bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
On Being Dominican
Authors: McCabe Herbert
Published: July 2007

“They began to speak as the Spirit gave them utterance . . . and their hearers were bewildered because each one heard them speaking in his own language.”

We are the “Friars Preachers”, the preaching brethren, a community that specialises in talk. This is the mystery to which we have all been summoned. I say this community is a mystery in the sense in which a sacrament or a work of art is a mystery; there is a depth of meaning in it that is by no means obvious on the surface at first sight, a depth that reveals itself only gradually and in hints and glimpses as we enact and re-enact the mystery. Macbeth is a good thriller; but as we grow familiar with it, it yields profound secrets about man and nature and time, secrets that can only be revealed in this way, indirectly, as symbolised, as half hidden. Again, the Eucharist is a commonplace symbolic meal, a token of hospitality and friendship, but as we enter into it, it reveals the depth of love which is God, the love enacted on the cross. And so it is with us; we are a commonplace gathering of men meeting to make decisions about our work, men partly anxious, mainly bored, hoping to get a few things cleared up as well and as quickly as possible so that we can get away: but there is a depth here too.

The depth is not something alongside, added on to, associated with the surface significance; the deep meaning of Macbeth is not additional to the story of murder and intrigue; the grace of the Eucharist is not something associated with, linked with, the sacrament; the mystery of our community is not something alongside, additional to, our day to day life and work and difficulties: it is just the depth within them. We do not have a professional job together with a spiritual life, the depth and the spirituality are just in the living together and the doing of the work.
Eric Gill and Workers' Control
Authors: Cunningham Adrian
Published: July 2007

‘ . . all decent people are ultimately anarchists — certainly all Christians must be.’

[Letter to Stanley Morrison 16.9. 36]

The importance of Gill’s political writings lies in their linking of two major traditions of response to industrial capitalism, that of libertarian socialism and that of Catholicism. In the line of Morris and Kropotkin he is a significant figure; in the history of modem English Catholicism, a major one.

Industrialism in nineteenth and twentieth century Europe can be seen as consisting of two basic phases. In the first industrial revolution there was a breaking of the traditional vertical links between social strata and a tendency for them to polarise into selfconsciously opposed classes. In the second wave of the industrial revolution the horizontal links of family, workplace and voluntary association which had survived are weakened or broken. A basic strand of socialist thought was preoccupied with the first development. It tended to welcome the polarization of social classes and to stress the conquest of state power and state control of industry as the agent of the liberation of individuals. In their very different ways, anarchists and catholics were as responsive to the second as to the first development of industrialism. Attention to the disruption of horizontal relations of work and domestic life produces an hostility towards, at least a scepticism about, the role of the state, of centralization, and of the mass-organization of work. Issues of control and quality of life predominate, whether the focus is on the family, the individual, or group of workers.
Bernard Sharratt's Little Parallelepiped
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

Sharratt has taken the place for which the name of his father predestined him. In Blackwell’s English Literature department his book, if book it is, fits squarely on the shelves, or interlopes roundly, between the texts ascribed to Shakespeare and the works produced by Shaw. Physically, at least, it has the shape and weight of a book. Legibly printed, fondly designed, it also has a marvellous photograph of the Author on the jacket. Apparently taken on a motorway lay-by one misty Kentish dawn, perhaps on his daily jog, he is at first blush gazing truculently out into the far distance. On second inspection, however, like Wittgenstein’s famous duck-rabbit, he turns out to have his eyes slanted resolutely upon oneself — his reader, the innocent eye, his hypocrite lecteur. To go by her latest communication Dame Helen Gardner isn’t going to like Reading Relations. To drop some more illuminating names, the other waiting space into which this little parallelepiped so engagingly enters is the clearing between Terry Eagleton and Gabriel Josipovici (Marx and Nietzsche, or if you prefer: Raymond Williams and Roland Barthes).

For a start, the very idea of a book, with an author, has become questionable. In 1969, in a journal rejoicing in the name of Man- teia, Roland Barthes wrote of “the death of the Author” (I don’t say that he was the first to do so). The story goes roughly as follows. Once upon a time, in the pre-modem cultures, the responsibility for a narrative was assumed by a relator, a shaman or a seanachaidh, whose “performance” might be admired, but whose “genius”, “originality”, etc. if such concepts had existed, would have counted as a defect and embarrassment
Russell vs Lawrence and/or Wittgenstein
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

