bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Contraception Revised—Reflections on a Spreading Argument
Authors: Gilby Thomas
Published: July 2007

Money-dealings to the religious temper of the Middle Ages were somewhat like sex-activities to that of the nineteenth century and after: they were a pity, but could be excused. Now as the condemnation of usury by canonists and moralists was based on a reading of the rôle of money afterwards displaced by another, on the rôle of capital investment, and the first was allowed to stand even when it was no longer applied to a changed economic structure, so the traditional arguments about sex are based on a reading of its function which simply does not fit in with our changed social structure. The old premise was that the primary purpose of sex was the preservation of the race. Once upon a time this was true, but not now. There is a new situation: science has enormously diminished the dangers of a pregnancy, infant-mortality, and famine; machinery supplies for a large labour-force and State welfare for the parents’ education of their children and the children's care for them; psychology enhances values in sex formerly relegated to secondary purposes; domesticity itself demands wider spacing and the standard of living for whole nations a lessened birth-rate. Let Catholic theologians then, instead of appearing evasive by the distinction they draw between contrivance and contrivances and by allowing intercourse more certainly destined to be childless than the contraception they forbid, instead of tinkering with their old apparatus and adjusting it to ‘rhythm’ and other methods which do not touch the heart of the problem, just leave it intactfor what it is worth, like the condemnation of usury, and address themselves to afresh statement adapted to modern conditions. They are not invited to preach a new morality, but to revise their arguments which appeal to reason, and to take a more balanced view of the conclusions that have been drawn from them.
The Post‐Modern American Novel
Authors: McNamara Eugene
Published: July 2007

Since 1950, the American novel has undergone a subtle and almost unnoticed change; there has been a break in the continuity of tradition. Before World War Two, writers like Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe could be placed by cultural historians into categories, and literary antecedents could be found: Mark Twain for Hemingway, for instance, or Walt Whitman for Wolfe. But since the war, or perhaps more accurately, since the Bomb, a kind of novel has appeared which is entirely different from the main, and even from the minor or eccentric, traditions.

True, the influence of Hemingway can be seen clearly (though in a much diluted and brutalized form) in the hard-boiled detective novel, and Thomas Wolfe has had much to do with the pose and prose of Jack Kerouac and James Jones. But the most significant works of writers like Steinbeck, Dos Passos, Hemingway and Wolfe had all been completed by the end of the war.

Since then, there have been no novelists of their stature. Nonetheless, there have been some writers of promise: James Gould Cozzens (By Love Possessed), Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny), Paul Bowles (The Sheltering Sky), Frederick Buechner (A Long Day's Dying), Norman Mailer (The Naked and the Dead, The Deer Park), and J. D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye). Both Cozzens and Wouk had relatively unnoticed pre-war careers. Indeed, their post-war careers were largely due to the political climate; each of them wrote non-experimental narratives in a reactionary, conservative, narrowly authoritarian tone during the McCarthy era. Novelists like Paul Bowles and Frederick Buechner were too esoteric, strained and mannered to contribute meaningfully to a living art form.
Nuclear Deterrence by Bluff
Authors: Wharton Nicholas
Published: July 2007

Probably very few people accept the ‘political’ arguments against British participation in the nuclear deterrent system; the arguments that British unilateral nuclear disarmament will encourage an Afro-Asian movement leading to multilateral disarmament, and that, whether or not the present Western deterrent is immoral, Britain is entitled to withdraw from it and expel its bases in order to cut down her risks in the event of war actually breaking out. But the traditional teaching of the Church on war and murder suggests to many Catholics that the deterrent system involves immoral risks and intentions, and must therefore be rejected on these grounds whatever the consequences may be. Now that this traditional teaching on war and murder is being clearly set out, fewer and fewer people will be able to hold that it is inapplicable to modern conditions. Yet, given this teaching, the current arguments from risks and intentions are still not strong enough to convince the majority who support nuclear deterrence. As the Revd. A. Kenny pointed out recently, even Mr Stein’s symposium has not quite succeeded in refuting the ‘theory of deterrence by bluff’: it is not selfevident that the risks involved in nuclear deterrence are too heavy to take; and because it is very difficult to show that Western governments themselves have an immoral intention to use the deterrent weapons immorally in certain circumstances, it would have been better if the symposiasts had pointed to the fact that, if the operators of the deterrent must be ready to act on governmental orders to launch the weapons against normal cities at a moment’s notice, then it is psychologically impossible for them, at least, not to have immoral intentions.
Zoroaster
Authors: Avery P. W.
Published: July 2007

