bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Ordination to the Priesthood:‘That the one who acts in the person of Christ the Head must needs be male but need not be a Jew’
Authors: Gaine Simon Francis
Published: July 2007

If a priest must be male in order to represent Christ who was and is male, must he then be Jewish in order to represent Christ who was and is Jewish? My first aim is to clarify what I call the various elements or levels that go into or have gone into an explanation of the Church’s practice of not ordaining women. I am concerned here only with the reservation to men of the priestly or sacerdotal grades of the sacrament of order, namely the episcopate and the presbyterate (bishops and priests). I say this before going any further, because at one time ‘ordination’ had a very wide application, including to deaconesses, abbesses, empresses and so on. My discussion, however, will not even comment on the question of ordaining women to the diaconate, but is restricted to the priestly grades of order. My second aim is to ask how the relationships of Christ’s maleness and his Jewishness to the economy of salvation differ in such a way that though his priestly representative must needs be male he need not be a Jew. Thus I shall include here discussion of arguments for the restriction of the priestly grades to men only, particularly insofar as they might seem to imply that a priest must needs be not only male but also Jewish. I shall pursue my second aim against the background of the first, thus placing the question of maleness, Jewishness, Christ and the priesthood, in its wider theological-explanatory context. I shall begin my clarification of the various levels of explanation
Casting the Nets of Symbolism
Authors: Dyczek Christopher
Published: July 2007

A bridging-passage in a piece of music can have several roles. One of them is to make us wish that we might fully appreciate the effect of the music’s ending when it comes. Able to hear the separate musical messages converge. In her great work The Dialogue, a complex meditation, Catherine of Siena speaks of ‘the lovely and glorious bridge’ of Jesus’ presence as having a similar role. Although ‘he was no longer with you’—and here, adding her own reflection to scripture, she adopts a voice as God’s own—‘his teaching remained.’ The reader is addressed as one of the disciples who, on the day of the Ascension, were ‘as good as dead, because their hearts had been lifted up to heaven.’ The bridge himself has ascended, and we, the reader-followers, must ask, ‘Where can I find the way?’ As we shall see, Catherine expects her metaphor of a bridge to play many parts in the dramatic speech patterns of conversion. It can stand for the reliable relationship we have with Christ through all our own difficulties. But it stands also for our vantage point of calmly casting nets to help others in trouble. Theological discourse has not often called on one symbol to be so versatile, although the image of each stone which contributes to a tower in The Shepherd of Hermas is similarly polyvalent. A recent translator of The Dialogue, Suzanne Noffke, suggests that Catherine may have had in mind the kind of walled bridge which was built over the Arno, containing shops. This was a route allowing concealment but could also mean sudden surprise for the traveller herself. It might indicate a suitable direction to evade severe pressures.
Learning the Lesson of Love: The Poetry of Elizabeth Jennings (1926‐2001)
Authors: Gardner Timothy
Published: July 2007

Elizabeth Jennings, who died in 2001 was ‘the most unconditionally loved poet of (her) generation,’ according to Michael Schmidt writing in the preface to her New Collected Poems’ This seems a slightly less generous accolade when Schmidt goes on to say that the other poets of her generation included Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, not themselves obviously loveable poets. One imagines that Larkin might have been rather disappointed to have discovered, posthumously, that he was unconditionally loved, whereas Elizabeth Jennings’ poetry seems to invite just this response. Indeed, so different is the poetry of Elizabeth Jennings to that of Amis and Larkin it is hard to imagine how she can ever have been seriously associated with them in the minds of critics. Whether The Movement ever existed at all has been much debated, but the mature Elizabeth Jennings that we find in New Collected Poems shows what a different trajectory she had followed from that of her laconic and wry contemporaries.

New Collected Poems begins, like her Collected Poems and Selected Poems with a dozen poems from her first collected volume of poetry (entitled tentatively Poems). First and second are ‘Delay’ and ‘Winter Love’ which seem to set the tone of everything which comes after. They are short poems — the first consisting of two quatrains, the second of a sestet, almost two halves of a divided sonnet — which address two recurrent themes of Elizabeth Jennings’ poetry: love and time, more particularly the way in which the test of love is the test of time.
Creation From Nothing
Authors: Selman Francis J.
Published: July 2007

Nearly all theories of the origin of the universe, from the early philosophers to contemporary scientists, presuppose the existence of matter. Thus they are accounts of the genesis, or generation, of the world rather than its creation. The first to say that the world was made by Mind was Anaxagoras (d. 428 B.C.). He saw that what drew things out of matter that was mixed up to begin with could not be material like it. But he presupposed the matter.

When scientists today talk about the matter of the universe having zero magnitude and infinite density at the beginning, they seem to be running up against the idea of creation out of nothing. It is as though they recognise that the world came from nothing, yet they presuppose the existence of matter. But all matter has extension and no magnitude is quite zero. If there was matter in the beginning, it had a magnitude.

