bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Group Prayer and Contemplation
Authors: Tugwell Simon
Published: July 2007

For most Catholics, a prayer meeting is a new and perhaps disturbing experience. However, in recent years an increasing number of Catholics have been meeting to pray together, in silence or in spoken prayer as they feel led by the Spirit; so it may be useful, for both enthusiasts and critics, to consider in general terms the advantages, objectives and principles of prayer meetings, and to face frankly the dangers and possible errors to which they are liable.

The basic principle of group prayer is the teaching of our Lord, that ‘where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in their midst’ (Matt. 18, 20), and that ‘if two of you agree about anything on earth in prayer, it shall be granted’ (18, 19). For we are together the Body of Christ, and as such ‘members of one another’ (Eph. 4, 25). As Christians, we belong together; it is therefore natural and proper that we should exercise our most specifically Christian privilege of prayer together. This is what much of the recent liturgical renewal has been about.

Group prayer obviously falls into two kinds: formal, liturgical prayer, and spontaneous, free prayer. Originally, of course, these two were not separate. Even the Eucharistic Prayer, the Canon of the Mass, was originally extemporized by the celebrant. And it is clear that in the worship of the early Church the whole assembly would take part in various ways (except perhaps the women—and there St Paul may have been dealing with the particular situation!). Whether we shall ever return to this, or even whether it would be a good thing to return to this, I do not know. In any case, our situation is different, and we do have to distinguish between set prayer and spontaneous prayer.
Plus ça change—Plus c'est la même chose
Authors: Bailey Bede
Published: July 2007

‘Of course you English Dominicans have had a terrible time recently, losing relatively more priests than anyone else.’ My journalist friend’s job is to know facts and comment on them, and he was saddened at our dilapidated state. So I thought I’d look at the figures. The result is surprising, remembering that in 1860 there were 25 priests, and in 1960, 148.

Here are the figures. They include all who left for any reason, but exclude those in South Africa who never worked as priests in Britain. The ten-year periods are those during which religious profession was made; they are therefore the ‘years of formation’. The figures are of priests only and omit all those who left before ordination.
Beowulf and the Limits of Literature: 1
Authors: John Eric
Published: July 2007

I am not concerned in this paper to talk about Beowulf for its own sake. I want to take Beowulf as an example of a more general point that seems worth making about literature and in particular about literary studies. It is a point I cannot make directly because if I expressed it in a series of propositions I should be misunderstood. I want to take a number of questions raised by Beowulf, some of which have been discussed in their own right by a series of scholars and with some of which I shall have to take issue: I am not, however, concerned with this or that interpretation of the poem but much more with pointing out certain difficulties in the way of understanding it that do not seem resolvable by conventional methods. I do not believe that these problems are confined to Beowulf but that they are part of the necessary business of understanding any literary work. The difference lies in this: Beowulf is a marginal work from the frontiers of literacy and the beginnings of English society, unlike the works most of us get worked up about which are much more central to our language and our way of life. We must beware of committing what the late R. G. Collingwood called the fallacy of precarious margins—that is arguing from marginal cases as though they were central, but it does seem that marginal situations—as the late Ludwig Wittgenstein has so brilliantly shown—have a power to point to things we take for granted without questioning in more central, more ‘normal’ situations.
The Experience of Group Prayer
Authors: Tugwell Simon
Published: July 2007

The only way to find out about the experience of a prayer meeting is obviously to take part; all I can do in these pages is to drop a few hints, in the hope that they will stir a chord or two, so that something will get across.

People sometimes talk as if prayer were a purely human act; but this is not Christian doctrine. Prayer is the act of the believer, the one who says T live now not I but Christ’ (Gal. 2, 20). It is only in Spirit and Truth that we can offer prayer to the Father (John 4, 23). It is because Christ prays, that we, in the same Spirit, can pray. Prayer is a divine activity in which we, by grace, participate. (On all this, see Herbert McCabe’s very lucid account in Doctrine and Life, August 1970.) It is always ‘the Spirit and the Bride’ who prays (cf. Apoc. 22, 17); we can only pray because God himself gives us prayer (as the Lord taught St Catherine expressly). All prayer, in so far as it is true prayer, is ‘infused’; the contemplative is the one who knows it by experience. In our prayer groups, therefore, we aim to pray with the prayer that God himself gives us.

