bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Life Before The Common Good
Authors: Barrett Richard
Published: July 2007

Simplifications are dangerous at the best of times and the same may be said of applications of general principle to particular circumstance. In this vein it seems appropriate to offer some thoughts on the recent document of the Episcopal Conference of England and Wales entitled The Common Good. A document which purports to offer a moral diagnosis on a specific socio-economic context is, like a surgeon, heavily dependent on antecedent data in arriving at that diagnosis and thence at a remedy for ills detected. In this short study we cannot hope to conflate the entire corpus of Catholic Social Teaching into a few words but it may be helpful to focus on the diagnostic aspects of the recent document of the Conference, viewing it as essentially applicative of previous interventions of the Roman magisterium, and thus be able to discern some possible avenues of interpretation for the future.

Diagnosing the problem, especially with regard to socio-economic conditions, must offer the ecclesiastical spectator the most challenging of tasks, given the shifting and undulating nature of the economic landscape. The historio-genesis of the first official contribution to the problem, Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum, bears this out, and yet there are a number of observations from that document which would resonate well with even the most sceptical of economic analyses of our time. Thus Leo XIII observed:

A tiny group of extravagantly rich men have been able to lay upon the great multitude of unpropertied workers a yoke that is little better than that of slavery itself (RN 2).
The Beautiful Death of Thérèse of Lisieux and the Sufferings of the Tubercular Self
Authors: Neal Diana
Published: July 2007

For those familiar with the themes of traditional female spirituality in the Christian West, the dreary saga of Thérèse Martin and her death at the age of twenty-four in 1897 can only come as a grim reminder of the symbolic burden by which women have carried in their persons the dualistic designation of the spirit at war against the flesh. In the past the story of Thérèse has divided the Catholic faithful between traditional adherents of her cult, and those who opposed it in the name of a more virile postVatican II spirituality. More recently interest in her has extended beyond its traditional bounds. Monica Furlong’s biography, written from outside the Catholic community, provided a long overdue reappraisal of the young woman’s ambiguous character, from a frankly feminist perspective. Furlong concluded that the vitality and strength of determination typical of the young adult Thérèse has often been hidden from view by the sickly cult of weakness and submission that sprang up after her death.

Thérèse’s asceticism, which has come to be known as the Little Way, is an asceticism which reaches its apogee in her uncomplaining spirituality of suffering and death. By the time Thérèse died, a few months short of her twenty-fifth birthday, she had developed a spirituality of the body which stood over against a theology of considerable insight.The orthodoxy of her assertion of the gratuity of divine love, and of her conclusion that God cannot be pleased by heroic effort, but accepts the imperfect human being without question of merit, is expressed with all the clarity and conviction of so distant a figure from her in time, if not altogether in temperament, as Martin Luther. But the profundity of her basic theological insight is not the subject of this article.
Hindemith’s ‘Mathis der Maler’: A Parable for our Times
Authors: Fuller Michael
Published: July 2007

The musical fortunes of the German composer Paul Hindemith (18951963) waxed and waned in his own lifetime. The recent centenary of his birth, however, has brought opportunities for re-assessment of both the composer and his work, and much interest has been focussed on his masterpiece, the opera ‘Mathis der Maler’ (‘Mathis the Painter’). Two recordings of this work are now available on compact disc, and the Royal Opera produced the first ever British staging of the work on what would have been Hindemith’s hundredth birthday. ‘Mathis der Maler’ has been revealed to be an enormously powerful music-drama, remarkable no less for the historical individual who inspired it and for the circumstances in which it was produced than for the beautiful music which it contains. Hindemith wrote his own libretto for this opera, which enabled him to put forward in it a number of his own ideas about both art and music, and also to raise profound spiritual issues. In its exploration of such themes, ‘Mathis der Maler’ has a relevance that transcends Hindemith’s own day, touching on issues both contemporary and timeless. To explain the motivation behind such a remarkable work, it is necessary to set it in the context of Hindemith’s life, and of his theories about music.

Hindemith was a precocious musical talent, playing violin and viola in orchestral and chamber ensembles from an early age. He rose to prominence as a composer in the years after the First World War, and his music was much performed, in Germany and further afield, during the 1920s.
Friendship: A Metaphor for Moral Advancement?
Authors: Haggerty Donald F.
Published: July 2007

Latent in the moral teaching of the Catholic Church since Vatican II has been a conception of morality as a life project, a positive force for the shaping of human character. This marks a shift of focus beyond morality as a science of demarcations, separating good actions from evil, the permissible from the forbidden, a method of problem-solving when ambiguity confronts conscience about a particular choice. A broader vision has been sought in which subjects treated under the heading of the moral life can be concluded aptly only by connecting them to the life of holiness. While in some cases it can be difficult to observe a distinction between a treatment of morality and an exhortation to more serious spiritual life, this overlapping of subject matter is not unwelcome.

