bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
A Scholastic Universalist The Writings and Thought of Bernard Kelly (1907–1958)
Authors: Stoddart William
Published: July 2007

Bernard Kelly was a regular contributor to Blackfriars and other Catholic periodicals over a lengthy period extending from the 1930s to the 1950s. Rayner Heppenstall, in his book on Léon Bloy, called him “a man of the purest genius”. In more recent times, however, he seems to have been strangely forgotten. If we speak of him now, it is because we believe that his insights, drawn from scholastic philosophy and especially from the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, are of value not only for present-day Catholics, but for all Christians, and indeed for spiritual seekers of all faiths. Kelly once said: “There are some of us who can’t rightly pray without a pen in our hands.” Kelly was clearly no ordinary writer for him writing was prayer. He epitomized the view that prayer could only be accomplished on the basis of truth, and his writing was a means of determining and fixing the truth in his own mind and in the minds of others. A few years ago Barbara Wall published a moving account of Kelly’s life; here we shall concentrate chiefly on his writings and thought.

Kelly’s inspiration was the writings of the Medieval philosophers and, in particular, the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas. For him, the Summa was a vehicle of truth and a paradigm of spirituality. Many are aware of St. Thomas’s declaration towards the end of his life that, in comparison with the Divine Reality Itself, his writings were as a heap of straw. A differing and more important evaluation is less well known; Christ Himself appeared to Aquinas in a vision and said to him: Bene scripsisti de Me, Thoma (“Thou hast written well concerning Me, Thomas”).
Beauty in Catholic Churches
Authors: Jones David
Published: July 2007

Among those people who are conscious of and annoyed by the complete badness manifest in the building and decoration, in use in the Catholic Church in our days, there are very few who regard the matter as anything more than a superficial defect that can be, with care, remedied. There are few who realise the essentially malignant and even mortal nature of the infection that so ails us.

Most of these people speak with varying degrees of confidence about ways and means of ‘improving the taste of the Faithful,’ of educating people up to this or that notion. Again, others propose the copying on a vast scale the works of certain respectable and accredited masters of the past centuries, thereby improving the ‘outward appearance’ of churches and images. By this manoeuvre they hope to get the unsuspecting worshipper used to the form and comeliness of the Italian primitives and other work of men who lived in more civilized periods than our own so leading them on until, after a very few years of this aesthetic welfare- work, the most suburban Catholic will revile the pink and white- Madonnas as supplied by the ‘church-furniture shop’ and have nothing less than exact reproductions of Giotto or sixth century Byzantine.

Whatever may be said for these sincere attempts of pious people, the root of the matter is left untouched; it is not even approached. The issue is usually confused by a notion of ‘giving the best to God.’ I say confused because it creates in the mind the notion that there can be constructed a kind of scale of beauty, extending from the merely useful objects required for a church (like shelves or pipes or rubber door-mats) to the culminating point in the vestments and the sacred vessels.
Literalism and Tolerance
Authors: Rooney P. V.
Published: July 2007

Saint Paul (2 Cor. 3:6) is often quoted in support of a position of leniency, though some would say laxity, with regard to the precepts of the law, whether it be those of the state or those of the church. Or he may be cited in support of an anti-literalist, anti-fundamentalist interpretation of scripture generally. But what is wrong, exactly, with that aspect of fundamentalism, or that approach to church rules, that can be characterized as literalism? Consider two instances in which literalism is decried. First, a parish priest “proves” that scripture is not to be taken literally by relating the story of Abraham, Isaac and the attempted or would-be sacrifice of the son by the father. He explains that, since we know that God is loving and could not have commanded such a sacrifice, we can be sure that this story is not literally true, but must have some other significance: it must be symbolic or allegorical, or is possibly intended only to be thought-provoking. To take it literally is to fail to understand the goodness and love of God. Second, a parishioner wonders whether attendance at mass late on Saturday afternoon falls within the period when Saturday evening observance stands good for Sunday, fulfilling the weekly obligation. She is considered to have misunderstood, through too literal a conception of rules, the nature of the duty to attend mass once a week. There are of course different forms of literalism, but my plea below is for tolerance of what they have in common: a straightforward acceptance, when possible, of the letter.
Gnosticism and Contemporary Soteriology: Some Reflections
Authors: Weinandy Thomas
Published: July 2007

The abundant variations of Gnosticism in the second and third centuries A.D. testify both to its popularity and to the threat that it posed to the early Christian church. This threat is all the more evident in that some forms of Gnosticism were espoused by men, for example Valentinus and Basilides, who considered themselves faithful Christians. Yet, as is well known, Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Tertullian, and other Church Fathers believed that Gnosticism was radically inimical to the authentic Christian gospel as professed by “the Great Church”. I wish to argue here that many contemporary theologians, who equally profess to be Christians, have proposed soteriological theories which are at their heart Gnostic, and constitute an equally grave threat to the integrity of the gospel today.

