The episcopal silence and secrecy associated with the recent pedophilia scandal echoes a larger inability of the Catholic episcopal hierarchy to enter into open and honest dialogue about a wide range of sexual issues. For more than three decades the chasm between official teachings on sexuality and gender and the belief and/or practice of the majority of Catholic laity, clergy and theologians (and an unknown number of bishops) has been growing. Still, attempts to address or bridge this divide have met with a fourfold silence. It is a silence that has kept bishops from speaking their true minds, a silence sought by restricting, investigating and sanctioning theologians, a silence that renders pastors mute or covert on sexual matters, and a silence that ignores the experience and voices of women. Such a silence undermines magisterial authority and deprives Catholics of a useful and persuasive sexual ethic, while marginalizing those willing to speak out and demoralizing those who feel they cannot.

This article examines the theological and ecological significance of the International Pastoral Letter on the Columbia River Watershed issued by the U.S. and Canadian Bishops in 2001. It argues that through its inclusive, participatory process, its emphasis on the watershed as a significant locus for theological reflection, and its strong moral, spiritual vision regarding what a watershed is and can be, the Letter makes a significant contribution to Catholic teaching on the environment. However, the article also claims that due to its generalizing rhetorical style, its weak vision of spirituality and its lack of a critical, prophetic edge, the Letter fails to realize its full potential. The article poses questions about the central meaning and purpose of such pastoral letters and about what the Roman Catholic community can learn from the present Letter that might strengthen future attempts to address environmental or other pressing concerns.

This paper examines the use of themes from J.R.R. Tolkien in the work of John Dunne, C.S.C. of the past two decades, but especially The Mystic Road of Love (1999) and Reading the Gospel (2000). Dunne has “culled” four sentences from Tolkien that express Dunne's own sense of being on a journey with God: “Things are meant. There are signs. The heart speaks. There is a way.” These sentences not only express Dunne's personal journey but also indicate where, according to Dunne, humanity is going in its collective journey with God. The paper concludes by shifting the focus from Dunne to Tolkien and asking how, if Dunne is close to right about Tolkien's significance, the conventional view of twentieth-century English literature and Tolkien's place in it would have to change.

Our paper sets the groundwork for a Christian theology of dating. We begin with a critique of the religious and secular sources on dating. We next turn to theological works on friendship, marriage, and feminist spirituality to distill issues that we deem important for a positive Christian theology of dating. Because dating differs from these perspectives—it is both temporary (as opposed to marriage) and sexual (as opposed to friendship)—we conclude by offering a two-tiered perspective on dating. On the first level, we offer a narrative: two people are each on a separate journey, they encounter each other, their journeys become intertwined and are forever changed from the meeting even if they do not remain together. On the second level, we sublate the narrative by locating it within the broader Christian gospel.

Scripture offers readers not a prescriptive printout but a recital behind our experience, invites a transformative engagement between text and life. The main insight available from Wisdom of Solomon is that Wisdom, intimate of God and structuring element of all creation, saves her friends into Life, not without their collaboration; the alternative is Death. Processes of transposition and transformation are the hermeneutical key to the book, both as authored and as read. The book's few central claims shift from genre to genre and from section to section for fresh and illustrative presentation. Transformation is also the challenge offered to readers: reappropriate the heritage afresh and thus survive. The envisioned transposition implies not simply change but growth out of a profound fidelity to something valued. What is at stake in the book is the “mother of transformations”: the journey from life through death, either to Life or to nothingness (Death), but also the survival of the Jewish community in Alexandria in the first century C.E.

