This essay studies the treatment of Jesus' crucifixion in contemporary theology. After presenting four influential systematic conceptions, it isolates four historical issues with immediate systematic implications and concludes with some reflections on principles for constructing and evaluating theologies of the cross.

After tracing the history of the term “spirituality” and the discipline of spirituality up to the mid-twentieth century, this article describes the contemporary understanding of spirituality as lived religious experience and of the academic discipline which studies this subject. This phenomenology of the discipline grounds a position on the relationship between lived spirituality and theology on the one hand, and the academic disciplines of spirituality and theology on the other.

How different from each other are transcendental method and reconstructive hermeneutics as approaches to foundational theology? Not so different that there is no room for dialogue between Bernard Lonergan and Francis Schüssler Fiorenza. Some parallel areas of concern which Lonergan and Schüssler Fiorenza develop idiosyncratically include the self-correcting process of learning, the role of faith in foundational theology, the relationship between experience and interpretation, and the specific connection within Christian foundational theology of inferiority with the data on Christianity. Imagining how the authors could be open to each other's theory yields points of complementarity.

Relativism is a central issue in anthropology, philosophy of science, and a number of other disciplines. It is usually contrasted with objectivism or foundationalism, the quest for universal and absolute norms. Richard Bernstein has recently written an illuminating overview of the relativist-objectivist tension and has sketched out a notion of rationality “beyond objectivism and relativism.” This paper is an effort to follow Bernstein's lead and consider the theological implications of objectivism and relativism and the attempt to move beyond them. The first two parts of the paper take up objectivism and relativism in their philosophical and theological forms. The third section briefly explores some aspects of a non-relativist and non-objectivist model of rationality.

This paper explores an issue raised by psychologist Robert Lifton in The Broken Connection. Lifton believes the present threat of total extinction through nuclear war has drastically affected humanity's ability to reconnect life and death, and to make individual death meaningful. The death of everyone—as an imaginable possibility—defeats all expressions of “symbolic immortality,” affirmations of continuity and hope.

How has Christian theology met this predicament? Twentieth-century history has been so menacing and overwhelming that some theologians have found in apocalyptic-eschatological imagery the most appropriate framework to encounter that history and discern its spiritual meaning. Yet this imagery, even when de-literalized, provides at best ambiguous answers. Early twentieth-century theology—Schweitzer, Case—recognized the importance of apocalyptic thought for the New Testament, but easily repudiated this for contemporary life. In contrast, later thinkers such as Cullman, Brunner, and Moltmann make extensive use of eschatological imagery. However, they face the problem raised by Lifton: how to make “hope” vivid to readers already gripped by a future of possible universal catastrophe.

Simone Weil was a mystic obsessed with the search for absolutes and with a holistic vision of the world. At the same time she was deeply concerned about the plight of the outcasts of society. This concern rooted her mysticism in reality and, like the biblical prophets, she decried societal abuses. She saw the Church as larger than the institution she was invited to enter through baptism. Her refusal to enter symbolically united her with the members of “common humanity” who were excluded from the institutional Church. This mystical vision was prophetic of the Church of Vatican II.

While awareness of feminist issues has not left its mark on all professors of theology, much less on all who teach christology, those whose awareness has been changed by facing these issues often find themselves asking how they can bring them to bear on courses with already substantial content. The point of raising feminist issues, however, is not a matter of adding content but of uncovering questions that have not been asked and of transforming the way we look at key areas of the discipline. This is turn leads to the discovery of new resources and new insights.

My own approach in teaching “Christ in Tradition and Culture” to undergraduates has been to uncover feminist issues and concerns that are in the mainstream of christology. I have done this by looking at scriptural, theological, and soteriological/spiritual perspectives that are central to the development of a contemporary christology. The purpose of this article is to share the ways I deal with feminist issues within the perspectives noted and to indicate some of the more important bibliographic resources that address them. Before examining issues that surface in the various perspectives, it may be helpful to underscore some aspects of feminist theology that should be kept in mind.

It is difficult to speak calmly and quietly about what one loves passionately, and next to my wife and my children I love the Catholic church more than any other thing. The passion for it has perdured all the years, and grows stronger the longer I live in it even though it must be said that my years with it have been far from easy. I do not love the church because I examined it and found it lovable; I loved it long before I could have examined it, and no examination has lessened my love for it. I cannot go back far enough in time or dig deeply enough in my psychic archaeology to find the root of that love. I think the root is the grace of God, yet I do have memories of important places and persons.