bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Under the Starry Night
Authors: Billy Denis J.
Published: July 2007

I once had the opportunity to travel to St.-Rémy-de-Provence and to celebrate Mass in the chapel of the convalescent home where Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) spent two years of his life painting some of his most striking canvases (e.g., Cypress Trees, The Sower, Starry Night). An epileptic who suffered from erratic bouts of depression, Van Gogh came to this former abbey-turned-sanatorium in a futile attempt to ward off the disquieting shadows that haunted him in both his sleeping and waking hours and which eventually caused him to take his own life. The space created by the stone walls of the chapel’s romanesque nave has a chilling effect on the heart. It seems haunted by the spirit of a man whose delicate sense of life’s inner beauty was strangely (and inexplicably) heightened by the tragic circumstances of his waning sanity.

The spirit of Van Gogh haunts the air and environs of his one-time place of refuge. During my short time there, I half-expected to catch his passing shadow in the comer of my eye ducking behind a column or escaping upon human detection into the lonely spaces of the nearby cloister. He lurks there, yes, in the chapel and adjoining gardens, down the long row of sycamores and beyond, in the surrounding fields. He lurks there, yes, in solitary isolation, always on the periphery—and never without evoking a deep sense of sadness. This place of healing could do nothing for the very man, whose brilliant swirling strokes and swift, contrasting colours continues to awaken a sense of wonder and yearning for transcendence in millions upon millions of searching admirers.
Styles of Scientific Thinking
Authors: Hodgson Peter
Published: July 2007

Science as we know it today has a long history stretching back to the Greeks and the Babylonians. It is essentially the results of our continuing attempts to understand the natural world, and as such it is conditioned by our culture, by our beliefs concerning what is important and what is not about the nature and purpose of knowledge, and about the structure of argument and the criteria of proof. These factors vary from one culture to another, and together they determine the style of scientific thinking.

It was very difficult to get started, and fatally easy to become trapped in a blind alley. Early civilisations amassed much natural lore, and extensive astronomical observations were made, notably by the Babylonians. But the chief credit for initiating the scientific enterprise belongs to the ancient Greeks.

The whole scientific enterprise, as Alistair Crombie points out in his magisterial treatise, depends first of all on the underlying vision of reality, and then on the arguments used to support and verify that vision. The Greek philosophers provided both the vision and the argument. The first idea was that the vast complexity of the world can be understood in terms of simple elements; once we know these elements we can see how everything else follows from them, giving an integrated knowledge of the whole. The rules of rational inference were codified into the science of logic, and an outstanding example of the power of rational argument was provided by Euclid.
Charles Taylor and John Milbank: A Footnote
Authors: Sparrow M.F.
Published: July 2007

In his recent study of the sources of the modem identity, Charles Taylor coined the phrase, ‘the affirmation of the ordinary life.’ He argues that modem culture has been marked not only by a growing recognition of the dignity and worth of human beings but also by a growing recognition of the dignity and worth of the ordinary life—the life of production and reproduction, of work and family. Taylor calls this affirmation of ordinary life ‘one of the most powerful ideas in modem civilization.’ It has certainly become one of the predominant themes in Catholic theology in the second half of this century.

Taylor notes, however, another ‘extremely important fact about modern moral consciousness. . . . We are in conflict, even confusion about what it means to affirm ordinary life.’ So for example, Catholics may, almost unanimously, describe the post-Vatican II era as the age of the laity, but particular attempts to live the Gospel in the modem world and to theologize about that experience create storms of controversy. The debates surrounding liberation theology, which with its turn to the economic, social and political life of man is nothing if not an affirmation of ordinary life, are one such example.

One particularly illuminating instance of the debates surrounding the affirmation of ordinary life and liberation theology is Juan Segundo’s Theology and the Church: A Response to Cardinal Ratzinger and a Warning to the Whole Church (Minneapolis, 1985). In it Segundo responds to the ‘‘Instruction on Certain Aspects of the Theology of Liberation’ issued by the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Newman on doing theology
Authors: O'Loughlin Thomas
Published: July 2007

Newman’s writings on the nature of theology, the role of the theologian in the Church, and the nature of personal faith and assent, all receive a great deal of scholarly attention. However, one text where he characterises the nature of the work of a theologian as a continuing activity has been passed over in studies of his writings on theology and seems only to be known in studies of his marian doctrine.

The text is from the Sermon 15 of his University Sermons which was preached on the feast of the Purification, 2 February, 1843 upon the text: ‘But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart’ (Lk 2:19). The sermon begins by introducing the notion of Mary as a pattern of faith (paragraph 1) and then develops the theme by reflection on the significance of Mary “pondering” what was said to her (paragraph 2).

