During the Chrism Mass of Holy Thursday, when the oils of the sick and of the catechumens are blessed and the chrism is consecrated, the whole church assembles to celebrate these symbols of the human journey to God. That the oils and balsam used in the rite are derived from creation signifies the role of creation (specifically nonhuman creatures) in salvation. Indeed, the holy oils, fashioned from creation and blessed and consecrated before the whole church, are destined to mark and enable the journey of human beings toward union with God through the church. The consecration of the chrism is considered the foundation of all other blessings in the church, making it an appropriate lens to consider the relationship among creation, the church, and salvation. These prayers of blessing and consecration during the Chrism Mass indicate the movement of the Holy Spirit in creation, drawing human beings into heaven.

Female bodies as sexual and reproductive are subject to much scrutiny in Western societies and the church. Mysteriously missing from discourses related to such scrutiny is the reality of menstruation and its place in theology and females’ lives. From within a feminist theological perspective, this article aims to recover menstruation and menstrual awareness, and to advocate for the positive possibilities of widespread recognition and acceptance of, and engagement with, these realities to advance female presence in sexual theology and related discourses. In engaging contemporary social discussions, Jewish and Christian histories of menstruation, contemporary sexual theologies, and varied feminist theologies, this article proposes a robust view of menstruation in the sexual lives of faithful females.

This article examines political and liberation theologies as instances of apocalypticism, focusing in the work of Johann Baptist Metz and Jon Sobrino. The first section develops a heuristic framework for identifying and analyzing apocalyptic discourse in general, using the historical work of Bernard McGinn and the rhetorical analysis of Stephen O'Leary. The second section applies this framework to Metz and Sobrino, arguing that their theology is a legitimate, provocative, and instructive instance of apocalyptic discourse today, in part because of the way it integrates apocalyptic eschatology with Christology. In a final section, the intelligibility proper to this apocalyptic discourse is discussed by arguing a correlation with mystical theology with its discursive pair of cataphasis and apophasis. Just as this pair finds its context of meaning in the practice of contemplative prayer, apocalyptic affirmations and the reserve expressed in the eschatological proviso find their context of meaning in the practice of opting for the poor.

Because of their communities' experiences and tendencies, New Testament writers such as Paul and Mark stress the death and resurrection of Jesus as the source and model of the Christian life. In the Book of Revelation, John's version of this is that the lion of the tribe of Judah indeed “conquers” but does so as the Lamb who was slain; the Christian witnessing that leads to the victory of Christ's followers may also entail their death. Yet the seer associates the Lamb imagery with that of ancient near eastern and classical versions of the conquest myth. Does John risk subverting his own purposes? The paper examines his presentation of the Lamb and suggests that he does indeed run such a risk, at least for the inattentive reader, but this does not justify neglect of such a creative and imaginative soteriology in which evil is overcome by the word of God.

The Catholic Worker Movement, widely known for its critique of violence and capitalism in American culture, has largely neglected racism. This seems surprising because its urban houses of hospitality, staffed mostly by middle-class whites, provide material resources disproportionately to impoverished African Americans. The movement's embodiment as a white movement and the failure of its founders (Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin) to prioritize racial justice has impeded its ability to adequately confront racism. This article contrasts the ways in which racism was addressed by the founders with the way it was addressed by two prominent African American Catholic Workers. The article includes a new Catholic Worker narrative to explain the movement's relationship with racial justice and offer suggestions for ways the movement can mine its own rich resources to become an authentically anti-racist movement.

This article examines Liberal Theology's claim regarding a universal religious experience and George Lindbeck's rejection of this claim. Since a universal religious experience is frequently put forth as the basis for the transcendental unity of religions, the theological debate regarding such an experience is very pertinent to the current discussion of religious diversity. The author argues that neither Liberal Theology's appeal to religious experience nor Lindbeck's rejection of this appeal is helpful. In lieu of a comprehensive theology of non-Christian religions based on an appeal to a universal religious experience, the author proposes a comparative theology as the best candidate for dealing responsibly and creatively with the plurality of religions.

