The nephew of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger was ordained a priest in the Roman Catholic Church for the Archdiocese of Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany. Heinrich Heidegger, born in 1928, was the son of Fritz Heidegger (1894-1980), the younger brother of the philosopher. Soon after the ordination of a Roman Catholic to the priesthood he celebrates his First Mass, and after that special Eucharist there follows a dinner and reception enhancing the day. The following pages give a translation of the remarks made in 1954 by Martin Heidegger at the dinner after the First Mass of his nephew Heinrich. There are then some reflections on themes from this brief discourse relating to Heidegger’s thinking, motifs like the disclosure of Being, the centrality of individual existence, and the pervasiveness of history. In 2002, Fr. Heinrich Heidegger responded to an inquiry about the priest’s close relationship to his uncle, and that essay gives a further context for information on Heidegger and faith and church.

Karl Rahner’s transcendental Christology examined the conditions for the possibility of faith in Christ and presented human nature as developing in response to God’s grace. This article affirms Rahner despite the critiques of Michel Henry, Roger Haight, John McDermott, Patrick Burke, and Donald Gelpi. Rahner’s Christology is not a phenomenology (Henry) but a theology that affirms God’s presence in history. To be sure, some critics have attacked Rahner for emphasizing God’s initiative and diminishing human responsibility (Haight) and for uncritically accepting Greek metaphysics (Gelpi). Yet Rahner rightly depicted Christ as a sacrament of the Father’s will, an event in history with consequences for all time. Other critics have accused him of obscuring the distinction between God and humanity (McDermott) and suggesting that there are two conscious subjects in Christ (Burke). This article accepts Rahner’s view of Jesus as both the presence of God’s Word and the human response to it.

This article responds to the article by R. R. Reno that appeared in the May 2013 issue of the journal First Things. In that article, Reno calls Rahner a restorationist, an integralist, and the “ultimate establishment theologian,” who reassured but failed to challenge the mind-set of the Church before Vatican II. Reno also claims that Rahner had a negative impact on the Church, blaming him for the many deficiencies Reno sees in contextual, feminist, liberation, and revisionist moral theology. The first part of this current article looks at the term intégrisme, and rebuts Reno’s suggestion that Rahner is an integralist. The second section explores Reno’s charge that “Rahner’s time has passed.” The third part examines the ecclesiologies of Reno and Rahner, highlighting the differences between the two and the implications for theology. The article concludes with a brief discussion of Rahner’s contribution to theology in his own right.

This essay argues that Locke’s presentation of justification and the soteriological framework in which it is placed in The Reasonableness of Christianity is broad enough to encompass all “Christian” views on the topics except antinomian ones. In other words, the focus of the treatise is not Locke’s personal views of justification and the broader doctrine of salvation but an ecumenical statement of them. Locke’s personal conclusions on certain theological issues discussed in the opening pages of The Reasonableness of Christianity has led most to assume that the soteriological discussion that follows reveals Locke’s own personal theological position despite clear indications of his ecumenical intent in The Reasonableness of Christianity and elsewhere.

Rahner’s work offers several starting points for Catholic theology’s necessary conversion on gender issues. His theology of the symbol sets the stage for an analysis of how “woman” functions in theological anthropology, and for a discussion of how “male” and “female” should be understood in the light of the critique of feminist thought. In short, how do we understand symbols, theologically, as expressive? Linking Rahner’s day and ours, I will then consider how Marian themes were treated by Lumen Gentium and Sacrosanctum Concilium, and how ecclesial questions since then further illustrate the ongoing struggle over the symbol “woman.” Finally, Rahner’s approach to conversion will be employed, as a way of illustrating the intimacy and ubiquity of sexism, given his sense that conversion engages not only isolated actions, but “the whole human being.”

Gilson became familiar with American academic life and language during the summer of 1926 when he first visited the United States and taught two summer courses at the University of Virginia. His international renown as well as his popularity at the University of Virginia resulted in a second visit in 1937 to present the Richard Lectures on Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages, which focused on the challenging theme of attempting to bring faith and knowledge into an organic unity. His dissection of three main philosophical traditions in the Middle Ages constituted an important step in Gilson reaching a satisfactory understanding of the relationship between philosophy and theology within the thought of Saint Thomas Aquinas.

This essay argues that Heidegger’s theological thinking, best expressed by his “last god” from his 1930s Contributions to Philosophy, is a radicalization of his early Pauline phenomenology from the 1920s. I claim that Heidegger’s theological thinking, including his onto-theological critique, is in no way incompatible with Christian philosophy, but in fact furthers the Christian philosophical endeavor. The tenability of this thesis rests on disputing three critiques of Heidegger’s theology put forth by John D. Caputo, Richard Kearney, and Jean-Luc Marion, all of whom argue that Heidegger and Christianity are incompatible.

