Walking with Jesus Christ: Catholic and Evangelical Visions of the Moral Life is the collected essays and consensus statements of the second round of the National Evangelical-Catholic Dialogue. In 2021 the National Evangelical-Catholic Dialogue completed its four-year round of discussion on the moral life, at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, MN. Sessions were held each year on the following topics. In 2017, the dialogue discussed the norms governing the moral life. In 2018, the dialogue discussed sexual ethics. In 2019, the dialogue discussed social ethics. Finally, in 2021 the dialogue discussed the relationship of the moral life to eschatology. At each of the annual meetings, members presented background papers that formed the basis of that meeting’s discussion and became starting points for constructing a common statement. These common statements and background papers make up this book. The members of the dialogue hope this book will provide a fruitful starting point for future conversations between evangelicals and Catholics. The Catholic essays begin with the contributions of Catholic theologians Daniel Keating, William Stevenson and Christian Washburn, who examine the various norms for Catholic moral theology including the role of Scripture, tradition, magisterium, and natural law (2017). David Fleischacker, Daniel Keating, and Christian Washburn examine the morality of marriage, contraception, abortion, and homosexual acts (2018). Daniel Keating and William Stevenson discuss social ethics, including Catholic social teaching and socialism (2019). David Fleischacker and Christian Washburn discuss the relationship of the moral life to our final beatific end (2020). The Evangelical essays begin with the contribution of Evangelical theologians Bruce Cromwell and Dennis Jowers who explore the norms of Protestant Ethics (2017). David Van Drunen and Luke Geraty discuss sexual ethics from different ends of the Evangelical perspective (2018). Glen Menzies and Steve Hoskins evaluate approaches to evangelical social ethics from Pentecostal and Wesleyan points of view (2019). Bruce Cromwell and Steve Hoskins discuss the notions of eschatology and ethics from a Wesleyan viewpoint (2020).

For Augustine, that the Word became flesh transformed a merely human understanding of the virtues and grounds all virtue in humility. The Way of Humility: Augustine’s Theology of Preaching explores how this truth became a new paradigm for understanding the scriptures and thus, how Augustine embodied the virtue in the preaching of the scriptures. One of Augustine’s most devoted students, Possidius, said that anyone can learn from reading Augustine, but “those were able to profit still more who could hear him speak in church and see him with their own eyes. Truly, he was indeed one of those of whom it is written, ‘speak this way and act the same way.’” The Way of Humility searches for evidence of the virtue of humility in action through the preaching of the humble Word in the sermons of Augustine. Many know of Augustine through his more famous treatises but few have encountered the Doctor of Grace where he had his most immediate impact, preaching. The Way of Humility follows the sermons through several traditional theological loci, ecclesiology, Christology, soteriology to uncover what can be learned about Augustine’s theology through the way he preached to a mixed audience of urbanites and rustics, many of whom did not have the benefit of a formal education. Throughout the book, we see the interplay between Augustine’s action in speech and Augustine’s more direct statements on his theology of Preaching. Through handing over Christ in his sermons, he became himself an example of humility for the congregation on their journey toward the final end for all people, the Beatific Vision.

The Wayfarer’s End follows the human person’s journey to union with God in the theologies of Saint Bonaventure and Saint Thomas Aquinas. It argues that these seminal thinkers of the 13th Century emphasize scriptural notions of divine rewards as ordering principles for the graced movement of human viators to eternal life. Divine rewards emerge as a fundamental category through the study’s emphasis on Thomas and Bonaventure as scriptural commentators and preachers whose work in sacra pagina structures the content of their sacra doctrina. Shawn Colberg places Bonaventure’s and Aquinas’s scriptural, dogmatic, and polemical works into conversation and illumines their mutually edifying depictions of the way to eternal life. Looking to the journey itself, The Wayfarer’s End demonstrates a nuanced understanding of the roles played by God and human beings in the movement to full beatitude. To that end, it explores the relationships between grace and human nature, the effects of sin on the human person, the vital themes of predestination, conversion, perseverance, and the place of “reward-worthy” human action within the overall movement toward union with God. While St. Bonaventure and St. Thomas both stress the priority of grace and divine action for the journey, the study also illustrates their distinct frameworks for human action, unpacking Bonaventure’s preference for the language of acceptatio versus Thomas’s emphasis on ordinatio. This difference inflects their language of rewards, their exposition of scripture, and the scope of free human action in the movement to union with God. This study places the two most seminal theologians of the 13th Century into conversation on central and enduring topics of Christian life. Such a comparative study has been sorely lacking in the field of studies on Aquinas and Bonaventure. It offers insight to those interested in high scholastic thought, Franciscan and Dominican understandings of human salvation, and Thomist and Franciscan theology as it pertains to questions of the Reformation, including biblical exegesis on justification and sanctification. Above all, the study appreciates and foregrounds the richness of Bonaventure’s and Aquinas’s vocations: mendicant theologians concerned to share the fruits of contemplation with fellow friars and others seeking the goal of the wayfarer’s end.