Before examining instances of what I consider contemporary variants of Gnostic soteriology, I will briefly state what I believe to be at the heart of the ancient Gnostic systems. I am not so much interested in the particular details of the various Gnostic Schools, but rather I want to highlight what exactly it is that gnosis consisted of for the Gnostics. What is it that the Pneumatikoi knew which brought them salvation?

The various Gnostic Schools taught elaborate cosmological systems or schemes. These were normally composed of the utterly transcendent and, often, unknowable good God, followed by the assorted lesser aeons of spirits (such as, Sige, Ennoia, Nous, Logos, Zoe, Pneuma, Sophia, angels, etc., depending on the Gnostic school). These made up the Pleroma and filled the infinite void between the transcendent God and the world of matter.
Nuclear Radiation: Facts and Fears
Authors: Hodgson Peter E.
Published: July 2007

There is widespread public anxiety about the effects of nuclear radiations, particularly concerning the cases of childhood leukaemia near nuclear plants. Seven cases occurred in Seascale in Cumbria near the nuclear reprocessing plant at Sellafield from 1955 to 1983. This number seemed to be much greater than would be expected by chance, and received much publicity. It was, however, very difficult to understand how these cases could be blamed on Sellafield, since the amount of nuclear radiation released is far smaller than the natural background.

A possible mechanism was suggested in 1987 by Gardner, who postulated that the children developed leukaemia as a result of their father’s exposure to nuclear radiation. He collected statistics that showed a significant correlation between paternal radiation dose and leukaemic children. This led to several Court cases in which families sought compensation from British Nuclear Fuels, the company operating the plant.

The Gardner hypothesis has such serious implications for the nuclear industry that many further investigations were made. These were on the actual process whereby paternal irradiation could lead to childhood leukaemia, the observations of leukaemia in the children of survivors of the atomic bombing of Japan, and more extensive studies of leukaemia around nuclear plants. The results of these studies have now been summarised by Sir Richard Doll, Dr H.J.Evans and Dr S.C.Darby in Nature (367.678.1994). They conclude that the Gardner hypothesis is wrong.

The possibility that nuclear irradiation could cause a gonadal mutation leading to childhood leukaemia can be studied using data on genetically-determined leukaemia. The detailed statistical knowledge shows that there may be a recessive mutation that could contribute to a number of observed cases.
American Art Cultural Crisis
Authors: Navone John
Published: July 2007

Art inevitably reflects the virtues and vices of the culture that produces it. This article treats of the American cultural crisis as reflected in American art and then discusses the moral and religious implications of this crisis.

Martha Bayles, in her Atlantic Monthly article ‘The Shock Art Fallacy’ (Feb., 1994, p. 20), affirms that “Obscenity as art is everywhere. ... Never before in the history of culture has obscenity been so pervasive.” She calls attention to a Spin magazine jeans advertisement in which a young man brandishes a handgun over the caption “Teaching kids to KILL helps them to deal directly with reality.” In the Whitney Museum Bayles finds a photographic display of penises in one room and a row of video monitors showing “transgressive” sexual practices in another. The compulsion to shock dominates popular music, movies, television, publishing, talk-shows, stand-up comedy, and video games. Whatever the cultural bomb-throwers seem to think, Bayles avers that this does not mean we cannot be shocked. Obscenity, she affirms, is shocking. The Supreme Court defined obscenity as the depiction of “sexual conduct” in a “patently offensive way” lacking “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” This definition, because it focuses exclusively on sex while exempting material possessing “serious artistic value,” is irrelevant to our present situation.
A Just Defence of Just Prices
Authors: Wicker Brian
Published: July 2007

The row over exorbitant salaries for the bosses of private monopolies has resurrected an ancient belief: namely that we can distinguish just from unjust prices. ‘Just prices’ — as distinct from prices set by market forces and the profit motive — once formed part of the ‘moral economy’. A just price for some article had to be proportionate to the amount of work that went into making it and to the contribution it made to the common good.

The great enemies of justice in fixing prices were (and are) ‘damnable avarice, sensuality and pride’ (as the fourteenth century writer Henry of Langenstein rightly remarked). His views resonate loudly today in the columns of the newspapers and on the tops of Clapham omnibuses. But they can hardly be squared with the economics of Adam Smith or his modem disciples. For the tradition which Smith initiated put things asunder which the earlier tradition regarded as having been joined together by natural law and ultimately by God: in particular, ethics and politics (and therefore economics).

