bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Lay Appropriation of the Sacraments in the later Middle Ages
Authors: Duffy Eamon
Published: July 2007

Perhaps the most crucial single utterance of the Second Vatican Council, at least in terms of impact on our shared experience as Catholics, occurs at paragraph 14 of the Council’s constitution on the liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium. This was the first of the conciliar documents to be promulgated, and in many ways its most bloodily contested production. The paragraph in question runs like this:

Mother Church earnestly desires that all the faithful should be led to that full, conscious and active participation in liturgical celebrations which is demanded by the very nature of the liturgy, and to which the Christian people, “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a redeemed people” (1 Pet 2: 9, 4-5.) have a right and obligation by reason of their baptism.

In the restoration and promotion of the sacred liturgy the full and active participation by all the people is the aim to be considered before all else, for it is the primary and indispensable source from which the faithful are to derive the true Christian spirit. Therefore, in all their apostolic activity, pastors of souls should energetically set about achieving it through the required pedagogy.

“Full, conscious and active participation”, pastoral energy and liturgical pedagogy: these were momentous notions, laden with an agenda whose implications were sketched out in the rest of the document, and which were embodied in the reforms which followed. The summons to “active participation”, indeed, a phrase which occurs sixteen times in all, was singled out subsequently as the main refrain of the document.
Augustine and Divine Simplicity
Authors: Rosheger John P.
Published: July 2007

The doctrine of divine simplicity in its denial of any real ontological distinction between God’s substance and His attributes commanded a special place within classical theism, finding a forceful expression within Augustine’s metaphysic. However, the simplicity of God is a relatively neglected doctrine within current metaphysical and theistic considerations. This is somewhat strange considering the profound implications it has for theistic matters. Its tenets are inextricably linked to such theistic concerns as immutability, aseity, sovereignty, divine volition and necessity. As such, it is well worth our effort to devote careful attention to the Augustinian conception of God’s simpleness, confronting head-on its seemingly counter-intuitive assertion that there is not any actual distinction between divine substance and its qualities. We will want to first expound the relevant texts to Augustine’s teaching on divine simplicity. After its main features have been identified, our analysis will measure Augustine’s doctrine against some of the more serious contemporary objections.

We initiate our exposition by asking: What is Augustine’s notion of divine simplicity? Augustine’s doctrine rallies around the claim that God is what He has (hoc est quod habet). He remarks, “What is meant by ‘simple’ is that its [the Godhead] being is identical with its attributes,...” (CD XI.10). To gain a fuller appreciation of this pithy formula, it is necessary for us to consider its wider context.

Within De civitate Dei, Augustine begins the tenth chapter of Book XI by stating, “There is then one sole Good, which is simple, and therefore unchangeable; and that is God. By this Good all good things were created; but they are not simple, and for that reason are changeable.”
Ontology, Theodicy and Idiom – The Challenge of Nietzschean Tragedy to Christian Writing on Evil
Authors: Cane Anthony
Published: July 2007

In this article I want to suggest that Christian theologising about evil cannot avoid the multifarious voices of those who have defined what is meant by the term “tragedy”, even where it seeks to reject this. This is to argue that the “tragic vision” articulates something important about human and worldly reality, and that theologising that does not acknowledge this will inevitably demonstrate it anyway in its own incoherence. This will be shown in relation to the writings on evil of St Augustine of Hippo and Donald MacKinnon, and finally it will be argued that the only possible “theodicy” lies in the area of Christology.

I begin with the man who proclaimed himself the first “tragic philosopher”, Friedrich Nietzsche, who in his first published book, The Birth of Tragedy, produced the most radical and disconcerting (to Christian sensibility) account of tragedy I have yet encountered. Early in that work Nietzsche retells a fragment of Greek mythology, as follows:

There is an ancient story that King Midas hunted in the forest for a long time for the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, without capturing him. When at last he fell into his hands, the king asked what was best of all and most desirable for man. Fixed and immovable, the demon remained silent; till at last, forced by the king, he broke out with shrill laughter into these words: ‘Oh, wretched race of a day, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to say what it were most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is for ever beyond your reach: not to be bom, not to be, to be nothing. The second best for you, however, is soon to die.
Zacchaeus Chance and Necessity
Authors: Ombres Robert
Published: July 2007

A Sermon, written for the Internet series of weekly sermons by Dominicans, for the 31st Sunday of the Year: C. The Scriptural texts were Wisdom 11:22-2:2; Thessalonians 1:11-2:2 and Luke 19:1-10.

Does God play dice with the universe?

Is everything the product of chance?

Is necessity a one-way road along which we must travel?

Why are some people given faith and others not?

These are the kinds of questions that should jostle for attention in our minds as we consider today’s gospel. And yet at first sight the story of Zacchaeus up a tree could well seem just a charming and picturesque Oriental tale, told to make the simple point that Jesus leaves nobody out.