In his book, The Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism, Professor R. C. Zaehner gives as an appendix Professor W. B. Henning’s critique of the work of E. E. Herzfeld and H. S. Nyberg, taken from Henning’s Zoroaster, Politician or Witch-doctor? (Oxford, 1951). It is much to be regretted that this appendix did not include the whole of that valuable short work by Professor Henning; rather than comprising only the part of it which is least tasteful and of least interest to any but those few who are arrayed in the ranks of quarrelling Zoroastrianists. Because it is to Henning’s lucid description of who Zoroaster was, where and when he lived and what he taught that the wearied and somewhat confused reader of this much larger work by Professor Zaehner wants gratefully to turn after the ordeal he has just undergone. However Professor Zaehner does satisfy the enquirer on the matter of when Zoroaster lived: he follows Henning and dates Zoroaster as Zoroastrians have traditionally done—‘258 years before Alexander’ ,i.e., Alexander’s defeat of the Achaemenids in Iran in 330 B.C., so that Zoroaster’s date may be taken as about 588 B.C. This is important because of theories which have been advanced, that Zoroaster lived much earlier; and that he lived at all has, also, I believe been put in doubt. Therefore it is refreshing to have a Henning and a Zaehner, who know the languages and the texts relative to Zoroastrianism and the prophet’s original teaching, to tell us when he lived—not so long ago after all— and also where.
An Englishman's House
Authors: Ward Maisie
Published: July 2007

After a war, a housing shortage. This is, of course, inevitable. There is no labour to spare for building when men are all fighting or making munitions, yet weddings are even more frequent than at other times and babies continue to be born. An increase in population is not met by any increase in dwellings. On the contrary, destruction is going on all the time. Throughout England in the last war bombers were razing homes to the ground or were making them uninhabitable. Repairs had practically ceased. Anyone looking for a house after the war found dry rot and woodworm rampant; found, too, that in empty houses broken windows had gone unrepaired, no painting had been done. Again and again, a young couple cheered by seeing a cheaply priced house were told by their surveyor that to make it habitable would cost more than the purchase price.

In 1946 we were looking for a flat in London: success was deemed almost impossible, but by great good luck—and a large premium—we got what we wanted in Kensington. All around us were empty houses, mostly damaged in the blitz, surrounded by delightful gardens run wild and with boards proclaiming that they were for sale. But soon we saw at night in houses with no gas, electricity or water, the faint light of candles moving from window to window: squatters had arrived from London’s East End, claiming for themselves the right to a home. ‘Communist influence’, intoned the daily papers in solemn notes; but it did seem possible that these families, like ourselves, had only wanted a place to live in. They had neither the luck nor the cash to get it in any other way.
In the Mid‐day Sun
Authors: Campbell Duncan
Published: July 2007

I have been asked to write some account of the Church’s life in the West Indies, and how it is affected by changes taking place thick and fast in these islands. I say that I have been asked, because I would certainly not have tried to do so on my own initiative. I mean by this that I feel a priest is the one least able to see and judge the situation at such a level, and that for two reasons. The first is a purely personal, silly one. It is that one becomes so accustomed to people and things here as elsewhere that it is an effort to stand back and look at them. When I first came here, I learnt the names of streets, shops, government departments, various other places. I have to ‘think’, now. I go to them, that’s all, without thinking of their names. Not only names, but things that would strike the stranger at once, are precisely the things not noticed later on. Unbelievably so. A young woman came to ask for an interview with the Bishop who was out. I took her name, and made the appointment, and informed the Bishop later on. Not recalling the person, he asked me to describe her. He still didn’t remember, and then suddenly asked—‘You didn’t mention; was she black, or brown, or white?’—and was very understandingly amused: I confessed, I couldn’t say! I just hadn’t noticed.

It is all very unhelpful, I realize, but it is the only answer that can sometimes be given: ‘I dunno. I just live here’.
Alberto Moravia
Authors: Foster Kenelm
Published: July 2007

In one of his novels—II Conformista, I think it was—Moravia makes the hero reflect that everything can be understood except existence. The observation is pointed enough to start one reflecting on this interesting and influential writer; it offers, I think, a clue, slight at first glance but likely to repay attention, to Moravia’s mind and habits of thought and even, implicitly, to the way he poses and attempts to answer the fundamental moral question: what is the right discoverable term of human desires?

To say that everything except existence is intelligible sounds like a way of declaring oneself an intellectual, in the sense of one who has a large confidence in reason; but also, at bottom, an intellectual agnostic, for the fact of existence itself is declared unintelligible. But let us note, first, the rationalistic temper. Moravia is a man who tends to place knowledge above all other values. In a recent interview arranged by a popular weekly, on being questioned about the erotic stress in his work, he came out with this: ‘sex is above all a means to knowledge’; and it is obvious from Moravia’s novels that the knowledge he speaks of here presupposes, besides immediate experience, a great deal of rational analysis. This is not to say that the many pages of explicitly reflective analysis that occur in his novels are always convincing, either in themselves or in their context: the prostitute Adriana’s reflexions in La romana (The Woman of Rome) offer easy game to the critic in this latter respect; but simply that Moravia’s is the sort of mind that does not rest until it has distinguished every experience into its components and so gained lucid rational control—or what he takes to be such—over each aspect and phase of life. At his best Moravia is certainly a formidable analyst of character, mood and situation.
Christian Action in World Crisis
Authors: Merton Thomas
Published: July 2007

