bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Galileo and the Inquisition
Authors: Carroll William E.
Published: July 2007

On the occasion of the publication, in March 1987, of the Catholic Church’s condemnation of in vitro fertilisation, surrogate motherhood, and foetal experimentation, there appeared a cartoon in a Roman newspaper, in which two bishops are standing next to a telescope. In the distant night sky, in addition to Saturn and the Moon, there are dozens of test-tubes. One bishop turns to the other, who is in front of the telescope, and asks: ‘This time what should we do? Should we look or not?’ Many see the Galileo affair as a prime example of the fundamental incompatibility between science and religion, between reason and faith. Stephen Hawking, in his recent best-seller, A Brief History of Time, writes a two-page biographical appendix on Galileo which offers ample evidence for the persistence of the view that the accomplishments of Galileo must be understood in the face of the opposition of Aristotelian science and Catholic theology. Galileo, Hawking claims, ‘was one of the first to argue that man could hope to understand how the world works, and, moreover, that we could do this by observing the real world.’ Hawking, in commenting on his participation at a conference on cosmology sponsored by the Vatican at which he challenged traditional interpretations of Big Bang cosmology, evoked the image of himself as a potential Galileo:

The Catholic Church had made a bad mistake with Galileo when it tried to lay down a law on a question of science, declaring that the sun went around the earth. Now, centuries later, it had decided to advise it on cosmology.
Magna est Veritas et praevalebit
Authors: White Allan
Published: July 2007

‘Jeszcze Polska Nie Zginela’ (‘Poland is not Dead!’). It was with these words that V&clav Havel, Czechoslovakia’s new President, closed his address to the Polish Sejm and Senate on 21 January, 1990. He was quoting from the Polish National Anthem, the Mazurek of General Jan Henryk Dabrowski, who in 1797 assembled a Polish legion to fight with the French revolutionary armies. The quotation would have been familiar to every Pole:

And from the trumpets to the heavens sped That march of triumph: ‘Poland is not yet dead!’

The verse itself is incorporated in a large epic poem, Pan Tadeusz written by the Polish national poet Adam Mickiewicz in 1834 as he languished in exile after the failure of the Polish revolution against the Russians four years earlier.

Adam Mickiewicz (1798—1855) belonged to a group of poets which included Julius Słbvacki (1809—49) and Zygmunt Krasiński (1812—59) collectively known as the Polish Messianists. A theme common to all of them was an emphasis on the manifest and representative destiny of the Polish people. In their struggle for independence and national integrity the Poles were not only fighting for the fulfilment of a purely political design but for the realisation of a humanitarian and cosmopolitan dream with a strong vein of spirituality. Many of the images they used were drawn from the Christian symbolic repertoire with, not unnaturally, a particular emphasis on the significance of the resurrection of Christ. This messianic theme was quietly alluded to by Havel in his January address in Warsaw.
God, Time and Helm
Authors: Davies Brian
Published: July 2007

In much modem thinking, God is eternal only in the sense that he has no beginning or end. I reject that view. But I also reject what is sometimes taken to be the only genuine alternative to it—the suggestion that God is timeless, where ‘timeless’ includes ‘having no temporal location’ (i.e. existing at no moment of time) and ‘lacking duration’. I think we should speak of God existing at moments of time and having duration. In what follows I shall try to indicate why by focusing on one of the most recent statements to the contrary—Paul Helm’s new book Eternal God.

On Helm’s account, to call God ‘eternal’ is to say that ‘There is for him no past and no future. It makes no sense to ask how long God has existed, or to divide up his life into periods of time. He possesses the whole of his life at once; it is not lived successively’ (p. 24). God’s timeless eternity, says Helm, is to ‘be explained in terms of time-freeness, where the only questions of simultaneity and non-simultaneity are quoad nos, and from which both the notions of duration and instantaneousness are banished’ (p. 36).

Some have urged that the equation of eternity with timelessness leads to insoluble problems for the theist. According to Anthony Kenny, for instance, it means that God is simultaneous with distinct temporal events, which are therefore simultaneous with each other. Such is also the opinion of Richard Swinburne.
Preaching on Purgatory
Authors: Mills John Orme
Published: July 2007

‘Then Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said, “Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit!” And having said this he breathed his last.’

According to St Luke, the Lord dies fully conscious, quoting this line from the 31st psalm: ‘Into thy hands I commit my spirit!’ And, later on, in St Luke’s second book, the Acts of the Apostles, we hear St Stephen, the first Christian martyr, saying as he is dying: ‘Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.’ And in the 1st epistle of Peter Christians suffering severe hardship are told to ‘entrust their souls to a faithful Creator’.