Dwell a little longer on those questions that float in and out of our consciousness as we begin to reflect on the gospel. To read the Scriptures in the Christian assembly as part of the liturgy is not the same kind of activity as reading them alone at home. To start with, the Sunday readings are selected and combined for us. We come to the gospel story about Zacchaeus only after we have taken in the reading from the book of Wisdom. That first reading already releases large questions and cosmic issues into our consciousness:

In your sight, Lord, the whole world is like a grain of dust that tips the scales . . . Yet you love all that exists . . . And how, had you not willed it, could a thing persist?

So, back to the gospel. Consider what might have been that day in Jericho.
Aquinas and the Act of Love
Authors: Nolan Michael
Published: July 2007

Newmah's Anglican days made him acutely aware of how the language of Catholicism sounds strange in unaccustomed and indeed suspicious ears and how readily misunderstanding ensues. Infallibility is taken to be a claim to be right on everything, the Immaculate Conception is confused with the Virgin Birth, and the remission of sins becomes a permission to continue in evil ways. It is, he saw, a general problem in dealing with the unfamiliar, and he wondered what a hostile foreigner would make of the maxims of the laws of England. Might he not, reading in Blackstone's incomparable Commentaries that ‘the power and jurisdiction of parliament is so transcendent that it cannot be confined either for causes or persons within any bounds’, see a blasphemous claim to divine omnipotence? Might not the assertion that ‘the king can do no wrong’ seem an arrogant claim to divine sinlessness? In truth, of course, all that is meant is that in English law there is no higher authority than Parliament and that the King cannot be sued in his own Courts: nothing more. Newman could but ask the hostile foreigner to abide a while and abate his hostility.

Aquinas, writing in a highly technical Latin and within a philosophy and theology alien to modern ears, is no less prone to be misunderstood, and the modes of misrepresenting him, often unwitting, are many. What he has to say about marriage and related issues has been the object of recent attacks: often he is read as if he were a Lutheran or Calvinist. It may be well to note some of these types of error before dealing with his own understanding in these matters.
Gravissimum Educationis 30 Years on
Authors: Bayldon Michael
Published: July 2007

The Vatican Council issued Gravissimum Educationis on 28th of October 1965. On the 30th anniversary a few reflections may prompt a reconsideration of the document.

Education and schooling are not the same thing. Education, correctly understood, is a lifelong process. Schooling occupies our young days. Although it is a generalisation, I think it is true to say thal modern schooling is the product of the Industrial Revolution.’ Education, by contrast has a longer pedigree. We have schooling because an industrialised nation requires skills best imparted by a schooling process. Recent education reforms (1988 onwards) — particularly under the influence of Toryism — have tried to cement schooling to current economic theory.

The Catholic Church cannot afford to dedicate too many of her resources to reinforcing a particular economic or social theory. Indeed, history shows that the Church has demonstrated wary resistance to such trends. A turning-point arose at Vatican II. In the Decrec Gravissimum Educafionis we read: “Holy Mother Church … is under an obligation to promote the welfare of the whole life of man.” (In modern — politically correct — speech, we would say person, of course). Many, though not all, diocesan education departments concentrate on schooling. This falls under the spell of a myth. The myth suggests that schooling educates. Reality suggests that schooling may open avenues, but education is a most complex process. As the Church slowly climbs out of the shadows of medievalism, we are discovering the need for broader minds, broader concepts of formation. Trends are gradually changing.
An Ambrosian Right: Church and State after Evangelium Vitae
Authors: Barrett Richard J.
Published: July 2007

Introduction

The question of the relationship which should obtain between Church and State has vexed Christians for two millenia and will probably go on doing so for another two. Nonetheless this problem has become the subject of renewed debate following the publication of the recent papal encyclical Evangelium Vitae. Towards the end of the encyclical the Pope urges that those in public office are obliged unequivocally to defend the rights of the unborn. A practical conundrum is, therefore, posed for those who exercise public office in lay States and who at the same time consider themselves to be members of the Christian faithful. Put very concretely, the question may be posed like so: Is there a conflict between my responsibilities to the Church and my duties to a democratically elected government which espouses laws that do not cohere with the Church's positions on human rights? At times the potential conflict of allegiances that may result poses the broader theological problem of the autonomy of the lay sphere. More specifically, in the case of Evangelium Vitae, it raises the problem of the relationship between the civil law and the moral law and the claims of the magisterium to interpret the latter as a criterion of legitimacy for the former. In the short space available to us we cannot hope to explore both of these questions comprehensively. The following thoughts are offered as reflections on the current problems which vex the theological and legal statement of the Church's relationship to the State and of the allegiancgs of the faithful owed to the civil legislature.
Consider Catherine Cambridge University Sermon 30 April, 1995
Authors: Loades Ann
Published: July 2007

Yesterday, 29 April, happens to mark the anniversary of the death at die age of thirty-three, of Catherine of Siena, in Rome in 1380. And for that day we find her listed in the Church of England’s Alternative Service Book under the heading of ‘Lesser Festivals and Commemorations’ as a mystic — a designation she shares with Julian of Norwich and Teresa of Avila. In the Roman Catholic tradition she also shares with the latter the dignity of having in 1970 been accorded the title of Doctor of the Church. I note in passing that no women in the Church of England’s list are yet deemed to have been Teachers of the Faith!

