Recent US election cycles, debates about the Affordable Care Act, and a variety of so-called culture war issues have placed the term “intrinsic evil” into public discourse. This issue's roundtable affords readers the opportunity to probe deeply various dimensions of the concept, such as the pedagogical effectiveness of the term, its current use in virtue ethics, and the rhetorical effectiveness of competing moral discourses. The authors' explorations range from consideration of classical questions about the substance and circumstances of acts to a taxonomy for “intrinsic evil” to how social processes affect the discourses available to ethicists.

Recent US election cycles, debates about the Affordable Care Act, and a variety of so-called culture war issues have placed the term “intrinsic evil” into public discourse. This issue's roundtable affords readers the opportunity to probe deeply various dimensions of the concept, such as the pedagogical effectiveness of the term, its current use in virtue ethics, and the rhetorical effectiveness of competing moral discourses. The authors' explorations range from consideration of classical questions about the substance and circumstances of acts to a taxonomy for “intrinsic evil” to how social processes affect the discourses available to ethicists.

Adolescents and young adults are generally missing from Catholic theological reflection on what it means to be a human person. However, Pope Francis's 2019 Apostolic Exhortation, Christus Vivit, reveals an operative theological anthropology of young people as inherently good and of adolescence and young adulthood as a life stage that is good in its own right. This, then, can serve as a foundation for a more robust theological consideration of adolescents and young adults in Catholic theological anthropology, in general, and in our understandings of the doctrines of the imago Dei, sin, and grace, in particular.

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.

After decades of optimism, interreligious dialogue is now confronted with a considerable amount of skepticism. In theology, this skepticism is primarily being fed by the cultural-linguistic theory of religion. This theory seems to be in keeping with what the Babel narrative has always said: people belonging to different “language” communities can do no more than babble at one another. The author asks, first of all, whether the story of Babel indeed affirms the cultural-linguistic argument for the end of interreligious dialogue. After showing that there are theological and exegetical reasons to doubt the classical interpretation of the Babel narrative, the author demonstrates how a renewed hermeneutic of this story actually challenges the cultural-linguistic discourse concerning the incommensurability of religions. Indeed, she argues, ultimately, the Babel story is not a narrative about the end of communication, but about its beginning.

From the manuals of the classicist period, moral theology inherited an understanding of the moral act that is rooted in the classical conception of the human being as a rational animal. However, the new personalist and relational anthropology characterizing contemporary theology requires a corresponding revised idea of the nature of the moral act. This revision, it appears, cannot be definitively achieved unless a holistic material understanding of the moral life first replaces the merely formal and empty concept of it in the manualist tradition. Fortunately, this replacement seems to be occurring. The areas of sexual morality and social consciousness are those that suffer the greatest distortion in ethics based on classicist anthropology and, similarly, admit the greatest revision when transferred into the context of contemporary theological anthropology.

Recent US election cycles, debates about the Affordable Care Act, and a variety of so-called culture war issues have placed the term “intrinsic evil” into public discourse. This issue's roundtable affords readers the opportunity to probe deeply various dimensions of the concept, such as the pedagogical effectiveness of the term, its current use in virtue ethics, and the rhetorical effectiveness of competing moral discourses. The authors' explorations range from consideration of classical questions about the substance and circumstances of acts to a taxonomy for “intrinsic evil” to how social processes affect the discourses available to ethicists.

The Study Quran is an impressive volume intended for scholars and teachers in various fields, as well as for students and general readers, both Muslim and non-Muslim. It is a vital addition to the existing translations of the Quran and to the not-so-vast body of commentaries on the Quran in the English language. The volume contains a comprehensive English translation and an extensive commentary on the entire Quran, as well as several essays on a range of topics, including Quranic ethics and law, branches of theology, death and dying, and art in the Quran. It includes useful appendices on hadith citations, a timeline of major events specified in the Quran, biographies of the commentators and the authors, a solid index, and a number of maps illustrating the ancient world and Arabia in the early years of Islam.

In this essay the author rethinks the provocative remarks of Karl Rahner about the overall symbolic character of reality in his essay “The Theology of Symbol.” While conceding the inevitable differences in perspective between a Thomistic metaphysics of Being and process-relational philosophy, the author explains how Rahner's “theses” on symbolism likewise make good sense within the context of his own process-oriented metaphysics of intersubjectivity as developed in previous publications. Then he applies this Rahnerian/neo-Whiteheadian scheme to the analysis and explanation of Christian belief in the Incarnation of the Divine Word in the human nature of Jesus, the Real Presence of the risen Christ in the Eucharist, and the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ.

Once the need to reform Catholic ethics became manifest with the Second Vatican Council, revision and adaptation of moral theology, the science that had served since the Council of Trent as official Catholic ethics, was often presented as the theological path to renewal. Scrutiny of philosophical, ethical, and theological presuppositions, however, discloses that the foundations of moral theology differ radically from those on which contemporary theological ethics must be based and that, accordingly, the way to true reform is not revision and adaptation of moral theology but the replacement of this self-contained science through construction of a fundamentally different kind of ethics, theological relational ethics as an essential, integral part of a reconstituted holistic theology.

Determining whether, and when, to get one's children vaccinated has become an increasingly controversial decision, often leaving parents fearful of making the “wrong” choice. Part of the challenge stems from the fact that what is rationally optimal for an individual is inherently at odds with the best outcome for the community, meaning that if everyone acted out of self-interest with respect to pediatric vaccines, communal health would suffer significantly. Given these tensions, the issue of pediatric vaccines benefits greatly from the nuanced assessment of Catholic social teaching. Specifically, the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace's “four permanent principles” of human dignity, the common good, subsidiarity, and solidarity highlight the issues involved and help parents navigate this significant medical choice with a more informed conscience and a greater sense of their moral responsibilities. The end result is a fruitful alignment between Catholic social teaching and ethics in ordinary life.

Reaction among conservatives to Pope Francis' Evangelii Gaudium has most often been negative. Ross Douthat, however, in his 2013 New York Times op-ed, has offered a more nuanced critique. Our four Roundtable authors respond to Douthat's implied invitation to a discussion by responding from the viewpoint of Catholic social thought.