Bertrand Russell, by any reckoning, must count as a figure of central importance in British intellectual history. Many of his books continue to be reprinted, in cheap paperback editions, up to sixty years since he first brought them out. He is standard fare for first- year philosophy students and some of his essays are classical points of reference in current debates in the analytical tradition. In 1915 he was brought to Pulborough by Lady Ottoline Morrell to meet D H Lawrence. By that time Russell (1872 - 1970) was aged forty- three and had already achieved his most original and influential contributions to philosophy. Lawrence (1885 - 1930) was thirty, with Sons and Lovers published (Duckworth, 1913), and The Rainbow about to be so. Their common interest lay in opposition to the War — in which, to place the other main characters in this essay, F R Leavis (then aged twenty) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (aged twenty-six) were both volunteers, Leavis as a stretcher-bearer in Flanders, Wittgenstein as an officer in the Austrian army.
Reasoning about the Bomb
Authors: Ruston Roger
Published: July 2007

A few days after the publication of the Church of England report, The Church and the Bomb, a Foreign Office spokesman replied to the suggestion that the Church has a duty to give a moral lead to the nation by saying that “giving a moral lead may be good for the conscience but it is not a valid proposition in the real world”. A somewhat more elaborate version of the morality versus reality outlook occurred in Bernard Williams’s talk on Channel 4 on 15 November (now published in New Society, 18 November). He said that something he called the Simple Moral Argument about deterrence works in the abstract but is useless for coming to any conclusions about how to live with nuclear weapons now we have them. It is the business of practical and political rationality to argue about what to do next. (Unfortunately, he went on to say, practical rationality soon breaks down amid the complexities of deterrence theory and we are left with scepticism as our only intellectual resource.)

It is a fact that the apparent divorce between morality and practical reason is brought into sharp focus by the issue of nuclear deterrence. To simplify the picture somewhat: against nuclear deterrence are to be found nearly all those who give priority in international relations as in personal relations to certain inviolable moral principles; in favour of nuclear deterrence — in some form at least — are to be found nearly all those who believe that moral principles must be subordinated to “reason” or “reality”, especially in matters of security. Underlying the difference over nuclear deterrence are undoubtedly some fundamentally opposed value- choices at work, but also some fundamental confusions about the meaning of morality and practical reason.
The Problem of Evil and Modern Philosophy — I
Authors: Davies Brian
Published: July 2007

God is all-powerful, all-knowing and perfectly good. But there is a great deal of evil in the world. People inflict suffering on others and on themselves. And there is suffering which is not caused by what anybody does. So must we not conclude that there can, after all, be no God? This question is an ancient one, but in what follows, I shall briefly try to indicate how it has been answered by modem philosophers of religion. Then I shall comment on the answers to which I refer.

One popular line of reasoning holds that in view of the existence of evil God’s existence is simply disprovable. The charge here is that someone who believes in God is caught in a straight logical contradiction given that he also accepts that evil is a reality. Many modem philosophers take this line (which is, incidentally, sharply raised as a topic for discussion by St Thomas Aquinas in Question 2 of the First Part of the Summa Theologiae). H J McClos- key, for example, writes:

Evil is a problem for the theist in that a contradiction is involved in the fact of evil, on the one hand, and the belief in the omnipotence and perfection of God on the other.

The late John Mackie expresses a similar viewpoint. He says:

... it can be shown, not that religious beliefs lack rational support, but that they are positively irrational, that the several parts of the essential theological doctrine are inconsistent with one another ... In its simplest form the problem is this: God is omnipotent; God is wholly good; and yet evil exists. There seems to be some contradiction between these three propositions, so that if any two of them were true the third would be false. But at the same time all three are essential parts of most theological positions: the theologian, it seems, at once must adhere and cannot consistently adhere to all three.
Stories of the Soul
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

When it comes to the crunch, how does one know what other people are thinking, feeling etc? One way — the classical modern-philosophical way — of dealing with this question is to say that one knows what others are thinking etc. from analogy with one’s own case. Another way, however, is to go back to the Aristotelian conception of the soul as form of the body — which rules out radical scepticism about other people’s minds. In comparison with the Platonic story, at any rate, Aristotle’s view seems like plain common sense. On the other hand, the imaginative power of the Platonic story is so immense that liberation from it cannot be easily achieved. It is possible to read Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations as an intervention in this long debate. By resorting to St Augustine’s picture of how (why) an infant acquires language, as he does at the beginning of the Investigations, isn’t Wittgenstein inviting his readers to learn to tell a different story about the soul from the one that is so entrenched in the Christian spiritual tradition?

