Fifty years ago, as a glance at standard textbooks would confirm, history as taught in school and university was mostly about battles and wars and the doings of kings and queens. Since then, however, there has been a massive shift of interest to the doings and sufferings of ordinary people— much more difficult as it of course is to reconstruct their lives. More recently still, historians have turned their attention to retrieving the experience of women—ordinary women, in different societies, but also (as in such recent books as Woman Defamed and Woman Defended edited by Alcuin Blamires or Medieval English Prose for Women edited by Bella Millett and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne) women who played a distinctive and much more significant part in history than has previously been acknowledged. Here too, it has become possible to read between the lines of familiar material to discover what was (no doubt inadvertently and unconsciously) played down, skewed, marginalized, concealed or so blatantly omitted that the silences themselves have become eloquent. Texts written, by men for men, although nobody realized that, inevitably operated with a male-oriented system of interests and values. Once the ‘androcentric’ agenda of a document or a cultural artefact is allowed for, we can begin, cautiously and tentatively of course, to look for the lacunae and distortions that might reveal the absent and unidentified women’s experience.

For once, work in Christian theology has not lagged far behind this much wider shift in cultural interest and awareness. There are, of course, always predecessors, belatedly discovered—above all Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) in this case. She stands as the precursor of Christian feminists for whom equal rights for women is the issue.

Recently several works that study Thomas Aquinas’s ethics have been published. Why is it, too, that a return to Thomas’s ethics yields insights into his writings that have escaped us for decades, even centuries? Why is he a perennial font of reflection that prompts new writers to find fresh insights at the end of the second millennium?

The answer rests, I believe, in the fact that he captures an understanding of the moral life that is enormously helpful in forming a vision of the type of people we ought to become. In an age that wants to respect the individual conscience while maintaining a sense of the objectively right and wrong, Thomas provides a framework in which we can achieve both. In order to demonstrate how Thomas accomplishes this, I advance along the way ten key points that Thomas makes that serve as sign posts to our conclusions.

1. Rather than retreat from public life. Thomas believes that good religious life, like good theology, can be at home in the life of the city. At the age of six, Thomas’s parents sent him to the famous Benedictine Abbey, Monte Casino, where they (reasonably) hoped that he would become abbot. At fifteen, he leaves the order and, after five years of studies in Naples, enters the relatively new order of SL Dominic. As urban areas emerge for the first time in human history, the fifteen year old Thomas makes his first adult decision to leave an order that requires a vow of permanence and enters a new order already known for their work of preaching in the cities and teaching in the medieval universities.

Eschatology has found new respect at the heart of theology in the course of the twentieth century. The cross of Christ as a source, subject and description of soteriological concentration has secured a central place in the work of theology in recent decades. More remarkable is the communion of soteriology and eschatology, yielding an emphasized eschatology of the cross, still fresh in contemporary theology. The development of this vision in theology is particularly instructive in the work of five renowned theologians: Moltmann, Kasper, Ratzinger, Küng and von Balthasar.

In 1960 Hans Urs von Balthasar wrote that eschatology is the “sign of the times” of contemporary theology. That significance has strengthened in the passing of over thirty years. The work of many theologians demonstrates the truth of this and one of those most active in the breaking of the eschatological silence is the German theologian, Jürgen Moltmann.

The debate about the morality of using military force in the post-coldwar period has shifted decisively away from theories of ‘just wars’ between states, towards the concept of ‘humanitarian intervention’. The Bosnian and Somalian crises have been widely discussed in this context The reason for the shift is that aggression by one sovereign state against another is no longer the principal focus of attention. Most of the conflicts now going on, or likely to take place in the future, are within the borders of states, not across them. (The Kuwait case was anomalous rather than typical of the period since 1989.) Yet such conflicts can easily turn into threats to peace and security, rightly attracting the attention of the international community under the terms of the UN Charter.

Humanitarian intervention (henceforth, simply ‘intervention’) has been proposed for such purposes as the following:

The morality of intervention in pursuit of such causes such is commonly discussed by applying the traditional criteria for a just war. These criteria are directly relevant, in so far as they apply constraints to the use of organized force, or violence.