Now as we become more and more sanctified, our prayer too becomes more and more attuned to the prayer of Christ. That is what we aspire to. But we must avoid two antithetical traps. On the one hand, we must not assume forthwith that anything we utter at a prayer meeting is automatically underwritten by God; we may on occasion get a ‘witness’ of some kind to assure us that our prayer is truly willed by him, but that is a different matter. The other trap is to sit and wait until God actually forces something out of us. Dom John Chapman used to reiterate: ‘Pray as you can, not as you can’t.’ We must start where we are. There may be a great gulf set between our ‘own’ prayer and that of the Spirit, but both are important.
Beowulf and the Limits of Literature—II
Authors: John Eric
Published: July 2007

It is well known that Anglo-Saxon poems, including Beowulf, go in for a device of repetition in varied form of key words and phrases, presumably to get the point across without boring an audience listening to the poem. No device gives the scholar more headaches. Some of these synonyms concern weapons. A lot of different words have to be rendered flatly in modern English by ‘sword’, ‘spear’ and so on. It seems to me this is more serious than many commentators have taken it to be. In Beowulf's world, swords and sword-play were the very matter of survival. My instinct tells me that the mysterious and fallible swords Beowulf used in his fights have an important significance not yet elucidated, but I do not think we shall ever know what it is. It was pointed out to me by one of the greatest scholars of the last generation that many of these so-called synonyms were in fact words for different types of weapons. It is obvious from the archaeological evidence that the Anglo-Saxons had a variety of swords and spears of different types and it takes no great guessing to think they had different names, different functions, and different, quite socialized and common-place, emotions attached to these names.
Signs in the Wind
Authors: Haughton Rosemary
Published: July 2007

If the Spirit speaks to the listening people of God in the events of history, as well as in Scripture, then the events of this time seem to indicate that a renewed search for the springs of Christian spirituality is probably the most urgent task placed by the Spirit before the churches.

The visible church is the listening people. It is not all the people who listen, but it is an identifiable collection of those people who are supposed to be listening to God and acting on what they hear, and who indeed have pledged themselves to do so—though in some cases rather casually, or with extensive reservations. The people must listen to the breathing of the Spirit, even if the message be only whispered, but at this time it rises even to thunder.

At any time in the history of Christianity it would be taken for granted that the personal pursuit of holiness, or the imitation of Christ, or the experience of the Spirit, are indispensable to the Christian life. The emphasis is different under these three headings, but all definitions of how Christians deepen and increase their be done in the assembly of God’s people, by virtue of incorporation in Christ, with all the others who share that membership, but it also takes for granted that this is a personal matter, in which each one must strive and search, often apparently alone. The task and its rewards may belong to the whole, but they also belong to each member. The need for holiness is not new, but it is being newly demanded, with renewed urgency.

In the past two centuries an emphasis on individual holiness at the expense of a sense of social and political responsibility was an easy refuge for good people who wanted to be Christians without rocking the boat too much.
Catholics and Pentecostals
Authors: Tugwell Simon
Published: July 2007

Since 1967 considerable impetus has been given to group prayer in the Catholic Church, by the Catholic Pentecostal Movement in North America. This movement began as largely a lay movement of spiritual renewal in Catholic university circles in the U.S.A. It has connexions with the Spanish-born cursillo movement, whose aim is to bring Catholics to a personal knowledge of the Lord Jesus (the evangelical terminology is deliberate), but it actually derives from the encounter with interdenominational Pentecostalism. It received massive and sensational publicity, and grew with amazing rapidity, spreading throughout the States, and penetrating into Canada. In 1969 it was cautiously approved by the U.S. hierarchy, and has also been enthusiastically recommended by one or two individual bishops.

Although it is a very variegated phenomenon, running right through it is the insistence that all Christians can and should claim ‘the promise of the Father’ in what they, with other Pentecostals, call ‘baptism in the Spirit’. That is to say, people who are already believers in Christ call down upon themselves or upon each other an outpouring of the Holy Spirit, ‘just as it was in the beginning’ at Pentecost. The usual procedure is for someone who has already had the experience to lay hands on one who is seeking it, with prayer; it is believed that this will result in a sudden or gradual unfolding of the person’s life in Christ into the charismatic manifestations, usually beginning with tongues, followed in due course by prophecy, interpretation, healing, or some such supernatural endowment or ministry.
The Revolutionary Church in Latin America
Authors: Roper Christopher
Published: July 2007

When thirty tons of stolen dynamite were recovered by the police in the Argentine province of Santa Fe in February, the local police chief told journalists that the entire responsibility for subversion in Argentina could be ascribed to ‘those cursed Third World priests’. He was exaggerating, but it is true that members of the Movement of Priests for the Third World along with other young Catholics in other parts of Latin America—both priests and laity—have become increasingly deeply involved in revolutionary activities. This does not just mean that many Catholics now accept the need for radical change in the structure of Latin American society and sympathize with the aspirations of the extreme left. An Uruguayan professor of sociology, writing last year of contemporary trends in Latin American Catholicism, has suggested that the old antithesis of Christianity or Marxism is disappearing, and that a new revolutionary synthesis is emerging: ‘Latin Americans have no time any longer for the parlour discussions that are so popular in Europe. They want a dialogue in action and for action, focussing on the political and strategic future of the Latin American revolution. They do not consider either Christianity or Marxism as immutable, selfsufficient or mutually exclusive options.’

