bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Just Intervention and Police Action
Authors: Wicker Brian
Published: July 2007

The debate about the morality of using military force in the post-coldwar period has shifted decisively away from theories of ‘just wars’ between states, towards the concept of ‘humanitarian intervention’. The Bosnian and Somalian crises have been widely discussed in this context The reason for the shift is that aggression by one sovereign state against another is no longer the principal focus of attention. Most of the conflicts now going on, or likely to take place in the future, are within the borders of states, not across them. (The Kuwait case was anomalous rather than typical of the period since 1989.) Yet such conflicts can easily turn into threats to peace and security, rightly attracting the attention of the international community under the terms of the UN Charter.

Humanitarian intervention (henceforth, simply ‘intervention’) has been proposed for such purposes as the following:

to stop the fighting or enforce a cease-fire; to stop the forcible movement of populations (ethnic cleansing); to enforce the delivery of humanitarian aid and safe extraction of the sick and wounded; to preserve safe havens, zones, demilitarized areas or open cities; to restore pre-existing boundaries or enforce those newly agreed; to ‘restore’ democratic institutions — as in the ECOWAS declaration of 9 Aug. 1990; or, most ambitiously, to establish an international protectorate under UN control.

The morality of intervention in pursuit of such causes such is commonly discussed by applying the traditional criteria for a just war. These criteria are directly relevant, in so far as they apply constraints to the use of organized force, or violence.
Early Dominican Hagiography
Authors: Haseldine David
Published: July 2007

This paper purports to deal with a non-existent subject in holding that there was no Dominican hagiography before the canonization of St. Dominic nor for some time afterwards.

Dominic Guzman died and his obsequies were presided over by his friend and patron Cardinal Ugolino on 6th August 1221. The same Ugolino, having ascended the papal throne as Gregory IX, issued a bull on 3rd July 1234 ordering annual celebration of the feast of St Dominic and likening the Order of Preachers he founded to those of St Benedict and Citeaux as an historic achievement for the faith. The first life of St. Dominic written by a Dominican (or by anyone) is the Legenda S. Dominici of Peter of Ferrand composed between 1235 and 1239 for liturgical use in the new office of St. Dominic which was established throughout the Order in the latter year.

It is at first sight astonishing that no earlier Dominican life exists and that none was produced specifically for submission in the canonization proceedings as had become standard practise at this time: these facts this paper seeks to explain. To do so will involve answering two questions: 1. What was the procedure which had become established for the canonization of saints by 1234 and what factors affected its operation in the case of St. Dominic? 2. What material had in fact been produced from Dominican sources about Dominic up until his canonization and why did this not include a life of the saint?
Early Dominican Confessional Practice
Authors: Cessario Romanus
Published: July 2007

At the beginning of the 13th century, the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) sanctioned a number of fresh efforts at evangelization. Among the major pastoral concerns that the conciliar decrees addressed, the sacrament of penance figures in a prominent way. Having established the requirement of annual confession as a fixed element of Christian life, the conciliar Fathers at the same time recognized the need to supply qualified priests who could competently exercise the ministry of reconciliation.

With Bishop Fulk of Toulouse, St Dominic was present at the Fourth Lateran Council, after which he obtained official approbation for his newly-begun work of preaching and hearing confessions. In 1221, Pope Honorius III granted universal faculties to Dominic’s band of preachers-confessors. The international character of Dominic’s mission in the Church meant of course that his fiiars would hear the confessions of persons caught up in the displacement that marked the beginning of European cosmopolitanism. This circumstance explains the advice that, according to Paul of Hungary, St Dominic himself gave to his brother priests, namely, that they should discreetly enquire during the course of the confession from where the penitent came, so that their spiritual counsel could take account of certain regional differences, such as local fasting customs. Of course, such advice would be hardly necessary for a parish priest who heard the confessions only of those under his permanent pastoral care.

Recent scholarship suggests that we should not underestimate the importance that hearing confessions played in the pastoral ministry of the early Dominican friars.
Siena Icon of the Common Good: Lorenzetti and Lonergan
Authors: Navone John
Published: July 2007

