One of Catherine of Siena's principal teachings is self‐knowledge, i.e., knowledge of oneself and knowledge of God. Catherine adapted the Christian spiritual tradition on the subject and presented it anew using a number of ingenious images such as a well, a cell within a cell, a peaceful sea, a mirror. So important was self‐knowledge in her life and teaching that she came to regard it as virtually prayer itself.

This article offers an ecclesiological assessment of Pope Benedict's first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est. It draws parallels with an earlier papal encyclical, also, on charity and suggests that the attention in the latter to the exercise of charity within the Catholic church is a much needed supplement to Benedict's attention to what the church might teach the ‘world’ad extra about charity. Indeed, the article suggests that the Catholic church must strive all the more to be truly a sacrament (both a sign and mediation) of that love that constitutes the very threefold being of God, both ad intra and ad extra. But, first and foremost, the church must learn to exercise such love within its own confines before it can hope to teach those in the wider human family anything about charity. The promise of applied trinitarian ecclesiology in serving such ends is highlighted.

Employing several major lines of argument, I claim that Augustine exhibits styles of thought, literary methods and modes of inquiry that are not only accessible to feminist scholarship, but that are genuinely feminist‐friendly. I first examine the Confessions, and then proceed with analyses of Augustine's style, a comparison of his work to that of another major thinker in the Christian tradition, an analysis of his use of the notion of unity, and a final look at City of God. The work of commentators such as Chadwick, Clark, McMahon and Mallard is used in order to support the argument. Augustine's standing as one of the founding Church Fathers may make it difficult for us to mention him in the same breath as the concept of “feminism.”1 Yet in our attempts to try to come to grips with thinkers as diverse as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Quine, we have frequently noticed that concepts useful to feminists are where one finds them.

The reception of Greek learning in mediaeval Islam, Judaism, and Christianity was the occasion for a profound analysis of many theological doctrines. In particular, Neoplatonism and Aristotelian philosophy led to renewed thinking about what it means for God to be the Creator of all that is. In the Latin West, Thomas Aquinas benefited from the works of Avicenna, Averroes, and Maimonides as he fashioned his understanding of creation, understood both philosophically and theologically. The recognition that creation is not a change and as a metaphysical dependence in the order of being does not challenge claims in the natural sciences (e.g., that something cannot come from absolutely nothing) are crucial features of the mediaeval heritage on the relationship between creation and the natural sciences. Indeed, Thomas Aquinas argued that an eternal, created universe was intelligible.

Jean‐Luc Marion's work has received plenty of critical attention in recent years. This paper returns to the core of Marion's project in a rather different way from many of the previous critiques by focussing on two troubling aspects of his work. Firstly, the way in which Marion conceives the relationship between phenomenology and theology is explored in the hope that Marion's missteps might illuminate the ongoing problem of the relationship between philosophy and theology; secondly, the major methodological move which Marion makes, that of linking givenness to phenomenological reduction, is critically examined. This latter critique is the main purpose of the paper, since it is apparent that the role which reduction plays in Marion's phenomenology, when seen under the rubric of a philosophical practice, also indicates one possible route towards the clarification of the first problem, that of the relationship between philosophy and theology.

We no longer believe that the mind is a blank slate that simply records sense‐data as given. Over the last two centuries, we have become increasingly aware of the fact that we bring something to what is given to us in experience. It is what we bring to our experience in the form of our conceptual perspective that molds and shapes our understanding or interpretation of the experience. This is especially true of religious experience. What is given in our God experiences is from God, but our interpretive understanding and reaction to our God experiences are uniquely our own. This paper considers several aspects of religious experience from such a phenomenal perspective.

This essay explores the political and legal problem of legitimate wars in relation to the theological question of justice and peace. It begins by charting a brief genealogical account of how in the modern era the Christian ‘just war’ tradition was formalised and thus drained of much of its substantive and practical context.

The essay also examines and rejects a number of contemporary attempts to use ‘just war’ theory in order to legitimate modern warfare. The argument is that both neoconservative realism and political liberalism instrumentalise the ‘just war’ tradition to defend and extend central state power. Christian pacifism has a compelling critique of realism and liberalism, but it fails to offer a genuinely transformative ontology and politics.

The essay concludes by calling for a metaphysics of peace that can resist the modern primacy of violence and make real the divine promise of a harmoniously ordered cosmos.