In this essay the author rethinks the provocative remarks of Karl Rahner about the overall symbolic character of reality in his essay “The Theology of Symbol.” While conceding the inevitable differences in perspective between a Thomistic metaphysics of Being and process-relational philosophy, the author explains how Rahner's “theses” on symbolism likewise make good sense within the context of his own process-oriented metaphysics of intersubjectivity as developed in previous publications. Then he applies this Rahnerian/neo-Whiteheadian scheme to the analysis and explanation of Christian belief in the Incarnation of the Divine Word in the human nature of Jesus, the Real Presence of the risen Christ in the Eucharist, and the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ.

“Spirit” is a more universally available religious symbol than “Christ,” found in various forms in most of the religions of the world. It helps to open Christian theology to a genuine religious pluralism, and, in the framework of the doctrine of the Trinity, provides a Christian way of construing this pluralism, relating it to the purposes, activity, and being of God. The pneumatic Trinitarianism proposed in this essay contrasts with the christocentric Trinitarianism recommended by advocates of an inclusivist theology of religions. The concrete incarnation of God in Christ is not lost but placed in a larger context. The Spirit proceeds not just from Christ but from the interaction of God and the world, including a diversity of religious figures and practices. The idea that a theology of the Spirit might serve as the basis of a pluralist theology of religions is tested by looking at the modalities of Spirit that are present in Hinduism and Buddhism, and that enrich a Christian understanding of the Spirit.

Swami Abhishiktananda (Fr. Henri Le Saux, 1910–1973) was a French Benedictine who wrote a pioneering work in Hindu-Christian dialogue entitled Saccidānanda: A Christian Approach to Advaitic Experience. Therein he attempted an inclusivist integration of the theologies of Advaita Vedanta and Roman Catholicism. He later rejected aspects of Saccidānanda and argued that Advaita and Christianity are too different to be integrated in this manner. In place of Saccidānanda, Abhishiktananda developed two positions at the end of the 1960s which anticipated current Roman Catholic debates over the theology of religions. One was an experiential inclusivism which bears affinities with the pluralist position of Paul Knitter and others. The other was a “comparativist” position, similar to the one later developed by Francis Clooney and James Fredericks. This paper will examine how Abhishiktananda developed these various approaches to Hindu-Christian dialogue and the tensions between them.

A contemporary culture of market individualism in the United States today is increasingly marginalizing the lives of children. This situation requires Christian ethicists to raise once again, as in the historical past, the question of the larger meaning and purpose of child rearing as a serious disciplinary concern. This paper identifies fundamental issues of child rearing ontology, teleology, deontology, and practice, and maps out some newly emerging Christian ethical responses by communitarians, liberationists, and covenantalists. It then develops a larger social ethics of child rearing—drawing on a range of historical theological resources—able to speak to children's issues in a disciplinarily complex, publicly meaningful, and culturally transformative way. Its argument is that child rearing should be rescued from its increasing social privatization through a revised covenantal social ethic that strengthens the unique tasks of families but also places them within a larger interdependent nexus of community and state supports.

At the 2003 Annual Convention of the College Theology Society in Milwaukee, Sandra Yocum Mize presented some of her research for a history of the Society. I greatly appreciated her investigation of our Society's origins and its progress. She reminded me of things I had forgotten and told me much that I have never known. Let me add a few reminiscences that may be helpful to those who are new in the profession or relatively so.

The Korean War consumed the last two years of Harry Truman's second term as president, when Dwight Eisenhower was elected to succeed him. After the unsuccessful effort to contain Communism on the entire Korean peninsula at the cost of many lives on both sides, the eight Eisenhower years, 1952–1960 were largely a matter of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Eisenhower was basically a retired general, on the basis of which he had been named president of Columbia University in a kind of travesty of academic life. His brother Milton who might have made a better chief executive rose in academia to become president of the Pennsylvania State University, well before Joe Paterno brought the Nittany Lions to another kind of eminence. The Eisenhower years were a lull of sorts in U.S. life bringing prosperity to the few, Republican style, and a scandal over his chief of staff who had accepted a gift of an alpaca coat. Days of innocence! Catholic college enrollments were still very much on the increase in the mid-1950s as a result of the G.I. Bill granting full tuition and books, not only for undergraduate and graduate study but even for any theological seminary of a veteran's choice. Many a convent motherhouse's instructional situation was being transformed into a bachelor's degree-granting institution in those years, at first for the religious students only but then shortly for adult lay women in the surrounding areas. The teachers of religion in Catholic colleges and in the few universities of the mid-1950s were priests with a seminary education—no religious brothers, sisters or lay persons as yet.

The historian remains in many an imagination nothing more and nothing less than the purveyor of facts about the past. The historian's task appears simple, straightforward—to report the facts accurately. According to the logic of this image, once one has “the facts” about a selected topic, then the history nearly writes itself. Fortunately for the historian, even the most focused historical study demands more than setting the events in their proper order. I write “fortunately” because if the historical task were as straightforward as just described then a single history written by no particular historian would suffice on any given topic, and historian unemployment rates would rise even higher than they are now. Though most contemporary academics know the subtle and complex influences of social location, those whose work is other than historical tend to exempt history from such influences. They have little reason to ponder the many variations possible in constructing a historical narrative nor to consider the merits of each variation. The historian, on the other hand, must consider as many variations as possible in trying to figure out what story to tell about the given subject and how best to tell it. Even writing on a relatively focused topic like the fifty-year history of the College Theology Society requires careful reflection on exactly what story is to be told and numerous choices on how best to tell that story.

