This article analyzes today's global values crisis as a matter of both personal and institutional failure. Social disintegration constitutes humanity's greatest challenge at the turn of the millennium. A viable future requires a new social project which embodies a new ethos—one which includes both traditional and liberal values and which avoids their vices along with the traps of authoritarian socialism. In order to spell out this new social project, the article describes the essential features of the traditional ethos and the liberal ethos: their economies, the understanding of nature, religion, history, politics, and ethics. This article argues that the needed participatory radical ethos incarnates Christian values for our time.

Feminist bioethics, in both its Christian and secular forms, can play a prophetic role by bringing a much-needed social ethics perspective to Christian health care ethics. Six characteristics of feminist bioethics are highlighted: focus on oppression of women and its concrete forms in the health care system; epistemological critique; call for a more diverse community of ethical reflection; critique of the standard principles of bioethics; criticism of liberal individualism in mainstream bioethics; and a critical perspective on the discipline's loyalties and social location. The author highlights two important tasks for feminist bioethics: analysis of the current metamorphosis of health care in the marketplace and the more explicit use of stories to ground ethical reflection in the concrete struggles of women in meeting health care challenges.

This article explores the contribution which a strictly normative theology of conversion might make to an understanding of Christian humanistic education. The first part of the article argues for the need for an ongoing, multidisciplinary discussion of the nature of the human in order to clarify the goals of humanistic education. Part two argues that the four secular forms of conversion—affective, intellectual, personal moral, and socio-political—set important goals for a balanced, humanistic education. Part three argues that the transvaluation of the secular forms of education effected by Christian conversion defines fundamental aims of Christian humanistic education.

This article explores Gregory Baum's notion of how the Holy Spirit leads the church to a new understanding of Jesus as the Christ. It begins by examining Baum's interpretation of the doctrinal development at Vatican II, then analyzes the innovative understanding Baum has developed based on how the Spirit works to reformulate the church's message through a process of cultural conversion. It relates Baum's theory to preceding reflection on the development of dogma, then takes up Rosemary Ruether's criticism that Baum's position deprives Scripture of its transcendence. It concludes by developing a way of relating Word and Spirit that combines Baum's openness to the spirit with Ruether's concern for the transcendence of Scripture.

Faith and love receive most of the attention in discussions about what makes the Catholic university unique. A theme of hope in a recent pastoral letter by Joseph Cardinal Bernardin on the Catholic health care ministry, if applied to education, may provide another perspective on what makes, or could make, the Catholic university distinctive. This article first summarizes Bernardin's thinking about hope in the context of Catholic health care. Second, reference is made to what seems unique about hope in the Catholic tradition, and what hope can mean for Catholics today. The next section applies this understanding of hope to what we mean by a Catholic university, with the focus on undergraduate education. The last section begins to explore some practical implications of affirming hope as part of what makes a Catholic university distinctive.