bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Empty Tomb and Resurrection
Authors: Pamment Margaret
Published: July 2007

In 1976, Fergus Kerr reviewed Hubert Richard’s The First Easter in New Blackfriars, and followed the review, in 1977, with two articles on the empty tomb and the appearance stories in recent Catholic writing. Hubert Richard’s book made available to the British public the method and results of form-critical study of these narratives. The method had been developed in Germany and taken up by English-speaking scholars like R. H. Fuller and C. F. Evans. The form-critical method still dominates study of the resurrection narratives, although, during the past twenty years, New Testament scholars have adopted different methods for interpreting the rest of the Gospels and the epistles. The books by Fuller and Evans have been reprinted, and as recently as June 1981, Professor Kenneth Grayston offered a spirited and compressed form-critical study of the empty tomb tradition (Expository Times, June 1981, pp 263-267). The form-critical method isolates the pericope from its context and examines its form with a view to discovering its purpose and giving it a place in a history of tradition. It is part of a quest to discover what happened in history, but it is often also very useful in elucidating the genre of the passage. It presupposes that fragments of tradition can be separated from the Gospels and the epistles and that such separation and analysis can lead to accurate relative dating e.g. Professor Grayston’s comments on I Cor. 15:3-5 (p 263f). The criteria for this kind of separation are sometimes doubtful and the results uncertain, but the method has a more serious limitation. It involves losing sight of the whole for the parts, and since any statement made in isolation becomes difficult to interpret with confidence, in losing sight of the whole, meaning is lost.
The Use of Heidegger
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

Nobody could be more kosher than Jaakko Hintikka in the bracing climate of Anglo-American analytic philosophy. In the festschrift recently offered to him, nevertheless, Dagfinn Follesdal evidently thought nothing of writing as follows: “Heidegger’s main contribution to philosophy, it seems to me, is to focus attention on the idea that all human activity, all our ways of relating to the world, to one another and to ourselves, contribute to constituting the world”. A few pages further on he writes: “Heidegger’s analyses of the many ways in which we may relate to the world . . . anticipate in many respects some of Wittgenstein’s later analyses of forms of life”. That last statement, of course, implies a somewhat controversial reading of Wittgenstein’s later work. The only point here, however, is that, for an analytic philosopher, such statements as those just quoted represent an unprecedentedly positive assessment of Heidegger’s work. This is of particular interest to students of recent theology, both Protestant and Catholic, where, for better or for worse, Heidegger’s influence has been considerable.

Scandinavian philosophers have always been well placed, culturally and linguistically, to mediate between the analytic and the phenomenological camps into which philosophers are still largely divided. Roughly speaking, the genealogy of the analytic line begins with Frege (1848 - 1925) and runs through Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein and Carnap to such philosophers as Quine, Donald Davidson, Elizabeth Anscombe and Michael Dummett. The alternative line descends from Hegel (1770 - 1831), deviates by reaction into Kierkegaard and Marx, and is disseminated diversely through Nietzsche, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, to such contemporaries as Foucault, Derrida, Gadamer and Habermas.
The Church in Argentina
Authors: Kirby Peadar
Published: July 2007

Quilmes is a large, predominantly working class suburb on the eastern side of Buenos Aires. With a population of some 800,000 it was constituted as a separate diocese five years ago and Bishop Jorge Novak was named its first bishop. To mark their five years as a diocese Quilmes held a synod last September whose aim was, as Sr Justa Tello told me at the synod office, “to help the people commit themselves”. The two-week synod last year was however just the beginning of a process of getting to know the socio-political and religious realities of the diocese; further sessions planned for 1982/83 hope to evolve pastoral responses to these realities. It is, as Sr Justa Tello explained, based on the ‘See-Judge-Act’ methodology and the September session of the synod had limited itself to the first of these.

Fr Orlando Yorio, who himself ‘disappeared’ for five months in 1976 just after the military coup in March of that year, is secretary of the synod. He pointed out to me that in the early years of the Spanish conquest of Latin America “evangelisation took place through synods”. Among the ample documentation prepared by various commissions for the synod is one which gives an historical background in the early councils of the church, various diocesan synods held in Europe at different times and especially the 51 diocesan synods held in many different regions of Latin America from 1539-1638. To my great surprise Fr Yorio pointed out to me that canon law insists that each diocese hold a synod every ten years. This major event in the life of the Quilmes diocese then was, in the words of Fr Yorio, “to put us in touch with a renovating tradition of the Latin American Church”.
Ideological Disputes
Authors: Grimes Alistair
Published: July 2007

Since the term ‘Ideology’ and ‘Ideological’ are used in a variety of ways, I shall start by saying something about how I intend to use these terms in this paper and indicate what I understand to be the nature of my remarks about them.