Then he continues:

Thus St. Mary is our pattern of Faith, both in the reception and the study of Divine Truth. She does not think it enough to accept, she dwells upon it; not enough to possess, she uses it; not enough to assent, she develops it; not enough to submit the Reason, she reasons upon it; not indeed reasoning first, and believing afterwards, with Zacharias, yet first believing without reasoning, next from love and reverence, reasoning after believing. And thus she symbolizes to us, not only the faith of the unlearned, but of the doctors of the Church also, who have to investigate, and weigh. and define. as well as to profess the Gospel; to draw the line between truth and heresy; to anticipate or remedy the various aberrations of wrong reason; to combat pride and recklessness with their own arms; and thus to triumph over the sophist and the innovator.
Hegel and ‘The End of History’
Authors: Boyle Nicholas
Published: July 2007

In September 1989, while the dominoes were falling in the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe, a very minor revolution occurred in our national newspapers: the face of the German philosopher Hegel suddenly and briefly, and surely for the first time, was allowed to dominate the centre pages.

The deputy director of the American State Department’s policy planning staff, Francis Fukuyama, had published an essay entitled ‘The End of History’ in the right-wing journal The National Interest, suggesting that contemporary events were vindicating Hegel rather than Hegel’s unruly disciple, Karl Marx: that ideas and ideology were a genuinely motivating force in history, rather than mere economics; that Hegel had seen the ideas of the French Revolution, which Fukuyama identified with modern liberal democracy, as the ultimate goal of history; that we were witnessing the worldwide extension of those ideas through the collapse of the Soviet bloc; and that since no further ideological conflict or development was possible, history had come to an end. In other words — and though Fukuyama did not say it, it was soon enough said— America had won the Cold War and though things would undoubtedly continue happening, nothing much, nothing big, would ever change again. In the Independent the much-regretted Peter Jenkins aptly quoted Arnold Toynbee’s childhood memories of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897:

I remember the atmosphere. It was: well here we are on the top of the world, and we have arrived at this peak to stay there — forever!
On New Testament Scholarship and the Integrity of Faith
Authors: Meynell Hugo
Published: July 2007

Hermes and Athena consists of the proceedings of a conference of philosophers and New Testament scholars. I think the sponsors of the conference are to be congratulated on bringing members of the two groups together; the interaction was salutary, for all that one of the most significant exchanges is very angry, and makes painful reading. The issues raised appear to me to be of quite fundamental importance.

As Michael Dummett sees it, the most influential New Testament scholars of the present day operate with two axioms, that the Gospels are not a reliable witness to Jesus’ words and deeds, and that Jesus had no powers and no source of knowledge that were not available to other human beings. In so doing, they not only offend and bewilder ordinary believers, but effectively deprive Christianity of any rational basis. However, there is good reason to disbelieve what these scholars seem to take for granted, that the central doctrines of Christianity were derived not from what was taught by Jesus himself, but from later reflection on his life. For this to have been the case, the disciples must have been either deliberate deceivers or mentally unhinged, and their subsequent behaviour is not consistent with either hypothesis. Another mistake that these scholars make is to assume that one should prescind from faith in trying to determine what is or is not likely to be historically true in the Gospel narratives; in general, probability cannot be assigned to alleged events without reference to background beliefs.
Hegel and ‘The End of History’
Authors: Boyle Nicholas
Published: July 2007

Now I have already indicated that the picture I have painted of what I believe to be post-1945 socio-economic reality corresponds after a fashion to the picture of the cultural and intellectual world to be found in the works of writers who concern themselves with what since 1975 has been called ‘postmodernism’. I should like as the next stage in my argument just briefly to survey the correspondences.

Firstly there is the question of politics, which seems to me intimately linked with the term ‘postmodern’ itself. I regard ‘postmodern’ as corresponding to what I have today called ‘post-1945’, for I believe that post-modernism is inseparable from the development of the global market. This is not an obvious point, for there has been much discussion among those who have taken up the term on whether ‘postmodern’ is a chronological term at all. Most have taken the view that it is not, that what they mean by postmodernism is something that runs in parallel with modernism or is even a permanent possibility of the human spirit — it is suggested that Montaigne, in the 16th century, is postmodern, but the brothers Schlegel, in 1800, are only modem. (It is of course a Frenchman who makes the suggestion.) As it is part of a postmodernist approach to deny — at any rate from time to time — the significance of chronology this is an understandable ploy. Indeed the term ‘postmodernist’ is a good one precisely because ‘modernism’ in all the arts depended on the belief in an opposition between the present and the past. To be modern was to do things differently.
Modern Women Mystics: Etty Hillesum and Simone Weil
Authors: Bowie Fiona
Published: July 2007

If the life of the twelfth century Flemish mystic Christina Mirabilis is anything to go by, intimacy with God should carry a health warning! After the death of her parents Christina’s elder sisters arranged that she should have the menial job of looking after the family’s herds. ‘Immediately’, we are told in her Life, ‘Christ did not fail to the lower and more humble office and He gave her the grace of an inward sweetness and very often visited her with heavenly secrets’. As a result of the ‘exertions of her inner contemplations’ Christina died. That was not, however, the end of the story, indeed it was the beginning of Christina's extraordinary vocation; to suffer for souls through voluntarily imposed penances. During the requiem mass the following day ‘the body stirred in the coffin and immediately was raised up like a bird and ascended to the rafters of the church’. When finally forced to descend Christina explained that she had been granted a vision of heaven and hell, before Christ commanded her soul to return to her body.

