bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Self‐Transcendence and the Group: The Attitude to Life of Thirteenth and Fourteenth Century Beguines
Authors: Bowie Fiona
Published: July 2007

You should love what is not

And flee what is.

You should stand alone

And approach no one.

You should strive always

To be free from all things.

You should free the bound

And bind the free.

You should comfort the sick

And yet possess nothing.

You should drink the water of suffering

And feed the fire of love with the fuel of virtue.

Then you shall live in the true wilderness.

Mechthild of Magdeburg: The Flowing Light of the Godhead. (35 1)

This highly poetic, but deeply paradoxical passage from Mechthild of Magdeburg, the thirteenth century beguine and mystic, can stand as a paradigm for the themes of self-transcendence and communality as understood and experienced by religious women in the later middle ages, and in particular those belonging to the beguine movement.

Mechthild advises her readers how to live in ‘the true wilderness’, a place located beyond our ordinary existence and geographical reality. This ‘true wilderness’ is reached by ‘loving what is not’ and ‘flee(ing) what is’. All that binds her to this world must be left behind, if the mystic is to rise above earthly ties and unite herself with God, her transcendent lover; a God who, like the Lady of the Courtly Lover, is a God of absence as well as presence, of pain as well as joy. Although Mechthild chose a communal form of spiritual life as a member of a monastic community, she realised that each of us must travel to God alone.
Law, Change and Revolution: A Theological Note on the Finality of Capitalist Resurgence.
Authors: Moss David
Published: July 2007

If it is the case that ‘every age adopts an image of itself—a certain horizon, however blurred and imprecise, which somehow unifies its whole experience’, then we may enquire: in what does such a contemporary image consist? Perry Anderson suggests, with characteristic elan, the following: ‘The radical internationalization of the forces of production—not to speak of circulation—that defines the spearhead forms of capital in the final years of the 20th century promises to render all national correctors. . . increasingly tenuous in the future. In that sense no society ...will be immune to the unpredictable tides and tempests of an uneven development whose elements are acquiring a well-nigh meteorological velocity around the world.’ The intimation of apocalyptic in this image of tides and tempests hints at the possibility of epochal change; and indeed, it is a feeling that has grown into a conviction on the part of many theorists, as the world economy lurches towards the 21st century. ‘Post-industrial’, ‘informational’ or ‘hyperreal’: however the revolutionary force of capitalism is to be described at the close of this century, it is becoming increasingly clear that the sheer magnitude of these changes are installing, not only new patterns of economic production and exchange, but also, and more profoundly, new realms of human experience. The world is changing, a feeling uncannily and often disturbingly present to many, as they search to establish the lineaments of the human in this Promethean age.
Catherine De‘: Ricci Part III
Authors: di Agresti Domenico
Published: July 2007

‘Desire nothing except to be pleasing to him and to do his most holy will’ [CRE I 28]. This simple formula, inspired by the relationship between Christ crucified and his Father, and lived ever more intensely in the most radical way by Catherine, provides the key to an integrated reading of her spirituality, of which it is the heart. But how does it actually take shape in practice? Will it not don the emaciated face of renunciation, gloomy earnestness, human frustration, all-enveloping pain, self-denial and deprivation? The reality is in fact quite different. There is not a single letter in which Catherine does not invite people to be ‘cheerful’ [cf. CRF VII. 3 163-167], This certainly does not mean a superficial, silly cheerfulness which is only skin-deep and unpredictable in its durability. What Catherine encourages is a cheerfulness which does not exclude the heights and the depths of the various states of spirit people find themselves in as their circumstances vary, whether internally or externally, but which remains constant even in times of pain and tribulation. It is a cheerfulness which is rooted in its depths in the very mystery of God and whose intensity flows from faith, hope and the love with which it abandons itself to God’s plan in the specific life of each individual.
Out of the Greenhouse
Authors: Milbank John
Published: July 2007

In the false Spring of our times, everything is painted green: it is the appointed liturgical colour for our post-historical sabbath. It’s to everyone’s taste, the guarantee of minimum respectability. There’s a Green party, but that doesn’t get very far, because it appears to appropriate for a particular cause the symbol that belongs to all. The colour has a utopian hint, or rather that of a puritan arcadia, but at the same time it soothes the passages of capitalist economic exchange. More than that: the guarantee of a ‘good’, ‘healthy’ relation to nature, as to one’s own body, increases surplus value. Capitalism has already incorporated, in the interests of profit, the new religiosity of our times, which takes the form of transcending one’s humanity in order to celebrate nature or animality as the ‘other’ with which one nonetheless seeks to become united.

I don’t want to be misunderstood. The planetary structures which support life have been dangerously interfered with; much natural beauty, along with the delicate and long-developed harmonies of people’s everyday environments has been ruined or destroyed. Technology is employed indiscriminately and for the mere sake of size and complexity. However, ‘Green consciousness’ is not the complete answer to all this: in too many ways it may collude with precisely what it purports to oppose.
Utility, Understanding and Creativity in the Study of Religions
Authors: Arthur Chris
Published: July 2007

At one point in Speculum Mentis, R G Collingwood remarks that

If thought were the mere discovery of interesting facts, its indulgence, in a world full of desperate evils and among men crushed beneath the burden of daily tasks too hard for their solitary strength, would be the act of a traitor.