In the many published reports of the sexual abuse of children by priests in past years there is discernible a common pattern in the inadequate responses of Church authorities to the allegations and evidence of sexual abuse. Since judgment of conscience and moral decision flow from moral discernment, which in turn is based on moral perception, inadequate moral perception renders faulty an entire moral-response process. The moral perception underlying the decisions of Church authorities bearing responsibility in the sexual abuse scandal is seen to be, unfortunately, consonant with the moral perception cultivated in the moral theology in which they were educated.

Photographs of human suffering inundate everyday life in the United States. The camera lens brings the human gaze into the intimate anguish of state sponsored torture and “natural disaster.” This essay argues that photographs of suffering in contemporary culture present a nexus of ethical and moral issues. These issues arise from how photographs represent suffering “others” and how these images inform collective response to human anguish. This essay interrogates this intersection through the lens of Christian ethics' root metaphor of imago Dei. First, the essay explores the power and privilege that are invisible in the act of gazing upon a photograph of human suffering. Second, Kevin Carter's 1994 Pulitzer Prize winning photo of a Sudanese girl-child is deconstructed through the use of visual cultural studies. This analysis illustrates that photographs are not a literal depiction of suffering but rather a cultural representation which deeply condition the knowledge of human suffering. Finally, the essay argues that the photo is an invitation for the viewer to become an agent, not a spectator whose morality is realized in the sociality of imago Dei in suffering.

Some concerned Catholic theologians and popular writers have addressed the ubiquity of body hatred in the United States in their prescriptive considerations of liturgical fasting. This essay brings a feminist theological lens to their writings to argue that this Catholic fasting literature presents dualistic and decontextualized accounts of embodiment and of sacramental practice that reify the discursive structures of body hatred in the US context. In response, the author advocates for a shift in Catholic theological discourse about fasting as one attempt to resist body hatred and support more liberative possibilities for embodiment in this context.*

This article will outline a feminist interpretation for responses of the Roman Catholic Church to particular events in modern history, and sketch feminist proposals for solving the resulting problems of the Church today. The first section interprets the Church's initial response to scientific and philosophic discoveries and movements of the late Renaissance and the Enlightenment period as responsible for the feminization of the image of Roman Catholicism in the secular mind. The second section interprets the Church's response to liberalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as confirming for the secular, and increasingly popular, mind this feminine image of Catholicism. The third section depicts Vatican II as a contemporary attempt to create a more masculine image for the faith by moving the Church's sphere of action from the feminized private sector to the public world characterized by masculine rationality and technology. The final section sketches some ways in which modern feminist scholarship and its perspective can be a major and necessary contributor to the eradication of this feminine view of religion through the elimination of public/private dualism.

In Laudato Si’, Pope Francis links environmental degradation and the poor, writing that “the poor and the earth are crying out.” Appalachia complicates the pope's claim, however, because it is an area that suffers from environmental degradation but also supports the Trump administration's dismantling of environmental regulations. Thus, Pope Francis’ understanding of the poor in Laudato Si’ needs development in three ways. First, he needs to explore how environmental degradation causes spiritual harm in addition to physical harm. Second, the pope needs to note that spiritual harm often causes the poor to cry out in ways that are sexist, racist, homophobic, and hostile toward the environment. Finally, the pope should note that the voices to be heeded in responding to environmental degradation are those voices marginalized within poor communities because they are most likely to address the spiritual harm and avoid scapegoating others.

This article proposes a theological interpretation of Jean-Luc Marion that accents the importance of prayer as a remedy to conceptual idolatry. It also addresses theological concerns about Marion's understanding of the relationship between phenomenology and theology, and about his critical attitude toward ontology. In response to the first concern, it uses Marion's readings of Dionysius the Areopagite and Augustine to demonstrate that Marion prioritizes a prayerful approach to theology that transcends phenomenology, even while benefiting from it. In response to the second concern, it draws on Marion's treatments of Dionysius, Augustine, and Aquinas to show how the same prayerful theology accommodates an ontological way of praising God. Prayer is the key to both arguments. Prayer resists the conceptual idolatries operative in the realms of phenomenality and of being, while revealing the potential iconicity of both. Finally, this article clarifies why Marion's recent Augustine book is crucial to an understanding of his project.

