bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Reflections on a Report
Authors: Edwards Adrian
Published: July 2007

Fr Hastings has touched on many very serious problems in his report, now published as Christian Marriage in Africa, and in the previous article, with a compassion and sincerity that draw on wide reading and long reflection. Yet I feel myself out of sympathy with much that he has to say. This may be more to my discredit than to Fr Hastings’; at any rate, let me throw down a few words to suggest that at any rate such differences may be permissible.

First of all, on a relatively secondary point, Fr Hastings takes a view of polygamy which, while he is not the first to suggest it, is still very much a minority view among both Catholics and Anglicans. The direction of the New Testament is monogamous, not so much in an explicit command, as in defining marriage by the image of the union of Christ and His Church in the New Covenant. For the baptized Christian, therefore, polygamy is not an option. For the non-Christian, however, polygamous unions, when they are in accord with the traditions of his society, cannot simply be written off as ‘immoral’; to force the disruption of such unions as the price of baptism is much more immoral. Polygamists might therefore be admitted to baptism; and while Christians should regard monogamous marriage as the norm, there are cases where a Christian who has taken more than one wife may be admitted to the Eucharist. Fr Hastings claims that this is the only policy which will be consistent with the ‘central precepts of the Gospel’.
Women's Liberation: Has the African Woman settled for tokens?
Authors: Ankrah E. Maxine
Published: July 2007

The Rights of Women throughout most of Africa are guaranteed, legally. Yet the full participation of women in the life of many African countries is still more a matter of policy than practice. Very few women share in the actual power of state. Former traditional securities are today less assured. Rather than more high-level appointments, the masses of women need more to be awakened to their potential as the changers of women’s position. For this, ‘Women’s Lib’ may have something to offer.

* * *

‘Women’s Liberation’ is the current development in the United States, although the movement has since spread to Europe. However, a militant reformist movement of African women predates this upsurge of feminist rebellion by nearly two decades. It was born out of national struggles for independence. The women of Algeria fought and worked for their nation’s independence and after the struggle a dynamic women’s organization was founded. Sékou Touré described as ‘decisive’ the contribution of Guinea’s women to the liberation of the country and the growth of the Democratic Party of Guinea. The Mau Mau of Kenya’s forests learned that their women had equally understood the high stakes at risk in the war against European settlers.

These activist roles in bringing about independence in many countries facilitated the development of an undoubtedly latent ‘freedom consciousness’. However, this stirring was only for a duration centred on the struggle against the colonial authorities. In some instances, women’s national movements were given impetus because of the gap between what women expected and had been promised, and what they actually received.
Not by words alone
Authors: van der Hart Rob
Published: July 2007

Religious experience is thickly overlayed by theological speculation and the reality of God is further and further submerged beneath theories that fruitlessly attempt to forge a connection between the Invisible and ‘ordinary’ things, between ‘the living ascended glorified personal Christ and lifeless impersonal objects, bread and wine’, as it was put recently in this magazine. Making sense of this sort of discussion is often difficult, because what is actually disputed is the very experience that the doctrine was formulated to express, the experience of God’s presence in things, which, indeed, sinks beneath the weight of words spoken about it. We are increasingly left with the empty shell of a splendid worship from which God himself has retreated.

Of course, many aspects of our faith are well served by serious questioning, but that does not always entitle us to unrestrained reflection. Sometimes speculation obscures its object instead of clarifying it, and the mind creates for itself a vacuum where once there was the immediacy of response: for example, when we begin to believe that a demonstration is required to confirm a reality that can, in truth, only be encountered. Is it not a most peculiar ability of the mind, a strange inclination towards self-destruction, to wonder about the factuality of the world, to wonder about the reality of the forest, or the person we love, or the God we inescapably find in our path ? Perhaps the mightier the experience the less we feel able to cope and the more we feel called to doubt. By putting such things in question they are indeed rendered questionable, and we are confronted with the frustrating task of proving that there is a reality that corresponds to the ideas in our mind.
Gospel or Religious Language?: Engels on the Peasant War
Authors: Maguire John
Published: July 2007

Dialogue between Marxists and Christians is no longer surprising. It seems to me, however, that it frequently takes place on far too wide a plane. Marxism and Christianity are juxtaposed as two competitive all-embracing ‘philosophies of man’, and the discussion is conducted in ultimate, cosmological and metaphysical terms. I realize that this is all very well, and probably very necessary too; it does not, however, seem to me to exhaust all the interesting and important questions that Christians and Marxists, or Marxist Christians, should explore.

I write now for Christians who, in their understanding of society, social change and political controversy, recognize that Marx has made a fundamental and essential contribution to our diagnosis of social ills and our prescription for their cure. Along with these positions, they (probably necessarily) accept Marx’s criticism of the repression, physical and psychological, which have at times been perpetrated and justified in the name of Christianity.