By comparison with Teresa, Anglicans at least seem to have neglected Catherine and what she may represent for us — with the notable exception of that remarkable nineteenth century reformer, Josephine Butler, whose own day of commemoration falls on December 30. With these preliminary points in mind, therefore, I would like to take the opportunity provided by this occasion to make a small contribution to the consideration of Catherine.

Catherine’s book, her Dialogue, a biography and other memoirs of her, were among the earliest books in print, her Dialogue indeed in an English version by 1519. The book, the biography and the memoirs, copies of her letters and prayers, — all would be needed by those who wanted to advance her claim to sanctity, declared as it happened some eighty years after her death. And all these writings are now available to us in new translations and editions to provoke us to ask in our time what we might now make of her.
A Prologue to a Theology of the Atonement
Authors: Evans Michael
Published: July 2007

Watch any of the world’s great sporting events and you are likely to see carefully placed placards with the simple message ‘John 3.16’, drawing our attention to the heart of God’s good news of salvation in Jesus Christ. That God’s own Son became a human being, died a human death on the cross and was raised from the dead ‘for us and for our salvation’ is the core of any truly Christian faith. But what does it mean to be ‘saved’, and how was — and is — that salvation achieved?

‘Save’ and ‘salvation’ are increasingly common words. A goalkeeper who makes ‘great saves’ is seen as the ‘salvation’ of a soccer club facing relegation. There are even governments of ‘National Salvation’. We are persistently urged to save the whale, our planet — and our money! It is not too difficult to grasp this use of the words, but it is often another matter altogether when it comes to salvation in its deepest, richest and ultimate sense.

In theological circles ‘salvation’ is but one of many different words for what God is offering humanity, each with its own nuance of meaning. Some prefer ‘redemption’, ‘justification’, ‘liberation’, ‘divinisation’ or another. But for ordinary English-speaking Christians, ‘save’ and ‘salvation’ are still the usual words for expressing something which we recognise lies at the very heart of our faith.
Scepticism and Sovereignty: The Significance of Lamennais
Authors: Nicholls David
Published: July 2007

Scepticism has frequently been associated with authoritarianism both in politics and in religion. Those who have emphasised the limitations and fragility of human reason have needed to look elsewhere for a basis for certitude—some solid foundation to support a viable political or religious system. Few sceptics have been prepared to accept the view that knowledge and certitude are impossible; there is indeed something paradoxical about the very assertion. Although I shall refer to Lamennais as a sceptic, he firmly rejected pyrrhonism—for he believed that certitude is possible at least in some matters. Nor did he say that reason, or empirical knowledge (arrived at through sense experience) is useless, though he did emphasise the limits of these human faculties, stressing their dependence upon faith and authority.

Lamennais’s life and writings raise questions of perennial importance both for theology and for political philosophy. What is the nature of authority? How are claims to authority legitimated? Are there any independent criteria by which to judge the decisions of political or religious authorities, if so how are they constituted? If custom and tradition are ultimate, does this imply ethical relativism? Can one ethnic group or religious party which happens to wield power (for example the British in nineteenth-century India, or Calvinists in sixteenth-century Geneva) justifiably impose its ideas of right and wrong on those of a different tradition.
Aquinas's Model of Mind
Authors: Quinn Patrick
Published: July 2007

One of the most interesting features in Aquinas’s theory of mind relates to his view that the human intellect is inferior to that of an angel. St. Thomas gives the impression that if only our minds could act in the same way as those of the angels, many of our noetic difficulties would disappear. The weakness of the human mind is due, he believes, to the discursive process of human cognition which results from the application of our understanding to the potentially intelligible data that is acquired from the senses. Aquinas quite frequently deplores this mental condition, claiming that it represents a form of intellectual weakness (e.g. S.T. 1.58.3). The result of such a discursive process is that the human mind struggles to understand by means of lengthy and arduous mental efforts (S.T. 1.89.1). By comparison, the intuitive grasp of the angelic mind is swift and immediate, capable of directly obtaining knowledge of first principles (S.T. 1.58.3). Aquinas perceives the latter ability as a sign that angels are truly intellectual beings in a way that humans are not and he reserves for us the term rational (rationales vocantur) as a way of describing our slower intellectual ability. In such a context, rationality obviously does not constitute a positive description but rather denotes a form of mental weakness (ex debilitate intellectualis). The latter, according to S.T. 1.58.3, is quite clearly the result of our present mode of mental discursiveness in which the intellect proceeds gradually towards the knowledge of truth.
A Catholic View of Orthodoxy
Authors: Nichols Aidan
Published: July 2007

