Irish Theological Quarterly

This article considers the activities of a generation of young English Catholics – mostly middle-class convent and grammar school students – who belonged to the international Young Christian Students movement. Through examining two decades of the YCS magazine, alongside its detailed Study Programmes and annual Conferences, it charts the organisation’s increasingly politicised engagement with social justice and decolonisation agendas (especially in Africa) and its creative embrace of Christian-Marxism and Liberation Theology. Into the 1970s, with escalating tensions in Northern Ireland, the English YCS sought to incubate ecumenical Catholic–Protestant encounters in schools in Belfast and beyond, educating Catholic schoolchildren about the conflict and its causative links to British imperialism. As a case study of the religious experiences and faith-fuelled activism of thousands of young people in post-conciliar Britain, this recovered history of varieties of grassroots, liberatory theologies offers insight into present-day experiments with synodality.

This essay argues that the Apostle Paul offers rich, underutilized theological resources for the Church’s teaching on the universal destination of goods. Close exegetical reading of the Corinthian correspondence shows how Paul frames generosity not only as ethical obligation but as liturgical action and theological witness. Paul’s theology challenges modern notions of ownership and selfhood, insisting instead that all possessions, including the self, ultimately belong to God. Integrating Paul’s theology of the collection for the poor, and his provocative claim that believers are ‘bought with a price’, reveals that Catholic Social Teaching (CST) can gain depth and vitality by embracing the Pauline links between economic life, worship, and the universal destination of goods.

This article explores how the incarnational Christology of the Nicene Creed can be reinterpreted to address ecological concerns, particularly through the theological anthropology and Eucharistic vision of John Zizioulas. While the Creed proclaims Christ’s incarnation ‘for us humans and for our salvation’, it does not explicitly extend this salvation to non-human creation. Drawing on Zizioulas’s concepts of the human being as microcosm and mediator, the article argues that humanity’s material and spiritual unity with creation grounds the cosmic scope of Christ’s redemptive work. The Eucharist, as a liturgical enactment of this vocation, becomes a space in which human beings participate in Christ’s redemptive act of assumption, offering, and healing of creation. This vision presents a form of radical, inclusive anthropocentrism in which the human vocation serves the redemption of the entire cosmos, thus situating the Nicene Creed as a foundational resource for contemporary ecological theology.

Over the last two or three decades, analytic philosophers have become increasingly involved in debates about life’s meaning. They have fruitfully adopted a bottom-up strategy involving the observation of human experience and the description and comparison of circumstances that can make life meaningful. In this essay, I intend to adopt a top-down strategy. This approach involves accepting the notion of life’s meaning as it is presented in theistic views of a supernatural being who has made it possible for humans to become aware of him through divine revelation. More specifically, I will focus on Christian revelation. My thesis is that the view of life’s meaning it offers can only be revealed by God, and that this view is more beneficial than those that emerge from a bottom-up strategy because it enables everyone to become aware of and achieve life’s meaning, rather than just some people.

This article explores how resilience and conflict resolution figure in the narratives common to all monotheistic religions, such as the call and the transformative journey of Abraham. The text focuses on the dynamics of Abraham’s inward relationship with God, and getting on with other people in a world divided by wars into which Abraham is thrown, and out of which he emerges with a different vision of life. It explores the evolution of the divine promise shaping his and Sarah’s journey, the experience of conflicts and sacrifices that his double fatherhood puts into motion, his balancing between engagement and surrender, and in these processes, relations between human greatness, human fragility and hope. Iconic-contemplative, socio-political and psychological readings of the texts are brought into conversation. Each approach sheds a different light on the nature of Abraham’s pilgrimage, on the choices he makes in a war situation in which his relatives are taken hostage, and on what options are available to him as he attempts to understand what sounds like an impossible promise and offensive call to sacrifice his offspring. The article shows how Abraham’s outer and inner conflicts participate in his growth, and, revealing different forms of fragility and resilience, make Abraham an iconic father of the multitude of nations.