Ethical deliberations about care for creation require more theological clarity about God's eschatological plan for creation than presently found in church teaching. Nonetheless, we can identify in the writings of recent popes a trajectory toward what I describe as a “covenantal communion” approach. This approach holds that God's eschatological plan is to draw all creatures together in Christ and attributes to creation its own form of agential density through which it becomes, with humanity, a genuine participant in the divine economy. I set this view in contrast to two other approaches: creation as “microcosmic referent” and “humanized abode.” Though versions of these latter two appear in Vatican II documents and in the writings of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, their claims have been moderated in Francis’ move toward a covenantal communion approach. Further developing this approach will help clarify the goods and values at stake in our environmental choices.

In their respective contexts of Roman empire and global neoliberal capitalism, the Jesus movement and the Zapatistas announce that another world is possible and that this world has irrupted in the struggle for that other possible world. This article argues that the practical and theoretical work of the Zapatistas offers to theologians a way to articulate the meaning of the kingdom of God as a world of hope and struggle that is actualized in and informed by struggles to resist fetishization.

This article explores how Christian theology has historically contributed to the modern ideology of Islamophobia. After arguing that contemporary popular and political Islamophobia has its sources in replacement theology, theological supersessionism, anti-Judaism, antisemitism, Christian-Islamic polemics, Orientalism, and modern racism, it seeks to reorient Catholic theology by undoing and unsaying this discursive and political harm. Constructively, the relatively novel genealogy of Islamophobia this article tentatively traces is based on three discursive moves: linking (1) replacement theology/supersessionism with medieval anti-Islamic theology, (2) the latter to Orientalism, and (3) the previous two to Islamophobia. These three discursive moves are possible because they were and remain sustained by supremacist theologies begotten by replacement theology/supersessionism. The article draws from theories of ideology and social imaginaries to recognize that the words, symbols, narratives, and metaphors that constituted a Christian theology of Islam since the seventh-century emergence of the Islamic tradition cannot be subverted merely by forgetting or ignoring them; they cannot be unlearned merely by learning “positive views” of the Islamic religious traditions (from Muslims, scholars, or both); they cannot be undone through a religion-blind, apolitical theology of religions that rejects nothing that is true and holy in religions; finally, they cannot be dismantled even by a Catholic theology of Islam that cherishes specific beliefs and practices in common with Muslims. It concludes by beginning to construct a Catholic theology of interreligious praxis intended to dismantle and disrupt Islamophobia today. This praxis-oriented theology is grounded in a Christian conception of restorative justice and the Catholic sacrament of reconciliation. At the core of this proposal is the assertion that theologies of the past remain the politics of the present. If Catholic theology has shaped the sociopolitical ideology and structure of Islamophobia today, then an anti-Islamophobic Catholic theology must be political; otherwise, it will remain ineffective in undoing the political harm it has produced.

This article analyzes the complex processes of modernization and individualization, as well as how the church has structurally fostered individualization despite its public criticism. First, the article demonstrates how modernization and individualization have gradually restructured human self-understanding into an economic image of humanity: the human person as homo oeconomicus. Second, this article examines the church's relation to modernity, and specifically its critiques of liberalism and economic individualism. However, the church has often generated the conditions and structures for individualization, and by extension the processes of acceleration and economization of the life-world that it criticizes. Three areas in intra-ecclesial discourse that foster individualization are examined: the interiorization of faith, ecclesial centralization and clerical bureaucracy, and the promotion of corporatism and digital immediacy. The article concludes by examining recent papal efforts at structural reform and the degree to which they address previously entrenched problems and point toward a renewed, non-economic anthropology.

The disclosure of serial plagiarism in the extensive theological and journalistic publications of Thomas Rosica, CSB, former Vatican spokesperson and sometime media attaché of the Holy See Press Office, attracted significant media attention in early 2019. This article examines a selection of Rosica's hidden sources, focusing on how passages from magisterial church documents appear without attribution in his theological works. Our examination of this unusual case of plagiarism highlights important facets of authorship and authority in the practice of theology as well as the key role of attestation in magisterial teaching.

Jürgen Habermas’ assessment of the rationality of religious convictions is ambivalent, as it oscillates between a postsecular appropriation of their semantic potentials and a fideistic insistence on their “discursive extraterritoriality.” In this article, I argue that Habermas’ fideistic portrayal of religious convictions is neither compatible with the overall argumentative architecture of his postsecular paradigm nor a logical consequence of Habermas’ philosophical framework in general. Instead, once his fideism is overcome, Habermas’ postmetaphysical discourse theory provides valuable resources for contemporary Catholic theology. This article thus offers both a theological assessment of Habermas’ view of religious belief and an argument for a Catholic appropriation of Habermas’ postmetaphysical thinking.

In the midst of a pandemic, an ongoing global climate emergency, violent white supremacy, economic inequality, and fraying democratic institutions, the work of theologians and religious studies scholars offers a much-needed illumination by attending both to the religious roots of these disfunctions and to religious sources of alternative possibilities. This article argues especially for the importance of religion in providing hope, inspiring unity, warning of perennial human temptations, and encouraging the practices of introspection essential to independent thought. The story of Fr. Félix Varela, Cuban scholar, patriot, and pastor to immigrant Irish in nineteenth-century New York, provides an example of someone whose deep religious faith enabled him to resist common polarizations and to illuminate his time by envisioning and working for a world more just and humane than that imagined by the official Catholicism (or by most of society) in his day.