Theologians have recently been criticizing the notion of an immanent Trinity as idle speculation and focusing their attention exclusively on the economic Trinity. The change thus proposed is at once too radical and not radical enough. It is too radical in that it seems to set aside almost two thousand years of careful theological reflection on the reality of God as derived from Scripture and Tradition. It is not radical enough in that it does not grasp the deeper issues involved here. For, what is really needed is not a move away from ontology toward phenomenology, but rather a conscious shift in ontologies, a move, in other words, from a metaphysics of being to a metaphysics of becoming as the appropriate conceptuality for an understanding both of the doctrine of the Trinity and of the God-world relationship.

Following the work of gender theorists who find the terms “male” and “female” to be socially constructed, feminist theology has tended to repudiate essentialism. The position that results is one of agnosticism about biological sexuality, a position that is only reinforced by the essentialist excesses that ground the discussion of the “psycho-physical structure” of women found in official Catholic teaching. This article suggests that the polarity of feminist theology and official Catholic teaching on questions of sex and gender can be overcome by using the framework of a “critical essentialism,” a position that retrieves the Catholic theological tradition of reflection on “male” and “female” while allowing its claims to be appropriately winnowed by the insights of gender theorists.

Recent social studies have show that there are, especially among young American Catholics, different conceptions of what constitutes a Catholic. Factors contributing to this new understanding of Catholic identity include religious pluralism and the divergent conceptualizations of catholicity and Catholicism in contemporary theology. As a consequence, different criteria are used to define what it means to be a Catholic. These variations pose serious challenges to religious educators whose task is to shape the religious identity of the students.

The study begins with a survey of the history of the concept of catholicity as well as of the criteria for Catholic identity. In view of the variations in the understanding of catholicity, the work discerns four challenges for religious education with its task of fostering Catholic identity: how to maintain a fruitful balance between Vatican II's recognition of the ecclesial nature of non-Catholic Christian communities and its claim that the Catholic Church possesses the fullness of the means of salvation; between Vatican II's call for dialogue with non-Christian religions and its insistence on the distinctiveness of Catholic beliefs and practices; between the legitimate concerns of “communal Catholics” and the necessity for all Catholics to participate fully in the Catholic symbol and ethical system; and between the spiritual and institutional, the invisible and visible elements of the church. The article concludes by suggesting an indirect method to develop and strengthen Catholic identity by means of the “deep structures” of the Catholic faith, with particular focus on Christian doctrines.

Understanding and celebrating the Eucharist does not take place in a vacuum, but depends at least in part on our ability to grasp and be moved by the fundamental symbols of food, body, and table. And yet in contemporary America we increasingly find ourselves in a culture characterized by distorted experiences and notions of all three of these. How, then, does our growing obsession with dieting, nutrition, and efficiency, as well as the increasing disparity of our national and global tables, challenge or undermine our experience of breaking, sharing, and eating the Body and Blood of Christ? And how does the Eucharist speak to and challenge some of the distortions of “Diet America” regarding the humanizing characteristics of food, the importance of embodiment, and the demands of table fellowship?

The critique of the subject and subjectivity in postmodern theory serves also as as critique of the modern turn to the subject in theology. After reviewing that critique in contemporary literary and rhetorical theory, this article examines the concept of the subject in Karl Rahner's theological anthropology. This article argues that both postmodern theory and Rahner's anthropology suggest alternatives to the autonomous subject, and that Rahner's view can provide a description of an authentic, semi-permeable, and historically mediated subject.

This article draws on some of the interpretive strategies of the ancient Rabbis as well as the exegetic writings of some modern literary theorists to present the Book of Amos as an unfolding story of a man of titanic courage who excoriates the powerful of society because of their rebellion against the divine will. Living in the eighth century B.C.E., Amos entered the royal sanctuary at Bethel in the Northern Kingdom to deliver his prophetic message. Speaking in the name of the Lord, he condemned the perversion of justice and the disdain of righteousness. He threatened that a day would come in which all the oppressors would be “plucked out of the land” leaving only a remnant of the people Israel. This remnant, however, will know what the Lord requires: that the weak be sustained and the fallen uplifted, that the stranger be protected and the widow and orphan cared for. Henceforth, a new age will prevail, an age in which the soil will be blessed and all will share in the abundance.