After this return from the grave Christina, her Life continues, ‘ran from the presence of men with wondrous horror and fled into the deserts and into the trees and perched on the peaks of turrets or steeples and on other lofty places’. She went on to develop mortifications which included standing in ice-cold rivers and throwing herself into hot bread ovens, not to mention suffering the cruelty of her alarmed family and other villagers who bound her in chains and put a heavy yoke on her shoulders.
Passive and Deformed? Did Aristotle Really Say This?
Authors: Nolan Michael
Published: July 2007

Belief in the passivity of the female survives few honeymoons, and would appear to be largely confined to people of celibate life and retiring disposition who do not visit supermarkets and have little opportunity to note the skilled use of what the French appositely call un chariot. Aristotle was not long married — happily, it would seem — when he wrote his biological works, and if he says that in the act of reproduction ‘the male is the active partner and the female qua female is the passive one’, he goes on to remark more discreetly that ‘that which acts, is acted upon in return’. Indeed, ‘sometimes the extent to which it gets acted upon is greater than that to which it acts’. Quite so. Horresco referens, the male may on occasion be ‘mastered’ and then a female is born, one, to boot, taking after her mother. All of which suggests that Aristotle’s beliefs are not to be summarised in the simple schema: ‘female passive, male active’. The seemingly absolute assertion is attenuated when set in context.

The same applies to the much-cited statement ‘the female is as it were a deformed male’. One can appreciate the anger this phrase can cause when it is taken to encapsulate Aristotle’s metaphysical and ethical understanding of Woman. Phrases, however, have contexts, and this phrase occurs in a work on biology. A little reading of this biology shows that Aristotle also says that that elegant and beautiful creature, the seal, is ‘deformed’.
Cardinal Philip Howard OP, Rome and English Recusancy
Authors: Champ Judith F.
Published: July 2007

Philip Howard remains an enigmatic character — clearly influential in Church and State in his time — but a shadowy figure in the history of English Recusancy. Yet his career opens a window on all the major problems which dogged the English Catholics in the 17th century — episcopal government, relations between religious and secular clergy, loyalty to the Stuarts, the ramifications of the Oates plot and, of course, finance. He played a crucial role in the most turbulent period of Recusancy between the Restoration and the Revolution Settlement, yet because he spent the last six months of his life destroying papers his influence is not easy to assess. Howard was the subject of a lengthy unpublished biography by his later confrere Father Godfrey Anstruther OP. This was a project which began in 1955 when Anstruther was living at Santa Sabina in Rome and was Spiritual Director at the Venerable English College. He wrote to a friend, “... I have been rereading Palmer’s Life of Howard, and I never realised before how uninspired it is. It has all the matter but no literary merit and, alas, no references. Shall we do a new one?” His new one occupied much of the rest of his life and it was a source of frustration that he was never able to get it published. This paper draws heavily upon it and I am grateful for the late Father Anstruther’s exhaustive research and to Father Bede Bailey OP for access to his files at the Dominican Archives in Edinburgh.
The First Tractarian Bishop
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

The Scottish Episcopal Church emerged in 1689-90 when the Catholic King James VII of Scotland and II of England was ousted in favour of his Protestant daughter Mary and her Dutch Calvinist husband William of Orange. Although he preferred episcopacy to presbytery as an ecclesiastical system, no doubt for supposed ease of political control and rather against his theological judgment, William allowed the reformed Church of Scotland finally to rid itself of its episcopalian element. He had very little option, since the bishops felt that they could not break their oath to the deposed and exiled monarch. For that matter, it was only a small minority among the ministers who had presbyterian convictions. At the time, furthermore, it must have seemed that a fresh turn in political events might soon lead to a restoration of episcopacy. Anyway, led by a General Assembly drawn entirely from the south of Scotland, the convinced presbyterians succeeded in forcing out hundreds of ministers in ‘the most drastic purge the Church [of Scotland] has ever known’ (Rosalind Mitchison). It took years to establish Presbyterianism in Aberdeen and the northeast. In and around Edinburgh, however, a fairly fanatical Presbyterian party rapidly prevailed. The grim measure of their fanaticism may be estimated by their success in 1697 in having Thomas Aikenhead, an Edinburgh University student, aged about eighteen, hanged for blasphemy.
Post Critical Contemplation and Do It Yourself Religion
Authors: Echlin Edward P.
Published: July 2007