Trusting ourselves to God, letting go, putting ourselves in the hands of God. Down through the ages numerous holy men and women have urged us to do this, but it is not quite as easy as it sounds. There are all sorts of obstacles—our sins, hang-ups deep down inside us—that stop nearly all of us, right until the end, right until death, from letting go completely.
The Church, Homosexuality and AIDS
Authors: Moore Gareth
Published: July 2007

There are a number of ways in which HIV, the virus responsible for AIDS, is transmitted, but still by far the most important worldwide and in particular in the West is sexual transmission. In America and Europe a major and growing route of infection is needle-sharing among drug abusers, but in the past, and still now, it has spread mainly, though far from exclusively, through homosexual contact between men. It is this sexual aspect of AIDS, and its connection with homosexuality, that has made it so controversial, and which has made it so problematic for the Church to find a proper response to it. So it is on AIDS, sex and the Church that I shall focus.

What is the proper attitude of the Church to AIDS? One thing to be said first of all is that the Church’s ministry is one of word and deed. As a body we seek both to proclaim the Gospel and to bring ordinary human comfort to those in need, whoever they may be. We not only preach, teach and defend a message; we also tend the sick, feed the hungry, visit those in prison, and so on. We lay before people the possibility of a fuller life and help them to share in the life that we ourselves have received. The two belong together; ours is a practical Gospel. We cannot, as Church, preach the commandments of Christ without being committed to obey them; we cannot preach his love for us and for all without letting that love reach others through us.
AIDS and Truth
Authors: Malherbe Jean‐François , Zorrilla Sergio
Published: July 2007

We see the AIDS epidemic first and foremost as exposing a crisis which goes beyond it and which emphasises how urgent and exacting is the challenge facing us all: the challenge to become, both personally and collectively, the subject—or subjects—of our own history.

In approaching this subject, clarification of the obscure relations between AIDS and the question of truth plays an indispensable part. That is why we desire to return to it by tackling it from the angle of the patient/practitioner relationship. This offers us the advantage of a concrete approach to the question of truth and AIDS without exempting us from facing the question at the deeper level of an analysis of our desire to control everything. Also it enables us to stress the close bonds which link this question of truth with that of deficiency.

The patient-practitioner relationship is a particular instance of human relationship in general. It also can be subjected to the same fundamental ethical analysis. As we have shown elsewhere, no true human relationship is possible if those involved do not fulfil the following three conditions: to be present to one another, to accept their differences in fact, and, above all, to cultivate their moral equivalence. But their moral equivalence would be denied by one lying about the other. Why, in fact, pretend to recognise another person as morally your equal if, by hiding the truth from that person, you seal him or her up in a lie?
Guardian Angels and Carrotburgers: Two Views of the Role of the Magisterium
Authors: Parvis Paul
Published: July 2007

John Henry Cardinal Newman died on 11 August, 1890. In the summer of the centenary of his death the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued an Instruction on the Ecclesial Vocation of the Theologian. It is a topic by which Newman was much exercised. In this article I would like to look at the Instruction in the light of two ideas adumbrated by Newman, each of which involves a distinction between positive and negative models of the role of the Magisterium.

The Vatican Council of 1870 was a major landslip in the history of Catholic theology, and for much of the following decade Newman was riding the after-shocks generated by its definition of papal infallibility. His central concern was to assimilate what he understood to be the true teaching of the decree Pastor Aeternus into a structure which would still allow scope for theological responsibility. In November 1874 an intemperate pamphlet by William Gladstone gave Newman an opening for a formal and public statement of his reaction to the definition. A Letter Addressed to His Grace the Duke of Norfolk on Occasion of Mr. Gladstone’s Recent Expostulation was dated 27 December 1874 and was published in January 1875. In the Letter Newman was of course particularly concerned with infallibility, ecclesial and papal, rather than with magisterial teaching in general, but his reflections are of wider application.

Newman observes that authoritative statements may be either positive or negative:

The infallibility, whether of the Church or of the Pope, acts principally or solely in two channels, in direct statements of truth, and in the condemnation of error.
Subsistit in
Authors: McAndrew Fred
Published: July 2007

Last January the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Robert Runcie was giving one of the addresses in the service being held at Westminster Cathedral to mark the 25th anniversary of Vatican IPs decree on ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio. Referring to the ecumenical implications of the use of the words subsistit in, he said: ‘After Vatican II the Church “subsisted” in the Roman Catholic Church, a small linguistic change, but a world apart in self-understanding.’ He was echoing the thoughts of Fr Grillmeier, the distinguished Jesuit theologian: these two words ‘constituted a development of unforseeable dimensions’.

Sadly, it appears that there are those in Rome engaged in preparing the Universal Catechism of the Catholic Church who would wish to change the words of the Council fathers. To understand properly what is going on we must go back over some familiar old ground.