Given the distance that can separate academic inquiry from any humane application of its results, the thinking that is fostered within the universities is often accused of being useless. With images of famine, war, and ecological disaster appearing daily on our screens, the pursuit of many avenues of learning can easily seem like the sort of treachery which Collingwood condemned. ‘We try to understand ourselves and our world’, Collingwood argued, ‘only in order that we may learn how to live’. Often the connection between learning and living is so tenuous that it seems to have been lost altogether. On any map of knowledge drawn today there must, from the point of view of the hungry, the homeless, the oppressed, be many desert areas, arid zones which seem intellectually barren and morally bankrupt. The quality of the intellectual flora which flourish in such impoverished regions is pointedly identified in Lucky Jim when the book’s hero, honestly assessing the worth of an article he has written, talks about its ‘niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudolight it throws upon non-problems’.

In a world so full of ‘desperate evils’, every academic must surely be faced with the question of whether there is any point in his or her work.
Creating Confusion: A Response to Markham
Authors: D'Costa Gavin
Published: July 2007

Ian Markham makes two basic contentions in his article ‘Creating options: Shattering the “exclusivist, inclusivist, and pluralist” paradigm’. The first is that the threefold paradigm of approaches to the question of salvation outside explicit Christianity are flawed and therefore unhelpful. The second is that his own tentative proposal further indicates this point, for his own position does not fit neatly into any of the three approaches. I think that Markham’s arguments for his first contention are not entirely convincing and therefore his own proposal fails to fit the categories, not because it has created a new option, but because it leaves certain questions unanswered and introduces a certain amount of confusion. In fact I will suggest that the usefulness of the three categories of exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralism allows us to see more clearly what type of questions he leaves unanswered and thereby justify themselves heuristically in providing a basis for criticising those who question their viability. This brief reply has as its main purpose to defend the threefold paradigm in the theology of religions.

This is not to say that these three categories are problem-free. It is simply the case that a sustained and convincing critique of them is yet to be produced. I agree with Markham that Michael Barnes develops a sophisticated Trinitarian inclusivism despite his claim to break the paradigm. Kenneth Surin’s critique of the paradigm is of an altogether different nature. Surin seems to redescribe the terrain so that there are no valid theological questions left, only political-sociological questions.
After Kuwait the Deluge
Authors: Wicker Brian
Published: July 2007

This article has been written as a contribution to a study, by Pax Christi International, of the relevance of the ‘just war’ tradition to the world situation after the Kuwait war. Brian Wicker is engaged with others in editing this study, which it is hoped will appear during 1993, the thirtieth anniversary of Pacem in Terris.

We have been invited to discuss the justice of war because of the Kuwait case and its aftermath. But, I believe this is not the best place to begin. Let me start by saying why.

Whether the Kuwait War was a ‘just war’ is still controversial. The ad bellum case for using force against Saddam was strong. The cause—a plain case of invasion by one sovereign state of another—was surely just by the traditional standards. Furthermore it is unlikely that sanctions alone could have got Saddam out of Kuwait (though I accept that they were not given enough time and that this meant that the ‘last resort’ criterion was not fully met). The force to be used was assembled under the authority of UN resolutions (although some have argued that these were themselves unconstitutional). The intention was at least partly to restore peace (even though putting the Sabah family back into Kuwait hardly amounted to justice and peace for the Kuwaitis). On the other hand, the in bello criterion of proportionality was always in danger of being breached. The Pope’s warning that such a war was likely to do more harm than good was timely and valid.
Seeking Others in their Otherness
Authors: Lipner Julius J.
Published: July 2007

That we live in a world of all manner of racial, cultural and ideological difference, of profound specificities and contingencies, is a trite fact of existence. Such awareness is nothing new. Indeed it was a containing feature of Aquinas’ intellectual perspective. The title of one of his major works—Summa Contra Gentiles—indicates as much. What is new in our time is a growing if still somewhat grudging appreciation of this fact of difference, and the realisation, still halting on the whole, that there is an important sense in which difference is creative and so must be celebrated. In the role of theologian and scholar of religion, and as a tribute to Aquinas’ comprehensive philosophical-theological vision, I propose in this article to inquire into this sign of our times (Mt. 16.3), to assess its significance, and to indicate, with special reference to the study of religion, how it might orient our lives.

Just over 25 years ago, on the last day of October 1967, John Hick, on assuming the H G Wood Chair in the University of Birmingham, gave his inaugural lecture, entitled ‘Theology’s Central Problem’. ‘Today. . . theology’s central problem,’ he declared, ‘is not so much one within theology as around theology, enfolding it entirely and calling into question its nature and status as a whole.’ ‘This issue,’ he continued, ‘at once central and all-embracing, presents itself... as a problem concerning religious language. In a sentence the issue is whether distinctively religious utterances are instances of the cognitive or of the noncognitive uses of language.’
New Age Spiritualities: How are we to Talk of God?
Authors: Woods Richard
Published: July 2007

Two autobiographical accounts by American Jesuit priests of their New Age involvement have gained considerable attention recently—David Toolan’s Facing West from California’s Shores: A Jesuit’s Journey into New Age Consciousness published in 1987, and Fr. Mitch Pacwa’s Catholics and the New Age, published last year and already reprinted.