In this article I attempt an overview in four parts. First, I shall discuss why Catholics should not only show some ecumenical concern for Orthodoxy but also treat the Orthodox as their privileged or primary ecumenical partner. Secondly, I shall ask why the schism between the Catholic and Orthodox churches occurred, focussing as it finally did on four historic ‘dividing issues’. Thirdly, I shall evaluate the present state of Catholic-Orthodox relations, with particular reference to the problem of the ‘Uniate’ or Eastern Catholic churches. Fourthly and finally, having been highly sympathetic and complimentary to the Orthodox throughout, I shall end by saying what, in my judgment, is wrong with the Orthodox Church and why it needs Catholicism for (humanly speaking) its own salvation.

First, then, why should Catholics take the Orthodox as not only an ecumenical partner but the ecumenical partner par excellence? There are three kinds of reasons: historical, theological and practical — of which in most discussion only the historical and theological are mentioned since the third sort — what I term the ‘practical’ takes us into areas of potential controversy among Western Catholics themselves.
Abstracting Passion: Hazlitt's Ideal of Power
Authors: Natarajan Uttara
Published: July 2007

Hazlitt’s writings as a whole are distinguished by his close attention to the structures of power, political power not excepted. In a Morning Post article of March 1800, he writes,

... power is the sole object of philosophical attention in man, as in inanimate nature; and in the one equally as in the other, we understand it more intimately, the more diverse the circumstances are with which we have observed it to exist.?

(“Pitt and Buonaparte”, Political Essays; vii. 326)

“Power” in Hazlitt’s metaphysic refers to the mind’s innate faculty, its freedom from subjugation to external influences. His philosophy also connects power with liberty: the mind is free since it is subject only to the laws of its own innate constitution. By affirming innate “power”, Hazlitt refutes the empirical account of epistemology in which the mind, moulded from without, remains passive or subjected. He asserts in its stead that the process of knowledge is ab intra, directed by the mind from within. The creative genius celebrated in Hazlitt’s literary and artistic criticism exemplifies intellectual power in its highest degree, and so vindicates the core principle of his metaphysics.
What Makes a Christology into a Christian Theology?
Authors: Braine David
Published: July 2007

What makes a “Christology” count as a “Christian” Christology? Evidently, there is some distinction to be made. Presumably the reverent accounts of Jesus’ person and role offered by Islam, by notable non-Christian Jews of modem times, by Jewish writers such as Vermes, or by Gandhi and others in the Hindu tradition, do not count as “Christian” Christologies — and clearly a respectful account of his person and role offered by an agnostic or atheist could not count as a “Christian” Christology. Whether we situate the sentimental nineteenth century Renan, or modem theologians such as Maurice Wiles’ and John Hick, on the “Christian” or “non-Christian” side of the divide in respect of their Christologies, waits upon some clarification of what it is that makes a Christology a “Christian” one.

The term “Christology” does not mean a “Messianology” which would have to do with the role of a Messiah the question of whose identity lies open. Rather it means what would have better been called a “Jesuology”, that is an account of the person and role in human existence and the universe of the historically identified person, Jesus of Nazareth.
A History of Blackfriars and New Blackfriars
Authors: White Allan
Published: July 2007

In 1920 Father Bede Jarrett, then provincial of the English Dominicans, wrote to a friend saying that he had just bought the Catholic Review for the province. The Catholic Review was a quarterly journal edited first by Father Benedict Williamson and then by Father Henry Rope. The new publication was to be called Blackfriars. In the view of its first editor, Father Bernard Delany OP (1890-1959), Father Bede had wasted the forty pounds he had paid for it since the journal was defunct and there was to be only a notional continuity between it and the one that was to replace it. In purchasing the title Father Bede was fulfilling a long-cherished ambition to establish a Catholic periodical which would express a specifically and characteristically Dominican voice in England.

As early as 1910 a similar project had been mooted by Father Hugh Pope OP (1869-1946), a celebrated apologist and exegete who had taught at the Dominican house of studies in Hawkesyard, Staffordshire, but who was then teaching Scripture at the Angelicum, the Order’s Roman university.’ In the Hawkesyard Review, an in-house journal mostly edited by the Hawkesyard students, Father Hugh argued the case for a Dominican review suggesting that, in the contemporary world, it would be a sign of the Order’s commitment to the ministry of the Word. In the midst of the Modernist crisis, whatever Scripture scholars wrote was of interest to those in higher authority and was often carefully scrutinised. It was for this reason that Pope’s article in an obscure English Dominican publication with a tiny circulation attracted the attention of the Master of the Order, Father Vincent Cormier (1832-1916).
The Mystery of God: Aquinas and McCabe
Authors: Davies Brian
Published: July 2007

Herbert McCabe was the first Dominican I ever met. He answered my ring on the front door of Blackfriars, Oxford, when I came there in 1977 to see what Dominicans were like and whether I might be interested in joining them.’ came to learn that Dominicans are not quite like anything. They are not easily typecast. But Herbert, as I also came to learn, is someone who holds that they have something which unites them in spite of their differences. His thoughts on this subject emerge in a sermon he preached to most of the members of the English Dominican province at their Provincial Chapter in 1982.