No description quite captures the fragmentation through which our culture is passing. Post modem, new age, deconstruction, immanentism, emotivism, all are usefully employed — none quite turns the key. In general we may say not that there are no narratives, but that the received narrative, the foundational cosmology, the consensus about ultimate reality upon which our societies formerly concurred have receded. Moreover, at least in affluent cultures, the mourning about dwindling consensus is past. Rather than writhe in anxiety before religious fragmentation, people simply accept as the one “luminously self evident reality” that they are alone in the universe making their own meaning. Confusion exists as to what theology is, and what real theologians are. Walter Kasper writes, “It is unfortunately not a redundancy to say that, especially today, a theological theology is the need of the hour.”

Do It Yourself Culture

Perhaps our present phase can be fairly described as a spiritual do it yourself culture in which God, faith, morality and the future are for each and every person what each decides they are. Appreciation of expertise, theological training, the religious wisdom of the centuries, is suspended. Religion, says Cambridge’s Don Cupitt, is “wholly of the world, wholly human, wholly our own responsibility”. Eclecticism, picking and choosing from traditional religions and from new constructs, is increasingly common. The “spiritual” remains important. But the wholly transcendent is questioned. Far from being without spiritual narratives, ours is an age in which there are almost as many stories as there are tellers.
Introducing Jean–Luc Marion
Authors: Ward Graham
Published: July 2007

The rue d’Ulm in the centre of Paris, a small almost insignificant street close to the Parthenon and the Jardin de Luxembourg, houses one of the most important and prestigious academic institutions in France: the École Normale Supérieure. Founded in the first decade of the 19th century with entrance by a nationwide competitive examination, it has educated many of the leading 20th century French intellectuals. Jean-Paul Sartre, Raymond Aron, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida are just a few of those selected in a nation-wide competitive examination to be schooled here. In 1969, when considerable student unrest still remained in Paris following the May riots a year earlier, Jean-Luc Marion, then 21, took up his place there. At an institution which had played an enormous role in disseminating the work of Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger in post-War France, Marion began to work for his agrégation de philosophic. It was a time of les enfants terribles in French philosophy: when structuralism was gaining ground through the work of Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes; when Althusser was attempting to rewrite Marxism; when Foucault’s Les Mots et les choses (translated as The Order of Things) could enter the French best-sellers list; and Derrida launched, in the three books published in the same year, his deconstructive assault. Lacan and Derrida both gave seminars at the École Normale Supérieure (as Marion does now). The influence of German Idealism and its critics, Nietzsche and Heidegger, have remained throughout Marion’s philosophical work.
Only Theology Overcomes Metaphysics
Authors: Milbank John
Published: July 2007

Jean-Luc Marion, along with several other contemporary French phenomenologists-cum-theologians, represents a curious final shift in the course of twentieth-century theology. In the traditions of neo-orthodoxy and the nouvelle théologie, they seek to think God through the pure reception of his word, which alone gives to us God himself. This strictly theological talk requires no philosophical foundations, and presupposes no metaphysical categories, not even that of Being, which most of all insinuates a false necessity. And yet, such a thinking out of the resources of revelation alone is specifically seen by Marion and many others as according precisely with the demand of modern philosophy in its ‘phenomenological’ variant that we should accept nothing as true except according to the conditions in which a phenomenon presents itself to us in excess of any preceding categorical assumptions. One can even go a stage further not only does the God known from himself alone fall within the phenomenological understanding of ‘donation’ as the one transcendental condition for simultaneous existing and knowing; this God most of all fulfils the demand for pure phenomenality, for reduction to ‘the thing itself’, since in this instance solely it is impossible for anything in my experience, including my own subjectivity, to persist outside of the donating gift as the independent site of my reception of it. Hence God, whether announced through an ultimate ‘natural’ appearance, or else revealed through historical events, retains, against all conceptual idolatry, his absolute initiative, and yet operates as the phenomenon of all phenomena, the absolutely preceding call which ‘interlocutes’ us as subjects and provides transcendental permission for all other awareness.
Reading Heidegger: Is God Without Being? Jean-Luc Marion's reading of Martin Heidegger in God Without Being
Authors: Hemming Laurence
Published: July 2007

Jean-Luc Marion is one of the first theologians to take seriously the force of Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics as a whole, which means he takes seriously Heidegger’s claims about the “overcoming” (Überwindung) of metaphysics. In other words, when in the work of Martin Heidegger the whole of metaphysics is thrown into question, any and all of its determinations become “questionable”, that is, worthy of being questioned. Marion concedes the impact this may have for theology.

