bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
William of Saint Thierry II: God in Man
Authors: Webb Geoffrey
Published: July 2007

William's literary personality conveys the impression of a sensitive and rather depressive man, who was very much the perfectionist. He seems to have been tortured by the fact that it was not possible for him, as the abbot of a Benedictine monastery, to achieve precisely what he was looking for in the religious life. When he met Saint Bernard, however, and saw what the Cistercian reform was like, he felt he had found his place at last. Bernard tried to persuade him not to change. William was doing the Lord's work, after all, he wasn't getting any younger, and change was always a risky business. William listened for a time, but eventually he felt he had to make up his mind for himself. He has left an account of his worry in the eleventh of the Meditativae Orationes, and again in the ‘Nature and Dignity of Love', where he laments that the sons he loves are a perpetual source of anxiety. ‘There is still a long climb ahead of us before we reach the top of God's holy mountain . . . Surely an old man is entitled to a little consideration when he no longer has the strength to carry his burden ?'

The theme of the Meditativae Orationes is a search for the face of God. William is looking for various things, but all together they amount to something like a convincing vision, a view as nearly possible perfect of the reality of God.
A Liturgical Reformer Sums Up
Authors: Reinhold H. A.
Published: July 2007

It is quite evident that the ‘new’ Mass arouses so much comment and genuine interest that people approach many of us older ‘pioneers’ with a sincere expression of good will on their lips. Naturally they want to know how it feels to belong to the winning team ! But could it be that we find it disappointing to witness what is only a superficial outward change? That the outward changes should attract so much comment, favourable and unfavourable, is only natural: we cannot look inside people and can only judge what appears. Nevertheless we maintain that a truly internal reform will follow naturally if things are left to develop. After all, that has always been our whole thesis. Things were left to the ‘unliturgical’ forces for too long and never had a proper chance to follow a theology inspired by the Bible and the sacramental system. Quod erat demonstrandum finds its first chance only now. While the unexpected vote on all phases of the Constitution on the Liturgy was in itself almost miraculous, we cannot pin our hopes of a ‘follow-through’ on another miracle. What we now need is hard work and intelligence (and, above all, prayer).

The slightest contact with the liturgical movements of forty years ago gave the impression that few ‘liturgists’ had any changes or reforms in mind which would give the people a more profound understanding of what they were supposed to do with their ‘whole hearts and minds'.
The Counsels of Erasmus
Authors: Gwatkin Jean Bowes
Published: July 2007

In April of the year 1518 a young Augustinian friar was summoned by the order of Pope Leo X to attend the Chapter of his Province at Heidelberg. Four years previously. Martin Luther had reached his radical conclusions on justification and by 1517 they were beginning to cause a stir in the University of Wittenberg, where, in his capacity as professor in the faculty of theology, Luther had been lecturing on the Epistle to the Romans. In May 1517 he had become so confident as to write to the prior at Erfurt: The lectures on scholastic theology are deserted and no one can be sure of an audience who does not teach our theology'.

Then, on the eve of All Saints that same year, Luther announced his 95 theses on indulgences – these, together with the earlier and more fundamental theses on faith and works, were the occasion of his summons to Heidelberg where Luther himself presided over the disputation and won the support of most of his brethren.

These Germanic vibrations reached the Netherlands and in particular a man – perhaps the most learned in Europe – who stood at the pivot of affairs, supported by the Pope and sought after by kings and bishops – Erasmus of Rotterdam. In the summer of 1518 Erasmus wrote to the Rector at Erfurt where Luther had studied:

‘Luther has said many things excellently well. I could wish, however, that he would be less rude in his manner. He would have stronger support behind him, and might do real good ... I can give no opinion about his positive doctrines ...’
William of Saint Thierry I: The Five Senses of Love
Authors: Webb Geoffrey
Published: July 2007

'When Our Lord said “Do not be afraid, little flock, for it has pleased your Father to give you the kingdom”. He was calling down upon it long life and blessing. The praises of this life were first sung by the apostles, who learned it either from our Lord or from the Holy Spirit, with whose grace they had recently been clothed from on high. They established a way of life such that the multitude were of one heart and one soul. They had all things in common and with one accord they would all meet in the temple. Since that time there have always been men to imitate the community of the apostles . . . ‘

The quotation is from William of Saint Thierry, a Cistercian, writing not very long after the famous dictum of Etienne de Muret: ‘If you are asked which order you belong to, say you belong to the order of the gospel. I will not be monk, canon or hermit: the titles are too holy for me'. A period of evangelical revival was beginning, which would culminate a century later with the beginning of the friars under Innocent III. And so it is not really surprising to find a monastic author like William, in the twelfth century, identifying the scope of a life which we have tended to think of as enclosed, exclusive and specialized, with the most basic demands of the Christian life.