The sermon begins in a spirited fashion: “We are the ‘Friars Preachers’, the preaching brethren, a community which specialises in talk.” It then goes on to suggest that Dominican talkers are part of a mystery in which what they preach is also a mystery. The mystery of which Dominicans are part, says Herbert, is nothing other than the work of God in Christ. The mystery they preach, he adds, is nothing other than God. And God, Herbert insists, is indeed a mystery. God is “the unknown beyond and behind the whole universe” who “does not come within the scope of our interpretation of the world or our language”.
The Neglected Virtue
Authors: Finn Richard
Published: July 2007

In the contemporary recovery of virtue ethics some virtues have fared better than others. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy has entries for justice, wisdom, courage, self-control and the good of friendship integral to the life of virtue as understood by Aristotle and Aquinas. Yet between Hume’s fork and Humour there is no mention of humility. Why so? Aquinas wrote that “after the theological virtues, after the intellectual virtues which regard the reason itself, and after justice, especially legal justice, humility stands before all others.”

The reasons for this eclipse of humility are several. One is the absence of humility from the Classical Greek and Roman account of virtue or excellence. Not only is it missing from that account, but for many in the Ancient world to be humble or lowly was to suffer evil. Humilitas meant first a lowly and despicable origin. It was to be born a nobody. In the Tusculan Disputations Cicero’s privileged interlocutor M, discussing that chestnut of ancient philosophy, whether happiness is a matter of virtue alone, or virtue in conjunction with good fortune, lists those evils, or apparent evils, which can afflict us and lie largely beyond our control, beyond the self-definition of character: “poverty, obscurity, insignificance, loneliness, loss of property, severe physical pain, ruined health, infirmity, blindness, fall of one’s country, exile and, to crown all, slavery.” The word ‘insignificance’ here translates the Latin humilitas.’ To some this humility was incompatible with virtue. If excellence is a matter of character, of who one is and not merely what one does, and if who one is in a patriarchal world is to be the son of this father, to claim these ancestors, to be a nobody is already to fail in excellence, to be base.
Cartesianism According to Karl Barth
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

One easy way into Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics is to trace his references to the philosophy of Descartes. He ascribes the liberal-modernism in Protestant theology, to which he was so deeply opposed, to the grip of Cartesian epistemology on theological methodology since the Enlightenment. Paradoxically, he insists on a radicalization of Cartesian considerations about doubt and certainty when he comes to work out the doctrine of creation.

Very early in the first volume of Church Dogmatics (henceforth CD), Barth assails ‘Modernistic dogmatics’, ‘theology since the days of the Enlightenment’ (CD 1/1, page 36, first published in 1932, English translation 1936, revised 1975). He means, of course, Protestant theology: a theology, or a family of theologies one might say, in which ‘church and faith are to be understood as links in a greater nexus of being’, so that dogmatic theology becomes ‘a link in a greater nexus of scientific problems, from the general structural laws of which its own specific conditions of knowledge are to be deduced and its own specific scientific character known’. The mistake with this, according to Barth, is that theology is regarded as having the same epistemological status, requirements, methods and so forth, as any other scientific or scholarly discipline. More specifically, this ‘nexus of problems’ is ‘that of an ontology’, a conception of reality, a metaphysics of being, which— ‘since Descartes‘—is the ontology ‘of a comprehensively explicated self-understanding of human existence which may also at a specific point become the pre-understanding of an existence in the Church or in faith, and therefore the pre-understanding and criterion of theological knowledge’.
Natural law and ethics: some second thoughts
Authors: Bishop Jordan
Published: July 2007

Students of the Thomistic synthesis have always had to deal with the ambiguities inherent in the project of bringing together an Aristotelian vision of ethics and the inevitable-—for a Christian—intrusion of the law-centred vision of the Bible. And because of the centrality of the Bible in Western culture, discourse about ethics has remained largely law-centred. We think of ethics in terms of law, even, as been suggested, long after belief in, or acceptance of, a notion of divine law had been largely eroded. In the Church, in spite of Aquinas's espousal of Aristotelianism, the law-centred idiom remained dominant. And it can be argued that this conception of ethics is a source of many of the problems faced in discussions of ethics in the Church today.