Veritatis Splendor is a recent case in point. While the middle portion of the encyclical offers a very precise analysis of the relations among human acts, conscience, and the moral law, the encyclical begins and ends with meditative chapters in which the moral life is described as nothing less than the road to sanctity. These sections require little familiarity with moral theology to inspire personal response. The pages on martyrdom, for instance, in their evocation of the cost of moral commitment in the modem world, are a striking appeal to the heroic courage that produces saints.

A less well-known example of this ‘spiritual’ approach to moral theology has been the incorporation of friendship as a thematic point of reference for the quality of a person’s moral life.
Jesus Christ and Auschwitz
Authors: de Lange Nicholas
Published: July 2007

The 27th Cardinal Bea Memorial Lecture 15th May 1997

Nineteen years ago, when I delivered the 8th Cardinal Bea Memorial Lecture, I said this:

History obliges Jews to take account of the figure of Jesus, because Jewish life is lived in the midst of the gentiles, and for the majority of Jews that means in the midst of Christians. We are compelled to respond to Jesus—not Jesus the ancient Jew but Jesus the Christian Lord.

And I concluded with the positive judgment of Franz Rosenzweig:

Before God, Jew and Christian both labour at the same task. He cannot dispense with either.

I fully share Franz Rosenzweig’s optimistic vision, and it is in the light of this belief, and in the spirit of my earlier talk, that I accepted the invitation to come back and give a second lecture in memory of the man we are gathered to honour. We owe it to Cardinal Bea and to other predecessors who, like him, laboured to clear away the bitterness and hatred of centuries, to continue this work, each one of us in whatever way we can.

I would like to take this opportunity to push my own thinking further than I was willing or able to do nineteen years ago. In the intervening years my thoughts have moved on, and so has the climate of Christian-Jewish dialogue. I think we are ready now for some tougher talking. I hope I am not wrong about this.
A New Dawn? The Roman Catholic Church and Environmental Issues
Authors: Deane‐Drummond Celia
Published: July 2007

Introduction

Awareness of environmental issues, seems, if anything, to be on the increase. In spite of fears that the public debate about the ‘green’ agenda would fade, rather like the anxiety over a threat of a nuclear holocaust, which is now far less prominent compared with the 1970s, politicians today seem even more aware of the need to include environmental concerns in their policy statements. Yet there still seems to be a gap opening up between political affirmations and cries for more radical restructuring. This gap has led to heightened tension, exemplified by the high profile displays of attachment to the land shown by characters such as Daniel Needs, alias ‘Swampy’, who, in January 1997 buried himself underground in an attempt to prevent an A30 ‘improvement’ programme near Fairmile in Devon. Such actions may seem extreme, but they epitomize the dissatisfaction, especially of the young, with the ineffectiveness of politicians to make any real difference and an almost total lack of clear national transport policy. Such dissatisfaction is expressed in other ways as well: now more young people belong to voluntary environmental groups than political parties. Official jargon and teaching feels alienating for those who want to see real practical advances in the way we treat our planet. Such language also spreads into official Church documentation on other issues in a way that alienates many ordinary men and women.
A Critical Note on Norman Pittenger's Mariology
Authors: Cummings Owen F.
Published: July 2007

In his ecumenical Marian theology, Fr. George H. Tavard has a fine chapter entitled “Mary in Anglicanism,” in which he traces the development of Marian teaching from Thomas Cranmer to the present. Tavard’s essay is not intended to be comprehensive and so. while he maintains that it would be “an exaggeration to speak of a Marian movement in contemporary Anglicanism,” nonetheless significant contributions have been made in recent times, for example, by Canon Donald Allchin and Professor John Macquanie. Had the nonagenarian Anglican priest-theologian Norman Pittenger’s Our Lady, The Mother of Jesus in Christian Faith and Devotion been published before 1996, no doubt Fr. Tavard would have included some mention of it as yet another contemporary Anglican contribution.
Nature in a ‘world come of age’
Authors: Scott Peter
Published: July 2007

What is striking about the reception of the account of worldliness in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s prison writings is how few commentators have drawn attention to the fact that Bonhoeffer concentrates on the status of nature. To be sure, nature is not part of the definition of ‘the coming of age of mankind’. But the aim of such ‘coming of age’ is ‘to be independent of nature’. Bonhoeffer writes: ‘Our immediate environment is not nature, as formerly, but organization. But with this protection from nature’s menace there arises a new one — through organization itself.’ So the claim that ‘organization’ is now the environment of humanity is to be understood dialectically: the emancipation of humanity from nature leads to new forms of domination.