A death struggle can also be a struggle for life, a new birth. Perhaps the present crisis is the birth agony of a new world. Let us hope that it is. No one can dare to predict what is about to be born of our confusion, our frenzy, our apocalyptic madness. Certainly the old order is changing, but we do not know what is to come. All we know is that we see the many-crowned and many-headed monsters rising on all sides out of the deep, from the ocean of our own hidden and collective self. We do not understand them, and wecannot. We panic at the very sight of their iridescent scales, their jaws that flame with nuclear fire. But they pursue us relentlessly, even into absurd little caves fitted out with battery radios and hand-operated blowers. We find no security even in the spiritual cave of forgetfulness, the anaesthesia of the human mind that finally shuts out an unbearable truth, and goes about the business of life in torpor and stoical indifference.

And yet the monsters do not have to come to life. They are not yet fully objective like the world around us. They do not have the substance which is given to things by the creative power of God: they are the spiritual emanations of our own sick and sinful being. They exist in and by us. They are from us. They cannot exist without us. They are our illusions. They are nightmares which our incredible technological skill can all too easily actualize. But they are also dreams from which we can awaken before it is too late. They are dreams which we can still, perhaps, choose not to dream.
Patriarch of the West and Supreme Pontiff
Authors: Dumont C. J.
Published: July 2007

The Orthodox Churches are unanimous in their hostility to the existence of Catholic Churches of Byzantine rite. They fear that Catholicism seen within the framework of the rite that they know must needs be more attractive to Orthodox people than when seen within the framework of the unfamiliar Latin rite. But this tactical objection is not the only one. Behind it lies a deeper conviction, two convictions in fact.

First, there is the conviction that it is the Orthodox Churches, and not the Roman Church, that have remained wholly and completely faithful to Christ’s teaching and to the tradition of the Apostles and the primitive Church. This is so much so that in Orthodox eyes to make an act of adhesion to the Roman communion is to give up something of the revealed faith and to cut oneself off from the true Church founded by our Lord Jesus Christ. We believe this conviction is mistaken, and we indeed have good reasons for doing so. But we must recognize that it is a conviction that governs the Orthodox attitude.

The other conviction is connected with the first one. It is that the Roman Church is not and cannot be anything but the patriarchate of the West, whose head is the bishop of Rome; she is therefore of her very nature, as it were by definition, limited to the Churches of the Latin rite.
A Survey of New Testament Studies‐II. The Influence of Environment on New Testament Thought
Authors: Bourke Joseph
Published: July 2007

It may be useful to return to our initial picture of a primitive community of believers, each with his gaze steadfastly fixed upon ‘the Man on the other side of Easter Sunday morning’, the Man whom we can no longer see except through their eyes. How, the critics ask, can we be sure that they see him truly—that their account of his words and deeds is correct? It was an account formulated by naive and credulous minds, minds already pre-conditioned by the fever of Messianic excitement which marked the closing years of the pre-Christian era, minds that were exposed, consciously or unconsciously, to a whole range of external religious influences, among which those of the Old Testament and rabbinic Judaism would only have been the first.

Within the fold of Judaism itself not only the more orthodox traditions of Rabbinical interpretation have to be taken into account, but the possible influence of enthusiast movements such as Essenism (as attested by the Qumrân writings) and related baptist movements. The outstanding characteristic of these movements is an intense and eager expectation of a personal and apocalyptic advent of God in judgment in the near future, and an insistence on penance and purification in preparation for this event. ‘Do penance for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!’ is one of the key sayings recorded of Jesus. How far, the critics ask, was it influenced by these ideas? How far was the original message amplified and embellished in terms of them by his followers?
A Policy for Economic Growth
Authors: Jackson J. M.
Published: July 2007

The discussion of the Government’s incomes policy has overshadowed discussion of the setting up of the National Economic Development Council. This is hardly surprising. Every individual is not only very concerned with what goes into his pay packet, he is also fully aware of what is happening to it. Economic growth, inflation and a host of other factors, may have just as great a bearing on his standard of living as the amount of cash he actually takes home, but, for all that, it is a less obvious bearing. Nevertheless, the question of economic growth is a vital one for each individual, and for the community as a whole. Moreover, it is a question that is intimately connected with the subject of incomes policy. In the present article, economic growth will be considered under three headings. The first is the desirability of economic growth; the second, the facts which account for slow or rapid growth; and thirdly, the possibility of framing a policy for more rapid growth in Britain.

