bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Williams, Ward, and the Unity of Theological Language
Authors: Parvis Paul
Published: July 2007

In the February issue of New Blackfriars, Rowan Williams explored the unity of theological discourse. He asked what criteria might be used in setting limits to pluralism—how we can go about deciding what should be allowed to count as a statement of Christian truth. He concluded that we must go beyond the domain of formal theological language and look to the way in which a theology becomes enfleshed: ‘the unity of Christian truth is perceivable to the extent that we can perceive a unity in Christian holiness’.

The limits of Christian truth are perceivable as we engage in the hard work of spelling out the human meanings, the hopes and possibilities, carried in this or that theological utterance ... Does it... continue to offer intelligible roles for the living out of new creation? Does it conserve a hope for shared, unrestricted human renewal/liberation/salvation?

I believe that, in an important though rather complex way, Williams is right, and in this article I would like to explore that complexity and to offer some observations on the understanding of Church which implies and is implied by that insight.

One obvious criticism which could be made of Williams’ position is that it shifts the problem of unity rather than solving it. If ‘the unity of Christian truth’ is to be discerned through ‘a unity of Christian holiness’, this latter unity must be in some way recognizable. And that raises a question.

On this view it is not particularly helpful to say, for example, that what unites Mother Theresa and Simeon Stylites is their shared Christian faith. Rather, it is the other way round. What holds the articulated faith of the fifth and twentieth centuries together is the fact that spending forty years on the top of a column and tending the sick in Calcutta somehow display ‘continuities of Christian patterns of holiness’. I would want to say that in the end it must be so. But how can we know?
The Changing Paradigms of Sin
Authors: Kelly Kevin T.
Published: July 2007

Since my experience is probably typical of many Catholics, it might be a useful exercise to begin this paper by sharing with you my own personal journey through various understandings or paradigms of sin. I believe it has been a journey of healing, because my earlier understanding of sin was very crippling and has probably left me scarred for life.

DISOBEDIENCE is the word which captures my initial paradigm of sin. While this model presumed an internal dimension to disobedience, the external dimension loomed far more important. Psychologically ‘disobedience to authority’ was the dominant notion. This was emphasized by the fact that the gravity of the sin was often determined by the commanding or prohibiting authority. Certain actions were commanded or forbidden under pain of mortal sin. Other actions, admittedly, were regarded as mortal sins because the ‘matter’ was grave in itself. Yet even here the determination of grave matter was sometimes a matter of decision by authority—no light matter in the area of sexual sin, for instance! In my teens I once had to write out 100 times: ‘Tintinabulum vox Dei est’. That says it all! The ‘disobedience’ paradigm, in the form I absorbed it, was individualistic, act-centred and voluntarist. It offered no help in developing a capacity for moral decision-making or conscience-formation.
Holiness and Sin
Authors: Baxter Anthony
Published: July 2007

Do you, when speaking informally in your own words, talk of particular other people as ‘holy’, or say you desire ‘holiness’? Christians today vary widely on this—from omission of the word ‘holiness’, through assorted hesitations, to unselfconsciously terming certain others holy and voicing a wish to be holy themselves. People may often have deep down a lot more inklings regarding holiness than commonly become explicit. But faced here with an invitation to consider how ‘our perceptions’ of holiness relate to ‘our perceptions’ of sin, it is wise to note that initial reactions on the former front as well as the latter can prove less than clear-cut. In my own case, I tend to be fairly reticent in singling out specific individuals as markedly holy, while quick—amidst theologizing—to state that all are called to holiness, and that some growth towards it is widespread.

The central ideas in this article are the possibility for humans of close relationship with God and alignment with God’s purposes; the primacy in this of God’s gracious outreach; yet the place also of human personal responsibility. These ideas lie at the heart of my account of holiness; and they help assessment of statements about holiness as ‘virtue’, or as ‘wholeness’. Notions of sin are correspondingly clarified. And light is thrown—so I think—on some issues evident during reflection on engagement within history, including in political arenas.

From biblical times onwards, ‘holiness’ has been applied to certain collective referents: specially ‘People’ and ‘Church’. ‘Sin’ terminology too has had collective referents, whether defined religiously or by other social concepts. The immediate focus of this paper is on individuals, and ascriptions of holiness or sin to them. But such focus spans not just any particular individual’s private concerns, but also the individual’s stances vis-à-vis broad social affairs and structures.
Rites of Reconciliation
Authors: Harriott John
Published: July 2007

When I set out to prepare this paper I was mildly disconcerted to discover that what I had in mind had already been done, and done brilliantly, by an American nun, Sister Kathleen Hughes R.S.C.J. You will find it in Reconciliation, a collection of lectures given by American theologians at Notre Dame in 1986, and I must express my warm appreciation of its excellence and my debt to its contents for stimulating much that I now wish to say.

