bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Aesthetic: James Joyce and Wittgenstein
Authors: Barrett Cyril
Published: July 2007

Any reader of Joyce's A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man with the slightest interest in beauty, the arts and literature must remember the conversation between Stephen Dedalus and the fatuous fathead, Lynch, on aesthetics, with special reference to the definition of beauty by St Thomas Aquinas. In this short piece I shall compare Stephen's interpretation of Aquinas's definition and succinct analysis with some notes on the aesthetic from Wittgenstein's Notebooks 1914-1916.

Aquinas's definition - Pulchra sunt quae visa placent - defies elegant direct translation. Literally it means ‘Those things are beautiful which give pleasure [merely on being] seen'. Joyce’s translation (which involves interpretation) is as good as any: ‘that is beautiful the apprehension of which pleases'. He expands the notion of visa from the visual to, as he (Stephen/Joyce) puts it: ‘aesthetic apprehensions of all kinds, whether through sight or hearing or through any other avenue of apprehension.’ This would include the beauty of floral smells, the taste of fruit, the taste of an imaginative cuisine, the feel of a hot bath in winter or a cool pool in summer. In Joyce’s view all these would be, on his interpretation of Aquinas, aesthetic apprehensions.

There follows a good deal about aesthetics which is Joyce's own. Then he returns to Aquinas and his threefold analysis of beauty: Ad pulcritudinem tria requirunlur: integritas, consonantia, claritas. This Joyce translates for his own purposes as: ‘Three things are needed for beauty, wholeness, harmony and radiance.’ In his original and personal interpretation—none the worse for the that—Stephen draws Lynch's attention to a basket which a butcher's boy ‘had slung inverted on his head'!
The Passion of Jesus: A Test Case for Providence
Authors: Roy Louis
Published: July 2007

In this essay I should like to raise the question: In what sense could we say that God’s providence was active in the last events of the life of Jesus, that is to say at Gethsemane and on the cross? I will proceed in three steps. First, I shall characterise Jesus’ encounter with evil. Second, I shall reconstruct the meaning attached to his life and to his relationship with the Father. Third, from the clash of evil and meaning represented in the passion of Jesus, God will be portrayed as absent-present in the midst of human suffering.

Before engaging in our reflections, a methodological note is in order. When we examine New Testament texts reporting Jesus’ words and actions, we find out that ‘the accounts are not mutually consistent either in detail or in the interpretation they offer.’ Each of the scriptural narratives or comments on the passion not only does not attribute the same words to Jesus, but casts the saving event into a particular theological vision. Therefore, most exegetes try very carefully to avoid concordism.

Next, the Gospel narratives are not ‘historical’ in the sense we moderns ascribe to this adjective. Surely they have an historic basis, but each of them tells a story the purpose of which is to highlight what it entailed for the faith of believers several decades after the resurrection of Jesus. The New Testament texts are not meant to give us some information about the inner psychology of Jesus. The details and dialogues presented are not directly biographical, but they are part of a narrative whose organizing principles are, in a sense, closer to those of a novel.
Ethics in an age of self interest
Authors: Chappell Timothy
Published: July 2007

What is the meaning of life? Peter Singer’s new book offers us this answer (258-9)':

If we are to find meaning in our lives by working for a cause, that cause must be... a ‘transcendent cause’, that is, a cause that extends beyond the boundaries of our self. There are many such causes... No doubt a commitment to each of these causes can be, for some people, a way of finding meaning and fulfilment. Is it... arbitrary, then, whether one chooses an ethical cause or some other cause? No; living an ethical life is certainly not the only way of making a commitment that can give substance and worth to your life: but for anyone choosing one sort of life rather than another, it is the commitment with the firmest foundation. The more we reflect on our commitment to a football club, a corporation, or any sectional interest, the less point we are likely to see in it. In contrast, no amount of reflection will show a commitment to an ethical life to be trivial or pointless... living an ethical life enables us to identify ourselves with the greatest cause of all.

In Singer’s view the greatest cause of all is “to make the world a better place”, a cause which Singer also calls, apparently without irony (or indeed even humour), “taking the point of view of the universe” (274). “Making the world a better place”, as Singer understands it, in fact means only “the reduction of pain and suffering, wherever it is found” (275). What is the reflective justification for seeing this project as the only one involved in “making the world a better place”?
Shooting round corners: Newman and Anselm
Authors: Logan Ian
Published: July 2007

It is beyond the scope of this short paper to compare the views of Newman and Anselm on faith and reason. Lengthy debate continues to surround our understanding of both. My purpose is to understand a comment of Newman’s concerning the interpretation of Anselm, and in so doing to address the possibility of agreement between the apparently disparate views we would expect Newman and Anselm to have concerning the particular question: is it possible to ‘convert’ by rational argument? To this end, I will (1) look at what little Newman had to say about Anselm, in the context of his views concerning the use of logic in matters of faith, (2) address the issue of the relation of Thomas and Anselm, as raised by Newman, (3) consider the role of the Fool (Psalm 14) and the notion of ‘natural words’ in shaping how Anselm thought about God, and (4) identify a degree of congruence between Anselm, Thomas and Newman.

