bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Killing With Kindness ?
Authors: Visocchi Tony
Published: July 2007

Vatican Council II and the post-colonial period in Africa dovetailed chronologically very neatly and the resultant euphoria witnessed the growth of funding agencies (hereafter F.A.) established by various national hierarchies dedicated to playing a role in alleviating poverty and ignorance in the less developed countries. The F.A.’s range from the small but effective Scottish Catholic International Aid Fund and the Catholic Fund for Overseas Development of the hierarchies of England and Wales, to the large and wealthy “Misereor” of the German Bishops and the even wealthier Catholic Relief Services of the United States. Apart from these there are other funds of a more private, voluntary and ecumenical nature. It is mainly through missionaries that the first group channel their funds, but the latter group also to a large extent, make use of missionaries. As a result, the traditional image of the poor missionary bringing the Gospel and ministering to’ the world’s poorest is rapidly being challenged. In this article we would like to examine the effects that this is having on missionary activity, and some of the implications.

The operating procedure of the F.A.s is relatively simple, through advertising and appeals they collect funds from those Christians in the more developed countries interested in helping alleviate misery and encourage development in the Third World. This is mainly done through advertising and making appeals through the parish, school or other Christian groups in the hope that they will also be able to solicit not just a one-off donation, but a continuous commitment from interested parties. It should be stressed that the aim is not limited simply to collecting money but also to educate the Christian public of their responsibility to help the Third World more than just financially, and that their donations do not absolve them from cutting down on waste and attacking rampant consumerism in their own lives. Advertising is also used to assure the donors that their contributions are being correctly and wisely used.
Contemporary Christianity as a Religion of Nature
Authors: Edwards Adrian
Published: July 2007

While my cook is preparing chicken soup, to be followed by the actual chicken and some yam cakes, I ought to fill in the interval of anticipation by explaining my situation and my problem. I might perhaps equally well fill it in by drinking some sherry, but it might be better to keep that luxury for the guests who may come at the week-end.

My situation is this; I am a Catholic priest, with some training in anthropology, in charge of a mission in a rural area of the Rivers State of Nigeria. For the article I want to write, my library is extremely limited. I beg my readers not therefore to grumble at inadequate, nay minimal, footnoting, and the absence of exact quotations.

My problem is this; how correct is the claim that contemporary Christianity differs from all other manifestations of religion in being unconcerned with nature? It may be seen, in an approach which goes back, I think to German Idealism, as a historical religion, the moment of the Incarnation marking the beginning of the end for the nature religions; or it may be seen as a religion essentially concerned with relations between persons, having, with the progress of science, sloughed off the cosmological ideas on such absorbing questions as the exact date of the Creation, the topography of Hell, and the necessary function of mosquitoes in the designs of a benevolent Providence, which were found so fascinating in earlier centuries.
The Ideology of National Security
Authors: Westow Theo
Published: July 2007

Because every single nation talks about national security, it is necessary to point out that the national security this article is concerned with is that particular kind of philosophy which at present is the basis of the justification of most Latin American military dictatorships.

In so far as these Generals and ‘Colonels’ are concerned, national security is simply the national expression of what they see as the permanent and irreconcilable conflict between capitalism (act. ually : neo-classical capitalism) and Marxism (actually: the Russian interpretation of it). So here we have our ‘black and white’. No grey can be allowed in. The military governments in South America which have, each in their own way, adopted the doctrine of ‘national security’ are Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay. There are other regimes which are more crudely dictatorial in the sense that they are simply based on family ambition. The most glaring example is Nicaragua where until recently President Somoza tried to maintain his position in the face of world-wide protest.
Faith And Experience: XII Christian Experience
Authors: Tugwell Simon
Published: July 2007

In the past few articles we have been tracing some of the ways in which philosophers and theologians have used the idea of the ineffability and incomprehensibility of God. They warn us insistently not to suppose that we know more about God than we actually do. Whether our understanding of God derives from philosophy or from revelation or from our own experience, they remind us that he is still largely unknown to us, mysterious and transcendent.