Inside the Palazzo Pubblico, the dignified Town Hall of Siena, is Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s cycle of frescoes of the Allegories and the Effects of Good and Bad Government painted between 1337 and 1339. The frescoes were commissioned by the Council of the Nine, a régime which retained power in Siena until 1355, after having preserved its peace and prosperity for some sixty years. A wise old man symbolizes the Common Good while a patchwork of neat fields, tame boar and busy hoers suggests order and prosperity. Bad Government is a desolate place, razed to the ground by a diabolical tyrant, the Sienese wolf at his feet. Lorenzetti’s civic masterpiece, Siena’s icon of the Common Good, documents the Catholic social tradition which recent papal teachings reaffirm in their critique of both Marxism and laissez-faire capitalism. Lorenzetti’s frescoes are not only decorative and celebratory, but they are also didactic; for this was the primary object of all medieval painting. The frescoes, a distillation of Augustinian and Thomist thought, are designed for the eyes of Siena’s ruling 61ite, for few, outside of that charmed group, ever penetrated to the innermost rooms of the Palazzo Pubblico. It is clearly the Nine who are addressed by the words which appear above the head of Justice in the fresco: “Love Justice, you who rule the earth.” The frescoes state the obligations of the governor to the governed, rather than the obligations of the governed to the governing.
The Best Reader and the One Repetitor? The Bishop in Augustine's Confessions
Authors: Mazziotta Richard
Published: July 2007

The Confessions of Saint Augustine’ have been esteemed throughout the centuries for the literary elegance with which their author integrates self-disclosure, compunction, and analysis of the human and redeemed condition. For all the claims made for this classic, however, rarely has it been noted that prime among Augustine’s intentions in writing was to convey a definitive point of view regarding the orthopraxy of the Church. This article maintains that central to the Confessions is an unequivocal instruction regarding the reading and interpretation of texts. Written between 397 and 401, only a few years following Augustine’s succession in 395 to the see of Hippo, the Confessions are a study of the place of texts in the community. Furthermore, they are an explicit defence of the bishop’s primacy in the governance of a community’s texts.

No matter what his topic at any given moment, Augustine’s attention throughout the Confessions scarcely deviates from the issues of speech, language, poetics, and, ultimately, scripture. Augustine plumbs their meaning throughout, returning repeatedly to how all these function for ill or good within community. Cognizant of the extent to which language and texts can abet fallen human nature and lead towards its worst proclivities, Augustine admonishes readers ever to beware of the potential of texts to deceive, endanger, and enslave. To note only this, however, would be to remain ignorant of the author’s far more important conviction. If some words can entrap, cannot different words liberate? The scriptural Word of the psalms, which Augustine quotes so profligately that his own voice
Two Paths to Truth: A Tribute to Georges Lemaître
Authors: Dwyer Christopher
Published: July 2007

“I was interested in truth from the point of view of salvation just as much as in truth from the point of view of scientific certainty. It appeared to me that there were two paths to truth, and I decided to follow both of them.”

The two paths led Georges Lemaitre (1894-1966), the Belgian priest who became a founding father of modem cosmology, to the farthest reaches of the universe. The centenary of his birth fell on 17 July; his face, accompanied by the “primeval atom”, is currently featured on Belgium’s stamps.

Born in Charleroi, in the heart of French-speaking Belgium, he planned to become an engineer. But service in the First World War turned his thoughts to the priesthood, and he was ordained by Cardinal Mercier in 1923. After further mathematical studies in Cambridge and in the USA he returned to Louvain in 1927 as Professor of Astronomy, and remained there (apart from frequent travels) for the rest of his career.

The 1920’s were exciting years in astronomy. In 1919, the team led by Arthur (later Sir Arthur) Eddington, Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge, to the island of Principe had observed the bending of light near the sun that provided the first proof of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. In 1925, Hubble’s observations yielded the first evidence that the distant nebulae are separate galaxies, and that they are receding from us.

Lemaitre's achievement in those years was to show, in a famous paper of 1927, that the Einstein model of the universe could not be static: it must either expand or contract.
Liberation Theology and the Bearers of Dangerous Memory
Authors: Grey Mary
Published: July 2007

Liberation theologians, from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and even from North America and Europe, are actively engaged in responding to massive human rights violations in countries where revolution has either been a success or a tragic failure. The inspiration for this commitment is the Church's ‘Option for the poor’, originating in the historic Conferences of the Latin American Bishops at Medellin and Pueblo. But twenty years on, in a changed global context, there is a need for Liberation Theology to develop more than a praxis-oriented focus: there needs to be a further development of that epistemic shift on which Liberation Theology was originally constructed, as well as a new sensitivity as to how knowledge itself is attained. This new sensibility must extend to those who have withstood and suffered the violation of human rights, and include reflection on who has the right to know, and the de-humanisation process on both individual and communal levels. I will briefly explain what I mean by this epistemic shift before exploring the whole notion of ‘dangerous memory* and its bearers.