David Toolan does not, so far as I am aware, attempt to define the New Age movement. But his encounters reveal this ‘epistemological revolution’ to be an amalgam of Asian mysticism, modem physics, and transpersonal psychologies. Its major proponents are the Esalen Institute, Jean Houston’s ‘Ritual Theater,’ and a host of physicists, psychologists, and naturalists, including Ernest Becker, Stanislaus Grof, Loren Eisley, David Bohm, and Ilya Prigogine, among others.

According to Pacwa’s descriptive (and to my way of thinking very limited) definition, the New Age Movement ‘is a loosely structured, eclectic movement based on experiences of monism that lead people to believe in pantheism, with a tendency to hold millennarian views of history’ (p. 13). (No one, of course, with the possible exception of some professional philosophers, experiences monism or believes in pantheism or even holds millennarian views of history. What Pacwa means is that some people have experiences that he considers monistic rather than dualistic, or entertain ideas about God that he considers insufficiently distinct from ideas about the world, and who tend to think the world might end soon.)
Anthony Ross OP 1917–1993
Authors: AJW
Published: July 2007

Oscar Wilde is alleged to have said that there is only one thing worse
than being talked about and that is not being talked about Fr Anthony spent
a great deal of his life being talked about Many people have commented on
his list of achievements: Catholic Chaplain at Edinburgh University, Deputy
Chairman of the Scottish Parole Board, Chairman of the Scottish Catholic
Historical Association, Provincial of the English Dominicans, Rector of the
University of Edinburgh and many other distinctions. But like many priests,
his most valuable work as pastor and counsellor was hidden. During his long
career he was an instrument through which many were brought to glimpse the
edge of the mystery of God, and through whom many came to hope in
God’s goodness and to trust in his mercy.

It was often said of Fr Anthony that he was a man ahead of his time. In
many ways he was precisely a man of his time, but in an age which could not
make space for prophets. Like many of his generation, his experience was
indelibly marked by economic depression and by war. He said himself that in
the thirties he, “lost faith in bullets and ballots as a way of
re-shaping society, and thought some kind of spiritual revolution was the
only hope for the future.” It was this conviction which led him to
the Church and to the Order. At the same time a group of theologians in
France were stressing the need for a re-centring in the person of Christ and
in his paschal mystery.
Opera: The Creative Expression of Italy
Authors: Navone John
Published: July 2007

...so long as people keep getting born Greek or French or Italian their culture-production will bear the unmistakable signature of the place.

Lawrence Durrell

A map of Italy showing the birthplaces of its principal composers reveals that nine of its twenty regions can boast of no one: Piedmont, Valle d’Aosta, Trentino-Alto Adige, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Umbria, Abruzzi, Molise, Basilicata, and Sardinia. Four of the nine are border regions; most are mountainous. Two regions have produced one composer: Calabria, Cilea (1866-1950); Liguria, Paganini (1782-1840) .Three regions have produced two: Sicily, Alessandro Scarlatti (1660-1725) and Bellini (1801-1835); Puglia, Paisiello (1740-1816) and Giordano (1867-1948); Latium, Palestrina (1525-1594) and Clementi (1752-1832). Two regions have produced three: Marche, Pergolesi (1710-1736), Spontini (1774-1851), Rossini (1792-1868); Campania, Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757), Cimarosa (1749-1801), Leoncavallo 1857-1919). Emilia-Romagna produced four, Frescobaldi (1583-1643), Corelli (1653-1713), Verdi (1813-1901), Respighi (1879-1936). Two regions have produced five: Veneto, Gabrieli (1557-1612), Vivaldi (1678-1741), Salieri (1750-1825), Boito (1842-1918), Wolf-Ferrari (1876- 1948); Lombardy, Monteverdi (1567-1643), Cavalli (1602-1676), Donizetti (1797-1848), Ponchielli (1834-1886), Menotti (1911- ). Tuscany is in first place with seven: Lully (1632-1687), Cherubini (1760-1842), Boccherini (1743-1805), Puccini (1858-1924), Mascagni (1863-1945), Busoni (1866-1924), Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1895-1968).