Those who are drawn by the idea of that “infinite ignorance” which was proclaimed by Evagrius may find all this quite delightful. But may not some people rather feel that they are left with almost no God at all? We may recall the tragic conclusion of Cassian’s account of the anthropomorphite controversy in Egypt. When at last old Paphnutius is convinced of the truth of the anti-anthropomorphite theology, he throws himself on the ground, howling. “Poor, poor me!” he cries out. “They have taken away my God and now I have no God to hold on to. I do not know whom I am to worship now or whom I am to pray to” (Coni. 10,3).

As Bowker says, “No matter how ‘God’ is constituted, if there is no feedback at all into the actual situations and experiences of life, plausibility is under maximum strain; if no effect of God can ever be discerned or specified, then in effect God is nowhere” (The Sense of God p. 84). Now maybe there is good reason for saying that that is precisely where God is. But does our negative theology not tend to make God so remote from our actual situations and experiences, does it not make it so difficult to accept anything at all as an “effect of God”, that it eventually ceases to be plausible to talk of God at all?
A Note On AQuinas And Ordination Of Women
Authors: Miller Jeremy
Published: July 2007

On 20 January 1977 the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued the “Declaration on the Question of the Admission of Women to the Ministerial Priesthood,” reaffirming the Catholic position barring women from priestly ordination. The issue is complex and thorny. The major argument of the Declaration was that the restriction is founded on an “unbroken tradition” possessing a “normative character”. Later in the Declaration other arguments from fittingness, described as being in themselves non-demonstrative are brought forth.

One set of these arguments developed the sacramental idea of natural resemblance, listing in support various theologians, among whom was Thomas Aquinas. Because this latter part of the Declaration, with its attendant idea of maleness as a prerequisite for priestly ordination, attracted so much interchange in newspapers and periodicals, it behooves us to take a more careful look at the position of Aquinas referred to by the Declaration. While it is our opinion that the real strength of the Declaration hinges on the idea of “unbroken tradition”, and on which we are not commenting in this essay, it remains instructive to understand the context within which Aquinas’ views on ordination are elaborated. For this reason the essay is termed a Note and simply wishes to make a small contribution to a much wider discussion engaging theology today.
Liverpool 1980 The National Pastoral Congress
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

The young couple, both teachers, one at a Catholic school in the city, did not know that the National Pastoral Congress would be taking place that week-end in Liverpool until they agreed three or four days before to put me up. On the Saturday afternoon thousands of people were left outside when the gates were locked at Anfield long before the kick-off: that Liverpool FC retained the First Division championship obviously stirred far more hearts far more deeply, Catholic ones no doubt included, than the NPC’s deliberations ever had any chance of doing. With all such qualifications duly noted, however, the Congress was nonetheless the most important event in the history of the Catholic Church in England and Wales since the restoration of diocesan bishops in 1850. On the Sunday afternoon the Liverpool Orange Lodge held a march, with several bands and plenty of Union Jacks, so they at least had an idea of what was going on.

The Congress, in effect, took the form of seven three-day conferences of about 300 people each, dispersed at centres all round the suburbs of Liverpool. The Congress gathered in plenary session only at the beginning and the end, for the inaugural Act of Reconciliation and Renewal in the Cathedral on the Friday evening, and then again on the Tuesday morning, first in the Philharmonic Hall, simply to receive the reports and resolutions of the seven conferences, and finally for the concluding celebration of the Eucharist, again in the Cathedral.
Measure for Measure and the Epistle to the Romans
Authors: McCombie Frank
Published: July 2007

In the period in which Shakespeare wrote Measure for Measure, he was regularly investigating ways in which the drama might reflect and explore matters in doubt. In the Histories he had attempted to support certitudes upon which Man might depend, or at least find it useful or even necessary to depend; but after Henry V he was more interested in what was the experience of living with a philosophy or belief than in how it might be justified and made to work. Julius Caesar is a play of “isms”: stoicism, epicurism, absolutism, and so on; Hamlet, as a Renaissance scholar-prince, seeks a place to stand between the “isms” of chivalry and those of the new politics. In Measure for Measure, a morality play warping towards tragedy, it was the “isms” of practical Christianity which came under scrutiny.