A commentary by an eighteenth-century Spanish scholastic on Adam Smith’s political economy may seem an unlikely place in which to find a sharp and telling critique of ‘the state we’re in’ (to use Will Hutton’s punning phrase). Yet (as Scott Meikle’s recent article in the February 1995 New Blackfriars shows) Fray Antonio de la Santisma Trinidad, who was appointed in 1791 by the Spanish Inquisition to examine The Wealth of Nations, was able to reveal something fundamentally amoral with the ideology which afflicts contemporary Britain.
Celebration and Sacrament: Holy Place and Holy People
Authors: Gibbons Robin
Published: July 2007

If you are keen to visit old buildings, some of the best examples of medieval ecclesiastical remains are to be found in East Anglia. On a recent visit I had occasion to spend some time church crawling and stumbled across Binham Priory, the remains of a Benedictine monastic settlement 4 or 5 miles from Walsingham. Why this place sticks firmly in my mind is the stark contrast between what now exists and what had been. Apart from the monastic ruins, the only utilised building (apart from a farm) is the nave of the church. The poignancy of juxtaposition makes the place special, a holy place in the sense that it has a continuity with the past and also a sense of dramatic personal history; it seems to have been a building that moved with the times as the different styles of architecture and furnishing show, but its truncated nave and aisles, gives the impression of a magnificent church built for monks and people in a remote place. Its setting is typically East Anglia, the rear approach is through a gatehouse, ruined, and then a paved way, into the door to face a magnificent medieval seven sacrament font, benches with carved figures on the poppy heads, the old holy water stoop, and a fine tapestry behind the Jacobean table altar.

I use Binham as an example of what one could call the ‘sacrament of building’, a place which engaged and still engages people with a transformative presence. This might be fanciful language but it hints at the importance of place and ritual in the context of human life.
Whispering Galleries: the small magazines
Authors: Mills John Orme
Published: July 2007

According to George Steiner, commentary is without end. No, strictly that is not quite accurate. What he said was that it was without end “in the worlds of interpretative and critical discourse”, where there are no final conclusions. “Essay speaks to essay, article chatters to article in an endless gallery of querulous echo,” he said in his book Real Presences'.

Functioning as whispering galleries is one of the things that small magazines can do very well. Inevitably, writing in the special number marking the 70th birthday of Herbert McCabe, the small magazine which jumps first to my mind is New Blackfriars, which Herbert edited so memorably for eleven years. However, another ex-editor, Allan White, is writing in this number about New Blackfriars in particular. It is all magazines with circulations of under 5,000—frequently well under 5,000—which I am writing about here (though not, I should add, house magazines or parish magazines or any magazines written entirely by the editor and his staff.) Of course, the echoes which Steiner speaks about come far faster in clashes between opposing pontificators on TV and in the newspapers than in these small magazines, but on TV and in the newspapers the echoes can get distorted out of all recognition.

>What sort of future, though, have the small magazines got? Unless your name is Rupert Murdoch, if you are working in any of the communications media you are beset from time to time with fear for the future—fear of being frozen out or eaten up. It is something that goes with the job.
Kyssegyrlan Vuched or Ymborth yr Eneit
Authors: Ryan John
Published: July 2007

Sir John Morris Jones, the most distinguished pupil of Sir John Rhys, collaborated with the latter in editing a Jesus College manuscript. This work appeared in 1894 in the Medieval and Modem Series of Anecdota Oxoniensia under the title of The Elucidarium and other tracts in Welsh from Llyuyr Agkyr Llandewivrevi, A.D. 1346 (Jesus College Ms. 119) (The Book of the Anchorite of Llanddewifrefi). A note added to the translation of the preface to the Elucidarium says:

Gruffudd ap Llywelyn ap Phylip ap Trahaearn of Cantref Mawr caused this book to be written by the hand of a friend, namely a man who was an anchorite at that time at Llanddewifrefi: whose souls may God hold in His mercy. Amen.

There are seventeen stories in the book, beginning with ‘Hystoria Lucidar’ and ending with ‘Hystoria o uuched beuno ae wyrtheu’ (The story of Beuno's life and of his miracles). One might say that the contents of this book give some idea of the nature of the religious teaching of the Church in Wales in the Middle Ages. Practically all the works included in this book are translations from Latin except for one which is our special interest on this occasion. It is known as ‘Kyssegyrlan Vuched’ or ‘Ymborth yr Eneit’ (The Holy Life or The Food of the Soul) ff. 78v - 92r. It begins on f. 78 with the words ('we now deal with divine love which joins the Creator God and the creature Man ...'). On f 80r there is the sentence ‘and so ends the second part of this book, namely, of Divine Love'.
Socialism of the Gift, Socialism by Grace
Authors: Milbank John
Published: July 2007

I want to discuss in this essay the possible interrelations between socialism, Christianity and community.

For one strange moment in the summer of 1994, it seemed as if the people of this country had become a community, united, like so many communities, perhaps all communities, around a death. The death of a Scottish Christian socialist, John Smith. But they became a community it seemed, perhaps again like every community, around a mourning for lost community, lost solidarity, lost hope of a religiously-tinged socialist ideal (which many more sympathise with than believe in).