Since the war, Britain has been faced with the problem of inflation. During the war, inflation occurred because of the very heavy Government spending on war materials, a restricted supply of civilian goods for consumption, and a reluctance to raise taxation to the level where it would have left civilians with just enough money to buy the greatly restricted supply of civilian goods available. Many economists thought that the high level of personal savings (which did much to keep inflation from getting entirely out of hand) would prove a useful defence against any post-war depression.
The Artist and God
Authors: Donnelly Dorothy
Published: July 2007

A man is an animal with a sun inside him. That there is such an anima in the animal is clear from evidence, early and late. The cave paintings stand witness to its creative force. Plotinus recognized as the birthright of all an inner ‘sunlike’ eye; Sir Thomas Browne said that ‘we live by an invisible sun within us;’ and Picasso has claimed that he has a sun in his belly.

Artists strikingly testify to this signet of humanity because as ‘makers’ they leave in the world enduring traces of its radiant power. Man is a creative creature. (I use the term, to ‘create’, as it is commonly applied to the arts.) As artist he is privileged to bring new things into existence, endowing substance with singular and personal form. ‘Seen’ into existence by one man, they may be seen thereafter by all.

This anonymous gift of sun, outside the strictly animal order and indicating an extra dimension, generates questions. Where did it come from? Why is it there?

Speculation, unless of the philosophical variety that provides in itself the pleasure and the end, is not fashionable. The present moment, transient and isolate, provides sufficient stuff to engage all our attention. The artist concentrates on the empirical problem of seeing that the fabulous goose in his possession continues to lay the golden eggs. Though he may suffer ‘the disinclination of the sophisticated mind’ (de Lubac) to consider the source of his gift, the question is not extraneous. It is a question of life and death, like ‘Who am I?’ and ‘What am I doing here?’ By pressure of necessity it asks itself at unexpected moments. It has the vitality of a hydra; cut off one head and it confronts you with another.
Catholic Ecumenism 1962
Authors: St John Henry
Published: July 2007

The year 1962 has seen a remarkable step forward here in England in the recognition of ‘unity’ or ‘reunion’ work as ‘a particular charge and duty of the Church’; an ‘excellent work’, which ‘should daily assume a more significant place within the Church’s universal pastoral care’. In these words the Instruction of the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office on the Ecumenical Movement describes the place of Catholic Ecumenism in the Church’s apostolate. This important Papal document was published in December 1949. It was addressed to Local Ordinaries, the Bishops of the Church, and its first concern was to remind them that Bishops, whom the Holy Ghost has placed to rule the Church of God, ought to make this ‘reunion’ work a special object of their care and attention. They must not only use great diligence in keeping it under effective supervision, they must also give it prudent encouragement and direction, with the twofold purpose of assisting those who are in search of truth and the true Church, and of shielding the faithful from the dangers which so easily accompany the progress of this movement.

To implement this directive of the Holy See more effectively the hierarchy of England and Wales appointed from among their number, a year ago, a committee for Unity to represent them in the guidance and promotion of unity work. The President of this committee is Archbishop Heenan of Liverpool, and he and his fellow bishops who are members of it have lost no time in getting to work on their important task. It is this that is responsible for the considerable movement forward of Catholic Ecumenism in England which this year is witnessing. Several meetings have been organized, with the committee’s sanction, of Anglican and Catholic scholars, for the discussion of ecumenical questions at a deep theological level.
Gertrud von le Fort
Authors: Hilton I.
Published: July 2007

The celebration of the eighty-fifth birthday last October in Oberst- dorff, Bavaria, of Gertrud von le Fort passed off practically without comment in this country. Whilst the name of this Catholic authoress may not be unknown to the English public (the best known of her works, Die Letzte am Schafott, was the source of an opera by Poulenc performed at Covent Garden in 1958, and also of a Georges Bemanos scripted film produced in 1960), it would be true to say that much of her work remains literally a closed book—an unfortunate state of affairs, since her writings are concerned with many of the themes of more internationally celebrated literary figures such as Mauriac or our own Graham Greene.

Of Huguenot descent, Gertrud von le Fort was born in 1876 in Minden, Westphalia, and can trace a rich family history back to the times of the Reformation (three Le Forts fought as officers of Louis XVI in the Tuilleries, whilst the most famous of her ancestors, Francois le Fort had been admiral and companion to Peter the Great). From her father, a Prussian army officer, comes her love of history, plus a knowledge of military life, which stands her in good stead, for example, in her Die Magdeburgische Hochzeit, whilst her interest in religion stems from her mother, a devout Protestant believer. It was these subjects, History and Religion, that she proceeded to study at the universities of Heidelberg and Berlin, coming at the former under the guidance of the learned philosopher, Ernst Troeltsch; to him she is indebted for showing her the place of history as a basis for her work.
Preventing Family Breakdown
Authors: Timms Noel
Published: July 2007

’ “What’s the use of preventing a man from stumbling when he’s on a sinking ship ?”

