bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Church's Option in Hull
Authors: Doyle Patrick J.
Published: July 2007

Let us not forget that the Son of Man had nowhere to lay his head: that Jesus, the Father of the Poor, had less than the foxes with their holes; and always remember that Jesus worked among the lepers, the prostitutes, the sinners, the outcasts. Yes, Jesus caused scandal by his work among those marginalised by society.

Jesus too was called ‘the Nazarene’: ‘Jesus the provincial’; He could just as easily have been Jesus from Middlesbrough, or Jesus from Hull. If Jesus walked the face of the earth today, would He weep again over the city? Over Hull or Middlesbrough? How would He react to such contemporary problems as Aids, the apparent breakdown of family life, the scourge of unemployment, the plight of the homeless, and the tragedy of young drug addicts? Of one thing we can be sure, if he was to visit Hull, he would be on our outer estates of Bransholme, Orchard Park and North Hull—and he would react. But this, of course, begs the question.

Jesus is still with us; by his own promise he is with the Church, and in his own words he is in our fellow men and women. ‘Whenever you do it to the least of my brethren you do it to me.’
Lonergan's Method and the Dummett‐Lash Dispute
Authors: Fitzpatrick Joseph
Published: July 2007

Not the least of the things that are interesting about the vigorous dispute between Professor Michael Dummett and Professor Nicholas Lash in the October and December 1987 issues of New Blackfriars is that it provides an excellent opportunity for testing the practical relevance of Bernard Lonergan’s much-discussed method for theology. The dispute is at heart a dispute about the appropriate way of doing theology, at least within the Roman Catholic church, and here is a chance for seeing how Lonergan helps us to discern the flaws (and the strong points too). But first of all quite a lot must be said about that method of Lonergan’s, and this will fill two-thirds of this article. Lonergan may well be the theologian who will best assist us in delivering Christian theology safely into the twenty- first century, and beyond. His thinking bears the stamp of the Catholic trust in the compatibility of reason and faith, of science and religion, of the God of philosophy and the God of revelation, while at the same time the foundational role he allocates to conversion accords with one of Protestantism’s basic religious insights. And, in a world in which religious fundamentalism holds such sway, he also insists on the indispensability for theological inquiry and doctrinal enrichment of objective research and scientific rigour. Nevertheless, in Lonergan’s writings it is at times difficult to see the wood for the trees. So here is an impressionistic account of the wood.
J.L. Austin and the Book of Jonah
Authors: Eagleton Terry
Published: July 2007

The surrealist farce known as the Book of Jonah, surely the one consciously witty book in the Bible, is easily summarised. God commands Jonah to go and cry doom on Nineveh, a city whose viciousness has just come to his attention, but Jonah doesn’t reckon much to this mission and takes off instead for Tarshish. A divinely engineered storm threatens his ship, and he requests the crew with remarkable sang froid to pitch him overboard. God sends a fish to swallow Jonah up and spew him out again three days later, whereupon Jonah does manage to get himself to Nineveh and wanders the city proclaiming imminent catastrophe. Unusually enough, the inhabitants of the city, prodded a bit by their king, take Jonah’s prophecy to heart and repent, which infuriates Jonah so much that he goes and sulks outside the city hoping to die. God fools around with him briefly, sending a plant to shade him, then a worm to devour the plant, then a sultry wind to make him faint from heat, and finally treats him to a short homily about divine mercy.

Why was Jonah so reluctant to go to Nineveh in the first place? Perhaps because hectoring a seedy bunch of strangers about their vices isn’t the best guarantee of a long life. But in the storm scene Jonah shows scant regard for his own safety, and indeed by the end of the text is betraying a powerful death wish. The fact is that he refused to obey God because he thought there was no point, and tells God as much after he has spared Nineveh.
Religious Experience and the existence of God
Authors: Gross Selwyn
Published: July 2007

Philosphers of religion sometimes appeal to religious experiences as evidence for the existence of God. To take one notable and philosophically sophisticated example, Professor Swinburne argues that religious experience constitutes good C-inductive ground for belief in the existence of God; and that the contribution of the argument from religious experience to the ensemble of arguments for the existence of God as a whole makes the ensemble a good P-inductive rather than just a C-inductive argument. This is a substantial claim: a C-inductive argument merely adds to the probability of some claim, without making it more probable than not. A P-inductive argument, by contrast, establishes that the probability of the claim it defends is greater than fifty percent.

Not all religious experience is covered by Swinburne’s claim. Non-theistic experiences and theistic experiences not claiming to be of God are excluded from this discussion. This article will deal with unequivocal claims to have had experience of God, not with weaker claims (to have had an experience as of God touching one, for example). Weaker claims might be indefeasible, but offer little joy for the theist. Univocal claims, by contrast, are non-trivially true if true at all.

