The religious epistemology of John Henry Newman offers an avenue, unexplored by scholars, for interpreting moral doctrine today. Although he did not write any work on moral theology, a systematic account of the interaction between conscience and moral law in his writings can illumine foundational concerns about personal morality and episcopal authority in the Roman Catholic Church. In reaction to the rationalism of the Enlightenment Newman had remarkable confidence in the capabilities and trustworthiness of the personal, historical reasoning of individuals and ecclesial communities alike—a type of reasoning that he recognized as the driving force for the genesis and the application of moral law. Not surprisingly, his concern for historical moral consciousness, with its emphasis upon subjectivity, generated a significant shift from abstractness to concreteness in theological method, a shift that would later influence the thought of Bernard Lonergan. To illustrate the contemporary relevance of Newman's commitment to personal reasoning in theology, his explanation of the legitimate authority of conscience and doctrine provides the basis for an instructive critique of the document On the Interpretation of Dogmas (1989) from the International Theological Commission.

This article attempts to reveal how Julian uses imagery to make real and concrete for her readers the experience of affective union with God through contemplative prayer. Part of Julian's strategy involves an identification of herself with the figure of Mary Magdalene, in medieval times the seeker of Christ par excellence. I highlight imagery in the Book of Showings that Julian and her readers probably would have associated with the Magdalene. But the more important insight is that, through her use of Magdalene imagery, Julian emphasizes the dramatic elements in the soul's quest for God. In this, she is following the example of many medieval authors, including William of St. Thierry, her major influence, who stressed that the Song of Songs was, not allegory, but essentially a drama between the soul and God. In this study I try to uncover precisely what this drama is like through a word-study of Julian's term for her visions, schewynges, or showings. I also note striking similarities between Julian's individual showings and the actual drama performed in her time, with specific attention to the figure of the Magdalene.

Feminist theologians claim that women's experience is the key to both their critical and constructive theological endeavors. This article is first an effort to sort out the ways women's experience has been named and used for theological reflection particularly through the lens of gender constructs as these have been called to our attention in relation to social location, language, and the quest for human wholeness. Second, it explores the implications of this work on women's experience for constructive feminist theology.

William Golding, in The Spire, invites us to ask how we may know the will of God, and suggests that what we take to be the will of God is often simply the projection onto history of the disguised image of our private and self-absorbed desires. Though contemporary critics tend to interpret the novel as a sympathetic exploration of moral ambiguity rather than as a compelling condemnation of Jocelin's mortifying and death-dealing sin, the novel turns on the contrast between the drive toward dominion and the capacity for assent. The final salvific discovery, given form in Jocelin's mind by the experience of the apple tree and the kingfisher, is the overthrow of the will, its panicked drowning, in terrified apprehension of implacable glory and squandered gifts.

Newman, in the famous essay in question, cited the Nicene orthodoxy of the faithful during the Arian controversy as this main, and only extended, argument for the thesis that there were situations in the life of the church where the Christian faith was upheld more consistently by the ordinary faithful than by their pastors. This article shows that historical evidence does not support Newman's claim for the faithful in the Arian controversy, and raises the question as to whether this fact undermines his thesis about the dogmatic importance of the sensus fidelium.

The article argues that the anthropology of the cultural-linguistic model elaborates the radical materiality, historicity, and contingency of religious experience in a way that the experiential-expressivist model does not. More specifically, the article argues that experiential-expressivist thinkers who conceptualize religious experience as having a nonconceptual core which is not constituted by the contingencies of a person's material, social, and historical environments implicitly compromise human finitude. The article also suggests that the cultural-linguistic model will seem threatening to our sense of human freedom as long as we share the modern assumption that material causes and human choices are competing kinds of “things” in the world, rather than being descriptions of the same concrete phenomena from different perspectives and for different purposes, and that the cultural-linguistic model will seem atheistic if one shares the modern view that this-worldly causal efficacy is in competition with God's agency.

This essay explores the theology of the Religion of the Republic (what Robert N. Bellah called civil religion in America) in order to compare it with elements in the catholic tradition of Christianity. The assumption is that the Religion of the Republic has much in common with the consensual religiosity of American evangelicalism.

Using John Williamson Nevin's “Catholicism” of the Mercersburg theology, the author provides a critique of the theology of the Republic and suggests a principle of radical catholicity which offers a profound role for the church in the destiny of the American Republic.

