Women and the Meaning of Suffering
Maryanne Confoy, pp.249-266
This study proposes that the experience of suffering is an integral aspect of women’s experience of being human. When women minister, it is frequently within the framework of the experience of personally dealing with birth- and death-related aspects of suffering, or in caring for those who are experiencing pain in one form or another. Key understandings from women writers offer a means for the development of a contemporary Christian ministerial response to the experience of suffering. The essay concludes with reflections upon the place of suffering in relation to the mission of the Church.
A Question of Posture: Engaging the World with Justin Martyr, George Lindbeck and Hans Frei
Geoff Thompson, pp.267-287
This essay explores the posture adopted towards the world by one ancient and two contemporary Christian writers: Justin Martyr, George Lindbeck and Hans Frei. They respectively represent what are designated as defensive, receptive, and reciprocal postures, postures which determine the extent to which, and the manner in which, these writers appropriate insights and knowledge from beyond the Christian tradition. The theology and, to a lesser extent, the cultural background of each approach are studied. The particular doctrinal locus in question is Christology. An assessment is made of the link made by each author between the place of Jesus Christ in their theological framework and the posture which they adopt towards the rest of the world. Using the approaches of Justin and Lindbeck as a foil, Frei’s idiosyncratic work will be shown to demonstrate that a high level of reciprocity between the church and the rest of the world is compatible with an orthodox Christology.
Dialectical Approaches to Retrieving God after Heidegger: Premises and Consequences (Lacoste and Marion)
Jeffrey Bloechl, pp.288-298
Contemporary European continental thought about God and faith has long struggled with the rise of secularity, whether as a cultural phenomenon or dimension of human nature. This essay out-lines and questions a recent variant of that exercise which defines itself especially by a dialogue with the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. This approach first concedes that Heidegger’s meditations on the “ontological difference” between being and beings furnishes the basis for an apt description of secular existence, but then attempts to reinstate a more radical conception of God “without being” (J. -L. Marion) and human existence anterior to the field of being (J. -Y. Lacoste). Such an approach raises a number of questions asking for further clarification but perhaps also indicating a different response to the phenomenon of secularity, even as supported by Heideggerian thought. This essay thus profiles the positions of Marion and Lacoste primarily against the background of the Heideggerian thought they attempt to outflank, then enumerates some questions accruing to those positions along the way of sketching them, and finally draws those questions into a pointer toward a different post-Heideggerian approach to God and faith.
The Primacy of Conscience in the Roman Catholic Tradition
Brian Lewis, pp.299-309
Everybody is aware of having a conscience, but ideas of what conscience is and how it operates differ. This is not surprising, as conscience is a complex reality, susceptible to a variety of interpret-ations. The question of the primacy of conscience has also in recent times been the subject of debate. This article aims to shed light on the issue by reviewing the theological development of the meaning and function of conscience in the Roman Catholic tradition through some of the key witnesses of that tradition in the moral field. Most im-portantly, it stresses the often forgotten dimension of the role of the virtue of prudence in the formation and judgment of conscience. This helps to illuminate how the primacy of conscience is to be understood.
Desire in Psychoanalysis and Religion: A Lacanian Approach
Graham E. Bull, pp.310-325
Is religion the death of desire and desire the death of religion, or is there some desire that is authentically religious? Lacanian psycho-analysis has a strong ethic of desire. By using the Lacanian concept of desire and applying it to Buddhist ideas on desire and Christian ideas on desire as seen in St John of the Cross, this study attempts to show that the concept of desire has a central place in religious discourse.
Households of Faith (Jn 4:46-54; 11:1-44):A Metaphor for the Johannine Community
Mary Coloe, pp.326-335
This article proposes that the image of “the household of God” provides the best metaphor of the Johannine community. Within the text itself we are able to see traces of this community in the issues confronting the households at Capernaum and Bethany. The article draws on a previous study of the Temple as the “House of God” and the transferral of this image to the community as the “Household” of God. Where the image of Temple is applied to Jesus in the Gospel narrative, the community is reflected in the different households of faith.
The Old Testament in Aotearoa New Zealand
M. E. Andrew
A. F. Campbell pp.336-338
Dictionary of Fundamental Theology
René Latourelle and Rino Fisichella
Andrew Hamilton pp.342-343
The Art of Theological Reflection
Patricia O’Connell Killen and John de Beer
Maryanne Confoy pp.348-349
Enjoying God’s Beauty
John Navone
Graeme Chapman pp.351-353
John Chrysostom
Wendy Mayer and Pauline Allen
Eric Osborn pp.358-358
Rome Reshaped: Jubilees 1300-2000
Desmond O’Grady
Moira O’Sullivan pp.359-359
MARYANNE CONFOY R.S.C. is a faculty member of Jesuit Theological College and teaches at the Untied Faculty of Theology, Parkville. She is visiting professor at Boston College. She was contributing editor to Freedom and Entrapment: Women Thinking Theology, and is the author of Morris West: A Writer and a Spirituality. Her interests are in the areas of spirituality and religious development, and women’s issues. She is presently working on a biography, Morris West: A Self Composed Man.
GEOFF THOMPSON is an ordained minister of the Uniting Church in Australia and presently serves in the Alphington/Fairfield congregation in inner-suburban Melbourne. His doctorate, on the contribution of Barth’s theology to contemporary theological accounts of non-Christian religions, was completed at Cambridge University in 1995. With Christiaan Mostert, he has recently co-edited Karl Barth: A Future for Postmodern Theology?
JEFFREY BLOECHL studied philosophy, theology, and psychology in Washington, DC and Leuven, Belgium. He is presently Edward Bennett Williams Fellow and Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the College of the Holy Cross, in Worcester, Massachusetts (USA). His publications include Liturgy of the Neighbor. Emmanuel Levinas and the Religion of Responsibility (Duquesne University Press, 2000).
BRIAN LEWIS, after graduating from the Angelicum and the Academia Alphonsiana, Rome, with a Doctorate in Sacred Theology, taught Systematic and Moral Theology for many years, first at the Redemptorist Seminary at Ballarat, then on campuses of the present Australian Catholic University in Sydney. He has held a number of positions on various committees and is now living in retirement in Ballarat.
GRAHAM E. BULL studied theology, philosophy, and anthropology at undergraduate level. He has an MA in anthropology. He trained as an inter-cultural therapist at University College, London and as a psycho-analyst at The Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research (London). He now works part time as a counsellor in a refugee agency and is in private practice as a psychoanalyst in Wellington, New Zealand.
MARY COLOE P.B.V.M., lectures in Scripture at Australian Catholic University, St. Patrick’s Campus, Melbourne. Her doctoral thesis is to be published early 2001 by Michael Glazier/Liturgical Press under the title, God Dwells With Us: Temple Symbolism in the Fourth Gospel. Her current research extends the work of this thesis to a study of Johannine ecclesiology and the use of household imagery in the New Testament
