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This article reviews the changes in discourse and responses to the clergy sexual abuse crisis from 2004 to 2023. It highlights the difficulty of talking about sexual violence and the silencing of those who have spoken out as a secondary moral harm and an epistemic injustice. It also mentions that the renewal of sexual morality, the diversity of theologies, and the issue of the use and abuse of power have become more urgent today. The article examines the Christian response to sexuality throughout history, especially in relation to pastoral power and its impact on Western concepts of sexuality and subject formation. It also addresses issues related to the legal framework within the Church and the relationship between Canon Law and Civil Law. The importance of prioritizing the well-being of individuals over the well-being of the institution is emphasized. The text addresses the issue of sexual abuse committed by clergy and the need to distinguish between individual assaults and repeated abuses. Additionally, the importance of feminist ethics in studying responses to clergy sexual abuse is mentioned, and the need to reflect on the structures and governance of the Church is highlighted. The article also addresses two opposing views within the Catholic Church regarding the clergy sexual abuse crisis and concludes that the Church must reform to have a future in liberal democracies. [Extracted from the article]

This essay reviews the major themes of the 3/2004 Concilium Issue "Structural Betrayal of Trust," exploring changes in the discourse and responses to the clergy sexual abuse crisis since then. In addition to the continuing difficulty to speak in the aftermath of sexual violence, the silencing of those who have spoken up is now discerned as a secondary moral injury and epistemic injustice. Whereas the understanding of priesthood and the structure of the Church dominated the earlier issue, currently the renewal of sexual morality, the diversity of theologies, and the question of use and abuse of power have become most urgent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vulnerability as a critique of the one-sidedness of the principle of autonomy is at risk of overemphasizing the positive dimension of vulnerability. Moreover, in the discourse on vulnerability, the threat of dehumanization (or moral vulnerability) has not been scrutinized enough ethically. Therefore, the ethics of vulnerability is insufficient when faced with the force of war that requires the conceptualization of vulnerability for political-ethics. The Russian war in Ukraine demonstrates this weakness in a striking way: the called-for openness to the other as well as an active form of nonviolence, as promoted by Judith Butler, may not be an option in times of war. Continuing Jessica Benjamin's psychoanalytic approach to mutual recognition, the essay shows that the task of morality does not rest upon broadening one's vulnerability, but rather in understanding vulnerable agency as the dialectic of vulnerability and agency. For the further development of this dialectic, the triadic figuration is emphasized, complementing the dyadic relation of self and other. While the Third can take multiple figurations in the psychoanalytical setting, I understand the Third within the politicalethical context as the possibility of a "moral world" of nonviolence and respect. During war, the role of the bystander is to become a witness who, through the process of witnessing, advocacy, diplomacy, and justice, allows for the moral Third to reemerge. Among others, the ethics of vulnerability must spell out the price for the failure of taking on this responsibility, namely the eclipse of morality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Basándose en la tradición de la nueva teología política y la teología de la liberación, decolonial y feminista, este artículo explora las consecuencias de una epistemología decolonial de la teología para la teoría ética. Introduce una ética política crítica que coincide con la teoría crítica, postestructural y decolonial de que el conocimiento y la ética están necesariamente situados mientras se mantienen firmes en su orientación ética hacia la liberación de la injusticia. En todos estos enfoques, la cuestión de la libertad tiene una importancia central para el desarrollo de la ética política, y tanto la teología política como la teoría crítica plantean la cuestión de la autoridad. Más que presuponer el concepto liberal de autonomía o la libertad moral de Kant, la ética política crítica distingue cuatro dimensiones de la libertad, a saber, la libertad trascendental, la existencial, la social y la política. Para la ética, el reajuste de la teoría y la práctica políticas significa que la solidaridad con el individuo y/o el grupo que sufre no solo es el criterio del juicio moral sino también una prioridad de acción. Sin embargo, además, la ética política crítica sitúa la ética teológica en la tradición de los testigos de la fe que sirven de referencia para una reimaginación creativa de las prácticas morales y políticas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building upon the tradition of the New Political Theology and liberation, decolonial, and feminist theology, this article explores the consequences of a decolonial epistemology of theology