Shakespeare’s working knowledge of the Bible has long been recognised, though he seems to have been more familiar with some books of the New Testament than with others. Matthew is more extensively quoted than the other three Evangelists together; Romans is more extensively quoted than even 1 and 2 Corinthians together. Romans was, of course, the great “Protestant” letter, and Shakespeare could be expected to know it more intimately than any other. Echoes of Romans, in terms of quotation, paraphrase, and shared terminology, are notably denser in Measure for Measure than in any other of Shakespeare’s plays. That this is not an accident, but rather evidence of a carefully planned investigation of Paul’s terminology and dialectic is what I am proposing in this paper. Whatever else he is doing, Shakespeare is testing out Romans.
Political Theology 1
Authors: Ruston Roger
Published: July 2007

This is the first of a series of articles intended to be an introduction to contemporary political theology. It is not meant to be a survey of movements or literature. There is already a large and increasing number of articles and books which set out to do this. But a certain amount of surveying will have to be done, since it is of the essence of political theology that it is tied to history. It is not a purely theoretical discipline which can be elaborated without regard to events. It has been generated precisely as a Christian response to events. It is a response to the historical misappropriation of theology. It is a historical re appropriation of the Bible, of the Christian tradition and of the practice of worship out of the hands of those who serve certain dominant class interests with the aid of these things. It is a critique of Christianity in its form of class ideology and at the same time a critique of those societies which use Christianity in this way. This critique is done in the name of a more authentic Christianity, faithful — it is hoped — to the true purposes of revelation. It is not therefore a mere branch of theology, to be studied alongside of a ‘theology of marriage’ or even a ‘moral theology’. It is not a ‘theology of politics’, still less a ‘theology and politics’: In the hands of the Liberation theologians at least, it claims to be a complete rethinking of theology: an entirely new turning point in the historical articulation of the Christian faith. Such a large claim will need examination. At any rate it is clear to me that theology can no longer proceed without a close examination of the role that it has played in the past and even now plays in the political determinants of human life. Christian theological innocence is now lost in this respect: as should have been acknowledged since Marx’s critique of religion. We cannot escape facing the use to which theology has been put in case the very purposes of revelation have been frustrated by this use. No politically neutral theology is now possible. Political experience has forced itself upon theology.
Hemingway's Naturalism
Authors: Fitzpatrick Joseph
Published: July 2007

In this article I shall attempt to place Ernest Hemingway in an intellectual tradition that continues to exert enormous influence on our civilization. The paradox of placing Hemingway, of all people, in an intellectual tradition will be dealt with in passing. What I wish to do straightaway is to say what I mean by an intellectual tradition; I shall then sketch the particular tradition I have in mind; the body of the article will be devoted to substantiating the thesis that Hemingway belongs to this tradition. By way of conclusion I shall say why I believe this kind of thesis, the establishment of which requires a combination of philosophical and literary analysis, is important.

It is not all that easy to say what is meant by an intellectual tradition in the present context. It does not refer to a single, unified philosophical system but rather to a set or series of philosophical systems that hang together naturally because of certain assumptions or methodological principles common to all of them. It is a fairly loose mesh of ideas the various strands of which represent distinct lines of development but nevertheless interconnect and sustain each other in certain important respects. The three main strands of the tradition to which I shall assign Hemingway are empiricism, behaviourism and naturalism. It will be necessary to say briefly what each is or stands for and why they can be considered as amounting jointly to a distinctive pattern of ideas.

Traditional British empiricism received its classical statement from David Hume and it is to Hume that I shall refer in outlining this philosophical option. The importance empiricism places on the senses and on sensations — what Hume calls ‘impressions’ — is vital. The contents of the mind are divided into ‘impressions’ and ‘ideas’, and ideas are said to derive from impressions.
Rahner Retrospective: II—The Historicity of Theology
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

Karl Rahner, as we saw last time (New Blackfriars May 1980), believes that, however much of Barth’s work may endure, it has not settled the questions raised by Liberal Protestantism To that extent, then, Rahner sides with those who think that no amount of massive reaffirmation of classical Christian doctrine can ever dispense us from facing Bultmann’s programme of demythologization.

