Volume 6, Issue 3, October 1993

In order to renew the Catholic Church, we need to re-imagine it as inclusive rather than exclusive, as offering to each of us, in community, healing for our shared neediness.  Out of our individual frailty a whole community can be re-imagined, particularly in the context of worship and eucharistic sharing.

This article argues that the cultural transformation of our times, and the world-community it is bringing into being, compel Christian thought to re-assess the “exclusivist” position which has made genuine dialogue with non-Christian religions almost impossible.  It is suggested that the two basic axioms of Christian faith (affirming the unique status of Christ in the plan of God and the universality of the salvation which he has brought) can retain their absolute character without impeding a dialogue in which Christians have much to learn from other religious traditions.  This will mean that the healthy agnosticism demanded by Christian faith itself is to be taken seriously.

This article argues for a reappraisal of the nature of doubt. Doubt is itself an ambiguous phenomenon: it may signify unbelief but it may also be an expression of faith. Two major theological approaches to doubt are considered, as evidenced in the works of Newman and Tillich. Neither one is adequate to the ambiguity of doubt.  The second part of the article explores the significance of doubt as a factor in the Australian religious context, drawing on contemporary Australian literature to illustrate the ambiguity, and possible significance for theology, of that doubt.

This article explores three overlooked contemporary arguments concerning faith (raised by Iris Murdoch, Boyce Gibson and Hans Küng).  It shows how these arguments found expression at the beginning of Christian thought, and consider their weaknesses and strengths.

The purpose of this article is to suggest that the Christian doctrines on God and the church are a significantly untapped resource for contributing to the broadening social conversation on the economy.  The logic of the market economy is distinguished from the logic of God’s economy. The conversion which the church has to undergo in order to give witness more credibly to God’s economy is also discussed.  Ours is an in-between time in which the church is invited to bring the strength of religious passion to bear upon the task of redefining economy in a humane fashion.

The evangelistic fervour of the West is misplaced.  It appears to assume the conversion of Asia to European Christianity rather than the conversion of its own colonial tendencies, a conversion which would come about if the church attended to the Gospel that belongs particularly to the poor and to the rejection of Mammon already present in traditional Asian religions.