Lumen Gentium, the Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, states that the visible Church, structured hierarchically, and the invisible Church, the Body of Christ, are not to be thought of as two realities, but as one complex reality having a human and a divine element:

Haec Ecclesia, in hoc mundo ut societas constituta et ordinata, subsistit in Ecclesia catholica, a successore Petri et Episcopis in eius communione gubernata, licet extra eius compaginem elementa plura sanctificationis et veritatis inveniantur, quae ut dona Ecclesiae Christi propria, ad unitatem catholicam impellunt.
Of two kinds of deep belief
Authors: Kameda Masanori
Published: July 2007

Mahayana Buddhism is called the religion of grace. In other words, the very core of its teaching is dependent on the compassionate work of Amida Buddha, the Saviour of all sentient beings. In this article I, who am today a Christian, would like to show how, through the Jodo Shin- shu teaching which was established by Shinran (1173—1262), and which very fully embodies the essence of Mahayana Buddhism’s teachings, I came to understand the doctrine of ‘Nishu Jinshin’ (‘Two kinds of deep belief’), and why this doctrine has been so important in my religious development.

To do this I must first write about the beginnings of my knowledge of Christianity. When, for the first time, I heard the name of Jesus Christ, from my elementary school teacher, Miss Yamano, I was just six years old. One day, in her class, we were talking about the greatest people in the world, and she told us the stories of Buddha, Hideyo Noguchi and Jesus Christ, among others. I still clearly remember what she told us about Jesus Christ: ‘Jesus Christ is the man crucified on the cross for all people’s sake.’ I remember it because I was deeply impressed by this, and wished to meet this man. However, since I was a small boy, I did not know anything at all about an institutionalised Christianity. Nevertheless, from that time onwards, Jesus Christ became a great man for whom I longed. He was also the first person to teach me the value of self-sacrifice for the sake of others, something the consciousness of which grew steadily stronger in me under the influence not only of people whom I met but also people whom I knew through their writings.
Why were Eckhart's propositions condemned?
Authors: Davies Oliver
Published: July 2007

The promulgation of the Bull In agro dominico in March 1329, which condemned twenty-eight propositions taken from the work of Meister Eckhart, is an event which has attracted the attention of many scholars in recent years. This interest is the result not only of the ‘rehabilitation’ of Eckhart by the theological fraternity (the greater part of which is now convinced of his fundamental orthodoxy) but also of the extraordinary character of the condemnation itself. In the present article I do not intend to repeat the work of Bernard McGinn, Edmund Colledge and others, who have shown the extent to which Eckhart was misunderstood by the commission which examined his work, but rather to enquire why it was that such misgivings were ultimately translated into a formal condemnation of Eckhart’s work by the Holy See itself.

In agro dominico stands out from other such condemnatory Bulls in a number of ways. Firstly, it was the first and only occasion when the full machinery of the Inquisition was used against a member of the Dominican Order, and it was similarly the first and only time in which a theologian of the first rank was charged with the inquisitio haereticae pravitatis: the most serious accusation which the Inquisition had at its disposal and the one which carried the heaviest penalties. Despite its extraordinary character, however, Eckhart’s trial remained fundamentally within the bounds of legality, as Winfried Trusen’s recent study has shown. Trusen also reveals, however, the malevolence of his detractors and their determination to inflict maximum damage upon Eckhart within the strict letter of the law.
Brothers in the Church Today: Probing the Silence
Authors: Lescher Bruce H.
Published: July 2007

The years since Vatican II have hit religious brothers hard. Brothers have been leaving religious life in greater percentages than priests or women religious. The brothers’ present search for identity in this vocational crisis may take years to work itself out. Meanwhile, brothers need to reflect on a phenomenon not affecting women religious or priests: general silence in the Church about their vocation. The question is: what do we make of the silence?

Before exploring the silence, I want to first situate the brother’s vocation in a historical perspective. Brothers are presently caught between two contradictory historical forces. On the one hand, the lay religious life has an ancient, valid, and venerable tradition in the Church; on the other hand, male religious life has become clericalized since the middle ages.

In western monasticism, by the ninth century the vocation of the lay monk suffered gradual diminishment as more and more monks were ordained. The identity of the brother suffered further obfuscation during the Gregorian Reform. A monastic reform accompanied Gregory VII’s battle against the abuses of lay investiture. New communities such as the Camaldolese and Cistercians arose; other monks (e.g. William of Hirsau) attempted to reform Benedictine monasticism without breaking away. During this monastic reform, some orders created a new class of religious: the laybrother (at that time called conversi Laybrothers were not considered monks. Some orders, particularly the Cistercians, established structures of class distinction. Cistercian laybrothers, for example, had no vote in chapter, wore a habit different from that of the monks, were not allowed into the cloister, and could not be taught reading and writing.
Memory, Nostalgia and Repentance
Authors: White Allan
Published: July 2007

A few years ago vehement opposition to the idea of further European cooperation and integration came from an unusual quarter. The Moderator of the Free Church General Assembly used the occasion of his moderatorial address to warn of the dangers to Protestantism posed by the existence of the European Economic Community. He was particularly concerned to warn the church that the Roman Catholic Communion was perhaps more dangerous to the Protestant polity at that time than at any other point in recent European history. In his view the Common Market was nothing more or less than the foreign policy of an imperialist papacy. He pointed out that, at that time, Catholicism was the religion professed, at least nominally, by the majority of inhabitants of the Community, that the founding document was the Treaty of Rome and that large numbers of the Community’s officers were associated with Christian Democratic parties which were closely linked with the Catholic Church.