Schleiermacher, who died in 1834, was the first theologian to face up to the problems of making sense of Christian faith in the aftermath of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. No doubt, by the close of the century, the movement he initiated had degenerated into mere accommodation of Christianity to the spirit of the age. Barth’s outcry, particularly in the 1921 version of his Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, was a necessary protest against critical methods in biblical exegesis which amounted to rationalism, and against an emphasis on religious experience in systematic theology which promoted subjectivism. The counterpart in the Catholic Church to Barth’s protest was the encyclical letter Pascendi issued by St Pius X in 1907 condemning Catholic Modernism on much the same grounds as Barth rejected Liberal Protestantism. Even allowing for the difference in literary genre, and ecclesiastical function, Barth’s commentary is obviously an incomparably richer human and Christian document, and of altogether greater intellectual distinction. The papal letter, as far as the doctrinal part goes, was apparently composed by Joseph Lemius (1860-1923), an extremely influential Roman theologian otherwise known best as an effective protector of Mercier’s reputation and of the kind of neo-Thomism he was promoting at Louvain, which others in the Vatican suspected (rightly, as it turned out) of being disturbingly open to ‘modem’ philosophy.
On Being So Placed
Authors: Theron Stephen
Published: July 2007

One of the main points of crisis in modem civilization concerns, in my view, the relation of conscience and authority. Where these two are not simply taken to be polar opposites, neither tolerating the claims of the other, the one is often subordinated to the other. This may be right. Unfortunately what should then dominate is often made subordinate and vice versa. Thus Fr Eric D’Arcy writes:

Of course, one of the elements of the decision which one’s reason ultimately makes will be the guidance of authoritative and skilled moralists whose standing we accept; but it has to be the individual’s judgment of conscience that this is an authority which we may safely accept. As Mr Hare says, other people cannot make decisions of principle for us unless we have first decided to take their advice or obey their orders (Conscience and its Right to Freedom, Stag edition p 216).

D’Arcy goes on to quote Newman in support:

Certainly, if I am obliged to bring religion into after-dinner toasts (which indeed does not seem quite the thing), I shall drink — to the Pope, if you please — still, to Conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards (Difficulties of Anglicans, 1910, vol 2 p 261).

Now we may I think take these authors as referring here to a common, non-technical notion of conscience which, we might want to say, is our knowledge, either of what we ought to do or of the rightness or wrongness of what we have done, or merely the memory of an unambiguously evil deed. But here at once the difficulty would meet us of the erroneous conscience. If this is as much a conscience as a correct one is then it seems we cannot characterize conscience as knowledge, not even as our knowledge. It will only be a seeming knowledge of right and wrong, and a seeming only to ourselves moreover.
Rahner's Grundkurs revisited once again
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

Karl Rahner writes as follows (Foundations of Christian Faith, page 431): “In view of the mode in which eschatological statements are made in the Old and New Testaments, a Christian is always tempted to read and to interpret the eschatological statements of Christianity as anticipatory eyewitness accounts of a future which is still outstanding”. The meaning of this sentence, according to Hugo Meynell (New Blackfriars, July/August 1980, page 348), is that Rahner is warning us against the temptation of thinking that eschatological statements tell us anything, or have any bearing upon, what is to happen to us when we die: “Perhaps it is stupid of me not to be able to see what is being denied here, unless it is that Christians have some kind of expectation for the future after the end of the present life”. Dr Meynell thus reads the sentence as if it were stressed as follows: “In view of the mode in which eschatological statements are made in the Old and New Testaments, a Christian is always tempted to read and to interpret the eschatological statements of Christianity as anticipatory eye-witness accounts of a future which is still outstanding”. What we are being warned against, then, is the notion that eschatological statements refer to the future. This is the only sentence which Dr Meynell quotes to support his suspicions that Karl Rahner does not hold orthodox Catholic beliefs about the afterlife.
God: II Freedom
Authors: McCabe Herbert
Published: July 2007

In the previous article, (New Blackfriars October 1980) I spoke of the radical questionableness of the universe and suggested that it seems anomalous to ask “How come?” about individual events or things or whole classes of things and yet refuse to ask this question about the whole world. The belief that such a question is unaskable is based, firstly, on the fact that we have no answer to it, and, secondly, on the fact that the language in which it is asked is exploratory; we are using words in ways that are stretched beyond their familiar use. I suggested that both these things are characteristic of the creative growing points of our understanding whether in science or in the arts. To assert the existence of God is not to state a fact within an established intellectual system but to claim the need for exploration; it is to claim that there is an unanswered question about the universe: the question “How come the whole thing instead of nothing?”