For the purposes of this paper I shall take Marxism, Conservatism, Liberalism and Nationalism to be examples of political ideologies. This is not intended to be an exhaustive list; I could, for example, have included Fascism or National Socialism. It is merely intended to provide me with enough material to make the main points of this paper without becoming too involved in matters of exegesis. It should also be noted that in calling Marxism, Liberalism and the rest ideologies I am not using the term in a pejorative manner. That is, I wish to distinguish at the outset between my thesis and that of those who would argue that in calling a belief, doctrine or argument ideological, we are also condemning it as unreasonable or irrational. My aim is simply to discuss how we can best characterise ideological arguments, by comparing and contrasting them with other kinds of arguments. That said, it ought to be clear that my remarks will be philosophical rather than historical in nature. Though I shall be referring to disputes between ideologists that took place in the past, my interest in them will not be that of the historian. I shall be concerned with their conceptual structure rather than their chronological development.
The Church in Bolivia
Authors: Kirby Peadar
Published: July 2007

Izara doesn’t appear on the map of Bolivia. It is a tiny village of some 100 people lying in the foothills of the range of mountains that mark the edge of the Altiplano, the 14,000 foot high plateau on which most of the country’s five million people live. It is just one of the 50 communities served by three priests who live in the village of Paria some 30 miles away by an unpaved dusty road. I went with one of the priests, an Englishman, Fr John Sullivan, on his quarterly visit to Izara during which he married a young couple, baptised two babies and said Mass. But the small Indian community of Izara doesn’t have to wait another three months to celebrate their faith or receive instruction since every Sunday Luis, the village catechist, leads the community’s liturgy.

Luis is just one of the 4,000 adult catechists who have become the leaders of the church in their traditional and isolated communities. They have grown up in the communities and they get their formation as community leaders by going away for week- long courses every few months organised for the catechists of a particular area. It is this network of catechists which has become the single most important influence in the growth of a grass-roots church in Bolivia. They are, Mr Pedro Duran, the co-ordinator of the episcopal commission on catechetics, explained to me a phenomenon in Bolivia where the church relies on foreign missionaries for 90 per cent of its clergy. For the first time Bolivians have become not just helpers of foreign missionaries but an autonomous force evangelising their own people from within their highly distinctive culture and not from outside it.
John Coulson: Religion and Imagination
Authors: Cockshut Anthony
Published: July 2007

It is a delicate and difficult matter for me, a professional student of literature, and an amateur of theology, to review a book by a professional theologian and an amateur of literature. Odium academicum is usually a much greater danger than the more-publicized variety, theologicum. But at least I have the advantage of having already acquired a deep respect for Dr Coulson’s work, and of having learnt a lot from him about Newman in reading his earlier volume.

The main thesis of this book is clearly stated as follows:

The argument of this book is that the real assent we make to the primary forms of religious faith (expressed in metaphor, symbol, and story) is of the same kind as the imaginative assent we make to the primary forms of literature.

At first sight this claim is so improbable, and indeed extraordinary, that we feel it cannot mean what it appears to say. If we can appreciate Homer and Dante and Henry James because they all make a powerful appeal to the imagination, it would seem that by analogy we can simultaneously assent to Greek paganism, Christianity, Islam and Hinduism. Imaginatively, if our knowledge is sufficient, and our sympathies are wide enough, no doubt we can enter into all these and more. Those of us who had a classical education can remember (very likely with pleasure and gratitude) entering into the religious ideas contained in the Oresteia. But we did not for a moment think of believing them to be true. There are other statements, both religious and secular which we believe to be true, without being able or perhaps wishing to enter into them imaginatively.
Lonergan and Hume — I
Authors: Fitzpatrick J
Published: July 2007

There are several reasons for undertaking a comparison of Lonergan and Hume. It is my intention to move the discussion on to the realm of philosophy of religion and as the author of the most powerful critique of religion ever written in English, Hume lays strong claims for inclusion. It will, I trust, be interesting to see how Lonergan’s argument for the existence of God copes with Hume’s famous objections and to see further how a Lonerganian response might be fashioned to meet the various facets of Hume’s critique.

But before going on to philosophy of religion it will be necessary and profitable to compare and contrast the epistemologies of the two philosophers since these underpin and are presupposed by their respective positions on religious belief. Besides, there is a growing awareness today that the dispute about religious belief is at heart a dispute about rival conceptions of human rationality. It is surely significant that philosophy of religion, as a subject, dates back to the rise of empiricism. Before then there had been, to be sure, disputes, frequently acrimonious, over interpretations of religious doctrines and so forth, but it was not until then that men were affected by a profound unease surrounding religion as a phenomenon. For the first time since the classical age the legitimacy of religious belief of any kind was called in question. From the vantage-point of the twentieth century it is becoming increasingly clear that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the importation into philosophy of what was believed to be the method of science, there arose a new and revolutionary conception of human rationality that rendered religious belief problematic.
Alfred Jones and the Party Perilous or Misunderstanding Mr Graham Greene
Authors: Tatham Michael
Published: July 2007

