UNITED STATES
The Chronicle of Higher Education

August 18, 2014 by Charles Huckabee

A theologian and nun who drew the ire of U.S. Roman Catholic bishops with a book they considered radical and flawed fired back on Friday, saying the church’s investigation of women’s orders was “unconscionable” at a time when the hierarchy’s moral authority has been eroded by financial and child-abuse scandals, the Religion News Service reported.

Speaking in Nashville, Tenn., as she accepted an award from the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, Sister Elizabeth A. Johnson, a professor of theology at Fordham University, lambasted the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ criticism of her 2007 book Quest for the Living God: Mapping Frontiers in the Theology of God, published by Continuum. The book saw a spike in sales in 2011 after the bishops issued a statement saying the work contained “misrepresentations, ambiguities, and errors.”

In her remarks on…