Pope Francis’s “Pilgrims of Hope” and Pope Leo’s emphasis on listening and dialogue invite us to reflect on how communal action within the College Theology Society fosters hope in a period of destabilizing social and ecclesial challenges. Hope is both a gift and a task—it sustains action for justice while being nurtured by such action. The story of Joseph of Arimathea provides an example of small, faithful acts of resistance to injustice and dehumanization, taken in community, that can generate hope. Our work together as a theological society and our new CTS initiatives—our visioning process, decolonization efforts, and renewed international partnerships—are practices of intentional communion that embody resistance to polarizing forces and open pathways for theological engagement that promote solidarity, hope, and human flourishing.
Many theologians and philosophers have ignored or dismissed the crucial distinction between theodicies and defenses. The distinction was and is of theological and philosophical importance not only to avoid conflating crucial issues in accounts dealing with the goodness and power of God and the reality of evil, but also to getting the challenges of evil to belief in God rightly located. This article revisits the distinction I discussed more than forty years ago in "The Use and Abuse of Theodicy." The present article analyzes problems in the rhetoric and logic of recent works and their concerns with structural and cultural (social) evil. It focuses on major titles in philosophical theology: Marilyn McCord Adams, Christ and Horrors; Ross McCullough, Freedom and Sin; and Karen Kilby, God, Evil and the Limits of Theology. Along the way, it seeks to clarify some issues I have taken up, especially in The Evils of Theodicy.
This article examines Teresa of Avila's articulation of and response to spiritual suffering in the Interior Castle. It applies a feminist hermeneutic to the text in order to locate the resources that contribute to Teresa's resiliency in the face of this suffering. This approach to the text reveals that Teresa's use of contemplative prayer and interactions with her community facilitate a direct engagement with her suffering so as to make it manageable. Her successful navigation of the spiritual journey allows her the opportunity to share her insights toward resiliency with her community by speaking honestly about her experience in her writings. This article's approach to reading the Interior Castle lifts up Teresa's experience as a potential resource for women today who may have difficulty locating a sense of agency in their own experiences of suffering.