Of course we have always known that the monastic life was essentially nothing more or less than a concentration on Christian ideals.
Christianity and Islam
Authors: Avery Peter
Published: July 2007

Islam and Christianity; or should it be, Islam and Christendom? In the difference between the connotation of the words Christianity and Christendom lies the explanation of one of the most essential differences between the two faiths. For Islam is a way of life, and perhaps, in selecting ‘Christendom’ in preference to ‘Christianity’ in the context of comparing the two religions, the tendency is evinced to seek a term referring to Christianity as if it, too, were a way of life in the same, all-embracing way that Islam set out to be. But Christianity is a religion; in some respects an institution that happens in spite of terrestrial life, although a life which it does not inform is death. Christendom remains a territorial concept, so that, though it does in a sense express an antithesis which the existence of Islam called into being, it cannot be used to mean what Islam meant-to refer to the way men worshipped, wrote, thought, practised the law, washed themselves, devised systems of finance that would not break the law and so forth. Christendom was a place; Islam a complete and monolithic concept of human conduct.

Christianity was never a way of life to the same degree because, for one thing, its founder, Jesus Christ, had not been at pains to legislate for this world, only to save it by symbolical and actual death to it. He had preached its unworthiness and left no doubt that what is God's is what counts, not what is Caesar's.
Liberal Studies in a Technological Time
Authors: Cooper Bruce
Published: July 2007

The term ‘liberal studies’ arouses responses of approval, derision and perplexity. Those who approve of it do so in post-prandial statements, amidst the fug of cigar smoke-industrialists lamenting the narrow education of new entrants to industry. Those who deride it do so because they identify the term with a superior culture to which they are not admitted, something to do with making the right noises during the interval at Glyndebourne. The perplexed command most sympathy for their attitude. They are in genuine doubt what the term means.

Most people can identify a liberal attitude and recognise a liberally educated man when they see one. It is difficult to find two people who agree what is the best education to produce this desirable end-product. And there the debate lies. There are many contestants in the field. Historically the strongest, though the one heard least, is the claim of Greats at Oxford. This degree produced the most complete man. But the voice is drowned in the general clamour of economists, sociologists and historians pressing their claims.

A liberal education has always been the concern of teachers, but only recently has the term ‘liberal studies’ come into prominence. Much of its impetus stems from a Ministry of Education circular issued in the midfifties and directed at technical colleges. The 1956 White Paper on technical education heralded an enormous advance in full-time education for technologists. Before the war, they had won their technical laurels via the hard grind of evening classes.
Contraception and Holiness
Authors: McCabe Herbert
Published: July 2007

This is a symposium in which Archbishop Roberts and ten American Catholics argue that the usual teaching in the Church about contraceptives is in need of revision. They seek to show that their use in some circumstances may be morally justified. A great many Catholics will, like the present reviewer, open it eagerly; the more critical may not find their enthusiasm invariably sustained. Contributions to any symposium vary in value and the first duty of any reviewer is to indicate which, in his opinion, are important and which may safely be left until we have a lot of time to spare.

In this book there are three chapters which an educated Catholic in England must read if he is to inform his conscience properly in this matter: these are by Rosemary Ruether, Elizabeth A. Daugherty and Leslie Dewart. If these alone had been published, I believe the effect on English-speaking Catholicism would have been electrifying; as it is their voice may be muffled by the wool in which they are wrapped. Next I would place articles by Gregory Baum and (with serious reservations), Justus George Lawler, the contents of which are good but not unfamiliar. After this we descend rapidly through the ponderous and the incoherent to two almost compulsively skippable essays by professors respectively of dogmatic and moral theology.

In his introduction. Archbishop Roberts says that the natural law arguments against contraception are inconclusive. He gives reasons for this which I do not find cogent. In the first place he holds that since precepts of the natural law do not depend for their validity upon revelation they must easily be known without revelation.
The Cistercian Memoria
Authors: Webb Geoffrey
Published: July 2007

Saint Benedict’s Rule, which was the most basic piece of government in the lives of thousands of medieval Christians, visualises the good life as a return to paradise, a return made possible through the merits of the Redeemer, and essentially an imitation of His life. The lost image of God was found again when the novice heard the voice of his master, calling clearly for the first time: ‘If today you will hear his voice, harden not your hearts’. The Redeemer has put everything at the novice’s disposal in the church and, more specifically, in the monastery. The monastery is a quintessence of the church in its life of community, its consecration to the one thing necessary, and its gradual preparation for the fulness of the beatific vision.