For Bonhoeffer, the attempt to escape nature thus raises once more the question of humanity. Or, as Bonhoeffer puts it, if the menace of nature is displaced by the menace of social organization, ‘What protects us against the menace of organization?’. ‘Coming of age’ is thus an anthropological development (the theme of worldliness) predicated upon the emerging independence of humanity from nature which, in turn, requires a theological response (the theme of ‘secular interpretation’). Such interpretation must address the fact that nature is now mediated to us by social contexts. So the theological interpretation of a ‘world come of age’ includes judgements about the status and significance of nature for humanity.

The difficulties raised here for Christian theology by the place of nature in a ‘world come of age’ are acute for we are driven back to the origins of modernity.
Relativism: Opportunity or Threat?
Authors: Bebb Andrew
Published: July 2007

The postmodernist perspective is so amorphous as to almost defy description. A good deal of imprecision inevitably flourishes. Its description ranges from the superficial level of popularist culture and its images, to an anarchistic nihilism. Many of its adherents are refugee post-Marxists sheltering under the banner of a relativistic abandonment of all ideological absolutes. Where is one to find the link between the post-structuralism of literary criticism and the postmodernism in the field of architecture and art? There are many who regard the process as a fundamental transformation in human self understanding. They regard it as a radical de-centring of the self and as a comprehensive embracing of relationality and relativism, (which seems to be generating such concern in the breast of Cardinal Ratzinger and his colleagues), as a complete disavowal of the enlightenment project. Others, rather strangely on the other hand, see it simply as the next sequential stage in the modernising process, and equally a threat to the purity of faith. The emphasis, for them, is on its continuity with the past.

It is a difficult area and to be approached with diffidence. I am myself heavily dependent upon the contribution of Gerard Loughlin, who gave me my first introduction to the writings of Levinasian ethics in his article in New Blackfriars in January 1994.

Both the enlightenment and the reaction against it in postmodernity have at their heart an exploration of the significance of the self as it is confronted by a world in which it feels itself to be an alien.
Eucharist and Hope
Authors: Stancil Wilburn T.
Published: July 2007

While the Eucharist has a focus on both the past (re-presenting the passion of Jesus) and the present (feeding and nurturing us with the Body and Blood of Christ), it also is a celebration of hope and renewal. This hope provides a vision for the future, challenges the status quo, and prevents the church from falling into despair when faced with a culture that no longer lives sacramentally.

Even though hope is one of the three theological virtues, it has taken a beating in recent years. In today's secularized culture hope is synonymous with mere optimism or even wishful thinking. For a large segment of Christianity, hope means little more than heaven when you die. Even our language betrays us. A sentence such as, “I hope it may come true,” structured in the subjunctive mood and filled with uncertainty, casts a pall of doubt.

The Christian concept of hope, however, is much richer. It implies expectation, even confidence, and is centered on the promises of God. In fact, the focus of hope is not only on its content but on the act of hoping as characteristic of the community of faith. Therefore, hope is closely connected with patience, because it speaks of future promises which are already authentically experienced now, even though partially and in a preliminary form.
Mary Magdalene's Touch in a Family Church
Authors: Eggen William
Published: July 2007

Recently, the anthropologist Mary Douglas has pleaded for a space within the Church's pastoral life, in which women’s contributions could be fully valued. Her article might appear to some as a make-do solution, because it advocates using the area which has not been claimed by the hierarchy so as to spell out a proper task for women. The misgivings of some feminists might actually be heightened even further by her last paragraph, on the caring role of women. For has this not been the age-old role pattern? Maybe it has. But as the article was printed in a special issue on the sacramental life of the Church, there is a strong case for its argument, looking at a much neglected side of the Eucharistic tradition. I wish to highlight this by reflecting on an insight of the Nigerian sister and exegete Teresa Okure, and especially on a most revealing, new definition of the Church which emerged from the African Synod (three years ago, April-May 1994), calling the Church ‘the Family of God'.

In keeping with the hope that African perspectives may also inspire the Church at large—as the papal exhortation Ecclesia in Africa expresses it—I venture to join the research on this concept. Although the papal text openly endorses this term at the outset of the third phase of the synodal process, it does not wish to advance any specific interpretation of it yet. It sees it clearly as a notion that is still to mature in the interchange between pastoral practice and reflection.
Rewriting the Liturgy: the theological implications of translation
Authors: Duffy Eamon
Published: July 2007

The transformation of the liturgy of the Catholic Church in the wake of the Second Vatican Council was, by any standard, a landmark event. It represented the unfreezing of a liturgical tradition which had seemed to many to be sacrosanct and immemorial, beyond question or change. Almost a century ago the greatest of all English liturgists, Edmund Bishop, could write without a hint of irony that “With the Missal and Breviary of St Pius V ...the history of the Roman liturgy may be said to be closed”.

