I argue that the authors of the December 2015 Vatican statement “The Gifts and the Calling of God Are Irrevocable” both present the Jewish Old Covenant as a good covenant (rejecting traditional Christian supersessionism) and nonetheless view Jews’ conversion to the better Christian New Covenant as desirable. I challenge the assumption that post–Nostra Aetate positive views of the Jewish covenant, including the claim that Jews are already “saved,” preclude a desire for Jews to convert to Christianity. On the contrary, I show that the authors’ claim that the New Covenant is the “fulfillment” of the Old Covenant provides a motive for contemporary Christians to emulate the efforts made by those early followers of Jesus who shared the gospel with their fellow Jews. To support my argument, I first carefully study the writings of Cardinal Walter Kasper. The authors of Gifts draw almost entirely on Kasper's nuanced and complex views regarding the desirability of Jewish conversion to Christianity, adopting even his approach to and format for presenting this controversial claim.

Human personhood should be understood as a gift from and to others as well as a permanent and unchanging attribute of what it means to be a human being, for this understanding of human personhood fits better within a contemporary systems-oriented approach to reality. Likewise, for Christians it can also be seen as derivative from a more contemporary process-oriented understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity, namely, as co-constitutive members of a transcendent community or archetypal life-system. Finally, given the individualistic character of contemporary Western culture, an emphasis on the interdependence of entities on one another rather than on their independence from one another seems to be more needed at the present moment.

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.

This article tries to construct an ethical framework to address the issue of infertility through a creative use of Thomas Aquinas’ thought. Involuntary childlessness is one of the forgotten issues among Christian communities in West and Central Africa. Starting with the scientific definition of infertility, the article shows the gender differences and biases in the perception of childlessness in that region. Although infertility equally affects men and women, the latter, most of the time, are blamed for it. Although Scripture contains some ambivalent elements concerning infertility, on the whole it offers valuable insights by presenting childlessness as a type of life also blessed by God. Likewise, the language of the church since Vatican II has done away with the hierarchical view of the ends of marriage (or the idea that procreation is the primary goal of marriage over and against the unity of the spouses). Aquinas teaches us about the true nature of marriage and the value of childlessness. In addition, Aquinas’ understanding of love helps articulate areas that could guide infertile individuals and childless couples, on the one hand, and Christian communities, on the other hand, who have to deal with childless members.

Christianity espouses the dignity of all humanity and professes welcome for all to the communion of saints. Yet people with disabilities, especially those with more severe or profound physical or psychological disabilities, are largely invisible inside our houses of worship. This article examines the meaning of dignity and inclusion through the lenses of Christian anthropology, disabilities liberation theology, and the lived experience of persons with disabilities. It concludes with some suggestions on how to begin inclusion.

In recent years, discussion has raged within theologies inspired by Continental philosophy of religion regarding the supposed “overcoming” of ontotheology. In this article, I will consider the theological methodology of Louis-Marie Chauvet, a sacramental theologian whose work has been highly influenced by these discussions. For Chauvet, it is the liturgy that provides human beings with the necessary means, not for overcoming ontotheology, but for learning to live with it in a healthy way. Through the liturgy, we learn to work through ontotheology, and thus to hear the call of Being to appropriation and thankful response. This is, however, quite a bit to ask of our liturgies, and I suggest that the only way that Chauvet's method can function is if it is placed in a framework of dialogue. I adopt this framework from Chauvet and expand upon it, which results in an innovative relecture of Chauvet's theology.

The sweeping movement of student protest over racial discord on university campuses reflects intractable divisions in the public square. Catholic higher education is obligated by its mission to address this interpersonal situation with practices of healing as integral to its formational end. This article approaches Thomas Groome's shared Christian praxis as a “pedagogy of caritas” in light of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. The focusing activity and five movements of shared Christian praxis enact the dynamic structure of Bernard Lonergan's cognitional and existential interiority. Friendship praxis sets the conditions for the possibility of self-transcendence and healing for a commodified and increasingly diverse community of learners. A pedagogy of friendship is a promising integrative teaching strategy for a Catholic university in our divided time.