What on earth is Dr Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party all about? Can it really be, as one reviewer believes, ‘a bitter little parable about the subservience of the rich to riches; about the despair that deepens so much every day one lives, that death in the end seems to lose its point; about the ephemerality of happiness; and about the way in which a man may finally come to despise himself so much that life becomes intolerable for him’. Seen like this, Graham Greene’s story-parable — for it certainly cannot be considered an orthodox novel — is remarkably thin and — in many respects — uninformative. There is, for example, very little serious discussion of the attitude of wealthy people to money: that gradual debilitating disease of judgment and balance which leaves the victim convinced of imminent poverty, or the stealthy atrophying of every generous impulse. It is hard to find anything to do with money that could not have been more adequately examined in a normal domestic setting of the type found in Bennett or Galsworthy, or the opening chapters of Sense and Sensibility. Neither, I am sure, would it be useful to assume that Mr Greene constructed his parable with the object of indulging his well-known interest in Russian roulette — a version of which forms the prize-winning entertainment at the last of Dr Fischer’s parties. There is a sense in which the explanations and commentaries do not seem to be able to account for the material, and yet given the brevity and apparent simplicity of the text this adds what can reasonably be regarded as a further curtain of bewilderment.
A Sermon for St Thomas
Authors: McCabe Herbert
Published: July 2007

Parents are desperate bores about the cute things their children have said but the Aquinas family preserved a story about young Thomas of a rather different kind. They complained that he was always bothering people with the question: What is God? I expect the story is quite true and totally trivial; it only becomes interesting if we see it as a sort of premonition of his whole life, of what his life was to be like and of what his sanctity was like. The first interesting thing is that it was not a statement, an affirmation, but a question.

Some people are saints through their heroic work for the poor, some through their courage in dying for the faith, some through their indefatigable preaching of the gospel; sanctity takes all sorts of forms: the sanctity of St Thomas lay in asking questions.

We (and I mean especially his Dominican brethren) regularly get him wrong by thinking of him as someone who provides the answers. He does, I think, provide more and better answers than most, but what makes him central and vital to our tradition (which is quite an important one for the whole Church) is his conviction, which he hands down to us, that there is always a question to be asked to which an answer is either true or false.
Religious Celibacy and Sexual Justice
Authors: Ruston Roger
Published: July 2007

It is a foolish thing to make promises about what you intend to do in a year’s time, but at the chapter meeting last year I promised the Provincial that I would give a talk on celibacy this year, hoping to provoke some discussion on a topic that is too rarely discussed. I have had plenty of time to regret it. But I have kept to my original proposal because the reasons I had for making it have not gone away.

The first reason was a sense of irritation at the way some of the brethren speak about the problems of celibacy entirely by way of anecdotes: how Father A was nearly seduced in the parlour, how troublesome women plagued the life of Father B, about Father C and his “cousin”, about the real reason for Brother D leaving the Order. When I thought about it, I realised that there are two things about this kind of talk that I find unsatisfactory:

its privatisation of the vows: that celibacy is mostly a matter of an individual keeping his vow of chastity, like a precious object to be kept intact under threats, especially threats from certain women; and that the available collective wisdom on the matter consists in anecdotal knowledge of how to do this.

the failure to take seriously the lives of the women whose attentions cause so much difficulty when it gets out of hand and — it must be added — so much satisfaction when it is under proper ministerial control. It is a failure to look very deeply into what happens and ask why it happens in such predictable ways and what this tells us about the injured relationships between men and women,which we celibates have to live out as much as anyone else. Men and women in the life of the Church get caught up in processes of interaction which few people understand and which cause humiliation and frustration on all sides.
Lonergan and Hume III
Authors: Fitzpatrick J
Published: July 2007

Lonergan sometimes calls his epistemology the fully critical position on account of its total rejection of the naive realist notion that reality is an-already-out-there-now and that objectivity consists in sensory extroversion to this already-out-there-now. The residue of the naive realist notion is found in the empiricist assumption of a world of bodies ‘out there’ and in the Kantian assumption of things in themselves, or noumena, with the debilitating consequence for both that the real becomes unknowable since knowledge is confined either to sense data or sensible phenomena, i.e. appearances. By its rejection of naive realism the fully critical position denies the intelligibility of any mere matter of fact that is simply given in experience. It affirms that the real is what is understood on the basis of experience and affirmed in rationally grounded judgments. Besides the real there is nothing. But the real is, in its very constitution, intelligible. Therefore, besides the intelligible there is nothing. The universe is intelligible.