In terms of the Italian boundaries fixed by the Congress of Vienna (1815), eight of the above composers would come from both the Papal States and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies; one would come from the Kingdom of Sardinia.
The Elusive Life of a Modern Pope
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

One of the pleasures of reading resides in the flourishing condition of biography. According to publishing statistics, biographies sell better than any other genre of serious literature. Some, such as Leon Edel’s five-volume life of Henry James or Michael Holroyd’s three-volume biography of George Bernard Shaw, not to mention Martin Gilbert’s monumental series on Winston Churchill, may seem so overwhelming as to tax even the most devoted student of other people’s stories. Really great biographies, however, such as these all plainly are, only hold their readers in thrall to the next instalment. It was a long wait from Edel’s first volume (1953), which got James to the age of twenty seven, to the final instalment (1972), but no reader once under Edel’s spell would easily have lost patience. Even then, Edel’s one-volume abridgment (1985), no doubt all that any reader but a fanatical Jamesian would now tackle, is arguably better still than the original work. But one could easily list a dozen other superb modem biographies H Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart, by Robert Bernard Martin (1980), for example, to mention only the one that has most recently come my way.

Peter Hebblethwaite records that, when he submitted one chapter of his new book, Paul VI: The First Modern Pope (Harper Collins, London, 1993, £35), to Archbishop Luigi Barbarito, Pro-Nuncio to Great Britain, for comment, he was told that it would not be possible to write a ‘true and objective life of a Pontiff’
Travellers' Tales and After‐dinner speeches: The Shape of Acts of the Apostles
Authors: Cook Cornelia
Published: July 2007

Acts is a good story. But what kind of a good story it is has exercised scholars. For a long time Luke was regarded as an historian, but he was an historian who reported unhistorical speeches and constructed unlikely journeys. Theologians have tended-to sum up Acts as (I quote from the New Oxford Annotated RSV) ‘the triumphant narrative of the spread of the gospel from Jerusalem to Rome’. More recently, scholars with literary interests have begun to argue that Acts is not meant to be historiography. Richard Pervo argues in Profit with Delight, that Acts is like ancient novels in its conventions and structures; therefore its fictionality is legitimate, and not a little bit of its agenda is to entertain.

Brian Reardon points out many elements of ancient romance in Acts: its setting in a near-contemporary familiar world, travel with the aspect of purposeful journey (quest) which generates plot, adventure with trials and successes, rescue or salvation. Richard Pervo finds in the ancient world a sizeable body of prose fictions which he calls ‘novels’ and which display numerous conventions easily discoverable in Acts: adventures (including arrests, persecutions, plots, trials, shipwreck and snakes), miracles, riots and rowdy scenes, exotic and utopian elements, an active providence, a robust hero, an episodic plot. We may assume, then, that ‘Luke’ was a fiction-addict, also steeped in Biblical narrative and prophetic literature, who employed received conventions of historiography and fiction-writing to make Acts a readable story with recognizable features. He structures his story through a progress which gets Christianity—largely in the briefcase of the apostle Paul—from Jerusalem to Rome.
Silence, Metaphor and the Communication of Religious Meaning Part I
Authors: Arthur Chris
Published: July 2007

In his important study of The New Era in Religious Communication, Pierre Babin offers a startling juxtaposition of two very different thought- world. First, he introduces us to the practice, among some Indian tribes living in the Canadian wilderness, of plugging children’s nostrils and covering their eyes soon after birth, the better to attune them to the noises of the forest in which they will have to survive. Then, in stark contrast to these “hyperauditory” individuals, made alert to the subtlest natural sounds: the whisper of snow falling on the leafless branches of aspen and birch, the footfalls of deer in soft summer mud, the long indrawn breath of a hibernating bear and so on, Babin invites readers to consider a modem American adolescent reared in front of the brash sights and sounds of the TV screen. Such an individual will have logged some 20,000 hours of viewing by the age of sixteen. How, Babin asks, can these two individuals be supposed to have the same reference range or to have a similar idea of God and the transcendent? Is it possible that their sense of the holy could follow even remotely similar contours or be effectively explored or addressed by a single method of approach?

To some extent, the hyperauditory Indian and the media-saturated American can be taken as representing two forms of consciousness and communication which Babin spends much of his book outlining. On the one hand there is the linear, analytic, and alphabetical mode.
Silence, Metaphor and the Communication of Religious Meaning Part II
Authors: Arthur Chris
Published: July 2007

It would be fascinating to trace out in more detail the role of silence in modern thought. However, my aim here is necessarily limited to a selection of comments on silence rather than a comprehensive analysis of how this far from straightforward topic has been tackled.

There are, of course, varieties of silence. In an interesting paper in which he looks at silence in the work of Rudolf Otto and Harold Pinter, Bernard Dauenhauer notes that silence “does not always manifest itself as ‘safe’ and ‘benign’. It can, for example, be terrifying, menacing or awesome. Silence can express many states of mind, both trivial and profound and in spiritual training a distinction is often made between the silence of mouth, mind and will. And Arthur Danto, in an essay on “Silence and the Tao” makes a distinction between reaching and being reduced to silence.” One way of looking at silence, though naturally it is not applicable to every manifestation of this phenomenon, is to view it as what happens when metaphor fails.