The critique of ontotheology undertaken by Heidegger and expended by Derrida calls into question not only the meaning but the possibility of God-language. In response, thinkers such as Kevin Hart have attempted to map out an area of non-metaphysical theology that draws on the resources of negative theology. Hart's work, The Trepass of the Sign, however, contains three significant ambiguities. First, he defines negative theology as a denial that God can be described using predicates, but in his text negative theology has a quasi-positive (rather than merely negative) role. Second, Hart contends that negative theology precedes positive theology, but in fact it seems to depend upon a prior affirmation of God. Third, Hart offers no rationale for negative theologians' use of the word “God.” Derrida writes that the only way out of negative theology's referential vacuity is prayer: which, he continues, mires that theology in metaphysics. However, if prayer is understood as agape rather than knowledge or supplication, a way through Hart's ambiguities might be found.

On August 12, 1996, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, Archbishop of Chicago († November 14, 1996), released a statement entitled “Called to Be Catholic Church in a Time of Peril,” which concretized an initiative called the Catholic Common Ground Project. This project is to be staffed by the thirteen-year-old, New York-based, National Pastoral Life Center, which was originally established under the auspices of the Administrative Committee of the U.S. Bishops' Conference. The peril which is the project's concern is the polarization that has developed in the Catholic Church in the United States in the course of the thirtyodd years elapsed since the close of the Second Vatican Council.

This article summarizes and compares the theology of religions propounded by two important modern participants in the Hindu-Christian encounter, Swami Vivekananda and Bede Griffiths. It will be seen that both thinkers construct theologies of religion in the form of hierarchies, and that, moreover, these hierarchies reveal a specifically Hindu and Christian understanding of spiritual truth and of divine presence. The article advocates the view that a comparison of these two understandings of truth can be beneficial to both Hindus and Christians by broadening each's understanding of divine presence and of what constitutes human liberation. At the heart of the comparison is the controversy over the meaning and final goal of creation and history.

This article calls for an acceptance of a constructive postmodernity and links that epoistemology with the use of collaborative learning techniques. If we and our students live in a postmodern world, then our pedagogy must make sense within that same postmodernity. To ignore these epistemological horizons is to split our intellectual commitments from our teaching. The tone of the work is set by a sketch of the muddled term “postmodern.” Four markers are developed to situate postmodernity's ironic sense of reality and to link it to a suspicion of any universal master narrative. Why should teachers care? Because learning should reflect our picture of knowing. We teach a world in what we do. The pedagogical practices most in line with the postmodern vision involve collaborative learning, which itself represents a departure from the classic vision of knowing. The article ends with a coda on the theologies resonant with these commitments.

This essay discusses spirituality as opening toward the experience of interconnectedness which forms the world. It interprets God as an empowering presence within the gracious quality of being reaching toward us through the connectedness. The essay draws upon Masao Abe's notion of sunyata and Heidegger's description of the everyday world to discuss the interdependency which finds us within one another's care, though this is generally taken for granted and lies hidden. Spirituality experiences this connectedness as gift and opens the possibility of care. By associating care with the empowering presence of God, we move beyond the dualism which otherwise sets apart God and world, God and humans.

This essay argues that “essentializing” history and theology is less useful as an approach to the problems of “faith” and “history” than a more piecemeal and pragmatic approach. It begins by invoking the intellectual virtues learned in communities of character. It analyzes role-specific responsibilities of historians and argues for evaluating historical claims in terms of historians' execution of their professional responsibilities, rather than in terms of the presuppositions they bring to their work. It examines a recent controversy involving the Catholic Theological Society of America and argues that serious confusions in that dispute about the practices of history and theology can be overcome using the approach advocated here. It concludes by arguing that overcoming specific conflicts between historical and religious claims requires exercising one of the virtues of the mind, phronēsis, and by showing how the constructivist epistemology ingredient in this approach is appropriate for a Catholic theologian.

There is a tendency in the Catholic theological tradition to attribute to apophaticism a status superior to the via affirmationis. There are good reasons to offer a critique of this tendency, if only to raise once again the issue of theological rhetoric, especially as it makes use of metaphor and paradox. To make the point, the present essay then proceeds to exemplify the affirmation-negation dynamic of the Profession of Faith in an expansive, poetical version of the Creed of the Great Tradition. Ambrose's classical hymn Te Deum has functioned as a model for the piece. And who knows if this attempt might help restore the theology of the Blessed Trinity to the classrooms of Catholic colleges, from which it has virtually disappeared, often under cover of apophaticism or (worse) ethics?