Sister Hughes’s argument was that any theological discussion of reconciliation should start from human experience, which she illustrates very broadly from both fiction and real life. It may be worth adding that the point applies not just to this one sacrament but to all. Every sacrament meets something lodged deeply in human instincts and widely expressed in human behaviour. It was not the sacrament that invented marriage. It was not the Eucharist that invented ritual meals celebrating the intimate bond between creator and creature, the gifts of creation, and human ties of affection. And so with the other key human experiences—entrance into life, entrance into adulthood, serious illness and death. The sacraments are not stuck into ordinary life like candles on a cake. They are the God-given, church-moulded, Christian ways of speaking to deep-seated human needs and instincts as familiar as the lines on our hand.
The Gift of Memory
Authors: Radcliffe Timothy
Published: July 2007

Based on a talk given in London at a Pax Christi mdemnce on 3 September 1989 marking the 50th annivematy of the outbreak of World War II.

We are told to remember the Second World War, but how? I was born just a few days after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I have no stories to tell of my own. Maybe that does not matter. Remembering something as awful as the War can only happen later, long after it is over. To remember is not just to sit back and let the facts surface. It is the creative business of putting things together, re-membering, so that we discover for the first time what it was really like. Robert Kee was a RAF bomber who kept detailed diaries of the war, but afterwards they did not turn out to be of much help: ‘For all the quite detailed evidence of these diary entries I can’t add up a very coherent picture of how it really was to be in a bomber squadron in those days. There’s nothing you could really get hold of if you were trying to write a proper historical account of it all... No wonder it is those artists who recreate life rather than try to recapture it who, in one way, prove the good historians in the end.’

It is like the writing of the gospels. It took forty years before the disciples could tell the story of Jesus, and of how they betrayed him and ran away. It took about the same length of time that separates us from the Second World War before the disciples could cope with remembering what had happened, and so write the first gospel. Like them we are just getting to the point where we can begin to remember.
Bastille Day, the Bible, and Mrs Thatcher
Authors: Harvey Graham
Published: July 2007

Last July, while in Paris for this year’s most widely-covered anniversary, Mrs Thatcher pointed out—correctly—that the French Revolution was not the first move towards Human Rights.

Whether this was worth saying (especially during the celebrations of that Revolution) is questionable. Previous moves towards Human Rights had been countered either deliberately or by neglect, so that the French Revolution was perceived to be necessary, and some of the previous moves towards Human Rights cited by Mrs Thatcher had never had any effect in France. This, though, is not the only question, nor even the most important one.

Among steps towards Human Rights, Mrs Thatcher cited the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount. Now, were these in fact reall anything at all to do with Human Rights‘?

Certainly, ‘I am Yahweh your God who brought you out of the Land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage’—suggesting slavery is antithetical to people’s good and God’s desires—makes a good start in this direction. But ‘You shall have no other gods before me’ denies the Right to religious freedom. (I am not arguing that this, or any other of the Ten Commandments, should be abandoned. What I am questioning is whether this has anything to do with Human Rights.)
Render to God What Belongs to God
Authors: Rowland Christopher
Published: July 2007

The forms for my Poll Tax registration are sitting in my kitchen as I procrastinate about how to deal with them. The whole process of registration and the tax to which it is a prelude seem so despicable that I would gladly decide at this point not to fill in the form and begin the process of non-compliance. When Ministers say that this tax is fairer than the present system I feel anger and also a sense of powerlessness. There seems to be little doubt about the injustice of a tax which charges the richest person in a locality the same as the poorest. Yet another part of me recognizes what a fruitless gesture non-compliance would be, seeing that the mechanism exists to sequester my resources: I will have to pay it whether I like it or not. Is there room for manoeuvre in responding to this injustice? How best can I work constructively to remedy this injustice when there seems to be little space for any alternative action?

In situations like this there are two important tasks for me as a Christian. Firstly, I am determined to join with those who feel similar revulsion to this piece of legislation, with its regressive attitude to taxation and alarming implications for civil liberties. Secondly, while I have to renounce my desire for ready-made answers to my problem, whether in Scripture or Tradition, I must attend to what the Spirit is saying to the churches today, but use the necessary discernment to enable my path of discipleship to be in continuity with our ancestors in the faith. What I want to attempt in this article is to put on paper some of the clearing of the Biblical ground that enables me to continue the journey of faith and take into account this new challenge to our contemporary witness.
Towards a Theology of Scottish Liberation
Authors: MacLaren Duncan
Published: July 2007

On Clydeside in Glasgow, beside the early 19th-century Catholic Cathedral, there now stands a substantial modern glass building reminiscent of an oil company HQ or international bank. It is the new Curia for the Archdiocese of Glasgow, a gleaming symbol that the Catholics ‘have arrived’. Inside, the presence of a portrait of the Queen alongside one of the Pope underlines the political message behind the concrete and tinted glass. Catholics in the West of Scotland have come out of their mental and physical ghettoes and now feel secure enough to take to task, in a much more critical manner than hitherto, the establishments which govern Scottish society.