Scepticism about our knowledge of other people’s minds, feelings, etc., may thus be met by the argument that one infers the existence of such hidden entities from analogy with one’s own case. But this concedes far too much to scepticism. This argument remains under the spell of the myth of the homunculus peeping suspiciously through the eyelet-holes of his face-mask at the surrounding horde of similarly masked creatures, all no doubt engaged in equivalent inferences. One alternative to this radically paranoid-solipsist conception is to return to the relatively ‘physicalist’ approach to be found in Aristotle (and perhaps, by qualified extrapolation, in Thomas Aquinas).
Archetypes, Stereotypes and Humanity
Authors: Thomas Ronwyn Goodsir
Published: July 2007

The work of C. G. Jung, in particular his theory of female and male archetypes, has had a marked influence on the way women and men see themselves in modem society. This influence has been particularly noticeable among some feminist writers, especially those with religious interests. How much reliance should be placed on this theory of Jung’s is debatable in the light of modern philosophical and anthropological thought. There are, of course, serious difficulties in any discussion of archetypes. As Jung himself said, “The archetypal representations (images and ideas) — Should not be confused with the archetypes as such. . . Every archetype, when represented to the mind is already conscious and therefore differs to an indeterminate extent from that which caused the representation.” In view of the changes that have been taking place in human consciousness in recent years and the fact that there is the possibility that these changes may lead to changes in human understanding, it may be helpful to examine Jung’s writing on the Syzygy. Anima and Animus, in relation to present day philosophical and anthropological thinking.

A dictionary defines an archetype as “the original pattern from which copies are made — a prototype”; a stereotype is “something copied or constantly repeated without change”. It is in relation to the differences between these two concepts that Jung’s theory of male and female archetypal representations will be considered, for Jung claims that in his theory he has uncovered the original pattern of the female and male psyches i.e. archetypes.
Schillebeeckx's Anatomy of Experience
Authors: Lefébure Marcus
Published: July 2007

I should like to begin this paper on a personal note. I suppose it was in my late teens that God began to make a really personal claim on me and over the next four years or so I found that more and more of what I experienced and read spoke to me of God — not only the Mass and spiritual books but all my experience and reading: travelling in the London underground in the rush hour as well as visits to the country; my first experience of girls as well as my discovery of contemplation; films, novels, articles in the secular as well as Catholic journals. It was as if my experience of the present enabled me to begin to understand what I received from my culture and Christian past, but also as if what I thus, so variously and fragmentarily, received from the past put in question, corrected and filled out what I experienced in the present. Present and past thus interacted, sometimes challengingly, sometimes consolingly, sometimes shockingly, but vitally. Everything tended to become a medium and an occasion of the experience of God.

Then I entered the Order and was gradually initiated into traditional Church studies, and little by little I had it impressed on me that the right and proper way to become a theologically-minded persdn was to start from the beginning in the person of Jesus Christ and the Scriptures and then to move through the various reformulations of this fontal inspiration in the various forms of the Tradition (to be spelled now, I discovered, with a capital T).
Church and Family IV: The Family in Late Industrial Society
Authors: Ruether Rosemary Radford
Published: July 2007

In the United States it was the year 1921 that marked the culmination of the era of Victorian feminism. Women finally won the right to vote that gave them the official status of public citizens in the American Republic, after an eighty-eight year struggle that began in the 1840s with the first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York. But this culmination of Victorian feminism also marked its rapid demise as well. The Victorian domestic culture of female moral superiority and sisterly bonding gave way to the more eroticized world of the 1920s. The daughters of the suffragettes became the flappers of the “Roaring Twenties”, who were embarrassed by the moralistic culture of their mothers, with their large hats and long white dresses. Women, it seemed, had won access to the male promised land of education, politics and business, and even the male world of sexual pleasure, and now it was only a question of entering into and taking possession of it.
Animals in Heaven?
Authors: Quinn Edward
Published: July 2007

“Fido is wagging his tail in heaven to-night”. According to Evelyn Waugh, this was the greeting sent out from Forest Lawn to the owners on the anniversaries of their pets buried in the cemetrey. No one, of course, asked if the owners would also deserve a place in heaven if they had killed their dogs by overfeeding or whether the latter would have the joy of interrupting the heavenly choirs by their barking. But the false assumption behind this attitude was perhaps less the hope of reunion with animal friends than the idea of a heaven where we shall all congregate cosily with our pets and former neighbours. If some of us do not relish the prospect of an eternal menagerie, can we nevertheless in all charity welcome the company of human beings who never hurt us but often threaten to bore us to death?

Even from traditional theology we get the impression that we shall not be troubled with bores, but equally that our joy in the beatific vision will be solitary and even then frustrated by the delay in the restoration of the body or by a reunion with the soul to which it will be no more than a glorified appendage. We look for the restoration of the whole personality, redeemed in Christ and therefore in Christ’s company and in the company of those we have loved on earth. The lonely person in particular asks if the affection of his or her pet, expressed in an outstretched paw, in a purring response, is not somehow transfigured also and not forever extinguished.
John Hick's Copernican Revolution: Ten Years After
Authors: Costa Gavin D.
Published: July 2007

It was in 1973, in his book God and the Universe of Faiths, that Professor John Hick argued for a Copernican revolution in the Christian theology of religions. His argument met quite a lot of criticism, and it is fairly widely thought that the debate is today a dead one. How true is this?