I will assume, then, that if my reader has any quarrels with Marxism, it is not on the broad issues that I have just mentioned. We will then be able to look at another kind of question, which I think is equally interesting and important.
Virginia Woolf and the Corinthians
Authors: Swanston Hamish F. G.
Published: July 2007

Leonard Woolf, in Downhill all the Way, remarked of his wife that ‘the idea of a party always excited her’, and though it is true that on 11th November, 1918, ‘Virginia and I celebrated the end of a civilization’ by ‘eating, almost sacramentally, some small bars of chocolate cream’, for Virginia Woolf, as for the rest of us, eating was generally a celebration of the continuing value of life, where, as at the restaurant meal of The Waves, ‘here and now we are together’ drawn into ‘this communion’, and making ‘something that will join the innumerable congregations of past time’.

Talk of that kind about eating is an open invitation for those Christians who would engage in ‘Theology and Literature’, but a man should guard against any quick transition from Virginia Woolf’s talk of sacramental chocolate creams and congregations of past time to his peculiar Christian understanding of meal and communion. It should give us pause, for example, that the chocolate creams were eaten at the ‘end of a civilization’, and that in The Waves the meal is created around a hero who, described in Christ-like terms certainly, is finally ineffective.
Catholics and Politics at the time of Emancipation
Authors: Holmes J. Derek
Published: July 2007

It has almost become platitudinous to state that the controversial literature at the time of Catholic Emancipation illustrates the fact that the expression of radical political opinion had been muted as a result of the events of the French Revolution. On the whole, it is argued, the controversy tended to be theological or apologetic rather than political and the usual arguments in favour of Catholic emancipation were those of expediency rather than principle. The Roman Catholics themselves, it is argued, would not wish to associate their claims with more radical political demands, while their social and political isolation during the previous century would be reflected in their reluctance to seize the opportunities which became possible after emancipation. As the future Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman himself wrote, the ‘shackles were removed, but not the numbness and cramp which they had produced’.

However, the point of this article is simply to show that the most cursory reading of Catholics periodicals at the time would demonstrate that none of these historical claims are necessarily supported by the evidence. In fact, it would be more surprising if the political awareness of the Cisalpines at the end of the eighteenth century had so quickly disappeared; after all, the political tradition of English radicalism did not completely disappear after 1789. Furthermore, Bernard Ward made the interesting point that there were eight English Catholic M.P.s in the Parliament of 1831—a number which was only exceeded in the twentieth century. Of course, not all English Catholics wished to be associated with political radicals and most of them were not prepared to ‘seize their political opportunities’ after the grant of emancipation, but there were significant exceptions.
Priorities in Religious Life
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

Nobody who cares about the future of religious life should fail to study the recent essay on the subject by Jerome Murphy O’Connor, an Irish Dominican who teaches at the Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem— an entire issue of Supplement to Doctrine and Life is given over to it (No. 45, May-June, 1973). What he has to say is so illuminating that it is worth repeating the main idea here, adding some comments and observations to back up his argument.

1—The raison d’etre of religious life

The question of priorities is crucial. What service do religious have to offer the Church and society? As they proceed to retrenchment and reform, the dilemma that confronts religious today is as follows: are they to decide what work they should be doing (teaching, nursing, preaching, whatever) and then allow the style of their life to be determined by that, or are they to make the form and quality of their community life the priority? Fr Murphy O’Connor is categorical : ‘What is important is that religious recognize that the primary service they render to the Church and to the world is the witness of their life together as a community’. Though religious increasingly do regard their service to the Church and to society as teachers, nurses, preachers, etc., as the primary determinant and seek to define the nature of religious life in terms then of work, this job- oriented approach in fact distorts religious life and leads to the disintegration of religious orders and communities.

For how can religious define and justify their existence as religious primarily in terms of the jobs they undertake ? Does a woman have to become a nun in order to teach or to nurse ?
Kami‐Natures
Authors: Allen Louis
Published: July 2007

Stiff opposition from the Socialist and Communist parties in Japan has forced the Japanese Government to cancel the visit to the United States of a marine biologist, author of Some Hydriods of the Amakusa Islands and ten other works. Censorship ? Persecution of intellectuals ? No, nothing so sinister. The distinguished scientist in question also happens to have another role, and is known, outside the pages of biology periodicals, as the Emperor of Japan. This gives the postponement this week of his visit to America planned for the autumn an importance of a different kind. The Socialists and Communists claim that the Liberal-Democratic party is misusing the person of the Emperor by making him a factor in relationships with the US. It is, they say, giving him a political role, and this is in direct contradiction with the Japanese Constitution of 1947. Indeed, that constitution does state quite clearly in Article 1 that the Emperor ‘shall be the symbol of the State and of the unity of the people, deriving his position from the will of the people with whom resides sovereign power’. It doesn’t matter now that this new constitution was largely American- inspired, in ideas and language; what matters is that a totally new concept of the Emperor’s function was forcibly introduced into Japanese life by it. The Meiji Constitution of 1889 had stated categorically that the Emperor was sacred and inviolable, the heir of a ‘line of emperors unbroken for ages eternal’.
Tea with Mr Taha
Authors: Hickley Dennis
Published: July 2007