“Because if he breaks his ankle he won’t be able to swim”, I suggested.

“But why try to save him from breaking his ankle if you can try to save him from losing his life?”

“Because I know how to do the former but not the latter”, I told him rather testily’.

The Net, by Iris Murdoch, p. 112.

This appears an unambiguous title; we talk frequently, both about ‘prevention’ and ‘family breakdown’. Yet if we reflect on each of these terms there are good reasons for doubt and uncertainty. Does the death of a father constitute the breakdown (or break-up?) of a family? Has a family in which the eldest child is unloved by mother and overprotected by father broken down? Or a family from which the mother is away in mental hospital, possibly for a short time? In brief do we use the term to refer to the lack of the physical wholeness of a family or to a failure in one of the essential functions of the family? If we refer to both these features at the same time it is likely that the term is being stretched beyond its usefulness.

If we turn to the other term in the title, prevention, the lack of clarity is much more in evidence. The idea of prevention has a long history as far as public provision for social welfare is concerned. It is possible to observe at least three stages in the development of this idea. Firstly, it was considered that people should be prevented from recourse to dependence on such social provision as existed by the availability early in life of certain guiding influences. Thus, education was seen ‘as one of the most important means of eradicating the germs of pauperism for the rising generation and of securing in the minds and morals of the people the best protection for the institutions of society’.
The Catholic Family as a Minority Group
Authors: Ward Conor
Published: July 2007

The sociological writing most relevant to the theme of a conference on ‘The Catholic Family and its Needs’, is that concerned with the position of minority groups and with social change. The minority group with which we are concerned is a social or cultural minority, that is to say, it is a minority distinguished from the majority by the fact that it holds, as a group, distinctive values, attitudes and ideals!

The social scientists who first studied minority groups of that kind concluded rather hastily that there were only two possibilities open to such a minority in the contemporary world—either existence as a segregated closed group, or complete absorption and assimilation to the majority. It has, however, been shown by subsequent research that this was a false dichotomy. As a matter of fact, valid dichotomies are rare in the social sphere, and one should adopt a sceptical attitude to those which are proposed. These dichotomies generally derive from over-emphasis on the determining impact of social forces and they are not usually in accord with a Catholic approach to empirical study of social life, which, when known, can be accepted or rejected, changed or controlled, through the use of the human understanding, and the power of the grace of God. The Catholic in a position of social responsibility should avoid adding to the classical danger of being impaled on the horns of a dilemma the new peril of being split by a false dichotomy. And so it is with regard to minorities—in addition to ‘segregation’ and ‘assimilation’ there is the further possibility of ‘limited integration’.
Two Roseveare Incidents
Authors: Synnott Finbar
Published: July 2007

A visitor from South Africa to England is naturally asked many questions, and is equally naturally interested in any comments or reports of African and South African matters in the British press. Two incidents connected with the name of Bishop Roseveare of Ghana last August appear to me very significant.

The first of these is that the Daily Mail front page comment, discussing the expulsion of Bishop Roseveare from Ghana, went on to suggest that it is a pity there were not Ghanaian clergy trained and in positions of sufficient responsibility to make the statement needed. In other words, while someone had to point out to the Ghanaians that some of them were giving quasi-religious cultus to a human being, Dr Nkrumah, it would be far easier for the Ghana administration to hear this from a Ghanaian Bishop. It might indeed be almost impossible for them to accept it from a white man, a member of the colonial power from whose unjust domination (as they see it), they have just been liberated. We ought to hear truth and justice from anybody, and to fail to do so is flatly wrong. But there is the more excuse for the sin or failure, or whatever one is to call it, if the person who tells us the truth appears in some way himself identified with injustice. Not so very long ago a Pan-African Congress in West Africa passed a resolution to the effect that the white-organized Churches had been identified with the powers of exploitation. To expect Africans wholly to dissociate an individual from his people, a truth from the man expressing it, is to expect much.
Literary Criticism and Humanist Morality
Authors: Bergonzi Bernard
Published: July 2007