To convey to students what writing history entails, I often ask them to imagine producing a history of the preceding day as each of them lived it. Most immediately understand that even to write such a limited history would demand choices not only in terms of details to include and omit but also in terms of organizing those details within a framework selected to provide a particular view of the day. A single event or a special relationship might frame the narrative. Then again, a series of interconnected events organized conceptually might create the intended effect. Audience shapes these choices. Students admit that their narratives would change if the audience shifted from peers to parents.

In the wake of the Second Vatican Council there were remarks about the Decree on Religious Freedom being a time bomb, because its views on freedom of conscience would have revolutionary impact if applied to the life of the church itself. There was more general recognition of the fundamental shift in ecclesiology that was implied in Lumen gentium and Gaudium et spes. As for Sacrosanctum concilium (SC), the document on liturgical revision, it obviously pointed to important shifts in Catholic liturgical activity, but it was not seen as a theologically innovative document. It may well be, though, that SC will prove to have the most radical and revolutionary effect on the thought, the life, and the structure of the church.

That SC effected an important shift in the church's thinking and liturgical practice has been undeniable. However, like so much that was achieved in the Council, the profoundly revolutionary implications of the document are only beginning to be realized. To the extent that it is understood and implemented, the Constitution on the Liturgy points to a reversal of eighteen centuries of thinking about the church and its sacramental rituals. Clearly, this is an audacious statement, but basically what is asserted is that the understanding of sacramental liturgy is moving away from the notion of instrumental causation and towards appreciation of the effectiveness of ritual as such. There was not, of course, a formalized theology of sacramental liturgy eighteen hundred years ago that explicitly employed the idea of instrumentality. However, already in the second century there was a noticeable move away from the communitarian outlook that characterized the liturgies of early house churches. In its place the up-and-down view of liturgy's effectiveness in which the ordained person stands between God and the assembly, channeling prayer upwards and blessing downward, is expressed in the prayer for the ordination of a bishop in the third-century Apostolic Tradition.

When Dorothy Day decided to write a history of the Catholic Worker movement she drew for inspiration from the writings she knew and loved intimately: the novels of Charles Dickens; the radical reportage of activists like Carlo Levi (Christ Stopped at Eboli), George Orwell (Down and Out in Paris and London), and Danilo Dolci (Report from Palermo). She also loved Ignazio Silone's antifascist novel Bread and Wine. Towering over all of these writers, however, were the Russians and more particularly the late Leo Tolstoy of Resurrection and the profound, fictive world of Fydor Dostoevski whose “fool for Christ” (Prince Myshkin of The Idiot) and the saintly Aloysha of the Brothers Karamazov were iconic. Day was a follower of the Gospel but her human horizon was nourished by her life long love for literature.

Who knows the mystery of God's attracting grace but if the old scholastics had it right in their axiom that grace builds on nature one would have to say that the four persons whom Paul Elie chronicles in his recent brilliant work on the American Catholic Church in the middle of the twentieth century were attracted to a vigorous life in Catholicism on nature as made concrete in literature. What all four had in common was a profound love of literature and, more to the point, the fact that there was a common thread in their devotion to The Brothers Karamazov and other seminal works of literature. In fact, one can play a little mind game while reading this capacious study: what were they all reading as their adult lives matured?

The four persons at the heart of Elie's book were writers but of a decidedly different stripe. Flannery O'Connor, whose life was cut short by a debilitating case of lupus, wrote slowly and with an exactitude that demands an equally slow patient reading even when the stories are clear but the meaning allusive.

The celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the College Theology Society naturally turns our focus to what has transpired in these fifty years. In terms of Roman Catholic theology, the two most significant historical realities are the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) and the now twenty-five-year pontificate of John Paul II as Bishop of Rome.

In my discipline of moral theology, Vatican II and its document on the training of priests called for the renewal of moral theology with a special emphasis on its Scriptural bases. “Special care is to be taken for the improvement of moral theology. Its scientific presentation, drawing more fully on the teaching of holy Scripture should highlight the lofty vocation of the Christian faithful and their obligation to bring forth fruit and charity for the life of the world.”

John Paul II as pope has written and taught extensively in the area of morality. In the light of the Vatican II mandate to renew moral theology through a greater appreciation of its scriptural roots and bases, this essay will critically evaluate John Paul II's use of scripture in his teaching on morality.

On the occasion of my retirement from Xavier University, and at the request of some long-time friends I have the opportunity to reflect on what has happened to me during these forty years of trying to combine my vocation as a Catholic theologian with what I felt was a “call” (therefore, also a vocatio) to take persons of other religions seriously and to dialogue with them. The “vocation of an interreligious theologian” is really the meeting and, as it were, mating of two vocations, two calls that make very real and definite and often contrasting claims on the same person. What follows is a “retrospective” on how I have attempted to walk one path in response to two calls—to be a Catholic theologian and to be an interreligious dialoguer.

In my day in the New York Archdiocesan seminary there was a room in the library dedicated entirely to anti-Catholic literature, with four walls, ceiling to floor, of books and pamphlets exposing the various shortcomings and infidelities of the Romish Church. That collection in the New York seminary was more extensive than the collections I found in the Buswell Library at Wheaton College and the Billy Graham Center, and in the library of Westminster Theological Seminary forty years later. In the last ten years I have closely studied only a small fraction of the extant material. Even so, the literature I have plowed through is huge, and the literature of evangelical criticism and Catholic response which I will never get to study is vaster still.

While all of the material belongs in a collection of some sort, not much belongs on a library shelf. Much of it is literary and historical junk. Some of it borders on the savage: for example, H.G. Wells' Crux Ansata with his suggestion that the allied bombers in World War II obliterate the Vatican. Wells and Jack Chick will sit in the same circle of Purgatory. But some of it is intellectually respectable, even if panic-ridden. Some of it is serious and responsible in its attempts at theological and historical criticism.