In one sense, it is amazing that the Scottish hierarchy, of all episcopal conferences, should take such a consistently radical stance, though I am sure most bishops would baulk at the phrase. The change was a long time in coming, in part because of the introversion of native Scottish Catholics and in part because the incoming Irish kept their heads below the parapet and concentrated on material improvements for their community. They faced considerable prejudice from a Presbyterian Scotland where the calvinistic version of the Reformation had taken deeper root than anywhere else in Western Europe. 1923 is not that long ago—the time when the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland approved a report on ‘The Menace of the Irish Race to our Scottish Nationality‘.It was little wonder that the Catholic bishops kept stumm on social issues.

Yet lay Catholics, after 1906 and the emergence of the Catholic Socialist Society, gradually took an active part in Labour Party politics, breeding a mafia which is still strong in the City Chambers of Glasgow and other West of Scotland towns.
Aristotle on Excellence of Character
Authors: Urmson J.O.
Published: July 2007

My main object here is to try to clear up some remarkably persistent confusions. What I am discussing is commonly called moral virtue. But since I believe that the translation ‘moral virtue’ frequently leads to misunderstanding of Aristotle’s views I shall use always ‘excellence of character’, which is, no doubt, an imperfect translation of ēthikē aretē, but less misleading than is ‘moral virtue’.

Aristotle distinguished between three broad types of excellence that may be displayed by human beings; these correspond to the three levels of complexity that living things display, the least complex shown by all living things including plants, that shown by all animals and that shown only by human beings. The first is bodily excellence, comprising health, strength, good looks and the like; this is not of direct concern to the student of ethics. Of the other excellences of the soul there are two kinds, those of the irrational or, more properly, non-rational element in the soul and those of the rational element.

Within the rational element of the soul Aristotle distinguished two main types of excellence. These we may call the excellences of intelligence, though they are commonly and absurdly called intellectual virtues. Of these excellences of intelligence one is theoretical; to have this excellence is to be good at such things as metaphysics and mathematics, which it is quaint to call a virtue. Like bodily excellence, theoretical excellence of intelligence lies outside our present scope.
What does it mean to be a Muslim today?
Authors: Hassan Riffat
Published: July 2007

To be a Muslim today—or any day—is to live in accordance with the will and pleasure of Allah. Muslims often say, with joy and pride, that it is easy to be a Muslim since Islam is ‘the straight path’ leading to paradise. What this means, in other words, is that the principles of Islam are simple and straightforward, free of ambiguities, confusions, inconsistencies or mysteries, and that comprehending them or living in accordance with them is not difficult. The assumption here is that if one somehow comes to ‘the straight path’ by accepting Islam, which is Allah’s last and final revelation to humanity, one will fairly effortlessly arrive at the destination which is a state of eternal blessedness in the presence of Allah. I must confess that I am totally amazed, and overwhelmed, by this assumption. To me, being a Muslim today—or any day—seems to be exceedingly hard, for to be a Muslim one has constantly to face the challenge, first of knowing what Allah wills or desires not only for humanity in general but also for oneself in particular, and then of doing what one believes to be Allah’s will and pleasure each moment of one’s life.

In view of the stereotyping of Islam and Muslims which has gone on in the West for many centuries, and especially since the Arab oil embargo of 1973 and the Iranian Revolution of 1979, it is necessary to state at the outset of this article that ‘the world of Islam’ is not a monolith and that Muslims differ as sharply within their “ummah” of one billion persons as do adherents of other major religious traditions within their own respective communities.
Islamisation and Women: the experience of Pakistan
Authors: Shaheed Farida , Mumtaz Khawar
Published: July 2007

During General Zia-ul-Haq’s tenure, the escalating conflict in neighbouring Afghanistan brought Pakistan to the centre stage of international politics. However, at the popular level, it was Zia’s Islamisation campaign, particularly its more brutal manifestations, that drew shocked world attention. Following hard on the heels of the Iranian revolution, it raised fears of another Muslim fundamentalist sweep in the region. These fears were unfounded. Comparisons between the outcome of a mass movement and the impact of state-imposed measures introduced by a military dictator are unwarranted and one needs to remember that the religiously defined political parties (Islam-pasand) in Pakistan have consistently failed to mobilise wide-spread popular support. Furthermore, the current use of the term ‘fundamentalism’ is so loose that it obscures important differences between various religious political forces.

Described by some as the high point of fundamentalism in Pakistan, the last decade should be seen as one which witnessed the convergence of interests between the military rulers and the Jamaat-e-Islami. The former needed political support for credibility; the latter saw in the situation the possibility of access to power, otherwise remote. Thus the slogan of Islamisation became the meeting point. If viewed in terms of social configuration this was the opportunity for the emerging class of traders and entrepreneurs to attain political power.
Friday, Saturday, Sunday
Authors: Lash Nicholas
Published: July 2007

The Aquinas Lecture given at Blackfriars, Cambridge on 29 January 1990.