This study concerns itself with how Jean Luc-Marion attempts in the work God Without Being to speak of God after Martin Heidegger’s claims for the overcoming of metaphysics. This arises as a question about the extent to which Jean-Luc Marion has been attentive to what Heidegger says. Marion appeals to an accepted philosophical reading of Heidegger in order to inaugurate a fresh theological reading of Heidegger. Underlying this study is the view that Marion is insufficiently attentive to the complexity of Heidegger’s thinking.

In order to show how this is so in the limited space available here, I propose to undertake a re-reading of two of the key texts upon which Marion rests for his case against Heidegger in God Without Being, with, I hope, surprising results for Marion’s project. Finally, I wish to conclude with some more general remarks about the Icon, which may at least point us in the direction of a more constructive reading of Heidegger’s work.
In the Beginning was the Gift… A Marginal Note on God Without Being
Authors: O'Donoghue Noel Dermot
Published: July 2007

I

A gift implies a giving and a giver distinct from the gift. But what if the giver is all giving? What if the gift and the giver is one? What if the giving alone names the giver? But surely the giver must first in some sense exist before it can be understood to act as giver (actio sequitur esse, said the old manuals that now languish in the deepest stackrooms of our libraries). But what if the esse is essentially agere, actio?

This line of inquiry has surfaced for me once again in reading Jean-Luc Marion’s book (as presented in the University of Chicago translation), resuming a meditation that had its first airing in a paper prepared for the 1990 conference of the Catholic Theological Association of Great Britain. The paper was entitled ‘Celtic Creation Spirituality,’ and it tried to identify the understanding of God and creation as shown in the Carmina Gadelica of Alexander Carmichael and the people of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland in the 19th century, and as it remained in my memory from my own boyhood in the South-West of Ireland. I felt that the common faith of all these people could be summed up in the Johannine variant: ‘In the beginning was the gift and the gift was with God and the gift was God’. My reading of Jean-Luc Marion’s brilliant and challenging book has pushed me towards recalling that icon of the creator that was/is at the centre of Celtic Christianity and also at the centre of Jean-Luc Marion’s thinking.
Aquinas after Marion
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

What reflections might occur to a veteran student of the works of St Thomas Aquinas after reading Jean-Luc Marion’s remarkable book God without Being? Of course, it is not primarily about the thought of Aquinas. But we are persistently encouraged to reject an approach to the question of God which thinks in terms of a concept of ‘Being’, in favour of an acceptance of the reality of God in an economy of ‘Gift’. Thus, one is certainly sent back to the text of Aquinas with provocative questions. For myself, I have to say that I was prompted first of all to return to the magnificent account in the Summa Theologiae of the epistemology of the beatific vision (Section I)—not that Marion himself discusses it (he doesn’t), but his whole approach is a reminder of the radical ‘theocentricity’ of Aquinas’s thought. Next, it proved interesting to compare Marion’s approach with philosophy of religion in the English-speaking context (Section II). Much else might be mentioned, no doubt, but, given that context, the intelligibility of speaking of God either with or without reference to ‘Being’ could not but become questionable (Section III).

I

Question 12 of the Prima Pars must be one of the finest in the Summa Theologiae. Composed in 1266-67, when St Thomas was teaching at Santa Sabina in Rome, it has no precedent or exact parallel in the rest of his work, although of course he treated the same material in several different places.
Hildegard of Bingen, Nicole Oresme, and Conjugal Ethics
Authors: Mirkes Renée
Published: July 2007

Some persons are, by their nature, trailblazers, innovators, avant-gardists—just generally ahead of their times. In many ways, Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), the subject of this investigation, is representative of such a personality. Embodying enough of the intellectual eclecticism and enthusiasm for the arts and sciences characteristic of the historical period after hers, some twentieth century critics dub this talented polymath a Renaissance woman.

A list of Hildegard’s salient accomplishments and personal charisms confirms that appellation at a glance. Hildegard of Bingen, a German Benedictine aristocrat, was a mystic, a visionary, and a prolific writer. Her oeuvre deals with subject matter as diverse as natural science, medicine, theology, biblical exegesis, dramatic poetry, music, hagiography, and linguistics. She was elected Abbess of a community of Benedictine nuns who were attached to the Abbey of Disibodenberg and subsequently founded two other Benedictine houses. Guided by her ecclesiastically sanctioned gift of prophecy, she launched into a missionary style of preaching and teaching aimed at the spiritual and moral reform of the clergy and laity throughout the kingdom of Germany. Undaunted by her lack of formal, classical education or by whatever misogynist tradition prevailed in secular or ecclesiastical circles, she managed to maintain a lively correspondence with kings, queens, emperors, saints, popes, and fellow religious.
Christian Widowhood
Authors: Rees Elizabeth
Published: July 2007

Ours is a culture which, by and large, does not talk about death. We prefer to focus on life. Widowhood too is something we tend to ignore. Yet widows have a unique experience of death and resurrection to share with us. As they grapple day by day with death and suffering, they more than others can teach the Church about the mystery of Easter. What follows is an exploration of widowhood in the Christian tradition.

