For most readers the conceptual elements of Whitehead's doctrine of God stand out more than the imaginative elements. If we take a more careful look at his understanding of the role of imagination in various realms and at his choice of particular images to illustrate his view of God, however, we can appreciate better the primary concerns that underlie his reformulation. We also find a consistency of purpose in relating images to his philosophical system and a richness that otherwise goes unnoticed. The shortcomings in his use of imagination result from a neglect of certain aspects of experience.

Drawing lessons from literary dialogues on religious issues, this essay offers a rhetorical and hermeneutical analysis of the workings and achievements of theological discourse. The rationality proper to theological discourse is found to be a function of interlocutors' communicative actions and reactions, describing the social processes by which speakers sustain common space and time for persuasion and understanding. Standards of rationality are idiosyncratic not simply to individual cultural-linguistic frameworks, but to public, dialogical situations which speakers must create and sustain in their communicative interaction.

Although Catholicism and evangelical Protestantism characteristically view each other only at great distance, the present article finds evidence of methodological similarity between leading figures of each tradition. The similarities between Karl Rahner and Edward John Carnell may be traced not to mutual influence, but rather to a common desire to overcome the epistemological weaknesses of Kant by means of beliefs and categories expressive of the Christian tradition which nonetheless appreciate the subjective beginning point of the modern period. In particular, this article explores the significance of Jesus within a theological approach broadly construed as transcendentalism It asks what role is played by an incarnate God in a theology whose distinctive mark is that all moral and cognitive progress is possible only on the presupposition of the existence of God, thus seemingly making an incarnation of God redundant. Through different perspectives, both Rahner and Carnell show on the contrary that it is only because God's character is to transcend Himself that the phenomenon and the question of human transcendence arise as possibilities at all. A summary critique suggests that Carnell's emphasis on cross is not as successful in making this point as is Rahner's on cross and resurrection.

A critique of the distinction in the Peace Pastoral between stating moral principles and addressing concrete questions. The distinction seems to be an example of the invalid dichotomy between analytic and synthetic truths; it is also inapplicable to the bishops' condemnation of nuclear war as a concrete action immoral in principle. Thus the use of the distinction introduced confusion into the bishops' interpretation of the principles of just war and obscurity into their conclusion about the concrete question of nuclear deterrence. A dialectical methodology, critically sounder and implicit in much of the pastoral, would have made their argument more consistent and more cogent.

This essay examines an approach to the first course which aims to be flexible enough to allow for a diversity of emphases reflecting the strengths and interests of specific teachers, but specific enough to justify its status as a core requirement and as the first course in theology. The correlation between theology and anthropology provides the key for maintaining this balance. The syllabus which illustrates this coalesces around several sets of interrelated images, questions, and themes which seek to formulate a theology for the head, heart, hands and feet.

Traditionally, western theologies have been systematic, orthodox, dogmatic, and ecclesiastical. Recently, however, liberal, neo-orthodox, philosophical, and radical theologians have begun to reform the theological enterprise, and in turn to prepare the way for what has been called “world theology.” Whereas the traditional theologian viewed other faith communities as less truthful than his or her own, the world theologian is the Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist who views other theologies and world views non-exclusivistically, and from within the other's viewpoint.

W. C. Smith captures the Janus-nature of this emerging world theology in one sentence—“All theology is self-theology, and yet it must exclude no one.” According to this assessment, today's theological task must be autobiographical (self-theology) and world-oriented (excluding no one). Each person's life-story is significantly related to each other's, for without personal history (autobiographical and biographical) theology reverts to a scholasticism of structures, rules, and restrictions, and without a world-orientation, theology retreats into exclusivistic, specialized edifices, and thereby surrenders any claim to speak to and for all humans.