Although it is now over a year since the Lady Chatterley trial took place, the issues it raised continue to be absorbing for anyone interested in the relation between literature and morality. And only now, perhaps, when the angry dismay of those who disapproved of the verdict and the somewhat shrill jubilation of those who welcomed it have both subsided, can one look at those issues in a dispassionate spirit. So I make no apology for opening this paper with a consideration of some key aspects of the trial, before I pass on to other and more general questions. Reading through the Penguin volume, The Trial of Lady Chatterley, which contains a transcript of most of the proceedings, one is struck by the frequency with which the defence witnesses came into collision with the judge or prosecuting counsel over the fundamental meanings of words. Mr Richard Hoggart, for instance, puzzled and irritated the prosecuting counsel by insisting on giving to the word ‘puritanical’ its full historical significance; while Mrs Joan Bennett and the learned judge found themselves quite comically at cross-purposes about what they meant by ‘marriage’. Another witness, Mr Raymond Williams, has since suggested that these clashes were inevitable when literary and legal minds had to meet on ground chosen by the latter; and no doubt he is right in finding them unedifying. Nevertheless, certain of these disagreements are, I think, fruitful if properly considered, and this is particularly true of the profound and sustained disagreement about the significance of the word ‘moral’, which formed a continuous undercurrent to the trial, intermittently manifesting itself in the witnesses’ evidence, and the speeches by counsel and the judge. This disagreement became more overt in the public controversy that followed the trial, notably in the correspondence columns of The Times.
North American: I—Composition of Place
Authors: Evans Illtud
Published: July 2007

The English visitor, returning from America, seems rarely to have found much to praise. Dickens, Trollope, Kipling—to mention only the Victorian big guns—cast a dyspeptic glance on the continent and found it wanting. ‘Hell with the lid off’, was Dickens’ judgment on Pittsburgh, and Kipling found little sign of gracious living in New York.

Travellers, it is true, can always find some evidence to confirm their own prejudices, and the Americans—in this, as in all else, a generous people—are liberal in providing it. Thus, innumerable films have prepared one for the usual Mid West town, but it is still a surprise to see it articulated, to realize that the image is not a Hollywood set inspired by a reading of Sinclair Lewis. A sort of Slough extending to infinity: it can underline the story of the man arriving at an American airport late at night, who, having booked in at the universal convention hotel, had to telephone room service in the morning to discover where he was. But generalizations of this sort are singularly unfaithful to the essential American fact. The Main Street snapshot, with its drive-in cinema and its ten-cent store, is as misleading as the British Tourist Board’s advertisements suggesting that England is all cottages with roses round the door.
The Kongo Conception of the World
Authors: Kisanga S. N.
Published: July 2007

One of the most remarkable features of the Church’s life today is its persistent and widespread effort to return to the springs of that life. In every domain—biblical, liturgical, catechetical—there is a desire to rediscover the sources in their freshness, to re-animate the Church with the primitive vitality, and power which enabled it to reach out all over the world. So far as biblical studies go, this effort finds one concrete expression in archaeological and anthopological research into the history of the Jewish people. The object of this research, as Fr Joseph Bourke, o.p., suggested in his recent ‘Survey of Old Testament Studies’ in this review, is to reconstruct the ‘living context’ in which the Old Testament traditions were originally formulated.

It is remarkable to find that this concern for the revival of the past also exists in the African continent. Anthopologists in Africa are more and more interested in the study of African culture, and particularly African religion and ritual, not in order to reject them but to re-discover virgin Africa. Seized by the passion for négritude, this movement to renew negro-African culture, occurs just at the moment when Africa is opening out into modern life, and seeks to advance but realizes it cannot do so without returning to the authentic roots of its history.
The Strange Ethics of the Organization Man
Authors: Kennedy William F.
Published: July 2007

The moral sensibilities of Americans have received many shocks in recent years on disclosures of misbehaviour in the worlds of entertainment, labour, and government. The discovery that ethical practices were no better in some of the most highly regarded of the large corporations gave public opinion a far heavier jolt. In February 1961 Judge Ganey, in the Federal court at Philadelphia, pronounced sentence on the leading corporations in the electrical manufacturing industry and their executives found guilty of violating the antitrust laws. He imposed fines totalling $1,924,500 and handed down seven jail sentences and twenty-four suspended jail sentences. Never before had so many highly placed business executives been marched off to jail. By the usual standards they were good men, most of them family men, pillars of church and community, who had won success by years of hard work. Among those who went to jail was George Burens, father of a family of four children, whose career to this point had been another Horatio Alger story. He had risen to a vice presidency in the General Electric Company with annual compensation of $127,000 from his first position with the company at age fifteen as a stockroom boy paid 33 cents an hour.

Corporate failure, though less dramatic than individual failure, was perhaps more unexpected. Just a few months before the grand jury began its investigations, the chairman of the board of General Electric had testified before the Kefauver subcommittee that his company was pursuing a vigorous policy of compliance with the laws and quoted a distinguished jurist who ranked General Electric as the No.
Five Years of Space
Authors: Porter Neil
Published: July 2007

On October the 4th, 1957, the world was startled by the announcement that the Russians had put a satellite, Sputnik I, successfully into orbit. The launching, coupled with the relatively large size of the satellite, caused widespread alarm in the United States. The Americans had already announced their intention of launching a number of small satellites as part of their contribution to the International Geophysical Year, which began in July 1957. Practically the only hint that the Russians intended anything similar was given by an article in a Soviet magazine for Radio amateurs, which in July 1957 asked enthusiasts to prepare receiving systems in the 20 and 40 Megacycle Bands for satellite reception, laid down the form in which observations should be taken, and gave a telegraphic address, Moskva-Sputnik, to which they should be sent. This article passed unnoticed in the West.