In his book he characterised as “Ptolemaic” the view which has been allegedly held for at least the last “fifteen centuries” which proclaims that “all men, of whatever race or culture, must become Christians if they are to be saved”. He cites the Decree of the Council of Florence (1438—1445) which upheld the traditional Catholic position, summed up in the axiom, extra eeclesiam nulla salus—there is no salvation outside the Church. He maintains that Vatican II and modem theologians such as Karl Rahner propound further epicycles of the same Ptolemaic view, as they still assume “without question that salvation is only in Christ and through incorporation into his mystical body, the Church”. He feels that there is little difference between Roman Catholics and Protestant positions on this issue.

The Ptolemaic system held that the earth was at the centre of the universe and explained the movement of the planets (which did not conform to the theory) through “epicycles”. The increasing number of epicycles rendered the Ptolemaic view less and less plausible until finally the Copernican view, in its simple explanation of the facts by the theory that the sun rather than the earth was the centre of the universe, replaced it.
Violence and the Gospel in South Africa
Authors: Williams Rowan
Published: July 2007

The first thing that has to be said is that we are not just talking about a single country a long way off. What is sobering and startling in South Africa is the realization that it is a sort of caricature of the whole of our world— ‘like everywhere else, only more so’. The world in focus, perhaps: because here you see the proximity of lavish overconsumption and starvation, freedom and slavery, massive military investment and plain human need. Here you can see the link between our wealth and their poverty. A few of the intermediate stages that usually cushion us from this realization are missing, so that poverty appears in its naked causal connection with the aggressive greed of a minority. It is impossible there not to see poverty as what is created by the violence of the few against the many in a situation of a great natural wealth of resources. In some of the so-called native ‘homelands’ in South Africa, where populations are forcibly shifted from their existing locations, something between one-fifth and one-third of black children die before they are five years old. They do not die by accident, though they die of ‘natural’ causes: they die because decisions have been taken which mean that they are exposed to disease and malnutrition endemic in these areas, far from real medical care. They die because of Dr. Piet Koornhof, the astonishingly titled Minister for Co-operation and Development. That will sound shocking; though the real shock is to grasp that children there and elsewhere in Africa or in Asia or Central America also die because of us, because of the electors of our governments.
Chenu's Little Book
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

Chenu is ninety. Although he may remain far less renowned in the English-speaking world than many of his juniors, such as Congar and de Lubac among his compatriots, not to mention Rahner, Lonergan, Hans Küng, and perhaps Hans Urs von Balthasar now, his intervention in the history of reading Aquinas, as well as the part that he played in the profound shift of Catholic consciousness that was precipitated by Vatican II, may well hold much greater promise of continuing significance.

What that significance might be is suggested by the republication, at the insistence of some of his friends, of the small book which he published in 1937, and which the Holy Office placed on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1942.

(As a young Dominican, in 1958, I remember being admonished by the librarian, the late Fr Cornelius Ernst, who had himself drawn my attention to it, that, although the book stood on the open shelves of the study-house library, I needed special permission to read it. The Index was abolished in 1966.)
Paradox and Paradigms: defending the case for a revolution in theology of religions
Authors: Loughlin Gerard
Published: July 2007

Thus Hick has shown little reason to change the traditional Christian paradigm of the world religions from a Ptolemaic to a Copernican model of the universe of faiths; from a system with Christ and his church at the centre, around which the other religions revolve, to a Copernican model with all the religions, including Christianity, revolving around the central mystery of ultimate reality. It must be said that D’Costa’s critique is both powerful and ingenious. But is it correct?

In a recent article in New Blackfriars, Gavin D’Costa argued that Professor John Hick’s call for a Copernican revolution in the Christian theology of religions is both unnecessary and incoherent. It is unnecessary because the paradox it is intended to resolve can be met without radically changing Christianity’s traditional selfunderstanding; and incoherent because it assumes a premise denied by its conclusion, namely the Christian conception of an all-loving God definitively revealed in Jesus Christ.

In order to answer our question we must first assess whether or not Hick’s argument has been adequately represented. For we will be in danger of wrongly dismissing Hick’s call for a Copernican revolution if we have not rightly understood the reasons which have led him to make it. And it is precisely at this point that we may suspect several of Hick’s commentators and critics, including D’Costa, of misunderstanding the nature and force of the considerations that weigh with Hick—and should be weighed by us when considering his proposal.
Pohier's Apologia
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

Finding myself at Le Saulchoir, the French Dominican study-house near Paris, towards the end of September 1962, was a daunting and exciting experience. My first meal, in the meticulous asceticism of that lofty gymnasium-like refectory, consisted of half an artichoke, a lump of cheese, and as much thin beer as one wanted. A month later, as complaining letters home would confirm, I felt hungry, cold, lonely, alien, and profoundly depressed by the oppressive weight of lectures. The liturgy, with its drilled schola, ran with praetorian precision. When my week came to preside at the conventual mass I was told that my performance was ‘détraqué’ and ‘relâché’—and these were not complimentary epithets. At the end of the academic year I was told that my dissertation was too ‘literary’—that I needed to be more ‘scientific’. With the two laid-back Brazilians and the three irrepressible Dutchmen, I constituted the handful, in this pagoda of exact ceremonial and dedicated cerebration, who knew that other Dominican ways were possible.