How did faith in the resurrected Jesus arise? Can we reconstruct, or deconstruct, the original Easter story? What are the implications of the empty tomb, the women’s failure to believe, and the lack of appearances in Mark? These questions are raised and a proposal offered in this chapter from the author’s forthcoming book, The First Coming.

To avoid the difficulties that follow from essentialism in ethics, a new account of generality is required. The first half of this paper develops such an account by considering the work of Levinas and of Merleau-Ponty who turn to the incarnate subject as expressing a mode of generality of which universals and essences are derivative types. I call this kind of generality “carnal generality” and the context-specific complexes that exhibit it “carnal generals.” In the second part I turn to paradigmatic lives both within and outside of religious tradition to show how such lives function as carnal generals. I examine some competing claims, Nelson Goodman’s account of samples and Alasdair MacIntyre’s view of the virtues as they bear on resolving ethical disputes, and suggest reasons for preferring a phenomenological view of paradigmatic lives.

The central theme is a hitherto unknown explanation of the “temporality” of the person as proposed by the late Max Scheler. The first part deals with the meaning of “absolute time” in general. The second part shows how the temporality of the person is to be seen as “absolute” time on the basis of two opposing principles in man: the “life-center” or impulsion, and “mind” which, without the former, remains powerless, but conjoined with it “become” personal in absolute time.

In this article, the activity of conscience around abortion serves as an example to illustrate the thesis that adequate moral decisions require knowing our feelings. Coming to know how and why we feel as we do is a complicated process involving psychoanalytic exploration of the unconscious. In abortion it involves coming face to face with our feelings about our mothers, about motherhood, and about our own infancy and childhood. Failure to come to grips with such feelings allows our unconscious to disguise our feelings to ourselves, and thus to manipulate our moral decisions.

After summarizing Plantinga’s critique of “classical foundationalism” and his substitute, Reformed epistemology, the paper argues that Reformed epistemology has so many problems that it is not an adequate substitute for classical foundationalism. Given Plantinga’s reformed epistemology, believers of any religion could have “knowledge of their God.” This is because Plantinga has not set forth the justifying conditions necessary to distinguish between “properly basic beliefs” as opposed to improperly basic beliefs. Given such problems, it is more reasonable to stick with classical foundationalism rather than Plantinga’s substitute.

Models of the Church (published 1974) still seems adequate as an overview of the dominant types of ecclesiology in our day. It leaves open the question whether a single model could be found to harmonize the differences among the five described. To this end the author later proposed “community of disciples.” Well grounded in the Gospels, this model relies also on the post-Easter concept of discipleship as inclusive of the whole Christian life. Christian catechesis, ministry, and sacraments can profitably be understood as means of fostering discipleship, which also demands missionary activity for its completion. The discipleship model is appropriate in an age of dechristianization, when the Church must necessarily assume the form of a contrast society. This model, however, needs to be appraised in the light of the other five, which in some ways supplement and correct it.

Christian hopes for salvation and redemption, and Marxist promises of emancipation and liberation have had and do have today much to do with each other. Historically they have grown up in dialogue with one another and today they address each other more than ever. Mutual condemnations get us nowhere. This article tries to identify areas of common intention and cooperation, without ignoring real differences, and offers a theological reflection that suggests an alliance with the critical elements within Marxist circles that speak for humanism and the exercise of freedom in the present.

The way in which much of the conventional interpretation has tried to describe the structure of Hegel’s civil society is inaccurate and one-dimensional. To Hegel civil society is not just the economic marketplace, where every individual tries to maximize his or her enlightened self-interest: side by side with the elements of universal strife and unending clash which are of the nature of civil society, there is another element which strongly limits and inhibits self-interest and transcendswhat would otherwise be a universal atomism into a sphere of solidarity and mutuality. The principle of civil society itself is dual. Hegel’s communitas grows organically within civil society itself, and is not imposed on it from outside by the state.

Three distinct objects of attention - nature, culture, and God - call for the recognition of three distinct modes of truth. A single code of rational discourse - the preferred one today is that of the empirio-mathematical study of nature - is not enough to preserve the diversity of meanings called for by the investigation of culture and religion. In particular, the human subject stands in relation to the three objects of enquiry respectively as “door-keeper,” “participant,” and “respondent.” Recognition of the analogous unity of rational discourse is prelude to releasing the spheres of culture and religion from subjection to the epistemology that functions in the natural sciences and frees them for investigation on their own terms.