I consider this to be a theo-political task: theology has always been concerned perhaps over possessively with the location of truth and its formulations. But since the work of Michel Foucault, philosopher and social historian, and his call for the ‘insurrection of the subjugated knowledges’, it is no longer possible to ignore the power factor in theological expressions. The call to listen to oppressed peoples as the ‘bearers of theological truth’ must be woven into the struggle against the dominant ideology.
Truth and Martyrdom: The Structure of Discipleship in Veritatis Splendor
Authors: Berkman John
Published: July 2007

Early in February, I was privileged to participate in a gathering of forty-five predominantly Catholic philosophers and theologians who met to discuss John Paul II’s encyclical Veritatis Splendor. Most of the discussion at the conference focused on the second of the encyclical’s three chapters, which deals with “some trends of theological thinking and certain philosophical affirmations [that] are incompatible with revealed truth.”(§29) Conspicuously absent was any attention to either the first or especially the third chapters of the encyclical. The first chapter investigates the nature of Christian discipleship through the lens of St Matthew’s account of Jesus’ meeting with the rich young man. (Matt 19) The third chapter treats the issue of Christian martyrdom and other sources for Christian renewal. In the course of the discussion, the notion of discipleship was mentioned rarely, and the subject of martyrdom never came up. By concentrating almost exclusively on the second chapter, the conference failed to locate the encyclical’s critique of particular “trends of theological thinking and certain philosophical affirmations” within the context provided by Veritatis Splendor itself, namely that of Christian discipleship. In doing so this group mirrored much of the general response to Veritatis Splendor, which has centred almost exclusively on the second chapter. It is my goal to shift this focus, and to highlight the primacy of discipleship for a right understanding of Veritatis Splendor.

Veritatis Splendor has a message about a notion central to our lives: freedom. The Pope argues that the common conception of freedom as merely the absence of constraints is misguided. Christian freedom must be connected with the pursuit of truth.
On Nietzsche, Postmodernism and the New Enlightenment
Authors: Meynell Hugo
Published: July 2007

In spite of Nietzsche’s enormous and apparently ever-increasing influence, it is notoriously difficult to spell out the essence and precise implications of his position. This is evidently due partly to his poetic and rhetorical style; but in my view there is a more important reason than this. I would maintain that his thought, when taken as a whole, is rather like a carpet which cannot be laid straight unless you cut off one or other of two bits. To make Nietzsche consistent, you have to reject or downplay one of two elements in his thought. If you reject one, what you get is cognitive and moral nihilism; if you reject the other, you end up with what I want to call the new enlightenment. In these respects the postmodernists, as represented at any rate by Michel Foucault, are Nietzsche’s true successors.

When in nihilistic mood, Nietzsche seems to imply that it is true that there are no truths, that it is really morally good to act as though there were no such thing as moral goodness. In the course of considering this self-destructive tendency of one strand of Nietzsche’s thought, Walter Kaufmann remarks that consideration of problems like these was not Nietzsche’s strong suit. Now the basis of the new enlightenment is epistemological, and turns on theses and arguments which directly address such problems. These may be summarized as follows: (1) Denial that our judgments are ever true is self-destructive (is it supposed to be true that we never speak the truth?); and so is denial that we ever have good reasons for our judgments (do we have good reasons for this particular judgment?).
Theology's historical task: The problem of the disciplines
Authors: Evans G.R.
Published: July 2007

John Henry Newman came to see the need to frame what was in effect a new discipline of the history of theology, with rules and subject-matter which would make it a practical working instrument, but with a flexibility which would allow for insights about the interconnectedness and coherence of a living body of knowledge which was sustained in a vital community. This recognition, and Newman’s own response to it are instructive because, mutatis mutandis, we stand in much the same need now. Unlike the history of (say) philosophy or science, the history of Christian theology deals with subject-matter which is understood to be of its nature continuous and semper eadem But it clearly changes within that continuity. And that poses special problems historiographically.

We can get a glimpse of the way one thing led to the other in Newman’s arriving at these perceptions in a letter written in 1826. Newman begins by suggesting that it might be put to the test whether the Anglican divines from the sixteenth century onwards, if read so as to eliminate the adversariality of the polemic in which many of them had been engaged, had amongst them set out an account of their beliefs which formed a coherent and harmonious whole.

‘My dear Rickards,—In our last conversation I think you asked me whether any use had occurred to my mind to which your knowledge of our old divines might be applied. Now one has struck me,—so I write. Yet very probably the idea is so obvious that it will not be new to you, and. … I begin by assuming that the old worthies of our Church are neither Orthodox nor Evangelical … now it would be a most useful thing to give a kind of summary of their opinions. … if, then, in a calm, candid, impartial manner, their views were sought out and developed, would not the effect be good in a variety of ways?
Authentic Relationships: Justice, Love, and Christian Spirituality
Authors: O'Keefe Mark
Published: July 2007

The Letter of James reminds Christians that an authentic Christian faith cannot be completely separated from works:

What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead (James 2:14-17 NRSV).

Similarly, a number of theologians have recently suggested that an authentic Christian spirituality cannot be separated from an active concern for and pursuit of justice. These theologians argue that a Christian cannot truly strive to grow in a relationship with God without a real concern for the well-being of other persons. One cannot hope to attain a transcendent union with God without a lived concern for the present circumstances of other men and women.