There is a great deal of writing about creation at present, both within theology and in the dialogue between science and religion. This dialogue will only help us to see the truth if it works with a clear concept of creation. Amid all the views that are being put forward, it will surely be useful to look at what Aquinas has to say about creation. His patient analysis of the topic is closely linked with his philosophy of existence. He both drew on Avicenna and worked out his ideas in criticism of the Neoplatonic influences that the Arab philosopher included in his exposition of Aristotle.
Patrick Primrose: A Dominican in Seventeenth‐century Scotland
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

In August 1670 the Privy Council in Edinburgh considered reports that ‘Mr Patrick Primrose’ had been ‘used to say messe’ in ‘the house of Kinnairdie in the paroch of Aberchardour, within the shyre of Banff’. Indeed, ‘there is usuall resort publickly to masse every Lords day’; ‘four families of the heretours in the said paroch doe upon ringing of the bell goe to a roume in the said house where there is ane altar erected and preists doe officiat’. When the sheriff of Aberdeen had verified that Mass was being said, he was ‘to make inquyrie for the preist’ and ‘to apprehend and committ him to prison, and to seize upon any vestments or other popish ornaments made use of in their superstitious worship and service’. In November the Council discussed the priest’s capture; he was by then in the tolbooth1 of Banff. On 22 December, having been informed that he was a chaplain to the Queen, Catherine of Braganza, they set him free, on condition that he went into exile, never to return, ‘under the payne of death’, without permission of the King or the Council.

Early in January 1671, being evidently too frail to travel, he was allowed to stay in Scotland until 5 February. On 4 March 1672, the sheriff of Aberdeen was instructed to back the bishop and clergy in their efforts to root out popery and quakerism, this to include demolishing the ‘superstitious monument erected upon the grave of the deceast Mr Patrick Primrose’.
Monica's Tears: Augustine on Words and Speech
Authors: Soskice Janet Martin
Published: July 2007

The third volume of the Blackfriars Summa Theologiae, translated by Herbert McCabe, is entitled (I have always supposed by him) Knowing and Naming God. These words make a concise brief for the philosopher of religion. Of its two movements, knowing God seems at first glance the more demanding and critical, yet it is evident that for Aquinas and the Patristic tradition which preceded him, naming God was of equal difficulty and weight. In fact the two cannot be separated for to name one must, in some sense know which, for the early theologians, formed an almost insurmountable obstacle to our speaking of God.

Augustine is continuously occupied with how we can know God, and with how we can name Him. It is the problem with which he opens the Confessions, for if we do not know what or whom we address then how can we call upon our Lord? To call upon we need a name, and a name involves definition and definition risks idolatrously presuming to know the divine essence.

How shall I call upon my God, my God and my Lord, when by the very act of calling upon him I would be calling him into myself?

The primary Biblical text for the naming of God for Patristic and medieval readers alike was Exodus 3. 1-14, the story of Moses at the burning bush. Moses, herding his father-in-law’s sheep, is addressed by God and in the negotiations which follow Moses asks the Deity for a name,

And God said to Moses ‘I AM WHO I AM’ —you must say to the sons
Christology, History, and Frankenstein's Monster: The Evolution of the Historical Jesus in John P. Meier
Authors: McMahon Christopher
Published: July 2007

In the first three volumes of his projected four-volume work on the historical Jesus, John P. Meier has articulated a position on the nature of historical inquiry that would exclude theological concerns from the pursuit of properly historical questions. For Meier, historical inquiry proceeds by means of a rigorous and commonly accepted methodology and finds confirmation in the emergence of a consensus among historians. Meier concedes that this methodology yields only a profile of Jesus’ ministry and death. This profile is a compilation of various pieces of an inherently incomplete puzzle, and to this extent, he compares the results of historical Jesus research to the popular image of Victor Frankenstein’s monster—a mass of assembled pieces, hardly identifiable as a “real” human being. When brought to bear on properly theological questions, this profile—this monster—exercises a negative function. Since the historical Jesus is a hypothetical reconstruction, it is not the object of Christian faith, but can serve as a restraint against flights of theological fancy and preserve the autonomy of the historian (or the historical critical exegete) against the encroachment of theology, or ideology.

This paper contends that Meier’s practice of historical Jesus research goes beyond the narrow methodology and the modest goals he has articulated. While Meier has remained stridently faithful to his understanding of history and historical methodology, one can recognize, not massive shifts, but rather tensions, in his work, in particular, the tension between Meier’s formal statements on methodology and his performance of historical Jesus research. The paper will seek to advance the general discussion of the relevance of historical inquiry for the Christian faith by examining the work of John P. Meier on the historical Jesus and the manner in which that work has evolved through the publication of the first three volumes of A Marginal Jew.
My Beloved is Mine and I am His: non‐commensurable‐giving as a metaphor for the divine‐human relationship
Authors: Kevern Peter
Published: July 2007

At the heart of Christian belief is a gift: the ‘free gift of God. . . in Jesus Christ our Lord’. The language of gift is peppered through the New Testament and constitutes one of its most distinctive features. It portrays an abundant and generous God who acts out of love, without expecting return, and whose generosity in no wise depends on our activity. Traditionally, this utter gratuitousness of God’s gifts has been cited and defended in connection with the doctrine of divine sovereignty: God’s gifts must be offered without expectation of any return, because to claim otherwise would be to imply that God desires something, and so lacks it in the first place.