My goal in this article is to explicate the perspective of Kierkegaard's pseudonymous author, Johannes Climacus, on the leap to faith, based on Climacus’ presentation in Philosophical Crumbs. I will argue that for Climacus, during the moment in which this leap is a possibility, while God must bring to the individual both the truth and the condition for understanding it, the leap is a decision by the individual, an existential decision to believe. In attempting to understand Climacus, it is important to use his definition of faith—namely, that faith is a passion and that it is the condition for understanding the paradox of the Christian conception of the Incarnation (as opposed to a synonym for religiosity), because this allows us to understand why faith is not an act of will but is simultaneously a decision (because belief is a free expression of will).

This theological roundtable discussion on shared communion, presented at the 2018 CTS Convention, reflects twenty-plus years of conversations among theologians: some Catholic, members of the College Theology Society; and some Baptist, members of the National Association of Baptist Professors of Religion, region-at-large. They gather at the annual convention of the College Theology Society not only for intellectual exchange but also for common prayer. Over the decades, the Baptist theologians have always participated in Mass. Their fidelity informed Sandra Yocum's presidential address at the convention, which began with a lament over our Christian disunity reflected in the faces of my dear friends in Christ, these Baptist theologians who with all humility process with the other communicants, but with arms crossed over their chests to signal that they cannot receive Christ, whom they too believe to be present in the sacrament.1 The lament sparked a desire in Curtis Freeman to respond with this careful study of the rules among Baptists and Catholics for intercommunion. The subsequent thoughtful responses from Catholics and Baptists bring to the foreground the painful reality of Christ's wounded Body that neither refraining from nor participating in the Eucharist will fully resolve. Yet, each respondent affirms hope in the Eucharist's healing power and echoes Christ's own prayer “that they may all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you” (John 17:21).

In April 2016 Pax Christi International and the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace cosponsored the Nonviolence and Just Peace Conference at the Vatican. The conference issued an Appeal calling on the Catholic Church to make nonviolence and just peace central to its purpose, while also urging it to cease teaching or using just war theory. This roundtable consists of four perspectives from Catholic moral theologians who offer just-war responses to this Appeal.

Gerald Schlabach wrote that a key test of progress for Catholicism in its dialogue with the historic peace churches on nonviolence and the use of force would be that the church's teaching on nonviolence would become “church wide and parish deep.” While modern Catholic social teaching has recognized nonviolence since the time of the Second Vatican Council, and Pope Saint John Paul II gave nonviolence strong, formal endorsement in his 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus, the church's teaching on nonviolence is hardly known in the pews. If they are familiar at all with Catholic teaching on peace and war, most Catholics would know the just-war tradition, especially through the US bishops’ 1983 pastoral letter, The Challenge of Peace. But the newer and still relatively slight teaching on nonviolence is hardly known at all. Only by rare exception do Catholic preachers address issues of peace and war.

As Freeman points out, the 1993 Directory for the Application of Principles and Norms on Ecumenism generally repeats the criteria from 1972 but drops the reference to “serious spiritual need,” raising the bar to “danger of death” in paragraph 130. I would add here that the 1993 Directory also says nothing about lacking recourse to the sacrament in one's own tradition for a prolonged period of time. The 1993 text states only that the person in question be “unable to have recourse for the sacrament desired to a minister of his or her own Church or ecclesial Community.”