Five years later, with more than too successful launchings of satellites and space probes, it is possible to attempt some assessment of the scientific contribution made by these experiments. In some fields it has been very significant, in others disappointingly small, serving mainly to confirm what had already been inferred by indirect methods. The number of spectacular discoveries has been very small indeed.

Sputnik I was a sphere, about 23 inches across, and weighing 184 lbs. Its rocket carrier, weighing four tons, went into the same orbit. It carried two radio transmitters of fairly high power, which continued to transmit for about three weeks. As far as is known, it had no scientific instruments apart from those which monitored conditions inside the satellite, and the only scientific publications resulting from this flight have been those concerned with the satellite path, and the effects of atmospheric drag. Sputnik II, which went into orbit on November 3rd, was heavier and more sophisticated.
Living and Partly Living
Authors: Butcher Marryvonne
Published: July 2007

The sixth London Film Festival was held as usual in the National Film Theatre at the end of last October, but on a wet day it looked and felt more like the Western Front in 1916 than the South Bank in 1962. The demolition around the Royal Festival Hall had to be seen - and heard - to be believed. Nothing, however, could damp or deafen the enthusiasm of the crowds who wished to see the films so briefly available to them; during the fifteen days of the Festival just over twenty-one thousand people paid to see the thirty feature films and fifty shorts presented in the framework of the fortnight, and a full house stayed the whole course of an all-night show on the first Friday. This was a marathon indeed: four feature films - Bunuel’s Exterminating Angel, Tony Richardson’s Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, Gregoretti’s I Nuovi Angeli and Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water - were shown between 11.30 p.m. and 8.15 a.m. the next morning, with intervals for hot soup and other refreshments; one can well beheve they were needed.

Of the films new to me which I was able to see during the festival two stood out head and shoulders above the rest, though I am ready to be persuaded that they might have had close competition from two which I did not catch - Commare Seca and Les Oliviers de la Justice: but my two winners were the Polish Knife in the Water and the Italian II Mare. No one who saw Two Men and a Wardrobe is likely to have forgotten it; this brilliant, imaginative and enigmatic short was made by Roman Polanski as a technical exercize while he was still a student at the Lodz state film school.
Christianity's Vocation in the Nuclear Age
Authors: Dewart Leslie
Published: July 2007

If the question whether it is better to be red than dead or vice versa is stultifying, the reason is not so much that it poses a false alternative as that it masks what may be the true nature of the critical problem that mankind, and Christians specifically, face at the present moment of man’s time. When the atomic bomb was dropped over Hiroshima, the magnitude of the explosive power or the extent of personal and property damage did not materially change the nature of modem war, though its magnitude and that of even more powerful, later weapons has served to bring to consciousness the qualitative difference between modem and traditional war. Of course, no one will argue that it makes no difference whether to the arsenals of World War II we add the refinements of fusion warheads and ballistic missiles, not to speak of the bacteriological and chemical weapons to which we pay little attention in our fascination with the quantity of heat liberated by a nuclear firestorm. But one could become so entranced with the terrors of nuclear war that one might spend all one’s efforts in the de-nuclearization of war; just as one could become so pragmatic about legitimate spiritual values that one might squander all one’s conscience in the justification of an unjustifiable war. I would suggest, against both, that nuclear weapons are the effect of nuclear war and, in sum, that nuclear war is not evil because it is nuclear but, on the contrary, that nuclear war is nuclear because it is evil in the first place.

Less epigrammatically, the point is that we might consider very seriously whether any modern war can be just. One may grant that, in principle, defensive war can be justified and yet question whether any total war, nuclear or conventional, can be but essentially offensive.
African Opinion
Authors: Kisanga S. N.
Published: July 2007

It is a difficult task to attempt a survey of the Congo, because in doing so, one can easily make mistakes. This is due to several different factors, as the natural condition of the country, the speed with which the history of the Congo is building up, the originality of the Congolese experience, and the fact that everybody wants to deal with the Congolese problem.

The area of the Congo is 905,400 square miles. In such a big country whose population is estimated at about 14,000,000, towns and important villages are but scattered islands in the deep forest and the exuberant grass of the savannah. Thus, one can hardly pretend to speak competently about everything which is going on throughout the country. Besides, there are so many contradictions among reports and eye witnesses that one must reflect carefully and sift newspaper reports and radio-messages. Misleading tales, issued from personal interest or wrong interpretation of the facts, lead people to doubt even the value of the objective reports which he has succeeded in distinguishing from wrong ones.