However, this affirmation is in some tension with another: that at the heart of Christian life is a response, in the worship and works of God’s people. While the image of a needy God is alien to Christian understanding, it is equally alien to the Christian understanding to postulate a God who does not want or intend a responsive movement from God’s people. Herein lies a dilemma for Christian theology: how to hold together such an exalted view of the necessary freedom and unconditionality of God’s gift with the maintenance of human responsibility and so capacity to respond?

So Christians must at one and the same time preach that God gives freely; and that to love God is necessarily to serve God. This tension is a familiar and perennial one, beginning with the faith-versus-works controversy of the New Testament itself, and re-emerging regularly throughout Christian history.
Paradise and the Groundlessness of Ethics
Authors: Parsons Susan
Published: July 2007

The thought of paradise has exercised a particular hold upon the ethical imagination. Bringing us before those things that lie just outside of our reach, its language speaks to us of what has been there all along, before ever we appeared to take up our places in the world, and of what will still be there ever after we have gone from here. Paradise speaks to us of this enduring somewhere else than here, and so we are drawn to its lasting otherness, held in fascination by its suggestion that things might have been otherwise, and might still come to be so—if only. Ethics has been shaped within this ‘if only’, the cue for its opening lines taken from the lead of paradise that it is our truest beginning, and its action directed by a promise that all will end well. So the thought of paradise enables the self-understanding of ethics as an interim measure, fit for the time between times, living from out of a perfect beginning and facing towards the horizon at which the sun will rise again. Paradise thus discloses the world for ethics, illuminating the world as a place of change, and at the same time a place of failure and of loss, and so it gives an ever-available ground for ethics, sending it forth to do what work it can in the time given, and shaping the activity of ethics as the careful observance and restoration of what comes to be known there.
Paradise and the Liturgy
Authors: Harbert Bruce
Published: July 2007

Soon after the Second Vatican Council it became customary in our churches for celebrant and people to face one another during the Eucharist, whereas previously it had been more usual for everybody to face in the same direction. Considerable sums of money were spent in facilitating this arrangement, which was widely thought to be among the chief requirements of the ‘new liturgy’. For many, ‘mass facing the people’ has become, together with the use of the vernacular, the sine qua non of contemporary liturgy. Many priests will refuse to celebrate otherwise, many laity would not attend a mass celebrated otherwise. The reasons are surely ecclesiological: the reorientation of priest and people at the liturgy is seen as symbolic of the move from a pyramidal to a collegial model of church that the Second Vatican Council effected.

Before the Council, for celebrant and people to face each other was a clear sign of affiliation to the liturgical movement. The pattern was rare in this country, especially among Catholics. An early example was the chapel of Queen’s College in Birmingham, built in 1938 but only opened for worship after the Second World War. At Queens the celebrant of the eucharist has always stood in the apse, facing the body of the church, and in doing so has faced west I have been told that Queen’s College chapel was the first built in England for the ‘westward position’, under the influence of the liturgical movement.

The change was represented as a return to primitive practice, but this justification was based on a misunderstanding.
Heaven, Then and Now
Authors: McDade John
Published: July 2007

I remember, as a small boy, telling my parents that before 1 was bom, I had been in heaven and had chosen them to be my parents. My father laughed heartily at this. In retrospect, it is clear that Platonism was not strong in my family, but it was inevitable that when later I came to do a doctorate I did it on pre-existence language in Christology because Christ had been there too and we had discussed my parentage, at some length, I remember. I have no idea where my childish fantasy came from: it may be a common idea among religious children to think that they were somewhere before they are here and that they are going somewhere after they have been here.
No tradition, no civilization
Authors: Navone John
Published: July 2007

Having lived in Europe for the last forty years, I have enjoyed the experience of my historical and cultural roots. My residence of the last thirty-five years, for example, was constructed the year that the Church of Scotland was founded, that Madrid became the capital of Spain, and the tobacco plant was imported to Western Europe by Jean Nicot. The buildings in my immediate Roman neighbourhood are much older. The Colonna Palace, half a block away from my front door, was described by the Italian humanist Petrarch (1304-1374). The final discovery-scene of ‘Roman Holiday’ was filmed there.