The speech caused some embarrassment to his co-religionists and was widely reported in the press. Many people immediately assumed it was nothing other than the theocratic ravings of a small and paranoid body and dismissed it out of hand. However, it cannot be denied that many of the founding fathers of the pan-European movement were clearly influenced by Catholic social teaching and motivated by a strong desire to ensure not only the prevention of another European war but also the promotion of reconciliation amongst former enemies. The vocabulary of European integration was often theological in tone and conveyed the resonance of Roman juridical formulae.
Understanding Germany
Authors: Boyle Nicholas
Published: July 2007

The feelings of trepidation and resentment aroused in Britain by the imminent unification of East and West Germany, and too accurately voiced in July by Mr Nicholas Ridley, derived as much from the disturbance of illusions about ourselves as from any rational insight into the affairs of our most powerful and important neighbour. ‘Don’t mention the War’ was a good joke because it precisely identified a British obsession: since 1945 a mythologized version of the Second World War (‘the War’) has stood in as the image of a national identity which neither the twilight of Empire nor our ever shabbier political institutions, let alone our industries or our culture, could provide. Mr Ridley’s outburst expressed the fear that soon we should not be able to tell the joke any more. We may even, in the Europe of tomorrow, be forced to face the truth about those forgotten, untried, unpunished, uninvestigated war- crimes: not just a few wicked old collaborators who escaped to Britain rather than Latin America, but the collusion of an entire supposedly civilised ruling-class in the deliberate and systematic burning, machinegunning, dismembering, and burying alive of hundreds of thousands of women and children in what until a few months ago were regularly and not incorrectly referred to in GDR official publications as ‘the Anglo- American terror-raids’ on German cities. ‘Murder is murder’ are words that we must hope will return to haunt the British popular conscience.

Yet, at the same time as the Ridley affair, the revelations about the Chequers seminar on Germany showed that even at the highest level at which in modern Britain the political and intellectual worlds can interact (and quite evidently not all of the seminar was conducted at that level) the subject of Germany is peculiarly beset by illusions.
Religion after Ceausescu
Authors: Almond Mark
Published: July 2007

Easter, 1990, was the first time that the greatest Christian festival could be openly celebrated in Romania for forty years. The coincidence of the Orthodox and Western calendars gave especial significance to the celebrations of the Easter Vigil in both Patriarchal and Catholic cathedrals in Bucharest and in churches throughout the capital and elsewhere. Romanian television celebrated the feast as it had Christmas, treating viewers to the incongruous sight of the presenters, all familiar faces from the past, surrounded by Easter eggs, intoning throughout the weekend, even before the weather forecast: ‘Hristos invitat’ (Christ is risen).

Although the joy of the crowds of worshippers able to process freely for the first time at midnight was common to all denominations, disputes about the relationship between Church and State under the Communist regime bedevilled the atmosphere. Shortly before Easter, more than forty leading intellectuals issued a petition calling upon the Patriarch Teoctist to abstain from celebrating the Easter liturgy. Teoctist had already abdicated once before in January after fierce criticisms of his compliant behaviour under Ceausescu and most particularly for his public congratulations to the Conducator for his stern measures to repress the ‘hooligans’ in Timiscara before Christmas. Teoctist’s abdication had placed the Orthodox Church in a dilemma, since his natural successor, the Metropolitan Antonius of Sibiu, had distinguished himself still more vigorously than the Patriarch when it came to rendering unto Ceausescu. For instance, Antonius was an indefatigable traveller to the West always ready to deny that the programme of ‘systemization’ had led to the demolition of churches and monasteries, insisting it had affected only ‘redundant’ buildings, of which there were apparently at least twenty-four, including some of the most ancient, in Bucharest—all concentrated in the area designated as the new Civic Centre containing Ceausescu’s Palace of the People.
A Kingdom of Priests?
Authors: McCabe Herbert
Published: July 2007

As the book of Exodus tells it, when the People of God was formed out of liberated slaves from Egypt (a kind of early Liberia), Aaron and his sons were made the first priests of the new community. Like all the peoples around them the Hebrews took it for granted that a real established society needed a priesthood, just as we take it for granted that a society needs some kind of civil service or some kind of school system. Aaron was the first high priest of the children of Israel, he had a job, an important job, within that community. The priest’s job was to arrange the transactions with the gods of the community, to ensure that the gods did not become hostile, for this could be disastrous for the people. The priest had to find out what the gods wanted and arrange for the people to give it to them. So he stood as mediator, on the frontier, looking both ways, to the gods and to the people; communicating to the people the messages of the gods, communicating to the gods the offerings of the people.

