Current trajectories in biblical interpretation have increasingly shelved or even attacked historical-critical methodologies, replacing these methodologies with doctrinally grounded (meta)narratives as the primary framework for the interpretation of Scripture. This trajectory is particularly apparent among proponents of the “theological interpretation of scripture” (TIS). These interpretive trajectories tend to be self-referential inasmuch as their primary aim is to buttress the doctrinally grounded narrative framework itself rather than providing any critical function that could move readers beyond ecclesially established horizons. Sandra Schneiders, however, stands out in the field of theology as a potent exemplar of nonreductive critical biblical exegesis, and her performance as an exegete has long anticipated the concerns of TIS. Schneiders' approach marks an important path forward for interpreters of Scripture, one that is critically informed, hermeneutically sound, and both theologically and spiritually fruitful. Schneiders’ own account of the Johannine resurrection narrative may prove helpful and even exemplary for contemporary exegetes and systematic theologians alike.

Ethical deliberations about care for creation require more theological clarity about God's eschatological plan for creation than presently found in church teaching. Nonetheless, we can identify in the writings of recent popes a trajectory toward what I describe as a “covenantal communion” approach. This approach holds that God's eschatological plan is to draw all creatures together in Christ and attributes to creation its own form of agential density through which it becomes, with humanity, a genuine participant in the divine economy. I set this view in contrast to two other approaches: creation as “microcosmic referent” and “humanized abode.” Though versions of these latter two appear in Vatican II documents and in the writings of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, their claims have been moderated in Francis’ move toward a covenantal communion approach. Further developing this approach will help clarify the goods and values at stake in our environmental choices.

Despite Pope John Paul II's call for “intense dialogue” between theology and science that excludes “unreasonable interpretations” of Scripture, ecclesial statements on gender and sexuality—including John Paul II's own works—deploy an interpretation of the literal meaning of Genesis to perpetuate a complementarian anthropology that contradicts scientific insights about the human body. After illustrating the implications of this hermeneutical inconsistency, this article presents Jesuit astronomer William Stoeger's theological method and hermeneutics of the full flourishing of life as an alternative approach, which fulfills John Paul II's vision for dialogue and paves a way toward reimagining church teachings on gender and sexuality.

In their respective contexts of Roman empire and global neoliberal capitalism, the Jesus movement and the Zapatistas announce that another world is possible and that this world has irrupted in the struggle for that other possible world. This article argues that the practical and theoretical work of the Zapatistas offers to theologians a way to articulate the meaning of the kingdom of God as a world of hope and struggle that is actualized in and informed by struggles to resist fetishization.

This article explores how Christian theology has historically contributed to the modern ideology of Islamophobia. After arguing that contemporary popular and political Islamophobia has its sources in replacement theology, theological supersessionism, anti-Judaism, antisemitism, Christian-Islamic polemics, Orientalism, and modern racism, it seeks to reorient Catholic theology by undoing and unsaying this discursive and political harm. Constructively, the relatively novel genealogy of Islamophobia this article tentatively traces is based on three discursive moves: linking (1) replacement theology/supersessionism with medieval anti-Islamic theology, (2) the latter to Orientalism, and (3) the previous two to Islamophobia. These three discursive moves are possible because they were and remain sustained by supremacist theologies begotten by replacement theology/supersessionism. The article draws from theories of ideology and social imaginaries to recognize that the words, symbols, narratives, and metaphors that constituted a Christian theology of Islam since the seventh-century emergence of the Islamic tradition cannot be subverted merely by forgetting or ignoring them; they cannot be unlearned merely by learning “positive views” of the Islamic religious traditions (from Muslims, scholars, or both); they cannot be undone through a religion-blind, apolitical theology of religions that rejects nothing that is true and holy in religions; finally, they cannot be dismantled even by a Catholic theology of Islam that cherishes specific beliefs and practices in common with Muslims. It concludes by beginning to construct a Catholic theology of interreligious praxis intended to dismantle and disrupt Islamophobia today. This praxis-oriented theology is grounded in a Christian conception of restorative justice and the Catholic sacrament of reconciliation. At the core of this proposal is the assertion that theologies of the past remain the politics of the present. If Catholic theology has shaped the sociopolitical ideology and structure of Islamophobia today, then an anti-Islamophobic Catholic theology must be political; otherwise, it will remain ineffective in undoing the political harm it has produced.

The current article analyzes and evaluates how the explicit Spirit-epicleses in the new eucharistic prayers of the Roman rite image the Holy Spirit. The author demonstrates that the Holy Spirit is usually described in dependence from the Father or the Son (e.g., “his Spirit”) or as the instrument that the Father sanctifies with or through (e.g., “through the Spirit”), and less frequently as actively sanctifying. As we tend to talk about the Holy Spirit's epicletic involvement in a more active way than the epicleses actually do, the author pleads for more accurate language. Further, he wonders what the results of the analysis mean in the light of the Trinity's dynamic complementarity and Geistvergessenheit. Finally, he argues that talking about the Spirit as “artisan” does not inevitably lead to tritheism, as a healthy Trinitarian theology equally promotes both God's unity and three-ness.

