Dorothy Day's sense of herself as a woman and as a mother feature prominently in her writings. In light of recent inquiries into gender identity and gender ideology, and given Dorothy Day's prominence as editor, social activist, anarchist, pacifist, and religious author, questions about her views regarding woman's role and related feminist concerns invite investigation. The paper argues that although Dorothy Day did not become a vocal advocate nor public ally of the women's movements in twentieth-century American life because of some fundamental differences in viewpoint and loyalty, she did share a number of affinities with feminist perspectives. To investigate her thought on this topic enables us to understand Dorothy Day more fully and to bring a critical eye to selected features of feminism, discerning (from Day's standpoint) both strengths and weaknesses.

This essay critically assays four recent attempts to furnish a moral justification for nuclear deterrence: the success thesis, the just war thesis, the argument from the “supreme emergency,” and the exceptionalist thesis. By entering into critical dialogue with representatives of these arguments I hope to show that the current confidence in the morality of nuclear deterrence is ill-conceived. Chief among the logical and practical difficulties plaguing these arguments are the following. (1) The success thesis rests on the fallacy of post hoc, ergo propter hoc reasoning. Nor does the assertion of the past success of deterrence furnish guarantees of future effectiveness. (2) Representatives of the just war thesis either establish conditions for accepting deterrence that are incoherent with their judgments about use (e.g., U.S. Catholic bishops) or develop a theory of deterrence that cannot be morally institutionalized (e.g., David Hollenbach). (3) The argument for the supreme emergency eclipses moral convention in the nuclear age. (4) The attempt to salvage the supreme emergency according to a classical theory of community rests on a fundamental disanalogy between the Aristotelian polis and modern nation-states. Moreover, it opens the door for a double standard to evaluate the methods of war.

This essay claims that some recent discussions of moral positions based on a principle of innocents' immunity, “The direct killing of an innocent person is never morally justifiable,” ignore two different meanings of “innocence”: “innocence” as applied to agents and “innocence” as applied to those upon whom the agents act (“patients”). It shows how neglecting this distinction distorts some discussions about abortion and justifiable war. Some recent philosophical analyses are used and developed (1) to argue that “patient innocence” is not dependent on “agent innocence,” but on how the role of “;patients” relates those “patients” to prospective or actual agents, and (2) to show the theoretical importance of distinguishing “excuses” from “justifications” of actions. This approach provides an alternative to traditionalist and revisionist accounts by suggesting how Catholicism's “inconsistent ethic” might be developed into a more coherent, multifaceted vision.

After an explanation of salient points of Wayne Meeks's construction of a social history of Pauline Christianity, this essay explores his concept of ritual efficacy with attention to what it might lend to a fuller understanding of ritual/sacramental efficacy in the contemporary churches. Because the communities of l'Arche of Jean Vanier are constituted by a great diversity of persons who are vastly unequal, at least in terms of intelligence, they provide a contemporary reference for investigating Meeks's claim that the function of Christian ritual is to socialize persons of various strata into a communitas in Christ. No definitive resting point is reached, the conclusion being that in light of various social factors facing the churches, Christian ritual needs to socialize persons into communitas more effectively than it usually manages to do. Suggestions for doing so are offered.

Bernard Lonergan's importance to Catholic theologians is existential as well as theoretic. For many he bridged the culture and the church. Three of the themes prominent in his recently published A Third Collection exemplify his service to his colleagues: community, history, and praxis. Lonergan shared the burden of alienation of his fellow Catholics from the culture, and in his struggle to understand and change, illuminated a path for them. Recent literature displays his influence: David Tracy's Plurality and Ambiguity, Tad Dunne's Lonergan and Spirituality, Vernon Gregson's Lonergan, Spirituality, and the Meeting of Religions, Hugo Meynell's The Theology of Bernard Lonergan, and the essays in the Festschrift, Religion and Culture: Essays in Honor of Bernard Lonergan.

The moral theologian's work is related to moral magisterial teaching as science to pastoral address. Speaking from a juridical perspective regarding faith and morals, the two Vatican Councils can be misinterpreted to mean that the relation of the magisterium to faith is the same as its relation to morals. These relations, however, are only analogically the same. The relation of the magisterium to moral theology, accordingly, is different from its relation to systematic theology. Nor can its relation to contemporary moral theology be identical with its relation to the preconciliar version. For its part, moral theology does not include “theological dissent,” since dissent is a personal and social but—apart from a single possible exception—not a scientific act. The tension between moral theology and the magisterium can be removed only on the basis of mutual understanding of their respective responsibilities and limitations.