And we are still just about within the echo of this moment, which determines that the new public visibility of Christian Socialism, concentrated around the Elisha figure of Tony Blair, has an elegiac, melancholy feel to it. There is nothing here for anyone to triumph in; least of all Christian Socialists. For if a surprising number of still remaining socialists are Christians, or indeed Jews, Muslims or Buddhists, then this may be precisely because socialism, like religion, now assumes a merely spectral reality in the modern secularised world. It has ceased to appear either plausible or rational, and has instead been consigned to the realm of faith. Yet, as with Christianity in the west, we remain haunted by its excellence, because nothing has emerged to replace it; we sense that just as the story of a compassionate God who became man was the ‘final religion’, so also, the hope of a universal fraternity based on sharing was ‘the final politics’. With its demise, we are delivered over to something somehow more secular than politics—to a future of infinite utilitarian calculation by individuals, states and transnational companies, of the possible gains and losses, the greater and the lesser risks.
Traveller of Culture: Michel de Certeau
Authors: Moingt Joseph
Published: July 2007

‘I am a traveller’, Michel de Certeau liked to say. This he was literally, ploughing Europe from one university to another, or America, from north to south, from campus to conference; and even more, figuratively, moving from one place of knowledge to another, using in turns different modes of writing, or mingling several disciplines in order to explore one and the same subject more deeply. Thus, he was disturbing. He was never where one sought to catch him. He appeared all the more a stranger to any classification inasmuch as he had the art, in every thing he approached, to make something strange emerge from the reassuringly familiar, where the very ones who call themselves ‘researchers’ willingly stop. He moved rapidly, sometimes a little feverishly, from one place to another, always departing and in transit, as if he guessed that his days were already numbered. He never travelled, literally or figuratively, out of mere curiosity, still less by incapacity to settle in one place, but to learn something new and, much more, to share other experiences, the experience of others, out of passion for the human and the other. And what he questioned relentlessly, in human experience at its deepest and most ordinary, was the passion for believing. In this passion he perceived the very place of otherness and of the search for the meaning of existence and of history. This questioning was his own quest for God.

Michel de Certeau was bom in 1925, of an old Savoyard family. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1950, and followed the usual course of training until ordination as a priest in Lyons in 1956 and solemn profession in Paris in 1963.
The disenchantment of postmodernity
Authors: Beckford James A.
Published: July 2007

Introduction

Social scientists show a surprising lack of interest in the influence of climate on social and cultural life. Montesquieu’s claim that climate influences social life usually falls on deaf ears these days. Can anyone seriously believe that the Economic and Social Research Council would fund a research project to test the hypothesis that “in cold countries the nervous glands are less expanded: they sink deeper into their sheaths, or they are sheltered from the action of external objects; consequently they have not such lively sensations”? Yet, I know that my mood is affected by weather conditions. It is difficult, however, to know exactly what the effect is and whether the same conditions are invariably associated with the same effects. My responses to The Enchantment of Sociology are a good case in point. I read it in proof in bleak midwinter; I read the published volume under a blazing Umbrian sun. The responses were quite different, but, as I shall explain, it is not easy to see why my responses to the book’s arguments varied with these different climatic conditions. In fact, the results were counter-intuitive in some respects, so perhaps this is why Montesquieu’s climatic thesis is regarded as problematic.
Culture, Ethics and the Ends of Sociology
Authors: Tester Keith
Published: July 2007

With the publication of The Enchantment of Sociology, Kieran Flanagan becomes one of the contemporary sociologists whose work is shaped by the devastating indifference which dominates so many social and cultural relationships. This is an indifference of apathy and unconcern in the face of the sense of the emptiness of so much of what passes as the good life in our commodified and media-saturated culture. It means that all the things and qualities which could once be taken to make a difference to what it means to be a human being in the world have been thrown into the flux of the quest for perpetual newness. Indifference has emerged to the extent that there has been a collapse of the chance that some quality, some ideal, or some value, might possess the abilities to make a difference.

In itself there is little new about this sociological care about the absence and lack of care. It bears some comparison with Hannah Arendt’s portrayal of dark times as those in which outrages can be perpetrated without a murmur of outrage (Arendt 1973). Meanwhile, and perhaps more pertinently for the purposes of this discussion, C. Wright Mills noted the prevalence of indifference in the late 1950s in The Sociological Imagination (Mills 1959). Mills looked at the situation which had emerged out of the settlement of the Second World War and saw people who had been left lost and alone by the erosion of their ability to accept readily the time-honoured ways of making sense of the world. He identified the outlines of what amounted to an existential and hermeneutic vacuum.
Remembrance of Things Past Sociological Ken
Authors: Flanagan Kieran
Published: July 2007

In May 1996, addressing the central problems of faith, Ratzinger commented on the great disillusionment and non-fulfillment of hope that came after 1989. Covering issues such as pluralism and New Age religions, where god replaced God, Ratzinger observed that “if we consider the present cultural situation....frankly it must seem a miracle that there is still Christian faith despite everything”. For him, relativism has now become the central problem of the faith. But the issues he raises also belong to sociology. It also has to deal with relativism, nihilism and the escape into the New Age, the unexpected spiritual impulses that mark the condition known as postmodemity. Uncertainty has arisen over religious affiliations that oscillate between pluralism and fundamentalism, both ambiguous responses to modernity. The relationships between theology and culture have been affected in an inescapable manner.

