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Recent archival research has uncovered material that usefully explains why the French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was required to remain in China for so long, despite assenting to the Six Propositions. However, the context in Rome, existing narrative evidence, and aspects of the archival evidence make it more likely than not that the Holy Office had a role in his silencing. Proposition 4 advocated monogenism, whereas Teilhard was developing a monophyletic understanding of human origins, which is consistent with recent attempts to situate Adam and Eve within an evolutionary account of these. The content of Proposition 4 exceeded existing magisterial teaching and requiring Teilhard’s subscription to it suppressed legitimate theological debate.

Material Eucharist interprets the Eucharist through its material elements of bread and wine. Drawing upon a rich variety of biblical, patristic, medieval, and modern texts and traditions, David Grumett brings together theological reflection and liturgical action and shows their mutual dependence. For both theologians and liturgists, a central concern is the matter out of which the created order has been made, from which issues of community and social justice are inseparable. The ingredients of bread and wine anticipate, in their harvesting and manufacture, the formal church liturgy, which is extended back into the world by the transformative priestly action of laypeople. Indeed, the transforming presence of Christ in the Eucharist as flesh and substance is theologically grounded in his transformative presence in the wider created order, as expressed in eucharistic giving and exchange between churches and their wider communities. Rooting the Eucharist in materiality suggests its primary context to be the death and resurrection of Christ in the power of the Spirit, in which its recipients may share. The many aspects of theology and liturgy with which the book deals have large implications for how the Eucharist is understood in a range of academic disciplines, and for how it is celebrated in churches today.

Henri de Lubac's doctrine of grace and nature emerged out of the pastoral and sacramental context of confession. Although recent critics have assumed a Thomist setting, a close reading shows that the doctrine is rooted in de Lubac's critical engagement with Augustinianism. In the form of Jansenism and drawing especially on Augustine's late, anti-Pelagian writings, this sensibility pervaded modern French theology. Notwithstanding its distorted conceptions of grace's mode of operation and of human nature, Jansenism provoked de Lubac into developing new understandings of the relation between belief and knowledge, and of theological anthropology. In advocating for the continuity of Augustine's theology, de Lubac made an important contribution to Augustine scholarship. His resulting doctrine of grace and nature, in which the person of Adam is central, has wider, abiding theological salience.

This paper argues that if practical theology is to be sustainable in the academy it must engage more closely with Scripture, doctrine and tradition and, in so doing, attempt to address the whole of material life. More particularly, he argues, there are dangers in a purely pastoral understanding of practical theology, since the temptation is to derive this from secular sources. Practical theology, however, is also closely related to Christian ethics, opening the further possibility that one of the tasks of practical theology might be to study and critique aspects of the secular social and political order. Turning to the nature of practice itself, Grumett reflects on Alasdair MacIntyre’s definition of practice as a complex, socially rooted, co-operative activity, through which goods intrinsic to that endeavour are actualised in the course of attaining the standards of excellence native to that activity. Grumett suggests that MacIntyre is too dependent on Aristotelian ethics which are, ultimately, epistemologically self-referential, proposing instead a proper dualism of practice and doctrine. The implications of practice as a (pre)condition for understanding are then unfolded in a profoundly illuminating way. Publisher PDF