Mr Taha is a model of Muslim piety and exercises a strict control over his household. A family joke has it that he once suffered severely from scruples on discovering that he had eaten some jam which had become fermented. As a member of a distinguished landowning family of Azerbaijan he has never had to work and has spent most of his life as a kind of gentleman scholar, leading an austere existence and devoted to prayer and such pursuits as collecting Old Korans. My impression is that, through leading this withdrawn life, he has allowed himself to become an isolated personality. A timid and nervous man, with a thin ascetic face, he betrays a tendency towards extreme excitability when discussing matters that involve his deepest convictions. On one such occasion I noticed that his features became distorted by his attempts to control his feelings and the veins on his forehead stood out. His family commented on this to me afterwards and said that he had not spoken at such length nor so vehemently for many years. It was evident that though they obeyed him externally he sensed that they were not with him in spirit. Consequently he no longer spoke about what was closest to him, which is to say that he hardly spoke at all. The visit of a Christian priest was like the breaking of a dam. Almost as soon as I arrived in Tabriz I was invited to his house—he is a relative of my Iranian friends—and hints were dropped that religion would be discussed.

We arrived at his house about the middle of the morning and after leaving our shoes at the bottom of the stairs were shown up to a long saloon which occupied a substantial part of the first floor, an arrangement which I understand is typical of the better class houses of Tabriz. The saloon has four large windows looking out over the garden which, during the hot hours of the day, are shielded by bamboo mats suspended from the exterior of the frame, so that however hot and glaring it may be outside, the room is shadowed and cool.
Chile: 1970–1973
Authors: Pyle Leo
Published: July 2007

In December 1972 Luis Corvalán, the general secretary of the Chilean communist party, was asked if a coup d’etat was possible. ‘It is theoretically possible. But I don’t expect it to happen, because I’m full of confidence in the success of the policies being implemented by the Unidad Popular. And, moreover, there are two very important institutions, the Catholic Church and the armed forces, which have, through their leaders, made themselves very clear on this issue.’ Ten months later Corvalán’s expectations and the hopes of people inside and out of Chile were totally destroyed in a savage and brutal coup.

Corvalán and the communist party were not the only people to seriously misread the situation. I believe the Christian Democrats also totally misjudged the strength of extreme right wing forces. Certainly Corvalán was tragically wrong: the armed forces were the final agents of the coup; the Catholic Church stood by, and a couple of days later the hierarchy were gathered in prayer with the military leaders. The role of the church and of Christianity in the Chilean process is important and I shall return to the theme towards the end of this account.

Most people probably have at least fragmentary ideas of the events which led to the death of Salvador Allende and the installation of the military junta. A complete analysis of the history of the U.P. would need a book. All I can hope to do in a short article is to try to outline some of the main changes in the balance of forces in Chile between 1970 and 1973. Inevitably I shall have to omit discussion of many important factors—for reasons of space there will be little discussion of the agrarian reform, important though it was. However, I believe the outline here to be a reasonably coherent version of events.
The 'Essence' of Christianity: Notes after de Certeau
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

The French theological landscape seems to have been lying comparatively fallow for the ten years since the great days of the Vatican Council, but the periodicals are now laden with the first fruits of a new generation. The notes that follow have been made in the course of reading essays by Michel de Certeau, and attempt to transpose his style and preoccupations into terms related to our own out of an idiom that is very different from most theological writing in English (though compare the valuable studies by Bernard Sharratt, hidden in the files of a sadly defunct review: ‘Locating theology’, Slant No 22 (1968), ‘Absent centre’, Slant Nos 24 and 25 (1969).

The Empty Tomb as Ideogram

On literary and text-historical grounds, as virtually all scholars now agree, the narrative of St Mark’s Gospel ends at verse 8 of the final chapter; the remaining verses printed in our bibles, though they appear in most of the extant MSS and are worth study in their own right, are clearly by some other writer and must therefore be set aside when we try to understand the message of St Mark. From the point at which the three women enter the sepulchre, then, the concluding verses read as follows
The Passage of Bob Dylan
Authors: Wall Alan
Published: July 2007

Tomorrow is a long time At the time of John F. Kennedy’s assassination Dylan was afraid that he too might be killed. Leaving aside his proverbial paranoia, what this fear showed is the extent to which Dylan considered himself ‘involved’ : he obviously thought that he was making a statement in his music radical enough for him to be made the target of a politically- directed bullet. Dylan was connected professionally with the Civil Rights Movement and was made into a young hero by that amorphous political and social group, but at certain points in his early career his own perspectives transcended the liberal optimism of the Civil Rights slogans.

