St. Thomas Aquinas argues that all of the passions, including hatred, anger, sorrow and despair, are morally neutral. That is, Thomas Aquinas argues that the manner in which a person responds to a particular passion determines the morality of the passion, and not the passion itself. Hatred, for example, can lead one to a good end, as when one comes to hate his sin. Likewise, Aquinas notes that even the passion of despair is not necessarily evil, since when felt rightly it can move one to some good end. Aquinas, however, fails to recognize that according to his own account despair so stupefies the soul that it cannot lead to any good end. Unlike hope or love, or any of the other passions, despair paralyzes the soul and thus must always be avoided.

This article has three sections, covering three themes in CST. In the first I sketch out the development of an integral humanistic approach and then go on to suggest that the ‘flip’ side of this is an unduly anthropocentric stance on ecological issues by Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict. In the second section I give an account of official Catholic teaching on justice for women and their equality with men. I suggest that over the past fifty years there have been major advances on this issue. But John Paul's concept of the complementarity of women and men raises great difficulties—particularly insofar as it is used as one of the main justifications for Vatican insistence that the Church does not have the authority to ordain women. In the third section I examine Vatican views on the appropriate means which Church authorities and the Church membership should use in working to promote justice. Should Church leaders limit themselves to clarifying the nature of authentic development, pointing out various forms of injustice, calling for change, and suggesting an alternative ‘economy of communion’? May they ever go further than such ‘education of consciences’, by encouraging the poor to struggle for justice, and by themselves confronting oppressive governments?

Augustine's Rule is one of the most influential texts in the history of religious life in the West. Those who follow the Rule, whose longest chapter deals with visual asceticism, are to examine themselves in it “as in a mirror.” This paper uses visual theory to explore the meaning of the Rule as a mirror in order to have a new look at the meaning of chastity, self-knowledge, and the gaze.

John Howard the then Prime Minister of Australia introduced a series of measures (June 2007) to regulate the life of Aboriginal peoples in the Northern Territory, an action that became known as the Intervention. The measures were introduced as emergency measures designed to control the widespread physical and sexual abuse of children, the excessive use of alcohol, poor levels of education and unemployment rife among Aboriginal people in the Territory according to a government sponsored report, Little Children are Sacred. The local councils of aboriginal communities were immediately dissolved, their property acquired by compulsory leases for five years and business managers appointed to administer them. After an initial occupation by army units and police to stabilize the situation in Aboriginal communities and settlements, the Federal government introduced a number of measures designed to channel welfare money for purchase of wholesome food, to limit access to alcohol and it made a commitment to refurbish schools and clinics and to build houses to ease overcrowding. These were all good things to do and cost the government hundreds of millions of dollars, but were imposed from without in a bureaucratic manner with little consultation of local people. Construction programs were conducted largely by non-aboriginal workers and school curricula were not revised with an eye to Aboriginal cultural needs or interests. The ancient culture of Aboriginal people depends upon the land, family relationship and upon the Dreaming. The bureaucracy dealt with Aboriginal communities as if it were dealing with a particularly difficult city suburb that required a new master plan. Instead of this, Aboriginal people must resolve their communal problems in their own way. For that to happen there is a need to encourage initiative and creativity and conversion of life. The Intervention and what followed did not deal well with the cultural side of its program and it did more to smother Aboriginal initiative than to encourage it.

This overview of de Lubac's work considers his background in French Catholicism at the opening of the twentieth century; the intellectual currents a-swirl in his formative years; his own education in Jesuit institutions; the mosaic of his highly disparate writings, and the broad lines of his ‘career’ as priest and cardinal. This ‘panorama’ is complemented by a proposal, intended to illuminate the ‘mosaic’ referred to: the author's suggestion is that unity – in a variety of analogical senses of that word – constitutes the key to de Lubac's entire enterprise.’

A sacramental ontology, informed by a ressourcement of the Church Fathers, informs the theology of the mid-twentieth-century Catholic movement of nouvelle théologie. Rejecting the neo-Thomist separation between nature and the supernatural, the nouvelle theologians focused on the sacramental presence of supernatural grace in natural realities. To be sure, differences among these ressourcement theologians cannot be denied: de Lubac and Bouillard emphasized the a-scending character of human participation in divine grace, while Balthasar and Chenu stressed the de-scent of the Incarnation into the created realities of time and space. Nonetheless, the four theologians shared a deep appreciation for the Greek Fathers, which enabled them to counter the neo-scholastic separation between nature and the supernatural with a sacramental ontology.

In this article, I argue that at the root of the ‘ontological’ argument lies the notion that the idea of God is truth: in the idea of God, the meaning of the concept and the reality of the Being actually converge; the idea of God is God. After looking at a number of thinkers whose philosophical method is reminiscent of Anselm's I conclude that, while Anselm did not furnish a conclusive proof of the necessary existence of God, his argument shows how the question of the existence of God is one and the same with the question of the intelligibility and coherence of God and with the question of the intelligibility and coherence of reality.

The study, American Grace by Putnam and Campbell affirms the sociological significance of religion as a distinctive vitalising form of social capital. With its stress on virtues of trust, altruism and communal affiliation realised through social networking in congregations, this civil religion, one peculiar to the U.S.A., accomplishes a form of grace that resolves the puzzle of belief and pluralism by generating harmony and religious tolerance. This solution bears a price of rendering religion as end in itself, one detached from exclusivist theological claims in regard to salvation. In exposing this conundrum, the study reveals a highly significant and unexpected facet of the secularisation thesis.

Arthur Peacocke, a biochemist turned theologian, accepted Christ's personal resurrection but not his bodily resurrection from the grave. He argued from Paul's silence about the discovery of the empty tomb, from Christ's sharing fully in our human condition, and from the irreversible processes of nature. John Polkinghorne, a physicist turned theologian, has maintained that Paul's view of resurrection implies an empty tomb, that Christ's resurrection from the grave has revealed the transformed destiny of matter, and that, for good reasons, God can suspend and change the laws of nature. In Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's vision of an evolving world, Christ's resurrection from the grave released a new force of love and revealed the spiritual destiny of matter. With Polkinghorne he shared a hope for the transformation of the universe, a process initiated by the glorious raising of Jesus’ crucified body.

It is often claimed that the encyclical Rerum Novarum of Leo XIII laid a foundation for the emergence of trades unions and was ‘the workers’ charter’. This is a myth. The origins of the encyclical and Catholic Social Teaching in the late nineteenth-century were entirely socially conservative. Rerum Novarum condemns socialism and its authors thought that the primary purpose of what the encyclical calls ‘associations’ was devotional, ‘confraternities of mutual support and religious observance’.

This paper is an attempt at proposing Thomas Aquinas’ metaphysics of ‘relationship’ and ‘participation’ as a corrector of a contemporary theological trend that conflates ‘person’ with ‘relation’ in its understanding of the trinity, turning God, eventually, from a self-existing, particular personal Being into an idealist expression of a network of relational movements reflective of what the human personhood means. Thomas Aquinas’ theology of relation and participation invites contemporary theology to retrieve a theology that keeps ‘transcendence’ characteristic of God's personal being in order not to turn the participation of God in the finite's realm of existence into a panentheist or one-sidedly, human-centered relationality.

People cannot receive information about philosophy while being themselves dispensed from philosophising, thinking. This requirement is reasonable, since “all men desire to know”. A dualist approach to philosophy and theology obscures that they are the same. Revelation is immanent within the thinking person and grace, pace Thomas, is not extrinsic. Ecumenism, the principle, underpins this. So the philosophy of theology transcends external confessionalism, as does Christian faith itself.