In a scientific age many would be willing to grant this much, since science itself seems to assume and support the notion of the universe’s intelligibility, without seeing any reason for proceeding from this to an affirmation of God’s existence. But the fully critical position demands an answer in terms of itself to the question of the universe’s intelligibility. Science is unable to supply such an answer since science is methodologically restricted to investigating the intelligibility of the data of sense by erecting explanatory hypotheses that stand or fall by appeal to the data of sense. Science has its own autonomous realm — the explanation of sensible data. The question of God does not arise from the questioning of sensible data but from questioning our questioning, that is, when we take a global look at the process of coming to know and ask what are the implications of the mind’s demand for explanation at the level of understanding and of the mind’s demand for the unconditioned in its movement towards judgment.
Your Affectionate Son in St Dominic Eric Gill T.S.D.
Authors: Bailey Bede
Published: July 2007

Thus did Eric Gill sign his letters to Bede Jarrett, the English Dominican Provincial between the wars. I hope to show that he was saying something true about himself.

But it is presumptuous of me to write about him, and especially here in New Blackfriars, which is a development of the Black- friars in which he first published so many of his essays. Blackfriars has also given us many personal witnesses to Eric Gill’s character and shape of mind — David Jones, John O’Connor, Walter Shew- ring, Desmond Chute and a number of others. So there is an element of the absurd in my appearing here. I have tried to get rid of the absurdity in so far as I am able by assembling some of the available evidence about Mr Gill, and especially of course from his Autobiography.

Since the publication last November of Dr Yorke’s book, the name of Gill has frequently appeared in all sorts of places. There have been several exhibitions of his work. There has been a sale at Sothebys. He has become someone talked about in the art world. I wonder what E. G. would have thought about that. When I read some of the reviews of Eric Gill, Man of Flesh and Spirit I wondered whether the Gill they portrayed was in fact recognisably the same as the Gill described by those who knew him, or indeed as Dr Yorke recognised him.

The Times reviewer wrote that ‘it is certainly true that the literature relating to Gill has up to now been mainly superior hagiography. And Gill’s confreres have most noticeably played down the eroticism’ (3 December 1981).
Eric Gill and the Contemporary
Authors: Kelly Michael
Published: July 2007

When I was an undergraduate in the early 1950s Eric Gill was a minor cult figure among Catholics whom I knew. As an apologist, a social, political and aesthetic theoretician rather than anything else. Gill’s lettering in stone was something I had learnt to admire at Ampleforth where Dom Patrick Barry was at that time active in calligraphy and lettering in stone himself. I liked Father Patrick’s work a lot and he introduced me to Gill’s. There was a certain general keenness about Gill at Ampleforth then but I only got to his Letters and Autobiography as an undergraduate. In those days Gill and Maritain and St Thomas and Belloc and Chesterton were good company. In a dilettante, amateur way I enjoyed myself among them. As far as Gill was concerned I was particularly pleased with him and myself for discovering him in his First Nudes and 25 Nudes. I had liked Gill’s apologia in his Autobiography for sensuality in giving proper appreciation to God for His ways in His creation, and I liked his nudes. For all their occasional clumsiness and maladroitness of balance and proportion, I still do. I find it particularly a matter of regret that Gill’s deliberate erotic work is still under so much prurient lock and key at the Victoria and Albert and the British museums. When will the English grow up?

Gill’s more steamy and obsessive side, his sexy nudes and ex- ultance in sensual experience and joys, appealed more to me than to some of my Catholic friends, and than much of his polemic argumentativeness. Some of the more arty side of my family were enthusiasts for Gill’s way of life via personal acquaintanceship with David Jones and I found that rather tedious. Gill began to smack of affectation and moral-art snobbery at about the time I stopped being an undergraduate and went into National Service.
“Is the Church Licensed to Kill?”
Authors: Pinnington Judith
Published: July 2007

In an article published in this journal in December 1980 I sought to draw out some of the moral and theological implications of a punitive attitude on the part of the Church towards a kind of minority which it could not comprehend and by which it felt challenged. Since that time it has been borne in upon me, both through experience and through discursive reasoning that the implications are far deeper and more terrible than I had thought. For that reason I beg the indulgence of readers for a further exploration. I am aware that such a fusion of introspection and exospection is spiritually dangerous, since the subjective and objective can only coinhere in one who is pure in heart. Nonetheless, I feel that the effort is worth the risk.