1. Telling the time

By current standards, St Thomas Aquinas did not have very much to say about time, and even less to say about Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. When discussing the commandments, however, he did say something rather interesting about the Sabbath. Human beings, he tells us, owe a threefold duty to the head of their community: a duty of faithfulness or single-hearted loyalty, of reverence, and of service. This threefold duty is, according to St Thomas, the subject-matter of the commands to worship only God, to refrain from taking his name in vain, and to keep the sabbath holy. It is, he says, the servant’s duty to repay through service the good things received from his lord. But what we have received from this Lord, the Creator, is—everything. Hence the command to sanctify the sabbath in grateful remembrance of the creation of the world: ‘sanctifica(re) sabbat(um) in memoriam creationis rerum’. In due course, I shall return to this suggestion that it is in keeping our very createdness in mind that we keep the Sabbath holy. But, first, I want to reflect on what is entailed in learning how to pray.

But surely, you may say, we know how to pray? Jesus taught us how to pray: he taught us to say ‘Our Father ...’.

But do we really know how to say ‘Our Father’ here and now, in this place, at this time?
J.‐K. Huysmans: The First Post‐Modernist Saint?
Authors: Flanagan Kieran
Published: July 2007

1. The man himself.

An incapacity to read French led me to the discovery of the significance of J.-K. Huysmans. In his book A Time to Keep Silence, Patrick Leigh Fermor used Huysmans’ term ‘les paratonnerres de la société’ to refer to the monastic calling, the time spent in ‘silent factories’ reducing ‘the moral overdraft of mankind’. One would expect monks to act as tuning forks for the holy, but hardly in this dramatic fashion, which seemed more the preserve of liberal theologians with advanced views. The phrase resonated in this sociological imagination. It seemed to be an answer to a long-standing effort to link sociology to an understanding of liturgical performance, where the actors endeavour to attune those present to signals of transcendence emerging from the absent. Huysmans appeared to be awarding monks a striking success in their social activities in attracting Divine attention. Apart from needing to find out the context of the phrase, a puzzle arose as to who was J.-K. Huysmans.

Initial inquiries were perplexing. Huysmans was infamous for his work A Rebours, the classical pioneering study of the art of decadence. This was the book that so influenced Wilde in The Portrait of Dorian Gray, and which elicited the lofty mot at his trial that he never spoke of the morality of an author. Further inquiry indicated that Huysmans had become bored with decadence and had returned to Catholicism. An account of his return was given in his book, En Route. The paths of both authors crossed oddly in the present day, for the only copy of this work that could be located by the interlibrary loan service at Bristol University was at Reading. His dalliance with vice in A Rebours was well known; his return to virtue in En Route seems to have been overlooked.
Critical Theology and Education
Authors: Jones Gareth
Published: July 2007

Introduction

To many, linking the two words ‘critical’ and ‘theology’ will seem at best a tautology. After all, since Saint Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae, theology has been regarded firmly and explicitly as second-order reflection, which is of necessity ‘critical’ if it is genuinely reflective. And yet there is a sense in which this understanding of theology—and this understanding of reflection—as in some sense one single identifiable discipline is very uncritical. Some of the more recent developments in narrative theology, for example, do not lend themselves to such a generalised analysis. A concern with hermeneutic theory, too, leads one at least to doubt the notion that ‘theology’ is ‘always’ the same sort of enterprise; one need only consider the diversity of ‘local’ theologies in Central America, or Black Africa, to recognise the possibility of there being many different interpretations of ‘theology’. David Tracy’s magisterial study, The Analogical Imagination (London 1981), in which the vexed question of the relationship between theology and cultural pluralism is addressed, is arguably the finest recent examination of these issues.

What I want to do in this short essay is to reflect upon our modern definition of ‘theology’, and to consider to what extent it is genuinely critical. To facilitate this, I will concentrate upon two texts: Tracy’s The Analogical Imagination; and John E. McPeck’s Critical Thinking and Education (Oxford 1981). In the light of their work, I will advance some ideas and suggestions concerning the way in which theologians might conceivably go about their tasks.
Francis and the Dark Night of Creation: A meditation on foolishness and discernment in St Francis of Assisi
Authors: Ayres Lewis
Published: July 2007

In some ways we ‘know’ so little about Francis. We have many legends and accounts of his life, some written by those who were closest to him, some collated from earlier accounts by the Order as it grew in the century after his death. However, all of these chroniclers and interpreters shared one thing, they did not write as would an academic historian of today: they wrote to explain their devotion, to explain why one man should have had such a devastating and transforming affect on the religious life of his day. We can neither ignore these accounts because they do not fit the criteria that we demand of ‘history’ , nor unthinkingly accept them as a ‘scientific’ biography. We are called always to interpret.