The present article attempts to offer further insight into the connection between justice and spirituality by focusing on the relational aspect of each and by viewing them in relationship to a contemporary understanding of Christian love. In short, it will be argued that justice, love, and Christian spirituality are all concerned with the establishment of authentic relationships with God, with other persons, and with the created order—ultimately as a transcendent hope but also as a task in present historical circumstances.
Adam Smith and the Spanish Inquisition
Authors: Meikle Scott
Published: July 2007

Spain in the Eighteenth century was in two minds about the economic thought of the Enlightenment reaching it from other parts of Europe. The first half of the century has been aptly characterised as a period of ‘ideological hesitancy’, but in the second half the hesitancy came to an end. The liberal cause, and its main instruments the Sociedades Economicas de los Amigos del Pais, made great strides. Political economy, then a brand new science, was welcomed by the liberal statesmen like Jovellanos and Campomanes who flourished under Carlos III. Their primary concern was that Spain might lose heavily if she were too slow getting into the new international market economy, and they regarded works like Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations as important guides to the industrial and commercial policies Spain should pursue.

Others were more cautious. Intellectuals trained in the Aristotelian tradition were often more concerned about the moral quality of the new economics, and about the moral costs of pursuing the kind of policies that flowed from it. These are concerns which today, after a further two hundred years experience of market economy, are even more alive now than they were then. It is worth reflecting on whether these critics were entirely the reactionary flat-earthers they are customarily dismissed as being. History is written by the victors, and the Enlightenment won this engagement, so it is only to be expected that in our standard accounts the Aristotelian opponents of the Enlightenment come out badly.
The Terrorism of Reason in the Thought of Zygmunt Bauman
Authors: Torevell David
Published: July 2007

This article is concerned with the social theory of Zygmunt Bauman. It will highlight recurring themes within his writing with particular reference to three of his works, Legislators and Interpreters, Modernity and Ambivalence, and Mortality, Immortality and other Life Strategies. It will trace his argument that Modernity constituted a process of gradual de-animation of Nature and disenchantment of the world, a condition that post-modernity aims to reverse. It will discuss his contention about the catastrophic effects of the strategies of instrumental Reason and Modernity’s relentless urge to design and order the whole of human existence. It will demonstrate some of the awful consequences of such strategies. The tension between human attempts to structure the world and its self-defeating failures to do so, becomes the central motif in Bauman’s work: a tension witnessed most visibly in the on-going confrontation between Reason and ambiguity.

Bauman learned the limitations of structuralism from Levi-Strauss. What fascinated him was the Modem urge to structure everything, the constant attempt to find the social structure, the underlying structure of everything; that ambivalence could be eliminated.
“Mission … Where Possible”
Authors: Doyle P.J.
Published: July 2007

To many outsiders the Catholic Church still appears authoritarian and monolithic, yet closer inspection reveals a very different picture. Indeed it could be argued that in some instances the Church gives the appearance of quasi-congregationalism, set within networks of prayer groups, which themselves reflect a spirit of loose independence and quietism. This paper raises the question of the place of the laity within the organisation and structure of the hierarchic church. Recently The Universe carried the headline “More power to the laity”, suggesting radical changes as the increasing priest shortage begins to bite. The report cites concerns in Scotland, Hexham and Newcastle, and Hallam Dioceses. It appears as if at last the Church is beginning to take up matters first raised at the Second Vatican Council.

The Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity makes specific reference to establishing national congresses and pastoral councils at diocesan, deanery and parish levels. Unfortunately the decree permits a “cop out” by adding the phrase “where possible”. This provokes the obvious questions: why has this aspect of the Council been virtually ignored, or, at the very least, haphazardly implemented, and further why has the laity so tamely acquiesced? Even more interesting is the knowledge that the Church in this country immediately before and after the First World War seems to have been well organized, with federations at city and diocesan levels, a national Confederation and annual National Congresses, which admittedly became triennial in 1920 before petering out after 1929.
An Outsider on the Inside: Anglican Reflections on the Synod on the Consecrated Life
Authors: Green H. Benedict
Published: July 2007