Living in Europe is living in a place where the stones speak; however, if you have not done your homework, you will not understand what they are saying. Returning annually for three months to the United States, I have the experience of what the anti-Western-Civilization lobby would call ‘freedom’ from the obscurantism and oppressive burdens of a democratic Christian—especially Roman Catholic—tradition. I can enjoy the ‘freedom’ of a world without history, tradition and roots, the world of what Vance Packard called ‘fun culture,’ the realm of a superior and untethered virtual reality. In short, I return to a place where both the educational system and mass media assiduously avoid the ‘homework’ without which we cannot hear or understand what the stones of our European heritage have to tell us.

An expatriate American author and actor living in Rome expressed his dismay to me, as far back as the early sixties, about the cultural tabula rasa that radically handicapped young Americans for understanding or appreciating their Roman experience in churches where they had no idea of what the religious paintings and sculpture represented because they were culturally un-equipped for any meaningful experience.
The Love of God and Neighbour according to Aquinas: An Interpretation
Authors: Beyer Gerald J.
Published: July 2007

Christian theologians’ ruminations on the relationship between the commands to love God and neighbour in the New Testament traverse a broad spectrum. Some posit a unity or even the identity of loving God and the neighbour. Others insist on a clear distinction or disjunction between loving God and loving the neighbour, sometimes pointing to the variance of the scriptural formulations: we are to love God “with all our heart, soul, mind and strength,” whereas we are enjoined to love our neighbour “as ourselves” (cf. Mt 22: 34-40; Mk 12: 28-34; Lk 10:25-29).1 In the Summa Theologiae, Thomas Aquinas deals with this issue under the rubric of charity (caritas) and the respective merits of the active and contemplative life (Il.n. 25-27; II.II. 179-182, 185.2, 188). In the following essay, I will analyze Aquinas’ thought on the relationship between the love of God and neighbour by examining these parts of the Summa. These articles will be the focus of my analysis as they represent the heart of Aquinas’ writing on this issue. However, I will occasionally refer to other parts of the Summa, which either reinforce, clarify or perhaps obfuscate his position.2 I will argue that Aquinas clearly emphasizes both the love of God and neighbour as constitutive elements of the moral life. However, his conception of the relationship between the two remains nebulous in various places. This essay will attempt to elucidate as far as possible the nature of the relationship between the love of God and neighbour according to Aquinas. As we shall see, his thought provides fertile ground for scholarly debate and various interpretations of the precise nature of the relationship between the love of God and neighbour. This essay will offer one possible interpretation.3
Who Owns the Bible? A Judaeo‐Christian Argument
Authors: Neusner Jacob , Chilton Bruce D.
Published: July 2007

The question, who owns the Bible, forms a way of framing a theological debate between Judaism and Christianity. They both lay claim on the same Holy Scriptures, and each insists that it reads those Scriptures correctly. Here is a way, then, of conducting an interfaith disputation on the truth of conflicting claims set forth by competing religions.

Which Judaism, whose Christianity? By Judaism and Christianity we do not mean the public opinion of ethnic Jews and culture-Christians. Rather, we mean, the classical religious systems set forth in authoritative documents and practised by those who value those writings as holy. The Judaic claim on the correct meaning of Israelite Scripture conflicts with the Christian one.
The Response of Christianity and its Counter‐Claim
Authors: Chilton Bruce D.
Published: July 2007

In asserting his four facts, Professor Neusner also puts pointed questions to Christianity, every one of them both serious and telling. Answering them involves spelling out the facts of revelation as they are perceived and taught by the Church.

First, “Why should they even want to claim to own Scripture at all, if they do not keep important commandments that Scripture sets forth?” This question strikes accurately at a sensitive spot. During the second century a teacher in Rome, Marcion, insisted that the New Testament should stand alone as Scripture, and that anything connected with Judaism should be expurgated from the one Gospel he liked (Luke) and Paul’s letters. He has had pale imitators ever since, but the Church then and now has authoritatively rejected the idea that the Old Testament can be dispensed with.

The letters of Paul, which Marcion made the basis of his views, undermined his position. The teacher whom the Church regarded as “the Apostle”, once its primary constituency was non-Jewish, himself emphasized that Israel has a permanent place in the history of salvation. Why should that be the case? Because, he said, from the Israelites came “the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises” (Romans 9:5). If you want to know what these things are, you need the Scriptures of Israel. Paul understands that all these gifts are only fully realized in the final gift of Israel: the coming of “Christ according to the flesh” (Romans 9:6).
Kataphasis, Apophasis and Mysticism in Pseudo‐Denys and Wittgenstein
Authors: Moringiello Scott D.
Published: July 2007

While the resonances between classical Christian negative theology and the discourse of deconstruction have been explored for the last twenty years, there has been scant attention paid to the resonances between negative theology and the philosophical writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein. To be sure, theologians have shown much interest in Wittgenstein, but that interest often links Wittgenstein’s conception of forms of life to religious practice. Such writings have sought to view Wittgenstein in terms of philosophy of religion. In this essay, I am not concerned with Wittgenstein’s philosophy of religion, but am interested in the connections between his writings on language and the view of language held in negative theology, specifically in the writings of the Pseudo-Denys. In the same way that Mark C.Taylor, John D.Caputo et al. see similar strategies at work in negative theology and in Jacques Derrida (specifically, the connection between apophasis and differance), I see similar strategies at work in Wittgenstein and Denys. I will argue that there are important points of intersection between the two, especially on the issues of the limits of reference in language, the necessity of communal understandings for meaning, and the view of the self within a community of shared practices and shared language.