I should perhaps explain at the outset that my own theology is rapidly developing in a radical ‘materialist’ direction; that is to say, my understanding of both the Gospel kerygma and Tradition is confirming my intuition that the material, and in particular our being-in-body, has normative spiritual value. I am not at all shocked by Bishop John Robinson’s suggestion in the famous lady Chatterly trial that sexual intercourse has precise sacramental signification. Those who cannot go along with this perspective will not be able fully to appreciate the following argument and may even be offended by it. Reader, be warned!
Infallible Fallibilism
Authors: Meynell Hugo
Published: July 2007

I believe that a thoroughgoing fallibilism, which is supposed to apply actually to the statements constitutive of fallibilism themselves, is self-destructive, and consequently absurd. I wish to propose a less radical, but I think perfectly self-consistent, kind of fallibilism, which I shall argue is not self-destructive. A first-order fallibilism — applying to the natural science, history, and hermeneutics — may issue in, and in my opinion ought to issue in, a second- order infallibilism — applying to epistemology and metaphysics. More concretely, fallibilism is in general an infallible way of getting at the truth about the real world; or perhaps rather, fallibilism is an absolutely infallible way of tending towards the truth.

The issue is not merely a technical one within philosophy, but seems to be of some general cultural importance. Fallibilism is in effect an attempt to set out foundations for knowledge, or, what amounts to the same thing, to provide a way of distinguishing between knowledge which is adequately grounded, and so amounts to ‘knowledge’ properly so-called, and what merely makes some pretensions to be ‘knowledge’. As a result of the alleged failure of fallibilism and of other attempts to provide foundations for knowledge, the conviction has got about that knowledge neither has nor needs any such foundations. If this principle is once seriously accepted and consistently applied, the urgent question of how much of what anyone claims to be knowledge actually is so, and how much is not, can only be settled at the level of dogma and prejudice. If it is not, this can only be due to saving inconsistency; since to provide criteria in virtue of which any claimant to the title of knowledge can be rationally vindicated as such is nothing else than to provide foundations for knowledge.
Civil Religion and Original Sin
Authors: Fourez Gerry
Published: July 2007

Original sin, nowadays is usually not welcomed by most Christians of Western culture. Religious traditions on original sin are felt to be uncomfortably strange in our society where people, by common consent, see themselves so unconnected to others that the actions of one person are supposed to leave other people untouched. Such cultural agreement is at the roots of a society that believes every person is free and able to achieve whatever he/she wants. Since original sin doctrines clearly deny such “unconnectedness”, no wonder they are often rejected and reduced to a teaching as simplistic as “a spot on a child’s soul!” This articles suggests that original sin traditions can speak to our contemporary culture, challenge some of its deepest presuppositions, and lead to new levels of awareness of what it means to be Christian in today’s world.

To understand the meaning of doctrines which are expressed in what anthropologists call mythical tales or myths, it is relevant to recognize the different representations of the world which flow from different mythical tales, and the effects of those different representations. I submit that a doctrine as “religious” as Original Sin says a lot about how we envision the civil organization of society. Furthermore, the present disregard for this doctrine is related to social and political respresentations. I will thus compare the basic assumptions of the original sin myth with another set of assumptions, those underlying the individualistic world view which is sometimes summarized in-another myth: the civil religion of free enterprise.

Various interpretations of original sin have attempted to articulate individual and collective dimensions of the sinful condition. These interpretations at the same time propose diverse understandings of the relationship between history and our present actions. Classical Catholicism seems to identify original sin with the tendency of each individual toward selfishness and personal aggrandizement.
In God's Image?
Authors: Morley Janet
Published: July 2007

The human mother will suckle her child with her own milk, but our beloved Mother, Jesus, feeds us with himself, and, with the most tender courtesy, does it by means of the blessed Sacrament.’ (Julian of Norwich)

‘It blurs the whole nature of the difference of the sexes if the woman does not play her proper part. She cannot be an icon of Christ, representing him at the altar’. (Graham Leonard)

These two quotations are separated not only by several centuries, but also by opposing assumptions about how we may think about God, and about which analogies from human experience are appropriate. Interestingly, it is not the modern comment which is particularly surprising or disturbing. Whether we happen to agree with the bishop or not, the argument feels familiar. But the picture of a breast-feeding woman is by no means a traditional image of the Eucharist. Some might consider it shocking, or at least in rather poor taste, and these feelings are worth exploring.
What's The Big Idea?
Authors: Dummett Ann
Published: July 2007

Suppose a fairy godmother were to appear and offer you three wishes — not, as in the folk tales, for yourself, but for the future of the world or even just for the future of the country. My guess is that the instant answers from almost everyone would start with No. No more hunger; no more wars;no terrorism-, no nuclear weapons; no more unemployment. But suppose the fairy godmother were to reply, rather acidly, that she was in the business of granting positive wishes, not negative ones, and that you must say what /ou actually wanted to happen, how easy would it be to formulate what you wanted in the few brief moments before, in exasperation, she vanished into the blue?

