Articulates a learning process to help Christians improve approaches to understanding other religious traditions. Understanding Other Religious Worlds is built on the difference between learning facts about other religions and understanding them and their followers in a wholistic manner. Berling argues that incorporating the religious "other" in one's own Christian identity is integral to living an authentic Christian life.

Postmodernity is a name that has been attached to our cultural milieu. Among its features are a sense of historical consciousness, a recognition of the social construction of knowledge, an appreciation for pluralism, and a suspicion of grand narratives. It is a cultural worldview that is naturally suspicious of Christian "mission." Meanwhile, conservative Catholics are equally suspicious of postmodernism, associating it with relativism, secularism, and syncretism). Drawing on his own mission training and experience, John Sivalon believes the gospel can and must be inculturated in any culture, and he believes that postmodernism, rather than rendering Christian mission meaningless, breathes fresh insight, vision, and life into Vatican II's notion that mission is centered in the very heart of God. Above all, postmodernism offers "the gift of uncertainty"--the ground of questioning, Why are we doing this? What should we do? How is it best done? With actual case studies that reflect the new face of mission, Fr. Sivalon offers a hopeful vision of how the Gospel retains its challenge and relevance in an age of uncertainty and change.

Contributors to this volume assess the meaning of globalization and the capacity of Catholic social thought to understand, reform, and guide it.

This book is an original study of the Marian discourses of Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) who is recognised as a major modern theologian within and without the Catholic Church. It evinces Ratzinger's ability to open new horizons in inherited teaching and new ways of understanding it within the parameters of orthodox theology. This is especially true of his theological understanding of Mary and the relationship of her being to that of the Church. The author gives a succinct introduction to this Mariology, navigating through biblical theology, Patristics, history of dogma, Christian anthropology, and some contemporary developments in Marian studies. By highlighting the devotional and pastoral implications of Marian spirituality in the Church, Ratzinger is further portrayed as a faithful theologian and conserver of the truth of Christian worship (lex credendi, lex orandi). Undoubtedly, Ratzinger is a renowned theologian, but the scholarly nature of this text convincingly presents him as a sound and outstanding Mariologist. This book is the fi rst to offer a fascinatingly comprehensive and intelligible account of this subject by drawing together, for the fi rst time, passages from a very wide range of Ratzinger's writings.