The ideal groundwork for Saint Benedict’s theology of conversion was already in existence, already a tradition, in Augustine’s teaching of a divine image deformed at the fall, and in constant process of reformation until the final union with God whose image the soul is. There is a catena from Saint Paul . . . ‘Be not conformed to this world, but be reformed, so that the image may be reformed by Him who formed it.’ ‘When the vision of God is perfect, the soul’s similitude to God will be perfect also. Now we see in a glass darkly... We are transformed from glory to glory in the same image. This is happening from day to day in those who strive after God.’
After the Council
Authors: St John Henry
Published: July 2007

The fourth and finalSession of the Vatican Council hascometoanend. The mind of the Council, and therefore of the Church as a whole, is now expressed in the sixteen official documents personally promulgated by the Pope in its name, four in the third Session and the remainder in the fourth. Most of these documents include, in a greater or lesser degree, outstanding new or revived insights into the nature of the Church and its place in the world. Many of them reflect the differing outlooks, in their various phases, of the bishops of the world and of the People of God they represent. Yet, on the whole, we may be deeply grateful for what the Council has given to the Church and to Christianity, as we stand at the beginning of what must be the momentous post-conciliar era. For in a very real sense the documents are seminal, seed planted in the soil of the life of the People of God. A long period of careful cultivation, within the sensus fidelium, now awaits them, before the fruits they may produce can be fully estimated and judged.

What will be the outcome? Will there be a real renewal, the emergence of a far more distinctive Christian character and attitude, manifesting more clearly the radical nature of the Church’s impact on contemporary life, in our own nation and in the world beyond it? Or will the work of the Council remain largely on paper, in its Decrees and Constitutions? That depends on the Holy Spirit, who will not fail, and on a resultant response to spiritual leadership among clergy and laity, which could. At present, at diocesan and parochial level, among priests and people, little of what the Council’s measures might involve is thought out, or the necessary steps to implement them realised.
Pius XII and the Jews–A Study of the Evidence
Authors: O'Carroll Michael
Published: July 2007

In the month of April, 1957, I was in Israel and thanks to a letter of introduction from a Dublin Jewish friend, spent part of an evening with the Chief Rabbi, an old Dubliner, Dr Herzog. I told him that I would be passing through Rome the following week and hoped to have a brief audience with Pius XII. I explained that the purpose of this interview was to present to the Pope a book I had written on St Joseph ten years previously, but which was dedicated to His Holiness ‘to commemorate his charity to the stricken Jews of Europe’. Dr Herzog became quite enthusiastic about Pius XII. He was very proud to have been received in audience by him, rather exceptionally on a Sunday morning, and told me that the audience lasted a full half hour. ‘Take my blessing to him’ the old patriarchal Jew repeated and this I promised to do. When I did so a week later I recalled the fact that Jews the world over seemed very grateful to the Pope for the help he had given them. We were speaking in French and the Pope ended the brief interview with words I translate as I wish I could have done more’.

I had been a member of a Dublin Christian-Jewish society at the time of the ‘Final Solution’ and had kept a fairly constant curiosity about the attitude of Jews to Pius XII since that time. With the exception of occasional remarks in the Israeli press and a rather silly comment in Gerald Reitlinger’s otherwise dignified and scholarly work, this attitude was more sympathetic than that of Jews to any previous Pope.
Africa: The Second Revolution
Authors: Hastings Adrian
Published: July 2007

To the European outsider the achievement of political independence in the last few years by most of the countries of Africa may appear as the ending of a story: the story of European colonisation and overseas rule, and the story of the nationalist struggle for freedom. As these are now over, it is presumed that conditions of stability must have been established, and that an era of uneventful development is about to ensue. When there is instead a revolution or other disturbance, one easily concludes that the country in question was not after all ready for independence. In the hands of a John Biggs Davison or a Patrick Wall every apparent deviation from western normality becomes one more item in a terrible catalogue of the sins of independent Africa: a ghastly warning which the white leadership of Rhodesia and the South are only too right to heed. This view does, of course, work on the curious supposition that a people not possessing economic and political stability should, ipso facto, be ruled by someone else. It seems to me that approaches of this kind to what is going on in Africa today present us with a dangerously false focus, implying as they do that the acquiring of independence should have marked the term rather than be the condition for the great process of building the new society. In fact it is that process which is going on now and I find it far more interesting than what happened before independence, but it is of its nature something which involves instability, tension and the immaturity which is inevitable when people are just beginning to face, collectively and individually, a wide range of new situations and problems.
Sex and Theology
Authors: Ross Anthony
Published: July 2007

The other day the members of a Youth Club asked if something could be done to prevent people who came to address them from talking about sex. They said, with considerable feeling, that nearly every speaker seemed to think that youth was interested in very little else; which is, of course, not true. It is not teenagers who are so much concerned with sex as their elders, who continue to produce and read a stream of books and articles. Reaction against secrecy has led to an over-anxious campaign to assert the importance of sex, which in turn is in danger of producing the reaction that sex does not matter much anyway. A good many people have become bored by sexual experience itself, and the last thing they want is to be further bored by reading about it.

