understood, is indeed consistent with divine, transcendent meaning, value, and purpose of creation. After criticizing traditional “intelligent design” arguments, the article analyzes the key notions of design and randomness. It then draws

The foundational experience underlying Paul’s Christology is the call and conversion that led him to focus his Christology on the death and resurrection of Christ. The foundational experience underlying the Christology of the Fourth Gospel is the witness of the Beloved Disciple to the incarnate Word, an experience that focuses the Gospel’s Christology on the

While Cyprian’s Epistula 72, sent to Stephen of Rome after the spring 256 synod of African bishops, is well known for its part in what is known as the rebaptism controversy, it is less well known for what it says about the question of clerics who wished to leave a breakaway Christian sect and rejoin

The author argues that in the present discussion over the meaning of Vatican II, considered from the historical vantage point of 40 years, the council needs to be resituated as an event of the mid-20th century. Its break with the past, embodied in ruptures and reversals of long-standing Catholic mentalités, must be seen as a

The article invites a reconsideration of our reflection on revelation in the light of both Frederick Crowe’s achievement in his Theology of the Christian Word and Vatican II’s call for a pastoral and ecumenical theology. Crowe’s text invites us to shift from a reflection on concepts of revelation to a reflection based on interiority. Such

Christian eschatology provides a compelling mystical-political framework both for unmasking the historical visage of racism and for calling White believers to conversion and racial solidarity. Juxtaposing the memoria passionis of the Black community with Vatican II’s mysticism of communion with the dead, the author asks what it would mean for White Christians to place themselves

The American government’s use of deception in making its case for the Iraq War to the American people, argues the author, revealed a deficit in the integration of democratic ideas into Catholic conceptions of just war theory. The article places the call for the deeper integration of such ideas into Catholic thought on war and

In a recent issue of L’Osservatore Romano Karl Becker argued that, contrary to a common interpretation of the change made in the drafting of Lumen gentium no. 8 from est to subsistit in, Vatican II never departed from its original affirmation of total identity between the Church of Christ and the Roman Catholic Church. Fellow

Scholars and the public are well aware of the ethically controversial nature of euthanasia, artificial nutrition and hydration, and embryonic stem cell research. Moral theologians have extensively analyzed these issues, and religious leaders have publicly made them tests of orthodoxy. Literature on death and dying is therefore the main concern of this article, which also

The survey examines writings in three areas: (1) the causes and cures of the rise of religious violence and terrorism, with particular attention to how Christian theology and the Bible contribute to or challenge this violence; (2) the ethical challenges of terrorism and the need to find a moral response to this threat; and (3)