Bishop himself was too good an historian to harbour romantic illusions about the timelessness or changelessness of liturgy. He had a highly developed sense of the historical evolution of worship and in fact he was a strong sympathiser and fellow-traveller with the Modernist movement, and its attempt to demythologise the doctrinaire nonhistorical orthodoxy of post-Tridentine Catholicism. But neither Bishop nor the two generations of liturgists who laboured after him to reclaim for the present the forgotten riches of the Latin liturgical tradition could have dreamed of the cultural and theological revolution which would come upon the Church in the late 1960s and 1970s, a revolution which swept away not only many of the accretions of medieval and baroque liturgical and para-liturgical practice which they so deplored, but many of their own most treasured convictions about the nature of liturgy and liturgical theology. They hoped that the liturgy, duly cleansed of accretion and distortion, would become, in Joseph Jungmann’s words, “a school of faith”. In the ancient prayers and ceremonies of the Church, Jungmann believed, would be found an endless resource, a great well of wisdom and truth.
A Short Essay on the Reform of the Liturgy
Authors: Pickstock Catherine
Published: July 2007

In order to gain an understanding of any mediaeval liturgical text, but especially the Roman Rite, which was the central liturgical text for the Latin West, it is essential to realise that the liturgy of the Middle Ages, unike the liturgy of today, was embedded in a culture which was ritual in character. The world of commerce, for example, was sacralised through its management by the economic guilds, whose liturgical basis ensured that production was perpetually crossed out by being offered in worship. This was a time when the Offertory gifts were not disconnected from the produce of everyday life; indeed, the category itself of ‘everyday life’ was perforce a thoroughly liturgical category. For the community was not seen as a given, existing prior to, or in separation from, its reception of the Eucharist. Rather, the community as such was seen as flowing from eternity through the sacraments. The historian John Bossy has shown this by stressing the sacramental nature of all social bonds in the mediaeval period.3 Supremely, the Church as ‘body of Christ’ was ceaselessly recreated through receiving the gift of the Eucharistic body of Christ. Because of this reciprocal link between life and liturgy, any liturgical reform must take into account the fact that the liturgy which it seeks to revise is as much, or more a cultural and ethical phenomenon, as a textual one. Now, criticisms of liturgical reform, such as those implicit in what I have just said, are often dismissed as conservative or nostalgic.
Learning and the Mind of God
Authors: Haldane John
Published: July 2007

Jesus said “Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a nation producing the fruits of it” (Matthew 21: 43).

Holy Scripture is often tough; indeed I cannot think of passages that simply tread water or offer bland affirmation. When God speaks, he calls us to attention, and generally to reform and renewal. Also, what sounds like condemnation is often a warning to relocate one’s heart, to shift from false to true goals and values, and to be aware that God and not man is the measure of all things.

One reading of God’s authority, of his being the ruler, is the familiar moral or legal one. The idea that duty derives from divine commands can be traced back through figures such as Calvin, to the medieval philosopher-theologian William of Ockham, and from there through an Augustinian tradition back to interpretations of scripture, particularly the books of the Old Testament such as Isaiah. But there is another sense in which God may be thought to be a ruler of reality and this is worth mentioning in connection with higher learning. In discussing truth, Ockham’s near contemporary, Thomas Aquinas, draws on the philosophy of the Greeks filtered through the commentaries of Arabs and Jews. What Aquinas arrives at is the idea that the human intellect is ‘measured’ by things and that things are ‘measured’ by God; so that, indirectly, God is the measure of our minds. What he means is that knowledge involves conforming our minds to the structure of reality—grasping the way things are—and that the way things are in the world is a reflection of God’s own mind.
Conrad Pepler's ‘Lent’
Authors: Nichols Aidan
Published: July 2007

Fr. Conrad Pepler, sometime editor of Blackfriars and Life of the Spirit, the ancestral pair from which New Blackfriars springs, was an outstanding spiritual theologian among a uniquely gifted generation of the English Dominicans. In a period when ‘ascetical and mystical theology’ was generally separated from the theology of the Liturgy (to the disadvantage of both), he was keen to see the journey of the soul to God within the landscape of the Church’s worship. His exploration of the meaning of the Lenten season is a case in point.

Fr. Conrad’s Lent, his first published book, takes the form, as its subtitle tells us, of a ‘Liturgical Commentary on the Lessons and Gospels’. Obviously, the Lectionary which Fr. Conrad used was that of the preConciliar Roman liturgy, more specifically the Lectionary of St. Pius V, the Dominican pope who, in the wake of the Council of Trent, had reformed the liturgical books of the Western rite. In 1969, in response to the appeal of the Council fathers of Vatican II that ‘a more representative portion of the Scriptures be read to the people over a set cycle of years’, Pope Paul VI replaced the Pian Lectionary with another of his own, or rather his experts’, devising. Although there are continuities between these two scriptural anthologies there are also discontinuities which, clearly enough, reduce the value of Fr. Conrad’s book as a Lenten companion. Really, it is only utilisable by those congregations of the faithful or religious communities which still cling to the earlier liturgical pattern, thanks to Pope John Paul II’s clement interventions to assist them.
The Priest as Artist
Authors: Barrett Richard
Published: July 2007

It is 1429 and in the Chateau of Vaucouleurs, Joan of Arc is being interrogated by the menacing Robert de Baudricourt. Joan claims to hear heavenly voices telling her to raise the siege at Orleans:

de Baudricourt: How do you mean? voices?