But, of course, the Children of Israel were no ordinary society, they were something unique in human history; they made a gradual but huge revolution from which all subsequent humankind has benefited and (as with all revolutions) suffered too. For by the time the Book of Exodus was put together it was becoming clear that their God was not one (or more) of the gods, and this was going to make a difference to what such things as priesthood meant.
The Sources of Moral Disquiet
Authors: Mounce H.O.
Published: July 2007

Disquiet in ethics, or moral philosophy, has its main sources (a) in an irreducibly subjective or personal element contained in moral judgement, (b) in a tension between virtue and happiness, and (c) in the nature of moral disagreement. It will be useful to consider each of these in turn.

(a) It is evident that people worry more often about the objectivity of morals than about the objectivity of fact. A statement about, say, the conditions on a certain planet, even if it cannot be verified, seems to them objective in the issues it raises, because although the human mind is involved in making the statement, it is not involved in what makes it true or false. Thus, what makes it true that there are mountains on the moon would hold even if the human species had never existed. Moreover, the same point applies to factual statements much greater in their complexity. For example, one cannot verify the theory of evolution as one can a simple statement in astronomy; nevertheless, everyone believes that what makes it true or false is independent of human views about it.

The term ‘objective’, no doubt, has many uses; but none is more fundamental than the one discerned above. My view is objectively true, when in holding it I am in contact with reality, when I am forced into believing it by reality itself. So long as I believe that of my view, I shall never be shaken free of it. It is of secondary importance whether I can get others to agree with me or whether I have reasons for my view. For many of my beliefs about the past, for example, I have no evidence at all.
Dominus Illuminatio Mea
Authors: Radcliffe Timothy
Published: July 2007

When I received a letter from The Summoner of Preachers inviting me to preach this Sermon before the University, I felt deeply honoured. But this turned to alarm when I discovered that there was no set text or topic. I was invited to talk about anything I wished. And this disturbed me because, within my tradition at least, what differentiates a sermon from a mere expression of opinion is that it starts from a text, a text that you have not chosen, may not like, and may well not understand.

Anyone who attends the Eucharist will have to listen to some extraordinary texts, which celebrate the squashing of the Amelekites, Moab becoming one’s footstool, the cleansing of houses suffering from leprosy, and the torments of the damned. And after we have listened, we say: ‘Thanks be to God’. The purpose of the sermon is to help us to be thankful, to discover some apparently bizarre or alarming text as a gift. The preacher should be the perfect host who shows us how to welcome the strange text, an exercise in hospitality of the heart and the mind.

But there was no text. And then I spotted a text at the top of the letter, Dominus Illuminatio Mea, ‘The Lord is my light’, the motto of the University. It is a quotation from the beginning of Psalm 27 in the Vulgate, Dominus illuminatio mea et salus mea. Quem timebo? The Lord is my light and my salvation. Whom shall I fear?’
The Transfiguration of Christ: its Eschatological and Christological Dimensions
Authors: Paretsky Albert
Published: July 2007

The Transfiguration of Christ—both the narrative (Matt 17:1—8, par.) and the feast we celebrate on 6 August—has such an importance in the Eastern Church today that we do not always realize that it emerged relatively late in the theological thought of the first centuries of the Church. However, if it took the Church several centuries to realize the central importance of the Transfiguration to Christian life, modern western Christianity seems to have forgotten it. In a world where men are tempted to seek the goal of human destiny in systems worked out by the human mind alone—be these systems philosophical or technological—we are tempted to focus on what can be accomplished here and now and tend to ignore the reality of death, which frustrates the plans of so many individuals. Christians, to say nothing of the world as a whole, must be reminded that, however laudable activity to better the human lot here and now may be, the ultimate goal of the human race is bound up with what God has wrought in Christ Jesus. The interpretation of the Transfiguration, as the Church’s awareness of its importance grew, makes a fascinating chapter in the history of theology. A re-examination of the past role of the Transfiguration in Christian thought may help Western Christians to recapture in our own lives the fascination which this event from the life of Christ once had for the whole Church. God’s revelation at this unnamed mountain is as important for understanding human destiny in Christ today as it was to Peter, James and John.
The Nature of Revelation
Authors: Lamont John
Published: July 2007

I wish to argue against the widespread view that divine revelation does not consist in a set of propositions. I think that I can show conclusively that a non-propositional view of revelation cannot be reconciled with Christianity.