Just what is a human being? Who counts? The answers to these questions are crucial when one is faced with the ethical issue of taking human life. In this affirmation of the intrinsic personal dignity and inviolability of every human individual, John Kavanaugh, S. J., denies that it can ever be moral to intentionally kill another.

Today in every corner of the world men and women are willing to kill others in the name of "realism" and under the guise of race, class, quality of life, sex, property, nationalism, security, or religion. We justify these killings by either excluding certain humans from our definition of personhood or by invoking a greater good or more pressing value.

Kavanaugh contends that neither alternative is acceptable. He formulates an ethics that opposes the intentional killing not only of medically "marginal" humans but also of depersonalized or criminalized enemies. Offering a philosophy of the person that embraces the undeveloped, the wounded, and the dying, he proposes ways to recover a personal ethical stance in a global society that increasingly devalues the individual.

Kavanaugh discusses the work of a range of philosophers, artists, and activists from Richard Rorty and Søren Kierkegaard to Albert Camus and Woody Allen, from Mother Teresa to Jack Kevorkian. His approach is in stark contrast to that of writer Peter Singer and others who believe that not all human life has intrinsic moral worth. It will challenge philosophers, students of ethics, and anyone concerned about the depersonalization of contemporary life.

Written by Dominican preacher and mystic Bl. Henry Suso (c. 1300-1366), Horologium Sapientiae, or Wisdom's Watch upon the Hours, was one of the most successful religious writings of its time. Now it is offered to the English-speaking world in a new translation based on Pius Knzle's critical Latin edition.

No description available

No description available

On November 10, 2017, Pope Francis became the first pontiff in the nuclear era to take a complete stand against nuclear weapons, even as a form of deterrence. At a Vatican conference of leaders in the field of disarmament, he made it clear that the possession of the bomb itself was immoral. A World Free from Nuclear Weapons presents the pope’s address and original testimony from Nobel Peace Prize laureates, religious leaders, diplomats, and civil society activists.

These luminaries, which include the pope and a Hiroshima survivor, make the moral case against possessing, manufacturing, and deploying nuclear arms. Drew Christiansen, a member of the Holy See delegation to the 2017 United Nations conference that negotiated the Treaty to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons, helps readers to understand this conference in its historical context.

A World Free from Nuclear Weapons is a critical companion for scholars of modern Catholicism, moral theology, and peace studies, as well as policymakers working on effective disarmament. It shows how the Church’s revised position presents an opportunity for global leaders to connect disarmament to larger movements for peace, pointing toward future action.

This allegorical retelling of the biblical creation story blends science, poetic understanding, and the spiritual revelations of Swedish visionary Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772). Starting with the creation of the earth from the substance of the universe, Swedenborg takes the reader through the formation of plants, animals, and finally human beings. He puts particular emphasis on the spiritual nature of Adam and Adam’s marriage to Eve. Although not considered one of Swedenborg’s theological works, this book was written just prior to his visionary period and contains the seeds of many of his later ideas, particularly the biblical commentary in Secrets of Heaven. This edition is a reprint of a 1914 English translation by Alfred H. Stroh and Frank Sewall.

This book is a systematic commentary on the Apocalypse of Saint John, examining each chapter and verse based on the original Greek and Latin texts. The underlying hermeneutic is an idealist or allegorical point of view that does not attempt to identify apocalyptic imagery with concrete historical events. Rather, symbols and metaphors are interpreted, with attention to their intertextuality, as paradigmatic of the epic battle between the forces of light and darkness, good and evil, the dragon and the Lamb, playing out not only in the vicissitudes of the world today, but also and especially in one’s personal life. Rather than focusing on sterile symbolisms, the book attempts to inspire a more radical discipleship of Jesus by applying the eschatological imagery to the realm of spiritual discernment. John’s Apocalypse is certainly considered the grand New Testament Theology of History, but here its ethical dualism is mainly taken as a challenge for the interior life, to enter into the worship before the throne of Christ the Lamb, and to realize that where evil makes war against the principles of good, God will remain in control at all times. The author has drawn on two commentators whose work has not been translated and made widely accessible until now, Rupert of Deutz and Adrienne von Speyr. The book aims to relay Revelation’s message of Christ-centered faithfulness and perseverance, of virtue and holiness, once addressed to the seven churches in Asia, to a contemporary readership.

No description available

Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464), widely considered the most important original philosopher of the Renaissance, was born in Kues on the Moselle River. A polymath who studied canon law and became a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, he wrote principally on speculative theology, philosophy, and church politics. As a political thinker he is best known for De concordantia catholica, which presented a blueprint for peace in an age of ecclesiastical discord.

This volume makes most of Nicholas’s other writings on Church and reform available in English for the first time, including legal tracts arguing the case of Pope Eugenius IV against the conciliarists, theological examinations of the nature of the Church, and writings on reform of the papacy and curia. Among the works translated are an early draft of De concordantia catholica and the Letter to Rodrigo Sanchez de Arevalo, which discusses the Church in light of the Cusan idea of “learned ignorance.”

No description available