There would be two kinds of difficulty in stating three wishes. The first kind would be the technical problem of finding positive answers to what is wrong: for example, unemployment is obviously appalling and should be replaced by full employment, but even if a wave of the wand would achieve this, what exactly would “full employment” be? Would it be a situation recognisably better than the present one, with far more people having jobs but with a considerable number still unwillingly out of work, or doing unpleasant and badly-paid jobs, or having to work through every weekend in order to make enough to keep the family going? A world in which nuclear weapons had, by magic, been made impossible to produce, would still be a world manufacturing cluster bombs, napalm, bacteriological weapons and expanding bullets. But the challenge of the fairy godmother would touch a deeper problem than these.
The Pope and Fatima
Authors: Hebblethwaite Peter
Published: July 2007

The admirable work edited by Fr Alberic Stacpoole OSB, Mary’s Place in Christian Dialogue (St Paul Publications, 1982), makes no mention of Fatima. Even Archbishop Eugenio Cardinale’s paper on ‘The Mariology of Pope Pius XIF does not allude to it, which is strange because in Portugal he is known as ‘the pope of Fatima’. Clearly, Fatima has no place on the agenda of the Ecumenical Society of the Blessed Virgin Mary whose papers are collected in this volume. The reason for the omission is evident: Fatima represents the kind of mariology that most alarms and scandalises our Christian brothers and sisters. With its banal ‘messages’, its improbable miracles and its resolute anti-communism, it makes the faith ‘risible’, and St Thomas says we should not do that.
The Church in Chile
Authors: Kirby Peadar
Published: July 2007

The large parish of San Jose Obrero on the outskirts of Santiago, the Chilean capital, contains a cross-section of the city’s poor. On one side of the Avenida San Pedro which runs down the middle of the parish are four storey blocks of flats, a memorial to a democratic Chile in which elected civilian governments built housing for the working class. These flats look across the avenue on the vast expanse of small, poorly constructed wooden huts which are the typical homes of Chile’s poor. This huge poblacion, as these areas are called, contains some 150,000 people who moved in to take this land and build their flimsy huts during the Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende.

Living in one of these wooden huts among the people are four Chilean sisters. While teaching three mornings a week in a local primary school to make a living the sisters concentrate their time on supporting the network of Christian communities which have been growing in their area. In the immediate chapel which is the primary focus for their work (it is one of the eight such chapels in the parish) they now have four fully developed adult communities and one youth community, each of which has about 20 members. As well as that there are looser groups organised around the chapel: six groups of family catechetics in each of which some eight or nine couples attend weekly meetings for two years as part of the obligatory diocesan programme before First Communion; two groups of preparation for Confirmation in each of which about 20 teenagers attend a weekly meeting, again for two years as the only way in which they are permitted to receive Confirmation; two groups of parents who want their child baptised and who must attend a series of eight talks, and finally two groups involved in an experimental catechetics for which the catechists take their themes from the experience of the local people rather than using the diocesan course.
Liberation Theology and Basic Communities In Latin America and in Britain
Authors: Pepper Mary
Published: July 2007

This article is inspired by an interest in basic Christian communities in Latin America, and also by a critical interest in some attempts to translate the Latin American experience to this country. The texts on which my criticism is based are John Vincent’s essay ‘Doing Theology’ in Agenda for Prophets (ed D Haslam and R Ambler, 1980), and, to a lesser extent, Basic Communities by David Clark (1977). I want to make it clear that I am concerned with David Clark’s view of the significance of the basic communities and not with the communities themselves. I shall be going on to argue that both writers implicitly deny the importance of a scientific study of society and the importance of intellectual work in social theory, politics and economics. They appear to be antiintellectual, preferring an instinctive, common-sense response with an emphasis on action. This means that they have no way of developing an awareness of their own ideological conditioning and so seem to accept many liberal middle-class values in an uncritical way. A comparison of the Latin American and British situations reveals that if the church in the west is ever going to stand with the poor and the weak, then western Christians must develop a critical attitude towards those class ideologies which they take for granted as common-sense. This is only possible through a social and political education, in theory and practice.
The Problem of Evil and the Activity of God
Authors: Walker Ian
Published: July 2007

The Problem of evil, from Epicurus via Philo of Alexandria to today, has usually been presented in more or less the same way. We are generally offered three, sometimes more, propositions:

1

God is omnipotent

2

God is good/loving

3

Evil/suffering exists

and the suggestion is that these three propositions, although all believed by many religious believers to be true, are mutually contradictory. These are held to be contradictory because, ‘if God exists, then being omniscient, he knows under what circumstances evil will occur, if he does not act; and being omnipotent he is able to prevent its occurrence. Hence, being perfectly good, he will prevent its occurrence and so evil will not exist’. Professor Plantinga sees the problem in much the same kind of way: .. five propositions . . . essential to traditional theism: a) that God exists, b) that God is omnipotent, c) that God is omniscient, d) that God is wholly good, and e) that evil exists . . . each of these propositions is indeed an essential feature of orthodox theism. And it is just these five propositions whose conjunction is said ... to be self-contradictory’. These writers are not unrepresentative of the vast numbers of philosophers who see, and try to solve, the problem in these terms.
“Who Do Men Say That I Am?”— Psalm 8 and the Humanity of Christ
Authors: Radcliffe Timothy
Published: July 2007

The evangelists obviously assume that Jesus was a human being. What is less clear is what would be entailed by that assumption. There is very little in the New Testament that we would immediately recognise as an explicit exploration of the significance of Jesus’ humanity. It is often assumed that this is because the authors of the New Testament were philosophically naive and so did not have a developed conception of what it meant to be a human being, but maybe it is because we pose the question in the context of a discipline called Christology which predisposes us to accept as valid only certain ways of thinking.