Joan: I hear voices telling me what to do. They come from God.

de Baudricourt: They come from your imagination.

Joan: Of course, that is how the messages of God come to us.

Joan claims to say something not only about herself but about the way God communicates to human beings in general. If this is true then it has a lot to say about the role of the imagination in discoursing about God. But, you will object, is this not the role of theology?

It seems a truism to say it, but professional theologians are not the only kinds of people who discourse about God; there are others who theologise in an indirect way—but sometimes just as effectively. Among these must be counted authors from the literary world who, either implicitly or explicitly, through the medium of the novel, short story or poem, mediate aspects of the religious sensibility in human experience. In their work we can discern signs of anonymous theology? Random examples may include C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter, Brian Moore’s The Colour of Blood, Morris West’s The Devil’s Advocate, Rachel Cusk’s Saving Agnes. In these works as in many others one can detect a sifting through the debris of human experience and a concern to view it through the prism of an implicit faith in God.
A Man and Three Women– Hans, Adrienne, Mary and Luce
Authors: Beattie Tina
Published: July 2007

This is probably best described as a marginal paper, given in one of the short slots at the conference of the Catholic Theological Association of Great Britain on the subject of Hans Urs von Balthasar. It is deliberately provocative, intended to raise questions about the relationship between von Balthasar and Adrienne von Speyr in the presence of experts who are in a position to defend him against my charges.

Von Balthasar made extravagant claims about von Speyr’s influence on his work, and they understood their relationship as the lived expression of their theological insights about the significance of sexual difference. John Roten writes that “The very concrete symbolism of man and woman was retranslated into theological categories” to such an extent that von Speyr sometimes depicted herself as the Church to von Balthasar’s Christ. Given that von Balthasar has become what somebody referred to as the “court theologian” of the Vatican, is there an implicit suggestion in neoorthodox Catholic theology that the relationship between von Speyr and von Balthasar embodies some kind of symbolic ideal, and what are the implications of this for the theological understanding of sexual difference? In asking these questions I draw on the insights of psychoanalysis, and in particular on the work of Luce Irigaray, but I am not suggesting that theology should be answerable to psychoanalysis nor indeed to any other non-theological discipline. I do however believe that Irigaray’s philosophy of sexual difference, informed by her experience as a practising psychoanalyst, offers a rich resource for those seeking to identify both the promises and pitfalls of Catholic sexual symbolism, especially in von Balthasar’s theology.
On Cultivating the Disciplined Habits of a Love Affair Or on how to do theology on your knees
Authors: D'Costa Gavin
Published: July 2007

I have previously argued that the state of ‘theology’ and ‘religious studies’ in most English Universities is such that one could hardly distinguish between the two disciplines, in their institutional presuppositions, their objectives and goals, and in their methodological procedures. It just happens that the subject of one is Christianity, and that of the other, religions other than Christianity. Were a ‘theology’ department to be renamed ‘religious studies’ overnight everything could probably continue as it did before, although there would be understandable pressures to include more study of religions other than Christianity. Here, I would like to pursue one feature of a tradition-specific department, such as I canvassed, whereby theology could break free from the homogeneous secularisation of the discipline that currently predominates and offer students within the university an intellectually rigorous alternative. If I am told that I should teach in a Roman Catholic seminary—a frequent criticism—I suggest that one vocation of the Roman Catholic Church, and this may be true of other churches, requires the rigorous educating of lay faithful. Roman Catholic, Anglican and Jewish parents in many parts of the country have the opportunity to send their children to denominational specific schools, endorsed and supported by the government. If all enquiry is tradition-specific, and the legitimacy of enquiry within often highly reputable religious foundations is publicly accepted at primary and secondary level—why not take the argument to Higher Education level? This paper is devoted to keeping that question open.
Keith Ward's Exceptionalist Theology of Revelations
Authors: Rose Kenneth
Published: July 2007