Given his insistence on the dual temporal and spiritual spheres in which Christians live in the tension of freedom and service to others, Martin Luther's theological ethics prove paradoxical. This conundrum unfolds at the intersection of Luther's doctrine of justification and consequent Christian freedom (1520), and his doctrine of two kingdoms, which elucidates the complex world in which we live (1523). How is one to live in service to the neighbor as an unconditional subject, love enemies, and uphold justice? This article explores the New Finnish School interpretation of Luther's doctrine of justification as theosis in order to elucidate the Reformer's convoluted ethics. We may ultimately understand Luther's tensive position in terms of the believer's soul united to Christ, thereby becoming a Christ to others albeit, simul justus et peccator, imperfectly. This more fully accounts for Luther's appreciation for the ethical contingencies faced by Christians in everyday life.

This article analyzes the complex processes of modernization and individualization, as well as how the church has structurally fostered individualization despite its public criticism. First, the article demonstrates how modernization and individualization have gradually restructured human self-understanding into an economic image of humanity: the human person as homo oeconomicus. Second, this article examines the church's relation to modernity, and specifically its critiques of liberalism and economic individualism. However, the church has often generated the conditions and structures for individualization, and by extension the processes of acceleration and economization of the life-world that it criticizes. Three areas in intra-ecclesial discourse that foster individualization are examined: the interiorization of faith, ecclesial centralization and clerical bureaucracy, and the promotion of corporatism and digital immediacy. The article concludes by examining recent papal efforts at structural reform and the degree to which they address previously entrenched problems and point toward a renewed, non-economic anthropology.

One of the demands facing the church is the call for unity with Christians with profound intellectual and physical impairments. As the church becomes a community of justice with and for people with impairments, she is an instrument of God's shalom. However, too many of our sisters and brothers with impairments find themselves on the outside looking in. How can the church continue to move toward a more complete welcome and participation? Responding to this theological question precedes clinical or legal concerns. The best the world has to offer is not what the church needs, though she can learn from reasonable professional approaches. The message and peace of Christ can undo the walls of separation that keep Christians with impairments out. Such a transformation would be a sign that the church is being built up in peace, and would offer a model of true communion among a diversity of people.

The disclosure of serial plagiarism in the extensive theological and journalistic publications of Thomas Rosica, CSB, former Vatican spokesperson and sometime media attaché of the Holy See Press Office, attracted significant media attention in early 2019. This article examines a selection of Rosica's hidden sources, focusing on how passages from magisterial church documents appear without attribution in his theological works. Our examination of this unusual case of plagiarism highlights important facets of authorship and authority in the practice of theology as well as the key role of attestation in magisterial teaching.

Jürgen Habermas’ assessment of the rationality of religious convictions is ambivalent, as it oscillates between a postsecular appropriation of their semantic potentials and a fideistic insistence on their “discursive extraterritoriality.” In this article, I argue that Habermas’ fideistic portrayal of religious convictions is neither compatible with the overall argumentative architecture of his postsecular paradigm nor a logical consequence of Habermas’ philosophical framework in general. Instead, once his fideism is overcome, Habermas’ postmetaphysical discourse theory provides valuable resources for contemporary Catholic theology. This article thus offers both a theological assessment of Habermas’ view of religious belief and an argument for a Catholic appropriation of Habermas’ postmetaphysical thinking.

Recognizing that thousands of people of color have suffered the many brutalities of racism, the editorial staff of Horizons marks the somber first anniversary of the tragic murder of George Floyd (May 25, 2020) with a pedagogical roundtable considering the possibility or impossibility of teaching antiracism in colleges and universities.

In March 1943, having narrowly escaped Europe three years earlier, Abraham Joshua Heschel published “The Meaning of This War,” his first essay in an American publication. The essay shows, quite remarkably, his full command of literary English. It also shows, as biographer Edward Kaplan remarks, that Heschel “had found his militant voice.” “Emblazoned over the gates of the world in which we live,” the essay begins, “is the escutcheon of the demons. The mark of Cain in the face of man has come to overshadow the likeness of God. There have never been so much guilt and distress, agony and terror. At no time has the earth been so soaked with blood.” Heschel's extraordinary life's witness, his whole body of work, traverses precisely this anthropological and theological knife's edge: The mark of Cain in the face of man has come to overshadow the likeness of God. Where is God? Or better, Who is God? in relation to the rapacious misuse and idolatrous distortion of human freedom? Or simply, Is God?

In the midst of a pandemic, an ongoing global climate emergency, violent white supremacy, economic inequality, and fraying democratic institutions, the work of theologians and religious studies scholars offers a much-needed illumination by attending both to the religious roots of these disfunctions and to religious sources of alternative possibilities. This article argues especially for the importance of religion in providing hope, inspiring unity, warning of perennial human temptations, and encouraging the practices of introspection essential to independent thought. The story of Fr. Félix Varela, Cuban scholar, patriot, and pastor to immigrant Irish in nineteenth-century New York, provides an example of someone whose deep religious faith enabled him to resist common polarizations and to illuminate his time by envisioning and working for a world more just and humane than that imagined by the official Catholicism (or by most of society) in his day.