The Vatican took a stand in February with its “notification” on Roger Haight's Jesus Symbol of God prohibiting him from teaching Catholic theology. Then in May it was reported that the Vatican influenced Thomas Reese's resignation as editor of America. In these two situations, as with other recent controversies in the church and American public life, the question was posed to the College Theology Society, “Where do we stand?”

This is not answered easily. The appropriateness of entertaining the question is itself problematic given the specific ways the CTS constitution defines our mission as an academic society. Has the CTS, its Board or its members at the annual convention any business at all taking stands on controversies in the church or American public life? What would justify this? And to what sort of issues would this apply? And when? How is this decided? And by whom? For whom does the Board speak? Or for whom does a majority at an annual convention speak? And to whom? And to what end?

Nor is the question of where we stand dodged without significant cost. Much is at stake for the specific pedagogical mission of the CTS both in the issues regarding Haight and Reese and in the questions of principle about taking stands. Both are part of a larger and consequential controversy about what place convictions should have in the interactions of the church, academy, and society.

Theologians have long recognized that the Augustinian formulation of the doctrine of original sin, based on a historicized reading of Genesis 3, is at odds with biblical scholarship and with what science has established concerning our evolutionary origins. Setting aside Augustine's anti-Gnostic Adamic myth, some attempt to recast the doctrine within an evolutionary worldview by developing an anthropology within the framework of genetics and sociobiology, now evolutionary psychology. This essay argues that a wholly biological explanation of the human tendency to evil is inadequate, even reductionist, and it attempts a constructive reformulation of the doctrine that, while incorporating insights of evolutionary psychology, appeals also to ontological, psychological, and social dimensions of humanity that must also be considered if we are to retrieve the central, still valid point of the doctrine, that deep within human being there inheres a proclivity to evil.

The Holy Thursday Evening Mass of the Lord's Supper relies heavily on language and imagery borrowed from the Jewish festival of Passover. This borrowing has become increasingly problematic after the Holocaust. It leads to supersessionism, and it does not take account of how the meaning of Passover has changed since the time of Jesus, sometimes as the direct result of Christian persecution. This article examines the three readings from the Mass of the Lord's Supper as well as the responsorial psalm in order to show how Catholic interpretations of Passover differ from Jewish ones. It suggests that the difference both can be harmful and is unnecessary.

Paulist priest James Martin Gillis was highly influenced in his youth by his Boston Irish heritage, as well as Sulpician and Paulist clergy who imbued in him a sense of Catholic idealism that stressed the dignity and value of the human person. He perceived the world to be filled with the presence of God. Yet, as a commentator on America from his positions as editor of the Catholic World and a weekly syndicated column, Sursum Corda, Gillis saw his idyllic picture of America's role in god's plan in serious peril through the domestic and international policies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Through his various organs Gillis championed the conservative Catholic voice in the period 1922 to 1948, speaking against statism and general government invasion in the domain of the individual. He thus represents a voice generally counter to the American Catholic mainstream of the period.

The article argues that contemporary dialogue on sexuality and contraception represents a new way of approaching Christian sexual ethics. Through an analysis of the experiential reflections of practitioners of natural family planning and artificial birth control, it shows that both sides seek the following goods: self-giving, relational intimacy, mutuality, sexual pleasure, and a strong connection between sexual and spiritual experience. It claims that while each side has distinctive insights, their shared concerns offer a way beyond the post-Humanae Vitae tension on sexual ethics. In this new dialogue, proving HV right or wrong will be much less important than helping Christian couples develop their sexual relationships in the context of their commitment to Christian discipleship.

M. Shawn Copeland joins a liberationist epistemology with the conceptual framework of Bernard Lonergan to offer both a stinging critique of racism and a constructive Catholic theological anthropology. This essay examines Copeland's grounding of theological anthropology in two dimensions: the historical experience of poor women of color, and eschatological solidarity in the Mystical Body of Christ. The second major concern of this essay is the rhetoric of race in black theology and its reception among white theologians. The author, from his perspective as a white, male Catholic theologian, probes questions of white conversion, black anger, and race essentialism raised by Copeland's theology. Highlighting a tension between speaking the truth about white racism “in the master's house” and maintaining the Christian vision of “one humanity” bound by grace, the author argues that, as far as possible, the race critique must flow from a contemplative and pastoral spirit.