What did Newman know of, think of, Anselm? There is little reference to Anselm’s intellectual work in Newman’s writings. Yet, Anselm has an important place in the development of Christian theology and understanding. Newman refers, in the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, to the fact that Anselm is interpreted by Thomas, going on to say, “in no case do we begin with doubting that a comment disagrees with its text, when there is a prima facie congruity between them”. We might infer from this statement that Newman is happy to take his reading of Anselm from Thomas. However, in a letter addressed to Pope Leo XIII, in response to his encyclical on the philosophy of Thomas, Newman writes:

“All good Catholics must feel it a first necessity that the intellectual exercises, without which the Church cannot fulfil her supernatural mission duly, should be founded on broad as well as true principles, that the mental creation of her theologians, and of her controversialists and pastors should be grafted on the Catholic tradition of philosophy, and should not start from a novel and simply original tradition, but should be substantially one with the teaching of St. Athanasius, St. Augustine, St. Anselm, and St. Thomas, as those great doctors in turn are one with each other.”
Von Balthasar, Rahner, and The Commissar
Authors: Endean Philip
Published: July 2007

Von Balthasar's attacks on Rahner are scattered over several works. Sometimes their expression is very technical, and complex personal factors also play a part. But von Balthasar expresses his concerns vividly and concisely in a bitterly satirical dialogue near the end of a polemical text which he published just after Vatican II: The Moment of Christian Witness.’ A ‘well-disposed commissar', a figure symbolising the culture of modernity both in its easy secularism and its nightmare terrors, arraigns a Rahnerian Christian. In less than three full pages, Raimer's theology is made to look ridiculous. For Rahner, God always transcends objects in space and time: we know God only in and through them, as their permanently mysterious, elusive ground.
‘Lift up a Living Nation’: The Political Theology of Georges Bernanos
Authors: Nichols Aidan
Published: July 2007

‘Lift up a Living Nation’: I take these words of G.K. Chesterton’s well- known hymnic poem, ‘O God of Earth and Altar’, as a suitable emblem for a study of Bernanos’ ‘polemical’ works. In fact, the three stanzas of Chesterton’s divine apostrophe — called simply, in the Collected Poems, ‘A Hymn’ - perfectly match the spirit and content of Bernanos’ political writings. Nor is this entirely surprising, for the two writers belong to a stream of intellectual reflection and spiritual endeavour in early twentieth-century England and France, where writers in a Catholic tradition (both Anglo-Catholic and Roman) sought to envisage and commend a new Christendom, on the basis of what was best in the English and French anciens regimes as well as humanity and the Gospel — all with the aim of countering and overcoming that extended cultural and political crisis which in England opened with the Edwardians and ended with the Second World War and in France coincided with the Third Republic and the division of the country between Vichy and the Occupied Zone. It is noteworthy that Chesterton’s ‘hymn’ was first published in The Commonwealth for November 1907 — the very year of Bernanos’ earliest published work, seven short stories on the themes of kingship, childhood and heroic death in the Royalist monthly Le Panache.

The prayer in Chesterton’s poem addresses a God who is named at once for the land (‘earth’) and for the traditional cultus of a Christian people (‘altar’). It speaks of the faltering of a political elite, and the disorientation of the masses; the excessive power of money (‘the walls of gold’) and the internal division that follows on party conflict (‘the swords of scorn’).
On Reading Evangelium Vitae as a Social Encyclical
Authors: Boland Vivian
Published: July 2007

John Paul II’s recent letter on faith and reason is the thirteenth encyclical of his twenty year papacy. Three of the thirteen are social encyclicals in the traditional sense. They explicitly place themselves within the line of social encyclicals which stretches from Rerum Novarum, published by Leo XIII in 1891, to Centesimus Annus, John Paul II’s encyclical to mark the centenary of Leo’s letter in 1991. This line of encyclicals has dealt with social, economic and political questions and reflects all the great events and changes of the 20th century. John Paul II marked the ninetieth anniversary of Rerum Novarum by publishing Laborem Exercens (1981) and the twentieth anniversary of Paul Vi’s great encyclical Populorum Progressio was honoured with the publication of Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (1987).

But John Paul’s encyclicals include also a number which might be termed ‘cultural encyclicals’ or ‘encyclicals of cultural critique’. Where the traditional social encyclicals, charting a middle road between the extremes of communism and capitalism, work within the general social and democratic drift of twentieth century development, these cultural encyclicals sound a more critical and, it may be, a more radical note. The letters I include under this rubric are Veritatis Splendor (1993), Evangelium Vitae (1995) and Fides et Ratio (1998). It is the middle one I want to consider here.
Thomism and the Future of Catholic Philosophy
Authors: Haldane John
Published: July 2007