What are propositions? I cannot do better than quote from Natham Salmon and Scott Soames:

... If you utter the words ‘Snow is white’ and a French speaker utters the words ‘La neige est blanche’, there is some sense in which both of you say the same thing despite your having used different words. This thing that both of you said is a proposition: the proposition that snow is white. When uttering or writing a declarative sentence (in a given context) one asserts (or records) a piece of information, which is the semantic information content of the sentence (in the context). Since they are the contents of declarative sentences—and what one asserts in uttering declarative sentences—propositions are the sorts of things that are true or false. But making true or false assertions is not the only thing we do with propositions. We also bear congitive attitudes towards them. Propositions are what we believe, disbelieve, or suspend judgement about. When you fear that you will fail or hope that you will succeed, when you venture a guess or feel certain about something, the object of your attitude is a proposition. That is what propositions are.
‘I gotta use words when I talk to you’: A literary examination of John
Authors: Cook Cornelia
Published: July 2007

‘I gotta use words when I talk to you’ says Sweeney in T.S. Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes. Sweeney is telling the awful parable of the man he knew who ‘did a girl in’ and wasn’t sure which of them was alive and which dead. In the world of Sweeney’s experience ‘That’s what life is. Just is ... Life is death’.

When you’re alone like he was alone/You’re either or neither/I tell you again it don’t apply/Death or life or life or death/Death is life and life is death/I gotta use words when I talk to you/But if you understand or if you dont/That’s nothing to me and nothing to you ...

Words here are strained to accomplish their explanation (how can ‘life’ be ‘death’ when the words signify opposites) and as they stretch they give up multiple significances to unfold un-thought-of meanings. If Sweeney’s friend Doris says (whether of Sweeney’s ‘canibal isle’ where life is ‘birth, and copulation, and death’, or of the proposed ‘crocodile isle’ idyll of ‘Morning/Evening/Noontime/Night’), ‘That’s not life, that’s no life/Why I’d just as soon be dead’, she may not only be expressing a simple equality of preference, but saying that on an isle with no telephones, gramophones, cars or trains, only fruit and flowers and sameness, death will come just as surely and as soon as in the busy world of sights and sounds and doings. When Sweeney picks this up and says ‘That’s what life is. Just is’, he may allude to the quality of life—hurried, mechanised, or slow-dropping hypnotised—as death or to the incontrovertible fact that the end, the fulfilment, of all life is death.
A Century of ‘Pontifical’ Thomism
Authors: McGuckin Terence
Published: July 2007

Theological attention to St Thomas Aquinas, from over one hundred years ago to the present day, has featured in the work of a great number of theologians, many of them outstanding in the formation of twentieth-century theology. There is, however, another important aspect to the revival of interest in Aquinas: the very effective official ecclesiastical promotion of Thomistic philosophy and theology led by the succession of popes from Leo XIII to John Paul II.

A point of entry for these observations is provided by the occasion of the inauguration of the Chair of St Thomas Aquinas at the Lateran University, Rome on 10 March 1963. Archbishop Dino Staffa, as Secretary of the Congregation for Seminaries and Universities, delivered a paper on the ‘Revival of Thomism’. His comments, as indeed much in the early years of the revival of Thomistic studies, had been largely inspired by another inauguration, that of the officially stated fundamental place of St Thomas in Catholic philosophy and theology by the encyclical Aterni Patris of Pope Leo XIII, dated August 4, 1879. The specific interest of the encyclical was the restoration of scholastic philosophy in general and that of St Thomas Aquinas in particular. It emphasized the Church’s concern for teaching ‘true philosophy’ because of its relation to theology. Declaring false philosophy to be the root of ‘many modern evils’ and mentioning the esteem in which St Thomas had been held, the encyclical urged the revival of St Thomas’ philosophy and of the spirit of investigation.
Thinking of That Than Which Nothing Greater can be Thought
Authors: Loughlin Gerard
Published: July 2007

And what is that,this something than which nothing greater can be thought? Why it is God of course.

‘Now we believe that thou art a being than which nothing greater can be thought’ (Anselm). Here is the stuff of philosophy, or at least of a certain sort of philosophy. Here are thoughts and things and relations between them, and God also. Anselm tied them together in such a complicated knot that thinkers have had difficulty untying them ever since. But perhaps Anselm’s knot is like the knot of the conjuror, a sleight of hand, and all one needs to do is to pull the rope taut and the knot will disappear?

Brian Davies (‘Quod Vere Sit Deus. Why Anselm Thought that God Truly Exists’, New Blackfriars,72 (1991), 212—221) has also suggested that Anselm’s knot is often misunderstood, that, for example, Kant untied Descartes’ and not Anselm’s knot. But Davies still thinks Anselm’s knot a good one. When properly understood (tied) it works. Whether Davies has really untied and retied (understood and explained) Anselm’s knot or a similar but different one, just like Gaunilo, Descartes and Kant before him, is not here important. What matters is that Davies has an argument for God’s existence and that he thinks it is a good one.
Accents in Theology
Authors: McDonagh Francis
Published: July 2007

More than in the case of any other school of theology, it is important to assess liberation theology in its social context. Liberation theology not only asserts a necessary correlation between belief and action; its adherents are also normally active in work with poor communities or one of the many church-linked sectoral support organisations. Liberation theology has also acquired wide influence within the magisterium of the Latin American church: the meeting of the General Conference of Latin American bishops (CEL AM) in Medellin (1968) and Puebla (1979) adopted key concepts, and for the past twenty years a liberationist outlook has shaped the thinking of the Brazilian bishops’ conference, the largest on the continent.

