‘Losing one's faith’ usually refers to ceasing to believe in God and in doctrines. But what changes—and losses—are experienced in the moral life when there is loss of faith? With reference to Aquinas, changes in moral understanding related to the loss of faith are discussed. Next, changes in the life of virtue and so in moral knowledge are examined, and finally changes in the inner moral life—particularly, the loss of moral certainty. The paper suggests that when they experience loss of faith Christian societies can suffer the same sorts of moral losses as Christian individuals. Such loss has inevitable effects upon identity, happiness and capacity to communicate with others.

Following Joseph Ratzinger's call for a ‘criticism of criticism’, this article situates the history of modern biblical criticism in its political context within the centuries long church state conflict. Beginning with Medieval Muslim polemical literature, this article traces through history the politically and theologically motivated philological analyses and hostility toward spiritual exegesis which formed the foundation upon which eighteenth and nineteenth century biblical criticism built. Rather than the result of some objective scientific enterprise, the methods modern Bible scholars employed often served state politics as well as other prior commitments.

The aim of this essay is to bring the philosophical theology of St Augustine, and in particular his anthropology, into fuller dialogue with contemporary psychology, and to examine how psychology and theology might benefit from such an engagement. A further aim is to show that intra-psychic accounts of Augustine's Confessions are insufficient on cultural-psychological, philosophical and theological grounds. To the extent that the modern concept of ‘pure nature’ is incompatible with Augustine's philosophical theology, attempts to develop naturalistic intra-individual, psychological accounts of spiritual change will necessarily be limited once the full ‘ecstatic’ orientation of human existence is factored out. The picture of the person that emerges from naturalistic accounts of any mystical theologian may be plausible within the framework of a classical modern, post Cartesian concept of scientific rationality, and potentially useful for some purposes, but it will be over simplified and never wholly sufficient to account for the potentialities of human existence.

Pope Benedict XVI often uses the concept of the dignity of the human person in his discourse. This article firstly attempts to present a synthesis of Benedict XVI's understanding of human dignity. The result is a multidimensional understanding of human dignity based on the belief that the human person is created in the image of God. Human dignity is constituted by the given-ness of human existence, the capacities inherent in being human—freedom, reason, love and community—and the telos of human existence, namely, spiritual union with God and the practical realisation of a peaceful and mutually edifying human coexistence. Based on this understanding of human dignity, Benedict XVI develops a normative morality. The second part of this article asks whether interpretations of this normative morality that would claim that some of these norms are absolute moral norms are in fact correct. Particular attention is paid to the apparent equation or reduction of human dignity to the dignity of life. The conclusion is, though it is possible to read Benedict XVI's normative morality as advocating absolute moral norms, such an interpretation would be usually incorrect in light of Benedict XVI's more comprehensive understanding of human dignity.