When one takes account of the scale and range of Aquinas’s achievements it becomes clear why he deserves to be described as the greatest of the mediaeval philosopher-theologians, for he was the first thinker of the high mediaeval period to work out in detail the new synthesis between Catholicism and philosophy. It is sometimes supposed that this just meant ‘Christianizing’ Aristotle. Even were that the limit of his achievement it would have been considerable, but in fact he went further. For while he opposed unquestioning appeals to authority, he believed in the idea of cumulative philosophical and religious wisdom and sought to integrate Neoplatonist, Augustinian and Anselmian ideas, as well as Aristotelian ones, with scripture, patristic teaching and evolving Catholic doctrine.
One World: the Disabled in Society
Authors: Nuttgens Bridget
Published: July 2007

Did you know that last December 5 was the Day of the Disabled. No? I’m not surprised. Possibly more people have heard that 1999 is the Year of the Elderly. A large proportion of our population is now over 60, and, frequently with old age comes some degree of disability, so perhaps our disabled citizens will get their share of attention this year. After all, the final part of the Disability Discrimination Act of 1955 (Part III) which requires service providers to review their procedures to make sure they do not exclude disabled people, comes into full force in October of this year. Then there is the new Human Rights Bill several of whose clauses cover the disabled, and the setting up by the government of a Disability Rights Commission which will mean that in future those suffering discrimination will have a body to whom they can bring complaints instead of being faced with the need to bring a private prosecution.

So all that remains is to change the attitude to disability in the general community. How do we do this?

First, (this sounds like a Delia Smith recipe) we must bury the Great Disability Debate as to whether it is personal physical limitations which constrict the lives of disabled people (the physical model) or the fact that society is not prepared to adapt itself to encompass the disabled (the social model). The basis for the first of these two approaches is that the disabled must accept that their life-situation is going to be different to that of the able-bodied ; for the second, that the disabled have a right to equal access and opportunities however difficult the circumstances.
Justice, Peace and Dominicans 1216–1999: VII ‐ France in 1953–4: Do the baptised have rights? The Worker‐Priest Crisis
Authors: Leprieur François
Published: July 2007

‘The members of the Holy Office use methods which, if they were in Great Britain, would soon land them in court. The Holy Office ruins reputations and destroys people’s careers.’ The English Jesuit, Archbishop Tommy Roberts, formerly Archbishop of Bombay, made these grave allegations in a full session of the Second Vatican Council. They are well illustrated by the way the French worker-priest crisis was dealt with between the sumrtier of 1953 and the spring of 1954. Obviously I can only record such a richly complex period in summary form—almost telegraphically. But even such a résumé gives an eloquent demonstration of the way the hierarchical authority of that time functioned, particularly in regard to the human rights of the baptised.

The loss of the working classes to the Catholic Church in France in the nineteenth century had for a long while made social issues prominent in French ecclesiastical thinking. The spiritual humanism with socialist leanings to be found, for example, in the influential periodical Esprit (founded by Emmanuel Mounier in 1932) was gradually accepted even by some members of the hierarchy. The publication in 1943 of the book by A. Godin and Y. Daniel La France, pays de mission?—the question mark was included at the request of the ecclesiastical authorities— helped to spur concrete attempts to bridge the gap between the Church and the working class. By far the most outstanding among these was the decision by the bishops to permit some of the clergy to combine their priestly ministry with day-to-day sharing in the lives of manual labourers, in other words working beside them, joining their trade unions and living among them in working-class fiats.
Justice, Peace and Dominicans 1216–1999: VIII‐Slant, Marxism and the English Dominicans
Authors: Wicker Brian
Published: July 2007

Dialogue between European Catholics and Marxists became significant in the 1960s and the English Province of the Dominicans had a major hand in its promotion. My personal memories of that episode focus upon three members of the Province in particular: Conrad Pepler, Laurence Bright and Herbert McCabe. Each had a distinctive contribution to make to the dialogue. But all shared one particular gift. They were enablers. In other words, each of them helped to make things happen, by encouraging others more directly involved than themselves to have their say. Conrad Pepler’s contribution was as the Warden of Spode House, the Dominican conference centre where much of the dialogue took place. He gave house room to the variegated groups who wanted to take part; and by standing back from the in-fighting he made the dialogue ‘fizz’. Laurence Bright was the organiser at the centre of the network, and it was he who brought people into contact with each other at the beginning, and saw to it that what they said got into print, in various books as well as in the pages of Slant. In the later phases of the dialogue Herbert McCabe, as editor of New Blackfriars, opened the pages of the periodical to the participants in such a way that they were able to conduct their dialogue at leisure and at suitable (sometimes excessive!) length in between the conference gatherings at Spode. He also made lapidary observations of his own in editorial comments.