A balance has to be struck somehow, and the four books listed below illustrate awareness of this in very different quarters. On the whole they illustrate the growing recognition that the fundamental question to be tackled has to do with the nature of human beings; what is being human ? For the Christian this is a theological question, answered in terms of our creation by God in his own image and likeness. Our life, even on the simplest level and at any time or place, must be somehow like God’s own life if it is to be truly human.

We are told something of what God’s life is in the doctrine of the Trinity.
Faith or Fact?
Authors: Blenkinsop Joseph
Published: July 2007

In 1825, while still at Oriel, Newman brought out his Life of Apollonius of Tyana which he had first written as an article in the now forgotten Encyclopaedia Metropolitana. In it he examined the claims made on behalf of a remarkable first-century contemporary of Jesus whose birth was accompanied by portents of various kinds, who quickly achieved great fame as an ascetic and philosopher, to whom many miracles and exorcisms were attributed and who, after a holy death at an advanced age, ascended, so it was claimed, bodily into heaven and was afterwards seen by certain persons who had entertained doubts about the future life. The first full account of this extraordinary person was written by a certain Philostratos, one of the smart literary set which foregathered in the salon of the Empress Julia Domna whose husband, one recalls, had trouble with the Scots and died at York. This accomplished woman had got hold somehow of the Memoirs of a disciple of Apollonius called Damis. She handed them over to Philostratos inviting him to write up a biography, making use as occasion demanded of any other sources available. This he did and his work is still extant. Newman’s study, as also his Essay on Miracles which appeared in the same year, was given over to a large extent to refuting the claims made on behalf of Apollonius. This was a perfectly legitimate undertaking but it raises the question: here you have two contemporary figures of whose existence we can have no reasonable doubt and about whom certain writings have come down to us (Justin also calls the Gospels Memoirs).
Television: Freedom and Responsibility
Authors: Shaw Roy
Published: July 2007

Just over ten years ago, as now, there were debates about the freedom of television; but they had a very different emphasis. Then, the argument of a commercial pressure group was that the bbc represented ‘state’ broadcasting, too official, too unfree. To counteract this, Independent Television was introduced. Now, the argument of a puritan-christian pressure group is that the bbc is too free and should have the measure of control stepped up to the level already prevailing in Independent Television. How and why has this happened, and for what party is the aid of all good men required ? These are the questions which this article tries to answer.

The Clean-up Television Campaign (CUTV) began in January 1964, when Mrs Mary Whitehouse, schoolmistress-wife of a company director, and Mrs Norah Buckland, wife of an Anglican vicar, jointly issued a five point manifesto:

1 We men and women of Britain believe in a Christian way of life

2 We want it for our children and our country

3 We deplore present day attempts to belittle or destroy it, and in particular we object to the propaganda of disbelief, doubt, and dirt that the BBC pours into millions of homes through the television screen

4 Crime, violence, illegitimacy and venereal disease are steadily increasing, yet the BBC employs people whose ideas and advice pander to the lowest in human nature, and accompany this with a stream of suggestive and erotic plays which present promiscuity, infidelity and drinking as normal and inevitable

5 We call upon the BBC for a radical change of policy and demand programmes which build character instead of destroying it, which encourage and sustain faith in God and bring him back to the heart of our family and national life.
Indirect Communication
Authors: Poole Roger C.
Published: July 2007

The philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), Professor at the Collège de France as from 1952, radically influenced the course of phenomenology, turning it from Germany towards France. With Merleau-Ponty philosophy is sincere and searchingly intelligent, it begins to try as never before, it really exerts its strength towards a genuine human breakthrough at all levels of our experience. With Merleau-Ponty we find a respite from those traditions of mechanism and intellectualism which, starting from Descartes and Kant, have never ceased to plague the course of the philosophy of perception. With Merleau-Ponty, philosophy speaks simply, simply because things are so very difficult.

What interests Merleau-Ponty most perhaps is the classical philosophical problem of the Other, and our possible means of knowing him and communicating with him. In Merleau-Ponty we have a guide who is awake to every level of consciousness in the Other. He sees that communication with the Other is a matter of understanding that area where thoughts and actions are conceived, of moving, that is to say, behind the figure of the Other as he expresses himself in acts and words, in a search for meaning. We need to destroy in psychology and in philosophy the mindless collecting of facts and the refusal of synthesis together with all artificial dichotomising. We need to seek for the reality of the Other in a private or ‘inter-subjective’ space.
The Conservatism of Situation Ethics
Authors: Burtchaell James Tunstead
Published: July 2007

Englishmen curious about the New Morality, and fatigued by the well-known but amateurishly incompetent exposition it has suffered from certain domestic divines, are benefited by the publication here of Joseph Fletcher’s Situation Ethics (SCM: 1966; 25s). The author is professor of social ethics at the Episcopalian seminary in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and has been active in ethical debate since the days when the Old Morality was the Newest thing around.