In the light of this, it may be worthwhile to look again at Aquinas's attempt to reconcile the ethical discourse of Christianity, based on the Torah, with that of Aristotle. For reasons that may in fact be familiar to readers of G.E.M. Anscombe’s now famous 1958 article on modem moral philosophy, Aquinas chose to make the Aristotelian account the centre of his own thought on ethics, to the extent of incorporating theological elements such as the virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity into an Aristotelian format.
“Then gentle Mary meekly bowed her head:” Some psychological reflections on Mary in Christian Thought
Authors: Callaghan Brendan
Published: July 2007

Let me begin by thanking in the first instance Dr Sarah Jane Boss for the honour of being invited to give this inaugural lecture, celebrating the establishing of the Marian Study Centre here at LSU College of Higher Education. In offering such thanks, I would like to extend them beyond that invitation to include thanks for the establishing of the Marian Study Centre itself. Without having any sort of “inside track” information, I imagine that thanks for such a timely and courageous move are due not only to the interests and commitment of Dr Boss, but also to the creativity and energy of Professor Mary Grey and the innovative drive and support of the Principal of LSU, Dr Anand Chitnis.

If you remember the terms introduced into our national vocabulary by “ Yes Minister”, my characterisation of the founding of the Marian Study Cenlre as “courageous” may begin to sound a little ambiguous. If my memory serves me accurately, bold decisions cost you votes, while courageous decisions cost you elections … But I would wish to stay with the term “courageous”, because I think that in its unambiguous sense it dbes apply. The doyenne of Jungian analysts in the UK, the Baroness Vera von der Heydt, points out the sensitivities that may be involved:

To some people it is sheer blasphemy to see Mary other than in white and light blue, untouchable, and unapproachable, and unaware of human suffering, sin or temptation. In others negative emotions are aroused at the mere thought of her: it makes them indignant that a mere human creature should havd such privileges …
Reflections on the Centenary of the Bushey Congregation of Dominican Sisters
Authors: Alford Helen
Published: July 2007

This year sees the centenary of the foundation of the Dominican sisters of Newcastle, Natal (South Africa), now based at Bushey Heath on the outskirts of London. A cause of rejoicing and of thanks to God for all that the sisters have been and done, but also for asking why we should be having such a celebration at all. Why was this religious institute founded only 100 years ago, when the history of the Dominican order as a whole goes back to the 13th century? Throughout the world, there are 158 autonomous congregations of sisters, with 35,000 professed members and 950 novices at the last count, while there is one international institute of the brethren, comprising nearly fifty provinces and forty vicariates, numbering some 7000 men, a thousand of whom are in formation. Why is there so much fragmentation amongst the sisters when the brothers have maintained, relatively speaking, a great degree of unity in their structure? It is not as if there were no sisters before the massive expansion of the numbers of women religious in the 19th century. Marie Poussepin, recently beatified, started what was recognisably a congregation which she put under the patronage of St Dominic 300 years ago. At the time of St Dominic, there were groups of women who were not following a specific rule, some later becoming enclosed monasteries and others, monasteries of the third order. Why is there not the organic connection between the convents of the Dominican sisters today and these forebears, as there is between the medieval convents of brothers and those of today?
Meister Eckhart and the Via Negativa: Epistemology and Mystical Language
Authors: Murphy John J.
Published: July 2007

The mystical language of the 14th century Dominican, Meister Eckhart, can certainly be characterised as daring in its creativity. Indeed, Eckhart uses language like few others in his talk of the divine, employing bold paradoxes and unusual metaphors. But as Bernard McGinn has written, “while Eckhart’s creative handling of language is one of the major attractions of his style, it often does not make the task of understanding him any easier.” Part of the problem in failing to understand Eckhart’s words involves a failure to understand the context of his theological vision and his efforts to bring his listeners to a new appreciation of the divine. This has been especially true in the contemporary philosophy of religion. Philosophical analyses have failed to attend to the conditions in which the mystic’s words have their meaning and instead have generally been attempts to “penetrate” the phenomena. What is required instead is what the 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein has advised, namely, a grammatical investigation. When Eckhart writes, “The eye in which I see God is the same eye in which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye and one sight and one knowing and one loving”, it must be recognized that the meaning of such a statement can only be understood in seeing how Eckhart’s words are being used, for it is only in this context that these words have their significance. Rather than impose a philosophical explanation, therefore, it is important to note the grammar of Eckhart’s discourse and thus a description is offered.
What kind of Missal are we Getting?
Authors: Harbert Bruce
Published: July 2007

The Sunday before Advent has long been known among Anglicans as ‘Stir-up Sunday’, the day for stirring mincemeat, cakes and puddings in preparation for Christmas. Its title is drawn from the opening words of its Collect in the Book of Common Prayer (BCP), Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people, translated by Cranmer from a Latin collect beginning Excita, ‘stir up’, which has been part of the Roman liturgy since the sixth century.