This assumption that there is indeed a Latin American revolution which will lead sooner or later to the building of socialism in Latin America is central to a great deal of Christian thought in the region today. This is perhaps the first great political upheaval of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in which Christians as Christians are in the vanguard.
Bodies and Other Minds: the Mind‐Body Problem in the Last Twenty Years
Authors: Williams C. J. F.
Published: July 2007

To the generation of philosophers brought up in England in the years immediately succeeding the Second World War it seemed as though the Mind-Body problem had been (in the current jargon) not solved but dissolved. Where the previous generation had toiled at the old Cartesian task of constructing a material world out of, or on the basis of, mental entities, our generation discovered that the mental entities themselves had been eliminated. The notion of sense-data used by Moore and Russell had been shown in Ryle’s Concept of Mind to be incoherent. ‘J. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia’ appeared on the Oxford lecture list in Trinity Term 1948. Austin’s principal target was just that dichotomy between sense-data and material objects from which the whole problem seemed to be derived. He directed attention to the variety of locutions in which ‘look’ can figure: ‘He looks a good sport.’ ‘He looks as if he were going to faint.’ ‘They look like ants.’ ‘They look like Europeans.’ It looked as if statements about how things look could not be the record of a subclass of mental events called visual experiences.

Mental events as such were gradually being eliminated. Wittgenstein’s views, already rumoured before the publication of Philosophical Investigations in 1953, seemed to require that, where Ryle had taken twinges, aches, itches and flutters had been for Ryle the only honest citizens of the interior state. Much of the odium that he heaped on claimants to mental existence like acts of will, judgment, understanding or perceiving was aroused by the comparison of the latter to their notable disadvantage with the former, whose claim to be genuine occurrences was unchallenged. But here was Wittgenstein apparently challenging it.
Christ and His Angels
Authors: van der Hart Rob
Published: July 2007

There is much more in this paper about angels than about Christ; but I am sure that you will forgive me this disproportion. Christ, so it seems, is already well known to us: we can take him for granted. But angels are new—there is news in talking about angels: they excite our curiosity.

At our disposal are numerous scholary treatises in which Christ’s personality is analysed and this nature is dissected in its several components. About Christ we may think we know almost everything there is to know. But angels. . . ?

Of course, we know they have not really got wings like birds, and that in fact they must be quite different from the naked babies that tumble from the skies in our baroque paintings. But what else is there to say?

To be fair only in the past century and a half have angels suffered a leakage of meaning ending in the present debilitated condition. Before that they were the objects of much serious speculation. Were they material or pure spirits; what sort of knowledge did they have; could they have intercourse; how many of them were there; etc. ? Indeed, angels were dissected too: Fr Cipolla (Brother Onion) treasured in a box a ‘penna dell’hgnolo Gabriello’ which was left behind on the occasion of the archangel’s visit to the Blessed Virgin (II Decamerone VI 10, 370)—supposing, of course, that Boccaccio is a reliable witness.

But alas, for us this wealth of information is buried in the past, unavailable because we do not even know how to make it appear relevant. The break with the past is pretty well complete: angels have been lost definitively in a welter of tinsel and feathers.
He will Baptize you with the Holy spirit
Authors: Tugwell Simon
Published: July 2007

The most distinctive and controverted doctrine of the Pentecostals is that of the ‘baptism in the Spirit’. This was the hallmark of the original Pentecostal movement, as it still is of all Pentecostal-inspired renewal in all the Churches, including, most recently, the Roman Catholic.

Essentially, the doctrine is this: after conversion (and ‘water baptism’), there remains a second blessing, associated usually with the laying on of hands, in which one receives the fullness of the Holy Spirit’s indwelling, experiencing for oneself what the first disciples experienced at Pentecost. Some manifestation, usually tongues, is expected; indeed, strict Pentecostals demand it—‘no tongues, no baptism in the Spirit’. Thereafter a person should increasingly realize in his life that he has been ‘endued with power from on high’, he will know that he is ‘led by the Spirit’, he will expect to receive and, when necessary, to perform miracles, especially healing. The whole doctrine rests on an appeal to texts like Mark 16, 17-18, and the obvious passages in Acts (all the texts that respectable commentators like Chrysostom have had to explain away).