The Enchantment of Sociology is an effort to provide something oddly unwritten: a sociological reading of the link between theology and culture. It was conceived against the moral and cultural despond of British society between August 1991 and Easter 1995. The theological mandate for the book, as Howes notices, came from Radcliffe’s irenic hope for peace in the vexatious relations between theology and sociology. His belief was that sociology could “provide a locus for the encounter of gospel and the world” and that this would be accomplished through the internal transformation of the discipline itself. The need for sociology to re-think its place in its own field of deliberations relates to a wider sense of unsettlement in a society characterised by postmodemity where matters concerning spirituality, identity and community have become uncertain.
Evil and Religious Pluralism: The Eschatological Resolution
Authors: Cheetham David
Published: July 2007

When Antony Flew in the 1950’s declared that religious assertions died ‘a death of a thousand qualifications’, he was expressing frustration in the face of a dogged refusal by theologians to relinquish cherished beliefs. No matter what conundrum the atheist camp hurled at the theists, they found (to their considerable consternation) that the theologians had moved the goalposts just that little further away. Although the debate following Flew’s comments addressed crucial questions concerning the meaningfulness of religious statements, it also highlighted, in my view, the durability and resilience of religious beliefs and assertions in the mind of the believer. Flew’s point was that religious believers, despite being surrounded by confusing and contradictory evidence, refuse to give up their notions and convictions concerning the divine. It is this resilience in the face of cognitive and experiential difficulties that forms the background of the following discussion.

As part of this paper I will be briefly looking at John Hick’s treatment of the problem of evil and be comparing this with his response to the problems of religious diversity. The purpose for such a comparison is not to provide an exhaustive look at these separate issues in relation to each other. Neither am I concerned to engage in recalcitrant hair-splitting regarding various ideas put forward by Hick. However, I will be showing how differently Hick has treated both problems and lead into a consideration of how the eschatological dimension of his thinking can result in a wholly different ‘solution’ to the question of religious diversity. I contend that the means are available to treat both questions in similar ways because of one highly significant factor—the possibility of further opportunities beyond death.
The Trinity and the Tripartite Soul
Authors: Charlton William
Published: July 2007

According to the Second Council of Constantinople (2 June 553) there is ‘one divinity in three hypostases or persons’. Today it is commoner to say that there are three persons in one God. No doubt these formulations come to the same thing, but what is that?

The English word ‘person’ translates the Latin persona and the Greek prosopon, expressions for the masks actors wore on the ancient stage. Since the same actor might appear in different masks, playing different roles, in the same play, the word suggests that the Persons of the Trinity, the Father, Son and Spirit, are three roles the one God plays, three appearances or aspects he presents. The word ‘hypostasis’ is a philosophical term for something that exists on its own like a living organism; so to call the Father, Son and Spirit ‘hypostases’ is to suggest that they form a kind of three-membered society. Both these suggestions are unorthodox. The first is Sabellianism, the second tritheism, and these are the Charybdis and Scylla between which the speculative theologian is supposed to steer. But is such a course possible? The use of both terms by Constantinople II rather poses the problem than solves it.
Writing of(f) Victims: hors texte
Authors: Fletcher Paul
Published: July 2007

Particular thinkers and their work seem to create significant intellectual waves at particular times and thus determine and define subsequent inquiry. We all know of the powerful consequences of Kant’s reading of Hume, but even more startling is the effect that Hegel had on the seventeen year old Ernst Bloch: ‘I read the Phenomenology of Spirit erotically—as I wrote at the time “the spiritual nightingale is singing within” in this park, this wilderness—and that is how I understood the Phenomenology as I have never understood it since’. One could respond to Bloch’s experience of the Phenomenology with the suggestion that he would have been better off reading Freud, but there is no doubting the excitement of an intellectual encounter that transforms our way of seeing the world. While Jean-Luc Marion’s book, God Without Being, cannot be placed in the same league as Hegel’s Phenomenology, it has nevertheless, in recent years, attracted much attention in English-speaking theological circles and for good reason. God Without Being, the first of Marion’s books to be translated into English, is a beautifully written book that blends a postmodern concern to overcome the impasse of ontotheology with a sensibility for things premodern—especially negative theology and the mystical tradition. This intellectual fusion of metaphysical and post-metaphysical themes is evident in one question which summarises Marion’s study: ‘Does God give himself to be known according to the horizon of Being or according to a more radical horizon?’ (xxiv) Thus the quest for a God without Being; a journey which Marion undertakes in order to expose that more radical horizon which is characterised by God’s ‘most theological name—charity’.
The Politics of Innocence
Authors: West Angela
Published: July 2007