Conrad Pepler was a child of the Eric Gill ‘Ditchling’ circle. As such he was familiar with the early Catholic peace movement. The Catholic PAX society had been started on 8th May 1936 by a small group including a recent Catholic convert from Wales, J. Alban Evans, who had experienced difficulties over the concept of ‘just war’ in Catholic thought until he read a book by the German Dominican, Franziskus Stratmann (a leader of the anti-war movement in Germany) called The Church and War. By June of that year, Eric Gill himself had taken an interest in the new group—and he of course was a Dominican Tertiary, as was Conrad’s father Hilary. So the Dominican influence on Catholic thinking about peace, and conscientious objection, was profound from the beginning.
Justice, Peace and Dominicans 1216–1999: IX – STOP WAR PLEASE Dominicans and the Christian Peace Movement in England
Authors: Flessati Valerie
Published: July 2007

Enablers was how, in last month’s New Blackfriars, Brian Wicker described the Dominicans who provided a forum—whether at Spode House or in the pages of New Blackfriars—where radical Christian debate could flourish. Companions is the word I would add to describe the role of Dominicans as they have accompanied Christian peace activists in the second half of the twentieth century. On that journey Dominicans have helped fellow pilgrims with their theological mapreading, and literally walked the same road, to Vézelay, Canterbury, Porton Down and Greenham Common.

PAX began in 1936 with the aim of ‘resistance to modem warfare on grounds of traditional morality and principle’. Its founders had come to the conclusion that modem methods of warfare, with air attacks on civilians, violated the conditions for a ‘just war’ and that Catholics had the right, and even the duty, to refuse participation in future wars. This immediately set PAX on a path to confrontation with the hierarchy, whose attitude was conveyed in a letter from the Diocese of Westminster:

‘The “conscientious objector” has an erroneous conscience.... He is entitled to respect and sympathy such as would be given to any misguided person... But error remains error... and no Catholic organisation may make it one of their purposes to support an attitude of conscientious objection which is at variance with Catholic teaching.”

As a result PAX could only continue its work by calling itself a society ‘of Catholics and others’ rather than a Catholic society.
The Theology of Time Regained: Eucharist, Eschatology and Resurrection
Authors: Worthen Jeremy
Published: July 2007

But let a noise or scent, once heard or once smelt, be heard or smelt again in the present and at the same time in the past, real without being actual, ideal without being abstract, and immediately the permanent and habitually concealed essence of things is liberated and our true self which seemed—had perhaps for long years seemed—to be dead but was not altogether dead, is awakened and reanimated as it receives the celestial nourishment that is brought to it. A minute freed from the order of time has re-created in us, to feel it, the man freed from the order of time. And one can understand that this man should have confidence in his joy, even if the simple taste of a madeleine does not seem logically to contain within it the reasons for this joy, one can understand that the word ‘death’ should have no meaning for him; situated outside time, why should he fear the future?

These words written by Marcel Proust, and proceeding from the mouth of the narrator, Marcel, in Time Regained, the final volume of Remembrance of Things Past, may appear somewhat foreign to the proper concerns of Christian theology. The language as such is hardly alien, deploying as it does the imagery of Christian liturgy and mysticism: the awakening of what seems dead, the transcending of time, the overcoming of the fear of death—and all this through a form of ‘celestial nourishment’ first introduced into the narrative through the memory of the madeleine once tasted on Sunday mornings by the young Marcel before attending Mass.
The Cultural Adaptation of Apocalyptic Imagery: A Case Study
Authors: Stancil Wilburn T.
Published: July 2007

The full head of hair and the moustache are still there, though flecked with grey. The sideburns have disappeared and the sixties’ sports shirt with the rolled-up sleeves has given way to the coat and tie of an elder statesman. The ‘father of modern-day Bible prophecy,’ as the blurb on one of Hal Lindsey’s most recent books anoints him, is now 70 years old. For almost 30 years Lindsey has held his position as the guru of popular premillennial dispensationalism.

This article will compare the apocalyptic themes of Hal Lindsey’s 1970 best-seller, The Late Great Planet Earth (hereafter LGPE) with his recent 1997 work, Apocalypse Code (hereafter AC). The purpose of the comparison is to demonstrate the resiliency and adaptability of apocalypticism in face of changing cultural situations. The article will also demonstrate ways in which Lindsey intertwines culture and theology to produce an eschatological system that, ostensibly, is rigid and inflexible, but in fact turns out to be capable of almost endless mutations.
The Younger Mrs Ward
Authors: Bergonzi Bernard
Published: July 2007

One hundred years ago two Mrs Wards, not related to each other, were writing novels in England. Mrs Humphry Ward had achieved instant fame in 1888 with Robert Elsmere. This story of an earnest clergyman who loses faith in organized religion keyed into Victorian anxieties and controversies about faith and doubt. Its author, born Mary Augusta Arnold, was a granddaughter of Dr Arnold of Rugby and a niece of Matthew Arnold; she was a woman of high intellectual and scholarly attainments, a devout agnostic but keenly interested in religion. Ten years later she turned her attention to Catholicism, in Helbeck of Bannisdale, a character study of a Catholic squire in the Lake District. Mary Ward had good personal reasons for being interested in Catholicism. Her father, Thomas Arnold Junior, was one of the ‘wanderers’ who flit through Victorian religious history. He became a Catholic under Newman’s influence when he was in his thirties, but reverted to Anglicanism some years later. After several more years he returned to the Catholic Church, just in time to stop him from being elected Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, which was still dominated by the Anglican establishment. Arnold then remained a Catholic until his death in 1900. In his later years he was Professor of English at University College, Dublin, where he was a friend and colleague of the Professor of Greek, Fr G.M.Hopkins SJ. Arnold’s changes of direction were intensely painful to his non-Catholic family. Mary Ward felt the pain, but she loved her father and tried to understand his beliefs.
‘Fides et Ratio’, articles 64–79
Authors: Webster John
Published: July 2007