I have already argued that we must take the Pentecostal challenge seriously, though expressing some doubts about the propriety of ‘Catholic Pentecostalism’. Here I shall simply examine what they call ‘baptism in the Spirit’. Without wishing at all to devalue the experience, I think it is essential, at least for us in the traditional Churches, to consider how far their doctrine of it is theologically and exegetically sound, and what precisely is the spiritual and psychological significance of the experience. Something must also be said about the gift of tongues.

The gospel begins with the appearance of John the Baptist, preaching a baptism of repentance, in view of the impending arrival of the Messiah who is to execute an eschatological baptism of judgment, in Spirit and fire.
Women in the Gospels
Authors: Brennan Irene
Published: July 2007

At the present time women are becoming more and more integrated into the public and professional spheres; they are taking posts of responsibility not only within the home, but outside of it, where they are being accepted not just as feminists but as members of the community with particular skills and aptitudes, which are not, moreover, merely ‘womanly’ skills and aptitudes. In many professional situations it is now no longer sensible to ask whether the applicant for a post is a man or a woman; the only criteria applied are those of professional competence. This change within the secular society is not reflected within Church communities. Women are systematically discriminated against; the most crude and powerful symbol of this is their exclusion from the sanctuary. Now, it is argued that ‘tradition’ supports this discrimination and any attack on it is an attack on the living and holy tradition of the Church, and moreover that woman’s place is sharply and strictly defined in scripture. We shall not be able to examine both of these objections, but must content ourselves with a partial examination of the second. Partial because we shall only look at the four Gospels and not at the Old Testament or the other writings of the New Testament. Also much of the work that has been done on this question is based on a study of the role of the Mother of God, but very little has been attempted in the study of the roles of other women mentioned in the Gospel narratives. Therefore, we shall concentrate on this area, hoping to discuss the unique and all-important place of the Mother of God later. Finally we should make clear that in spite of the content, this article is not a statement of a merely ‘feminist’ point of view. Issues will be raised that go far beyond the single problem of the status of women; rather this problem should be seen as one of many which present a moral challenge to the Church and which are all interrelated. Sexual discrimination is only one form of discrimination which may afflict a ‘Christian’ community.
Women and the Liberation of Men
Authors: Reventlow Tove
Published: July 2007

There is a loud cry of complaint. Women have a sense of betrayal, of having been subjected to male purposes in a world where they are forced to play an inferior part. Now many of them feel that the time has come to rise up and conquer this world, man’s world, and make it their own. Battle is joined, the revolution has commenced. But how can the war of the sexes ever be won ? If it is a battle it is one without real victory, for man and woman can never be anything but related, opposite but related—as right and left, day and night, heaven and earth. Women can certainly become as rational as men, they can think their thoughts, do their jobs, wear their clothes . . . unisex even returns the compliment and polarity is dissolved. So women can become as men. They can become specialists, technicians, breaking down universality into the particular, the whole into the isolated part; specializing as men have done, have had to do, in order to produce such a successful society. Women feel underprivileged, they have been left behind. They are still amateurs— inefficient, for only specialization makes for real efficiency. Women improvise, they tend to make do with what is to hand. They often go about things in a devious way which drives men mad. They seem so content to act from within the contingent. They are like Levi-Strauss’s ‘bricoleurs’, they do a variety of jobs with the limited means available. Many women do perform daily a balancing act quite illogical in its demands and immeasurable in its productivity. Of course there is the state, or the kibbutz, to release mothers for more serious business, the public rather than the private sector. There, like men, they can chart their advancement, calculate their progress and earn money. Women may have invented agriculture, cooking, pottery, weaving, in fact most of what makes life tolerable, but that was a long time ago. Now the mere job of living should take care of itself, women want more important work to do, they want to be anywhere but at home.
The Function of Criticism and Theology
Authors: Beisly Phil
Published: July 2007

To move away from a dogmatic allegiance, from a commitment to a worked-out system of beliefs, is not unusual today; nor is it unusual, having done this, to retain a profound conviction about the power and richness of the tradition underlying the theology. Many people can no longer assent to Christian theology—not only to the theology they have known, but to any theological system—and yet they may still want to read the Bible and other Christian literature, and, perhaps, to participate in the liturgy. From an older and more established viewpoint their position is curious, even dishonest, for it seems an evasion of the responsibilities of belief and commitment that the Bible and the liturgy are all about. To say this often enough, however, is to provoke an answering attitude which remarks, in tones of pragmatic commonsense, that there is nothing wrong in this at all, for surely the Bible is to be read and the liturgy attended; if the Bible is being read and the liturgy is being attended, then all is well; for the fact of the continuing response not being tied automatically to a dogmatic allegiance does not in itself invalidate the response—whether it does or not is a question which directs attention to the kinds of response which the Bible and the liturgy themselves seem to demand. And to put it like that is to pose not a theological, but a critical, question.