To be catapulted, at very short notice, into the deliberations of a worldwide gathering of Catholic bishops and religious was inevitably something of a culture shock, compounded no doubt by the sheer effort of concentration involved in listening, five hours a day for the first fortnight, to individual members’ interventions in their own languages (with instant translators whose command of Latin idiom tended to survive in their English versions). Yet the comprehensive overview of the present situation of the consecrated life in all its manifestations that emerged could hardly have been projected in any other way. We heard moving accounts from sisters, still young, from the countries of eastern Europe of the way they had not only maintained the religious life underground in the face of communist government restrictions, but continued to attract new vocations and to carry out their formation. We heard from African bishops (speaking confidently, I thought, for a church come of age) of an explosion of vocations that promises to give the lie to the assumption that celibacy will always be something alien to the African male; of the inherent dangers in a society where so many, in the secular sphere, are looking for ways of self-betterment; of the need for higher levels of education, for which outside help will be needed, and at the same time for a process of inculturation which the indigenous can only achieve themselves, and to which the assumptions and living standards of expatriates can be a serious hindrance.
Holy Texts of Deception: Christian Gnosticism and the Writings of Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh
Authors: Loughlin Gerard
Published: July 2007

John Milbank, in his important and magisterial study Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (1990), advances the claim that ‘secular reason’ is but a form of Christian deviancy. By secular reason Milbank intends ‘secular social theory’ or sociology. Milbank offers an ‘archaeology’ of secular social theory which is also an archaeology of the secular, since for him ‘the genesis of discourse is intertwined with the genesis of a new practice’. His genetic account of the construction of secular reason traces it first in ‘the discourses of liberalism— “scientific politics” and political economy’, where the human construction of the cultural world is discovered, and where human making is thought to ‘mark out an autonomous human space’, as in Hobbes. The secular is not that which is discovered when the sacred is removed, but that which is first constructed within the space of the sacred.

It is Milbank’s contention that, as he puts it, ‘secular discourse does not just “borrow” inherently inappropriate modes of expression from religion as the only discourse to hand ... but is actually constituted in its secularity by “heresy” in relation to orthodox Christianity, or else a rejection of Christianity that is more “neo-pagan” than simply anti-religious’. Thus for Milbank ‘“scientific” social theories are themselves theologies or anti-theologies in disguise’. The Hobbesian construction of man as the maker of society, the myth, as Milbank puts it, of the ‘self-present and self-sufficiently initiating “person” who echoes the pure will of a creator God’, is not, as the idea of ‘voluntarist sovereignty’, simply a notion transferred from the divine to the human, from the sacred to the secular.
Reason, Fools and Rameau's Nephew
Authors: Lash Nicholas
Published: July 2007

In the autumn of 1993, I found myself called upon to give the concluding address to a conference in Stockholm—jointly sponsored by the Royal Dramatic Theatre of Sweden, the Royal Institute of Technology, and the Swedish Center for Working Life—entitled: “Skill and Technology: on Diderot, Education and the Third Culture”. One focus of the conference was Diderot’s Dialogue, Rameau’s Nephew, my appreciation of which has, I hope, been properly enhanced as a result of having sat through not only a dramatisation of it in German but also an operatic version, by a Finnish composer, with a Swedish libretto.

Nobody knows for sure whether or not Denis Diderot had a conversation with Jean-Francois Rameau, nephew of the composer, in the Café de la Régence in Paris, in April 1761. Nor does it matter. Diderot certainly wrote the first draft of the Dialogue in that year, reworking it in 1773, 1778 and 1782, the year before he died. The history of this short text (less than seventy pages in the Flammarion edition) is so extraordinary that one almost suspects Diderot himself of having somehow arranged it.

Although it has been described as “the very centre of his writing” and has provoked a still burgeoning library of commentary and interpretation, the Dialogue was never published or referred to by Diderot in his lifetime, and it first saw the light of day in a German translation, done by an admiring Goethe from a French manuscript which he had been lent by Schiller, who seems to have obtained it from a German officer in St Petersburg. Goethe’s translation appeared in 1805.
The Dominican Experience in Russia
Authors: Knowles Peter
Published: July 2007

Recently the Dominican Order has been formally and canonically established in Russia and the Ukraine. This is an event that would have been undreamt of only a few short years ago. But now the question poses itself very clearly: What lies ahead for this new phenomenon? To frame the question in more precise terms: What should be its field of action?

The history of the Dominican Order in the vast lands of Russia over the past five hundred years consists of spasmodic sallies, made by individual members of the Order which have left little trace. In the last decades of the 15th century there was a Croatian Dominican, Benjamin, among the equipe of scholars centred round the bishop of Novgorod, Gennady. One of this group’s works was the translation of the Books of Wisdom from the Vulgate Latin into Slavonic, A more exotic and enigmatic Dominican figure who had a part to play in the history of Russia was Maximus the Greek. An admirer of Savonarola, he entered the Dominican community of San Marco in Florence in 1501. After abandoning that life he is next heard of as a monk on Mt Athos at the monastery of Vatopedi. From here he was invited to travel to Moscow to help in the labour of translating Greek texts into Slavonic. As was the policy of the Russians at that time, Maximos was never permitted to return to Mt Athos (it was thought that he had learned too much about Russia’s internal affairs) and he was imprisoned for some years. He eventually died in the Monastery of the Holy Trinity and St Serge outside Moscow in 1556.
The Feminine in the Cross of David Jones
Authors: Dye Jenifer
Published: July 2007