The impact of liberation theology in the Latin American church has been profound, though not universal. Where its ideas have been adopted, the church, from being in alliance with the elites and out of touch with the and a new following among the poor, and is treated with a new seriousness by non-Christian radicals. Bishops, who formerly entered the political arena mainly to defend their privileges, now commonly champion the rights of workers, the landless, indigenous peoples and other oppressed groups There has been an explosion of creativity, not only in theology, but in church structure, pastoral practice and liturgy. Liberation theology’s influence has spread beyond Latin America, stimulating similar contextual theologies in other parts of the Third World, and securing recognition of one of its key concepts, the ‘preferential option for the poor’, as an essential element of papal social teaching and a permanent question for Christians in the affluent world.
Why We Enjoy Coincidences
Authors: Roberts Frank
Published: July 2007

Timothy McDermott’s piece in New Blackfriars, March 1991, raised a number of fascinating themes. In this article, inspired by his, I would like to bring together two areas of thought not usually connected: the study of chance and coincidence and the study of the function of the human mind in the construction of its own perceptions. The link between the two will be a consideration of the metaphysical status of literature.

McDermott quotes Jacques Monod on coincidence: ‘The convergence of two totally-independent causal chains of events, the convergence itself being causeless.’ There is nothing unusual about either chain considered in itself. It is in the bringing together of the two chains that the coincidence lies. A coincidence only springs into existence when perceived by an appropriate, a ‘skilled’ observer. For example Leicester’s Moslems were recently excited by the discovery of the word ‘Allah’, in Arabic script, formed by the seeds on the inside of an aubergine. Many were the speculations about what this article portended. Had that aubergine instead been opened in the Leicester of 1931, few would have realised that they were in the presence of wonders.
An Epitaph for the Cold War
Authors: Wicker Brian
Published: July 2007

Just Deterrence by the ‘Pembroke Group’—a ‘distinguished group of civil servants, servicemen, service chaplains, theologians and academics’ to quote the blurb—claims to be about ‘Morality and Deterrence into the Twenty-First Century’. Actually it is about the morality of nuclear deterrence as practised by NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Inevitably, therefore, the book has the character of an epitaph. Of course the corpse of East-West deterrence is still twitching. Nevertheless, old-style deterrence is to all intents and purposes defunct. As Saddam has shown, new-style deterrence is about something very different. Today the question Hugh Beach’s contribution poses is all too relevant: could anything be worse than a war?

Just Deterrence is not a great book, like Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars, or Finnis, Grisez and Boyle’s Morality and Realism. For reasons beyond the editors’ control, it is not a strikingly apt intervention as was Walter Stein’s Nuclear Weapons and Christian Conscience in 1961, but neither is it perniciously muddle-headed, like Michael Novak’s Moral Clarity in the Nuclear Age. Like Ethics and Nuclear Deterrence edited by Geoffrey Goodwin in 1982, (with which it has much in common, including certain authors) it has some very closely argued chapters, and others which are certainly stimulating if, in the end unacceptable; together with yet others which are, to my mind, badly wrong. As an epitaph, it is well worth scrutinising closely as we peer at what is written for our edification on the gravestone of the Cold War.
The Misuse of the High‐minded: The British Government's First Campaign Against CND
Authors: Wittner Lawrence
Published: July 2007

On March 24, 1958, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan sent a remarkable memo to a member of his Cabinet, Dr Charles Hill, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. The memo read:

It is most important that we should fmd some way of organising and directing an effective campaign to counter the current agitation against this country’s possession of nuclear weapons. This is a question on which the natural emotions of ordinary people would lead them to be critical of the Government’s policy, and to accept without question or reason the arguments which our opponents use... .

The question is how to ... exploit the differences between those who oppose our policy.

Mr. (R.A.) Butler has been asked by the B.B.C. to take part in a discussion on this in Panorama in a week’s time, and I have asked him to accept... . Could we not get the I.T.A to take the initiative, but perhaps in a more positive way, by finding suitable people who would speak in support of the U.K.’s possession of nuclear arms? ...

There are no doubt many other ways in which we could press the campaign... . Can we persuade some influential publicists to write articles? Are there any reliable scientists? Or Church of England Bishops? What about Sir John Slessor, or Professor Bullock? Mr. Aiden Crawley would probably help.