One word of explanation before I continue. In making Denys and Wittgenstein interlocutors, I am not saying they were interested in the same things. Denys was concerned about liturgy and how liturgy does or dries not praise God properly, and Wittgenstein was interested in how language works and how proper use of language frees us from philosophical problems.
Being Brought to Light
Authors: Parsons Susan Frank
Published: July 2007

There is a certain urgency about the ethical today. Amid reports of the misery and injustice that seem to accompany all our human undertakings, and with increasing demand that it prove itself useful to an expanding range of unprecedented crises, the ethical is found to occupy a crucial place in contemporary thought. It stands at the point of a change, as our desire for a better world seeks the transformation of the one in which we find ourselves, and so it is to become the means by which we may be carried over from one situation to another, by which we are to make a difference. The ethical is to save us, and so the urgency of our salvation comes to rest in a particular and intense way on the salvation of ethics itself, saved and preserved for our sake, so that we might also be rescued and kept in safety and brought into the fulness of life that is to be ours. The enormity of this expectation of the ethical has become a kind of running theme through all sorts of contemporary discourses, assuming in many cases a force that would compel agreement without question, and at times erupting in expressions of disgust or even censure at those who would defy this logic. What else are we to do or think?

There is a sense in which this ethical has become the last sounding of the thinking of being in the western tradition, taking on the now empty form of its hegemony, while that thinking of being itself is already known to be fraught with difficulty, and so pronouncing itself as the final grand narrative by which nonetheless our redemption is to be secured.
The Religious Roots of Natural Theology
Authors: Sherry Patrick
Published: July 2007

The last few decades have seen a revival of interest among Anglo-American philosophers in natural theology, especially in what is an important part (though not the whole) of it, philosophical arguments for God’s existence. Of course, such arguments have been discussed for centuries, but the present situation contrasts strikingly with much of the twentieth century, when it was assumed by most analytic philosophers that they had been refuted definitively by Hume, Kant, and some later philosophers. There was, too, at that time opposition to the whole enterprise of natural theology in certain theological quarters, most notably, as we shall see, in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics.

No doubt discussions will move to and fro in future centuries, as they have done in past ones. My purpose now, however, is not to follow particular arguments and their counter-positions, but to suggest that there at least two good religious reasons (apart from Biblical texts like Rom. 1:19-20 and Acts 14:17) why natural theology is likely to flourish perennially: (1) behind particular arguments there are certain natural human reactions, especially wonder — not just at the beauty or intricacy of the world, but also at its very existence, at the fact that there is something rather than nothing; (2) theistic arguments are inverse forms of fundamental religious doctrines, e.g. Cosmological arguments reverse the doctrine of Creation, in that the latter claims that God brought the world into being and sustains it in being, whilst the arguments seek to infer His existence from that of the world or from some very general feature of it.
Homily at Gareth's Funeral
Authors: White Allan
Published: July 2007

I first met Gareth thirty years ago, almost to the day. I was a guest at Quarr Abbey. I was considering on which path the Lord was leading me; he was already a monk of Quarr. It was his duty that week to serve at the guests’ table in the refectory. One day, a Friday I think, he brought in a collection of dishes that included a very unappetizing looking fish, a kind of bloater or something, and a dish of white, lumpy sauce that looked suspiciously like rice pudding. The guests eyed each other nervously while Gareth looked at us encouragingly. All of us had heard of the horrors of the monastic cuisine, so we embarked on this voyage of gastronomic discovery obediently, if not with enthusiasm. I poured the white sauce on the bloater and stoically munched my way through it. The white sauce was, of course, rice pudding. Gareth had mixed the dishes up and brought them all at the same time! The first time I was treated to his wonderful smile was when he realized his mistake and saw the rueful expression of the guests. I shall not see that smile again this side of eternity, and how it pains me.