Dr Fletcher, if I understand him correctly, repudiates the Old Morality because it is legalistic. It takes the form of a code, a list of commandments which assign an invariable moral value to certain acts. The circumstances attending these acts may, it is granted, slightly modify their morality. But the ultimate and over-riding source of good and evil is the very nature of the acts. Against such a view Fletcher urges that no action is good or evil in itself. It cannot be judged in isolation from its meaningful and meaning-giving context of circumstances. The morality of any action is correlative to the love it expresses. Admittedly there are many deeds which are usually sinful (e.g., abortion, lying, arson, extramarital intercourse). This is not because they are intrinsically evil acts, but because they most often embody selfishness, exploitation of one’s neighbour, and irresponsibility. In certain extraordinary circumstances these actions might so bespeak commitment and caring and sincerity that, viewed in their contextual totality, they would be adjudged good and virtuous. Since morality is not intrinsic to acts, we can never resort to inflexible ethical laws or norms.
Arthur Lourié
Authors: Speaight Robert
Published: July 2007

Some few years ago I received a letter from Jacques Maritain, asking me if I could do anything to promote the performance in England of Arthur Lourié’s opera Le Maure de Pierre le Grand. This was based on a tale by Pushkin and extracts from it had been given by Stokovski with the Philadelphia orchestra. I did not know the work, and I had no influence in such matters. In the same letter Maritain declared that the time would come when Louri? would be recognized as the greatest composer of the century. That time has not come yet: Lourié’s work remains practically unknown, except to a few initiates. Until more performances of it have been given, and recordings from it made, it is obviously difficult for the rest of us to confirm Maritain’s opinion – whether we are musicians, or people like myself who are extremely fond of music. In the meantime curiosity is stirred by the publication of Lourié’s occasional writings under the title of Profanation et Sanctification du Temps.

Louri? and his wife are now living in Maritain’s house at Princeton and Maritain’s opinion is that of a close friend to whom this book is dedicated. It is supported, however, by independent and competent judges, like Henri Marrou, an eminent humaniste, and the musical critics Fred Goldbeck and Boris de Schloezer. Their testimony is printed as an appendix to this volume, which is admirably prefaced by Jean Mouton. The title is taken from a lecture given in 1963 at the Dominican monastery of La Tourette where the problem of Dieu et le monde moderne was under discussion. Lourié has no illusions about the monde moderne!
Obedience and Responsibility
Authors: Angela Mary
Published: July 2007

It is, by now, a truism to state that one of the major problems in the traditional forms of religious life is that they tend to attract and conserve immature personalities. So does marriage, of course. In both cases the state of life entered upon is not viewed objectively in all its stark reality, but as offering an immediate assuagement of the craving to be loved. It is an effort, not to give love, but – without necessarily earning it – to get love and, through it, an assurance of personal value which, for one reason or another, was denied in the earliest formative years.

Whatever names psychologists give to the various compensations and defence mechanisms which the ego develops in reaction to primary experiences, the trouble is always born of fear out of devaluation. Whatever ideal self-image the individual sets up, and for which he seeks recognition and affirmation, the burning question in every relationship is always, at bottom, ‘Do you love me, accept me, value me . . . ?’ When the proffered ‘me’ is not the actual person but a ‘persona’, a construct based on who knows what borrowed notions, the quest is bound to be a disappointment for all concerned.

A mature person is one who is free from the compulsion to play a part, who is content to be himself to the best of his ability and who is, therefore, free to pour himself out in love of others, and of another in particular. Maturity is developed by accepting and exercising responsibility.
Race, Christians and Christ
Authors: Hislop Ian
Published: July 2007

The central Christian tradition has always carried the teaching that men are, before God, equal: that the differences due to social rank, class or race are only of accidental importance compared with the fundamental truth that each human being, as made in the image of God, may not, without sin, be deprived of his dignity or proper freedom. Though this is a statement about what is most real in man, a statement about his meaning as a being created by God, it none the less wears a very abstract character. Each generation of Christians must find for it its historical verification, and the pious mind, being prone to dwell in the world of aspiration and ideal, is only too often content, in the name of subjective peace, to refuse to come to grips with concrete circumstances. The result is that the cynic often seems to have justice on his side when he says that it is a nice bit of rationalisation that is never allowed to influence the structure of society, or our social motivation. Excessive stress on the ‘before God’ leads either to the view that what happens in history is irrelevant to salvation, which is a heresy, or to the attitude that after all it is a personal matter between the individual and God. This implies a very naive view of the influence of environment and society on the individual.
Africa from Within
Authors: Hindmarsh Roland
Published: July 2007

The purpose of this article is to give some evidence of the kind of understanding we can win through reading African prose writers, and of the misconceptions we can clear up in so doing; and to make some suggestions as to what authors and what books we might begin by reading. A good deal of the prose writing done by Africans is biographical, either directly or derivatively. One of the best known examples is Camara Laye’s autobiography The African Child. In it he tells the story of his childhood and youth until the time he leaves Guinea, his home country, to go to France for higher studies. The extract below, which must be about a time when he was six or seven years old, shows the warmth and charm of the book. At that time he lived in Kouroussa, a large up-country town, and the incident described is a visit to his relatives at Tindican, a small village to the west of Kouroussa.