“It wasn't that I particularly supported their policies” a colleague said to me on the day after the election “but I just wanted to get rid of that other lot.” In many ways a natural conservative, she seemed to represent that vast change of mood among the electorate, for whom the Tory government had become the image of corruption, self-interest and hypocrisy, and for whom New Labour seemed to offer the hope of a re-birth of political innocence, a new national consensus about the common good. Coming from a different standpoint, it was a mood I could fervently share with her, and with so many friends who are still reliving the exhilaration of that historic night. Yet I am conscious of a paradox with regard to this great upsurge of new political hope. For the longing to avoid harm and be blameless is at the root of our highest spiritual and moral aspirations; but it is also a dangerous and corrosive passion. The lust for innocence can also be detected in the desires of the recently disgraced.

In the Guardian some months before the election Hugo Young analysed the particular form of corruption that had overtaken British politics—not so much systemic financial corruption, as a form of intellectual corruption. Ministers, defending their actions after the Scott Report or in the Neil Hamilton affair, had apparently come to believe that ‘the mere fact that words and actions are theirs, unfailingly performed for the best of all possible reasons, guarantees their rectitude’. They were scandalised that the public might actually believe that they had been privately milking the political system to protect or advance their political interests.
A Response to Cardinal Ratzinger on Religious Pluralism
Authors: Hick John
Published: July 2007

Last year Cardinal Ratzinger, head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, addressed gatherings of eighty bishops and of the presidents of the doctrinal commissions of the bishops’ conferences of Latin America, on the subject of Relativism as the central problem for the Faith today. In religion, what he calls relativism is what most writers in this area today call pluralism. He says of the ‘so-called pluralist theology of religion’ that ‘only now has it come to the center of the Christian conscience’ (Origins: CNS documentary service, Vol. 26, No. 20, October 31, 1996, p. 311). On studying the text I find that Cardinal Ratzinger, speaking of contemporary religious pluralism, identifies me as ‘one of its founders and eminent representatives’ (p. 312).

If I were a Catholic, owing allegiance to the Pope, I would probably not feel able to question Cardinal Ratzinger’s pronouncements. But as what he calls an American Presbyterian (I am not in fact an American, although I taught for a number of years very happily in the United States), I feel entitled to respond to the Cardinal as a fellow theologian—a much more eminent one than myself, but nevertheless subject to the same canons of accuracy when expounding views which one intends to criticise. The tone of the Cardinal’s address is courteous throughout and I can appreciate the concerns which he expresses from his own very conservative point of view. My regret, however, is that internal evidence reveals that he has relied on a secondary source which has provided him with a misleading version of what I have written.
St Thomas Aquinas on the “Scientific” Nature of Theology
Authors: Turner Geoffrey
Published: July 2007

Reflecting on the practice of theology to say what theology is and the kind of knowledge it might lead to is one of the most difficult things about doing theology. St Thomas Aquinas famously did this in the first question of the Summa Theologiae. It is a brief statement that is the culmination of a line of development from the time theology was taken up by the cathedral schools in the twelfth century. It is brilliantly conceived and, in some respects, wrong.

The development of theology into something like its modem sense as a rational procedure and an academic discipline owes a huge debt to Peter Abailard (1079-1142). Of course, Christian theology had been practised for a thousand years before Abailard and, in a quite different sense, can be traced back to pre-Socratic Greek poets. But it was Abailard who introduced the use of dialectic (or what we would now call logic) so that truth in sacra doctrina was to be established by rational procedures and not simply by appealing to traditional authorities. It also took theology teaching beyond being little more than a literary analysis of scripture (as it had been with Anselm of Laon, for example) to being once more a speculation about the nature of God, but a speculation no longer limited to the opinions of the Church Fathers, opinions which Abailard had shown in Sic et Non were sometimes contradictory.
Catholic Marxism: Looking Forward and Looking Back
Authors: John Eric
Published: July 2007

Catholic Marxism was deeply involved with the December Group which met annually for some years at Spode House. In most ways the December Group was the institutional form of Catholic Marxism. I was not a founding member of the group—its immediate ancestor was a magazine called Slant run by some young graduates, but I attended regularly for the last ten years of its existence. It was not called after any great event in socialist history but because it was simply convenient to meet in December. As most of its members were academics of one sort or another this is easy to understand. Since I am going to be critical in retrospect it is only fair to point out how good many of the sessions were. There was a memorable paper by Denys Turner (New Blackfriars, 1973), and for those of us who were present, there was the staggering all-day session on the Pinochet coup d’etat with Gonzalez Arroyo—recently evicted from his chair in his Chilean university—and Jacques Chamsun, Allende’s minister of Agriculture. There were some of the best, and best informed, lectures on Ireland, of which Irene Brennan’s contributions were outstanding. But what there was not was any attempt to compare and contrast as Finals papers used to say (and perhaps still do) the substance of Catholicism and the substance of Marxism.