To recognize the question thus is to move much nearer to the non-dogmatic person who isn’t starting out with a set of preconceptions called beliefs. That this person continues to attend to the Bible and the liturgy should suggest areas of meaning which the predominant orthodoxies have not taken into account, but of course the very perplexity of established dogmatism at the sight of this new type of reader or participant comes from an inability to entertain this possibility: what the Bible and the liturgy mean is what theology says they mean—surely there is nothing else! To this point of view the newer type of response is necessarily meaningless.
The Manifestation of Baptism
Authors: Tugwell Simon
Published: July 2007

In a previous article, we were considering the Pentecostal doctrine of the ‘baptism in the Spirit’, and concluded that it all really belongs to the full New Testament understanding of baptism, of what it is to be a Christian at all. Baptism should be—indeed (so far as the evidence shows) clearly was—a real spiritual turning point, leading a person into a whole new world of experience, with its own canons of understanding and behaviour, its own distinctive principles of action, moral and charismatic. We saw that there was an indissoluble complex of faith in the exalted Christ, metanoia (conversion, new heart), renunciation of Satan the Prince of this world (dropping out, apotaxis), the experience of the Spirit of God ‘who explores even the hidden things of God’, who ‘convicts the world’, who ‘leads us into all truth’.

We then had to admit the fact that this is not, generally, our experience of being baptized, and saw that the Pentecostal theory is one way of coping with this situation, though one that we cannot follow, as such. I shall now mention various other ways, and, with the theological basis thus broadened, shall attempt some theological and practical synthesis, showing how I think we can learn much from the Pentecostals, without betraying anything that the Church has always held dear.

Already in the New Testament we find some important guidelines. For instance, there is a very significant shift between Matthew and Mark. For Matthew, faith is a key concept, closely tied to his concluding scene, the exaltation of Jesus. The question Jesus asks is, ‘Do you believe that I can do this?’ (9, 28). The answer must be, simply and totally, ‘Yes, Lord’, an answer that entails a radical abandonment of care, a total upheaval of the normal procedures of social life.
South Africa: Dialogue or Disaster
Authors: Hill Edmund
Published: July 2007

Perhaps it would be as well to start with the reminder that it is impossible to analyse South African politics in terms of political Right and Left, and quite misleading to try. Neither the United Party nor even the Progressive Party are really to the left of the Nationalist Party in any meaningful way. A case of sorts could be made out for saying that in some respects it is well to the left of the opposition parties, and certainly its policies are far less shy of radical solutions. But as I say, these terms do not really apply in South Africa, where we are living in a different set of dimensions from Europe or America.

The two basic drives that power the Nationalist Party are intense Afrikaner nationalism and White colour prejudice. The two are distinct in principle, and there are Afrikaner nationalists of sensibility who take pride in the nationalism and genuinely abjure and deplore the prejudice. But they are few, and in the soul of the average nationalist the two drives are almost identical, or at least serve to boost and intensify each other. One might say, rather academically, that the basic drives of the United Party used to be a kind of Smutsian imperialism and White colour prejudice, but that the imperialism has vanished with the course of events, and so only the colour prejudice is left. It is true, up to a point; U.P. candidates, some of them, have not hesitated to appeal to colour prejudice in their electorates, or in their attacks on some government actions. The Progressive Party bases itself more on reason and the more humane sentiments of the heart, which is why it lacks any potent appeal among the dominant racial group in this country.
Contemplation and Mission
Authors: Tugwell Simon
Published: July 2007

The Church is both called and sent by God: called to sanctity and to salvation, and sent to preach the gospel to the whole creation (Mark 16, 15), healing the sick and driving out demons (Matt. 10, 8). It is only where action and contemplation have become secularized (or, for that matter, sacralized—it comes to the same thing), that any contradiction appears; that is to say, it is only because we try to apprehend and to practise prayer or good works without seeing how they proceed from the mission of Jesus Christ, that the hoary problem of reconciling and balancing the two arises.

‘You shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth.’ ‘As the Father has sent me, even so I send you . . . Receive the Holy Spirit’ (Acts 1,8; John 20, 2If). In their different ways, each of the evangelists (even the unexpanded Mark) concludes with some kind of experience of the risen, exalted Lord, coupled with a command to go and tell people, to bear witness, whether by word or by example. Luke’s Pentecost story is but the most dramatic version of this.