Cornelius Ernst O P, in a provocative article called “Thinking about Jesus”, said, “the ‘ology termination (of Christology) does presuppose a certain kind of abstraction, a certain kind of theoretical approach, a certain conception of what constitutes reasonableness, and in fact what is meaning at all, what constitutes thinking. I think one of the problems we have to face today is just what does constitute rationality, what is thinking, what are the appropriate categories, not only for thinking about Jesus Christ, but about anything else”. The assumption within Christology has generally been that to claim that Jesus is a human being is to say what he is, to identify him as belonging to a particular class of beings, a species. And one’s membership of this species is defined by the possession of a mind, a certain sort of inferiority. To be properly human is having certain sorts of things going on in one’s head. That’s what it means to have a human soul. To be a human being is to have a mind that has thoughts which are then communicated to others, who are assumed to have similar minds, by means of language.
On the Road to Solipsism
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

The first task, in the philosophical therapy that opens the way to constructive appropriation of the theological tradition, must be to examine one’s notions of the soul. The very idea of the mind, let alone of the soul, has been eliminated by one powerful philosophical school — exemplified here by Quine. We are far more likely, however, to endorse, or unwittingly host, a certain incipient Solipsism. John Stuart Mill’s argument from analogy for our knowledge of other minds may be classical, but it is not free from objections. On the contrary, it only confirms the myth of the Little Man inside the shell of the body which it is intended to refute. The problem is not intra-theological. The difficulty of the relationship between mind and body, and between myself and others, may be illustrated by some quotations from Proust. This brings us to the threshold of a re-examination of the work of Wittgenstein on the philosophy of psychology — but his work is best read in the context of further work by John Wisdom and Stanley Cavell, two of his finest interpreters, in this matter at any rate.

One line is to eliminate talk of the soul altogether. This could not satisfy Catholics, or any other Christians who regard themselves as obliged to make sense of the tradition which they have inherited. We may well feel strongly tempted by a Platonizing dualism that longs to release the soul from the barnacles and cirripeds with which it is encrusted in this present life (Republic, 612). But out and out behaviourism can have little attraction for people who find themselves at home, or even simply searching, within any Christian tradition. It is hard even for us to imagine what the allurements might be of any such strict materialist theory of consciousness. Quine’s eliminative physicalism will do as an example.
The Cosmological Argument
Authors: Davies Brian
Published: July 2007

I wish to defend a version of the Cosmological Argument. But the phrase ‘the Cosmological Argument’ has been used to refer to various arguments, some of them very different from each other. Let me, then, say at the outset that with some of these I am either out of sympathy, or I am just plain unsure.

Take, for example, the argument for God’s existence offered by Locke in Book IV, Chapter X of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. ‘Man knows’, says Locke, ‘by an intuitive certainty that bare nothing can no more produce any real being than it can be equal to two right angles’. So for Locke, if anything exists it is caused to exist by something else. And Locke thinks that what belongs to anything that exists, its nature, must be derived from something else, and that God therefore exists. For if something exists, says Locke, it must have been caused to exist. This means that ‘from eternity there has been something, since what was not from eternity had a beginning, and what had a beginning must be produced by something else’. But this argument is invalid. According to Locke, if something has existed from eternity, there is an eternal being. ‘If, therefore’, says Locke, ‘we know there is some real being, and that nonentity cannot produce any real being, it is an evident demonstration, that from eternity there has been something’. But all Locke’s argument shows is that there has always been something, which is quite compatible with there having been a whole host of different things. In other words, Locke thinks he has proved the equivalent of:

There is an X, such that, for every time t,

X occurs at t.
Wisdom as Touchstone in The Merchant of Venice
Authors: McCombie Frank
Published: July 2007

In distinguishing between character and role in Shakespeare’s plays, Peter Ure once wrote:

It is often because we are made aware of the gap, not the consonance, between the man and the office that the situation becomes profound and exciting, and permits rich inferences about what the hero’s inward self is like.