First century Christians inherited a rich theology of widowhood from their Jewish past. Luke makes this clear in his stories and parables about widows. He portrays Jesus teaching us about giving God all we possess in the story of the widow’s mite (Luke 21:1-4). His hearers would recall the ancient (8th cent B.C.) story of the widow who shared her last scrap of food with Elijah, instead of hoarding it for herself and her starving son. She gave life while staring death in the face, and her love was rewarded by an unfailing supply of flour and oil throughout the drought (1 Kings 17: 7-16).

When Jesus entered the village of Naim and brought resurrection to a near-dead family by raising a widow’s son to life (Luke 7:11-16), onlookers would have recalled how Elijah, who worked in the same area of Galilee, raised a widow’s son to life in similar fashion: “Elijah stretched himself on the child three times and cried out to the Lord, Lord my God, may the soul of this child, I beg you, come into him again!’
Complications in Theological Thinking about Other Species: A Reply to David Jones
Authors: Waldau Paul
Published: July 2007

This discussion concerns some difficulties which occur when we try to think about other, non-human animals. It takes the form of a reply to an article which appeared in this journal in December of 1992. The article, written by David Jones and entitled “Do Whales Have Souls?”, was a free-ranging attempt to ask theologically and philosophically inspired questions about whales and other life. This reply points out difficulties inherent in any thinking about other animals, and in particular those risks which such thinking faces if it relies on primary categories of Catholic theology. Failure to see the limitations of such categories can perpetuate the dismissal of other animals’ possibilities which has been characteristic of the Christian tradition.

Jones’ article contains the first mention of whales appearing in this journal, and it aims to be speculative and provocative. While at first we may smile at the range of the questions and the tendency to poetic observation in the article, the general subject matter—the existence of another group of species characterized by large brains, the occurrence of complex inter-individual communication, and both family structure and enduring social networks of distinct individuals—invites speculation of a very pointed sort. This reply argues that two sets of complications arise when Jones tries to think about whales. The first concerns the inherent limitations of familiar theological categories if we use them when trying to assess the significance of other living creatures, and the second concerns the viability of the familiar category of “species” when seeking to understand other animals’ value.
“Not judge in one’s own cause” and the Nature of Ethics
Authors: O'Neill J.C.
Published: July 2007

The principle “You can’t be judge in your own cause” is both selfevident and powerful. It is the principle that compels us to recognize that the ethical enterprise entails submitting to a higher judgment than our own first judgment. Moreover, it is the principle that commits us to conceding that ethical judgments are objective. Those two conclusions are accepted by many moralists. There is a third conclusion that, unless I am mistaken, follows just as inexorably as these two, but is rarely, if ever, accepted in modem discussions. If you can’t be judge in your own cause you commit yourself to depend on the praise and blame of a judge who is competent to judge your cause. The principle “Not judge in one’s own cause” entails an ethics of reward and punishment, because praise is a reward and blame a punishment.

“Notjudge in one’s own cause”

The principle “You cannot be judge in your own cause” is self-evident. It ordinarily applies in cases where I am in dispute with someone else over property: perhaps over ownership of land or fishing rights or the proceeds of a will. The principle is extended to cover issues such as the ban on an examiner from examining a relative, or a magistrate from presiding at the trial of a business associate.

No one doubts the applicability of the rule in these relatively unproblematic cases. What could be easier, it might be argued (but never is) than discounting one’s tendency to severity or to leniency when examining one’s own child? Yet most moral dilemmas are far more difficult than property disputes and arguments over examination grades. Every dispute inevitably involves the “cause” of every disputant.
Awareness of Angels
Authors: Davie Ian
Published: July 2007

Angelology may be unfashionable, but in recent years it has re-emerged in America, where it flourishes under a different name as the ‘Possible Worlds’ school of philosophy whose principal concern is with problems of ‘transworld identity’. In particular, its subtlest and most uncompromising proponent, David Lewis, has developed what he calls ‘Counterpart Theory’. This is a theory of modal quantification in which a close resemblance relation is substituted for strict identity, and it would seem to be a theory well-suited to provide a logical underpinning for what has been traditionally said of angels in their role as guardians. I have no reason to suppose that David Lewis would approve of the use to which I am about to put his Counterpart theory, and what I have to say should be regarded as no more than a modest footnote to the debate now being conducted in the stratosphere of symbolic logic with all the attendant ingenuity and zeal that once characterised scholastic disputations on the subject of angels.