The Catholic liturgy, too, has kept this ancient text for the week before Advent, but the version in the current Missal from the International Committee on English in the Liturgy (ICEL) is much duller: Lord, increase our eagerness to do your will. It is good news that this is to be replaced with a version that, like Cranmer, recalls the peremptory crispness of the original: Stir up the hearts of your faithful people. Lord God .... It is unlike Cranmer and the Latin, however, in that the words ‘Stir up’ do not stand alone, and so they are less arresting, less memorable.

This new version is part of the revision of the Missal undertaken by ICEL, whose fruits are now being submitted to Bishops’ Conferences for approval. The bishops of England and Wales have voted to accept most of the prayers submitted, including those for the Masses of weeks in Ordinary Time. In so doing, they parted company with their brother bishops in the USA, who have raised objections to a number of texts. ICEL has become something of a tyranny, which individual bishops’ conferences are in effect powerless to resist.
Ars Moriendi
Authors: Márkus Gilbert
Published: July 2007

In the Beginning

Perhaps I should begin by saying that the origin of this paper lies in the discussion of the North European diffinitors when they met last year to begin thinking about this General Chapter. We met in Edinburgh, one of the most northerly houses of the Order in Europe, in October as the all-enveloping darkness of a Scottish Winter began to make itself felt, and in a city known for its particularly gloomy Calvinist establishment. So perhaps there was a certain inevitability about our finding this topic. What I want to say is partly drawn from our conversations in Edinburgh, and from our correspondence with each other since then, and partly from the depths of my own sense of mortality.

I suppose we should also take into consideration the fact that one of the provinces represented at that meeting, Flanders, doesn’t have a single novice or brother in formation at present, and has had no ordination for two years. Only two men have been professed there in the last 25 years. Houses are closing, projects are dying. The Dutch province also has its difficulties: having had 600 members in 1957, it now has about 190, and most of these are old men. One novice was professed three years ago, and now they are asking themselves whether they can receive any more. They have had to sell the Albertinum, one of their major historical projects. It’s hardly surprising that the Dutch diffinitor, Ben, asks “Are we coming to the end of religious life?” This is certainly the impression given in some parts of the world.
The Question of Believing
Authors: Giard Luce
Published: July 2007

For Michel de Certeau, believing was rooted in a foundational experience, situated in a Christian tradition where the relationship to scriptures is central. Now, in this immense inheritance, he chose as object of election and familiarity mystical texts, not ‘mystical experience’ but the writings of mystics, that is, a particular type of writings implying a mode of believing. He loved the mystics not because they would be ‘elect’ but because he saw in them the wounded and often the relegated to the margins of the social group, disgraced people, the monastery idiot in the patristic tradition (see chapter 1 of la Fable mystique), Surin long regarded as mad by his Jesuit brethren and whose writings were dispersed, corrected, partly lost. There, in shame and suffering, madness or defection, the ‘corruption’ that haunts President Schreber in Freud,’ something essential is tied between believing and its defection. It seems to me, to take up an expression he employed about Foucault, that that is the ‘black sun’ of his thought and that it explains the turn to ‘history of mysticism’ as well as the turn to ‘cultural anthropology of the present’ in his work.

The platform that provided the force and originality of I'Invention du quotidien was the reflection on believing, beyond ecclesial institutions on every side. The disclosure of ordinary life as ‘mystical', in the proper as well as figurative sense, inspired the analysis of practices. He hoped to complete volume 2 of la Fable mystique in 1986 and counted then on writing an Anthropology of believing , which he had already announced as the theme of his seminar at the Ecole des hautes etudes in 1985-86.
What is Heterology?
Authors: Buchanan Ian
Published: July 2007

Heterology is Michel de Certeau’s great unfinished project. Begun while still in the U.S., it was put on hold so he could complete his work on mysticism,—and regrettably—never resumed. This work holds such great promise that the thought of continuing his project, of somehow bringing it to fruition, has long been a fancy of mine. But besides the obvious difficulty of creating what is practically a new epistemology, there is the more immediate difficulty of establishing just what heterology is meant to be. Since Certeau died before he could formulate either a specific thesis, or a particular method, we have no certain way of knowing what he actually meant by the term, or indeed intended it to mean. So until now the fancy has remained idle. However, it now occurs to me that it may be possible to construct a workable impression of what heterology is by determining what it decidedly is not.

