January 14, 2024
Talk on prayer
In my early years in the priesthood, I was often asked to give talks for days of recollection, as they were called. Re-reading them, I’m struck by how much I had still to learn about the Christian life, even if here or there an insight or two are happened upon.
January 13, 2024
Many models, one Church
This essay appeared in Church magazine, Spring 1993, 12-15. It addresses a common misuse of Avery Dulles’s “model-method” which turned his distinctions among ways of thinking about the one Church into descriptions of distinct Churches. Implicit is also a critique of the method itself which I think set the theological bar too low.
January 12, 2024
Synodality: Against abstraction and reification
This is the paper I delivered at a symposium sponsored by the Vatican office for the Synod of Bishops as part of the preparation for a revision of the statutes of that institution. It was perhaps significant that the theological perspectives I was asked to supply for the exercise of synodality was the next to last of the papers delivered on that occasion….
"In verbo veritatis" (2 Cor 6:7) 