In the Congo, matters are developing so fast, and the evidence is so shifting that people find it difficult to follow the events and give a sane judgement. Moreover, the political life of the Congo is so new and original that one scarcely knows where it is leading to. And the fact that everybody deals with the Congolese problem and each wants to solve it according to his own point of view, contributes no less to create confusion of mind. In spite of these difficulties, I would like to outline some few points of our drama, as I have seen it myself, or have heard from various people some of whom have been victims or actors in the game.

In the Congolese crisis, the Catholic Church was the organism which presented most stability, and whose European members resisted better the panic of July 1960.
‘Socialization’ in Mater et Magistra
Authors: Purnell Gerard
Published: July 2007

The term ‘socialization’ in Mater et Magistra has given rise to some misunderstanding and the uses of the word can be profitably examined so that the particular sense it has in the encyclical may be better appreciated.

In general, one can distinguish several uses of the word: (i) its broader sense in Mater et Magistra; (2) a limited, economic sense used by French writers to signify the way in which property and the firm are no longer isolated but are interdependent; (3) it can be used in a positive sense as implying something morally desirable, the idea of an institution being made responsible to society so that it fulfils a task of service to the community; (4) it can be used in a variety of different ways connected with public ownership; (5) it can be used in an unfavourable sense particularly by Americans e.g. ‘socialization of agriculture’, used as another term for collectivization, or ‘socialized medicine’; (6) in sociology the term ‘socialization’ describes the way in which a child acquires habits and is ‘conditioned’ through its upbringing.

The suggestion that John XXIII in this section of the encyclical has in some way approved the welfare state should be dismissed (whether paragraph 136 gives any approval of the idea of the welfare state is a different matter). The section on socialization (paras 59 to 67) immediately follows the section on subsidiary function in which the Pope has emphasized the importance of a man’s right to be primarily responsible for his own upkeep and that of his family (para 55). The section on socialization makes no direct reference to industry so that socialization in the public ownership sense of the term is not intended.
Dante's Indirection
Authors: Poole Roger
Published: July 2007

‘What then does it mean, “to deceive”? It means that one does not begin directly with the matter one wants to communicate, but begins by accepting the other man’s illusion as good money... nor does one begin thus: I am a Christian, and you are living in purely aesthetic categories. No, one begins thus: Let us talk about aesthetics. The deception consists in the fact that one talks thus merely to get to the religious theme.’ (S. Kierkegaard, Point of View.)

In all the wealth presented to us in Dante’s Divine Comedy nothing is so rich as the intention of the whole, and the methods of presentation and communication which Dante uses to body forth this intention. I want to draw out two themes, the first concerned with the medieval device of the Dreamer himself, the second with what might be called an existential concern for meaning, which realizes itself in Dante’s use of categories.

I want to talk in terms of Soren Kierkegaard, an analogy which at first may seem strange, but, seen in relation to his ‘indirect’ works and his Christian concern, like Dante’s, ‘by indirections to fmd directions out’, the analogy will I think throw light on those strange moments (such as the famous faint in Inferno, 5) when we see Dante himself - the figure of the Dreamer - in all his medieval clarity.

The tension between form and meaning can be pulled so tight, that the excitement of our engagement in the poem forces a reaction upon us before we have a moment to decide consciously what, by our ordinary moral standards and preconceptions, our attitude should be. Before we have, as it were, been tipped the wink by Dante as to what our reaction to Francesca’s story should be, we see him prostrate on the ground in a faint of sheer human pity. If we are honest we will admit that we have been taken unawares.
Ecumenical Studies
Authors: St John Henry
Published: July 2007

A Catholic, whose interest in the movement for Christian unity urges him to make ecumenical contacts with other Christians amongst whom he lives, will find himself, at least in town and city areas, confronted by Presbyterians, by Methodists, Congregationalists and Baptists, and with a certain dominance of prestige by Anglicans. For his encounter a Catholic ecumenist will want to know about some if not all of these differing religious bodies; what sort of people are they, what divides them from each other, on what are they agreed? He will probably need knowledge to supplement his vague ideas of their history and how they came into being. He will be interested in their antecedent presuppositions, but still more in what are their aspirations, hopes, doubts and fears today concerning the prospect of future unity; its possibility, the changes it would involve and its dangers.

The Star Books on Reunion a series of six inexpensive paperbacks on unity as Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists, Congregationalists, Baptists and Roman Catholics see it, contains the substance of this information in accessible and readable form. It is a pity that a seventh volume, on the Eastern Orthodox, was not included in the series, for full understanding of unity problems, especially the theological ones, requires the witness of these ancient churches. The authors are well chosen, highly qualified, theologically and pastorally, to represent the position of their respective communions. All of them share common ground in their conviction of the paramount importance of the ecumenical approach between Christians.