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The building of the moral subject seems to be difficult in our democratic societies. The so called moral autonomy is far from being a given there. People can always adopt a behavior of under age. Besides, the will is conditioned by affections it does not control. There are difficulties of an external order in addition. The constant flow of information generates conformism. Besides, the contradictory solicitations throw the subject into confusion and lead him to entrust himself to his own impulses. In this cultural scenery, the North American communitarians come forward with a solution for the problem of the subject. They maintain that tradition and narrativity have a role in his structuring process. But they forget that their proposal encourages isolation in a particular social belonging and considers this one as a refuge promoting a too easy identity. In fact, there is only one way to build the moral subject: to convoke him permanently to himself, in confronting the different realities that life presents to him.

It is to J. Jeremias that we owe the merit of having put the problem clearly: did Jesus’ Last Supper take place within the framework of the Jewish Passover meal, or did it not? The answer to this question is of the utmost relevance. Does the Eucharist have Jewish roots or does it transmit solely the new Christian message? This is the area of the present inquiry. As is widely known, the view of J. Jeremias was not consensual and different solutions have been put forward and successively placed in perspective. Here a new possibility is aired, showing that the Passover Feast, in the light of the final event in Jesus’ life, constitutes the most important hermeneutic criterion.

Following the 2nd Vatican Council, the various liturgical rites in use in the Western Church underwent reforms. Contemporaneously with this, a new interpretative category applied to liturgical action came to be used widely, that of anàmnesis. Liturgy came to be described as the anàmnesis of the work of salvation. The fortune of this conceptions is well-deserved, if we bear in mind the problems it helps to avoid, especially in ecumenical contexts, but that is not to say that it is not open to questioning. Recent studies, which need to be taken into account, raise the question: is it possible or not to be explicit about the sacramental nature of the Eucharistic rite and, by extension, of the Christian liturgy without recourse to be notion of anàmnesis?

“The Braga liturgy” is an excerpt from a doctoral dissertation made up of a study and edition of MS. 870 of the Braga District Archive, defended in June 2007 at the Saint Anselm Pontifical Liturgical Institute, Rome. The a quo and ao quem limits of this de luxe Braga-Roman pontifical have been fixed at 1485-1516. Assembled for the Archbishop of Braga, this codex was used by him when he came to the cathedral to celebrate the principal solemnities of the liturgical year. The present text corresponds to the first part of Chapter II, dedicated to a historical study, both diachronic and synchronic. The results of its application indicate that the history of the liturgy of this particular Church is complex, and that the factors incolved in its evolution are primarily external. The inorganic discountinuities introduced in printed books throughout the 16th century, largely ignored up to the present, provide ample proof of this and enable us to modify our knowledge of this local liturgy.

The concrete experiences of Christian faith are susceptible of ambiguity in the context of our modern societies. The believer, who inhabits these ones, tends to claim a space of assertion of his own vis-à-vis the ecclesial reality. As a consequence, the individual features of faith become diversified. The church searches a way to include them in her midst. Thus, the truth of Christian faith is considered not to exist out of the first person singular. But it is also required that each appropriation of faith be examined by the ecclesial community. Discernment is the means appearing to be able to link these two poles. It inquires to which extent the individual experiences of faith agree with the objective, Christian ‘given’ proclaimed by the church. It considers experience as the necessary mediation of faith, while respecting, at the same time, the scriptural and ecclesial normativity that guides this one.

This text focuses on biographical data, on the content of the Author’s poetry, on the theme that gives it its title and, lastly, on two cycles of numbered poems, one concerning verticality, the other horizontality. While always seeking to speak for the poet, attention is drawn to the quality and originality of the Work, the manner of its composition, placing emphasis on intertextuality, in relation to both biblical texts and spiritual authors, on the one hand, and to Portuguese poets, on the other.

Without betraying itself, how can the truth of the faith be formulated in the public forum of other competing words? In this agoric and agonic condition the conviction of the faithfull individual (fides qua) and its communicable expression (fides quae) have to passe the hardest of tests: to become involved in the forum not of truth, but of verisimilitude, not of reality, but of appearance; not of dogma, but of doxa. The Confessions of Augustine of Hippo constitute one of the most successful expressions of this willing involvement of faith in the pluralistic forum of rhetoric. Conscious of the divides character of the word, Augustine himself confesses having been “a word salesman”; professional orators and their apprentices are no more than “sellers and buyers of grammar”. But in distinguishing «rhetoric at the service of error and lies”, pure “bartering of chatter”, from “rhetoric in the service of truth”, Augustine redirects rhetoric to the neutral place of organon and agrees to involve the reasons of christian existence in the forum of persuasion and verisimilitude, for it is not sufficient for truth to be true; it must also seem true, be verisimilar. Thus, the intimate truth of the word a faith can and shoud be expressed with eloquence and beauty, so “that it teaches, that it delights, that it moves”. And the result of this rhetorical criticism of rhetoric is the unparalleled work Confessions and its innumerable mises en scène within the ‘theatre of self’, in search of itself and of God, through the “vast palaces of memory”. But it is precisely there that the idolatrous pretensions of annexing God to the “experiences of self” are denounced.