On the other hand, with sermons and lectures by Chenu, Congar, and so many others of that character, in the inaugural year of the Council, how could I not delight at being in a great theological power-station at such a time? The lectures were often dreary—but I remain grateful to have had that experience of good old-fashioned Thomist scholasticism. I shall not forget my excitement at Claude Geffré’s exposition of Thomas Aquinas on the Passion of Christ, or the recreation of his treatise on the Virtue of Charity by Jacques Pohier ...
Dear, Dear Maude
Authors: Hebblethwaite Peter
Published: July 2007

Baron Friedrich von Huegel wrote to Maude Domenica Petre in February 1910:

My dear, dear Maude,

You, now that Fr. T. is gone, are about the only English Catholic, with whom I have felt, with whom I feel, profoundly at one in these most complex and straining transition-problems (Michael de la Bedoyère, The Life of Baron von Huegel, p. 240).

Fr. T. was of course George Tyrrell, who had died, excomunicated in 1909. Maude, born in 1863, belonged to an old Catholic family which had combined dying for the Pope with a tradition of Cisalpine resistance to intolerable papal decrees. In childhood she resolved to become, when she grew up, a saint, a philosopher and a martyr (p. 6). When doubts assailed her, a learned Jesuit recommended that she should go to Rome to study the philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas.

Off she went, accompanied by a chaperon, and her puzzled aunt, Lady Lindsay, used to explain to inquisitive friends: ‘Maude has gone to Rome to study for the priesthood’ (p. 8). Though she wrote ceaselessly and well, her books have long been unobtainable. She has been referred to and exploited in all writings on the Modernist crisis, but she has always appeared as a subordinate figure, the devoted slave of Tyrrell and vestal virgin guarding his sacred flame. Clyde F. Crews has written the first book’ which treats her as interesting in her own right, and not merely as an appendage of others.

She emerges with enhanced reputation from this full-scale treatment.
Raised a Spiritual Body: bodily resurrection according to Paul
Authors: Pamment Margaret
Published: July 2007

The aim of this study is to understand what Paul means by his statement about the resurrection in I Corinthians 15:44: ‘It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body’. We must examine Paul’s use of the terms body (soma), physical (psychikon and psyche) and spiritual (pneumatikon and pneuma). One of the fullest recent expositions of Pauline usage is Robert Jewett’s Paul’s Anthropological Terms (Brill 1971), which criticises idealistic treatments of the subject and seeks definitions in particular historical settings. This is a sensible approach to the subject, since it allows for both development and contradiction, but it meets with the difficulties that we do not know for certain which of the epistles attributed to Paul are really Pauline; and we know neither in what circumstances nor in which order they were written.

Most sholars agree with Jewett in judging Ephesians, Colossians and the Pastoral epistles to be Deutero-Pauline, and I shall not include references from them in my argument. I have not followed Jewett in attempting to define the development of Pauline thought in terms of an historical schema, but have noted related uses together, in order to show the range of particular kinds of usage more clearly.
A Relationship of a New Kind: Marxism as a Transcendental Atheism
Authors: Hoffman John
Published: July 2007

The atheistic character of Marxism has often been regarded as an obstruction to dialogue and debate between Marxists and Christians. A recent contributor to this discussion suggests that if Marx has anything to offer Christians, it is ‘in spite of his atheism’, while others have pressed for a modus vivendi between science and faith; materialism and religion. Yet the atheism of the Marxist tradition is, I want to argue, an atheism which ‘transcends’. It is an atheism which translates the preoccupations of world religions into the language of a dialectical science and in this way offers a way out of the conceptual rigidities in which conventional materialists and believers alike find themselves increasingly trapped. It is an atheism which is far more positive and liberating than is commonly assumed.

I shall begin by presenting the Marxist case for atheism both in historical terms and as I believe it stands in logic. Once this is done, it will become clearer why Marxism has an essentially affirmative attitude to the religious heritage which it transcends.
Home Truths from Nicaragua
Authors: Alison James
Published: July 2007

Recently the distinguished Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar accused the almost equally distinguished Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff of not believing in Jesus’s divinity, and dismissed the liberation theology of Latin America as an export from Europe. What do Church leaders who know Boff well and have an intimate understanding of the pastoral situation in Latin America think of that?