Two things ought to be said at the outset. The first is that it is an event of some significance far beyond the confines of Catholicism that the Bishop of Rome should address his fellow bishops on matters of the relationship of theology and philosophy. Whatever else we may say about the document before us, it emerges from a style of church leadership which refuses to absolve itself from the task of addressing questions of the intellectual articulation of the faith. Thereby it (quite properly) asks us some hard questions about those modem conventions whereby serious intellectual work is thought to be properly located only in the open fields of free enquiry (that is, in the institution of the university) and not in the cramped domestic culture of the church. I wonder if what has made some academics cross about Fides et Ratio is that the document refuses to stay behind the sanitary cordon with which institutions of higher learning sometimes surround themselves in order to protect their interests.

That is the first thing to be said. The second is this: it’s a pity that an episcopal judgment on these issues doesn’t do a better job of staking its claims. Partly it’s a matter of style: at times the document adopts the threateningly paternalistic tone of communications from the Kremlin in the 1940s and 1950s, urging Socialist realism in art or music: not the sort of thing to provoke thinkers to do their best work, so much as a summons to produce the goods to an officially-approved set formula.
Christian Ministry and Christian People
Authors: Watson Natalie K.
Published: July 2007

The title of this article could be considered misleading in many ways. It does not at first sight disclose what I am actually writing about, i.e. marriage and ordination as sacraments. It also makes one wonder whether the two parts of the title connected with the conjunction ‘and’ actually present an alternative: i.e. does Christian ministry refer to those in specific or ordained ministry while marriage refers to those who are not in Christian ministry? Or have they got more in common than one would expect? Maybe this article ought to be more aptly named: ‘sacraments of commitment and commission’ as that briefly describes what marriage and ordination are about. Yet there are other common aspects which shed an interesting light on the topic. Both are rites which put one way of life, one form of commitment over many others. The idea of sacramental marriage makes one wonder why in an age of pluralism and plurality the church decides to bless one form of relationship, but not many possible others. The publication of John Boswell’s contentious book The Marriage of Likeness as well as the contemporary debates about blessings of same-sex relationships are signs of this phenomenon as is the question of single people whether their form of life is less valid than that of married couples. The debate over the distinction between clergy and laity makes one wonder whether the church does not support a system of privilege and expertise which devalues the work of those who do not participate in this form of privilege.
Three Ways to Love an Animal
Authors: Atkins Margaret
Published: July 2007

Animals are in the news these days. As so often, the world of the image and the soundbite encourages muddle, and we need to take a step back if we are to sort and integrate our conflicting ideas and emotions Let me begin with a popular caricature of the animal-lover: he, or more probably she, keeps a garden full of goats and chickens; she takes a break at weekends to liberate the odd rat from its laboratory; and she spends the little spare time she has left in campaigning to save the rainforests. The caricature, however, soon begins to reveal its contradictions when we are faced with a concrete problem. Take, for example, the release of mink into the countryside by members of the Animal Liberation Front In this case, the people most affected, and most angered, by this action were those directly involved in the welfare of animals: farmers, conservationists and pet-owners. The problem with the ‘liberation’ of mink is, precisely, that it is bad for other animals; and it clearly reveals that concern for the welfare of animals is a complex business. Our lack of clarity about this complexity is the main reason why debate about issues such as fox-hunting has proved so confused and inconclusive.

In this article I shall describe three types of animal-lover, whom I shall nickname, for reasons that will become obvious, Libbie, Connie and Aggie. In exploring how, in their different ways, these three care for animals, I examine different possible ways of understanding the Christian claim that creatures are good.
The Spirituality of Piers Plowman: A New Look
Authors: Davlin Mary Clemente
Published: July 2007

In memory of Conrad Pepler OP (1908-1993)

Sixty years ago, Conrad Pepler wrote “The Spirituality of William Langland,” a short study of the fourteenth-century poem, Piers Plowman (Blackfriars 20 (1939): 846-854). This book-length medieval religious poem, by a Londoner usually called William Langland, narrates the life story of a commoner, Will, in a series of ten dream-visions which give him insight into life, the community, evil and sin, and the search for God. In this poem, Father Pepler found “a truly English and liturgical type of spirituality that must have been characteristic of the devout members of the Church, both ecclesiastical and lay” ("Spirituality” 846). In his Blackfriars essay and in a chapter of his 1958 book, The English Religious Heritage, Father Pepler saw Piers Plowman as “delineating the beginning and growth of the spiritual life in the common man” {ERH 56). He defined the spirituality of Piers Plowman as “objective,” reflecting “the restrained, austere and majestic treatment of the liturgy” in sharp contrast to the subjective, “realistic and emotional devotion to the humanity of Christ, so typical of fourteenth century piety” ("Spirituality” 853). He noted the centrality in the poem of the idea of relationship: “from the very fact of the Incarnation all mankind has become related to God in common brotherhood, even those outside the Church” (ERH 56; cf. “Spirituality” 850).