For example, Aquinas discusses whether ‘morning knowledge’ and ‘evening knowledge’ are the same for angels. He explains this Augustinian distinction as follows: ‘Their knowledge of the primordial being of things is called morning knowledge; and this is according as things exist in the Word. But their knowledge of the very thing created, as it stands in its own nature, is termed evening knowledge, because the being of things flows from the Word as from a kind of primordial principle, and this flow is terminated in the being which they have in themselves.’
Theology for a World Come of Age: The Meaning of Dietrich Bonhoeffer for Doing Systematic Theology Today
Authors: Knödel Natalie
Published: July 2007

What is bothering me incessantly is the question what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today. The time when people could be told everything by means of words, whether theological or simply pious, is over, and so is the time of religion in general. We are moving towards a completely religionless time: people as they are now simply cannot be religious any more.

These words from a letter of the German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer mark one of the turning points in the history of systematic theological thinking in this century.

Hardly any other theologian has provided as strong a challenge to post-war theologians as Bonhoeffer. In this article I want to give an introduction to Bonhoeffer’s theology as a whole and his concept of ‘religionless Christianity for a world come of age’ in particular. Then, in the final section, I want to discuss the relevance of Bonhoeffer for doing systematic theology in the changing theological landscape of today.
John Henry Newman's Adoption of Baptismal Regeneration, and the Relative Importance of John Bird Sumner, Richard Mant and William Beveridge to his Development
Authors: Phipps David J.
Published: July 2007

The commonly accepted opinion of Newman’s adoption of the doctrine of Baptismal Regeneration and rejection of Calvinism follows his account in the Apologia that it was Hawkins’ gift, in 1824, of

the ‘Treatise on Apostolical Preaching,” by Sumner, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, from which I learned to give up my remaining Calvinism, and to receive the.doctrine of Baptismal Regeneration.

This statement in the Apologia is based upon a journal entry of August 1824:

Lately I have been thinking much on the subject of grace, regeneration &c. and reading Sumner’s Apostolical Preaching, which Hawkins has given me. Sumner’s book threatens to drive me either into Calvinism, or baptismal regeneration, and I wish to steer clear of both, at least in preaching.

Undoubtedly, the Apologia continues to be an invaluable insight into the religious development of its author, but yet we need to be aware of its tendency to pass over the details of what was a very complicated and lengthy development.

Newman divides his spiritual journey into four broad phases: Evangelical, Liberal, Apostolical, and lastly Roman Catholic. This has the great advantage that the broad sweep of his brush portrays the dynamic of his pilgrimage towards a definite goal, but this is at the expense of some of the background to significant changes in his life, for neither the Evangelical nor the Liberal stages of his progress were entirely unmixed with other strands of thought. In particular, the Apologia does not do justice to the whole spectrum of influences to which he was subject before he went up to Oxford.
The Mystery of Death Alterity and Affectivity in Levinas
Authors: Purcell Michael
Published: July 2007

In years gone by, November was the month most closely associated with death. The month, which Ted Hughes appropriately describes as the ‘month of the drowned dog’, opened, having remembered All Saints, with the Commemoration of All Souls, the black draped catafalque in the aisle, the three Masses, and a hymnody recalling death’s pains and anguishes. Think of the words of the popular hymn, O turn to Jesus, Mother, turn, in which it was recalled that those who died,

... have fought a gallant fight;In death’s cold aims they persevered;and, after life’s uncheery night.The arbour of their rest is neared.

Death was cold; death was pain and loss; sickness unto death was struggle.

Now, it seems, we have possessed death, we have brought it close and made it our own, not to be feared and fled from, but friendly and familiar. The theology of death has come of age and now faces death with that anticipatory resoluteness of which Heidegger speaks. Thanatology speaks the language of ontology. Subjectivity, formerly snuffed out in death, now appropriates, as integral to its own life, death, and reasserts its mastery. Mature in Christian faith, we have authentically managed to appropriate what otherwise we would rather forget. What I would like to suggest in this article is that this repatriation of death into life, rather than yielding death’s meaning, actually leads to a situation in which, as Blanchot says, we have lost death, and obscured its significance.
‘The Firmament Sheweth His Handiwork:’ Some Scientists' Reflections on Theology
Authors: Fuller Michael
Published: July 2007

There still appears to be a firm view in the minds of many people that science and religion are somehow inescapably opposed to one another. On the one hand (such a view might allege), to be a scientist means that one can’t take religion seriously: on the other, to be a religious believer one has to sit light to many of the findings of science, either quietly ignoring them or perhaps even flatly denying their validity. Anyone saying that modern science and Christianity are quite compatible is often looked at askance, as though either his or her science, or his or her theology, or both, must be suspect. However, a growing number of theologians are now writing about the theological implications of science; and, in addition, some scientists are also providing more or less explicit comments on the theological implications of their work.