Exclusive language is becoming increasingly problematic. Not only has the Feminist movement demonstrated the alienation and exclusion felt in male dominated language, but our post-Freudian environment forbids us to accept androgyny as convincing. One is female or one is male. That has to be reflected in our language. This scenario leaves us with great paradoxes in regard to our religious language, particularly in view of our ‘talk’ about the Christian sacrifice. I found an equally paradoxical source of inspiration on this issue in the writings and art of David Jones. His work is paradoxical because while hardly being a feminist (far from it!) or Freudian (he was nearer Jung), he can in the liberation of the artistic communicate the female as well as male.

In this limited exploration I am going to focus on his attitude in visual and written form to Mary and her relationship to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, her son and God. Then I will examine the role of the feminine in Jones’ handling of the Eucharist. Finally I will examine the claim that the painting ‘Aphrodite in Aulis’ is a picture of the crucifixion.

In Jones’ use of Mary as a picture of the Temple of the body of Christ he creates a layered effect of separate allusions each resting on the one before. The layering of imagery gives a different effect to a lineal arrangement so the finished picture takes on a perspective that is allowed because of all that has gone before.
Necessary Fictions, Real Presences
Authors: Phillips Peter
Published: July 2007

George Steiner in his subtle and richly suggestive essay, Real Presences, sees in the origins of modernism a breaking of the covenant between word and world which he regards as the significant characteristic of the decades following 1870. For Steiner, this sundering of continuities constitutes ‘one of the very few genuine revolutions of spirit in Western history’. Mallarmé and Rimbaud represent the beginnings of a genuinely new aesthetic, ‘a parting of the semantic ways’. Before this time, he argues, we could have presumed upon a logocentric order, a Logos-aesthetic, which included the assumption of correspondence, understood as something ‘strictly inseparable from the postulate of theological-metaphysical transcendence’. Such a world presupposes ‘real presence’.

While there is much to appeal in this argument, I wonder whether the Christian tradition has always had a more healthy suspicion of the innocent collusion of word and world than Steiner allows. The monist ontology at which Steiner hints does not allow for the rich sense of mystery that confronts us in the world of which we are a part: things as things stand over against us, ultimately unfathomable. There are aspects of the Nominalist agenda deeply rooted in the Christian tradition and rightly so. We come to what is real by way of the particular. Steiner, of course, is far from unmindful of this and comments with some force:

The arts are most,wonderfully rooted in substance, in the human body, in stone, in pigment, in the twanging of gut or weight of wind on reeds. All good art and literature begin in immanence.
Celebrating Grace in and through the Sacrament of Their Own Lives – Listening to the Urban Marginalised
Authors: Goulding Gill
Published: July 2007

This paper is the result of reflection upon both my doctoral thesis and my present research. There is a four-fold structure: first an emphasis on the voice of people on the margins; this is followed by an indication of how the collection of empirical data was facilitated by listening, dialogue and conversation and the theological significance of these elements; thirdly I give a brief indication of how the mystery of God at work amongst the marginalised is a feature of certain contemporary ecclesiology; and finally I indicate how the dimension of listening may be facilitated through a contemplative imperative, how this is in accord with the spiritual tradition and is a potential source of enrichment for the church.

There are striking features about those who are marginalised. Very often they are in a position where they are not involved in the central factors which determine their lives. Dependency is an inevitable development, as they are educated to believe that others will always know best, and that some “professionals” in social security, or housing, or education or local planning, or possibly anybody other than themselves, will have the next determining voice in their lives. From the beginning then, possibly at the early age of childhood, they cease to be participatory subjects in life, but rather form objects of concern for one or another agency. Such a process ongoingly undermines the value and self-worth of an individual and progressively renders them more and more inadequate to cope with life. Considered economically irrelevant, and increasingly impoverished, marginalised individuals and groups present a shocking discontinuity to mainstream society.
Does Creation have a Future?
Authors: Echlin Edward P.
Published: July 2007

In our scientific age, fascinated with dinosaurs and origins, we readily image creation as beginnings—of people, of life, the cosmos, the Bang. And the beginnings are creation, active creation, all things becoming and developing in dependence upon God. But creation is more than beginnings, creation, all that is not God, is God’s self gift Creation, says the Catechism of the Catholic Church, is “the foundation of all God’s saving plans.” (280) Creation, it must be added, is more than a backdrop to human redemption. Creation is precious in itself.