While it is true that we do not really know what heterology is meant to stand for, there is one thing, at least, of which we can be certain and that is what Certeau did not want this book “we will never ready” to be. It is quite clear from his existing work that he wanted to steer what at the time of his death was then emerging as cultural studies away from what might be called, to coin a phrase, ‘interpretative semiotics’. He objected to ‘interpretative semiotics’ not because its result is more allegory than analysis, but because it presumes that the state of affairs called culture is, through being composed of ‘symbols’, a purely relative, or else quid pro quo, structure, without any substantive base.
The Shattering of Christianity and the Articulation of Belief
Authors: Ahearne Jeremy
Published: July 2007

This article is based on a number of texts written by Michel de Certeau between around 1969 and 1974. These texts all explore the ways in which a lucid Christian belief may endure as a resource in contemporary societies. They also indicate a form of transition. In comparison to the probing but orthodoxly circumscribed analyses of L’Etranger, ou Bunion dans la différence (1969), we see the emergence of a more open (more exposed but also freer) mode of reflection. Although Certeau would rarely return in his writings after the mid-1970’s to the question of contemporary Christian belief as such, the analytic and figurative frameworks generated by this reflection continue to inform his thought. They help us to make sense of the apparently disparate heterogeneity of his subsequent publications, taking us as they do in a series of significant zigzags between, say, The Writing of History, The Mystic Fable and The Practice of Everyday Life.

Christianity was, in Certeau’s view, in the process of ‘shattering’. While this may have seemed a provocative diagnosis in 1974, it appears today as a basic premiss for a scrupulous sociological analysis. Moreover, Certeau suggests that there is nothing intrinsically new about this process. He recalls elsewhere the major scissions already at work in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as Christendom broke ‘into pieces’, producing here and there new generations of believers ‘without a church’. What is unprecedented, he argues, is now the sheer extent and scale of this shattering. This development is not necessarily synonymous with an imminent extinction of Christian belief, but does modify radically the conditions in which such belief must find a voice and a horizon for action.
The voice of the Other
Authors: Ward Graham
Published: July 2007

“Christian epistemology links mystic knowledge to language. God has spoken,” Michel de Certeau writes (M.F., p. 114) Two extended metaphors for the economy of this speech act are common in the tradition. In the first, God is Speaker, Christ is the Spoken Word, the Verb grafted upon this world (M.F., p. 150) and the Spirit is the breath (pneuma) which makes this communication possible. In the second, the Spirit is explicitly linked to the writing of the Spoken Word. God is Writer and creation is His book. Certeau, as we will see, examines both these metaphors (with the economies of revelation and redemption that they imply). The speech act is fundamental to his understanding of history, creation, subjectivity and the practices of daily living. And yet, as a thinker who draws upon and develops the poststructuralism of Lacan, Foucault, Bourdieu and Derrida (to name only a few), this privileging of the voice is somewhat at odds with poststructural denunciations of the author and critiques of the metaphysics of presence subtly organised around the hierarchy of speech over writing.
Faith becoming culture: theological perspectives
Authors: Gallagher Michael Paul
Published: July 2007

On 20 May 1982 Pope John Paul II signed a letter founding the Pontifical Council for Culture. In it he spoke of human destiny itself being at stake in the field of culture, and he stressed that “living culture” constitutes the “ethos of a people”. Then he went on to express a key challenge for faith horizons today: “A faith which does not become culture is a faith which has not been fully received, not thoroughly thought through, not fully lived out.”.

Kieran Flanagan’s The Enchantment of Sociology could be regarded as a long footnote to that claim (which he does not quote). Even though he is suspicious of much of the discourse of inculturation, he is passionately concerned about how faith embodies itself within culture by constructing its own “habitus”—a favourite term he borrows from Pierre Bourdieu. In this respect he engages in some running battles with theologians who have misread the power of the “living culture” and whose “liberal” options for “relevance” have undermined the power of religious belonging and of the sacred. Even the Second Vatican Council’s important document (issued in 1965) Gaudium et spes, on the Church in the modem world, is accused of naivety over the question of culture, or, more particularly, of ignoring sociological insights concerning the complexity and power of culture as a product. As a result it fell into excessive optimism about the hoped-for dialogue with contemporary culture and is criticised for playing down the necessity of religious distance from the deceptions of culture.
The Radical Vocation of the Catholic Laity
Authors: Davis Claire
Published: July 2007

Britain in the 1990s has lost its sense of direction and its people are at odds with themselves. It needs to revitalise its economy, modernise its institutions, rewrite the contract between the members of its society and recover self-esteem.

These are the words of political economist and journalist Will Hutton in his now famous diagnosis of the contemporary ills of British society, The State Were In. ‘All the malfunctions of the economy are related’, argues Hutton, ‘fused by the government’s overweening desire to establish the market principle as the basis of every policy.’ (p. 14) The character of the British economy has been shaped by the collective aspiration to a gentlemanly life—to have an income for which one does not obviously labour, ideally from land, but otherwise from finance and commerce—speculation on the markets. At all events, industry, the actual work of production, has been regarded by those at the centre of power as an activity from which to keep a distance. This attitude has created a lack of commitment and poor investment on the part of finance in relation to industry which has, according to Hutton, impoverished the economy, preventing real economic growth and stability. In this approach, Britain is unique among her capitalist partners both in the West and now increasingly in Asia.