Whenever I went to Tindican, it was always with my youngest uncle, who used to come and fetch me. He was younger than my mother and was not much more than an adolescent; and so I used to feel that he was still very close to my own age. He was very good-natured, and my mother did not have to tell him to look after me; he was naturally kind, and needed no telling. He would take me by the hand, and I would walk beside him; he, out of consideration for my extreme youth, would take much smaller steps, so that instead of taking two hours to reach Tindican, we would often take at least four. But I scarcely used to notice how long we were on the road, for there were all kinds of wonderful things to entertain us.
Christianity and African Cultures
Authors: Hastings Adrian
Published: July 2007

The way of teaching any set of ideas must depend upon the context within which they will be understood. If this context is very different for teacher and taught, deep misunderstanding is almost bound to arise. Christian doctrine can hardly be got across to Africans who have not received any appreciable amount of western education – and that is even now the great majority – if the missionary has not first understood something of their own thought world. In some ways the missionary of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was actually more likely to arrive at such an understanding than his successors of forty years later. The early missionaries could not open and busy themselves with loads of schools and hospitals. They were almost completely isolated from Europe and were forced to share closely in African society, once they abandoned the attempt to create independent Christian villages. Very probably there was quite a long period before any considerable number of converts was obtained. In this period they had the opportunity to acquire a fine knowledge of the local language, customs and thought forms, and many of them did so, both Catholic and Protestant. In areas and tribes where evangelisation began much later – during the last forty years – this has often not happened. Missionaries have rushed straight into the provision of social services and an extensive catechumenate without any adequate prior initiation into the local tribal mind.
Personal Testament
Authors: Kelly Michael
Published: July 2007

I should like to record something of the result of an experience which I had from 1961-1964. I was working as a schoolmaster in Ghana for that time. The school was in routine and academic syllabus an imitation of European, mainly English, practice but we were fortunate in being far removed from the main centres of European expatriate concentration. To be precise we were 130 odd miles from Accra and 70 odd from Akosombo which were the nearest and most accessible European centres. In a town of 10,000 inhabitants throughout our stay at most 40 were expatriates, at the least 20. They included from two to four priests, the Presbyterian missionary and his wife, the two mission doctors and their team of from four to six nurses. This situation could mean virtual isolation in a tiny social world where contacts with Africans and adaptations of ways to theirs were kept to a minimum, or it could provoke a more or less natural interchange between African or expatriate which the circumstances made easy and spontaneous, rather than condescending, folkloristic or exotic. It would be untrue to say that it did not involve a conscious decision, but the decision was an easy one.

Old attitudes die very hard even in so out of the way a place. Many of the Europeans did choose to huddle together to lick over each other’s sense of isolation endlessly; contacts with Africans were kept to a minimum, formality of occasion was encouraged, any crossing over of racio-customary lines was seen as daring and by no means habit-forming.
Concerning Virgins
Authors: Consolata Sister
Published: July 2007

Those of us who are anxious to implement as fully and as quickly as possible the Constitutions and Decrees of the Second Vatican Council have enough and more than enough to inspire, encourage and occupy us. So much to be done, and each of us has only a life-time in which to do our utmost — so that the less obvious and less exciting things, which will apparently have little immediate result, are liable to pass unnoticed. For example, since 1936 there have been numerous pronouncements concerning vocations to the priestly and religious life. It is only in the past year or so, in England at any rate, that it has ceased to be bad form to refer to the appalling shortage of vocations, so that now there is no need to speak of it in veiled and polite terms, and we can face it for what it is, a rapidly accelerating process which will take all our prayer, determination and ingenuity to arrest. The first necessity of course is that we should want to do something about it, and not, as living members of the Church, exempt ourselves from the responsibility.

On April 26th, last year, speaking on Good Shepherd Sunday, which is the annual World Prayer Day for Vocations, Paul VI said:

‘This most noble work of promoting sacerdotal and religious vocations, so essential to the life of the Church and so beneficial to the whole world, demands profound attention in all aspects. In other words it must be promoted with infectious enthusiasm, supported by ardent prayers, stimulated by intense desires, pursued with constant zeal and sustained by universal charity.’
Hell
Authors: McDermott Timothy
Published: July 2007

It is the somewhat tentative conclusion of this article that there are three different, though related, notions of hell in Christian tradition. A first might be called Hell as Sheol (since this was what the Hebrews called it) or Hell as Hades (which was the Greek tran-lation). Another is Hell as Gehenna, the hellfire of the New Testament. And a third is something I shall call Hell as Tartarus for reasons which will later appear.