What marks an experience as an experience of God? H.P. Owen’s definition of God as ‘the Creator, who is infinite, self-existent, incorporeal, eternal, immutable, impassible, simple, perfect, omniscient and omnipotent’ is useful in answering this question. A claim to have had an experience of an infinite, eternal, omniscient and omnipotent being, say, is a claim to have had an experience of God: here, a sufficient number of attributes secures the identification.
Altruism's Evolution
Authors: Reiss Michael J.
Published: July 2007

What can recent theories in evolutionary biology about the problem of altruism contribute to a Christian perspective on the nature of humanity?

Altruism is considered a ‘problem’ because Darwin’s theory of natural selection leads us to expect all organisms, including humans, to be selfish. According to the theory of natural selection those traits which we expect to see in the natural world are the ones which have conferred on their bearers the greatest reproductive success. As altruism means the giving of aid, a preliminary reading of Darwinism suggests that altruism poses a challenge to the whole theory of adaptation by natural selection. Sociobiology has a great deal to say about the evolution of altruism in non-humans. How far does the study of altruism in non-humans help us to understand altruism in us?

Sociobiological theories for the evolution of altruism Sociobiology, the systematic study of the biological basis of all social behaviour, dates as a named discipline from only 1975, when E.O. Wilson’s now much-discussed book, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, was published. As altruism manifestly requires social behaviour—an organism cannot be altruistic on its own!—theories for the evolution of altruism lie at the centre of sociobiology.

The first biological explanation for altruism was, however, proposed by none other than Darwin himself. Having developed the theory of natural selection, Darwin went on to consider how the sterile castes in many social insects could have evolved. He realised that it might be argued that such castes could not have evolved by natural selection because the bearers of traits associated with sterility leave, by definition, no offspring, but he proposed that sterility in such circumstances could evolve by a process he termed ‘family selection’.
A Symbolic Theology
Authors: Griffiths Bede
Published: July 2007

Professor Michael Dummett, in the article in New Blackfriars which has stirred up so much controversy, ‘A Remarkable Consensus’ (October 1987, pp. 424—431), seems to have taken as a criterion of Catholic faith what Avery Dulles, calls in his book Models of Revelation a propositional model of revelation. Professor Dummett is a distinguished logician. No doubt, then, he is accustomed to think of abstract logical thought as a norm of human discourse. But, if it is religious discourse we are considering, this is an assumption which can be extremely misleading. As Avery Dulles says, it tends to ‘reduce meaning and intelligibility to the narrow confines of conceptual logic’. In place of this Dulles suggests a symbolic model of revelation, which seems to me to give much more meaning to faith and to present a much more convincing model of the Church.

The proposition which Professor Dummett proposes as fundamental to a Catholic understanding of the Church, that ‘it is enjoined on us, whatever the provocation, never to take any step to disrupt the unity of the Church’ (p. 424), seems particularly unsatisfactory. In the first place, as Dummett acknowledges in regard to the schism between the Eastern and the Western Church, there is the problem of who was responsible for the split. And there is the further problem, that Dummett thinks that the Protestant Reformers ‘did not even pretend to form a rival Catholic Church’ (p. 425).

This, however, is a minor point. It is the whole idea of a propositional model of revelation which needs to be questioned—even at the risk of repeating here much that is familiar.
The Value of Literature: I—Chaucer's language of forgiveness
Authors: Finn Richard
Published: July 2007

It would seem that literature these days is increasingly a matter of taste. We are helped, not to learn and practise discrimination between the good and the bad, but to buy and consume according to our ‘special interest’. We ask of a play or novel, not whether it will sharpen our understanding, nor whether it may damage our sensibilities, but that it should appeal. It has not always been so. When Chaucer chose to take his leave of the reader at the end of the Canterbury Tales with a formal apology—though no mere formality—for the ‘translacions and enditynges of worldly vanitees’ it was precisely their appeal for which he sought to make amends.

The recognition of the power of stories to shape character, and to shape language, has led to the Tradition, a canon judged worthy of study and constitutive of our culture. That Tradition is now under attack. Where it has not already been dismissed as irrelevant, it is rejected as ‘elitist’, a snub too hastily dismissive of Leavis’ wish for ‘an English School ... designed for an elite’ Literature, has even been deemed the creation of a powerful, wicked literary institution in which the universities are prime movers. Terry Eagleton has argued in his book Literary Theory that

literary criticism cannot justify its self-limiting to certain works by an appeal to their ‘value’ (because) that criticism is part of a literary institution which constitutes these works as valuable in the first place.
Child Abuse and the Reality of Sin
Authors: Doyle Michael
Published: July 2007

Cruelty to children is not new, though no doubt we are an inventive enough species to come up with some new forms. It could be that some of us may be more disposed to it than others, but it seems safer to assume that we all share a capacity for cruelty. Such a capacity does not have to be exercised: cruelty can be understandable without being right. Some societies and some social situations may increase the likelihood of its occurring, but they neither excuse it nor explain it away.