Drawing extensively upon anthropological and historical studies of primal and “canonical” religions (RR, 2, 232, 278, 318, 343), the philosophical theologian Keith Ward attempts in his recent book Religion and Revelation,’ to develop a comparative doctrine of revelations in order to situate Christian revelation within the plethora of revelations that are an undeniable aspect of human religiousness in its virtually infinite forms (RR, 57, 37, 23, 215-16). Yet because Ward believes that in Jesus Christ God has disclosed the true form of human redemption (RR, 280), he evaluates other revelations in light of this belief. Consequently, his theology of religions, despite its drawing upon the data of historical and comparative study of religions, is incapable of accommodating other revelations on their own terms. For example, Ward tries to read Sankara as a theist, and, thus, as an ally. In this essay, I will argue that this appeal to Sankara is misdirected since Sankara's position involves an ontological nondualism that ultimately annuls theism. I will also argue that such a misreading is an inevitable consequence of Ward’s exceptionalist theology of revelations, but is unconvincing to philosophical theologians of religions who cannot agree with Ward that the central claims of orthodox Christianity are “simply true” (RR, 279). Ward’s fideism forecloses arbitrarily upon the limits of revelation and encourages an exceptionalist parochialism This is harmless perhaps within the walls of liberal seats of theological learning, but it can foster fundamentalisms in other settings. Finally, I will argue that Ward’s fideism belies the apparently comparative character of his undertaking.
A Beginner's Guide to Militant Islam
Authors: Nichols Aidan
Published: July 2007

Recent events in Egypt and Algeria, as well as the continuing difficulties of Christians in Iran and the Sudan, have returned the topic of Islamic militancy to Western newspapers. Concern for the situation of world Christianity requires of Catholics some grasp, however non-specialist, of where such militancy comes from and whither it is going. The 1994 Roman Synod of the Catholic churches of Africa was much exercised by the problem, though to judge from the reported speeches of the bishops, few had more to recommend than ‘dialogue'—that contemporary Vaticanesque panacea. To understand why the revolutionary Islam characteristic of a major segment of the Muslim world in the late twentieth century aims at nothing less than the comprehensive take-over of the civil societies where Islam is present, one sine qua non is an acquaintance, at least in broad outline, with the origins and development of the Islamic faith as a whole.
Religious Passion and the Pluralist Theology of Religions
Authors: Cheetham David
Published: July 2007

It would appear that there are few things in human life that have the power to override all other concerns. There are few things, that is, that seem to command our unconditional attention. Amongst such things we might include ‘matters of life and death’. Perhaps the most admirable aspects of the human spirit are often found in the setting of life and death situations. Self-sacrifice, life-threatening risks on behalf of others’ lives, self-denying and courage etc. What is it that motivates people to behave in these ways? A common response comes to mind in their defence: ‘it was a matter of life and death’. We all understand the priority of that appeal. At the scene of an accident, an observer runs to an occupied telephone kiosk - ‘please let me use the phone, it’s a matter of life and death...’ A businessman arrives an hour late for a meeting, ‘Excuse me for being late, I was caught up in an accident, I had to stop - it was a matter of life and death...’ Despite the potential rudeness of interrupting another’s telephone call, or the tardiness of the businessman’s entry, we are willing to excuse such behaviour on the grounds that ‘it was a matter of life and death’. Like a verbal skeleton key, it is a plea that demands (and usually obtains) the unconditional unlocking of doors or removal of obstacles.

The purpose of this brief preamble concerning the effect life and death situations’ seem to have upon our attitudes and actions, or more particularly, our perceptions of appropriate attitudes and action, is to focus our attention upon an assumption that will be forming part of this paper - that religion itself is a ‘matter of life and death’.
Seeing with Eyes of Faith: Schillebeeckx and the Resurrection of Jesus
Authors: Phillips Peter
Published: July 2007

John Macquarrie in his Jesus Christ in Modem Thought well formulates a criticism which is often raised about Schillebeeckx’s discussion of the resurrection of Christ. Macquarrie suggests that Schillebeeckx is arguing that the resurrection is better thought of as a powerful, but subjective, experience in the minds of the disciples. Macquarrie’s criticism echoes the point made by another of Schillebeeckx’s Anglican critics, David Brown, who is uncompromising in his characterisation of Schillebeeckx as a ‘deist’. Brown is certainly correct in identifying Schillebeeckx’s attempt at a more subtle account of God’s relationship to creation than a classic interventionist account might hazard, but I think the attribution of a deist position is wide of the mark. This is not the place to develop the general point other than to suggest that Professor Brown over-simplifies the issue in arguing that Christian discourse about God is inevitably either deist or theist in so far as it asserts the propriety of an interventionist or a non-interventionist account of God’s dealings with creation.

It is important to address the specific point which these critics raise in suggesting that Schillebeeckx is unable to maintain the objectivity of the resurrection. This can be better explored by considering the extended discussion in Peter Carnley’s important study of the resurrection, The Structure of Resurrection Belief (Oxford, 1987). Carnley goes rather further than either Macquarrie or Brown in acknowledging that, for Schillebeeckx, ‘the Easter faith certainly involves a post-mortem experience of encounter with the risen Christ’ (p 200). In spite of this Carnley is ultimately sceptical of Schillebeeckx’s account of the risen Jesus as fulfilling claims to objectivity.
The Power and the Glory Authority, Freedom and Literature: Part 1
Authors: Morris Kevin L.
Published: July 2007

Authority that does not exist for liberty is not authority, but force. It has no sanction.