Sheol

What man can live and never see death?

Who can save himself from the power of Sheol?

(Ps 89.49)

Sheol, in the Old Testament, means nothing more nor less than death. The word hardly ever occurs in prose except in the phrases ‘to go down to Sheol’, which means ‘to die’, and ‘to bring down to Sheol’, which means ‘to kill’. These phrases account for over a third of all the Old Testament references to Sheol. Well over half of the remaining references explicitly couple Sheol with death as parallel concepts.

Sheol then, for the Hebrew, is not a place of torment for the wicked after death, but the state of death itself which overcomes both just and wicked alike. The only difference between people is in the way they go down to Sheol, the way they die. The great blessing granted to Abraham and Jacob was to breathe their last in a great old age, surrounded by their sons; this was ‘to go down to Sheol in peace’. But at one period of his life, when he had lost both Joseph and Benjamin,
The New Left: Christians and Agnostics
Authors: Wicker Brian
Published: July 2007

The comments by Martin Green in the October Mew Btackfriars editorial, Raymond Williams’s article (November) and the appearance of Terry Eagleton’s book1 mark, perhaps, a new stage in the debate about the ‘catholic left’. Beyond the mud-slinging and the taking to the ramparts (useful though such antics have been recently in helping to publicise the importance of the catholic left as a distinctive movement); and also beyond the appeal to history (Donald Nicholl in the Clergy Review, August 1966) and to received notions of church structure (Michael Dummett in Mew Blackfriars, December 1965) we now come to a fundamental problem. The definition of this problem is difficult, and can be approached from a number of points of view. But I think the basic question the catholic left has to answer is this: is the commitment to a political order, the concern with the restructuring of the human community, part of a homogeneous continuum which will simply inaugurate the kingdom of God as its final term, or is it rather a means by which the essentially gratuitous character of the kingdom can be most clearly revealed by having the obscuring clutter of merely human obstacles removed ?

Perhaps I may begin a review of Mr Eagleton’s book by registering one note of disagreement with Martin Green. This is that I feel he is trying to evade a problem, when he speaks of the need to ‘attune’ ourselves to war and peace simultaneously.
Kierkegaard on Irony
Authors: Poole Roger
Published: July 2007

Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony with Constant Reference to Socrates, submitted at the University of Copenhagen in 1841 for the degree of Magister Artium, has at last appeared in English translation.1 Not before time. It is the last of his major works to reach the English speaking public, and certainly the one without which all the rest of Kierkegaard’s work is in danger of being misunderstood. It is interesting to note that 1841 is the year when Marx took his doctorate at Jena. Marx has been accorded every kind of critical attention, but Kierkegaard, discovered late, is still emerging into his full importance. Last summer Gallimard of Paris issued Kierkegaard vivant. Comprising papers read at a recent U.N.E.S.C.O. conference by such figures as Sartre, Heidegger, Jaspers, Marcel etc, it forms an eloquent proof that the thought of Kierkegaard is being revalued by those very thinkers who ‘discovered’ him thirty years ago. Collins, in publishing The Concept of Irony, adds one further work of ‘the living Kierkegaard’ to their previous excellent output in the field.

Lee Capel has rendered us great service in letting us have at last his polished and erudite translation. It has taken a long time, at least six years in the correcting. The difficulties of this work are famous. Now the work is available to anyone who, while interested in the enigmatic thought of Kierkegaard, has not a ready command of a fluent and punning Danish.

The Concept of Irony deserves to be well-known, hailed, read and enjoyed. Rarely can such a witty, good-humoured, mature, intelligent and ferociously yea-saying work have appeared as an academic dissertation.
Professor Grisez and Natural Law
Authors: Lawler Justus George
Published: July 2007

Professor Germain Grisez of Georgetown has written his criticism of contraception from the viewpoint of a natural-law theorist. He goes about his task in a tidily business-like way, first setting forth some of his own credentials:

‘My wife, Jeannette, and I married thirteen years ago. At that time I was just entering studies for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. We now have four children, the oldest twelve and the youngest six. Life has not been easy during all of these years. Yet we have survived without contraception, and we think the conviction that we had to survive and could survive without it has been essential to doing so’.

Husband and wife, to use some earlier imagery of the book were not ‘goaded on to wrong paths by enthusiasm over the greener pastures projected in an illusory light by the latest phantasms of secular thought.’ Being thus armored in these durable orthodoxies, Professor Grisez adds a kindly admonition for many of his readers, ‘Those not accustomed to subtle argument, as well as those who do not respect reason, will be little moved by what I have to say. Against the heart reason has little power, and it is just as impotent against sentimentalism which has become confused with charity as it is against plain ill will.’