Some of Dylan’s early songs were not in that one-dimensional rhetorical accusative one came to expect of the New York City folk crowd. Dylan became aware very quickly that there was only a simple answer to everything if you were simple enough to accept it. He did not wish to be made into a solo version of Peter, Paul and Mary, megaphoning easily-digestible platitudes to an auditorium full of hungry college students. In an early, unreleased song about Heze- kiah Jones he ‘accuses’ the white ‘rednecks’, the undifferentiated, anonymous, philistine mass who hide behind their respectable beliefs. But he was really more intelligent than that: he knew that the poor whites were as much victims of ‘society’s pliers’ as the exploited blacks (though often less spectacularly so).

His song, Only a Pawn in their Game, must surely rank as one of the most intelligent contemporary political comments upon the murder of Medgar Evans.
Liberating Theology: Gustavo Gutierrez
Authors: Réamonn Páraic
Published: July 2007

A theology of liberation purports to answer the question of the relation between Christian faith and the struggle for human liberation. From within the Bolshevik party, Bukharin and Proebrazhensky thought the two antithetical: ‘A communist who rejects the commandments of religion and acts in accordance with the directions of the party, ceases to be one of the faithful. On the other hand, one who, while calling himself a communist, continues to cling to his religious faith, one who in the name of religious commandments infringes the prescriptions of the party ceases thereby to be a communist’. But Gutierrez is a Peruvian who writes as a Latin American. Things in that strife-torn continent are less ossified, as in the third part of his book he makes clear. The struggle for liberation is not the possession of one revolutionary group or set of groups who can dictate the terms on which others may participate, and while the bulk of the church (for Gutierrez, the Catholic church) is still reactionary, many Christians are coming to see that their commitment to Christ places them within and not against or just outside the liberation process. Indeed, Gutierrez would claim, the scope and seriousness of the process of liberation is such that no one in Latin America, and no one in the world, is outside it (p. 143). Ostensible neutrality is a fraud, real neutrality a fiction. Gutierrez does not address himself to the world, though the world may have something to learn from him. He writes in a Latin American perspective, and for his own, for the oppressed and for the exploited.
Poverty: The Christian Response
Authors: Wesfon Alban
Published: July 2007

Theological Dictionaries are a valuable asset for any preacher. They can usually provide a helpful bibliography or perhaps the germ for preaching or lecturing on most theological topics. The Sacramentum Mundi article on Poverty is no exception; not however, because of its theological profundity, but because of the response evoked by the badness of parts of the section on the moral theology of poverty. Here are some of the offending passages:

In the Western world only isolated individuals lack the bare necessities of life. The understanding of poverty has largely disappeared from these countries. Instead of material poverty we often find other forms of poverty—desolation of heart, a sense that life is meaningless, anxiety, isolation—which must be interpreted as a kind of longing for redemption and love. A Christian who finds these things in himself or in others must accept them in the spirit of Christ as a means of encountering God.

Poverty must first be recognised by the sufferer as a fact. By nature every form of poverty demands admission of one’s own inadequacy. It is part of the human condition that distress can never be altogether abolished, whatever our efforts. . . . Certain privations are thrust upon us.

I think the passages quoted are bad, firstly because of the factual errors they contain, but more seriously because they show a misunderstanding of what Christians understand by poverty and what underlies the Christian’s response. ‘In the Western world only isolated individuals lack the bare necessities of life. The understanding of poverty has largely disappeared from these countries.’ That may be a convenient myth reinforcing the mistaken belief that the Western world is on its great march of progress, but it muffles the truth about the real situation.
The Eyes of Beatrice
Authors: Pearce Richard
Published: July 2007

The details that Dante gives us of his meetings with the earthly Beatrice are so sketchy and the circumstances so ephemeral—they encounter each other as children once, she begins to greet him in the street some nine years later and then shortly after passes him by—that one can reasonably say that Dante never fully meets Beatrice until Canto XXX of the Purgatorio. And it is neither the style of meeting nor the woman that Dante quite expected. He had gazed at a distance on the earthly Beatrice in the Streets of Florence and at Mass and at banquets—though she had rarely looked at him; he had gazed on the heavenly Beatrice, too, in his mind’s eye. But the actual encounter, the real meeting, with the heavenly Beatrice (and the heavenly is the revelation of the earthly, a manifestation of the truth) is a rude awakening. He has trembled through the reeking horrors of the Inferno, encouraged by Virgil’s indomitable trust that it is by descent into the deepest cavern that they will reach the redeeming light and come to Beatrice; he has toiled up the mountain of the Purgatorio, lightened by the hope of meeting Beatrice; he has cast himself into the wall of fire that divides the last purgatorial terrace from the Earthly Paradise, urged on by Virgil: ‘ “Look now, my son, between Beatrice and thee is this wall” . . . and my sweet Father, to comfort me, kept talking of Beatrice as he went, saying: “I seem to see her eyes already” ‘ (XXVII 35f and 52ff.).
Scarlet and Black: The Silent Pistol
Authors: Tatham Michael
Published: July 2007

Any political idea in a work of literature is like a pistol shot in the midst of a concert.—Stendhal.