By “creation” we mean the dependence of all that is, in so far as it is. We do not know what it is that it depends on, we do not know the nature of God. There is, as I suggested, a great gap between creation and making or causing in our familiar sense. Other causes bring things about in a “world without them”, (X is brought about in a world with an X-shaped gap in it). What is caused comes about in a world in which it is in some way potential, a world, for example, containing what can be made into it, but there is nothing within which resides the possibility of the whole world before.it is created. Creation is a matter of the existence of the world over against nothing at all.
The Concept of Divine Necessity
Authors: Davies Brian
Published: July 2007

My purpose in this article is (a) to consider the value and the coherence of the concept of divine necessity and (b) to offer some suggestions about the way in which divine necessity might reasonably be understood. I shall argue that there are reasons for denying the value and coherence of one notion of divine necessity but that another way of understanding it is not incoherent. Secondly, I shall defend the view that belief in divine necessity can plausibly be understood as an item of negative theology, as a way of refusing to tolerate certain positive affirmations.

Some philosophers have argued that belief in divine necessity amounts to belief that ‘God exists’ is a necessary proposition. As many recent writers have pointed out, however, there is more than one kind of necessary proposition. The kind which comes immediately to mind is, perhaps, that of logically necessary propositions. These are analytic, i.e. they are coherent and their negations are incoherent. But not all necessarily true propositions are logically necessary. There are, for example, propositions which are not analytic but which seem necessarily true when we think of what is picked out by the referring expressions used in them. An example is ‘The number which is the number of the planets is necessarily greater than 6’. The number referred to here is 9, and 9 is necessarily greater than 6. But the number which is the number of the planets could have been 4.

It is not, then, helpful simply to say that belief in God’s necessity is belief that ‘God exists’ is a necessary proposition. One influential view of divine necessity is, however, unaffected by this fact.
What Happens When You Pray?
Authors: Davies Brian
Published: July 2007

The topic of prayer is important to Christians and a number of recent books have been largely concerned with it. One of the latest is Hubert Richards’ What Happens When You Pray? a work that is likely to gain a lot of readers since Richards is now one of the most popular religious writers in Britain. Unfortunately, however, he is also somewhat misguided, and what follows is intended to say why. I do not want to write at length, and much of what I argue needs detailed development that I do not provide. But I still want to hold that more can be said of prayer than Richards allows. If you can begin to see why I am right, my purpose here will have been achieved.

To put things in perspective, it ought first to be agreed that much of what Richards says is, in fact, correct. Take, for example, the following remarks on God:

There is a sense in which God is apart from our world, beyond it, ‘other’ than and ‘different’ from everything else in our experience. He remains the transcendent mystery, and if we don’t give expression to that sometimes, indeed often, we will make him into an idol in our own image and likeness, (p 43)

All of that is thoroughly in order. We have to talk of God in words which are normally applied to objects in the world, and, in doing so, we can often make statements that are perfectly true. But God is not an intelligible subject possessing attributes. He is not a member of a class or genus, not a being among beings. As Aquinas puts it, God ‘is identical with his own godhead, with his own life and with whatever else is similarly said of him’.
Genesis and Patriarchy
Authors: West Angela
Published: July 2007

The authors of Genesis, and other books in the Pentateuch, created their text by taking myths and stories that had arisen in various sections of their society at different stages of its development, and by means of a process of combination, re-arrangement and redaction, they re-wrote them to provide an interpretation suitable for their society in quite new historical circumstances. These circumstances were extreme — they were a people cut off from their homeland and their origins, exiles in the superior and sophisticated civilisation of imperial Babylon. In his account of the Creation and the Fall, the Yahwist historian (as scholars refer to this one of the two authorial narratives of Genesis) addresses himself to a people experiencing political subordination and alienation from the culture in which they are living. Hence, he takes up what would be an understandable preoccupation for them in such circumstances — a reflection on the origins of human culture.