If the methodology of Religious Studies is empathetic, is such empathy not likely to lead towards a situation where silence rather than words is what is encountered? And if this is indeed the case, how, if at all, can the discipline function in a situation where, apparently, metaphor cannot operate? Before attempting an answer, I think we need briefly to review something of the conceptual centrality which metaphor has claim to.
The Mysterious Affair at Mâcon: The Bishops and the Souls of Women
Authors: Nolan Michael
Published: July 2007

The decree of the Council of Mâcon (585 AD) that women do not have a soul has the honoured place in liberal demonology given to historical events that never happened. It is a tale to treasure. As the eponymous wine is sipped at elegant tables, the misguided deeds of bishops can be recalled, and the only regret must be that no Synod of Brie or Council of Camembert offers occasion for further mirth. On these occasions, facts become such skimble-skamble stuff as puts men from their dreams.

For the Council, of course, never decreed any such thing, if only for the persuasive reason that some of the bishops may themselves have been married. The penalties applied to a bishop who decrees that his wife does not have a soul are not recorded in canon law presumably as surpassing male imagination. The decrees do indeed contain stuff to fuel fires: the fifteenth requires laymen to doff their hat to a cleric the sixteenth forbids the widow of a sub-deacon to marry on pain of being confined to a convent. But neither the word ‘woman’ nor the word ‘soul’ occurs even once in the decrees.

One does not hope ever to be free of the myth—but it may be interesting to trace its history, which is complex. Briefly: in the late seventeenth century some Dutch publications alleged that the Council had debated whether women are human; this was linked in nineteenth- century France with earlier satirical literature from Italy which claimed to ‘prove’ from the Bible that women do not have a soul, and the upshot was the allegation that the Council had issued a decree to this effect. The allegation was refuted by scholars but persisted as a myth which later reachcd England first, and then Ireland, where it flourishes today.
The Sound of the Analogia Ends Part I
Authors: Murphy Francesca
Published: July 2007

Urs von Balthasar’s theology is attuned to a realism which becomes more attractive as Rahner’s engagement with Kantianism seems less pertinent. This realism ‘turns the rudder hard over’, as von Balthasar said of Barth; but how did he acquire it? Rowan Williams has suggested that von Balthasar’s seamanship originates partly with Heidegger. This article will place him within the German Catholic revival of the 1920s and 1930s. At this time, German Catholics delved into phenomenology, and into Newman’s theology. They appraised Aquinas’s thought differently than did English or French neo-Thomists.

The Memoirs of the Hungarian philosopher Aurel Kolnai (1900-1973) supply some sidelights on von Balthasar’s writings. Both men attended the University of Vienna between 1922 and 1926. There von Balthasar is said to have “. . . heard the Plotinus lectures of Hans Eibl: there being was . . . interpreted as . . . the self-communicating good.” He will later say that the affinity between Thomas and Heidegger derives not from Aristotle, but from “. . . that Plotinus for whom being remains a supraconceptual mystery.. ,” Kolnai places Eibl in his time and place:

“. .. Hans Eibl, [was] a Sudeten German and violent nationalist, yet a Catholic with ... a prodigious erudition concerning St. Augustine and Patristic thought . . . During the Dollfuss-Schuschnigg regime, Eibl was editor of a crypto-Nazi rag ... Yet this man, essentially a ... rightminded Catholic Conservative, had little resemblance to the Nazi and none to the current... ‘Reich German’ ... type.”
Trinity and ‘the Feminine Other’
Authors: Soskice Janet Martin
Published: July 2007

The notion of ‘the feminine Other’ is a vexed one for feminists. In the opening pages of The Second Sex Simone de Beauvoir asks, ‘Are there women, really? Most assuredly the theory of the eternal feminine still has its adherents who will whisper in your ear: “Even in Russia women still are women”.’ For de Beauvoir the verbal symmetry of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine is merely a matter of linguistic form. In the real world of work and love—in life in general—man is the norm and woman is man’s ‘other’, thus her famous remark, ‘He is the Subject... she is the Other’, the ‘not man’ defined by men.

Levinas may be a ‘recent read’ for many of us but already, writing in 1949, de Beauvoir quotes him; ‘Otherness’, says Levinas, ‘reaches its full flowering in the feminine, a term of the same rank as consciousness but of opposite meaning.’ T suppose’ de Beauvoir comments, ‘that Levinas does not forget that woman, too, is aware of her own consciousness. . . . But it is striking that he deliberately takes a man’s point of view. When he writes that “woman is mystery”, he implies that she is mystery for man. Thus his description, which is intended to be objective, is in fact an assertion of masculine privilege.’3 And one which, we can note with de Beauvoir, can stand in a long line of philosophical evocation of ‘the female’ and ‘the feminine’ from the pre-Socratics to Nietzsche and beyond.

In the existentialist rubric of The Second Sex de Beauvoir sees the problem as this—a woman, like anyone else, is an autonomous freedom, yet she discovers herself in a world where men force her to assume herself as the ‘Other’. Woman, philosophically speaking, lacks her own subjectivity.
Israelites and Canaanites, Christians and Jews: Studies in Self‐Definition
Authors: Joyce Paul
Published: July 2007

My concern is with the phenomenon of self-definition, and particularly with the self-definition of one group over against another group. I shall consider two test-cases, one ancient and the other modem, the selfdefinition of Ancient Israel in relation to the Canaanites as evidenced in the Hebrew Bible, and the self-definition of Christians in relation to Jews in the Christian experience of reading the Hebrew Bible as Old Testament.’