After tracing the history of the term “spirituality” and the discipline of spirituality up to the mid-twentieth century, this article describes the contemporary understanding of spirituality as lived religious experience and of the academic discipline which studies this subject. This phenomenology of the discipline grounds a position on the relationship between lived spirituality and theology on the one hand, and the academic disciplines of spirituality and theology on the other.

The Black Lives Matter movement has received little scholarly attention from Catholic theologians and ethicists, despite the fact that it is the most conspicuous and publicly influential racial justice movement to be found in the US context in decades. The author argues on the basis of recent field research that this movement is most adequately understood from a theological ethics standpoint through a performativity lens, as a form of quasi-liturgical participation that constructs collective identity and sustains collective agency. The author draws upon ethnographic methods in order to demonstrate that the public moral critique of the movement is embedded in four interlocking narratives, and to interrogate the Catholic theological discipline itself as an object of this moral critique in light of its own performative habituation to whiteness.

Contrary to what may appear in a superficial understanding of his spirituality, John of the Cross strongly affirms the goodness of creation and its capacity to mediate the presence of God. He specifically identifies the web of mutual interactions among creatures as a primary manifestation of divine love, and he affirms that the more a person participates in God, the more he or she participates fully and joyfully in this community of creatures. Activation of creation's full capacity to mediate divinity, however, depends on the full fruition of the human person in God. Experientially, this involves a lengthy process of a back-and-forth rhythm between the glimpse of God in creation and the complete renunciation of dependence on creaturely knowledge in favor of faith. John's writings invite us to participate in the healing of the natural world by pursuing this contemplative rhythm all the way to its fruitional climax.

The pastoral constitution Gaudium et Spes of Vatican II represents a significant shift for the church, not only ecclesiologically but also intellectually, with deep consequences for the culture of the church and especially for Catholic institutions of higher education. This change has clear implications for the core curriculum of a learning Catholic Church—and of every learning Catholic. In the “modern cosmopolitan culture” of the church of Vatican II, the liberal arts have a central place. The ability to make a judgment on “the signs of the times” requires a cultural awareness that is the opposite of utilitarianism. Care for the “common good” requires “core knowledge” because the world—as it is presented in Gaudium et Spes—is nontransparent, ambiguous, and ever changing. In this sense the pastoral constitution is an antipositivistic manifesto for humanization that needs to be rediscovered.

The phenomenon of organizing a civic candlelight vigil in the face of violence and tragedy, while striking and powerful in addressing the moment, can be also religiously ambiguous in some circumstances, and insufficiently therapeutic in others. Keeping vigil in the Christian tradition is markedly different from its contemporary expressions. This article explores and evaluates—through the use of contemporary examples and the psychological and ritual analyses of Gotthard Booth and Victor Turner—the purpose and goals of vigils held in the public square with the nature and impact of keeping vigil in the Christian tradition, especially as celebrated in the Easter Vigil. This expository and diagnostic study suggests that a full expression of keeping vigil serves as an articulation of how believers are challenged to confront pain and suffering with a more profound theological and liturgical response that stands in stark contrast to contemporary cultural and social mechanisms.

This theological roundtable discussion on shared communion, presented at the 2018 CTS Convention, reflects twenty-plus years of conversations among theologians: some Catholic, members of the College Theology Society; and some Baptist, members of the National Association of Baptist Professors of Religion, region-at-large. They gather at the annual convention of the College Theology Society not only for intellectual exchange but also for common prayer. Over the decades, the Baptist theologians have always participated in Mass. Their fidelity informed Sandra Yocum's presidential address at the convention, which began with a lament over our Christian disunity reflected in the faces of my dear friends in Christ, these Baptist theologians who with all humility process with the other communicants, but with arms crossed over their chests to signal that they cannot receive Christ, whom they too believe to be present in the sacrament.1 The lament sparked a desire in Curtis Freeman to respond with this careful study of the rules among Baptists and Catholics for intercommunion. The subsequent thoughtful responses from Catholics and Baptists bring to the foreground the painful reality of Christ's wounded Body that neither refraining from nor participating in the Eucharist will fully resolve. Yet, each respondent affirms hope in the Eucharist's healing power and echoes Christ's own prayer “that they may all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you” (John 17:21).