We know that Francis underwent a conversion and gave up a wealthy life to become one of the poorest of the poor. We know that gradually there gathered around him a body of followers who formed themselves under his guidance into a Brotherhood, and were eventually transformed into the more organised structure of an Order. He travelled far from his base in Assisi, from France to the Middle East, but always returned. Francis continually struggled to resist the urge to become anything but one of the poor, always fighting the acquisition of houses, possessions, learning, or any self-conceit. Eventually he gave up control of his Order to people with a different vision of their mission, preferring to become just another brother to fighting for control as the head of a large and expanding organisation. Two years before his early death he received the stigmata on the feast of the Holy Cross. His standing when he died in 1226, the victim of a life of fasting and near continual illness, was as great as it had ever been.
God and Repression
Authors: Lascaris Andrew
Published: July 2007

In his attempt to defend the Declaration of Human Rights against criticism from both the second and the third world, the Belgian philosopher Guy Haarscher admits in his book Philosophie des Droits de l’homme (Brussels, 1987) that this would be easier if modern men could still believe in God. Why? Because God is the embodiment of what is common to all people. He represents the universal truth of human values on which human rights are based.

Ever since Durkheim we have been strongly aware of the fact that there is a close relationship between society and faith in God. But Guy Haarscher states that God is dead. We cannot go back to a faith in God, he says, for it would entail accepting a hierarchically structured cosmos and thus a hierarchical society. Society before the French Revolution was such a society, one in which all individuals had their place, their definable rights and obligations. It was a society in which the value system was clear and persons enjoyed quite a lot of security, but in which they were not allowed to leave their places lest they endanger the society’s unity. In the third century Plotinus had argued for the inner goodness of such a social order, and his impact on Christian theology can hardly be overestimated; many Vatican declarations cannot be understood fully without some knowledge of Plotinus’ philosophy.

For modern human beings this hierarchical society is repressive. The French Revolution marked the death of of hierarchical society and the dawn of an age in which (in theory) all individuals were allowed to find the places in society which suited them most.
Lefebvrism–Jansenism revisited?
Authors: Fisher Anthony
Published: July 2007

Jansenism and Lefebvrism arose in profoundly different worlds. Yet there are striking similarities between them in beliefs and practices—common tendencies, attitudes and assumptions.

Important similarities in the circumstances of their origins and development help to explain these. Not, of course, that the same weight can be given to all these similarities.

For example, both movements have been led by people with charismatic personalities. Central to the development of Jansenism was a series of individuals with powerful personalities such as Saint-Cyran, the Arnaulds, Nichole and Pascal. Their biographies are well recorded—all too well, for the Jansenists loved writing hagiographies of each other—and need not be retold here. Suffice it to say that ‘the personal factor’ was pre-eminent in the direction of the coterie.

Though vacillating and, by his own admission, inclined toward inordinate indignation, the personality and strong personal authority of Marcel Lefebvre, leader of the so-called ‘Tridentine movement’, has been central throughout the events linked with his name: his leadership at the Second Vatican Council of the conservative faction known as the Coetus Internationalis Patrum and his attack there against collegiality, against the declarations on religious liberty and against relations with non-Christians; his founding after the Council of the diocesan society ‘The Priestly Fraternity of S. Pius X’ in Fribourg; his setting-up of the seminary boasting preconciliar discipline, training and rites which was soon moved to Ecône; his illicit celebration of ‘Tridentine’ Masses and ordination of deacons, priests and finally bishops.
The Case for a Medicinal Ethic
Authors: de Dinechin Olivier
Published: July 2007

What are the effects on moral theology of the arrival of the AIDS virus? In society as a whole, both in individuals and institutions, we could say that this virus has functioned as a ‘catalyst’, emphasising the reflexes, the ideologies, what is commonly shared and what is unspoken. In the Church as well, the stir has been significant, and we have more than once commented on the episcopal statements which have appeared in all the countries affected. The moral theologians have had to face questions from journalists, from colleagues or in their relationships with the Magisterium.