I have always thought that this first encounter said something about both of us. It showed Gareth’s flair, sense of adventure, experimentation and imagination; all qualities that he was to show to great effect in later years. It showed my docility and sense of obedience, all qualities that have been so absent from my own life ever since, as my brethren will confirm.
Gareth Moore's Radical Wittgensteinianism
Authors: Robinson Howard
Published: July 2007

Gareth Moore arrived at Corpus to read P. P. E. about two years after I did. We soon became friends, not least because we were always the last two people at the college philosophy society, finishing off the wine. Gareth (who was then known as ‘Gary’ — a fact he later denied) claimed that in his Finals, he — G. E. Moore — was the only candidate for the new optional paper ‘Russell and Wittgenstein’. In 1969, his first year as a graduate student, he moved into 50 Abingdon Road, where I also lived. The landlady was the widow of a man who was said to have taught Edward Heath the organ. Gareth had just returned to the Church. Although we knew that he liked going on retreats to monasteries, he had not, to that point, had any religious belief.

By the time Gareth came to Blackfriars, I had left Oxford to teach in Liverpool. But I kept an Oxford base for the vacations and we met regularly until the mid nineties. We were not in much contact when he was in Belgium and had just resumed normal dining and drinking engagements when he fell ill. We kept in telephone connection until his death.

During our long friendship, we discussed many things, most commonly connected with religion. (My views are those of a rather conservative ‘anglo-catholic’.) But we did not often discuss philosophy. There was one reason for this. Wittgenstein is a philosopher who divides people, and Gareth was a root and branch Wittgensteinian, whereas Wittgenstein has always struck me, from first reading, as being more or less a fraud.
Expansive Naturalism and the Justification of Metaphysics in Sacramental Theology
Authors: O'Connor John D.
Published: July 2007

A feature of much modem sacramental theology, and indeed theology in general, is a distrust of traditional metaphysical categories such as ‘cause’ and ‘effect.’ Much of the impetus for this has arisen from the critique of metaphysics instigated by Martin Heidegger, which has sought to overcome the “totalising” tendency of traditional Western thought. In the theological sphere this position has generally taken the form of regarding metaphysics as imposing a straitjacketing framework upon the intersubjective dynamic of grace and symbolic mediation.

It is the aim of this article to question this critique as it appears in what is perhaps the locus classicus of the post-Heideggerian approach to sacramental theology, Louis-Marie Chauvet’s very fine book, Symbol and Sacrament. It is not the aim of this article to examine Chauvet’s sacramental theology per se, but, rather, to evaluate one of the principal motivating factors behind his theology, namely, the rejection of metaphysics. It will be argued that Chauvet’s concerns do not entail a rejection of metaphysics tout court. In addition, it will be argued that the non-reductive naturalist worldviews of modem mainstream British moral realists such as James Griffin, John McDowell and David Wiggins effectively undermine the dichotomies underpinning the rejection. This has the advantage of lessening the apparent differences between different theological camps through the establishment of a basis of common intelligibility. Although there have been other attempts to reconcile Chauvet’s theology with metaphysics, most notably with the process metaphysics of Whitehead, this article approaches the problem from a more traditional metaphysical viewpoint and thereby one more likely to command widespread agreement.
The First Issue
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

Revamped with effect from October 1964 as New Blackfriars, this journal first appeared in April 1920. We claimed then not to be ‘new’ but only The Catholic Review, ‘revived and renamed’: a quarterly that ran for several years but had to give up during the War. In 1919 Fr Bede Jarrett (1881-1934), then Prior Provincial, bought it for £40, on behalf of the English Dominican Province.

Bernard Delany (1890-1959) was appointed Editor of the projected journal. He had just come from two years as an army chaplain (1917-19). As he recalled, Fr Bede wanted a review which ‘was not to be learned or theological, nor of a specifically ecclesiastical character’ (see Bernard Delany, ‘The Beginnings of “Blackfriars”’, Blackfriars 34 (1953): 308-319).

The first issues were planned over lunches at Jack Straw’s Castle on Hampstead Heath. Besides Delany and Jarrett himself the editorial board consisted of Joseph Clayton and Stanley Morison, along with two other Dominicans, Fr Vincent McNabb and Fr Luke Walker.

Stanley Morison (1889-1967) was to become the most distinguished British scholar of typography. At this stage, barely thirty years of age, he was working for small presses in London. He became adviser to Cambridge University Press in 1925, designed Gollancz’s famous ‘yellow jackets’, completely restyled The Times, and created the Times New Roman type-family which remains widely in use.
The Liturgy of the Hours—Are we Biologically Programmed?
Authors: Rumsey Patricia M.
Published: July 2007

By the venerable tradition of the universal Church, Lauds as morning prayer and Vespers as evening prayer are the two hinges on which the daily Office turns: hence they are to be considered as the chief hours and celebrated as such.

Lauds is designed and structured to sanctify the morning ... This Hour, recited as the light of a new day dawns, recalls the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, the true light enlightening every man.

Vespers is celebrated in the evening when the day is drawing to a close ... we join with the Eastern Churches and invoke ‘blessed Jesus Christ, the Light of our Heavenly Father’s sacred and eternal glory; as the sun sets we behold the evening light and sing to God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit’.