Father Pepler's article was written at a time of great scholarly interest in Piers Plowman as a religious work. It was preceded by the work of such giants as R. W. Chambers (1924, 1939) who compared Piers to the Divine Comedy.
“Mother” and “Father” as Theolinguistic Antonyms
Authors: Hook Donald D.
Published: July 2007

Feminist religious-language reformers wish to eliminate or make substitutions for such masculine-loaded words as “lord,” “king,” “master,” and “father.” One substitute word, “mother,” is of particular interest because it is sometimes used to replace “father,” and sometimes it serves as a counterweight to “father.” The appropriateness of these terms as encountered in Christian liturgical prayers, Scripture, the Creeds, and the Trinitarian formula “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” is often discussed nowadays. My first contention is that mother/father stand in linguistic opposition to each other, preventing interchangeable or parallel use. My second contention is that the Trinity represents an hypemymy blocking the use of feminine hyponyms.

The terms opposition, contrast, and antonymy are sometimes used without careful distinction, for they all illustrate at bottom a linguistic and philosophical fact: to establish the meaning of any word it is necessary to set up oppositional considerations. This hardly profound observation is matched by other, similar assertions by any number of structural semanticists. Trier even goes so far as to attach some psychological association of opposites in the mind of speaker or hearer upon each utterance (Der deutsche Wortschatz im Sinnbezirk des Verstandes, J. Trier, Heidelberg: Winter, 1931) even though perhaps most linguists would consider psychology to be more a part of a theory of language behaviour than structural analysis.

Everywhere we look in the universe we see opposites: forces of attraction and repulsion, left and right crystals, concave and convex, rest and movement—the list is very long. In his important little book, Opposition, C. K. Ogden reminds us that Aristotle, in his Metaphysics, discusses the oppositions of unity and multiplicity and being and not-being, and that other philosophers make reference to hot and cold, odd and even, good and evil, and so forth.
‘Magic against Magic’: an atheist priest's use of Christ in Iris Murdoch's The Book and the Brotherhood
Authors: Hardy Robert
Published: July 2007

In Henry and Cato Iris Murdoch describes what it might be like for a priest to lose his belief in God - God understood ‘in the traditional sense of that term; and the traditional sense is perhaps the only sense’. In two later novels Murdoch returns to the theme of a priest’s loss of belief in God and, as was the case in Henry and Cato, she makes the priest’s acknowledgement of that loss central to her portrayal of his integrity as a man; in one case she also hints at the almost unbearable grief the priest suffers as he drifts into the darkness of atheism. In The Book and the Brotherhood, however, Murdoch takes a different path: she describes how a priest, who lost his faith in God ‘in the traditional sense’ long before, nonetheless uses ‘Christ’ to help a young woman recover from despair.

The young woman, Tamar Hemshaw, takes the advice of another character (who suggests that ‘Abortion is nothing, it’s a method of birth control’) to have her pregnancy terminated. Resolving not to ‘think about babies thrown away with the surgical refuse, dying like fishes snatched out of their water, dying like little fishes on a white slab’, Tamar enters the clinic ‘as one in a dream’ and leaves it ‘all raw anguished tormented consciousness’. Murdoch does not spare the details of Tamar’s self-torture:

She saw now, now, when it was so dreadfully absolutely just too late, that she had committed a terrible crime ... against herself, against the helpless fully-formed entirely-present human being whom she had wantonly destroyed. She had condemned herself to a lifetime of bitter remorse and lying.
Anti‐Foundationalism and Radical Orthodoxy
Authors: O'Grady Paul
Published: July 2007

It has often been claimed in the history of philosophy that great thinkers have been badly served by their disciples. Plato’s genuine doctrines don’t resemble the historical construction known as “Platonism”, Aquinas is a more subtle and rigorous thinker than the Thomists, Hume more interesting than the positivists and so on. This claim is cuirendy deployed for certain thinkers who collectively bear the signifier “Postmodern”. It’s held that Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze et al., are more subtle, deep and dialectically agile than their disciples. In particular, those who regard these thinkers as philosophers maintain that the use to which they are put in other disciplines—literary theory, cultural studies, sociology, and so on, fails to convey the depth of the echt thinker.

