This essay studies the treatment of Jesus' crucifixion in contemporary theology. After presenting four influential systematic conceptions, it isolates four historical issues with immediate systematic implications and concludes with some reflections on principles for constructing and evaluating theologies of the cross.

Theologies dedicated to radical social change require an understanding of how social change is possible. Gregory Baum has developed such a theory based on Max Weber's notion of charismatic leadership. This article analyzes Baum's understanding of the nature and dynamics of social change, the role of symbols therein, and shows how Baum corrects certain weaknesses in Weber's thought. Baum's theory could be strengthened by drawing upon Christian symbols of eschatological hope and the doctrine of the Trinity. This would help the church relate its faith to social movements and countervailing trends in terms of its own symbol system.

A certain “rugged individualism,” characterizing classical Catholic moral theology, can be traced to theology's defining love according to the model of appetite. This model of love, in turn, is part and parcel of the prepersonalistic, static “faculty psychology” that logically and inevitably flows from the Aristotelian, substance-accidents worldview. To overcome classical individualism in principle and to become solidly established as a socially conscious science, moral theology must operate from a new understanding of love—love understood according to the model of freedom.

In the light of what appears to be a growing consensus that historicist and postmodern thought undermines the credibility of appeals to women's experience as a source of theological and moral knowledge, I assess whether these criticisms do indeed discredit appeals to experience as a legitimate source of knowledge and norm for feminist theology. While such critiques pose insightful challenges to assumptions underlying the appeal to experience, I argue that they do not definitively discredit the appeal to experience itself. Drawing on trauma theory and the work of Margaret Farley and Martha Nussbaum, I seek to show how women's experiences can be defended as a credible source of knowledge and a norm for feminist theology.

This paper selects three aspects of consumerism (individualism, the chronically reinvented self, and viewing nearly everything as a product or commodity) and assesses how they pose a challenge to liturgical worship, which is properly grounded in a Christian indentity that is fundamentally communal. When consumerism takes the form of shopping for a parish, it threatens to undermine this communal identity. At the same time, parish-shopping may well be an expression of a sincere search for a vital Christian community. This paper thus neither condemns nor condones parish shopping but stresses rather that there is work to be done to build up the sense of community in Roman Catholic parishes. Liturgical worship is an essential element in that process, but liturgy by itself cannot build or sustain community.

This article focuses on an increasing trend—the attempt to combine responsibilities of parenthood and professional theology in a dual vocation. Today, many theologians are attempting to complete doctoral studies and earn tenure with young children in tow. Most likely, this will become the majority trend in the near future. How well is our profession adjusting to this significant demographic shift? This article compiles results of a survey of parent-theologians, covering family planning decisions, financial stability, attempts to balance work and leisure, and impact of parenthood on their work as theologians, as well as their suggestions for making the profession more conducive to this dual vocation.

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.

Matthew's adroit use of the summary passage at critical junctures in his Gospel to provide the reader with christological and ecclesiological insights has long been noted and the most important of these passages studied. However, for a number of reasons Matthew 15:29-31 has not been extensively probed. Ryan views this summary as the third in a triad of summary passages found between Matthew 11:2-16:20 concerned with the healing activity of an already rejected Jesus and the prophesied obduracy of the religious leadership which will culminate in the death of the Messiah-Son of God.

This is a sequel to the author's “The Theology of Faith” in Horizons of Fall, 1975. In that first survey article it was suggested that Christian faith is now seen as a radical commitment to God precisely through the ordinary things of our world and our history. The present article asks the questions: was this the faith of Jesus, the founder of our faith? Can one speak of Jesus as a man of faith at all? And if one can, how did Jesus himself become the object of a confession of faith, as he certainly did become in our tradition?

This paper explores an issue raised by psychologist Robert Lifton in The Broken Connection. Lifton believes the present threat of total extinction through nuclear war has drastically affected humanity's ability to reconnect life and death, and to make individual death meaningful. The death of everyone—as an imaginable possibility—defeats all expressions of “symbolic immortality,” affirmations of continuity and hope.

How has Christian theology met this predicament? Twentieth-century history has been so menacing and overwhelming that some theologians have found in apocalyptic-eschatological imagery the most appropriate framework to encounter that history and discern its spiritual meaning. Yet this imagery, even when de-literalized, provides at best ambiguous answers. Early twentieth-century theology—Schweitzer, Case—recognized the importance of apocalyptic thought for the New Testament, but easily repudiated this for contemporary life. In contrast, later thinkers such as Cullman, Brunner, and Moltmann make extensive use of eschatological imagery. However, they face the problem raised by Lifton: how to make “hope” vivid to readers already gripped by a future of possible universal catastrophe.

To introduce so dear a friend and so esteemed a colleague, I repair for help to five distinguished, tone-setting keynoters. Each of these keynoters touches themes that reflect the life and the theological mission of Charles E. Curran.

My first keynoter is Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J. In his Presidential Address to the Catholic Theological Society of America he said that Vatican II “implicitly taught the legitimacy and even the value of dissent.” The council, said Dulles, conceded “that the ordinary magisterium of the Roman Pontiff had fallen into error, and had unjustly harmed the careers of loyal and able theologians.” He mentioned John Courtney Murray, Teilhard de Chardin, Henri de Lubac, and Yves Congar. He could surely add the name of Charles E. Curran. Dulles said that certain teachings of the hierarchy “seem to evade in a calculated way the findings of modern scholarship. They are drawn up without broad consultation with the theological community. Instead, a few carefully selected theologians are asked to defend a pre-established position….” Dulles aligned himself with those theologians who do not limit the term “magisterium” to the hierarchy. He spoke of “two magisteria—that of the pastors and that of the theologians.” These two magisteria are “complementary and mutually corrective.” The theological magisterium may critique the hierarchical magisterium.