Creation also has a future. The future of God’s creation, the eighth day, what the bible calls the new creation, especially the transformed future of the biosphere, our habitat on this frail planet which is our home, is within “God’s saving plans”. Neglect, indeed avoidance of the reality that our planet in some way shares our future—and that we have responsibility, during our brief mission here, for this planet which shares our destiny, accounts for some of the temporizing within the churches about reintegrating with the earth and renewing God’s earth where it is damaged.

If Jesus risen were somehow in discontinuity with the Jesus who lived in Palestine, if the earth did not share our future, despite scientific testimony including the learning of the Hebrew Wisdom literature to our inherent relationships within it, if, in brief, salvation were independent of our relationships with other creatures, then Christianity would be a less ecologically inclusive religion. It must be said that a selective reading of the New Testament, of popular hymns, even of some social teaching, can appear to legitimate flights into psychologized spirituality, the delimitation of Christian mission to “spiritual and social needs of people”, and complacent collusion with economocentric industrialism.
Scepticism and Sovereignty: The significance of Lamennais
Authors: Nicholls David
Published: July 2007

The changes in Lamennais’s thinking after the papal condemnation of 1832 were in many ways anticipated in earlier works. In adopting a populist stance in his political writings, he was but extending into the social and political field the epistemological principal of le sens commun, as the final authority to which individual reason must submit. In an appendix to Des progrès de la révolution, published in 1829, he drew an analogy between his belief in the superiority of faith to individual reason in intellectual matters and the superior claim of social duty to individual liberty in the political world. I shall now outline how his thinking on religion and politics developed in the years following his break with the church.
Creation and Creator: Knowing and Glorifying God
Authors: Hill Edmund
Published: July 2007

A consideration of our human participation in the divine creativity can be regarded as a legitimate, indeed desirable appendix or coda to the theology of creation. It is essentially a consideration of the relationship between creature and creator, of the active relationship indeed of creatures, that is of ourselves, with God. A look at God’s active relationship with us, at what the creator does with and for his creatures, means reflection on God’s providence and on his government of his creation. A look at our active relationship with God, at what we as creatures do for the creator, means reflection on our ability and our need to know and glorify God.

But the question immediately arises whether it makes sense to talk about creatures doing anything for the creator; and it is answered by the very firm assertion that God has absolutely no need of his creation at all. We, all creatures, owe him everything, he has no need of us. Our need of him is total, he owes us nothing. Difficult to establish any relationship between such radical unequals, but leaving that point aside, we are faced with the next question that arises, which is why, in that case, did God create the universe. The only possible answer is because he wished to. And why did he wish to? The answer you give to overpersistent children—because he did.
Walking in the Pilgrim City
Authors: Bauerschmidt Frederick Christian
Published: July 2007

“Therefore Jesus also suffered outside the city gate in order to sanctify the people by his own blood. Let us then go to him outside the camp and bear the abuse he endured. For here we have no lasting city, but we are looking for the city that is to come”

(Heb. 13:1 2-14).

I

Blessed and cursed by a peculiar “hopelessness,” Christians claim fellowship with Christ who suffered outside the city gate, and are called to follow him into that wilderness beyond the camp, that region other than the earthly civitas, from which we might discern another city. This other city shows the structures of this world, which seem so solid and so real, to be afflicted with an ephemeral quality, a kind of unreality, so as to make them a source of anxiety rather than a resting place for our restless hearts (Lk. 12: 12-34.)- And so we exist in a state of perpetual pilgrimage to our true patria, following “Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God” (Heb. 12:2).
Theology and Sociology: the Irish Flâneur's Account
Authors: Martin David
Published: July 2007

“O senseless and foolish people, who have eyes and see not, who have ears and hear not.” That would seem to be Kieran Flanagan’s verdict on liberal theologians in The Enchantment of Sociology, though the accused are not named or their unhappy deeds documented by textual reference. As a class they are those who appear to accept the sociological mode of social scrutiny while resolutely avoiding its clear implications, whereas their traditionally-minded opponents appear to reject sociology and all its works while putting forward essentially sociological arguments. Flanagan suggests that one reason liberal theologians are so disoriented in their understanding is because their location in the secular university has made them strangers to the body of the Church. He, on the other hand, is enabled both to see and to hear because he is a stranger and an alien in the body of English society. He walks in our supermarkets and our semi- secularised cathedrals assisted by distance to envisage the true nature of the secular challenge and a possible response.

One response is to find unmarked (and unremarked) theological clues scattered in the detritus of postmodemity. At the end of the line in the trajectory of modernity we may discern again our beginnings. As sociology seeks sources of enchantment to reverse the chill closure of Weber’s “iron cage” it may also stumble upon an unexpected preparation of the gospel.