The presiding genius over Catholic Marxism wasn’t Marx, whose name was as infrequently mentioned as that of God. It was the French philosophe, Louis Althusser. He seems to me to have been a fraud from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head.
Truth, Tragedy and Compassion: some reflections on the theology of Donald MacKinnon
Authors: Devanny Christopher
Published: July 2007

To read Donald MacKinnon’s theology with the presupposition that he was a systematic theologian must be a great disappointment. Reading MacKinnon leaves one with the impression that his work is rather unfinished, yet this is its quality. Embodied in his work is the belief that any system cannot in the end do justice to the realm of irreducible fact. There is a sustained rigour in his writing which is so deep as to give the reader the sense that MacKinnon is involved in an interrogation so penetrating as to be at times harrowing in its execution. George Steiner, quite rightly, speaks the word ‘sombre’ of MacKinnon’s work, but I think ‘interrogative’, with the accent on the restless even painful questioning of MacKinnon’s genius to be the better description. If MacKinnon can be said to have a method it is Baconian. The question rather than the thesis is the cutting edge of his theology. There is a Barthian insistence about his thought which wants to put all understanding, all subjectivity to the question in order to disclose a deeper level: the subjective must give way to the ontological. Implicit in his writings is the belief that to be a theologian is to be a realist: to be sensitive to the limits of understanding, to let God be God.
Schillebeeckx's Soteriological Agnosticism
Authors: Phillips Peter
Published: July 2007

Edward Schillebeeckx’s richly thought-provoking explorations of Christology are focused in his two studies, Jesus and Christ. These works have brought out with considerable force the need to acknowledge differing, yet parallel interpretations of the person of Christ which are embodied in the life and experience of very different communities in contrasting periods of history. The New Testament itself bears ample witness to this diversity in so far as it is marked by a density of imagery and variety of interpretation which is the product of the churches both of the Jewish Diaspora and the Hellenic world which gave it its shape. The limits of this rich diversity are clearly established by discovering an identity between the exalted Christ and the life and ministry of the earthly Jesus: what Jesus said and what he did provides the necessary ground for the developing Christology of those who follow after their master. Schillebeeckx recognises what Donald MacKinnon insists on, in talking about ‘the explosive intellectual force’ of Jesus’ life and ministry, which confronts those scholars who would seek to reduce the earthly reality of the Christ event to ‘an acted parable of intellectual reconciliation’.

Schillebeeckx argues powerfully that the “‘Jesus affair”... is not just a vision born of faith and based solely on the disciples’ Easter experience; it is his self-understanding that creates the possibility and lays the foundation of the subsequent interpretation by the Christians’. (Jesus, pp 311-312) For Schillebeeckx, the fundamental tenets of soteriology are established by developing the implications inherent in the call to follow after Jesus rather than by way of a developing reflection on the saving significance of Jesus’ death as such.
Newman and the Victorian Self: From Loss and Gain to the Apologia
Authors: Peck John
Published: July 2007

This essay started with the experience of teaching Loss and Gain to an English Literature research class. I was teaching a novel that illustrated an important aspect of the intellectual history of Victorian Britain; the class had been reading a psychological novel which they found (often simultaneously) both perverse and amusing. They were, of course, laughing at Newman rather than with him. I imagine that the response I encountered is not untypical: however Loss and Gain might have been regarded in the past, it is not going to be looked at in the same way today. And when we take account of the impact of critical theory, the picture becomes even more complicated: feminist and New Historicist critics, while not necessarily taking a hostile view of Loss and Gain, are inevitably going to discuss it in a way that challenges traditional approaches. This prompts the question I want to consider: whether current sceptical critical approaches can be reconciled with a sympathetic appreciation of the serious intent of Loss and Gain?

I

A split in criticism becomes apparent immediately if we consider a basic point: Newman is writing about a man’s world. And why not? The Oxford of his day did not admit women. But times change, and even nonfeminist readers today are likely to be struck by the effete remoteness of the university life he depicts, perhaps seeing it as an environment that encourages a fear of women. The problems are apparent in the breakfast party that the junior tutor, Mr Vincent, arranges for Charles Reding and other undergraduates.
Sacrifice, Social Maintenance and the Non‐ordination of Women
Authors: Blenkinsopp Joseph
Published: July 2007