But if cruelty itself is not new, new in our own time is its categorisation. When we talk of ‘child abuse’, we are putting forward views on both cruelty and children which in some ways are new, or at least newly accepted, and which incorporate our contemporary notions of how human beings should conduct themselves. This categorisation is crucial to any discussion, since it provides us with the basic forms which it must take, but it does incline us to treat the phenomenon of cruelty to children as especially characteristic of our own time. The broad range of cruelty from deprivation through violation to murder is fully evident, in England at least, from a succession of court cases and official inquiries, yet it still cannot be asserted with any certainty that child abuse is more common now than in the past. Evidence from the past is lacking precisely because our forebears did not share our categorisations (or our interest in statistics).
Bloch’s Messianic Marxism
Authors: Marsden John
Published: July 2007

Esoteric and often frustratingly organised, his utopian philosophy has been dismissed, by Christians and Marxists alike, as a confused and idiosyncratic amalgam of heresies. Yet within his writings, which span half a century (born in 1885, he died at nine-two), there can be shown to be a remarkable unity of thought. Furthermore, themes and perspectives can be discerned which arguably continue even today to be of relevance to both Christianity and Marxism and to the dialogue between them, and which make Bloch a philosopher of more than just historical interest.
Collective Guilt and the Crucifixion
Authors: Turner Geoffrey
Published: July 2007

‘There is no such thing as collective guilt’ —Kurt Waldheim

Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he? Waldheim is one of a generation of Austrians and Germans who have a vested interest in excusing themselves from guilt by association in mass murder, in the absence of hard evidence that they pulled the trigger or signed the warrant or turned the gas on. But the evasions and moral insensitivity of the Austrian President do not merit further discussion here. What is more important is whether it is the case that ‘there is no such thing as collective guilt’, because if there is not then certain aspects of traditional Christian theology are in big trouble.

Of course, collective guilt is a deeply unpopular idea. It involves the suggestion that someone who has not perpetrated a crime or some other shameful act in some way carries the guilt for that act by virtue of sharing a social identity with the criminal. Is our reluctance to accept this idea the result of genuine moral difficulties with attributing guilt to someone who might with some justification claim to be innocent, or is it the result of two centuries of social conditioning in a liberal individualistic society? It may be both.

Western liberal democratic society is individualistic in a cultural tradition that was traced by C.B. Macpherson some years ago to Hobbes and John Locke, who had prepared a philosophical account of the lone individual who observes the world and constructs a language to talk about it.
Sermon
Authors: Gutierrez Gustavo
Published: July 2007

In his letter to the Ephesians St Paul says that we must walk as children of light (5:8). We have here an important biblical image: walking, walking as children of light. Probably you have observed how in the Bible people are all the time walking. Walking or eating ... all the time. These two human actions are the expression of life. And it is life 1 am preaching about.

The gospel of John is a very long text but a very rich one. And, as miracle stories go, the story in it of the healing of the man born blind (9:1—41) is very long but very rich.

Both in it and in the excerpt from Ephesians which is read with it (5:8—14) Jesus is the Light. That is an idea that comes up again and again in the gospel of John. And light in John is always related to life; light and life are linked. From the very beginning of the gospel, from the first chapter, Jesus is the Light, is Life, and all the miracles of Jesus in the gospel of John are done to give life. Jesus does not do miracles to surprise people, but to give life. And this is, of course, evident above all in the story of the healing of the man born blind.
The Sermon on the Mount: A Jewish View
Authors: Wright Rabbi Alexandra
Published: July 2007

The Jew is never more uneasy than when faced with a text from the New Testament. Aware of the scriptural authority that such a text holds for the Christian, the uneasiness is compounded when what, basically, the Jew is offering is an opportunity for Christians to listen in, as it were, on a Jewish interpretation of one of the most important texts in the New Testament.

There are, of course, historical considerations that determine how a Jew understands the New Testament. For much of the past, if Jews read or studied the gospels, it was only for polemical purposes. One of the first figures to abandon such an attitude was Claude Montefiore, an English Jew, founder of the Liberal Jewish movement in Britain. In 1909 Montefiore published The Synoptic Gospels, consisting of an introduction, translation and commentary on the first three gospels. The aim of such a book was two-fold: to dissipate the patronising and negative attitude which Jews held towards Christianity and to reveal the true spirit of the Jewish religion to Christians.

Montefiore’s attitudes roused dissent and suspicion among the Jewish community. For him, Jesus linked on to the prophets and sometimes seemed to go beyond them. But as Montefiore revealed, for the Jew it was not the personality or life of Jesus that was important but the teaching:

We persist in separating the one from the other, whereas to Christians they form a unity, a whole. From his childhood upwards the Jew’s highest conceptions of goodness and God have never been associated with Jesus. (Vol. 1)
Marian Symbols and Marian Doctrines: Lonergan's Contribution
Authors: Garafalo Rob
Published: July 2007

The celebrating of a Marian Year in 1987—8 helped to stimulate reflection on the process by which faith in God is evolving through the medium of the Church’s Marian tradition. By highlighting the figure of Mary, it posed the question: how are the Church’s Marian doctrines able to articulate their truth within the variety of contexts in which they are received?