I.

It was Silone, I believe, who proposed that we might be communists without the Party and Christians without the Church. Individually, perhaps : collectively, it can scarcely be doubted we lack the necessary courage and self-discipline. Belloc, I suspect, came closer to evaluating our gifts when he advised ‘always keep ahold of nurse. . . .’ The difficulty is, of course, that most of our nurseries are empty of nurses—the last wraith of a political nanny had disappeared some time before Mr Wilson sent for his famous removal van, and now that those long-serving retainers, the Latin Mass and the 1662 Anglican Communion, are skipping among us as vernacular folk masses and Second and Third Series, it is understandable that we should be in some confusion. Indeed, despite Silone, our predicament is such that we cling yet more tightly to the only security available. It is perhaps pleasantly ironic that for many of us the last and most esteemed resource is none other than Progressive nanny. Orwell could see the way of it a quarter of a century ago.

‘Almost everyone nowadays, even the majority of Catholics and Conservatives is progressive, or at least wishes to be thought so. . . . We are all of us good democrats, anti-fascist, anti-imperialist, contemptuous of class distinction, impervious to colour prejudice, and so on and so forth’, (England your England. Seeker and Warburg.)

Regrettably, some of the pleasanter aspects of such a position are now more in question than they were when Orwell wrote—colour prejudice wears all the dignity of democratic consensus—but for the most part the position remains unaltered and has probably been strengthened by the dominant position of television as a means of influencing public attitudes.
I will forgive their sin and heal their land
Authors: Bucher Hubert
Published: July 2007

There is a wide-spread feeling that the recent conference on ‘Salvation Today’ which took place in Bangkok from December 28th, 1972 to January 8th, 1973, under the auspices of the World Council of Churches’ Commission on World Mission and Evangelism, may herald the beginning of a new period in the missionary endeavour of the Christian churches. A significant feature of the conference was that delegates from churches in the Third World outnumbered those from the West. They attacked the sending of missionaries and funds by powerful Western churches to the poor churches in the Third World, urging that the missionary enterprise should become ‘completely mutual and international’, and even proposed a moratorium on the sending of funds and personnel to Third World churches, to allow them to discover their own identity and resources for missionary expansion.

Only a few months after the Bangkok conference had discussed the meaning of ‘Salvation Today’, 720 delegates attended a ‘Congress on Mission and Evangelism’ in Durban, South Africa. As in Bangkok, the greater part of those who took part in the South African congress were ‘Non-Whites’. There was a further similarity of great significance: The aim of the congress was ‘. . . to discover together the relevance of the Gospel and the meaning of mission and evangelism in present-day Southern Africa ... to assess the resources and potential of all Christian churches and agencies for mission and evangelism . . . and to give stimulus, inspiration and encouragement to Christians as they face this task’.
Chesterton and Distributism
Authors: Boyd Ian
Published: July 2007

Chesterton never gave a systematic account of what he meant by Distributism anywhere in his writing, but the outline of this sociopolitical philosophy is clear to anyone who is familiar with his work and that of the circle of writers to which he belonged. As the name implies, Distributism meant first of all that property should be distributed in the widest possible way. Belloc stated the case for this policy in The Servile State, which he published in 1912 and which became the text-book of the movement. He argued that Socialism and State Capitalism were helping to create the same kind of society in which power would be concentrated in the hands of a small ruling-class and security would be given to a permanent proletariat whose econonomic position would be fixed by law. The only alternative to the ‘slave’ state was the Distributist state of small peasant ownership and workers’ guilds. The nearest approximation to this simple society was found in medieval times. Consequently Distributists must be prepared to repudiate modern industrialism in its present form and work for a return to the past. The way in which this theory was interpreted among Belloc’s followers is best illustrated by a quotation from a Distributist manifesto published twenty-five years later:

Distributists agree with Socialists in their condemnation of the present system of society, but they think the evil is far more deeply rooted than socialists suppose . . . Distributists propose to go back to fundamentals, and to rebuild society from its basis in agriculture, instead of accepting the industrial system and changing the ownership, which is all that Socialists propose. Apart from their conviction that industrialism is essentially unstable and cannot last, Distributists refuse to accept it as a foundation upon which to build, because they believe that large scale industry may be as great a tyranny under public as under private ownership.
Teach yourself Tongue‐speaking
Authors: Archer Antony
Published: July 2007

Glossolalia can be produced with great ease—hence the title of this consideration of it. The interesting question is why people choose to engage in this form of pseudo-language, and this can at least be partially answered by describing its essential features, how people become glossolalists, and some of the conditions that favour it.

