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by Peter Damian Fehlner (Author), J. Isaac Goff (Editor), Timothy Geiger (Introduction by)
This volume of the Collected Essays of Peter Damian Fehlner on Ecclesiology and the Franciscan Charism contains some of the most practical of all of Fehlner's writings. This volume is divided into three parts. In the first, we are treated to Fehlner's first reflections on ecclesiology in the wake of Vatican II and his own earlier research into Bonaventure's ecclesiology and Duns Scotus's teachings on grace and personhood. To Fehlner, these studies, along with his Tractatus de gratia and teaching notes on the mission of the Holy Spirit, all from the 1960s, contain the rationes seminales of the entirety of his later thought. In part two, we find writings mainly from the following two decades on the Conventual Franciscan charism, the ecclesiola, the church in microcosm. Here we can readily discern the radical effects of Fehlner's encounter with Maximilian Kolbe and this volume's close affinity with volume six of this series, on St. Maximilian Kolbe. In part three of this volume, comprising essays from the final fifteen years of his life, Fehlner brings his lifetime of prayerful contemplation and research directly to bear upon practical spirituality. In these essays, Fehlner's spiritual testament, our author presents his Catholic and Franciscan charismatic vision of Christian life.
Author Biography
Peter Damian Fehlner, OFM Conv. (1931-2018), was a Franciscan priest and theologian. For nearly forty years he taught theology in Franciscan schools and seminaries in Italy and the United States. He is the author of several books and countless articles in theological and pastoral journals. His final work was published posthumously as The Theologian of Auschwitz: St. Maximilian Kolbe on the Immaculate Conception in the Life of the Church (2019).
J. Isaac Goff is an instructor of dogmatic theology at Saints Cyril and Methodius Byzantine Catholic Seminary. He is coeditor of A Companion to Bonaventure (2014) and author of Caritas in Primo: A Study of Bonaventure's Disputed Questions on the Mystery of the Trinity (2015).