In the period between Lumen Gentium and Redemptoris Mater* we have witnessed a theological debate concerning the symbolic character of statements made by the Church about Mary—a debate that questions whether the Church’s Marian doctrines are necessarily grounded in historical events. The purpose of this paper is to describe briefly the contours of the debate concerning theological statements about Mary and to suggest that Bernard Lonergan’s notion of conversion can provide a more adequate contemporary understanding of the ongoing role of Marian symbols and doctrines in the lives of believers.
Adam as Analogy: Help or Hindrance?
Authors: Kreitzer Larry
Published: July 2007

The use of ‘Adam’ in the New Testament is by no means extensive. The name itself occurs only nine times (Luke 3:38; Romans 5:14a and b; 1 Corinthians 15:22; 45a and b; 1 Timothy 2:13 and 14; Jude 14), but in a wide variety of senses. Sometimes its use is built upon the Genesis account’s portrayal of Adam as the first human creature: Adam is seen as the historic progenitor of the race. This is most clear in Jude 14 (a quote from Ethiopian Enoch 1:9), where Enoch is described as ‘the seventh generation from Adam’. Here the meaning is quite straightforward. ‘Adam’ is simply spoken of as an historical figure. In the same way, the Lucan reference to Adam is set within the genealogical table of Jesus, beginning with Jesus himself, and running backwards until it climaxes in the first created man. By such a structure the historical relationship between Jesus and Adam is emphasized and Jesus is seen to fit within the flow of human history. We who live in the 20th century are immediately presented with a difficulty by such an emphasis upon the historical side of the Adam stories.

Fortunately, the complete meaning of ‘Adam’ within the New Testament is not restricted to such a narrow historical basis as we see in Jude and Luke. We do find, in some of the other passages, hints of typological significance of ‘Adam’. ‘Adam’ as a theological category is thereby rescued and is able to have some contemporary meaning.
Bishops and Other Teachers: Some Signs of the Times
Authors: Lash Nicholas
Published: July 2007

In his President’s Report three years ago, Jack Mahoney considered whether a theologian’s relation to the episcopate should not be more like that of artist to patron than mandarin to minister, and he ended by suggesting that ‘part of the role of our Association is ... to have a sacramental function’ within the local Church, both reflecting on our common faith and aiming to communicate that reflection.

During the past year, a series of in themselves apparently unconnected developments convinced me that it might be helpful as part of our fulfilment of the tasks which Jack indicated, if we were to set aside an hour for their consideration. The developments that I have in mind may be listed under seven headings:

1.

First, and most diffusely, I sense a growing thirst, on the part of Catholic laypeople, for continuing theological (and especially biblical) education—the impetus for which comes variously from parental responsibility, from questions of justice and peace, increasingly (I think) from concern for creation and, most generally, from the recognition that, in an ever more barbarous and philistine society, only faith appropriated and purified through prayer and shared reflection can hope to stand.

2.

Secondly, there is a disturbing tendency towards polarisation in our perception of the relationship between ‘form’ and ‘content’ in religious education. This is surely an area which cries out for improvement in the quality of dialogue and collaboration between bishops, catechists, and theologians.

3.

Thirdly, the ‘Cologne Declaration’ signed in January by 163 theologians from Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands, was followed by statements from theologians in France, Belgium, Italy and Brazil.
Rex Gentium: History, Nationalism and Christ
Authors: Nichols Aidan
Published: July 2007

The Church’s liturgy calls on Christ as Rex gentium, ‘King of the nations’, the One whom they all ‘desire’, the Corner-stone that unites them. It appeals to him, therefore, to ‘come and save man whom you made from clay’. In this celebrated Advent antiphon, the Church affirms the relevance of Christ to world history and, more specifically, to the fate of the many peoples of the world whose histories contribute to the single history which is that of the world as a whole. The text intimates that this history constitutes an implicit call for his Coming, and it states quite explicitly that only Christ can unify their different and (presumably) divergent histories, and make them one.

My concern here is a vast subject which, it is probably fair to say, historians and philosophers in England, even when believers, would by and large regard as taboo ... and in this they would doubtless be joined by the majority of theologians. The relevance of Christ to world history, and, in particular, to the fact of its multiple national differentiations, is, they would say, simply too large a subject to talk sense about. English historians, with occasional exceptions like Arnold Toynbee, do not think it a proper part of the historian’s task to identify the structure of the historical process as a whole. The philosophy of history is not, in England, the study of the wider meaning of that process but, rather, the justification of any limited statement about the past. English philosophers of history avert their gaze in horror from their Continental counterparts, whose vaulting metaphysical ambition has produced schemes like Hegel’s (history as the coming of Reason to selfconsciousness) or Marx’s (history as the formation of a socialist society where the specific essence of humanity will be realised in uncoerced labour).
The Story of Mary: Luke's Version
Authors: Middleton Deborah F.
Published: July 2007