Anomalous speech is not so uncommon as is often supposed. Speech ingredients are used in ways ranging from the rudimentary to the highly sophisticated in both secular and religious contexts. The pseudo-languages of spells, incantations, games, nursery rhymes, and scat-singing for instance; those attributed to spirits and Martians; and those sometimes invented by children and adults can be located on such a continuum. What they have in common is that, unlike language, their meaning is not found in the conventions either of their internal organisation or of their relationship with the perceived world. Tongue-speaking in religious contexts is an improvised language of the same kind.
No Soup Kitchens
Authors: Quinn Edward
Published: July 2007

Lorsque les effets d’une politique intérieure menacent de démoraliser et d’exiler des centaines de milliers d’êtres humains, les considerations de correction diplomatique doivent faire place à des preoccupations de simple humanité. Je manquerais à mon devoir si je n’attirais I’attention du Conseil sur la situation actuelle et si je ne plaidais pour que I’opinion du monde, par l‘intermédiaire de la Société des Nations, des Etats membres et non membres, fasse le nécessaire afin de remédier à la situation actuelle et écarter la tragédie menaçante.

(James G. McDonald, High Commissioner for Refugees from Germany, Letter of Resignation 27 December 1935.)

McDonald’s letter exposing the deep roots of the Nazi persecution of the Jews and all opponents of racialism and other heresies naturally irritated the German authorities at the time, but it was also considered by the British Foreign Office as ‘a very ill-advised document’ and its author ‘a tiresome individual’. Not that our government lacked sympathy for the victims of Hitler’s policy, but it was hoped that a smoother diplomacy might in the long run prove more helpful to the Jews themselves and in the short run it seemed far too dangerous to tackle this still little known adversary on a matter of purely internal policy. And, like Pilate, they had no time to investigate the truth behind this policy. They simply could not grasp the fact that Hitler from the beginning to end was concerned to apply with ruthless logic the Weltanschauung he had worked out in bad German but with utter clarity in Mein Kampf.
The Sleeping Lord
Authors: Hague René
Published: July 2007

The Sleeping Lord brings together all that has been printed, sporadically, of David Jones’s work since The Anathemata was published in 1952, except The Narrows (in the Anglo-Welsh Review, Autumn 1973) and The Kensington Mass (Agenda, special issue, 1974). These nine pieces are described as ‘fragments’, but the word can hardly be used here in the sense in which it is applied, for example, to the fragments of Ennius (I choose Ennius because that dogged old hexametrist is specially dear to David—what would he not give to have half-a-dozen complete books of Ennius discovered?). There is nothing broken or incomplete in anything that is built into this work. The last piece, it is true, from The Book of Balaam’s Ass, starts with a ragged edge, but the context is restored and the continuity reestablished in a very few lines.

The collection falls into four parts: an introductory poem, A, a, a, Domine Deus, which comes close to, but leaves a loophole from, despair; then four sections, The Wall, The Dream of Private Clitus, The Fatigue, and The Tribune’s Visitation, which have in common (to put it crudely for the moment) an imperial Roman setting; then comes The Tutelar of the Place, which may be read as a prayer against the imposition of order at the cost of diversity and personality; and this acts as a natural bridge to the two ‘Welsh’ sections, The Hunt and The Sleeping Lord. Finally, Balaam’s Ass, which comes as an addendum : differing considerably in style, scale, and feeling from the preceding poems, and yet, in spite of its position in the book, serving as a link between David’s earliest and latest work.
Derida's Wake
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

The manifold operations with, and upon, a whole chain of representative texts which Jacques Derrida has been performing for more than a decade now, converge and conspire to outwit the continuing force of received metaphysical discourse. On every side, from Carnap to Heidegger, metaphysical discourse has been denounced and repudiated, but, as Derrida writes, ‘the way out of metaphysics is much more difficult to conceive than is generally imagined by those who think they made it with cavalier ease long ago, and who are in general sunk in metaphysics by the whole weight of the discourse they claim to have disengaged from it’ (E. D., page 416). Just how difficult the break with metaphysical discourse must be it is Derrida’s purpose to demonstrate in a multiplicity of contexts. But since it turns out that our whole notion of ‘sign’ is systematically as well as historically implicated in the hegemony of metaphysical discourse, and that ‘sign and deity have the same place and the same time of birth’ (Grammatologie, page 25), one’s theological curiosity cannot fail to be aroused.

Put briefly, Derrida’s programme is to dislodge the last vestiges of idealist metaphysics from our field of discourse, in order to open the way to a ‘materialism’ like Nietzsche’s affirmation of the ‘innocence of becoming’.
Chance and the Laws of Nature
Authors: Roberts Noel
Published: July 2007

The notion of ‘chance’ as a cause of the universe has fascinated many minds and nearly always it has been associated with its primeval beginnings. Milton, in Paradise Lost, especially Book II, line 890, et seq., paints a picture of the primeval chaos across which Satan is about to begin his journey from Hell to seek out Man and his earthly paradise.