These passages from the conciliar and post-conciliar documents of Vatican II make emphatically clear the Church’s tradition of prayer at the beginning and ending of the day, and connect this tradition with dawn, the rising light of the new day, and dusk, the waning light of the evening. In the Church’s tradition of prayer, these two Hours are given a Christological significance: Lauds recalls the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, and Vespers commemorates his death and burial. This paper looks at the biological as well as the liturgical rhythms involved in praying at dawn and dusk, and invokes a sacramental understanding of time, which was common throughout earlier ages, but has been lost in more recent times. It then examines the custom of prayer at dawn and dusk in other religious traditions besides Christianity and collates all this evidence to ask if there is any justification for arguing that human beings are biologically programmed for such activity.
Do Dolphins Carry the Cross Biological Moral Realism and Theological Ethics
Authors: Northcott Michael S
Published: July 2007

In Dependent Rational Animals Alasdair MacIntyre advances the case for a realist account of the moral life over against the unsituated Enlightenment account of the good. The normative foundation of his proposal is narratives of the dependent rather than autonomous character of human existence from birth through childhood to old age and death, and analogies between human biological and emotional dependence, and child development, and the rich moral lives, and nurturing behaviours of dolphins and some other animals. This approach represents a significant revision of MacIntyre’s earlier espousal of a principally Aristotelian - and hence heroic - account of the virtues. His setting of dependence as an ordering contingency of rationality brings him much closer to Christian narratives of the good life. The problem however with attempts to read off moral narratives from anthropological accounts of human embodied and social life, or from ethological narratives of other animals, is that they involve the attempt to found Christian theology and ethics on other than Christian foundations, and they therefore lack a true ontological foundation. In what follows I will suggest that narratives of the morality of embodiment, whether human or nonhuman, do find a legitimate place in Christian theological ethics but that this place is subject to the ordering narrative of the scriptures, and in particular the narratives of Christ crucified and risen. The narratives of the Incarnation, Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ teach Christians to interpret dependence, embodiment, illness and even death, as aspects of biological existence which find correlates in the vulnerability of God.
Advent addendum: further preparations for the Lord
Authors: Tschudin Alain
Published: July 2007

Given that the article “Preparing the Way for the Lord” was published in its unrevised form, it seems necessary to provide some orientation for readers concerning the substantive differences between that draft and the intended final manuscript. Initially, when seeking to describe the relationship between science and religion- specifically between evolution and Christianity-I chose the metaphor of a boxing match, to convey the conflict and tensions that existed between the two camps. As my explicit aim in the article was to promote conciliatory dialogue between the two parties, the “fight” metaphor no longer seemed appropriate and was excised from the revised version. In the printed article, however, fossils from the earlier metaphor remain, e.g. “This is a mighty punch to pack” (p.522) should read “This is a formidable assertion” and “the bout” (p.526) is reconceived of as “the engagement” with the world.
Was Peter the First Bishop of Rome?
Authors: Sobrino Oswald
Published: July 2007

The question of whether Peter was indeed the first bishop of Rome has recently gained popular prominence in the United States due to the best seller by historian and papal critic Garry Wills who vigorously dismisses the entire idea as myth. Although simplistically and sensationally presented, Wills’ thesis relies on the view of many, albeit more subtle, critical scholars that Peter could not have been a bishop at Rome because there were no bishops in Rome until the middle of the second century A.D. Several years ago, David Albert Jones O.P., challenged in this journal this common view of episcopacy in the first century. One scholar, Francis Sullivan S.J., recently responded specifically to Jones’ challenge by reaffirming the apparent majority view. This article will briefly refer to Sullivan’s critique of Jones, and will present in a new light the New Testament evidence showing that Jones’ questioning of the reigning critical view is indeed well-founded and long overdue.

The heart of Jones’ challenge is highlighting the flawed assumptions underlying the reasoning used to deny a first century episcopate: 1) the ideological tendency to view apostolic ministry as “free, loose, inspired and lay” while seeing “the emergence of clerical forms as a fall from primitive innocence” (Jones, p. 142); and 2) the denial of the existence of a first century episcopate based on the alleged silence of early documents. In essence, Jones rightly detects a pervasive bias in the critical literature against developed church structure as somehow contaminating the springtime of apostolic Christianity.
The Cross: The Non‐Apocalyptic Overcoming of Evil
Authors: Hemer John
Published: July 2007

One oppressively hot night in 1985 in the south of Pakistan I lay on my bed punching the wall. I was very angry. A local landlord was mistreating some of our Christians in a dreadful way. I had been several times to speak to him and at first thought I was doing some good, but now realised that my intervention would change very little. The landlord was a particularly violent man, but the system itself was brutal and too old and too ingrained to give way just because one Western missionary thought it should. The people I was trying to help were powerless and so was I and that made me furious. The landlord had lots of enemies. If only one of those enemies would take a revolver to him, put out a contract on him - it happened all the time in this violent society - then our problems would be solved
Immunonanoparticles − an effective tool to impair harmful proteolysis in invasive breast tumor cells
Authors: Obermajer Nataša , Kocbek Petra , Repnik Urška , Kužnik Alenka , Cegnar Mateja , Kristl Julijana , Kos Janko
Published: July 2007

