In 1989, in response to Richard Schenk’s doctoral dissertation, Josef Ratzinger wrote that “the only way to bring fresh wind into systematic theology is to connect looking back at the great masters in the history of the faith with questioning anew and more profoundly in the horizon of our times.”

Soundings in the History of a Hope offers Schenk’s experimental attempts to meet these requirements for the renewal of systematics, looking above all to St. Thomas Aquinas and some of his patristic sources,contemporary critics, and later readers in order to retrieve seminal ideas for addressing issues that would continue to develop after Thomas’s time. The essays in this volume examine interreligious relationality, hope and doubt, human labor and mortality, structures of nature, movements of history, and events of grace and failure—between the gaudium et spes of today’s world and its many “sorrows and worries.”