The Appeal declares, “We believe that there is no ‘just war,’” because it has been “used to endorse rather than prevent or limit war,” and it “undermines the moral imperative to develop tools and capacities for nonviolent transformation of conflict.” In what follows, I offer a response to the latter part of the Appeal’s criticism, one that has been similarly made by the Protestant pacifist theologian Stanley Hauerwas and the Irish Catholic theological ethicist Linda Hogan—namely, that JWT prevents us from imagining alternatives to war. For Hauerwas and Hogan, “just war” has been a dangerous figment of our imagination since the time of Saint Ambrose and Saint Augustine, and it has thereby impeded Catholics’ ability to imagine nonviolence as a faithful and practical way for addressing conflict. Similarly, the Appeal asks us to imagine a church without “just war” and, instead, with “just peace.” However, while I take both the Appeal’s criticism of just war and its call for nonviolence seriously, I think its portrayal of just war is a distortion and fails to acknowledge that just war theorists actually have imaginatively developed tools and capacities for addressing conflict that are directed toward protecting and building just peace. In the end, I will also suggest that the Appeal lacks consideration of the ethic behind just war, which actually provides a method for moral thinking about the use of all forms of force—not only war, but also nonviolent resistance, which is also a form of force—and, indeed, many other questions in applied ethics.

While I am not claiming credit for this year's panel session devoted to the question of intercommunion in the context of College Theology Society's convention with Baptist participation, I am deeply gratified that we as the church's theologians, Baptist and Catholic, are now raising the question in this manner, and that Professor Freeman has made clear for us what the ground rules seem to be for playing the hypothetical game of Baptist-Catholic intercommunion at a CTS convention. I have nothing to add to his spot-on summary of the Baptist “rules” for open communion and the Catholic “rules” for exceptional intercommunion articulated in the documents he has cited.

I begin with thanks to Professor Freeman for a helpful article, and with the admission that I am torn by this topic. On the one hand, I have shared by direct experience and that of friends the same pain Freeman describes of being unable to commune at the Saturday evening mass at the CTS/NABPR convention. I remember Sandra Yocum's words of public lament in her 2014 CTS presidential address. Some of us may remember our convention at Spring Hill in 2005 when the celebrant at the Saturday mass that year, Fr. David Robinson, who grew up a New England Congregationalist, spoke with deep anguish of his deep desire to share communion with the Baptists, coupled with the inability to do so. We had sung Susan Toolan's “I Am the Bread of Life,” hearing in our own voices Christ's promise of being raised up on the last day. And then we sensed how that day was not yet. But we should remember that the “last day” when we will unquestionably be one, if I may borrow words from the poet W. H. Auden, “is not in our present, and not in our future, but in the fullness of time.” So we ask now about the prospects of provisionally—proleptically—embodying that oneness this side of the eschaton.

Pope Francis titled his recent World Day of Peace message “Nonviolence: A Style of Politics for Peace.” The use of the word “style” is unusual but important. It reveals the significance of the way we talk about the questions of violence and peace—our rhetoric, in other words. It has been suggested that talking about “just war theory” can, in fact, obstruct the development and use of nonviolent techniques for the resolution of conflict. My contribution to this roundtable will examine the extent to which that is the case.

I am an unapologetic admirer of rules. In fact, one of my friends has dubbed me “the rule follower.” So, I greatly appreciate Curtis Freeman's careful delineation of Baptist as well as Catholic rules for intercommunion and commend his quite appropriate apprehension about “breaking the rules.” To ignore these rules subverts the sacred reality that intercommunion is seeking to promote. But what if, instead of thinking about how to avoid breaking the rules, we gave serious attention to what fulfilling these rules might mean? Is there any circumstance in which faithful Baptists might partake in communion with their equally faithful Catholic brothers and sisters that might actually affirm these rules that guide and limit intercommunion? I take this approach to the question of intercommunion relying on two sources. First, the rules themselves, especially the recognition of “profound spiritual need,” invite spiritual discernment as much as canonical jurisprudence. Second, these rules share an affinity with “Rule,” long in the Christian tradition, understood as a detailed guide for a communal way of life that gradually forms participants into the life of Christ.

This final section focuses less on theory, theology, and ethics and more on the practical implications if the church were to abandon JWT. After such sustained critique, it is crucial to reiterate the points made earlier regarding how many just-war thinkers, like ourselves, affirm what is in the Appeal. We agree with and support most of what it says. Where we part company with the Appeal is over the two sentences and one bullet point (forty-five words) outlined above.