The New Political Theology has always raised questions regarding the contrast implied by its qualification as “new.” The qualification “new” suggests a comparison resulting from an innovation, a departure. Precisely what comparison, is at stake? Various kinds of readings assume that the innovation of Metz's political theology is established in relation to Rahner's transcendental theology, in relation to left-Hegelian and neo-Marxist influences, or to the voices of Jewish testimony after Auschwitz. Taken alone, these lines of interpretation are valid yet insufficient, therefore potentially misleading in following the development of the New Political Theology. A different reading, therefore, proposes that Metz's New Political Theology is an effort to delegitimate and deliver an alternative to the antidemocratic and anti-Semitic political theology of Carl Schmitt. In diametric opposition to the violent identity politics of exclusion that defines Schmitt's decisionist political theology, the New Political Theology proposes an identity politics of difference, empowering responsibility for movements of justice and reconciliation in pluralistic societies through a deliberative social democracy oriented towards solidarity by the memory of the suffering of others.

The theological aesthetic framework of Hans Urs von Balthasar can be used to develop a “continuity” model for relating liturgy and the moral life: each supports the Christian's response of faith but in distinctive ways. The fundamental source of Christian faith is the graced encounter with Christ. For Balthasar, this encounter occurs narratively: our stories are invited into Christ's story where we discover a personal God calling us by name. Both liturgy and the moral life mediate the Christian's entrance into this salvific narrative; however, each does so by emphasizing a different aspect of it: liturgy underscores the eschatological fullness of the narrative; the moral life invites us into Christ's story at a point “between the times.” This different eschatological emphasis leads liturgy and the moral life to take on complementary roles in nurturing the Christian's encounter with Christ.

The contemporary American labor movement is in a state of crisis. Not only is the membership base at a low-point, but a host of negative factors and obstacles to growth present enormous challenges for its future viability. In the past, organized labor has been most effective when there was a strong alliance with the Catholic community. Since the middle of the twentieth century, however, this association has weakened, and in some cases has turned to opposition. The premise of this article is that a renewed church-labor alliance could provide needed assistance to reinvigorate the labor movement while also advancing the social concerns of the Catholic Church in this nation.

What does one say in a presidential address? First of all, and as always, it is good, and very good, for us to be here as we come together to renew the bonds of collegial respect and affection that make our Society unique. Looking back on the events of the past two years, however, “difficult” hardly begins to describe them. That short period saw the bishops of the United States acquiesce to Rome's demand for a juridical implementation of canon 812, and we have been wrestling both individually and as a society with the ramifications of that decision. Then, dwarfing all else, there burst upon us the towering horror of 9/11 with its awful images of fiery destruction and plummeting human bodies. Where that leaves us as a nation remains to be seen, but the specious practicality of Realpolitik seems to be the order of the day. An Afghan wedding party becomes “collateral damage,” while a spiral of violence sweeps over the Holy Land, engulfing even Bethlehem, birthplace of the Prince of Peace. At the same time the church that looks to him as its founder staggers through a sordid scandal of clerical sexual abuse and hierarchic cover up. We mourn and lament as even our heroes sink into the quagmire. On a personal level, this two-year term began with news that my father had fallen ill, and I attended his deathbed shortly before our board meeting last November. These have been a difficult two years.

The focus of this article is twofold. First, recognizing the influence of the mass media on the religious views of many undergraduate students, it examines the negative depiction of God in several popular American films and concludes that the image of God as absent, impotent and demonic ought to be addressed in the classroom. The second issue concerns the use of film in the classroom—both to encourage students to sharpen their understanding of contemporary theology, and to then use this theology as a basis for understanding and evaluating the religious messages carried by contemporary films. The films explored are What Dreams May Come, Dogma, The End of the Affair, The Rapture, and Stigmata.

Twenty-five years ago I happily compared Thomas Merton to Flannery O'Connor, finding in each of them an “urgency of vision,” and although I have not changed my mind about Merton's importance, I have had to fight my way through a substantially diminished admiration. Reading him a quarter of a century later was disturbing because, bluntly put, I did not like him as much as I did when I was younger. He seemed neurotic, over-published, and extraordinarily self-centered. Had I outgrown him? The arrogance of that question paralyzed me for a month even when I could find colleagues who agreed with me, but I decided to pursue it and began by making a list of things about Merton that bothered me now in ways I never even thought of a quarter of a century ago.