Pope John Paul II’s apostolic letter published on May 22 1994, by coincidence the anniversary of the burning of Joan of Arc at the stake, stated in peremptory fashion that the admission of women to priestly ordination is not subject to debate among Roman Catholics, and the nonnegotiability of this statement has been insisted on more recently by Cardinal Ratzinger. In deference to this admonition I propose neither to debate the issue itself nor evaluate the theological and exegetical arguments on both sides, though it will not be possible to leave them completely out of account. What I would like to do instead is reflect on what is at stake for the church leadership, theologically and practically, in excluding women from the ministerial priesthood and doing so in such uncompromising terms as to even forbid the faithful to debate the subject. To pose the question in this way is not meant to insinuate that there can be no reasonable and arguable grounds for an exclusively male priesthood nor does it imply a dismissive attitude to arguments put forward in official documents in favour of the exclusion of women, much less assume that these arguments are advanced disingenuously. At the same time, I think it can be said that our reasons for holding certain positions are often unacknowledged and unarticulated even to ourselves, and are in any case more primordial than the arguments we elaborate in defence of these positions. In other words, our agenda is not always fully displayed in our arguments, which I imagine also holds for arguments put forward in official church documents.
Polarization in the Catholic Church
Authors: Redmond Walter
Published: July 2007

A few years ago I was making a retreat in a Trappist monastery. There I met a man who, although a Protestant, would spend a few days at the monastery whenever he had to deal with a problem calling for serious prayer and sound advice. On this particular visit, the man's problem was a bitter dispute that was tearing his church apart. Two factions were at odds on abortion and women clergy. He told me the history of the conflict, and I offered him my analysis, which, he said, exactly reflected the situation (in fact, he urged me to write an article about it). Because we have an analogous problem in the Catholic Church, I offer these impressions, which are just that—impressions— and, I fear, rather obvious.
Romano Guardini and the Liturgy
Authors: Gorevan Patrick
Published: July 2007

‘The Catholic liturgy is the supreme example of an objectively established rule of spiritual life.’ ‘The liturgy is the lex orandi'. These were the principles of Romano Guardini’s liturgical writings, both theological and pastoral. He sought to bring the liturgy into the centre of the Christian’s life, at the heart of the many other, more private, expressions of prayer and reverence. He offers an overview of Christian public prayer:

Prayer must be simple, wholesome and powerful. It must be closely related to actuality and not afraid to call things by their names. In prayer we must find our entire life over again. On the other hand, it must be rich in ideas and powerful images, and speak a developed but restrained language; its construction must be clear and obvious to the simple man, stimulating and refreshing to the man of culture. It must be intimately blended with an erudition which is in nowise obtrusive, but which is rooted in breadth of spiritual outlook and in inward restraint of thought, volition and emotion. And that is precisely the way in which the prayer of the liturgy has been formed.

According to Aidan Nichols, if the principles of Romano Guardini on liturgy had been consistently applied to contemporary sensibility in the 1960s and 1970s, his influence might have stopped the post-conciliar liturgical reform from backing modernity as a winning ticket, just at the point when it became converted into postmodernism. This short sketch points to some of Guardini’s insights in the liturgical area, especially on questions which have recently been taken up anew by liturgical thinkers.
The Problem of Authority in Theological Education
Authors: O'Neill J. C.
Published: July 2007

All Christians have put themselves under obedience to God. They acknowledge God’s authority—his right to the obedience of every sentient being. They also acknowledge God’s power, since disobedience to God can only exist so long as God permits it.

God’s authority is promulgated to the human race in specific descriptions of certain rewards and punishments that are attached to specified kinds of behaviour. These laws are said to be made known by authoritative messengers, the prophets. God is held to be three persons in the one Godhead. The second person of the Trinity, the eternal Son of God, is said to have been incarnate, to have been crucified under Pontius Pilate, to have been raised from the dead and to have ascended to heaven. It is promised that he will come to earth again at the general resurrection of all the dead, and that those who merit eternal exclusion from the presence of God will be excluded and those who are judged worthy to enjoy God’s presence will live in bliss for ever. God the Holy Spirit has been sent, and will continue to be sent, to those who submit to the Father and the Son. Among other gifts, this Spirit has given and will give wisdom to discern what is true, good and beautiful.
Imaging God: Creatureliness and Technology
Authors: Scott Peter
Published: July 2007

The variety of ways of construing how humanity is in the image of God suggests a profound interrelation of tradition and context in theological reflection on the imago dei. For example, Colin Gunton has recently argued that the dominant ways of interpreting the imago dei at the present time are stewardship and the duality of male and female. It is not hard to see how contemporary discussions on the relations between humanity and non-human nature, and between men and women, inform such a selection. The recent work of Peter Hodgson furnishes us with a second example: being in the image of God, he argues, comprises three spheres: self-relatedness, other or world-relatedness and wholeness. Again, it is not hard to discern how such a construal is informed by the identification of three dilemmas which are, Hodgson considers, constitutive of our contemporary (Western) context: liberation from unjust social relationships; relations between Christianity and other religions; relations between humanity and non-human nature. In the presentation of the imago dei, we may safely say, tradition and context are deeply interrelated.

In what follows, I shall develop one aspect of recent Christian tradition—that sociality is the mark of the imago dei—in order to explore how humanity might be in the image of God in a technological society. Thus in the last two sections of this paper, I ‘expand’ Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s reading of humanity as social by including the themes of spatiality and temporality. It is as social, spatial and temporal, I shall argue, that humanity is to be understood as imaging God.