Juliet Mitchell, in her book Psychoanalysis and Feminism embarks on a project that, in some sense, resembles that of the Yah-wist historian. ‘All questions relating to the position and role of women in society’ she says, ‘tend sooner or later to founder on the bedrock of “where did it all start”?’ This, too, is a question about the origin of human culture, and what it implies for the subordinate position that women find themselves in. By taking Freud’s psychoanalytical myth of the origins of patriarchal society, together with Engel’s historical materialist account of women’s subordination in the institutions of the family, private property and the state, she re-appropriates for feminism two of the most important critical traditions of our society
Lonergan's Appropriation of the Concept of Praxis
Authors: Davis Charles
Published: July 2007

One could say I was startled into examining Lonergan on praxis What startled me was the remark of Lonergan in his essay, “Theology and Praxis”, to the effect that to ask whether theology is a praxis “is to ask whether there are basic theological questions whose solution depends on the personal development of theologians”.

Why should that have startled me? Because, as it stands, it establishes praxis as, first, simply a matter of consciousness, and, second, a function of individual development. Such a concept of praxis startles because it contradicts one’s prior expectation. Two key insights are operative in the modem, that is the post-Hegelian, problematic of the relationship between theory and practice, a problematic dominated by the thought of Marx. The first is that the human activity or praxis which fashions and transforms human beings and grounds the modes of human living is labour, that is, human action as a productive force. It is in acting upon nature to satisfy their material needs that human beings bring about modification in their own nature and develop varying forms of social order and modes of human thought and existence. In other words, the question of praxis is in the first place the question of the dependence of ideas or consciousness upon the productive forces and relationships that constitute the basis of every human society. The second insight behind the recent currency of the term “praxis” is that the activity or practice to which consciousness and theory are linked is social practice. In other words, the question of praxis is in the second place the question of the dependence of our thinking and our judgments, the formation of our consciousness and our production of theories, upon the historical development of human society and upon the place where we find ourselves in that society.
A Simple Argument for Faith: Requiring Reasons
Authors: Scarre Geoffrey
Published: July 2007

A view very commonly encountered in contemporary philosophy of religion is that it is a mistake to expect that faith should be capable of rational defence. The roots of the conception of faith as lacking rational defensibility lie far back in the history of the Church (see for instance St Paul’s remarks on faith as foolishness in I Cor 1), but it is only in the last two centuries that deep pessimism has set in about the prospects of finding really convincing a priori or a posteriori arguments in support of faith. This slide from conviction that faith is rationally warranted has not, of course, been a wholly or even mainly negative phenomenon, for it has stimulated an awareness of commissive and emotional aspects of faith which is proving very valuable in the life of the Church. The importance and profundity of much recent writing about faith is something I have no wish to dispute; yet I want to argue that it is a mistake to represent faith as requiring no support from reason, and I shall urge we are only entitled to that faith we can defend.

My argument is basically a very simple one — so simple indeed that many people will undoubtedly think that it cannot do justice to the complexity of the subject under discussion. The short response to those people is to say that they should not disregard the argument but refute it. To make the argument fully convincing, however, I shall discuss in some detail the theoretical basis which underlies it, and attempt to disarm various strategies for opposing or evading it. Finally, I shall describe a positive approach to the problem of finding reasons for faith.

In its most skeletal form the argument can be stated: faith is, or essentially involves, propositional belief; propositional belief requires reasons; therefore faith requires reasons. This clearly stands in need of some fleshing out.
Grace and Persecution
Authors: Cassidy Sheila
Published: July 2007

This essay is an attempt to illustrate the idea that the way in which God’s grace works in man is more obvious in a situation of persecution than in one of so-called peace, for in the former the contrast between good and evil, the graced and the graceless, is sharper and therefore easier to see.