Lord Acton

The best analogue of a God who reveals himself in strange ways is the wayward imagination of man.

Anthony Burgess

English Catholic literature, invigorated by Celtic tributaries, has been of fast and luxuriant growth, rich in diversity and broad in achievement, contributing generously to the cultural mainstream. A torrent of poets, novelists, essayists, historians, journalists and spirituality writers have entertained, sustained, instructed, defended and promoted the Catholic community, and rendered it intriguing, even attractive, to outsiders by sharing their belief and their humanity. In so far as they are direct, Catholic writers reflect themselves in relation to Catholicism—their chief reference point. Lapsed writers are relevant if they continue to engage Catholicism in serious dialogue, or maintain Catholic values. Catholic writers can be spoken of as ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative': the liberal values community, freedom and relevance, respects independence of mind, and aspires to understanding and toleration; the conservative values order, law and traditional forms, respects power, and aspires to conformity and exclusivism.

Since 1850 non-Catholics have generally thought that Catholicism is inimical to intellect and creativity; and the Church has indeed liked to picture itself as united, uniform, unchanging, righteous,infallible and ideologically lucid to the point of being mechanistic; and consequently there appears to be a conflict between the god-like Church and the human realities in which writers deal, between inflexible ‘Law’ and the fact that literature is of life, with the wind blowing where it listeth.
II: Justice, Peace and Dominicans 1216–1999 The Medieval Rhineland: Eckhart and Popular Theological Preaching
Authors: Mills John Orme
Published: July 2007

Thirty years ago the very idea of including the Rhineland mystics in a series of articles on the role of the Dominicans in the promotion of peace and social justice would have been seen as intolerably bizarre. At that time it was still widely taken for granted that mysticism and dedication to the promotion of social justice were irreconcilable: that they belonged to profoundly different ways of understanding the world and understanding the teaching of Jesus Christ. There were, of course, some remarkable people who seemed to be able to keep a foot in both the camps, but lesser mortals who attempted this were in danger of not being taken seriously by the occupants of either.

In spite of the massive changes which have taken place since then in politics, the culture and the Church, even today the presence of the Dominican Rhineland mystics in this series demands some explanation. By ‘the Dominican Rhineland mystics’ we mean, first and foremost, three friars of the Dominican Province of Teutonia: the brilliant but controversial Meister Eckhart (c.1260-c.1328) and two of his disciples, Johannes Tauler (c.1300-1361) and Henry Suso (1295-1366). At first sight the only things which these men seem to share in common with, for instance, the French Dominican worker-priests of the 1950s or the Brazilian Dominican liberation theologians of the 1970s are membership of the same religious order and considerable strength of character.

After all, Frank Tobin has said that Eckhart’s sermons ‘center so exclusively on what is within and are so utterly devoid of any comments that might be used as references to time and place that they might just as well have been delivered on the moon as in turbulent fourteenth-century Strasburg or Cologne.’
The Power and the Glory Authority, Freedom and Literature: Part 2
Authors: Morris Kevin L.
Published: July 2007

English Catholics have been a recognisable body; yet they have also been individuals engaged in a disorderly, energetic,personal and doubt-filled struggle to create, experience, explore and affirm. Catholic literature has been grounded in the tension between liberal and conservative: categories which are a function not only of how an individual relates to doctrine, but also of personality, for Catholics, like everyone else, believe as they must, as their personalities dictate. Cardinal Manning—together with his associates Herbert Vaughan, W. G. Ward and Mgr. George Talbot—may be taken as the archetype of the conservative mentality (Manning the presiding spirit of Vatican I), while Newman may be taken as the archetype of the liberal (the presiding spirit of Vatican II)—even though he was at least as doctrinally meticulous as Manning: temperaments— rather than theological or political stances—which constituted the warp and woof of English Catholic literature.

Manning sought an infallible authority, and identified himself with it, so that he aspired to be, as he said, ‘more Roman than Rome', and proceeded to make English Catholicism like himself. He had no sympathy, he said, for ‘the watered, literary, worldly Catholicism of certain Englishmen', and wished to keep Catholics untainted by English intellectual culture. In 1876 he told a gathering of Catholic intellectuals:

when any man comes and talks to you about scientific history, I advise you as soon as possible to change the subject. . . when the Church has decided, [he is speaking of the Vatican Council] defined, or decreed, any man who appeals from that decision to any human history whatsoever is guilty of rejecting a Divine Teacher, and of the sin of unbelief . . . Whosoever appeals from [the decrees of the Council] to human history commits heresy...
“A Woman is not Without Honour…” The Prophetic Voice of Christa Wolf's ‘Cassandra’
Authors: Lacey Antonia
Published: July 2007

This woman whose voices drive her into exile.

(Exile, exile.)...

This woman/ the heart of the matter.

Heart of the law/ heart of the prophets.