Now, as I have suggested, for those who did not live with Jesus on earth, baptism is the appointed way into the whole event of Calvary to Pentecost. In baptism we die with Christ and rise with him, receiving the Spirit that we may live no longer for sin and self, but for God. Of itself, this obviously does not entail any formally apostolic mission; but it certainly includes some kind of obligation to bear witness. ‘To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. To one is given through the Spirit the word of wisdom, and to another the word of knowledge according to the same Spirit ... for just as the body is one and has many members, so it is with Christ. For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body’ (I Cor. 12, 7ff). Tertullian is quite in line with this when he exhorts the newly-baptized, as they emerge from the font, to pray for an ‘apportioning of charisms’.
Priests and Socialism in Chile
Authors: Echegoyen Maruja
Published: July 2007

Eighty Catholic priests who live and work among the working classes in Chile met in April in Santiago to study the most effective way priests and lay people could help in building socialism in Chile. What follows is a summary made up from answers given to questions asked at a Press Conference on 16th April, to some questions asked later of some of the priests taking part, and from statements made in some of the papers read.

It has been compiled by the Uruguayan journalist MARUJA ECHEGOYEN.

Background

During the final Session of the study group, eight priests held a Press Conference at which they read out a prepared statement and answered questions from journalists representing both Chilean and overseas papers. Among these priests were Fr Gonzalo Arroyo, chaplain of the Catholic University of Santiago, and Fr Alfonso Pujadas, Director-General of the Workers’ Movement at the same University. The journalists mostly represented left-wing organs. Not long before, the Christian Democrat daily La Prensa had published, tendentiously and without prior authorization, with misleading headings, a private document circulated in November last year among a group of priests, wrongly making it out to be the starting-point for this meeting of Socialist priests. Gonzalo Arroyo attacked this action at the Press Conference, and it is indeed one more example of the growing inability of the more right-wing sector of Christian Democracy in Chile to listen and discuss rationally.
Poverty, Christianity and Revolution
Authors: Nyerere Julius
Published: July 2007

Poverty is not the real problem of the modern world. For we have the knowledge and resources which could enable us to overcome poverty. The real problem—the thing which creates misery, wars and hatred among men—is the division of mankind into rich and poor.

We can see this division at two levels. Within nation states there are a few individuals who have great wealth and whose wealth gives them great power; but the vast majority of people suffer from varying degrees of poverty and deprivation. Even in a country like the United States, this division can be seen. In countries like India, Portugal or Brazil, the contrast between the wealth of a few privileged individuals and the dire poverty of the masses is a crying scandal.

And looking at the world as a collection of nation states, we see the same pattern repeated. There are a few wealthy nations which dominate the whole world economically, and therefore politically; and a mass of smaller and poor nations whose destiny, it appears, is to be dominated.

The significance of this division between the rich and the poor is not simply that one man has more food than he can eat, more clothes than he can wear and more houses than he can live in, while others are hungry, unclad and homeless. The significant thing about the division between rich and poor nations is not simply that one has the resources to provide comfort for all its citizens, and the other cannot provide basic services. The reality and depth of the problem arises because the man who is rich has power over the lives of those who are poor, and the rich nation has power over the policies of those which are not rich. And even more important is that our social and economic system, nationally and internationally, supports these divisions and constantly increases them, so that the rich get ever richer and more powerful, while the poor get relatively poorer and less able to control their own future.
Man in the City
Authors: Markus Thomas A.
Published: July 2007

This paper asks some questions about man and nature from one point of view, that of an interest in the city. It puts forward a few current concepts of the city with emphasis on recent social studies. It asks to what extent the making of cities and living in them is ‘natural’ to man; to what extent they have always been a deliberate statement about man’s relationship to the world of nature (is there a conflict here ?); and it tries to show the direction in which cities are developing and the degree to which these developments may be said to enhance and enrich experience or to impoverish and destroy it. It is a personal statement and is not in any way an attempt to give a critical summary of current sociological, planning and artistic critiques of the city.

The City as Experience

After some weeks of reading in preparation for writing this paper I was preparing to make a concentrated start on it one evening. It happened that I had cause to visit a friend in a local hospital that same evening. The journey was short, through a decaying industrial/ housing part of the city. The hospital itself is entered through an arch over a narrow carriage way, unaltered since horse and carriage days as witnessed by the width of the opening and the stone cart tracks leading into a cobbled yard; the hospital building, an agglomeration of bits and pieces from the last 100 years or so. The pub next to the hospital, on a Friday night, is crowded and noisy and a refuge for both patients and staff.
The City: Agora and Underground, Camouflage and Masks
Authors: Edwards Adrian
Published: July 2007

Professor Markus seems to be concerned with the city as symbol and as organization. What does the city now mean, and how does it and might it function ? These two questions are very closely related; even a purely technical system will, if it functions, have various significant impacts on the aesthetic and ethical levels. And if a symbolic system really involves efficacious symbols these will at some point cut into the world of allocations and preferences. If his questions 3 and 4 were to be answered as he would seem to wish, we would be at the same time well on the way to answering 1 and 2. The really efficient city where rights and duties were clearly mapped would be therapeutic and liberating. I think again he doesn’t see this therapeutic role of the city as something static—rather as being more like a group psycho-therapy where recovery and discovery are both part of the programme.