Besides the strong recommendation to become involved without discrimination in the care of people infected by the virus, a striking phenomenon in this stir is the widely-shared impression—widely shared inside as well as outside the Catholic Church—that a certain kind of moral language is not suitable for those who are in the most direct contact with AIDS: the sick or people who are HIV Positive, their families, those caring for them, those responsible for public health, the scientific researchers and the pastors themselves. This gap was evident even at the international level, at the 4th Conference on AIDs organised by the Vatican, which took place on the 13—15 November 1989. Some of the moral theologians appointed to speak from the platform left speechless the majority of the thousand participants—priests, religious, doctors, directors of institutions—who had assembled from all over the world.
HIV in Britain 1982–1990: the Christian Reaction
Authors: Pendergast Martin
Published: July 2007

’ “I’d shoot my son if he had AIDS”, says Vicar’, was a tabloid headline only four years ago. Thankfully, most Christians have moved on from that type of reaction. Nevertheless, the variety of Christian responses covers a wide spectrum of opinion and practice. In this respect Christians are no different from many other people in society. The Churches reflect and consolidate the values and mores of the society of which they are a part. The overall challenge for Christians facing HIV/AIDS, as well as many other contemporary issues, is how to be prophetic. This means not simply falling into a reactionary mould, but analysing what is happening in the pandemic of HIV, reflecting upon this reality and after much listening to people’s needs, discerning whether the Churches have anything valuable to say.

It is important to distinguish institutional Christian responses, reflected in official statements, and the action on the ground by Christians of all denominations. In some responses there is convergence of view, in others informed dissent from ‘official’ lines. It is also important to note the context within which the debates about pastoral responses to AIDS/HIV take place, for these touch on other lively issues such as the right to life, understanding drug use, sexuality in general and homosexuality in particular. If society at large shows discomfort in dealing with these and some of the other major issues which AIDS raises, such as death and dying or the politics of health care, then it is hardly surprising that the Churches have been faltering in their first steps to respond.
Hear what AIDS says to the churches
Authors: Lion Antoine
Published: July 2007

Even though, as these years of AIDS go by, knowledge accumulates, experiences circulate and piles of books about the subject are written, nevertheless everybody seems to advance into an unknown territory, without maps or compass. Humanity has not got this landscape printed in its memory and each person who is HIV positive must rediscover for himself or herself how to cope with life and death, with time and with love, with the future, with sex, with money, in short with all those relations that human beings do not stop more or less consciously creating so that their lives have meaning, and which, among those that that the virus overtakes, are overthrown from top to bottom.

Often the man who is HIV Positive must live very much alone, so much is incommunicable. Moreover, he must often live with rejection and avoidance and fears—his own and others—in a society in which (to quote an observation of Olivier de Dinechin’s) it is many people’s opinion that ‘they brought it on themselves’ or even that ‘they have only got what they deserved’ ... whereas cancer is seen as a calamity and a heart-attack as almost an honour: ‘He worked too hard’. It is in a general silence or else censureship that some whole families are going into extinction, as Simon Robson describes in ‘Through the eye of a needle’. And, at least in some countries, to this rejection by public opinion very often is added exclusion from work, from one’s digs, from insurance coverage, from school ... the list goes on and on.
Religious Pluralism in Struggles for Justice
Authors: Gross Selwyn
Published: July 2007

I am one of many people of faith active in the African National Congress and the Mass-Democratic Movement in South Africa. What I propose to do in this paper is to make you party to a discussion about religious pluralism which presently exercises people of faith like myself in the ranks of the ANC and the Mass-Democratic Movement. As part of a discussion in progress, conducted in a context which values collective work and the achievement of consensus, it is deliberately rough-edged, tentative and open-ended, intended to facilitate the extension of the discussion rather than to say the last word in it.

What Hick calls ‘the universe of faiths’ is well-represented in the ranks of this liberation movement. In it people of different faiths are united in a common struggle for justice and peace in their land. People of faith involved in the struggle for justice and peace do not lead lives in which the religious and the political are split one from the other. On the contrary, the political and the religious come to form a seamless whole in the lives of people of faith involved in the struggle. If I may borrow a phrase from Albert Nolan, the struggle is experienced in a religious mode by people of faith, and this religious modality of the struggle for unitary non-racial democracy is a common feature of the experience of comrades of different faiths. But struggling for fundamental change in a country makes theological demands upon people of faith, not the least of which concerns religious pluralism.
BonJour on Foundationalism
Authors: Meynell Hugo
Published: July 2007

Both the ‘coherentist’ and the ‘foundationalist’ theories of the justification of our claims to empirical knowledge are subject to considerable difficulty, as Laurence BonJour admirably brings out in his book The Structure of Empirical Knowledge. (Coherentism is the view that justification of a proposition is always and exclusively a matter of its coherence with a whole system of propositions; foundationalism, that it is at least sometimes also a matter of its having foundations in things which are not propositions, typically a range of sense-impressions or observations of physical objects.) BonJour argues, however, that while the difficulties encountered by the foundationalist view are insuperable, a version of the coherentist position can be salvaged by considerations which render it proof against the usual objections. I myself maintain exactly the opposite view, which I shall try to defend in what follows.