Breast cancer cells exhibit excessive proteolysis, which is responsible for extensive extracellular matrix degradation, invasion and metastasis. Besides other proteases, lysosomal cysteine protease cathepsin B has been implicated in these processes and the impairment of its intracellular activity was suggested to reduce harmful proteolysis and hence diminish progression of breast tumors. Here, we present an effective system composed of poly(d,l‐lactide‐coglycolide) nanoparticles, a specific anti‐cytokeratin monoclonal IgG and cystatin, a potent protease inhibitor, that can neutralize the excessive intracellular proteolytic activity as well as invasive potential of breast tumor cells. The delivery system distinguishes between breast and other cells due to the monoclonal antibody specifically recognizing cytokeratines on the membrane of breast tumor cells. Bound nanoparticles are rapidly internalized by means of endocytosis releasing the inhibitor cargo within the lysosomes. This enables intracellular cathepsin B proteolytic activity to be inhibited, reducing the invasive and metastatic potential of tumor cells without affecting proteolytic functions in normal cells and processes. This approach may be applied for treatment of breast and other tumors in which intracellular proteolytic activity is a part of the process of malignant progression.
Mesure de l'efficacitééconomique des modes de faire valoir au Brésil
Authors: Araujo Claudio , Bonjean Catherine Araujo
Published: July 2007

L'objet de cet article est de tester économétriquement l'efficacité des différents modes de faire valoir rencontrés au Brésil. À cettefin, nous utilisons une mesure de l'eficacitééconomique des exploitations dérivée d'un modèle de frontière de profit stochastique dans lequel la variable d'efficacité dépend du mode de faire valoir et de l'investissement dans la conservation et l'amélioration de la terre. Les résultats montrent que le métayage est un contrat inefficace dont l'existence peut s'expliquer par une gestion plus soucieuse de la conservation et de l'amélioration du capital d'exploitation que dans le cadre du fermage. Les résultats permettent aussi d'opposer les exploitations des différentes régions du Brésil en fonction de leur degré d'efficacité et de la viabilitéà long terme des systkmes productifs. L'étude porte sur un écchantillon de données de panel, agrégées au niveau des États brésiliens.

The purpose of this paper is to test econometrically the efficiency of different tendril patterns in Brazil. We use a measure of farm economic efficiency derived from a stochastic profit function in which the efficiency variable depends on the tenurial contract and on the investment in conservation and land improvement. The results show that sharecropping is an inefficient contract the existence of which may be explained by a type of management that is more concerned with conservation and enhancing of the farming capital than within the framework of a fied‐rent contract. The results also allow us to compare the farms of different regions in Brazil in terms of their efficiency level and the long‐term viability of their systems of production. The study bears on n sample of panel data aggregated at the level of Brazilian states.
The Economic Impacts of Climate Change on Canadian Agriculture and the World: How Big are the Impacts Really?
Authors: Ebel B. J. , Walburger A. M.
Published: July 2007

A computable general equilibrium model was used to assess the impacts of global climate change on Canadian Agriculture. The assumption of ceteris paribus was relaxed. The results indicated that many supply and demand factors have potentially larger impacts on the Canadian and world economies over the next 5 decades than climate change. The distribution of regional impacts varied substantially. Such information is valuable for the agricultural sector and policymakers trying to allocate limited resources.
Managed Trade in Non‐traditional Products: Emerging Issues for Canada's Specialised Livestock Sectors
Authors: Hobbs Jill E. , Ken William A.
Published: July 2007

The specialised livestock industry is poised for excellent growth and development in both Saskatchewan and Canada. … Specialised livestock have the potential to meet market demands in other parts of the world as well as local opportunities for healthy and exotic foods. (Saskatchewan Agriculture and Food, 2000).

… there are now 4000 deer farms in New Zealand. They are running 1.8 million animals, in a country somewhat smaller than Saskatchewan! (Haigh 2000).

There are domestic and export markets for venison and export offers the best returns. Over 80% of Australian‐produced venison is now exported … They are large markets with limited Australian market penetration because of the current small size of our industry and our inability to provide the volume required (Mackay 2000).

…the behaviour of new enterprises follow a very predictable pattern. Unfortunately, despite the highly predictable nature of these issues and problems, the same mistakes are made over and over (McKinna 1999).
Development and Adoption of Dryland Cropping Technologies in Hebei Province of Northern China
Authors: Smith Elwin , KIein K. K.
Published: July 2007

The opinions expressed in this paper reflect the views of the authors and not Agriculture and Agri‐Food Canada or the Canadian International Development Agency.