Feminist theology and the Roman Catholic sacramental tradition share a common concern for the integrity of the body and the goodness of the natural world. Yet traditional sacramental theology has used its understanding of body and nature to define women as ontologically distinct from and inferior to men. This article argues that recent feminist theological writing on the body offers a corrective to the ahistorical and dualistic understanding of the body prevalent in Roman Catholic theology. By including women's interpretation of their own bodily experience, situating this experience in a social and historical context, and celebrating the variety of human embodiment, feminist theology offers a truly “sacramental” understanding of the body as it also criticizes the sexist assumptions of the tradition.

This paper looks back over the eight books of John S. Dunne as forming a unified theological project in two phases, each comprising four books. Dunne's first phase is a “journey of the mind,” in which Dunne is concerned with knowing and unknowing, with understanding and insight, and his basic epistemological stance is developed. His second phase is a “journey of the heart,” in which he moves from the basic loneliness of the human condition, to the “heart's desire” for God, to the presence of God in the desiring. Several changes in Dunne's understanding of the human relationships with God, others, and self are traced here. Dunne's most recent book adds a “pilgrimage of the soul” to those of mind and heart, so this paper moves to a discussion of the meaning and development of Dunne's idea of “soul.” It concludes by considering Dunne's work as spiritual writing and as theology.

This essay adopts Penelhum's analysis of parity arguments to show that Christian theistic faith and atheistic secular humanism are on an epistemic par with each other. It argues that Swinburne's attempt to show that theism is more probable than atheism fails because his ultimate canon of rationality is essentially contested and cannot render theism more probable than atheism. It proposes a way out of the epistemic stalemate by evaluating the prudence of religious commitment. It adapts some of Mavrodes' recent arguments and Swinburne's levels of rationality to analyze the dimensions of prudence. It finally extends this “prudential calculus” to indicate how a theologian could show a religious commitment prudent, and argues that if religious authorities silence theologians, the authorities may also show that commitment to and in their tradition cannot be comprehensively prudent.

Love for God as an actual concrete activity of a human being is sometimes obscured in contemporary American Christian culture. This essay studies the role of maternal affection for the divine child Kṛṣṇa, humanly embodied as a male child, in order to serve as a cross-cultural catalyst for the traditions of Christian love for Christ. The focus is the tenth-century Hindu Vaiṣṇava text, the Bhāgavata Purāṇa. Vaiṣṇavas promote the experience of loving God through imaginative participation in narratives of Kṛṣṇa's loves and by identification with human women who loved him, particularly his mothers. They are the exemplars of a maternal love for a divine child. This imaginative participation and identification is open to both men and women. This study illustrates the roles of gender, narrative, and imagination in the experience of loving God with one's whole heart, soul, and might.

This paper describes and compares two imageries for “peace” found in contemporary North America. Both arise within a context of “expressive individualism” as depicted by Bellah et al. and both attempt to ground values beyond subjective preferences. Popular psychology, especially represented by Maslow and self-help writings, relies primarily on the image of organic growth for a vision of peace and fulfillment. Language of unresolvable conflict and warfare is entirely avoided. In contrast, Charismatic Christianity, although it too employs the language of “health” and “growth” also advocates an imagery of peace focused on the triumphant Christ enthroned in heaven, after his defeat of spiritual enemies. The author suggests that the vigorous use of this language is best understood as a corrective and supplement to the “growth” themes more fully congruent with expressive individualism.