Pedro Casaldaliga is not a familiar name even to those in the English speaking world who take an interest in the Latin American Church. Yet within Latin America he is one of the most highly regarded figures in the ‘radical’ wing of the Church. A spry, fifty-seven year old Spaniard, he is one of those figures that move the Latin American heart more than any other type of hero—a Catholic bishop committed to the poor. His diocese of Sao Felix in the Matto Grosso in Brazil has been the constant scene of struggles between the multinational corporations and estate-owning landlords on the one hand, and the indians and landless poor on the other. Bishop Pedro’s stance in favour of the latter has caused him to be the target of many assassination attempts. He arrived in Managua, Nicaragua, in late July to show public support for the fast being carried out by the foreign minister, Father Miguel “Escoto, long a friend of his. As a European, though one who has lived in Brazil since 1967, he was particularly keen to draw more European attention to that struggle of which Nicaragua is the focal point.
A Mistake about Error
Authors: Hamnett Ian
Published: July 2007

In a recent stock-taking essay on the current state of the sociology of religion, Richard Fenn writes:

The functionalist synthesis in the sociology of religion has disappeared ... Functionalism provided a privileged methodological stance from which the sociologist could interpret and transcend the accounts of groups and individuals. As a trained interpreter. the sociologist could provide a coherent text of a community’s beliefs, but as one skilled in delving below surface appearances the sociologist could also identify ‘latent’ functions and, in the process, call into question a community’s account of its own life. These methodological approaches are still adopted, but the sociologist does not enjoy a privileged position from which to put them together. The result is parallel and competing perspectives without a single viewpoint (Fenn 1982:101).

Later, Fenn goes on to assert that

To abandon functionalism is therefore to abandon a privileged methodological stance and a synthetic theoretical viewpoint. Some might therefore argue that sociologists of religion have exchanged their functionalist birthright for a mess of ethnomethodological and philosophical pottage. It is unlikely that sociologists of religion will abandon the search for a privileged standpoint from which to improve on the accounts that others, lay or professional, give bf their religious activities. The claim that a sociologist’s account of a given religious group or practice is an improved and not merely adequate translation of that group’s own experience and understanding rests on the sociologist’s more direct and complete access to common sources of knowledge (1982:123—4).

Most of what I want to say accords with Fenn’s account of what has happened, but presents a case against the conclusions he draws.
To be a Sociologist and a Catholic: A Reflection
Authors: Flanagan Kieran
Published: July 2007

The total number of Catholic sociologists in Great Britain could fit comfortably at the back of the Clapham omnibus. Among the many exotic ideological species of sociologists, the feminists, the cat fanciers, and the vegetarians, it is reasonable to assume a believing Catholic could be found somewhere. Those found seem to occupy a peculiar ideological limbo, their religious and sociological gaze doomed to be misunderstood by Church and discipline alike. This tiny band of sociological hopers forms a dispersed breed, invisible in their own Church, and for some, best kept so; within their discipline, they seem as a holy huddle on a tiny rock discernable in a sea of analytical uncertainty, odd, but interesting. Doubtless every occupation carries a burden, a witness to a calling out of improbable circumstances.

Although some sociologists wear their ideological beliefs heavily in public, most carry their burdens privately. Few biographies of sociologists have been written, and even fewer about those who are also Catholic. Sociologists are a reticent breed, and theologically they are unlikely to be able to say much about why they believe in Catholicism. Doubtless coming back to Catholicism was a surprise for some: maybe reading Althusser by candlelight, or an account of the ceremonies of the Dinka in bed, or spotting the moral similarities between the plight of Goffman’s actor and Job in a pub, drove some unsteadily further along the road to Damascus. To be a Catholic and a sociologist is to occupy a place not necessarily of one’s own choosing.
‘Glorify God in your bodies’: 1 Corinthians 6, 12–20 as a sexual ethic
Authors: Radcliffe Timothy
Published: July 2007

Based on a talk given during a Catholic People’s Week

“‘All things are lawful for me,” but not all things are helpful’ (v. 12). The Corinthians have a sexual ethic which starts from the question, ‘What is allowed? What may I do?’. And doubtless they could quote Paul back to himself to show that since they were free from the law, they could do anything; ‘For freedom Christ has set us free; stand fast therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery’ (Galatians 5:1). It follows, then, that there can be no restrictions upon what is permitted to the Christian. We are allowed to perform any sexual acts that we wish.