Mary’s role in the first chapter of St Luke’s Gospel is integral to the author’s overall design, introducing his major themes of Christian discipleship and social justice. This chapter, which forms part of Luke’s infancy narrative, has been neglected by many modem biblical scholars. On the one hand historical critics have relegated it to the realm of ‘secondary source material’. On the other hand it has not readily attracted the serious attention of new hermeneutical schools that have arisen in the area of biblical studies, in particular feminist theology. Perhaps this is because one of the main characters featured in these chapters is Mary, the mother of Christ, who is a figure radical feminists tend to dismiss rather than use as a role model. One notable exception to the body of feminists who have rejected the figure of Mary is Rosemary Ruether. She has demonstrated that devotion to Mary and allegiance to feminist ideals do not have to be mutually exclusive. Although the Church has concentrated on certain aspects of the Marian tradition which centralise Mary’s passivity and immaculate nature, these are not central themes in her portrayal in the New Testament. Like the Liberation theologians of the Third World, Ruether puts the biblical evidence at the heart of her argument and assesses the tradition of the Church in its light. She takes as her evidence Luke’s Gospel, where Mary is portrayed as a character with an active role to play in God’s plan for the salvation of the world. Here I shall extend Ruether’s insight into Luke’s portrayal of Mary to suggest that this character provides an important clue to understanding the purpose, unity and integrity of the Gospel itself.
Nuclear Deterrence and Christian Vocation
Authors: Finnis John
Published: July 2007

If there is, as I believe, a temporal mission for the Christian, how would it be possible for the terrestrial hope by which such a mission is quickened not to have as its most comprehensive aim the ideal of building either a better or a new Christian civilization? ... At each new stage in human history ... it is normal that Christians hope for a new Christendom, and depict for themselves, in order to guide their effort, a concrete historical ideal appropriate to the particular climate of the age in question.

Lecturing On the Philosophy of History in the United States in 1955, Jacques Maritain thus restated a theme he had elaborated in Spain in the high summer of 1934, 23 months before Franco’s uprising. I shall argue that we should answer Maritain’s rhetorical question, No: it is a philosophical and theological mistake to suppose, as he did, that the temporal vocation of the Christian—or the Christian’s conscience in political matters—requires a ‘comprehensive aim’ such as the ‘concrete historical ideal’ of building a new or better Christendom.

In March 1955 the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, speaking in the House of Commons, used words which have survived as expressing the reality of the nuclear age, and the hope which has guided the masters of the age: ‘safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation’. The West’s new armaments, he said, would increase ‘the deterrent upon the Soviet Union by putting her ... scattered population on an equality or near-equality of vulnerability with our small densely-populated island’—a vulnerability matched by that of the West’s populations. The threat expressed by Churchill, to destroy Soviet populations by ‘a crushing weight of nuclear retaliation’, has remained the indispensable element in the deterrent threats and accompanying operational plans of the U.S., Britain, and France ever since.
The Gospel, the State and Education Rights
Authors: John Gus
Published: July 2007

There can be little doubt that British education is in a state of crisis, and that Kenneth Baker’s so-called education reforms have simply compounded that crisis. We are likely to witness in Britain in the next decade perhaps more than at any other time since the passing of the Shaftsbury Act over a hundred years ago, the fiercest ideological battles around issues to do with the purpose and function of education and schooling in a liberal democratic society, the rights of the child and of the student, and the relationship between education and the national economy. In such battles the Church will be heavily involved—Catholic schools will see to that. Government legislation may hit Catholics hard in other areas and receive scant criticism, but schools are where the hierarchy believes the Catholic community finds and passes on its own identity. Perhaps bishops also think that Catholic schools are among the last places where the hierarchy has real power. Thus in recent months we have seen the dispute between Cardinal Hume and parents over whether one school should or should not ‘opt out’ of the State system. The danger, exemplified by the case of the Poll Tax in England and Wales, is that the Church will fight what it sees as its own corner, but will then keep silent in the wider battle. Its intervention may be dangerously misplaced.

This article seeks to set out what has happened to British education and the vision which a prophetic Church should champion.

Our sense of history should tell us that we have a responsibility to safeguard and to extend the hard-won rights that generations before us have secured through their struggles and their blood, even to the point of sacrificing their very lives.
Origins of England’s Urban Catholicism
Authors: Every George
Published: July 2007

Today probably the majority of practising Roman Catholics in England would identify themselves as English, even if their origins are not altogether English, but how deep are the English roots of this English Catholic community? The answer to that question is important because the self-understanding of any community depends, to some degree, on its understanding of its own history. Twenty years ago it was almost universally assumed that the English Catholic community was dwindling away at the end of the eighteenth century and only saved from extinction by the ‘second spring’— the great influx from Ireland and the flow of well-educated Anglican converts in the nineteenth century. Now it is known that Irish immigrants went where Catholics were in industry already, but detailed studies are needed of how so many English Catholics came to be in those places. In the May number of Recusant History’ I have done one such study for a place in the heart of industrial England, Walsall, within reach of Oscott, between 1720 and 1824, using evidence from a variety of local records. I now want to point tentatively to some elements in the situation there that have parallels elsewhere.

