Theology lives in the days of the frost. Postmodern philosophers question the very possbility of God-language. In response, Edith Wyschogrod's Saints and Postmodernism attempts to develop an ethics grounded in lives of saints. Her definition of “saint” as one devoted to the alleviation of pain is problematic; moreover, her definition does not in fact grow out of hagiography. Rather, it reduces saints' lives to didactic tales. Still, Wyschogrod points toward a more adequate description of the saint as one who sees the being of others as constituted by a lack. An emphasis on otherness is developed in the theologies of Mark Taylor and Charles Winquist. Using their insights and Wyschogrod's, I propose that Christianity turn to the “minor sun” of saints' lives to rethink theology in light of the postmodern critique.

Dorothy Day has received a great deal of attention from contemporary scholars of U.S. Catholicism. This article makes a unique contribution to this growing literature by offering a close reading of Dorothy Day's autobiography, The Long Loneliness. The purpose is to highlight the narrative's integrity as a sustained argument in defense of Christian faith transformed by wrestling with the Marxist charge: religion is the opiate of the people. Day deserves credit for a daring approach to Catholic apologetics in the 1950s. The article presents the narrative as a dialectic between the personal and the political, the material and the spiritual, and the natural and the supernatural that resolves itself in a creative synthesis through the Catholic Worker Movement. Day embraces Marxist aspirations and acknowledges their criticism's truth in defending the authenticity of her Catholic commitment. Day simultaneously demonstrates that the Incarnation's reality informs traditional Catholicism with its radical political character.

The traditional understanding of the sacramentality of marriage, introduced by Augustine, systematized by the medieval scholastics, and still central to Catholic institutional thought, has in recent years been criticized as being internally incoherent and externally counterfactual. These difficulties may be perceived within the frame of reference provided by Thomas Kuhn to be anomalies such as those that can be expected to appear during a transition from normal science to a new paradigm for explaining the data once satisfactorily accounted for by that science. A new paradigm or conceptual frame of reference is proposed for the sacramentality of marriage, and evidence is presented that this new paradigm is in fact emerging in the theological literature on marriage. The reader is cautioned, however, that the emerging paradigm of marriage's sacrmentality is not what it is usually thought to be.

This article explores the key factors conditioning the position of women in developing countries and then searches official Catholic social teaching for a response. The first major section of the article explores gender bias as it shapes development efforts in the third world. Findings indicate that substantial progress in developing nations depends on including women in decision-making processes at all levels. Such inclusion requires improved access to resources as a significant element in the elimination of gender bias.

The second section of the article addresses official Catholic social teaching as it pertains to the status of women in society. This section concludes by identifying two significant affirmations in the tradition and three limitations.

A final section challenges the tradition of Catholic social teaching by calling for both the development and adoption of an anthropology that realizes the radical equality and fundamental difference between women and men and a fuller inclusion of women in the very process of developing Catholic social teaching.

Thomas Merton is one of the most significant figures in twentieth-century Catholicism. His books are still to be found in almost any bookstore with a section devoted to religion. Yet today, just over twenty-five years after his death, both Merton himself and the monastic life he represented are virtually unknown to most Roman Catholic undergraduates. This article describes a seminar on Merton offered for undergraduates. It outlines the books and articles used, the way the seminar was structured, and the reactions of the students, to Merton himself and to the issues he raises in his works.