Few critics spoke with greater conviction about the “inward self’ of the Shakespearean protagonist, but it is with the outward selves of the protagonists of The Merchant of Venice that we shall be concerned in what follows. It is at least arguable that the somewhat confused state of debate about this play is owing to the resolute concentration of attention upon the “inward selves” of Portia, Antonio, and Shylock, and to the too-easy assumptions that are made about the nature and importance of their roles. To suggest that the fabric of meaning in The Merchant of Venice depends absolutely upon the identification of roles in the terms in which Shakespeare conceived them is not to underestimate the interest and importance of the ways in which character regularly pulls against role, for what Peter Ure said is perhaps more true of this play than of many. This, nevertheless, is a truth which can be apprehended only if the conception of role is properly appreciated; if it is not appreciated, neither is the nature or purpose of the tension Peter Ure was attempting to define.
Personalism in Christian Social Thought and The Denial of Politics
Authors: Pepper Mary
Published: July 2007

‘The name (Personalism) was bom of a response to the expansion of the totalitarian drive, against this drive, in order to stress the defence of the person against the tyranny of apparatus.’

‘Just as, fundamentally, it is recollection and interiority, Personalism is at the other end of the scale from narcissism, individualism and egocentricity. It brings the whole of its weight to bear in the direction of the most obvious aspiration of modem man, whether this be called collectivist or communal.’

(E. Mounier What is Personalism? 1946. p 113 and p 176)

‘Insofar as man by his very nature stands completely in need of life in society, he is, and he ought to be, the beginning, the subject and the object of every social organisation ... There is a growing awareness of the sublime dignity of the human person, who stands above all things and whose rights and duties are universal and inviolable.’

(Vatican II. Decree on the Church in the Modem World.

Gaudium et Spes).

Thanks to the Gospel, the Church has the truth about man. This truth is found in an anthropology that the Church never ceases to fathom more thoroughly and to communicate to others. The primordial affirmation of this anthropology is that man is in God’s image and cannot be reduced to a mere portion of nature or a nameless element in the human city.... This complete truth about the human being constitutes the foundation of the Church’s social teaching and the basis also of true liberation. In the light of this truth, man is not a being subjected to economic or political processes.
Sacrament and Ideology
Authors: Turner Denys
Published: July 2007

If it’s magic to believe that merely saying something can make it so, then J. L. Austin’s account of the so-called ‘performative utterance’ is an account of a magical belief. For that, though not quite true without qualification, is what Austin maintains is the nature of a performative utterance. On the other hand Austin is not the first person one would think of as a believer in magic. And his undoubted credentials for unsuperstitiousness have given authority to the notion of the performative utterance which some theologians have thought to exploit for their own purposes. And some sociologists too. For these reasons respectively.

Theologians do not have a reputation so clear of superstition as Austin has. In particular, Roman Catholic theologians don’t and even more, among Roman Catholic theologians, those who concern themselves with rituals and sacraments don’t. And some of these have wanted to go along with the likes of Aquinas and the Tridentine formulae about sacraments and wish to legitimate propositions, such as that of Aquinas, that a sacrament is a sign which “effects what it signifies”. As this appears to mean that merely saying a thing, such as “This is my body” uttered over what is prima facie bread, or “I baptise you ...” said while pouring what is on any account water, is to make what it says so, and as such theologians are sensitive to the charge that this is mere magic-making, there is an evident temptation to exploit Austin on performatives in the prospect of de-mystifying such claims.
The Liberating Eucharist
Authors: Paxton Nicholas
Published: July 2007

In his 1977 book The Eucharist and Human Liberation, Tissa Balasuriya reminds us that “the Eucharist has an extraordinary potential for being an agent of personal and global transformation. Every week about two hundred million persons meet all over the world in Christian communities”. Yet, while the worldwide eucharistic congregations every Sunday probably make up the largest global assembly for any shared purpose, the influence of the Eucharist on the creation of a more just, more loving and (in fine) more Christian world is almost minimal. The paradox, in Balasuriya’s words, “is that while the example of Jesus should make the eucharistic community a champion of social justice and a contestant of social evil, this happens very seldom” (op. cit. pp 85-6). Gustavo Gutiérrez has tried to emphasize this matter by directing a hard hit at the quality of the Eucharist as celebrated in some gatherings:

“without a real commitment against exploitation and alienation and for a society of solidarity and justice, the eucharistic celebration is an empty action, lacking any genuine endorsement by those who participate in it”.

But Gutiérrez oversimplifies here. The search to help resolve the paradox has to take into account not only attitudes of indifference but also the theological schizophrenia — the great divorce between faith and life, or religion and everything else — which underlies and has helped to form them. This has led, on the one hand, to the ‘idealist’ and ‘spiritualist’ attitudes which (as Gutiérrez maintains) avoid the sharp realities; and, on the other hand, to the huge loss of credibility sustained by the Church in the present century and hence by the Eucharist which lies, or should lie, at the heart of the Church’s work.