I think though that we must start distinguishing; there is man’s activity carried out under the sign of the city, and that carried out as man the tool-maker, if you like man the world changer. The city expressed in the agora, a community of citizens functioning as a juridical and political unit, is essentially a Mediterranean institution; of course, there were cities elsewhere, among the Arabs, in India or China, and for that matter in pre-colonial black Africa. But these lacked the characteristic patterns of the city-state, centring round the concept of a body of citizens with specific rights and duties constituting the polis. Despite the claim of Massignon, the Arab cities had no real system of guilds; the Hindu cities had activity which may be called political within the various quarters, but there were no overall civic democracies, or oligarchies, nor did the Chinese city have any greater degree of civic personality.
Cor Unum: Return of the Monolith?
Authors: Jerman William E.
Published: July 2007

In a letter dated 15th July of this year and released to the public one week later, Pope Paul, writing to Cardinal Jean Villot, head of the Vatican Secretariat of State, announced the foundation of a new pontifical body, of which the cardinal would be the first president. To give it its official title, the new agency is the Pontifical Council ‘Cor Unum’ for Promoting Human and Christian Development. Its purpose is to ‘co-ordinate the energies and undertakings of all Catholic organizations’ engaged in emergency relief and development funding.

The project had first been made known beyond the confines of upper-level Secretariat of State circles some seven weeks earlier. From various sources the following sketch of background moves can can be made out. The story seems worth telling in view of one of the major objections that was to be voiced later against the whole project: the unilateral action of the Vatican in a matter that affects the whole Catholic Church, most especially all those persons directly involved in the collection and distribution of relief and development funds.

On 26th May, Cardinal Villot put his signature to approximately 100 copies of a 3-page document. The same day, Archbishop Giovanni Benelli, Under-Secretary of State, summoned a number of persons to see him; among them was Mons. Jean Rodhain, president of Caritas Internationalis. He spoke to them not in a group but one after the other, informing them of the content of Cardinal Villot’s letter.

With all the trappings of cloak-and-dagger international intrigue, Cardinal Villot’s letter was not to be sent to its addressees by mail: a team of envoys fanned out to deliver it in person. They travelled to Austria, Germany, France, Belgium, the United States, and elsewhere. They laid special stress on the confidential nature of the proceedings and the document.
Some Thoughts on the Eucharistic Presence
Authors: Egner G.
Published: July 2007

I turn to the newer theories of the eucharistic presence. They are not as accessible as the old: that much we can all admit. In fact, I begin what I have to say about them by giving two reasons for this inaccessibility. First of all they have been published for the most part in Flemish or Dutch, and in periodicals not easily traced in England. I got round this difficulty by having a large selection of material microfilmed in Holland: what I have to say, although I do not propose to take up much time in quotation, is in fact based upon original sources that I have read and translated for myself. The second cause of inaccessibility is more important. Just as the older theory was couched in the terminology of Aristotle (misleadingly so, if my contentions are correct), so the newer theories have their philosophical setting. The setting is the tradition known as phenomenology, and associated with the philosopher Edmund Husserl, who died in 1938. To understand what the newer theology is getting at here, one needs to know something of this way of philosophizing.

I have one help in embarking on a brief description: the relationship between the newer theology and Husserl is not the same as the relationship between the traditional account and Aristotle. The newer opinions do not abuse phenomenology in the way that the concepts of actuality and potentiality are abused in the theory of transubstantiation. On the other hand, phenomenology is a very difficult brand of philosophy to put into a few words. Be that as it may, I think it is possible to pick out one or two things from it that have influenced recent theological speculation on the eucharistic presence.
Marx on the Religious Illusion
Authors: Maguire John
Published: July 2007

Marx spent most of the years 1843 and 1844 in Paris, having been expelled from Germany. During this period he produced three essays, two on the Jewish question and one on Hegelian philosophy in Germany, as well as the more famous Paris Manuscripts. My aim in this essay is to present a puzzle which arises about the argument which Marx proposes in these writings as to the relation of religion and politics, and to suggest a possible partial explanation and some possible implications of the occurrence of this puzzle.

