This article considers Aquinas' doctrine of predestination as an eternal reality in God in light of its temporal realization in time by the incarnation of the eternal Son. In particular, Aquinas' repeated recourse to the ratio of the divine goodness as the motive of predestination is documented in conjunction with his teaching on the fittingness of the incarnation. In this light, the relation of the natural sonship of Christ to the grace of adoption is developed by Aquinas as the temporal realization of the eternal reality of predestination in God.

This paper supports the burgeoning movement that looks to find affinities between Hans urs von Balthasar's theology and various liberation theologies. It does so by offering a “recontextualization” of Balthasar's thought. Specifically, it provocatively looks to recontextualize Balthasar as a theologian of the street. The argument proceeds in three stages: First, the meaning of “context,” and so the possibility of recontextualization, is discussed. While the term has become commonplace in contemporary “contextual theologies,”, the most rigorous analysis of context is found not in theology, but in literary theory. Second, the particular locale of this particular recontextualization is discussed: the street. As sign, the street is ideologically and metonymically overdetermined. Here, Derrida, Goizueta, and Maeseneer are given as examples of thinkers who think with or from the street, who are contextualized by the street. Finally, the paper turns to specific instances in Balthasar's text that demonstrate his street contextualization: namely, his criticism of Rahner's martyrless Christianity and his discussion of the saints, particularly Joan of Arc. This section rejects those claims, epitomized by Murphy, that Balthasar's name signs a totally conservative context, and so completes my project of freeing space for the aforementioned liberatory movement to continue blossoming.

Pope Francis wants a reform of the church and he sees Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador as a model bishop, one who smells like his sheep and who was fully committed to a poor church for the poor. Pope Francis and Archbishop Romero agree that the basis for church reform must be the gospel. As Jesus did not preach himself but the kingdom of God, the church must be at the service of the kingdom, she is the sacrament of the kingdom. The first addressees of the good news of the kingdom of God were the poor, so there is an intrinsic relationship between the church and the poor. Church reform means that the church becomes more like Jesus Christ serving the poor, the needy and the marginalized.

There is an intrinsic relationship between church reform and the signs of the times. The Second Vatican Council established a new relationship between the church and the world. Of key importance for this are the signs of the times as signs of the presence and the plans of God in history.

Archbishop Romero's deepest and most creative spiritual and theological insight is his association of the passion of the Salvadoran people with the suffering servant of God and the crucified Christ. He spoke of a crucified people.

With the celebration of the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy indulgences have once again moved to the fore of Catholic imagination, with many pilgrims availing themselves of the opportunity to pass through a Door of Mercy or ‘Holy Door’ and thereby receive the jubilee indulgence. While the practice of indulgences has experienced something of a revival in popularity during recent papacies, the precise doctrine remains largely unrehearsed and unfamiliar, simultaneously evoking strong reactions of distaste and disquiet among many as memories of medieval abuse linger on. This article sets out the precepts of the most recent authoritative teaching on indulgences, itself almost fifty years old, before exploring the theological interpretation offered by Karl Rahner and tracing its gradual and largely anonymous appropriation in papal teaching through the post‐conciliar period. With Pope Francis promoting mercy as a central theme for his papacy and ecclesial vision, the paper closes by considering how he may be proposing a further re‐appropriation of indulgences which shifts attention from their post‐mortem efficacy to their capacity to establish a Franciscan reflexivity of mercy in the contemporary church.

Anglicanism's relationship with its Reformation heritage represents a tension. It looks to the Reformation as the movement from which an English Church, independent of papal authority, was inaugurated. At the same time, it refuses to be labelled as a “church of the Reformation”, pointing to its continuity with a much longer history of Christian practice in Britain. The growth of the Anglican Communion and current controversies over church order, the interpretation of scripture and the exercise of authority make Anglican identity difficult to define. Identity would once have been sought in liturgy, but the view that liturgy completely enshrines Anglican doctrine has been convincingly put to rest by scholarship since the 1970s. This paper argues that the liturgical legacy of the Reformation (especially use of the vernacular, concern for the orderly reading and interpretation of scripture, and attention given to the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist) offers categories that can help to form possible approaches to the current crisis of Anglican identity.

In the last 500 years our modern world has oscillated between the belief in “disenchanted” strategies of bureaucratic control and surveillance, and the celebration of iconoclastic ruptures that are supposed to preserve our sense of freedom and dignity. Yet, the equilibrium between these poles has fallen out of balance after the turn of the millennium. While the obsession with control has released concerted efforts to replace our supposedly irrational intelligence by the “artificial intelligence” of digital technologies, the implementation of ICT technologies in our everyday life has undermined the iconoclastic conviction that artefacts are merely tools. Our smartphones have a “magic life” of their own – be it that they afford a life that we appreciate, or that they nudge us into a life that we abhor. This challenge requires us to recover our ability to distinguish between idolatrous attachments and the prudent use of “magic objects” that is consistent with our natural desire to transform our life for the better. The following essay will discuss the question to what extent the basic assumptions of the confessionalized religions of the post‐Reformation era distract us from the task of engaging with this challenge. Moreover it will question the modern inclination to replace the engagement with sacramental objects with an engagement with pious “master signifiers”: authoritative substitutes for the “body of Christ”, like the Eucharistic host, the Bible or secular party books that reduce the attachment to religious traditions to a matter of formal belief and submission to an authoritative system of clerical, bureaucratic, or (today) robotic surveillance.

This article examines Teresa of Avila's understanding of the relationship between spiritual dryness, intellectual frustration, and shame. It argues that Teresa presents these experiences as interconnected, as well as spiritually and intellectually valuable. This aspect of Teresa's thought provides important resources for theologians in the contemporary age in its insistence on the necessarily dynamic relationship between the spiritual and the intellectual in the life of the theologian. The article concludes with an examination of shame and its impact on theological developments in our time, as well as the possibilities for integrating shame productively.