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.

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.

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.

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 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?