‘Before their eyes in sudden view appearThe secrets of the hoary deep, a darkIllimitable ocean without bound,Without dimension; where length, breadth and highth,And time and place are lost; where eldest NightAnd Chaos, ancestors of Nature, holdEternal anarchy, amidst the noiseOf endless wars, and by confusion stand.For Hot, Cold, Moist, and Dry, four champions fierce,Strive here for mast’ry, and to battle bringTheir embryon atoms; they around the flagOf each his faction, in their several clans,Light-armed or heavy, sharp, smooth, swift or slow,Swarm populous, unnumbered as the sandsOf Barca or Gyrene’s torrid soil,Levied to side with warring winds, and poiseTheir lighter wings. To whom these most adhere,He rules a moment; Chaos umpire sits,And by decision more embroils the frayBy which he reigns; next him high arbiterChance governs all.
David Friedrich Strauss: A Centennial Comment
Authors: Swanston Hamish
Published: July 2007

In a letter of November 1837 proclaiming the beauties of Agnese Schebest to his friend Rapp, Strauss declared ‘Her speech, too, is thoroughly noble and intelligent’. It is common for a man to note in others his own defects, and particularly common for a clergyman to notice such defects, but Strauss here seems to be admiring a virtue others thought to be his own. George Eliot, for example, in 1858 at her second meeting with Strauss remarked that he spoke ‘with very choice words, like a man strictly truthful in the use of language’. And it has become a commonplace of Strauss criticism in this century to praise the honest purpose of the Life of Jesus. This huge work, like the short attacks on the foxy Schenkel, was ‘directed against counterfeiting’. Strauss was ever striving to state the truth of a matter.

But is honesty enough? Was Strauss’ achievement merely, as Albert Schweitzer remarked, and Karl Barth approvingly quoted, ‘uncertain truthfulness?’ To the opening sentence of Schweitzer’s appraisal in the Quest, ‘Strauss must be loved in order to be understood’, Barth, in his Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, put the caution: ‘This can only mean that we must feel sympathy for him. Strauss is not a tragic figure’. He is not, perhaps, quite consistent enough in his statement of the truth to command our awed respect.

Barth’s explanation of the uneven quality of Strauss’ work was that he came across a great practical problem almost by accident, by a chance of mood. The problem was that of the relation of revelation and history. And Strauss himself admitted that he was not always ready to deal with it: I am too much dependent upon mood, and far too self-occupied’. His discovery and its disturbing effects made him ‘probably the best-known and influential theologian of the Nineteenth Century in non-theological and non-church circles’.
The Myth and Dream of Paradise
Authors: Navone John
Published: July 2007

It was Tertullian who coined the phrase, anima naturaliter christiana. This means that in the innermost depth of every human being there is alive a sort of natural religion with its standards of true and false, good and evil; it means that man is pre-programmed to a sense of wonder and awe before the mystery of his existence and meaning within the universe.

Plays, like The Glass Menagerie and A Streztcar Named Desire in this essay, often imply this basic truth of man's openness to the transcendent when a man's dreams are seen to surpass both his personal resources and those of his society for their attainment, yet dream he must. In fact, his dreams may become more real for him than any other reality of his historical condition, bearing witness to that reality which underlies human awareness and, nevertheless, transcends human definition.

Sometimes the dream is associated with madness when a man, tragically deluded about the meaning of his life, destroys himself in his attempt to force reality to conform to the shape of his illusions. There is a profound pathos in a man's faithful response to a destructive illusion, to the wrong dream : even this, however, is perhaps better than no dream at all. In any case the theatre in general and Tennessee Williams's Glass MenaEerie and Streetcar in particular reveal much about man and the quality of his dreams; they reveal how much man and his society can be transformed for better or for worse by them.
All Sorts of Occasions
Authors: John Eric
Published: July 2007

Wittgenstein once said (to M.O’C Drury): ‘It is impossible for me to say one word in my book about all that music has meant in my life’. I do not think Wittgenstein meant to point to some personal hang up Musical experience is at once very important to those to whom it is important at all and very difficult to talk sense about. It is not quite impossible to do this, but impossible to do it consistently. One thinks of the remarks on music in Cocteau’s Rappel a I’Ordre or Stravinsky’s Conversations where remarks which illuminate sit cheek to jowel with remarks that merely obscure. Or, to take a more academic example, what is one to make of the fact that the same man, Donald Tovey, wrote the brilliant essay on Schubert and Loewes’ setting of Erlkönig that so illuminates the whole world of Lieder, and the utterly wrongheaded paper on Mozart’s fortieth symphony? It is then no disparagement of Hamish Swanston to say that his article, A Redeeming Occasion, in the March number of New Blackfriars, whilst full of interesting ideas, adds up to a general thesis about opera that must be rejected.