The first is memories of the Civil War. After defeat at the Battle of Worcester in 1651 Charles the Second took refuge in woodlands in and around the parish of Walsall from the Presbyterian party who dominated the borough after the war and during the Commonwealth. In 1715 and 1751 the Presbyterian Meeting House there was wrecked by a mob who in 1750 celebrated Oakapple Day, the anniversary of the Restoration of Church and Throne in 1660, by hanging and burning an effigy of King George the Second with an orange in one hand and a bunch of turnips in the other.
Wittgenstein, Theology and Wordless Faith
Authors: Mark James
Published: July 2007

The inexpressible (that which appears to me mysterious and which I cannot express) gives perhaps the background against which what I was able to express gets its meaning.

Culture and Value, p. 16

To look at Wittgenstein’s influence on our contemporary religious thought raises all sorts of problems. The first is that, as a philosopher, he gave little attention to religion; his main writings contain no more than a few enigmatic references here and there. Nevertheless it is hardly possible to pick up a book on philosophical theology (in English at least) which does not refer to him. That might perhaps be explained by the pervasive influence that he has exerted on philosophical thought generally. But we must recognize that the leads which emerge from his thought in both periods of his philosophical activity seem to be predominantly negative. He offers two successive challenges to us to examine the ways in which we use language and what we communicate in doing so, each of which seems radically to question the language of theology.

The first came in the Tractatus, when he set out to show that the method of formulating the problems of philosophy rests on a misunderstanding of the logic of language (Preface). He was concerned, as Pears puts it, ‘with the general theory of factual language, and with the general theory of reality which he believed that he could deduce from it.’ The structure of reality determines the structure of language, and the structure of language is such that ‘What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak on that one must be silent’ (Preface). He was not prepared, like the logical positivists, to deny the existence of mysteries of which he did not think it possible to speak; ‘We feel that even if all questions in the field of scholarship are answered the problems of our lives are still quite untouched.
Seeking Roots
Authors: White Allan
Published: July 2007

One of the best-selling Scottish books of 1989, The Root of the Matter (Mainstream Publishing, Edinburgh, £9.95) recalls the earlier part of the life of its author, Anthony Ross OP, a convert from Presbyterianism who ended up as a Dominican priest widely known in Scotland for his work with young people, and who was elected Rector of Edinburgh University and then Prior Provincial of the English Dominican Province. Allan White OP, who was one of the first two Dominicans since the Reformation to take a degree in Scotland and for six years was Superior of the Dominican Community in Edinburgh, here puts the story of Anthony Ross in the context of a wider story.

I have caught a glimpse of the seamless garment And I am blind for evermore.

Hugh McDiarmid

An old friar once remarked to me that, whilst he was glad to live in the midst of a community of young and high-spirited Dominicans, he often missed the companionship of a brother of his own generation with whom he could share his memories. At various stages in our lives we cast backward glances over our shoulders but there comes a time when we look to our beginnings, uncovering the summer in the seed. Father Anthony Ross’s book is an exercise not only in the uncovering of memory but in the sharing of memories, and in the sharing there is a healing too; the work is dedicated to his parents and step-mother in the belief that ‘love covers all offences.’ In this book he offers us a lyrical account of his boyhood in the north of Scotland, somewhat reminiscent of the work of Tomas O’Crohan’s The Islandman and Maurice O’Sullivan’s Twenty Years A ‘Growing, his subsequent university career, his entry into the Roman Catholic Church and admission to the Dominican Order. Father Anthony is a historian by training and it is his particular gift to disclose ‘the past quivering in what is’. His own life has coincided with major developments in the political and cultural life of the Scottish people with related implications for the Catholic Church in Scotland in general and the Dominican Order in particular. His book is part of his own story but is also a chapter in the history of his country and his Church.
Singular Iniquities: Josephine Butler and Marietta Higgs
Authors: Cashman Hilary
Published: July 2007

A little over a century ago Josephine Butler was beginning to learn, with reluctance and dismay, the extent of organised child prostitution in Britain. When she tried to convey what she had learned she was often reviled as dirty-minded, corrupting and unwomanly. Her work did much to erect legal protection for children, but the possibility and practice of child sexual exploitation continued, as shown in the case notes of bodies such as the NSPCC. In 1987 a tide of hostility was unleashed against another woman, paediatrician Marietta Higgs, who had in the normal course of her work discovered signs of sexual abuse in a small and statistically unsurprising proportion of the children she cared for.