Prophets and poets make difficult stable companions and they share the ability to unsettle or subvert the norms of their societies. Because of this they are often silenced or killed. They both, in different ways, offer to the individual or community a two way ‘glass’ in which the individual or community then has to face the truth about themselves. One side of this glass acts as a mirror from which is reflected the breaking of communities; the injustice, the impoverishment, the godlessness, from which our laws and systems normally shield us. The other side of the glass is the window, through which, creative and energising, the prophet/poet offers us a new and radical vision of an alternative future, a place of possibility and change. Change however is always unsettling and never easy, it is usually simpler to shut our eyes. In Cassandra, Christa Wolf turns the mirror/glass onto a society being broken down by war, and through the Scamander Caves, offers a window on an alternate way of being, visioned by women.

Walter Brueggemann discusses Israel’s turning away from being a prophetic people to being a people of worldly Kingship. He suggests that we are so enmeshed by our present reality that any other way of being is virtually unthinkable. Moreover, that this present history is one of “briefcases and limousines and press conferences and quotas and new weaponry systems.
Hick and Loughlin on Disputes and Frameworks
Authors: Hyman Gavin
Published: July 2007

It was Wittgenstein who said that in order to ‘combat’ a point of view, one first has to establish whether that point of view is within or without one’s own framework. That is to say, one has to establish whether the ‘combat’ is to be a dispute within a framework or between frameworks. For Wittgenstein, that was of the utmost importance if one was to avoid falling into confusion. This is because whereas disputes within a framework proceed by means of reasoned arguments which are held fast and validated by that common surrounding framework, disputes between frameworks do not proceed within a common milieu, and so the common validity of reasoned arguments subsides. Thus, a dispute between frameworks has to proceed by means of quite different methods, that is, methods of persuasion and charm.

This insight has a particular significance when one considers some of the developments that have been taking place in theology in recent years. For the last three centuries or so, theological discourse was conducted within a framework that was, at once, both ‘theological’ and ‘scientific.’ As Amos Funkenstein has argued, it was a framework ‘in which theological concerns were expressed in terms of secular knowledge, and scientific concerns were expressed in theological terms. Theology and other sciences became almost one.’ Virtually all theological disputes in those centuries were located within that framework, and consequently, they were conducted by means of reasoned arguments.
Justice, Peace and Dominicans 1216–1999
Authors: Finn Richard
Published: July 2007

The Acts of the Apostles relates how in the Jerusalem church “the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all." The author of Acts is not simply reporting three separate facts about the apostles, how they felt, how they lived, and how they preached. Their preaching gains its power from their common faith and life. Their rejection of private property and redistribution of wealth, cutting at the roots of avarice, form an eloquent expression of their faith in the God who hears the cry of the poor, whose day of justice is at hand. The heart, the purse, and the voice are formed in a single apostolic life.

This picture of the apostolic life was at the heart of St. Augustine's vision of religious life and dear to the early Dominicans who adopted his Rule. Humbert of Romans in his Commentary on the Rule was adamant that the brother who even said “that’s my book!” and meant it committed mortal sin. All things had been shared before the Fall and would be in the Kingdom. Private property was a frequent cause of envy and strife. It tied down the heart. Humbert set out the different reasons why voluntary poverty was integral to the office of preaching. Preachers have to go everywhere and not everywhere could afford to support the retinue, the horses and servants, of a rich prelate.
Michel de Certeau's ‘Spiritual Spaces’
Authors: Ward Graham
Published: July 2007

The phrase ‘a spiritual space’ is used by Certeau at the end of his brief analysis of hagiographic material in ‘A Variant: Hagio-Graphical Edification’. The essay is one of three explorations in the production of certain topographies of the other found in The Writing of History. The spiritual space is another of Certeau’s non-places. Hagiography announces that a “non-place is here a discourse of places.” That is how he concludes the essay. What I wish to demonstrate in this essay is the way spiritual topoi govern Certeau’s understanding of the production of space both in its heterological and non-heterological forms. These spiritual spaces are profoundly theological in character and liturgical in economy. The direction of my argument, therefore, emphasizes, again, the importance of reading Certeau’s project theologically.

‘Spiritual spaces’ are not at the centre of Certeau’s work; they make that work possible. Other forms of space are focused upon and it is by mapping out these spaces that alternative places are opened up. I wish to examine three kinds of space explored, in fact, produced, in Certeau’s work. They correspond to three different epochs of time and three kinds of utopia [which, following the work of Louis Marin on Thomas More needs to be understood as both outopia (no-place) and Utopia (a good place)]. In outlining these three spaces, Certeau’s concerns with ethnography, speaking and texts at the dawn of modernity come more clearly into focus.

The Rational Utopia

The first space I will term, after Certeau, the ‘rational utopia’. It is the space produced by the closed system, what Certeau will describe as “a bubble of panoptic and classifying power, a module of imprisonment that makes possible production of an order.”