Taking as a starting point the recurrent theme in many of the new religous movements – the figure of Jesus and this relation to the cosmos – this article seeks to reflect on the cosmic Christ. Who is the cosmic Christ? Is he different from the Christ of the Incarnation? Will he substitute the crib of Bethlehem, the cross of Golgotha and the empty tomb? Jesus Christ, God made man or God made cosmos? What is to be done with the cosmic Christ? Is he the Christ of the age of the “religion of the exit from religion” (Marcel Gauchet), or the Christ of “desecularisation” (Peter Berger)? A new incarnation of God? A new paradigm? A cosmic desire of a human being? The present text seeks to re-examine this line of questioning in the light of a presentation and critical analysis of two non-converging studies on the cosmic Christ, produced by two thinkers who marked the second half of the 20th century – the French Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin and the American Dominican Matthew Fox.

This text is an approach to negative theology in the broader framework to which it relates: the apparent silence of God in the history of the world, and the drama of human existence which faces the frontiers of the enigma, of the mystery and even of the making no sense. Negative theology appears as an attitude of those who believe, but finds no adequate linguistic form to express the mystery, in the face of both the ineffability of God and his undeniable incomprehensibility, and the ineffability of the human condition. It not only proclaims linguistic limits before the ineffable immensity of the mystery of God, but also before humanity’s greatness and misery. Negative theology is another manner the theological question as an anthropological problem, and vice versa.

The frequency with which Paul has recourse to affective, family language as well as showing one of his typical configuration models for the evkklhsi,a, at the same time reveals a controversial context: the congregations that the apostle created had no family ties, but sought to be one single family and one single house, yet retaining other characteristics similar to a public organisation. This ambiguity is easily detected in the actual places of meeting, which had features that were both private and public. The present text seeks to shed light on this ambiguity, supported by criteria relating to domestic spaces and the difference between private and public. And we will see, in due course, how these criteria emerge in the Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians in both directions: reflecting the ambiguity and seeking a greater public and political dimension for the evkklhsi,a.

To understand the conditions under which Paul travelled, it is necessary to compare the Book of Acts and Paul’s Epistles with our knowledge of the Ancient World (its institutions, culture, means of transport…); this data clarify the text unexpectedly. It is necessary to take into account the contribution of archaeology, and particularly naval archaeology, which provides us with a knowledge of embarkation procedures, routes and ports, as well as maritime activity in the Mediterranean Basin,in the 1st century of the Christian Era. It is ultimately useful to compare Paul’s Epistles and The Books of Acts with other written sources, be they Greek or Latin narratives or other texts from ancient literature, especially geographical works, which testify to itineraries and travel conditions in general.

In 1934, Teixeira de Pascoaes (1877-1952) brought out a biography of St.Paul, which was widely disseminated. In it he creates an interpretation of the figure and work of the Apostle as the true founder of Christianity. This, however, is interpreted by him in a gnostic key, within and dependent on his poetic philosophy of nostalgia: the Christ of true Christianity lives (only) as a mythical personification of the sentiment of the fall of God to the material world, in his positive reaction of spriritualist elevation or of hope. And this is the means to redemption or salvation, while through it is brought about the reintegration of mankind and the world in what was originally divine in both.Paul was the one who first understood Christ in this manner and transformed him into an object of belief for the world.

At the threshold of the third millenium, when the Catholic Church is rethinking the boundaries of its own responsibility, the year dedicated to Saint Paul constitutes a challenge that permeates the contexts in which the Church is called upon to communicate the Gospel. Will the Church survive beyond the second millenium of Christ? Christianity – it would seem – will undergo profound change. Will it be ever more popular, black (or certainly predominantly non-white), much more synchretic in style, more charismatic and, at times, more sectarian. These are the current questions being lived in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. Then there is the big question of Asia, which contains many different worlds within it: the Near East with its Christian communities, of great antiquity and undergoing great suffering; Southen Asia and the Far East, where cultures going back thousands of years and great religions would seem to impede the spread of Christianity; China and India, dynamos of today’s world economy. Still today – as in the time of the very first generations of Christians – the world lives in expectation. Its rapid transformations and its conflicts place new questions before the Church.

