The movement broadly defined as the “New Quest for the Historical Jesus” represents one of the more important areas where academic scholarship has had a direct bearing on popular religion. Although many forces have been instrumental in this development, perhaps the most important has been the popularizing work of the Jesus Seminar, under the direction of Robert Funk. This essay examines two of the premier scholars associated with the Seminar, namely, John Dominic Crossan and Marcus J. Borg. It examines their methodologies and central christological claims, and gives special consideration to Borg's addition of a “theo-cosmic level” that distinguishes his work from Crossan's.

Recent declarations by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith have disallowed any effort to rethink the tradition's negative evaluation of homosexuality. Citing Thomas Aquinas, the CDF appeals to eternal law as an important warrant for its position. Homosexual orientation is an objective disorder. It is an inclination to intimacy which violates God's design for human sexuality. This claim excludes further consideration of the topic. This study examines Aquinas' claim to know God's eternal law. At the heart of Aquinas' argument is the simile that creation is like a human artifact and God like an artist. When we know the work we know the Artist's intent. Heidegger's hermeneutical account of the work of art suggests that Aquinas has overlooked the historical grounds for the relationship between artist and artifact. Aquinas has the simile wrong. If Heidegger's approach is a reasonable alternative to that of Aquinas, then a space is opened within Catholic discourse to rethink the question of homosexuality.

In the practice of multicultural religious education a conflict arises between two competing understandings of the term multicultural. In one understanding multicultural religious education means the incorporation of racial and ethnic diversity into a Western, European paradigm of Christianity. In another understanding, multicultural religious education means the implementation of theological and educational procedures and rationales that would account for the reality of social structural differences within the diversity of society, allow those differences to shape the content and form of the Christian tradition, and, therefore, challenge the Western paradigm as the dominant expression of Christianity. This article expresses the conviction that the term multicultural is most appropriately understood as that which embraces the reality of diversity and social structural difference. Based on this conviction, the article makes the case that theologies of liberation provide an important theological framework for a multicultural religious education that embraces both diversity and difference.

In his imposing work, Symbol and Sacrament, Louis-Marie Chauvet creatively explores the implications of symbolic mediation for the whole of Christian theology. Central to Chauvet's “fundamental theology of sacramentality” is the assertion that there is an inescapable absence within any mediation of presence. With this critical principle, he attempts to counter ecclesial triumphalism. Despite this critical concern, Chauvet's impressive project suffers from a naive optimism concerning symbolic mediation. Religious symbols are misused not only by those who assume direct, unmediated presence but also by those who coopt them to ideological ends. Chauvet's theology provides no principle of discernment concerning the possibility of the corruption of the Christian symbol tradition. His use of the notion of Gelassenheit to describe the proper posture toward religious symbols stifles critical reception. This article offers suggestions for correcting these shortcomings in Chauvet's worthwhile project using the thought of Levinas, Habermas, and Ricoeur.

This article expands a project begun as a participant in the first American Academy of Religion and Lilly Endowment Teaching Workshop on Religion. The original project examined feminist teaching methodologies and how a male theology professor could use these methodologies in a general undergraduate theology classroom. This work describes the processes of feminist and personalist teaching methodologies and analyzes their impact on undergraduate theology classrooms.

While these approaches help students come to a greater sense of participation in and ownership of their knowledge, there has also been the attending risk that such pedagogies seemingly involve the student too intensely, too personally, and the course becomes a form of therapy. This study examines how this therapeutic turn appears to develop. It concludes with a discussion about the need for clearly articulated teaching methodologies and how their use where appropriate helps us anticipate and respond to therapeutic classroom dynamics.

Catherine Mowry LaCugna died on Saturday, May 3, 1997, at the age of forty-four, after a long battle with breast cancer. She was the Nancy Reeves Dreux Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame, the recipient of the Sheedy award for excellence in teaching, and the author of God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life, which won the First Place Award from the Catholic Press Association in 1992. She edited the collection Freeing Theology: The Essentials of Theology in Feminist Perspective, and published numerous articles as well as her dissertation on the methodology of Hans Küng. At the time of her death, she had received a Lilly grant to work on a book on the Holy Spirit during the academic year 1997-98.

As her doctoral student I had the privilege of listening to her think aloud over a number of years, and found that her formidable intellect and deep sense of pastoral compassion were not complementary powers but the fruits of a single-minded focus on the Holy. For Catherine, the movement of creation from God and to God (exitus-reditus) was no mere model, but a deeply held conviction about the origin and end of the world and its creatures, herself included. Her theological writings reflected the directness of her engagement with the reality of God and, indeed, her disposition before this mystery had a monastic familiarity in its combination of fearlessness and utter humility. Her view of the world was both precise and thoroughly undomesticated; despair, artifice, and sentiments were sins against the Spirit that ignored the factum of the abiding presence of God.