Self and Other in Ancient Israel

I begin with the distinction between Israel and Canaan as presented in the Bible. This case illustrates how complex can be the mixture of reality and fantasy in the self-definition of a nation. Some words from the book of Deuteronomy:

‘You shall surely destroy all the places where the nations whom you shall dispossess served their gods, upon the high mountains and upon the hills and under every green tree; you shall tear down their altars, and dash in pieces their pillars, and bum their Asherim with fire; you shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and destroy their name out of that place.’ (Deut. 12.2-3)

Israel presented herself as being distinctive, a people set apart. This emphasis marks the biblical story from Genesis 12 onwards; in the call of Abram, Israel is effectively called to be a people, T will make of you a great nation’ (Gen. 12.2). The story of Jacob and Esau is all about Israelite identity over against others. Jacob represents Israel; through his craftiness, he triumphs over Esau, who represents the enemy Edom (See especially Genesis 27).
Identity and the Other: the Emergence of Christianity
Authors: Sawyer Deborah
Published: July 2007

Two areas of interaction have contributed to the essential identity of Christianity from earliest to contemporary times. One relates to an external phenomenon, that is to say, Christianity as an entity encountering something it distinguishes from itself; and the other to an internal phenomenon, relating to an encounter from within which has allowed one group to be dominant The external encounter is between Christianity and Judaism, and the internal encounter is between male and female. Both are named by orthodox voices as the ‘Other’, both raise problems for Christianity today, although the solutions may be diametrically opposed.

There has been growing attention given to anti-Judaism in earliest Christianity, and the contemporary implications of this have been an issue taken up by a number of scholars over die past twenty years. Furthermore, writers such as Charlotte Klein, Rosemary Radford Ruether, and John Gager were also aware that the attitudes of previous generations of scholars reflected anti-Judaism in their work. Charlotte Klein, in particular, noted the pejorative use of phrases such as ‘Spatjudentum’, late Judaism’ which German scholars used to describe the Judaism of Jesus’ day. Today scholars of both Jewish studies and Christian origins would readily describe the same period as early Judaism, understanding that Judaism and Christianity both gained their essential identity during the first century c.e. What were those scholars of past generations telling us about their attitude to the Jewish people of their own day in their use of such a phrase? That Judaism was coming to an end with the advent of Christ? That Judaism should have ended with Christ? That Christianity succeeds Judaism?
The Action of God
Authors: Davies Brian
Published: July 2007

I have a very simple point to make in what follows. For all I want to say is that God does nothing. I do not wish to deny that God brings or brought things about (e.g. that the universe continues to exist or that St Paul was converted). So my “God does nothing” has a special sense (it does not deny that action can be ascribed to God). But what I intend in saying it is, I think, something of great importance when it comes to thinking about God in a sensible way. To grasp the point I want to make will save one from following all sorts of false trails when it comes to reflection on divinity.

Let’s start with what is going on when you or I act. Examples of human actions could include opening a door, wiping one’s nose, making a telephone call, baking a cake, and waving goodbye to a friend. But what is common to these examples, and to others which might be mentioned?

There is at least one thing common. For they all involve people going through a process. I open a door by reaching for the door handle and exerting a continued pressure on it. I wipe my nose by transporting with my hand an object to my nose and moving it about. I bake a cake by walking around a kitchen and following a recipe. I wave good-bye to a friend by lifting my arm and going through a waving motion.
‘The Snakish Cunning of the Saints’: A Dialogue on Lying, Deception and Equivocation
Authors: Chappell T.D.J.
Published: July 2007

‘St.Athanasius was rowing on a river when the persecutors came rowing in the opposite direction: “Where is the traitor Athanasius?” “Not far away,” the Saint gaily replied, and rowed past them unsuspected. St. Joan of Arc... used to put a cross on her letters to her commanders to show that the sentences bore the opposite of the usual French meaning. . . .She was accused of lying, but surely she had a good defence; words get their meaning by convention, and her commanders, to whom the letters were addressed, knew the convention and were not misled; if English soldiers, who had no business to read her letters or to be in her country at all, read them and were misled, that was not her affair. Such is the snakish cunning of the saints . . .’ (Peter Geach, The Virtues, p.114-115)

Philip’s parents had gone out for the evening, and I had been given the job of keeping him amused. About twenty past eight he evidently had a better idea about how to amuse himself than homework, and said he was going out to see a video at a neighbour’s house. I wouldn’t have been dubious about this—if he hadn’t looked so shifty. ‘How long will you be?’ I asked. ‘Hour and a half,’ he replied. ‘So you’d be back ten minutes before your parents?’ ‘Er, yes,’ he grinned. ‘Would your parents let you go?’ Philip looked even shiftier.
Questioning the Virgin Birth
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

On a wet and windy evening last February over five hundred people gathered in a fine eighteenth century church in central Edinburgh to discuss the doctrine of the Virgin Birth. Given that the population of the city is about 500,000, one need not exaggerate the significance of the event. The interior of the church, modelled on St Andrew’s in the Via Quirinale in Rome, and thus neither cruciform nor circular but elliptical, provides a good arena for discussion. It is the church to which the dissenting ministers and elders went in procession when they withdrew from the General Assembly in 1843, to constitute the Free Church of Scotland.