The argument is that sociology can locate metaphors of the sacred and of theology lodged in the calculative, administered and commodified culture of postmodemity. The existence of such metaphors in itself points to a deficiency and to a vacancy at its heart where “superstition dances on the grave of positivism”.
Surprised by Grace: the sociologist's dilemma
Authors: Howes Graham
Published: July 2007

I approached The Enchantment of Sociology primarily as a sociologist of religion who teaches within both the Theology and Social and Political Science Faculties of an ancient University and whose research interests include the impact of the social sciences upon religious functionaries. I am also an intermittently active Anglican. From all three perspectives I was wholly engaged—if not always wholly enchanted—by Flanagan’s quirky originality, capacity for creative polemic, and heady mixture of sociological radicalism and theological conservatism. The prose is often dense, convoluted and subtly nuanced but a close and careful reading brings with it those two rarities, sustained intellectual excitement and an urge to continue the argument beyond the academy and into pulpit and presbytery.

At one point Flanagan cites Cooley’s observation that “a true sociology is systematic autobiography” (p.50) and in this case three components of personal biography form an integral subtext to his main arguments. One is his Irish identity. This, when not being acted out in Joycean word-play (eg. “exasperating an individualism” (p.9]),Wildean aphorism (“Satanism... a folk panic invented by Evangelical fundamentalists” [p.45]) or Shavian table talk (“theologians can appeal to the Holy Ghost when all the sociologist can evoke is the ghost of Weber” [p.86]), is nucleated around both a sense of being at one remove from English society and culture, and pride in what he calls “the capricious genius of the Gaelic intellect lying beyond the pale” (p.153).
Giving the Devil his Due?: St. Anselm on Justice and Satisfaction
Authors: Miller Kevin E.
Published: July 2007

According to the Preface to St. Anselm of Canterbury's Cur Deus Homo, the work, among other things, “prov[es] by necessary reasons ... that it is impossible for any man to be saved without [Christ].” In the course of this project, Anselm must clarify what is meant by salvation— without knowing this, we could not know whether salvation could be brought only by Christ. Anselm develops an understanding of salvation involving a deliverance from the punishment that is our due because of our sin, and a correlative restoration to blessedness, which deliverance and restoration are made possible by Christ’s “satisfaction” for sin. Hence, the question of the meaning of salvation and the need for Christ as savior includes the question of the meaning of satisfaction. Now, the Cur Deus Homo has been received as one of the most significant contributions to the Church's understanding of soteriology; most recently one finds echoes of Anselm's understanding of satisfaction in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (no. 615). For this reason it is worth inquiring into what Anselm means by “satisfaction.”

It is my intention in this essay to examine especially those sections of Book I of the Cur Deus Homo which treat the relationship between salvation and our deliverance from the devil, and to propose that one finds in Anselm's understanding of satisfaction a requirement for justice even for the devil (something that Anselm's rejection of the idea that our salvation requires payment of a ransom to the devil has tended to obscure).
Newman on the Doctrine of Original Sin
Authors: Testa Michael A.
Published: July 2007

In this article I explore Newman’s theological understanding of the human person and the doctrine of original sin. The concept of sin plays a dominant role in Newman’s theological anthropology. He argues that human beings are slaves to sin and are in need of God’s mercy. He describes sin as a pestilence and disease which robs us of our spiritual life. Original sin is an indifference to the very work of God’s grace within us and as such strikes at the very core of our being.

Newman’s understanding of the doctrine of original sin admits monogenesis which passes on the fallen state of human beings to descendants of Adam. For Newman the sin of Adam and Eve was different in degree from any subsequent personal sin that we can commit as individuals. Original sin encompasses both the original sin of Adam and Eve and the state of corruption into which all subsequent generations are born. The personal sins of future generations are conditioned by the milieu of original sin and they resemble original sin insofar as they contribute to the overall sinfulness of humanity.
Development and Environment: in Dialogue with Liberation Theology
Authors: Deane‐Drummond Celia
Published: July 2007

It is only comparatively recently that there has been an attempt to examine issues in environment and development together, rather than separately. The shift in attitude by the greens came as a result of the realisation that poor nations are forced to destroy their environment in order to survive and by the developers as a result of a new awareness that policies which destroy the very basis for change are invalid. The broad agreement in the notion that both environment and development are interconnected applies regardless of the particular models of development or environment.

Liberation theology identifies with a particular model of development which arose at a time when the global and political implications of environmental issues were largely ignored. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that environmental concerns are rarely, if ever, mentioned in the classical texts. The purpose of this paper is to explore both the challenge of the environment to liberation theology and its possible contribution to an inclusive environmental theology. Some models of development are more likely to be compatible with particular environmental philosophies. What contribution, if any, can liberation theology make to the current debate?

In the post-war era the conventional wisdom of the so-called ‘modernisation’ theory held that in order to achieve development so called ‘underdeveloped’ nations must adopt a profit incentive and find ways and means for economic productivity.