This should not surprise us. In his recent book Art and the Beauty of God, Bishop Richard Harries makes the remark that ‘All works of art, whatever their content, have a spiritual dimension,’ in that they can provide us with comfort or solace. It is surely also true that all the sciences necessarily have a theological dimension, in that they all investigate one aspect or another of the material universe, and, Christians believe, that universe is itself, in some sense, the creation of God. We ought therefore to expect to discover something about the Creator in our analysis of the creation, whether we conclude, at one extreme, with the deists, that God somehow initiated the Big Bang and then abandoned the cosmos to get on with it; or whether we conclude, at the other extreme, that the universe may be regarded as being so intimately connected with its originator that it is reasonable to call it in some sense the Body of God.
Signs and Symbols of Sacred Reality in Old Testament Religion
Authors: Heskin Kieran
Published: July 2007

In this paper, I propose to deal with various sacred realities that helped the people of Israel deepen their relationship with God over the years: die Aik of the Covenant, the desert Tabernacle, the Temple, the Sabbath and other feasts, the synagogue, religious meals and creation itself.

Of all the sacred objects of Old Testament Religion, the one that must have ranked among the most sacred was the Ark of the Covenant. It was constructed at Sinai, according to the instructions of the Lord, from acacia wood (Ex. 25.10ff.). It was a box two and a half cubits long, one and a half cubits wide and one and a half cubits high. It contained the two tablets of the law (1 Kings 8.9), a jar of manna and Aaron’s rod (Ex. 16.33; Heb. 9.4). It was covered by a gold plate called the kapporet (die mercy seat) at either end of which, facing each other, there were cherubim. The Aik was not only a powerful symbol of the Sinai covenant, it was also a location of divine presence “There I will meet with you...”(Ex. 25.22).

The cultures surrounding Israel provide some insight into the culdc thought that lay behind the construction of the Ark. In the Ancient Near East there was a custom whereby a treaty document was often placed in a container which served as the footstool for a deity. Thus the decalogue was placed in its container, the Ark, and this then became God’s footstool.

The Tabernacle

The aik was housed in the Tabernacle or the Tent of Meeting.
Sacraments and Society An Anthropologist Asks, What Women Could be Doing in the Church?
Authors: Douglas Mary
Published: July 2007

The sacraments raise controversy at every turn, no matter which one of the seven we think of. There is no end to hot debate on pastoral issues.

For example, why has Penance taken a back seat of late? Is it because we sin less? Or do we have less sense of sin? If so, why should it be so? Or are we more forgiving and therefore take it for granted that God is more forgiving? As to the Eucharist, why cannot any one receive communion, whether they are baptised Catholics or believing Christians or outright pagans? Would it not do them good, whatever their condition? Does Marriage really matter? Why does Ordination rule out Marriage? How often can the Last Sacrament be given? Why is Ordination the only gender-exclusive sacrament? I have left out Confirmation and Baptism, but we can ask why the Catholic Church institutes seven sacraments, while some Christian congregations just have Baptism, and others, Baptism and Confirmation, and some take everything in the world to be a potential sacrament?

I want to take the last two questions together, women priests (why not?) and the seven instituted channels of grace (why seven?), together with the claim of the Church to be universal. Universal means standing above local bias, resisting temporary pressures, recognizing a passing fashion for what it is, and thus standing for permanent truths for all times and places. The universal Church is old, but not a fossil, she must develop; truth is revealed gradually, the doctrines have to be unfolded. I understand that the work of the Holy Spirit is to safeguard doctrine and practice.
Sacramental Language
Authors: Harbert Bruce
Published: July 2007

We use the word figure in many ways. We speak of figure-skating, of cutting a figure, of a fine figure of a man, the fuller figure, a figure of fun, figuring things out, figures of speech and being good with with figures. These are all current senses. In the past, figure has had other meanings. When, in The Merry Wives of Windsor Mistress Ford encourages Mistress Page to ‘scrape the figures out of your husband’s brains’, she does not mean that he has been worrying about the mortgage, but that his head is full of mistaken ideas or fantasies.

Figure comes from the Latin figura. In 1944 the German literary critic Erich Auerbach published an influential article entitled Figura. He showed the wide range of meanings that figura has in classical Latin, and how these developed further in Christian usage. Fran the earliest records, figura could mean ‘the shape of a thing’, just as we now speak of a person’s ‘figure’. But it could also mean a shape representing something else. Sculptors, for instance, make figurae of human beings; in our dreams we see figurae of people who are dead.

Christian writers developed this second sense in a new and important way. For them, figura could refer to an object or event belonging to a particular point in time that represented something in the future. For Tertullian, Isaac, Joseph, Moses are all figurae of Christ2; the marriage of Adam and Eve is a figura of Christ and the Church3 (Theologians are familiar with this way of looking at history, though we usually call it by a word of Greek origin, typology.)