D. W. Winnicott offers a psychological interpretation of the intermediate area of experience between subjectivity and objectivity. He includes mature cultural imagination within this area. Religious scholars have recently observed that Winnicott's theory is an improvement over the dichotomy between subjectivity and objectivity Freud promoted in The Future of an Illusion. However, Winnicott continues to apply Freud's term “illusion” to this intermediate area because claims to verifiability or falsifiability cannot be made on its behalf. This article maintains that Winnicott's interpretation of culture should be clarified and revised to make room for a public domain, which includes morality and religion. A pragmatic position is presented, which argues that claims to goodness or Tightness can be made on behalf of morality and claims to moral fruitfulness can be made on behalf of religion.

This article describes a process of research and critical analysis of Catholic church pronouncements which I have used with both undergraduate and graduate students over the past ten years. Students are taught a method of “close reading” of Roman Catholic church pronouncements which involves their analysis of such issues as the statement's canonical significance, authorship, audience, historical context, content, and underlying ecclesiology. Through this method, students acquire a working knowledge of theological research methods and tools and learn how to practice a hermeneutics of suspicion and retrieval. They also learn how to recognize the various models of church which underlie particular formulations, the compromise nature of conciliar statements, and become acquainted with recent discussion concerning “reception” and the “hierarchy of truths.” Student awareness of the historically conditioned nature of dogmatic statements and of the need for reforming the way in which universal church teaching is formulated is also heightened.

The topic of this article is the effects that the writings of feminist theologians, many of whom are Roman Catholic, have upon Catholic students. The questions it attempts to answer are: Has feminist theology served to alienate American Catholics further from the church, discouraging them from identifying with the tradition or institution, or has it awakened them to retrieve the tradition in a creative way and to take responsibility within the institution and reshape it? The article further seeks to differentiate between spirituality, theology, and religious institution. How will Catholicism affect the larger culture if this generation is alienated from institutional identification? If they settle permanently on alternative forms of religious identification and spiritual fulfillment the face of Catholicism in the future will be even more conservative than it is today. However, feminist theology may be the basis for hope. Seriously attended to by the church, it could help to inform the consciousness of the next generation.

The task of the scholar and the university is the creative appropriation of a tradition in a new context. The documents of the church and recent commentators use the image of “borderline” to indicate the place and role of Catholic higher education. That image indicates well enough that the task of Catholic higher education is the mediation of the Catholic tradition. But let me turn to another aspect of the image of the borderline. Modern culture, or, in its broadest sense, the Enlightenment, is not only to be pictured on the other side of a borderline, but as a “root.” Catholic higher education has two roots, both of which are its own, one the church and one the culture. The Enlightenment is also its heritage.

Interreligious dialogue, like all else, is having its own way in Asia and reveals its own theology of religion. This has to be seen against the background of what transpires in the Western patriarchate in the same field of theology. Here I will focus on one particular model which has created tension between the two magisteria that function dialectically in the church today: the “academic magisterium” of the theologians and the “pastoral magisterium” of the bishops and in particular the bishop of Rome. They differ in their responses, but they begin their theology of religion by asking almost the same question.

The format is a scholastic treatment of creed, sacraments, morality, and prayer with many allusions to Scripture, church Councils, and teachings of the magisterium, particularly in the social teachings of the church. This Catechism could have been written before the Second Vatican Council with references to Council documents added later, much as the biblical references were added as “proof-texts.” The biblical, liturgical, ecumenical, and catechetical movements have not had a substantial impact on the structure or content of the Catechism. There are many excellent features of the Catechism. It avoids the question-and-answer format. It dropped the major doctrinal errors. Its expanded development of prayer is superb. The greatest weakness of the Catechism is its steadfast refusal to distinguish teachings of the magisterium which demand an assent of faith from teachings which demand some other interior assent.

An important dimension of the changing character of Roman Catholic theological education is the growing numbers of Catholic lay women and men in all degree programs at non-Catholic, university related divinity schools, theologates, and departments of religious studies. This year-long study focused on Roman Catholic students and graduates of five schools across the country, in a first attempt to analyze the phenomenon and to suggest implications of the trend both for “ecumenical” theological education and for ministry in the Roman Catholic Church.

During a recent meeting of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians in Graz, Austria, as various speakers discussed the concept of the good life, on the way to preparing a statement on global ethics, I found thoughts of death shifting the horizon within which I was considering the different arguments. Similarly, during recent work on a Jectio divina of John's Gospel, I felt myself drawn to images magnifying the theme, “in him was life,” because I wanted help contending with death. The following brief elaboration of these two experiences may illustrate concretely Nietzsche's dictum that all who philosophize defend themselves. As well, it may expose the roots of a thesis that deeper interpretation is usually religious, because usually we forge it at the crossroads of our contingency and the necessity that there be more. Following the exposition of these two possibilities, I shall suggest a few implications for pedagogy.