If every empirical belief requires justification by another empirical belief, we seem to be faced with either a vicious circle or an infinite regress; and the sceptical conclusion appears to follow, that there is no reason to think that any empirical belief is true. The foundationalist tries to stop the regress by maintaining that some empirical beliefs are justified in a way that does not depend on inference from other such beliefs. One influential way of doing this (and the one which I shall try to defend) is to maintain that while indeed all empirical beliefs have to be justified, in the case of some of these beliefs, the justification consists of reference to mental states other than beliefs which do not themselves have to be justified; these are described in various ways by various authors, but are usually said to be ‘given’, ‘represented’, or something equivalent.
Secular Discourse and the Clash of Faiths: ‘The Satanic Verses’ in British Society
Authors: D'Costa Gavin
Published: July 2007

Let us never believe that the way in which the people in power tell us to look at the world is the only way we can look, because if we do that, then that’s a kind of appalling selfcensorship. (Salman Rushdie).

In Britain we believe in live and let live ... Moslems, Hindus, Buddhists and Rastafarians are all welcome to our tolerant society. But there is only one law for all of us ... Those who say their deep religious convictions prevent them from obeying the law of this land should quit Britain immediately and go and live in a country where the conflict does not exist. (Sunday Sport, 19 February, 1989 — editorial on Rushdie).

So the battle over The Satanic Verses is a clash of faiths, in a way. Or, more precisely, it’s a clash of languages. (Salman Rushdie, The Observer, 22 January, 1989).

Britain’s prized tolerant and pluralist society began to exhibit the power of its master code from the beginning of 1989, following the highly publicised second attempt at book burning by Bradford Muslims in January, 1989. (The first protest in Bolton, in December 1988, failed to get any media coverage—so it was repeated after advice that the national media be duly invited!). Text burning was encoded and enmeshed into two curiously related histories: that of Nazism and that of the history of religious bigotry and intolerance. Hence, from a major national quality paper: ‘following the example of the Inquisition and Hitler’s National Socialists, a large crowd of Muslims burnt some copies of the book’ (The Independent, 16 January, 1989).
Memory, Sacrifice and War
Authors: Ruston Roger
Published: July 2007

There are many reasons why Remembrance Day has to be taken seriously, especially by those among us who are wholly opposed to war. If we feel that we cannot join in the play as it is staged, we need to appreciate why others do, and why departures from the script—white poppies, public figures wearing duffel-coats—may seem to them like a desecration.

One reason is that Remembrance Day is not simply an occasion for private grief. It is a ritual enactment of our national story about peace—how it was won at immense cost by a whole generation of young men in 1914-18; how it was snatched from the jaws of defeat in 1940 by the bravery of the few. It recalls the sacrifice of two generations of youth who gave their lives so that we could live in safety, especially the women and children. It is meant to recall the story of our salvation as a people, in the sense of our national liberation from tyranny and fear. It is meant to acknowledge the sacrifices that ensured it. It gives meaning to the bloodshed. Remembrance makes private grief tolerable by connecting it with national salvation.

If war itself usually creates strong feelings of solidarity, the aftermath of wars is always a time of doubt and division. The Remembrance ceremony has been part of the apparatus for coping with this. After the Great War the nation was seriously divided, especially as between those who had experienced life in the trenches and those who had not.
Proleptic Recapitulation: Passover, Eucharist and God's saving acts
Authors: Paretsky Albert
Published: July 2007

We may speak casually of ‘salvation history’ and look for patterns in the Bible which bear out a claim that the sacred writers saw a movement toward a particular goal, the fullness of revelation in Christ Jesus (cf. Heb 1:1—2). Such a view can influence how we interpret both the Old Testament itself and its relationship to the New Testament. These interpretations may range from a searching out of phrases and themes which may then be applied to the New Testament—giving the impression that the New Testament author created a patchwork of sources—to a searching for patterns of God’s grand design which is manifested in the sweep of the Bible, irrespective of the time, place, or particular interest of the biblical author. What is proposed here is an examination of a mode of relating the past to the present which can be found throughout the Old Testament and to see how this relationship in a cultic context has far-reaching implications for the understanding of both the Christian Eucharist and the Jewish Passover in relation to one another and to the memory of God’s saving acting.

A frequent pattern in the Bible is the recapitulation of origins to explain new beginnings. This is reflected in various ways.

One is to use the imagery of creation to describe a new creation. For example, the author of Gen 6—9 describes the punishment of the human race in terms of a return to chaos and a re-emergence of dry land from the waters as in Gen 1. One finds other references back to the days of creation throughout the Old Testament literature, where both the imagery of Gen 1—2 as well as extra-biblical myths (some unknown) are used.
A Threat to Due Process—The War Crimes Act 1991
Authors: O'Neill Aidan
Published: July 2007

In Act One of ‘A Man for all Seasons’, Robert Bolt’s play about Thomas More’s pilgrimage to martyrdom, More’s impetuous son-in-law, William Roper, argues that the Devil does not deserve benefit of law. In the course of the discussion More pushes Roper into the stark claim that obstacle to the conviction of the Devil must be overcome, even if it meant failing to follow due process of law. Roper, in his hunger and thirst for justice, declares that he is prepared to tear down every law in England in so worthy a cause. More, with his finely-tuned jurisprudential mind, answers him:

