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Recent activity among the American Catholic bishops in the social and political arena shows in some cases at least a tendency towards the “heresy” of integrism as defined by Karl Rahner, namely, the inclination to see the ethical teaching of the Church as a blueprint or template for secular society. This article surveys some examples of this tendency. It argues for a vision of the secular world as independent and grace-filled. The constructive proposal towards which this article moves, which is an effort to place the Church's ethical outlook on the secular world in the space between integrism and esotericism, is worked out in dialogue with Rahner, Archbishop Charles Chaput, Archbishop Rowan Williams and Professor James Davison Hunter.

Using Lumen gentium as a focus, what can we say about the unfinished business of renewal? How does it work, and how must we read Lumen gentium in order to grasp “what remains to be done”? We consider four issues, each of them in dialogue with one of four theologians who reached their 60th birthday in 1964, the year Lumen gentium was completed. Bernard Lonergan helps us come to terms with the historically conditioned nature of Lumen gentium itself. Karl Rahner points the way towards a better grasp of Lumen gentium's discussion of the place of other religions in the economy of salvation. John Courtney Murray's influence on the Council fathers is a case study in the importance of the local church. And Yves Congar's willingness to rethink his own positions testifies to the importance of not making Lumen gentium into unchanging truth. Overall, the unfinished business of the document on the Church is to learn to treat it, in Lonergan's words, as “not premisses but data.”

Introduction: Ecclesiology - The Nature, Story and Study of the Church Part 1: Historical Ecclesiology 1. In Search of the Early 'Church': The New Testament and the Development of Christian Communities 2. The Church in the Early Christian Centuries - Ecclesiological Consolidation 3. The Church in Medieval Theology 4. Ecclesiology and the Religious Controversy of the Sixteenth Century 5. The Church in the Tridentine and Early Modern Eras 6. The Church in Modern Theology 7. Postmodern Ecclesiologies Part 2: Ecclesiological 'Traditions' 8. Ecclesiology in the Orthodox Tradition 9. Lutheran Ecclesiology

The present crisis in the American Catholic Church stems from a two-fold source: lay people are powerless while the bishops are accountable to no one but the pope and the curia. While the number of lay people exercising ministries in the Church has grown enormously over the past thirty years (largely due to the shortage of priests), there has been little or no theological reflection till now on the genuine role of the laity. It is only from such reflection that structural reform of the Church will come. The first half of The Liberation of the Laity concentrates on the fortunes of the laity, theologically speaking, between Vatican I (1870) and Vatican II (1962 - 65). It examines the growth of the 'new theology' in France in the 1940s and 1950s, and shows how in the work of one of its leading practitioners, Yves Congar, much of the vision of the laity expressed at Vatican II was anticipated. Seeing the years after the council as decades of missed opportunity to recognize the role of the laity, the book turns to a series of constructive proposals for the liberation of the laity, and thus the liberation of the Church. It discusses the importance of 'secularity,' the need for a 'lay liberation theology,' and the centrality of the struggles against global capitalism in the mission of the Church. It ends with a chapter envisioning dramatic changes in ministry and governing structures, in which accountability will be central, 'servant leaders' will include women and married people, and both ecclesiastical careerism and the College of Cardinals will be history.

Discussion of the putatively Christian character of Hegel's philosophy focuses on the question of the relation fHegel envisages between philosophy and religion. There are those who argue that his philosophy is simply a foundational Christian metaphysic, a species of the philosophy of religion.2 Others are no less convinced that Hegel's system is the end of religion,3 and there are innumerable variations between the two extremes. This discussion dates back at least to the years immediately following Hegel's death in 1831, when those who interpreted him as a Christian philosopher and those who thought of him as at least implicitly atheistic were polarized into the so-called right and left wings of Hegelian philosophy.4 Classical right-wing interpretation saw Hegel as a metaphysician, thus leaving room for the identification of the Hegelian absolute with the Christian God. On the left, Hegel was (at the "highest") an ontologist, and the Christian god could not survive. Still today, though in a severely modified way, it is possible to talk in mean