Be that as it may, it is true that philosophical ideas percolate into other disciplines and have profound general cultural impact, and this is especially true of the so-called postmodern ideas. Theologians in particular have responded with a certain degree of alacrity to the postmodern clarion (probably because modernism proved barren ground for most of them). The kind of views articulated in theology serve also as a model of the way postmodernist views have been used in general in the humanities and social sciences. It’s not unusual for theologians to latch onto the latest philosophical fashion and use it with skill and ingenuity. The medieval theologians of Paris reacted to Aristotle and developed some of the most enduring intellectual works of the western tradition. The Cartesian revolution led to sustained theological reflection—a position still appearing as a bogey for novice theologians to sharpen their dialectical teeth on, or for more senior ones to dramatically unmask in their opponents.
Simone Weil: Patron Saint of Outsiders
Authors: Calvert Timothy John
Published: July 2007

I owe you the truth, at the risk of shocking you, and it gives me the greatest pain to shock you. I love Christ, and the Catholic faith as much as it is possible for so miserably inadequate a creature to love them. I love the saints through their writings and what is told of their lives— apart from some whom it is impossible for me to love fully or to consider as saints. I love the six or seven Catholics of genuine spirituality whom chance has led me to meet in the course of my life. I love the Catholic liturgy, hymns, architecture, rites and ceremonies. But I have not the slightest love for the Church in the strict sense of the word, apart from its relation to all these things that I do love.. .All that I can say is that if such a love constitutes a condition of my spiritual progress which I am unaware of, or if it is part of my vocation, I desire that it may some day be granted to me.

Simone Weil (1909-1943) spent the last six years of her life considering whether it was God’s will that she be baptised into the Church. In her many discussions with priests, she sought to translate her mystical experiences of Christ, who had come down to take possession of her, into an acceptance of the Church as Christ’s Body on earth. It is widely believed that she died without the sacrament of baptism, the Church being an obstacle to her faith in Christ, and not a refuge for that faith.
Good News: The Story Teller as Evangelist
Authors: Woods Richard
Published: July 2007

In recent years, I have come to think that at the risk of stretching hermeneutical principle, the opening line of the Gospel of John could be rendered, “In the beginning was the Story.”

In his superb little book on parables, John Dominic Crossan said in Ins good Irish fashion, “we live in story like fish in the sea.” Story-telling is the art of making sense out of life, and because of that, out of grace, God, and revelation. Story does not simply support us cn a sea of chaos, it teaches us how to survive and flourish. When we want to know who we are and where we’re going, whether as individuals or as a people, we tell stories. Personal stories, family stories, corporate myths and legends, the great stories—all of them help us establish identity and build a world. The story-teller is one of the most beloved members of society and, I think, one of the most important. I want to explore the role of the Story-Teller as Evangelist, that is, as Preacher, and the Preacher as Story-Teller.

What I hope to do, provisionally and inadequately, is to explore the dimensions of story and story-telling as a way of proclaiming not merely good news, but the good news, the relevance of story to preaching the Gospel. First I intend to look at imagination, dreaming, and memory as the faculty or spiritual power which personally grounds our story-telling. Then, I will look briefly at myths, parables and memoir as examples of stories, ending with a brief glance at some evangelical story-tellers.
Fides et Ratio: A Response to John Webster
Authors: Weinandy Thomas
Published: July 2007

Professor John Webster is not only a colleague and friend he is also someone with whom I have a good deal of theological affinity. Moreover, and more importantly, while he is an Anglican and I a Roman Catholic, we, on fundamental Christian doctrine, share a common faith. Because of this I read with special interest his article “‘Fides et Ratio”, articles 64-79’ (New Blackfriars, Vol. 81 No. 948 (2000) 66-76). I knew that he might be critical of the encyclical at certain points, as would be expected from any serious thinking theologian examining a particular piece of work. What I did not expect was his almost complete lack of sympathy towards the encyclical’s aim, his almost thorough disagreement with its approach, arguments, and judgements, as well as at times, his dismissive attitude toward the encyclical, which on occasion, so it appeared to me, to border on the mocking. In response to Professor Webster I want to address some of the issues that he raised in an attempt to show that his reading of the encyclical is not the proper reading, and in so doing hopefully demonstrate that the encyclical is not as misconceived and flawed as he thinks.

The Philosophical and Theological ‘Rumpus Room’

Webster begins by noting the Pope’s leadership in addressing such an important issue as the relationship between faith and reason and in so doing intruding himself into what some academics might consider their privileged and private domain. However, Webster faults the tone of the document.
The Meritorious Human Life of Jesus: Renaissance Humanist Tendencies in the Thomism of Cardinal Cajetan
Authors: O'Connor Michael
Published: July 2007

The Dominican theologian and cardinal, Tommaso de Vio (1469-1534), known as Cajetan after Gaeta, his birthplace, is best remembered for two things. Firstly, he is the expositor of Aquinas, whose monumental commentary on the Summa is included in the Leonine edition of Aquinas’ works. As a consequence of this canonisation, Cajetan’s commentary is either treasured or vilified, to the extent that it is judged to represent Aquinas accurately or not; meanwhile, more subtle developments, not to mention overt disagreements, tend to be overlooked. Secondly, and more widely. Cajetan is remembered as the Roman prelate who met with Martin Luther for three days in October 1518. At those meetings, characterised typically as a dialogue of the deaf, Cajetan sought to persuade Luther to withdraw a number of unorthodox theological opinions. Several years later, Cajetan was involved, albeit peripherally, with the Roman commission that drew up the formal condemnation of Luther’s teaching.