The present controversy about the factual basis and importance of accepting the doctrine of the Virgin Birth is unlikely to split the Kirk, although the main Scottish newspapers were inundated with letters during the weeks after the Moderator of the Church of Scotland (the Right Reverend James Weatherhead) took the occasion of a Christmastide address to note that Scottish Presbyterians might believe in the doctrine of the Incarnation while being free to regard the stories in Scripture about the virginal conception of Jesus as purely ‘symbolic’.

The sermon was given in St Giles Cathedral, another site of great symbolic significance in Scottish history. Only a single scallop capital survives from the original early twelfth century building, in what is now substantially a fourteenth century structure. The central tower received its famous crown spire sometime before 1500.
The Defective Male: What Aquinas Really Said
Authors: Nolan Michael
Published: July 2007

In his Summa Theologiae, Thomas Aquinas discusses the biblical account of Creation and deals at length with the production of the body and soul of the First Man and the First Woman. The soul of each, being immaterial, was created by God. But whereas the human body is normally produced by parents from the substance of their own bodies, God himself produced both the body of Adam and the body of Eve. He produced the body of Adam from earth, the body of Eve from the body of Adam. The matter used may have been different, but Adam and Eve were equally God’s own handiwork and Eve was not a child of (and hence not a dependent of) Adam.

He asks himself why God followed this (asexual) method of production and replies that it was to show that reproduction is a relatively peripheral activity in the life of the human being. The specific goal of human existence is to understand. He uses the word homo: the activities of mind are the central work of the human being qua human being, of woman therefore as of man.

In accordance with medieval practice, he states objections to his own position and seeks to refute them. Perhaps God should not have made woman at the beginning of the world? The suggestion by a theologian that God should not have done something he actually did is obviously academic. But Aquinas was an academic, and academics of all centuries find that the discussion of highly theoretical issues assists them to clarify their understanding of the real world.
“Memory and Imagination in Augustine's Confessions”
Authors: Breyfogle Todd
Published: July 2007

“Memory, like love, is an act of imagination, an abandonment and a possession.”

Susan Dodd

He who claims to have read all the works of Augustine, says Isidore of Seville, is a liar. Yet of all the works of the Augustinian corpus, few have received as much attention as the Confessions. One is tempted, thus, to paraphrase Isidore and say, He who claims to say something new about the Confessions is a liar. I have no desire to be called a liar, I have not read all the works of Augustine, nor do I claim to have absolutely new insights into Augustine’s great work. I do, however, wish to offer some provisional thoughts on a topic little discussed: Memory and Imagination in Augustine’s Confessions.

Augustine’s theoretical treatment of memory, which has of course received extended treatment, occurs in book X of the Confessions. We cannot engage the vexing debate regarding the relationship between the first nine and final four books of the Confessions here. Suffice it to say that in writing the 13 books of the Confessions Augustine saw them as an integrated whole. It is not surprising, then, that after nine books of confessional remembrance of his life’s events and their meanings Augustine should turn to reflect on the faculty of memory itself.
The Bonfire of the Vanities and the Ecology of Preaching
Authors: White Allan
Published: July 2007

Anybody who has been to Tuscany will have pleasant memories of the sunshine striking hilltop villages. But Florence, which is one of the two cities at the centre of this study is not a hilltop village, unlike Siena, Volterra, Cortona San Gimignano or Arezzo. What is important about Florence is the river Arno. The Arno answered all Florence’s need for water, it contributed to her hygiene, fish from the river helped to feed her whilst the river’s race turned the millwheels that ground the flour for the people’s bread. Equally important was the effect of the river on the Florentine economy. A plentiful supply of water was necessary for the washing, fulling and dying of cloth which was the basis of Florentine wealth. By the end of the thirteenth century the two pillars of Florentine political policy had been well-established: the pre-eminent cloth industry which promoted the establishment of branch houses of Florentine merchants all over Europe, and an alliance with the papacy which helped to promote the independence and security of the commune of the city.