The notion of St. Paul «to live by the Spirit», expressed in Gal 5, 25, motivates a reflection on the singularity of the Christian experience. It invites to understand the errors to which this one is subject in our time of spiritual thirst. Such experience confers the primacy to God, who addresses himself to the human being acting according to his sovereign freedom. It is important to have this point settled, before becoming aware of the confusion in which the notion of ‘spiritual’ is immersed today. It designates realities sometimes contradicting one another. In fact, we witness a new wave of searches of meaning usually named as ‘spiritual’, with a considerable social and cultural expression. They claim to be of religious character, even though they contain aspects that contradict such a pretension. They go so far as to mingle with the Christian faith and possibly pervert it with the logic of ‘knowing’ proper to them.

“The first scene that Siza devised was the fall of St. Paul from the horse: because he likes drawing horses and because the episode has almost everything that an artist seeks: movement, light, drama, mystery, rupture. The most famous fall from a horse in history. The bodies of horse and rider are fused, in the design, into a single body; a spontaneous and frugal distribution of lines that show the horse somersaulting and hide the face of the rider.” This text thus conserves and whispers the recollection of a conversation with the architect Álvaro Siza Vieira with regard to the ceramic tiles placed in the new Basilica at the Fátima Sanctuary, containing scenes from the life of St. Paul.

The question of God’s omnipotence and determination (or predestination) of natural and voluntary events (qadar) occupies a central role in medieval debates in Islamic theology. It revolves around a basic conflict between two core concepts in Islam: God’s omnipotence and human responsibility, a necessary presupposition for affirming God’s justice, another divine attribute alongside His omnipotence. This paper looks at the development of the different theological schools concerning discussions of God’s qadar and the way in which the tendency to a predestinarian outlook influenced also such Islamic philosophers as Avicenna and Averroes.

Speaking of creation takes us back to the limits of time and space, at which nobody was present and which can only be imagined. Experience and reason let us down. Only intuition and the symbolic discourse of myth may dare to go back to the beginnings of time. The most obvious thing to do is to transport experience of the production of new things to origins. New living beings appear through generation; new artefacts through work; new works and situations by order of whoever commands. Before the Old Testament, the Egyptians had already turned to the two most obvious forms of creation – through generation and through work. In both cultures, the divine action of creation is expressed through a pallet of verbs (generate, create, make, form, etc.) and of literary genres – simple forms, the hymn and the report. It is that, contrary to what St. Thomas Aquinas thought, no term is appropriate and none even as a set is sufficient. Every conceptual and verbal cannot go beyond approximations.

This study is centered on a semantic analysis of John’s account of the unction of Bethany (Jo 12, 1-11). Amid the various existing studies, the present one has the particularity of regarding this episode as a corollary of Jesus’ activity and, at the same time, as the beginning of His passion, death and resurrection. With this in mind, the study seeks to present the identity of Jesus and of the mission he entrusted to the disciples in accordance with the view put forward by the fourth evangelist. The study is rooted in the canonical text– based on the text of the Novum Testamentum graece edited by E. Nestle – K. Aland and others (Stuttgart 27 1993) – and the principle that John’s Gospel is a literary work situated in its historical context, with the objective of leading to faith and confession in Jesus Christ, Son of God. Thus, starting from the text, its framework and structure, this study analyzes its meaning.

Nicolau Cabasilas, an eastern lay theologian of the 14th century, left one of the most profound reflections on liturgy and spiritual life. In his book Life in Christ he described the experience of his deep friendship with Christ through the liturgical celebration of the sacraments. The present text underlines the importance of Cabasilas in the liturgical spirituality of the Church, with the purpose of knowing and deepening the life of Christ that is communicated to us through the sacraments and to which we remain attached with the collaboration of our will. The liturgy is an expression of authentic spirituality. Life in Christ in its various phases is founded on a listening to the Word, on the experience of the Mystery and on the vision of Glory, and will be perfect in the next life when we shall hear the Voice of the Silence of God.

The horizon of happening of other people marks a fundamental constituent of the THERE of BEING THERE, DASEIN, that which we have always been whenever we think of ourselves as being our because of our being. Hence it is not a separate horizon interpreted through an existential temporal analytical process of Dasein. Rather, it is a structuring factor in our being as an ACCESS to the THERE in which in existing we are ever present. The aim is, thus, to understand the manifold ways in which others may be with us, and therefore to open up the various ways of speaking of the other. To this effect we begin by concentrating on Being and Time, where the other as an horizon is analysed and interpreted almost with the sole purpose of putting it as a problem, so that the issue can be raised. What follows is an attempt to radicalise this horizon through its explicit emergence as tendencies towards atmosphere, cadence, vibration and wave, parting from later positions along the lines of Martin Heidegger. Here too we search for the other in the specificity of his happening in flooding (and in spreading through) our entire existence, but now questioned in the peculiarity of our access to the dimension in which he may truly be.