As we go to press, the church enters the final quarter of the Year of Mercy, an opportune time to consider what it would mean for the church itself to receive the transformative power of God’s mercy. For, as the Second Vatican Council confessed, the church is called to penance and renewal (Lumen Gentium 8).

One year ago, Pope Francis published his landmark encyclical letter, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home. Rarely before has an encyclical been so widely anticipated or generated so much commentary beyond theological circles, or managed to accomplish so much in one document: a symphonic synthesis of theology, the natural and social sciences, philosophy,

I write this editorial en route from Colombia, where I met with several teachers of theology at the Universidad Javeriana in Cali and learned something about their questions and concerns as theologians in the church. The issues they raised were not altogether unlike those I have encountered in the United States, where theologians bemoan the

In retrospect, a decade flashes by. So it has been with my decade as editor in chief of this journal; the incoming editor waits in the wings. My predecessor, Michael Fahey, in his last editorial (December 2005), sketched the journal’s development from a journal aimed largely at Catholic seminary faculty and students to a Catholic

This issue’s lineup of articles prompts the question: Would it have been possible even to fantasize about this lineup back in 1965? I think not. Fifty years ago, on September 14 (Exaltation of the Cross), Vatican II’s fourth and final session opened and, by closing time, promulgated 11 of the council’s 16 documents. Important as

Robert Doran’s article in this issue derives from his  Emmett Doerr Lecture entitled “A New Project in Systematic Theology” delivered at Marquette University on October 24, 2014. Astonished at his vision, I asked him to consider converting his paper into an article for Theological Studies.

“Redeeming Conscience,” the title of James Keenan’s moral note in this issue, startled me. Why would conscience need redeeming? Then I recalled Friedrich Schleiermacher’s definition of conscience: “We use the term ‘conscience’ to express the fact that all modes of activity issuing from our God-consciousness and subject to its prompting confront us as moral demands,

W. H. Auden’s eclogue, The Age of Anxiety (1947), depicts the cultural temper in the age of war and modernity. He identifies what much of the world has suffered since the Great War and continues to suffer today in the innumerable outbreaks of local wars streamed to our digital devices. Chronic anxiety is not new.

Theological Studies was founded in 1940 while the effects of the papal condemnation of Catholic Modernism were still lingering, while Europe was already in the throes of World War II, but the United States was debating, before Pearl Harbor, whether or not it should enter the war. In these parlous circumstances, American Jesuits hesitated about starting

Over the last several weeks of this past summer I found myself mulling over three dates: 1855, 1949, and 2005. The special pertinence of these three years is completely personal. They have no particular relevance to others. All three of these dates are connected with Ireland, and their combination is significant only for my own