Why is it so often women—supposedly the weaker sex, less tough-minded than men—who seem to be left to face up to the most cruel and sordid social practices, and even vicariously to bear the blame for them? And why, a century after Josephine Butler’s work, is society still so ill-equipped to deal with child sexual abuse?

Josephine Butler’s involvement with girls and women forced into poverty and prostitution began in 1865 in Liverpool, when she visited the city’s vast workhouse and met some of its 5000 inhabitants. Though frightened and horrified at the conditions, and doubtful of her welcome, she sat down on the floor and began to pick oakum with the women and talk to them about their lives. Shortly afterwards she took into her house a girl called Marion who had been seduced at fifteen and abandoned, and was dying of consumption. Others followed and Josephine set up a ‘House of Rest’ for incurably ill women.
Not so Much a Threat as a Challenge: acknowledging the religio‐cultural heritage of others
Authors: Amjad‐Ali Charles
Published: July 2007

Much has been written on religion and culture from the perspective of the sociology of religion, as well as from the perspectives of anthropologists and sociologists in general. The last two groups have largely tended to absorb the one into the other, and, as has been the case with most modern epistemologies in the social and human sciences, religion is the element which is always dislocated from its rightful place. There has been a tendency to look at religion itself as acultural phenomenon, rather than viewing the dialectic between the two as necessary for a proper understanding of both.

In the modern vision, however, both religion and culture have come into disrepute. Religion is seen basically as those myths and superstitions which hold back rational and scientific development in society; and culture is also viewed as an impediment which keeps people from participating in the fruits of the Enlightenment (primarily rationality) and the techno-scientific developments of western society. Emphasis on the social presence of religion and culture is therefore seen largely as a problem of ‘underdeveloped third world societies’.
Sermon: Remembering Romero
Authors: McCabe Herbert
Published: July 2007

On 24 March Catholics committed to the cause of social justice keep the tenth anniversary of the martyrdom of Archbishop Oscar Romero. Here is the sermon which Herbert McCabe OP preached at Blackfriars, Oxford, at the Mass marking the anniversary last year. The gospel reading was Luke 24:1—10 (Luke’s account of the first Easter morning).

When the Brazilian Dominican Frei Betto was in prison one of his interrogators asked him: ‘How can a Christian collaborate with a communist?’. He answered: ‘For me, men are not divided into believers and atheists but into oppressors and victims’. I think this was a witty reply—it certainly wasn’t saying anything so tedious as ‘Truth doesn’t matter; let’s do something practical’. I think it was witty because it turned the interrogator’s question round in a new and surprising way, and because it challenged and disturbed his interrogator: ‘Is it worse to collaborate with atheists as I do or to collaborate with injustice as you do? When I work with atheists I do not become an atheist; but when you work for the unjust you do become unjust’.

Frei Betto was saying that it is just because he passionately thinks that truth matters and just because he is not an atheist, that his first concern is not whether people agree with him but whether they are suffering and in particular suffering at the hands of sinful men, from the lovelessness and injustice of others. His atheist comrades may have their own reasons for struggling against injustice, but for him his reason is his belief.
Theologian meets Psychotherapist
Authors: Tillich Paul , Rogers Carl
Published: July 2007

It is a quarter of a century, this year, since the death of Paul Tillich, the Protestant theologian who has been called ‘perhaps the principal moulder of modern Christian thought’. To mark this we are publishing here a transcript of the dialogue between him and Carl Rogers, the pioneer of person-centred psychotherapy, which took place at San Diego State College, California, on 7 March 1965 and was his last public appearance. The transcript, which was circulated (in a somewhat edited form) as a pamphlet by the College in 1966, is appearing in Carl Rogers: Dialogues, edited by Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Land Henderson and published by Constable of London, price £12.95 hardback, £7.95 paper.

Carl Rogers: The importance of self-affirmation: I think that would be one area where we agree. Then I have been much impressed with your thinking about the courage to be, because I see that in psychotherapy; the courage of being something, the risk that is involved in knowing. ... I’ve also liked your phrase about the antimoral act being one that contradicts the self-realisation of the individual, and it seems to me both of us are trying to push beyond some of the trends that are very prominent in the modern world; the logical positivistic, the ultrascientific approach, the stress of the mechanistic and highly deterministic point of view which, as I see it, makes man just an object trying to find some alternative stance in relation to life. I wonder if you feel that we’re in some agreement on issues of that sort?
Making the Connections: The global agenda of feminist theology
Authors: McEwan Dorothea , Poole Myra
Published: July 2007

What is the connection between the cross-cultural phenomenon of the gender subordination of women which has led to domestic violence, genital mutilation, Indian widow-burning, Chinese foot-binding etc., and, on the other hand, the contemporary ‘received’ Christian theological tradition on women? This was the fundamental question underlying the reflections and discussions at the 1989 Maryknoll Summer School on the ‘Global Agenda of Feminist Theology’

This is not a report on that Summer School; rather, it is a presentation of ideas that emerged at it. The 65 participants were drawn from 20 countries and all continents, and were made up of single women, married women, single men, religious sisters and priests. They came from a variety of Christian faith commitments, though the majority were Catholics, and from a variety of academic backgrounds and life experience. From their perspective of involvement with grassroots organisations, local support groups and women church communities, they addressed themselves to many issues which face humankind, but primarily in order to integrate their conversion to Christian feminism into a global discernment on the position of women. They gathered at Maryknoll to look at developments in churches and societies and critique them from a feminist point of view, pointing to the areas where the holistic, inclusive and non-competitive aspects were missing.

