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.

This past February I spent a bracing weekend with two feminist pioneers in their own fields. Joan Huber is an old friend and early mentor, Dean of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Ohio State, and a well-published feminist sociologist. Susan Gubar, my best friend at Indiana University for more than a decade, is a distinguished literary critic and co-author of landmark books like The Madwoman in the Attic, and The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. Both have changed the shape of their respective disciplines with their work on women and so carry impeccable feminist credentials. Susan and I went to Columbus to help Joan prepare for her March debate with Carol Gilligan.

Since I grew up next to Joan as a teenager, weekends with her are always wonderful for me because they combine all the comforts of home with all the things I could never do while growing up. When I go to Joan's house I eat wonderful meals, drink too much, abandon all my resolutions about smoking, stay up too late, and engage in fabulous conversation. Adding Susan to this cluster of stimulants tripled the pleasure, and the fact that it took us hours to get there and forced us to reread Gilligan did not dampen the occasion. I looked forward to the visit and secretly hoped that the conversation would do something to renew my flagging feminist spirit.

Contemporary issues in the American Catholic Church can sound like a modern-day confusion of tongues making communication impossible. Furthermore, the traditional marks of the Church have supported the notion that dissent and controversy are to be discouraged. This article examines catholicity and shows that its definitions and uses in history have tied it to uniformity when its essential characteristic may well be the celebration of pluralism. Catholicity is placed in the context of modern mission theory in such a way that current challenges can be interpreted as so many new languages which require patient understanding.

Teaching religion in a state university setting challenges one to find non-confessional ways to discuss theological problems. While “Theology” itself is not the proper concern of a “Religious Studies” department, one can raise some significant theological issues in courses like Religion and Literature. The purpose of this course was to examine the presuppositions about damnation brought to the course by the professor and the students. A “Damnation Game” and a variety of literary texts were used to test the range of ideas we had about damnation, and to draw us into an experiential approach to religion and literature.

It is not unusual, when reading about Modernism, to notice references to the ‘Ward Family Papers’. De la Bedoyère and Barmann both had access to the von Hugel letters from the Ward Family Papers when they wrote their studies of the Baron; Laubacher's study of development of dogma in Tyrrell used his letters to Ward, the originals of which have recently been found. Ward's involvement in the Synthetic Society heightened interest in the papers for what they might yield about various late-nineteenth-century thinkers. Finally, no one has been sure how many of the papers and documents used by Maisie Ward still exist and how many of them might contain more information. I spent the summer of 1976 sorting, classifying and arranging the Ward Family Papers, a task made easier by the methodical work of Thomas Michael Loome some years ago. I classified the papers stored in London, surveyed the Ward material now housed on the Isle of Wight and retrieved some items that had been stored at Crosby, near Liverpool. The present Wilfrid Ward has, at his house on the Isle of Wight, the library of Wilfrid Ward with his annotations, and two small minute books of the Synthetic Society. The book collection may or may not be complete, and Ward's notes in them are not many and seldom legible. There is nothing else at the Isle of Wight house except personal family papers, the letters of Ward and his wife, some of the papers of Josephine Ward and her letters to various other people, and the letters of some of the children. The papers of Maisie Ward and Leo Ward (Wilfrid's children) are housed with the Sheed and Ward collection, still in private hands. The papers and letters from Crosby have been added to the London papers.