It is commonly and plausibly assumed that the rest of Cajetan’s work is to be understood in the light of his involvement with Luther, especially his commentaries on biblical texts, which he worked on from 1524 until his death in 1534. The conventional view of the biblical commentaries (found in various forms in Iserloh, Weisheipl, Parker, Janz and others), runs roughly as follows: the Reformers had appealed to scripture alone, and on the basis of scripture were challenging the papacy and Roman traditions; Cajetan, therefore, set out in his biblical commentaries to meet his adversaries on their chosen territory, and to demonstrate, with scholastic patience and rigour, that the Roman use of scripture was sound, that the Bible belonged to the Catholic Church.
A Lost Leader? The Course of a Literary Friendship
Authors: Bergonzi Bernard
Published: July 2007

In the opening chapter of David Lodge’s How Far Can You Go?, set in 1952, two Catholic students at London University are comparing the merits of Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh:

Michael’s favourite novel at the moment is The Heart of the Matter, and Polly’s, Brideshead Revisited. ‘But Greene’s awfully sordid, don’t you think?’ says Polly.

‘But Waugh’s so snobbish.’

‘Anyway, it said in the Observer that they’re the two best English novelists going, so that’s one in the eye for the Prods.’

In the assertive English Catholic culture of the time the achievements of Catholic novelists, like those of Catholic sportsmen or soldiers, could be flaunted as marks of the superiority of the Faith. Waugh was happy to appear before the world as a Catholic writer, but Greene disliked the term and preferred to regard himself as a writer who happened to be a Catholic.
The Recovery of Metaphysics
Authors: Selman Francis J.
Published: July 2007

One of the most notable features of Faith and Reason is its plea for metaphysics. The twentieth century saw interest in metaphysics recede to a low ebb. There were signs, however, that the tide had already begun to turn before Pope John Paul made his plea. Calls for metaphysics sometimes came from unexpected quarters. At the end of 1996, Clifford Longley wrote in The Tablet:

Unless it is grounded in reality, one must doubt whether a sense of the sacred can be much more than a kind of aesthetic sensitivity, an accoutrement of a man or a woman of exemplary taste. And one must doubt whether it can be grounded in reality without something like metaphysics to give it firm anchors.
Fides et Ratio and the Twentieth Century Thomistic Revival
Authors: Knasas John F. X.
Published: July 2007

I want to speak about the place of Fides et Ratio within the parameters of the twentieth century Thomistic revival. To do that I must first describe the revival Three strains of Thomistic interpretation characterized the revival before Vatican II: Aristotelian Thomism, Existential Thomism and Transcendental Thomism. The first two were a posteriori in their epistemology. The mind abstractly draws its fundamental conceptual content from the human knower’s contact with the self-manifestly real things given in sensation. Among the concepts abstracted are the transcendentals, chief among which is the ratio ends, the notion or concept of being. It is an analogical commonality, and so a sameness within difference, whose analogates are absolutely everything, actual and conceivable.
Theodor Haecker: In the Footsteps of John Henry Newman
Authors: Biemer Günter
Published: July 2007

There was nearly a contradictory impression between the intensive influence Haecker exercised with his writings and the atmosphere he created as a person. And even after half a century it is not easy to approach him as a historical personality. He left little about his personal life in the sense of autobiographical notes. Richard Seewald, a painter and friend of his for several decades who has left us two portraits of Haecker, describes him in a farewell article: “He was one of the most quiet and most taciturn men I knew.” Most people who met him may have had “great respect for his uprightness and a little fear to be pierced through by his clear blue eyes radiating with an unusual power ... They seemed to ask all the time: Do you quite seriously mean what you are saying? Does your life correspond to your words?” On the other hand Sophie Scholl, one of the “White Rose” martyrs, told her friend about the “impressive hours” she spent with Haecker in the afternoon of February 4th 1943, when he read for a circle of friends from his theodicy Schopfer und Schopfung (Creator and Creation): “His words fall slowly like drops which you can see gathering in advance and which fall under this expectation with a very special weight. He has a very quiet face, a look as though he would look toward the inside. Nobody ever convinced me with his countenance as he did.”
God, Theology and Music
Authors: MacMillan James
Published: July 2007

There has been a resurgence of interest in a particular kind of contemporary music in recent years. This has been a surprise to many, especially the composers involved, because we live at the end of a century that has seen a retreat by the composing community from the larger music loving public. If one looks back to the early days of the century we see figures like Schonberg, establishing private societies for the performance of Contemporary music. A perception is beginning to emerge within the composing community that the priorities of composeIs have in some way separated from the priorities of the larger music-loving public. At the very time when a museum culture was beginning to be the main priority of classical music listeners, composers were going into a very exploratory mode. In the century of the holocaust and the loss of meaning generally, composers have gone into a kind of laboratory phase when the very nature of music was the stuff of their investigations. Composers like Boulez, Stockhausen, Berio and the young Turks of the post-war generation took music into a very abstract phase indeed by making explorations into the purely abstract nature of music but with an ideological and idealistic desire to turn their backs on the past. They wanted to start afresh from year zero, as it were, to write a music that was untainted by tradition, a music that would not have any resonance of a failed bourgeois culture.