In September 2005 this journal published an article by Thomas Shannon and James Walter on the Catholic tradition surrounding assisted nutrition and hydration (ANH) in end-of-life care. Responding to this essay, moral theologians John Paris, James Keenan, and Kenneth Himes take exception to what they perceive as a proposition promoted in that article, that John

The authors suggest that their esteemed colleagues misunderstood the central argument of their Theological Studies article, which tried to make clear that, among a variety of documents written during John Paul II’s papacy, four significant and unacknowledged shifts were made that cumulatively appeared to challenge, but not alter, the long-standing Catholic tradition on the use

Recent emphasis on the continuity of Vatican II with the Catholic tradition runs the danger of slighting the aspects of the council that were discontinuous. Among those aspects are the literary genre the council adopted and the vocabulary inherent in the genre, different from that of all previous councils. Examination of these aspects yields tools

The article examines the thought of the fifth century theologian, Vincent of Lérins, particularly his claims that there is great progress and development in Christ’s Church, and that this progress and development must be in fundamental continuity with what preceded it (eodem sensu eademque sententia). The author argues that Vincent’s hermeneutical principles have been theologically

In his epochal work, L‘Évangile et l’Église, Alfred Loisy claimed to offer a purely historical refutation of Adolf von Harnack’s Das Wesen des Christentums (1900). Harvey Hill demonstrates that Loisy drew L‘Évangile et l’Église from a larger unpublished work, “Essais,” that combined history, apologetics, and a reform agenda, and shows that, Loisy’s claims to the

The author’s survey of the writings of moral theologians over the past five years shows a deep concern about both the nature of moral theology and the role of moral theologians. A certain urgency animates much contemporary reflection calling the moralist to be challenged by the vocation to serve the Church and to explore better

[To provide order to the welter of metaphors employed in Christian soteriology, the authors study them within their underlying systems or “models.” The “prophetic” model, in which salvation is effected within history through human instruments, appears in Isaiah and Luke as well as in Irenaeus. In the “liturgical” model, the divine presence is safeguarded by

[Christian belief in bodily resurrection is implicitly challenged by contemporary natural science with its empirical evidence for the interdependence of mental and bodily functions and their effective cessation at the moment of death. The author argues that only a new philosophical understanding of the relation between spirit and matter in which neither is intelligible without

[Philosophers have struggled with value theory as one of the most recalcitrant problems for environmental ethics. Theologians can benefit from their efforts when retrieving and reworking notions about the goodness of creation in patristic and medieval texts, particularly those by Augustine, John Chrysostom, and Thomas Aquinas. This process yields a religiously motivated rationale for intrinsic-instrumental

[Ecclesiologists have long acknowledged a possible role for the social sciences in their discipline. The author examines the difficulties theologians face in utilizing the social sciences, given the diversity of approaches in that area, and the more profound issue that the social sciences can never be theologically neutral. It concludes that the only way of