Paul’s reaction is not to revise his view that we are not under the Law but to suggest that asking what is permissible is not the right starting point. A proper sexual ethics is not, in the first place, about what is lawful, but about what is ‘helpful’. In this passage Paul subverts the Corinthians’ basic presuppositions in thinking about sexual ethics. Two thousand years later most Catholics need to submit to the same gentle subversion. The Church’s teaching on sexuality is normally seen in terms of what is allowed or forbidden; sexual ethics are classified as ‘permissive’ or ‘restrictive’, and the Church authorities are usually happy to oblige by stating the limits of acceptable behaviour. We all need to submit to the Pauline therapy, and this works, like any decent therapy, by means of a dialogue between the patient and the therapist.
The Art of Creation and Conservation
Authors: Taliaferro Charles
Published: July 2007

In a humorous, fanciful collection of stories by R.M. Rilke, Stories of God, God forgets about parts of the creation and then gradually comes to learn of them, sharing in their suffering and joy. The notion that God can forget about the created order or fail to know some of its basic features in not unique to Rilke. Some Christian philosophers believe that an essential feature of creaturely freedom is that God does not know what free acts will be performed. They claim that God either cannot know, or elects not to know, important events which will occur. More extreme is the deistic conception of God in which the creator is less than fully apprised of human history, past, present and future. Early gnostic myths envisioned God as being unaware of the created world, the world being the result of some demiurgic intermediary emanating from God. Aristotle held that God does not apprehend all the particular features of the world. In contrast to this sampling of deism, gnosticism, and Aristotle, the classical Christian conception of God is that God does not avert his gaze from the creation; the knowing presence of God is inescapable. Notwithstanding some disagreement whether the scope of divine knowledge includes future free acts, Christians have claimed God’s knowledge of the world is supreme and unsurpassable. God does not forget about the world, nor does the world blindly emanate from him. The creation and conservation of the world is deliberate and consciously willed.
Prayer as Bleeding
Authors: Matthews Melvyn
Published: July 2007

Prayer is a form of bleeding, a wound which we may not staunch. Its source is in the incompleteness of the human person and its continuance depends upon that incompleteness, that wounding being maintained. To be a prayerful and spiritual person requires an affirmation and an acceptance of one’s incompleteness. It requires a realisation that the important thing about human beings is their incompleteness. Human beings are characterised by the unstaunched wounds within their nature. They reveal these wounds by being those who continually and consistently look towards the future, always seeking a new heaven and a new earth, always hoping, always moving forwards. Doing this is what makes us human. To settle into a final completeness of understanding is to accept an ideology. To believe that you have found a complete explanation, a way of seeing things that explains and welds into a complete pattern all of the inconsistencies of life, this is to lock oneself into a diminishment of the human person. To believe that you have finally uncovered and understood the means of human fulfillment is to embrace the roots of fascism. We are all radically incomplete, wounded at the centre. The Christian gospel is that which asks us to accept that incompleteness and to accept it as being, in itself, good news. Prayer then becomes the outpouring of the self which radically maintains and affirms our incompleteness, springing, as it does, out of our longing and desire. Prayer keeps us incomplete and to remain incomplete is the fulfilment of mankind.
Permanent Creation in Saint Thomas Aquinas
Authors: Brown Montague
Published: July 2007

The intellectual climate in which Aquinas matured was one of conflict. The arrival of the works of Aristotle in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries brought to the Christian West an awareness of the natural world as an integrated, self-sufficient entity. Aristotle, as the first historian of philosophy, expressed the Greek philosophical tradition that ‘from nothing nothing comes’, a challenge to the Christian notion of creation. Let us mark but a couple of sayings discoverable in the tradition. Heraclitus, for example, wrote: ‘This world order (the same for all) did none of the gods or men make, but it always was and is and shall be: an everlasting fire, kindling in measures and going out in measures. Empedocles is even more adamant in his refusal to entertain any notion of making from nothing: ‘Fools—for they have no far-reaching thoughts—who fancy that that which formerly was not can come into being or that anything can perish and be utterly destroyed.’ Aristotle’s position, although subtler than his predecessors’, is consonant with the tradition: ‘We ourselves are in agreement with them in holding that nothing can be said without qualification to come from nothing.’ To the ears of a growing population of Aristotelian disciples who equated Aristotle with truth, this seemed to amount to the philosophical denial of creation from nothing.

This and other doctrines apparently incompatible with Christianity caused a reactionary movement among many theologians, and what was already a fairly well-established theological tradition became more explicit. It was argued that, since the world was created from nothing, it tends towards nothing and will, in fact, finally return to nothing.
The Theology of Robots
Authors: Furse Edmund
Published: July 2007

The initial reaction of nearly all theologians and religious people to the very idea that it is possible to talk about ‘the theological dimensions’ of the existence of robots would—today—be dismissive, and, more often than not, scornful. ‘It makes no sense,’ most theologians would say. Before beginning to argue that one day, on the contrary, it will make a lot of sense, something much more general must be said about robots, or, more specifically, about Artificial Intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence, or AI as it is usually abbreviated, is the study of computer models of intelligent behaviour. Some scientists are interested in using AI to understand human behaviour, others in designing intelligent mechanisms. As a discipline in its own right, it has existed since about 1950, with the pioneering work of John McArthy. It has two separate strands in its historical origin. Psychologists after the dark ages of behaviourism, which banished all talk of mental models as unscientific, started to study cognition (commonly called thought), which formed the subject of cognitive psychology. In devising models of mental processes they naturally turned to computers for an appropriate language of description; thus were born information processing models of human cognition. In order to formulate precise and testable theories of mental processes computer models were found to be indispensible. Models have been developed for memory, understanding natural language, vision, learning and, more recently, emotion.