for ethical theory. It introduces a critical political ethics that concurs with critical, post-structural, and decolonial theory that knowledge and ethics is necessarily situated while standing firm in their ethical orientation towards liberation from injustice. In all these approaches, the question of freedom is of central importance for the development of political ethics, and political theology as well as critical theory raise the question of authority. Rather than presupposing the liberal concept of autonomy or Kant's moral freedom, critical political ethics distinguishes between four dimensions of freedom, namely transcendental, existential, social, and political freedom. For ethics, the realignment of political theory and practice means that solidarity with the suffering individual and/or group is not only the criterion of moral judgment but also a priority of action. Additionally, however, critical political ethics situates theological ethics in the tradition of witnesses of faith that serve as reference for a creative reimagination of moral and political practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Religious freedom is too important a right to be politicized. Religions have an important role to play in the public sphere and are an indispensable voice in ethical conflicts of different kinds. Therefore, religions are necessarily political. But this does not mean that they should follow a political theology which claims that only those laws are valid that concord with the natural and, ultimately, divine law. I analyze the theological context of the religious freedom debate in the twentieth century, adding a theological-ethical analysis to the legal interpretations. I argue that the moral principle of dignity' and the right to freedom is not only a legal right that creates privileges but a moral right that comes with responsibilities. Theologically speaking, the legally granted right to religious freedom must be interpreted in view of one's religious tradition, and Christianity, among several other religions, prioritizes those who are most discriminated against and morally injured in their societies. Christian ethics entails the responsibility to respect and protect the needs and rights of others. Its morality is not rooted in an objective order but in the gift of human freedom, which calls moral agents to respect the moralfreedom and moral agency of others as one's own moral freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparing three concepts of mercy, compassion, and love, this essay describes, first, with Kasper, divine mercy or compassion as a central attribute of God's love, calling for the same human response to suffering. Second, with Metz, it situates compassion within a political theology, but develops it further as central concept of ethics. Third, with Nussbaum, the essay understands compassion and love as a bridge between political norms of justice and the social realities of injustice and indifference. In the second part, the essay takes up the political-theological lens of historical reason; it interprets compassion for justice as a practice of critical witnessing and resistance, and transformative solidarity. It upholds the anamnetic theology of God's compassion and mercy as the ultimate divine gift of justice, to be remembered in the face of forgetting and indifference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This essay explores the two main objectives of Bishop's book, which he analyzes in the context of the care for the dying: (1) the medical metaphysics underlying medical science and (2) biopolitics as governance of the human body. This essay discusses Bishop's claims in view of newer developments in medicine, especially the turn to the construction of life, and confronts the concept of the patient's sovereignty with an alternative model of vulnerable agency. In order to overcome the impasses of contemporary bioethics, the essay argues that practical reason requires a two-fold ethics: first, it must develop a new hermeneutics of illness and disease, and second, in order to protect the individuals in the process of dying, moral claims concerning death must be based on the concept of human rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hardly any field of science is regarded as having so much objectivity as brain research. If brain research can demonstrate on a neurological level that there is a gender difference corresponding to traditional manhood and womanhood, then this is of central relevance to theology. Critical analysis of scientific studies, however, shows that the interpretation of neurological findings is steered more by social assumptions than empirical data. This article points out how 'sex', even in science, is by no means 'found', but in fact 'constructed', without the need to deny biological facticity. The only thing is that this takes place not along the line of sexual difference, but characterises the whole bandwidth between the idealised poles of manhood and womanhood. The right course for theology is to make an effort to understand the scientific research in order to place its own judgments on a surer footing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including scientific concept of neurosciences, relationship between neuroscience, spiritual experiences and philosophy and issues of same-sex marriages in France.