The great surge of Christian missionary activity during the course of the nineteenth century elicited a new concern for church unity. Was this missionary activity, after all, spreading division? In 1910 representatives of Protestant churches came together to respond to that question in Edinburgh at The World Missionary Conference. The conference in its turn channeled the concern to the sending churches. Although somewhat slowed down by World War I, the ecumenical movement grew and was punctuated by landmark events in The Universal Christian Conference on Life and Work (Stockholm, 1925) and The World Conference of Faith and Order (Lausanne, 1927). The report of this second conference included a description of what the churches assembled in their representatives shared in common and the many things that distinguished and sometimes divided them. When the World Council of Churches came into existence in August of 1948, the Faith and Order movement was integrated into it as a distinct agency whose concern was the doctrinal unity of the churches. Its signal achievement thus far has been the document entitled Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry, frequently referred to as the Lima document, which sketches a proposal for a common understanding of these three aspects of the church across the churches. This document is the best example of what I will call “transdenominational ecclesiology,” and the fact that it has received so much attention from the churches indicates that it plays some important role in the whole church.

The advent of science has dislocated God from the ontological heart of the world. God no longer anchors, nor defines our shared horizons. As a result, the question of God's literal existence is no longer primary. Nonetheless, the question of God is no more avoidable than it has ever been. God continues to ceaselessly intervene in our lives in the form of the question: what do you love? To address the question of God in our world is to address the question of love and love's object. In particular, it is to address the question of love's mode of reference. Love's mode of reference, when properly understood, is metaphor, and to understand how it is possible for metaphor to refer is to have our understanding of existence and literality transformed.

This essay, an autobiographical narrative reflecting on my awareness of racism and white privilege in my theological journey, has not been an easy paper to write. In the last few years, I have become somewhat educated about racism and white privilege. I have to face the reality that I barely recognized the problem of racism in my own somewhat extensive writings and was blithely unaware of my own white privilege.

The references to racism in my writings are very few, and there is never any concentrated discussion of the issue. This lack is especially telling in a moral theologian who often dealt with social ethics. Other theologians because of the focus of their discipline might not have the same opportunities to discuss and evaluate racism.

In my 1982 monograph, American Catholic Social Ethics: Twentieth Century Approaches, I analyzed and critiqued the writings of five figures in Catholic social ethics. The index has seven references to race discrimination and racism. The two most extended discussions (at best, a few pages each) deal with Paul Hanly Furfey and John A. Ryan. Looking back now on what I wrote then, I am both embarrassed and uncomfortable.

Words matter, and they matter most of all in the context in which they are to be read and understood. On July 7, 2005, the New York Times published an opinion piece, “Finding Design in Nature,” purporting to offer “The official Catholic stance on evolution.” The author of that piece, my fellow Catholic Christoph Cardinal Schönborn, got the theology exactly right, but erred dramatically in his take on the science and the politics of the “design” movement as it exists in the United States. Knowing how the Cardinal's words will be misused by the enemies of science in our country, it is important to set the record straight.

As Cardinal Schönborn quite properly points out, the Catholic Church is staunchly opposed to any view of life that would exclude the notion of divine purpose and meaning. In the new century, as he puts it, the church will “defend human reason by proclaiming that the immanent design evident in nature is real.” In response I would echo the words of the Catechism that scientific studies of “the age and development of the cosmos, the development of life-forms and the appearance of man … invite us to even greater admiration for the greatness of the Creator.” Indeed they do.

But the Cardinal is wrong in asserting that the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution is inherently atheistic. Neo-Darwinism, he tells us, is an ideology proposing that an “unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection” gave rise to all life on earth, including our own species. To be sure, many evolutionists have made such assertions in their popular writings on the “meaning” of evolutionary theory. But are such assertions truly part of evolution as it is understood by the “mainstream biologists” of which the Cardinal speaks?