Feminism stresses the need to recognise ‘difference as a crucial strength’, to quote Audre Lord. If we do not do this, we will fall into the trap of patriarchy. The terms ‘feminism’ and ‘patriarchy’ are used to encapsulate different cultural and power systems, and ‘patriarchy’ is a system which is dividing and conquering, and doing this as a norm of control.
Bonebound Spirituality
Authors: Phillips Peter
Published: July 2007

The hall-mark of a genuine spirituality must lie in the honest recognition of our rootedness in the world of matter. It is the theme of poets as various as John Donne and Dylan Thomas. Perhaps in Donne we find its chief expression in the Devotions on Emergent Occasions and Severall Steps in my Sickness of 1624, but it is present as the background of many of his poems:

To our bodies tume we then, that so Weake men on love reveal’d may look;

Loves mysteries in soules doe grow,

But yet the body is his booke.

Dylan Thomas refers to Donne with approval and comments in a letter to Pamela Hansford Johnson in similar vein:

Through my small bonebound island I have learnt all that I know, experienced all and sensed all. All I write is inseparable from the island. As much as possible, therefore, I employ the scenery of the island to describe the scenery of my thoughts, the earthquakes of the body to describe the earthquakes of the heart.

This rootedness is our greatest glory. It must drive us towards engagement with the stuff of creation, in contrast to a spirituality which offers us ways of putting up with things as they are.

This suggests a spirituality which must face up to the concrete particularity of our daily life. As Jon Sobrino has remarked recently:

The ‘being human-with-spirit’ that will measure up to reality’s cargo of crisis and promise, that will unify the various dements of reality in such wise that reality be, in the event, more promise than crisis, is what I call spirituality.
People with AIDS
Authors: Webb Christopher
Published: July 2007

Hans was twenty-two. Except for a rather shabby greyish sheet, he lay naked on a double bed. His body was covered with large ugly black sores. I wondered if it was catching.

Earlier that evening I had been in my room, reading. I had been ordained about a year, it was 1984, and I had never even heard the word AIDS, though in fact three years had already gone by since, in Los Angeles, the first signs of a new viral infection had come to light. The telephone had rung, and a man called Carl, with a young voice, had asked if he were speaking to a priest. I had said I was. He had told me that his friend was dying. He himself was not a Catholic but his friend was. He had asked me to visit them.

At that time I was a curate in West London, at the Catholic Church of Our Lady of Victories, Kensington. The Parish takes in the Earls Court area. Earls Court has a large homosexual population, and Hans and Carl were part of that community. I call it ‘a community’ because, in many ways, that is just what it is. Earls Court has many pubs and places where homosexual men can go, and there is a feeling of support and acceptance among them. In fact, there is something rather ‘cliquey’ about the place.

Carl, Hans and I did not begin a heated discussion about the rights and wrongs of homosexuality. There were far too many more urgent problems. Carl had given up his job so as to be at home to look after Hans. They had no money, little hope, and Carl was coming to the end of his tether.
Through the eye of a needle
Authors: Robson Simon
Published: July 2007

We go on and on learning about AIDS. I first became aware of AIDS when I started reading the early press reports some ten years ago. Eventually I knew of people who were ill because of AIDS, I knew that lovers of friends of mine were ill, and in due course they died. I remember the very first time I saw the skin cancer Kaprosi Sarcoma: it was on the hand of a friend whom I was visiting in Amsterdam. I remember helping in 1987 to light over a thousand votive lights in the Dominican Priory Church at Oxford at an all-night vigil, to represent the current number of people in the United Kingdom known to be HIV Positive, and, of course, those candles also represented those who had died. My experience also included explaining how HIV infection is transmitted (and how it is not), talking about ‘safer sex’, and giving advice about the HIV test.

However, nearly two years ago I came to Edinburgh, and in my time there my experience of AIDS has broadened tremendously. I knew nothing about drug abuse whatsoever, although I knew that was how the HIV virus had been spreading so widely in Edinburgh, making it the worst-hit city in Britain after London. I had no idea how relevant my experiences of AIDS and of how it affected gay men in England would be. As it turned out, they were of great value. What, though, I was not prepared for was how AIDS affected children. Of course, gay men have parents and brothers and sisters and grandparents, all of whom are affected in one way or another when someone becomes HIV Positive.