And when the last law was down and the Devil turned on you—where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast—Man’s laws, not God’s—and if you cut them down—and you’re just the man to do it, d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake’. (Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons, 1960, Act I)

In this passage from Bolt’s play More focusses some of the issues raised by the recent War Crimes Act, which obtained the Royal Assent on 9 May 1991.’ The Act’s long title states that its purpose is ‘to confer jurisdiction on United Kingdom courts in respect of certain grave violations of the laws and customs of war in German-held territory during the Second World War.’
From Piety to Criticism and Back
Authors: Geraghty Denis
Published: July 2007

Since the Second Vatican Council many developments have taken place which the Council itself did not and could not have anticipated. The Council did not foresee, for example, that the reform of the liturgy would cause the disintegration of popular Catholic piety and leave a fearful vacuum, providing nothing to put in its place. Neither did the Council anticipate that an increasingly educated Catholic laity would, in some way, radically alter its attitude to the clergy and to their ascendancy in the Church, demanding for themselves a place and authority of their own as ‘the People of God’. ‘From piety to criticism and back’ literally means looking back; it is a very difficult exercise. There are many reasons for this. We often absorb and integrate change in a semiconscious way and, once we have integrated it, there is a tendency to look back at the past in a hypercritical way through the lens of contemporary experience. Thus, we sometimes reach a distorted evaluation riddled with anachronisms, because we now live, move and breath in the air of a different world. However, despite the dangers, it is useful to look back, to engage in a process of recapitulation of the past, just as we do in old age, so that we can better understand the present.

What is piety? A working definition might be: the dutiful observance of religious practice. Within the Catholic Church that I knew, 1 consider it to have been a concentration of devotional worship at the expense of systematic theology and the study of scripture. However, this understanding of piety needs to placed in a particular context. Such a contextualisation can only be the Catholic Church of my youth, that is of the Irish/Lancashire variety.
The Rise and Fall of Liberation Theology? An Evaluative Chronicle
Authors: Nichols Aidan
Published: July 2007

Liberation theology emerged gradually in the period following the Second Vatican Council. At that Council there were present, as influences on the conciliar process, a wide variety of theologies- Neo-Scholastic, Neopatristic, anthropologico-transcendental (alias Karl Rahner), as well as the inter-related theologies of the ‘signs of the times’ and of ‘earthly realities’, the latter soon to be dubbed ‘secularisation-theology’ and chiefly worked out, like its brother movement, by the French. As succeeding events have demonstrated, the resultant compound was unstable. So far as the Americas were concerned although ‘CELAM’, the Latin American Episcopal Council, had functioned since 19S6, the Latin American influence at Vatican II, whether of bishops or theologians was negligible, with the exception of one or two individual voices like the Brazilian Helder Camara, archbishop of Recife, who contributed to the making of the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modem World.

Very different, during the Council’s closing sessions, was the state of affairs in Latin America itself. There a veritable theological ferment was brewing, as became clear from four meetings of theologians held at, successively, Petrdpolis (Brazil), Havana (Cuba), Bogota (Colombia) and Cuernavaca (Mexico) in the course of 1964-1965. What transpired from these pan-Latin American theological assemblies was the need for a new theology whose nature would be determined by, first, the conciliar ‘renewal’, but also by, secondly, confrontation with the often cruel human reality of that continent.
1492 And All That
Authors: Alison James
Published: July 2007

In 19821 drove with friends from the city of Puebla to Mexico City by the rather hazardous route between the volcanoes Ixtaccihuatl and Popocatepetl. That is the route which Cortés and his followers travelled in 1519. From the top, they caught Europe’s first glimpse of the Aztec capital, glistening below. Bernal Diaz, in his eyewitness chronicle, describes their amazement at its size and beauty. Now you cannot see the city, but only the pulsating orange-brown glow of its pollution. What was more interesting to me was that in order to find the right track to the pass, we had stopped in a village to ask the way, and had been guided by indians speaking the Spanish of Cervantes, rich in forms and courtesies quite unused in modem Spanish.

In 1990 I spent a weekend in Sucre, the historical capital of Bolivia, a beautiful university city in the Andes. I was attending a national charismatic conference, which had borrowed a military academy during the summer holiday. In the evening there was a big Mass in the Cathedral, presided over by the newly appointed Bishop, a Spaniard. The next morning the Feast of the Epiphany, I stumbled out of bed to celebrate Mass at six with the (enclosed) Carmelite sisters in their 17th century Carmel. To my amazement, the church was full, mostly of indians , in multi-coloured costume; the sisters in their choir made sprightly song with the help of a number of Spanish and Andean instruments, and every time they did so, a small indian girl, quite unprompted, danced with delight in front of the image of Our Lady.