Newman's article, ‘On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine’, which appeared in the Rambler in July 1859, has become a natural reference point when people consider the sensus fidelium. It is helpful, therefore, to know how the article came to be written and important to be clear about what it actually said. Newman was not supporting some loose exercise in democracy, but was pointing to a vital process for the health of the Church, and encouraging the lay faithful and their pastors to work together. There are lessons too to be learnt from the way people behaved in the aftermath of the controversy. The episode may also be seen as illustrating Newman's life in a nutshell.

The purpose of this essay is to challenge the Modern assertion that economics is a theologically neutral science founded in the pure rationality of number, yet also connected to morality, particularly in regards to the ancient virtue of justice—“to render to each one their due”. Such an understanding has come at great philosophical, moral, and economic cost, as the Great World Recession of 2008–2013 is demonstrating. Instead, I argue that today's current economic crises are due precisely to a loss of orthodox Christian theological understanding of economics and virtue. I make this argument by examining St. Thomas Aquinas’ theological understanding of the virtues and his consequent understanding of political economy in the Summa Theologica. To evaluate the viability of applying Aquinas’ thought in addressing today's severe economic and ethical crises, I also consider Alasdair MacIntyre's call for a revival of Aristotelian virtue ethics along with his advocacy of Thomisic rationalism to combat the West's ethical decline. However, with John Milbank, I maintain that the integral deprivation of Western moral philosophy and political economy requires a distinctly theological solution that supersedes MacIntyre's neo‐Aristotelianism and neo‐Thomism. This is to be found in a (radical) orthodox reading of Aquinas’ Summa.

Stephen Mulhall has distinguished himself as one of the most rigorous and constructive contemporary thinkers on European philosophy and its complicated relationship to Christian theology. A prominent locus of that relationship in his work is the Christian doctrine of original sin, and its criticism but also structural recapitulation in the work of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre and others. This article begins with an overview of relevant themes and their development in Mulhall's writings. I then offer an account of the internal tensions Mulhall identifies in Heidegger et al's ambivalent contestation of original sin, and of his own response. The centre of this response is a reconfiguration of the character of the divine, and of human participation in that divine, as radical self‐abnegation. I conclude with an appreciative critique of Mulhall's proposal as insufficiently responsive to the eschatological framework within which original sin has its doctrinal and ontological place in Thomist thought.

The theme of “presence” holds an ambivalent place in Gerald O'Collins’ Christology. On the one hand the theme is O'Collins’ “most creative contribution to contemporary Christology” and on the other hand the notion itself is a difficult and stubborn concept that can be best understood in an evolutionary way. This deeper analysis of “presence,” which is not offered by O'Collins, occupies a center stage in Bernard Lonergan's Christology. This essay mediates O'Collins’ account of “presence” with Lonergan's evolutionary understanding of the term—a scientific theological account Lonergan worked out in dialogue with phenomenology and the sciences. The paper argues that such a mediation is necessitated by the fact that the meaning of “presence” is key to understanding the Chalcedonian definition of the union of the two natures of Christ, an important Christian dogmatic teaching that both O'Collins and Lonergan consider sacrosanct, and that a clarification of this meaning advances not only Christian understanding of Christ's presence in history, but also Christ's presence in non‐Christian religions.

Human existence entails that our encounter with the world is mediated by the context, historicity, and concrete particularities of that existence. Consequently, this situatedness, which contributes to our pre‐understanding, makes us more or less capable of “seeing” the truth of the world we encounter. The hermeneutical principle of pre‐understanding is sometimes presupposed to be ambivalent toward, if not in opposition to, traditional metaphysics. The present essay shows how traditional metaphysics, specifically of a Thomistic sort, need not be pitted against hermeneutics, but rather, offers the ground for understanding the way in which pre‐understanding, as our habituation into and connaturality with truth, and ultimately, God, is that means by which right interpretation is made possible.

This paper argues that the record of theological dissent at Trent and Vatican I are positive and fruitful sources of theological reflection on the sensus fidelium. Not only do these “minority” voices (minority in the literal sense of opposing a majority group or opinion) help us to accurately interpret the drafts and final documents of these councils, but these minority figures can sometimes preserve the sensus fidelium through their calls for various concessions from the majority.

First, I revisit Trent's decree on Scripture (1546). Due to the interventions of two Italians (Nacchianti, the Bishop of Chioggia, and Bonuccio, the General of the Servites), the question of the relationship between scripture and tradition was left open – that is, the “two‐source” partim‐partim theory was not dogmatically enshrined. This was an important episode wherein a tiny minority gained a critical concession. I argue that this minority intervention bore fruit not only in a final Tridentine document that better echoed the faith of the ages, but also bore fruit centuries later at Vatican II in Dei verbum.

Second, I argue that the minority at Vatican I protected the Church from extreme ultramontanism. This relatively large and intellectually powerful minority, many of them rooted in Gallicanism, played a key role in tempering a dogmatic proclamation that was further balanced and interpreted a century later in Lumen gentium and Christus Dominus.

I conclude by suggesting theologians should look for ways in which the minority at Vatican II could serve future generations of Catholics in unforeseen ways.

The dispute between two of Princeton Theological Seminary's leading Barth scholars concerning theological ontology invites engagement from the contemporary Thomistic tradition. On the one hand, McCormack argues that, in a fully Barthian theological ontology, divine triunity is constituted by the pretemporal election of Jesus Christ. On the other hand, Hunsinger contends that this election is expressive of an antecedent trinity. In the light of scholastic disputes between Dominican and Franciscan theologians, McCormack's proposal is seen to resemble aspects of the Bonaventurean account of triune relationality, particularly the account of procession as constitutive of personal distinction and the affirmation of a primordial ‘primity’ adhering to the Father's innascibility. Whilst McCormack seeks to avoid an undetermined originary plenitude, his treatment of the divine attributes as logically consequent to election risks attributing to pretemporality a status akin to originary primity. Affirming, with Hunsinger, an eternal trinity antecedent to election, the Thomistic tradition nonetheless contains the resources necessary to prevent this antecedence becoming a dissociative antecedence. As such, Thomism preserves divine aseity whilst equally safeguarding against the disconnection of logos asarkos from logos incarnandus that McCormack regards as an unwarranted metaphysical speculation that bypasses the particularity of revelation in Jesus Christ.