We may start by making clear Marx’s intention in the writings in question, particularly the three essays. He is concerned to warn the Jews against those who say: ‘Give up your religion, which marks you off from all of us; you cannot merit the privileges of modern political life unless you agree to shed your religious distinctiveness, at least where your politics is concerned.’ Marx tells the Jew to inquire carefully into the real conditions of life in modern society. If he does so he will see that shedding his distinct religion will in no way help him to overcome the defects of his real, concrete existence: he will still live a narrow, isolated life, in enmity rather than co-operation with his fellows. This sphere in which we live our concrete, day-to-day existence, Marx calls Civil Society, and he contrasts it with the State, or political sphere; together, the two spheres go to make up what I shall call ‘modern society’. This name refers not precisely to any actual historical society but to an ‘ideal type’ to which post-Revolution France and the post-Independence United States of America would be close empirical approximations.
Koch on Apocalyptic
Authors: Robinson Bernard
Published: July 2007

‘(Jesus’ audience) thought that the Kingdom would be a place like the old kingdom of David, with armies and a king’s throne. Jesus knew that it was not a place, but the action of God ruling over our hearts.’ So John Hargreaves, though it is perhaps unfair to pick on him, for similar pronouncements can be found in hundreds of popular, and indeed scholarly, theological writings. It is the way most of us were brought up to think. Perhaps it is the right way of thinking, but there are, I think, increasingly good reasons for feeling unsure about that. When the Jews talked about ‘the kingdom’ (without further qualification) they certainly were not thinking of some invisible operation: they meant the Roman Empire. The ‘Kingdom of God’ on the lips of Jesus may well have referred to something equally tangible—to a world order, not a concept. He may well have been speaking not of the invisible activity of ‘grace’ in the ‘soul’, but of a kingdom, however spiritual, with visible, material attributes. A recent writer on the Fourth Gospel, for instance, has interpreted the scene before Pilate in these terms:

Jesus’ kingship is not ‘unworldly’. Instead one of the characteristics of the Johannine treatment of the trial and of the events that lead up to it is that the political implications are emphasized. In 11, 48 a specifically political motivation is injected into the plotting of the Jewish authorities. John alone mentions the presence of the Roman soldiers (he spaira kai ho chiliarchos) at the arrest of Jesus. In the trial itself, the political-realistic element is introduced by the Jews at 19, 12: ‘If you release this man you are not Caesar’s friend; anyone who makes himself a king opposes Caesar’.
Analogy and Metaphor
Authors: Wicker Brian
Published: July 2007

One very obvious feature of the current theological scene is a divorce between—in Pascal’s celebrated distinction—the God of the Philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. That is to say, the people most interested in religion, mostly members of the ‘counter-culture’, are generally hostile to the intellectual exploration of religion and religious language. Their religion centres on ‘love and consolation’, to use Pascal’s phrase, not upon rational argument or analysis. Another way of putting this is to say that the God of Religion is naturally spoken of in metaphorical language, while the God of the Philosophers can only be spoken of in analogical language. I am concerned to argue that, despite the anti-intellectualism of the ‘counter-culture’, it is still necessary to have a philosophical foundation for religion, and that this involves accepting the validity of analogical language, even if the most significant religious language we have today is to be found in the metaphorical speech of singers, poets and story-tellers. It is important, therefore, to establish the right relationship between analogical and metaphorical language. The following analysis of a sonnet by Hopkins is offered as a brief preface to a discussion of the two-dimensional structure of any language that purports to discuss God.
Those who Dare not See
Authors: Murphy Richard
Published: July 2007

Man is conceived in aggression: too often, he dies in it.

The sexual act may be enhanced by its manner, exalted by its intent, transfigured by its context. But the instinct that impels to its performance is the aggressive instinct.

It is a primitive instinct, in the neutral sense that it strikes to the roots of our nature. In the past as in the present, it is often a necessary compulsion: the tribe of the timorous hunter was a hungry tribe.

Drives deeply rooted perpetually seek an outlet. But to find an outlet they must first be canalized. Therefore aggression seeks initially a focus, an object.

Now the world is full of objects; yet we direct aggression on our kind. It is on people rather than on things that we inflict violence. As the lover craves response from the beloved, so does the aggressor from his victim. The shattered window does not whimper; the smitten plane tree does not bleed. But the ravished woman whimpers. And the thrashing body bleeds. Thus does aggressiveness achieve its terrible catharsis.

Violence against the person is of two kinds, physical and psychic. The first is widely deplored: the second is hardly recognized as violence. Yet it is all but universal. Daily we inflict violence on one another. Hourly we crucify our fellows.