In the fifteenth century the city was dominated by an oligarchy of merchant families. The constitution was republican, but there was scope for only limited participation in government. Florence could in no way be called democratic. Government rested with the ottimati, the ‘best men’ of the community. This group itself was divided up into various parties built around family alliance systems. Over the years through marriage contracts, trading partnerships and, business ventures, patterns of association were forged which lent a certain stability to communal politics. By 1429, when Fra Angelico was about 42 years old, the leading figure in Florentine politics was Cosimo De Medici, a wealthy merchant and financier who had increased his fortune through acting as the papal banker. Cosimo’s economic activity had made him one of the richest men in Europe.
A New Interpretation of Fra Angelico
Authors: Fisher Anthony
Published: July 2007

In part I, I examined William Hood’s recent attempt to understand Fra Angelico as a propagandist for the Observant reform in the Dominican Order. In his magisterial treatment of Fra Angelico at San Marco (Yale University Press, 1993) Professor Hood interprets each of the works against the background of its predecessors elsewhere in Dominican or other art, or elsewhere in Angelico’s own corpus. His particular concern is with the institutional tradition out of which Angelico spoke: the spaces, spirituality and devotional practices of the friars, which conditioned the subject matter and significance of the works. He persuasively argues that Angelico’s art is to be understood as an expression of a particular view of Dominican community and tradition. I proposed that Angelico’s art would be better understood if there had also been some examination of the doctrinal tradition out of which the painter preached: in particular its Scriptural and Thomistic Catholicism. Essential are some understanding of Angelico’s aesthetic (its Thomist view of beauty, light, reality, analogy, the senses ...), his understanding of the function of religious art (as worship, visualizing spiritual exercise, source of instruction, tool of preaching), and his theology of the Incarnation and the Passion as the way to the beatific vision for the various audiences to whom he preached. Admittedly very little has been written to date on Angelico’s theology. Hood’s book is a great jumping off point for such an endeavour.

On the Feast of the Epiphany 1443 the high altar of San Marco was consecrated in the presence of the pope and all the cardinals, patriarchs and bishops present at the Council of Florence.
The Bible and the Holy Land: Pastoral Letter from Jerusalem
Authors: Frizzell Lawence E.
Published: July 2007

Spirits burdened by the wars or conflicts between peoples and nations have been uplifted in recent months, especially in the Near East. A new peace process between Israel and its neighbours, including direct negotiations with Palestinian leaders, requires consummate statesmanship and also an adjustment in the hearts of all, moving from fear and hatred to hope and generosity. The Fundamental Agreement between the Holy See and Israel (December 30, 1993) has implications for Catholics and Jews everywhere. Within this context, the Latin-rite Patriarch of Jerusalem has promulgated a lengthy pastoral letter in November 1993. An English version is published in Origins 23 (January 20, 1994) pp. 541-555. In the context of an interfaith conference held in Jerusalem from February 1-4, 1994 the Patriarch gave an address entitled “Religious Leadership in the Holy Land.” This text will be studied at the end of the essay.

In the pastoral letter Patriarch Michel Sabbah celebrates explicitly the new hope for “peace and reconciliation between our two peoples, Jewish and Palestinian, and with all the Arab world” (#1). The sad events of prolonged conflict “must not consume the past and present.. . “ but now the struggle will be to maintain and build peace with justice (#1). This letter about the Bible intends to encourage reading and understanding of God’s Word, “in order to make it the object of meditation and prayer” (#2).

The poignancy of praying in the Eucharistic liturgy the psalms and readings about Israel and its neighbours has been particularly graphic for Christian communities in the Near East over recent decades.
Acts Commanded by Religion
Authors: Harter Wayne H.
Published: July 2007

It is at least twenty years too late to prevent most Catholic institutions of higher education in Europe and North America from establishing departments of religious studies. It is not, of course, too late to disestablish them or, short of that rather impractical possibility, reform them along lines extending from a quite different set of principles. I believe a particularly good reason for doing no less than the latter is that the present enterprise is a contradiction to genuine Catholic education; simply one more manifestation of the stale secularism which now permeates Catholic schools. And the proof of this claim, as I intend to argue, lies in the fact that it is impossible within the regnant discourse of religious studies to reclaim what St Thomas meant by “acts commanded by religion.” The very notion of religion operating within that enterprise precludes it. The “religion” of religious studies is both too extensive in its initial presumptions but, more importantly, much too narrow in its final application to encompass what St. Thomas spoke of when he wrote on religion.

Perhaps the best route, then, to what St Thomas meant by religion, and in particular by acts commanded by religion, is getting straight about what he was not speaking of. To this end we can look to the most recent Encyclopedia of Religion, published under the editorial leadership of Mircea Eliade. The contribution on “religion” by Winston L. King provides just the sort of definition that reflects, not only the current wisdom in the field of religious studies, but a perfect antithesis to the teaching of St. Thomas.
The Eschatology of the Cross
Authors: McGuckin Terence
Published: July 2007

Eschatology has found new respect at the heart of theology in the course of the twentieth century. The cross of Christ as a source, subject and description of soteriological concentration has secured a central place in the work of theology in recent decades. More remarkable is the communion of soteriology and eschatology, yielding an emphasized eschatology of the cross, still fresh in contemporary theology. The development of this vision in theology is particularly instructive in the work of five renowned theologians: Moltmann, Kasper, Ratzinger, Küng and von Balthasar.

In 1960 Hans Urs von Balthasar wrote that eschatology is the “sign of the times” of contemporary theology. That significance has strengthened in the passing of over thirty years. The work of many theologians demonstrates the truth of this and one of those most active in the breaking of the eschatological silence is the German theologian, Jürgen Moltmann.