Computer science has probably had a longer historical interest in AI, although one could argue that cogwheel and pneumatic models were an early attempt by psychologists to understand the mechanics of the mind.
A Sermon
Authors: Ombres Robert
Published: July 2007

Preached at Blackfriars, Cambridge, on Sunday, 9 February, three days after Kenelm Foster’s death, to a congregation that knew him well. The readings for that Sunday were: Isaiah 6:1—8 (the call of Isaiah); l Corinthians 15:1—11 (Paul’s testimony of Christ’s death for our sins’ and resurrection); and Luke 5:1-11 (the call of the first disciples).

Kenelm would have been delighted at finding this Pauline reading, if he had been preaching today. He loved St Paul. He was his clear-favourite New Testament writer. Paul, who often spoke in the First person. Paul, who was like a boxer, and not in vain. Paul, who was always arguing, full of polemic and self-polemic. Paul, who could chart in his experience, even on his own body, the workings of grace, of grappling with the Saviour. Paul, who wrestled with meaning. We can even imagine Paul to be like his thought—tough, full of wiry strength. Kenelm had been a boxer at Downside and always kept some of the instincts and reactions of a boxer. Kenelm, who always asked awkward questions, even as a Dominican student; so he was banished to a parish as a kind of punishment, he who was so obviously clever. (But questions were not encouraged by all in the Study House in those days.) Kenelm on his death-bed, listening to a fellow-friar reading to him Hopkins’s poems—but not just listening, arguing about the meaning; getting impatient. Tenacious, dogged in style. You will never understand Kenelm properly unless you read some of his writings.
Friend and Colleague
Authors: Limentani Uberto
Published: July 2007

Kenelm was appointed a Lecturer in Italian in the University of Cambridge from 1 October, 1948. Professor Vincent showed flair and imagination when he made this far from obvious choice for the post which had become vacant following the retirement of Miss K.T. Butler. He had been one of the two examiners of Kenelm’s thesis on St Thomas and Dante, and was impressed by its quality. Kenelm had, I believe, some family connection with Italy and had spent some time there in the past, but he had had no formal training in Italian literature, apart from the deep knowledge of Dante he must have acquired while preparing his dissertation.

We were never formally introduced. After three years as Lector, I became an Assistant Lecturer on the same date on which Kenelm was appointed to a Lectureship, and a few days later, in the morning of 18 October, we bumped into each other in the Departmental Library, a gloomy and not much frequented room now occupied by University offices on the top floor at the back of the Old Schools, facing Clare College. I vividly remember that the first thing he said after a few words of introduction was a defensive and characteristically modest ‘I don’t know any Italian’. We must have felt a liking for each other from the beginning. Five days later he came to the house my wife and I rented in the Hills Road area for what was meant to be a brief afternoon visit and to meet my wife, and stayed till late in the evening.
‘Consecrate them in the truth’ : a homily for St Thomas' Day
Authors: Ratzinger Cardinal Joseph
Published: July 2007

Preached on the 28th January 1987 during Cardinal Ratzinger's first visit to the Dominican‐run Pontifical University of St Thomas Aquinas (‘the Angelicum’) in Rome.
Back to the Ark
Authors: Dowell Susan
Published: July 2007

The alarming resurgence of biblical speculation by the nuclear war-lords of the West in the last few years has drawn peace-movement Christians to sober biblical scholarship. New Blackfriars writers have pioneered the reclamation of ‘the most symbolically-rich eschatological language of the Bible, from Isaiah to Revelation, ... captured by abstentionist sects and a politically hostile movement’ and made ‘virtually unavailable to Christians who do not share those views about politics and God’s action in the world’.

The question I would like to explore here is: how, if at all, can this kind of investigation, which draws on academic exegesis but clearly goes beyond it, also help us to reclaim and wrestle with symbols and stories which superficially appear to be of a different kind, namely, the symbols and stories which speak of our earliest beginnings? With the Garden of Eden, Noah’s Ark and the Tower of Babel? This might be termed the ‘pop’ culture of the Bible, not being seen as belonging to the specialist or to any political faction with a biblical axe to grind, but as the mythic heritage of all—timeless, beloved of Hollywood as the stuff of Epic spectacle. It is, however, the area which has long been of interest to the Western Women’s Movement, because it has come to reckon with the power of these foundational myths over our culture’s perceptions of gender. Feminists see these myths as captured and distorted by patriarchal religion and hence by patriarchal power in general.