Dr Swanston likes opera. His taste is good, or at any rate I like most of the same things he does. He sees, what I am sure is just, that Mozart, Verdi, and Wagner are in quite a different category from other composers of opera. He would add Beethoven, on the strength of Fidelio, to this select company—here I strongly disagree but more of that in a moment. Going to one of this select group of operas is a redeeming occasion in the strict theological sense and Dr Swanston does not hesitate from a final conclusion that opera at this level ‘has itself become a way of theologising’. Here I am sure, he is quite wrong but to say why I find difficult because I do not think going to the opera, even to different performances of the same opera, is one kind of experience about which general conclusions can be made.
Analysis, Interpretation, Meaning; The Dilemma of Stuctural Anthropology
Authors: Edwards Adrian
Published: July 2007

The not unimpressive degree of agreement which prevailed as regards theory and practice among British social anthropologists between about 1940 and the later fifties was produced by a variety of factors, including of course the opportunities for fieldwork in the British colonial empire, on which the sun was unobtrusively, but inexorably, setting. Other factors were the relatively high degree of cordiality between the small number of leading social anthropologists, almost all of whom had been in some way influenced by both Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, and who found it possible to teach and organise research on the basis of what was called ‘structural-functionalism’, a workable synthesis (to simplify slightly) of Malinowski’s fieldwork methods with Radcliffe-Brown’s stress on the classification of social structures. The range of interests of structural-functionalism was unduly narrow, myth and ritual being treated as supporting adjuncts to the social institutions on which attention was focused, and both linguistics and oral literature were very largely ignored. Much of the theoretical basis of structural-functionalism was also of the sort that survives by not being questioned; if ‘the function of exogamy is to increase the solidarity of kin groups’, are those kin groups which allow endogamy therefore lacking in solidarity, how does one measure solidarity, and if exogamy (or any other social institution) cannot be explained as useful, what sort of explanations do we give?

The turning away from the structural-functional orthodoxy would have come anyway, with the end of the colonial era and the increase in number of social anthropologists, but it is only fair to point out that the new directions of social anthropology in Britain from 1960 onwards did grow out of work done by the leading apostles of structural-functionalism.
Unaccommodated Man
Authors: Tatham Michael
Published: July 2007

It is of course, a fruitless—if interesting—speculation, to ask oneself what would have happened to Christianity if the camera had been invented during Christ’s lifetime. Most of us probably find it pretty well impossible to picture Divinity trapped between the stiff pages of a family album or to conceive of a God crying out on a cross while, a few yards away, someone discards a flash or fiddles with a light metre. As we actually experience it, the problem arises in muted form, and is largely a matter of reconciling noble architecture, the tourist industry and religious sentiment. We have all seen those glossy volumes with coloured plates of pilgrim multitudes, a white figure with hand blessingly uplifted and that better-looking, younger nun, smiling instamatically over her own viewfinder. Granted then that the camera create; curious problems of credibility, it is perhaps not too outrageous to suggest—at least very tentatively— that if this medium had existed two milennia ago Christianity as we know it with its mystery and its historicity simply would not have happened.

If, however, there had been a photographic record dealing with the beginnings of Christianity, I believe that an American, Diane Arbus, who committed suicide in 1971, would have been better equipped than most people to salvage something meaningful from a past that we have magnified and isolated, and interpreted repeatedly into the patterns of our preconceptions. Quite recently her work has been on view at the Hayward Gallery and in March 1974 The Sunday Times ran an illustrated article on the exhibition in its supplement and asked several well-known critics to give their opinions.
Objectivity and Human Needs in Marxism
Authors: Cunningham Adrian
Published: July 2007

‘Communism is the solution to the riddle of history, and knows itself to be such—Marx, 1844.

Whether marxism poses for itself solutions to the riddles of history, or whether, more narrowly, it is a science of social formations and their transformation, or some combination of the two—these are central issues of contemporary marxist theory. They are focussed in the debate over the work of Althusser, and over the ‘neo-hegelianism’ of the earlier Lukacs, Goldmann, the Frankfurt School and others (for present purposes I shall collectively describe this latter position as Critical Theory). It is in this context that the old disputes over the relation between the earlier and the later work of Marx remain so important, for they have implications for the orientation, scope and purchase of the tradition as a whole.

Reflexion on these issues is prompted by two recent collections of marxist essays. Whilst Herbert Marcuse’s Studies in Critical Philosophy (New Left Books, £3.25) provides for the English reader essential material for the assessment of the claims of critical theory, Paul Walton and Andrew Gamble’s From Alienation to Surplus Value (Sheed & Ward, £5.50) is an attempt to establish the unity of ‘the total Marx’, without falling back on the critical theory tradition. In both texts, however, there are surprisingly similar lacunae and areas of fuzziness, especially over the definition and analysis of human needs. This is a concept basic to the marxist tradition but one which has rarely been satisfactorily investigated, or its crucial and awkward significance grasped (Mascolo, Meszaros, and Kolakowski not withstanding). It is on this question, and the related ones of the objectivity and universality of marxist theory, that I shall concentrate.