Will you please look into this question, in consultation with the Conservative Central Office, and let me have a report as soon as possible.
Time and Telling: How to read biblical stories
Authors: Radcliffe Timothy
Published: July 2007

There is probably no more serious threat to the Church throughout the world than the multiplication of fundamentalist sects. According to Robin Gill, ‘Fundamentalism may be defined tentatively as a system of beliefs and practices which treat scriptural absolutism as the way to counter the pluralism and relativism engendered by modernity.’ In our new ‘age of anxiety’, they offer certainty and security. God has spoken and He has spoken clearly and this is what He has said. A proper analysis of fundamentalism would have to examine its rise in various forms in different faiths, including our own, and its political and social implications. In this article I wish to perform the much more limited task of suggesting how it is that a fundamentalist reading of the text relies upon thoroughly modern presuppositions as to how a text should be read. It is as contemporary as the relativism against which it protests. All narrative assumes a particular perception of space and time, the fundamental framework of any story. If we wish to break the hold of such a literalistic reading of the text we must become sensitive to its conventions of chronology and geography. Upon what clock and map does it rely? In particular I wish to suggest that a fundamentalist reading of scripture relies upon a modern understanding of time.

Let us start with St. John’s account of the death of Christ:

Since it was the day of Preparation, in order to prevent the bodies from remaining on the cross on the sabbath (for that sabbath was a high day), the Jews asked Pilate that their legs might be broken, and that they might be taken away.
Theological Integrity
Authors: Williams Rowan
Published: July 2007

What makes us say of any discourse that it has or that it lacks ‘integrity’? Usually we can answer this in terms of whether such a discourse is really talking about what it says it is talking about. This is not necessarily to make a pronouncement on the integrity or otherwise of this or that speaker, who may or may not know that the discourse serves a purpose other than what it professes. It would be quite in order to say—as a Marxist might—that eighteenth century aesthetics was an integral part of the ideology of bourgeois cultural dominance, that what determined its judgments and strategies was a particular pattern of economic relations, without thereby saying that Johnson or Hawksmoor was a liar, or that Bach did not ‘mean’ it when he wrote ad maiorem Dei gloriam at the head of his compositions. Somebody perpetuating such an aesthetic today, when we know (according to the Marxist) so much about its real determinants, would be dishonest: they could not mean what an eighteenth century speaker meant because they know what that speaker (on the charitable interpretation) did not—the objective direction, the interest in fact served by the discourse. The discourse is without integrity because it conceals its true agenda; knowing that concealment robs us of our innocence, the ‘innocence’ of the original speaker; for we know too that speech cannot be content with concealment.

Why is it so important that speech should not conceal its purposes? Discourse that conceals is discourse that (consciously or not) sets out to foreclose the possibility of a genuine response.
Revelation and Contemplation
Authors: Harvey Nicholas Peter
Published: July 2007

An article under this heading, as part of a series on how God speaks to us, is presumably meant to presuppose that revelation and contemplation are two ways or contexts in which God does so. I want to suggest that the two are inseparable, and that they have much more to do with mundane realities than is commonly thought. To illustrate both points here is an extract from John M. Hull’s account of what it is like to be blind:

This evening, at about nine o’clock, I was getting ready to leave the house. I opened the front door, and rain was falling.

I stood for a few minutes, lost in the beauty of it. Rain has a way of bringing out the contours of everything; it throws a coloured blanket over previously invisible things; instead of an intermittent and thus fragmented world, the steadily falling rain creates continuity of acoustic experience.

This seems to me to be at once a revelatory and a contemplative experience. It is also about something so ordinary that sighted people take it for granted, namely rain. Hull’s account of this moment provides an extraordinarily vivid example of de Caussade’s doctrine of the sacrament of the present moment:

The rain presents the fulness of an entire situation all at once, not merely remembered, not in anticipation, but actually and now. The rain gives a sense of perspective and of the actual relationships of one part of the world to another.

...I feel as if the world, which is veiled until I touch it, has suddenly disclosed itself to me. I feel that the rain is gracious, that it has granted a gift to me, the gift of the world.
Death and the Christian
Authors: Sia Marian F. , Sia Santiago
Published: July 2007

Someone once said that death is a tragedy only when we know nothing about it. If this is true, then just how much do we know of death that to die would not be a tragedy? If we had some idea what it is like to die, would there be less fear in us? Would we be less scared at the prospect of it since it would not be a plunge into the unknown or a leap into the dark?

What is troubling about the moment of death, thereby causing much distress and anxiety, is that we all know that one day each of us will die; yet there is much uncertainty about death. Consequently, the thought of it grips our whole being, leaving us bewildered. Or could it be the parting with loved ones or perhaps leaving behind an unfinished task which makes death a sad and unwelcome moment? John Keat’s poem ‘Terror of Death’ certainly expresses the tragedy of being separated from loved ones or an uncompleted work. Maybe it is the fact that there is no turning back after—to use Alfred Tennyson’s words—one has ‘crossed the bar’ that terrifies. Dylan Thomas’s advice, therefore, is:

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

We are afraid that death may reveal our lives to have been a sham and it has rendered us powerless to change them.