The subtlety of the argument is immediately evident in Professor Grisez’s derivation of the fundamental and absolutely basic principles of morality from our knowledge of man’s intrinsic inclinations.
The Welsh Religious Tradition
Authors: Mullins D. J.
Published: July 2007

Towards the end of the sixth century, the invading pagans were pushing their way northwards along the eastern coast of Britain. At this period too, Aneirin the poet was singing his verses in the court of Mynyddawg Mwynfawr at Edinburgh. He was to sing the lament at the death of the brave three hundred who lost their lives in the desperate attempt to retake Catterick, and so halt the pagan advance. Farther to the west, about his time too, Taliesin was celebrating the victories of Urien Rheged and of his son Owain. He also sang their elegies. These two are the earliest Welsh poets of whom we can say with reasonable certainty that we have some of their authentic work. Both of them can use the word bedydd (baptism) to mean the world. To them, the only world they knew was the baptised world. All outside that was darkness and barbarism.

In 1823, at meetings at Aberystwyth and Bala, the Welsh Calvin-istic Methodists met and agreed on the forty four articles of their Cyffes Ffydd, their confession of Faith. It was published in book form in the following year, and literate Wales could read and learn by rote the restrained and powerful language, the finest prose of the nineteenth century written to give glory to God and to instruct His people.

It is a long cry from the sixth to the nineteenth century. The earliest Welsh literature was written in Southern Scotland, before Wales as an entity had come into existence.
Redemption and Revolution
Authors: Stein Walter
Published: July 2007

Raymond Williams strives to unite fidelity to tragic realities with an absolute secular revolutionary faith. On the social plane this leads him, as we have seen, to a highly problematic, indefinitely recessive, conception of ‘total redemption’ – and to attendant moral risks. And, so long as ‘so absolute a conception’ of some actual social future is envisaged, it is proper to ask how much is included in this conceptual absoluteness. There is a story about a conference of French writers, soon after the last war, in which a Marxist, discussing the mastery of human suffering under socialism, was asked what he thought of the problem of, for instance, a child run over in a traffic accident. His reply was that, in a truly socialist society, there would be no traffic accidents. It is not necessary to approach these problems with a similar ingenuousness in order to recognize the pertinence of such simple questions. Social injustices aside – and can we really envisage an era when all injustice and alienation will belong to the past? – accidents will never be wholly avoidable (at any rate, there will always be floods and earthquakes). It surely cannot be mere pedantry, or paralysis, that continues to find such problems to the point.

There would of course be no such problem if the theoretic future were not called upon to redress past and present actualities so absolutely. But in that case the whole imaginative universe of the ‘total redemption of humanity’ by revolution – and the whole moral calculus going with it – would wither away.
Catechetics is Not Enough
Authors: Lance Derek
Published: July 2007

Gabriel Moran has written an important and disturbing book. It is disturbing because it challenges practically every axiom of modem Catechetics. Just when it seemed we were getting somewhere we are made to wonder if we have to start all over again.

For about sixty years now the Catechetical movement has been working away to bring new life into the teaching of religion, to make religion relevant to the lives of the pupils; and in this it has achieved considerable success.

One of the first things that Catechetical experts turned their attention to was the danger of verbalism and jargon. Thus, the ‘penny Catechism’ with its archaic, involved and abstract vocabulary was soon under fire. Although not long ago Catechetics was regarded by many as the off-beat hobby of a few cranks, recently (and especially since Vatican II) it has become respectable and even fashionable. Catechetical books pour on to the markets, and phrases such as kerygma, Salvation History and the Four Ways are to be heard in staff-room and presbytery. And it is just this that worries Brother Moran! He is conscious that Catechetics has reached a crisis. There is a danger of complacency and fossilization. We may wake up and find that instead of a renewed theology we have merely a new jargon.
Western Food Surpluses and the Underdeveloped World
Authors: Power Jonathan
Published: July 2007

We are entering a new period in man’s history. Some men have always been poorer than others; people’s skin colours have always been different. But for the first time there is developing a fusion between those who are poor and those who are ‘different’. The one supporting the other – they have come to rest with odd exceptions side by side. A line has been drawn across the world. On one side are approximately one third who are white and well fed and affluent, whether they be American capitalists or Soviet factory workers. On the other side are the two thirds who are brown, black or yellow, and are either starving, or at least facing the prospect of always being poor and deprived; certainly standing little chance in the forseeable future of being affluent.

In the poor part of the world, the so called underdeveloped countries, there is a population growth of 2 to 4%. As well as high birth rates they have some of the lowest death rates in the world because of their over proportioned youthful population. A decrease in their birth rate from even a large birth control campaign would according to the distinguished Swedish economist, Gunnar Myrdal, have no effect on the labour force for 15 years and only a very minor effect for three decades.

Again as Myrdal observes even if industrialization were pushed much more rapidly than has been possible in the underdeveloped nations so far, it will not create much employment.