St Thomas Aquinas, the great thirteenth century theologian, defines that mysterious entity “grace” as a “share in the Divine nature”. Having read this we recognize that he has said both everything and nothing. In this life we perceive God only as “a dim reflection as in a mirror” (ICor. 13:12) and we can therefore know nothing of his nature, so we cannot catch hold of Grace and say “it is this”, or “it is that”. Granted the impossibility of talking about God, of finding words adequate to discuss his nature, we can nevertheless attempt to understand what happens to a man when he deliberately lays himself open to God’s action.

“Christ is the image of the unseen God” (Col. 1:17).

“He who has seen me has seen the Father”.
Reviewing and Realising
Authors: Primavesi Anne
Published: July 2007

I was in Dublin a month ago when the city was galvanised by an exhibition of tableaux by Edward Kienholz. I use the verb deliberately. The tableaux were shocking, composed as they were in threedimensional assemblages to present a particular concept, and that concept worked out to the smallest detail. One of the most shocking was ‘The State Hospital’, and the following extract from Kienholz’s blueprint of the work gives some idea of the nightmarish experience undergone by the viewer, who has to peer in through a small grille:

“This is a tableau about an old man who is a patient in a State Mental Hospital. He is in an arm restraint on a bed in a bare room. (This piece will have to include an actual room consisting of walls, ceiling, barred door, etc.) There will be only a bed pan and a hospital table (just out of reach). The man is naked. He hurts. He has been beaten on the stomach with a bar of soap wrapped in a towel (to hide tell-tale bruises). His head is a lighted fish bowl with water that contains two live black fish. He lies very still on his side. There is no sound in the room.

Above the old man in the bed is his exact duplicate, including the bed (beds will be stacked like bunks). The upper figure will also have the fish bowl head, two black fish, etc. But, additionally, it will be encased in some kind of plastic bubble (perhaps similar to a cartoon balloon), representing the man’s thoughts.

His mind can’t think for him past the present moment. He is committed there for the rest of his life.”
Reflections on Torture –
Authors: Cassidy Sheila
Published: July 2007

We have come together today as members of a Christian community because of our concern for the many thousands of men and women who are suffering persecution and torture throughout the world. Just as any divided family will forget its differences in times of crisis, so we are today united before God by that very problem.

Part of the excitement and also the difficulty of being a Christian is that it is a continuing process of exploring what it means to be a disciple of Christ. Just when we think we have got it sorted out, something happens to upset our complacency so that we are left, a little bruised, saying “where did I go wrong”? The only thing to do when that happens is to go back to the Gospels and look again to see how Jesus did it. As Paul tells us “Christ is the image of the unseen God”. It is only by looking to Christ that we shall learn how to walk towards our Father.

I would like, then, to explore with you for a few minutes the stance of Jesus Christ in the face of torture — what he taught his disciples and how he faced his own torture and death. By focussing on the man Jesus we should then be able to widen our gaze, to look beyond his death on Calvary, to the continuing crucifixion in our own time.

The trouble about the gospels for many of us is that they become so familiar that they lose their impact; we cease to be rattled, unnerved, by what Jesus is saying. Take for example, Christ’s assurance to his followers that they would be persecuted. “You will be dragged before governors and kings for my sake” (Mk. 10:18), “Brother will betray brother to death and the father his child ... You will be hated by all men on account of my name”.
Karl Rahner Volume Seventeen
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

Another one safely on the shelf, with only five more to come, and then all fourteen thick volumes of Karl Rahner's Schriften zur Theologie (1954-1980) will be translated into English, in some twenty-one slimmer and somewhat more manageable ones. This particular instalment is the second part of the volume which Rahner put together shortly after the celebration for his seventieth birthday (the volume itself was dedicated to his mother on her hundredth birthday).

The only comparable oeuvre by a Catholic theologian of Rahner's generation would no doubt be that of Hans Urs von Balthasar, but the translation into English is lagging far behind.
God, the Living One
Authors: Schillebeeckx Edward C.
Published: July 2007

When a Western European landed his plane among African natives who gazed unbelievingly at this enormous bird, he proudly remarked, “In one day I have covered a distance which used to take me thirty”. Thereupon the wise black chieftain came forward and aSked, “Sir, what do you do with the other twenty-nine?”

Here we have the twofold possibility of man’s fundamental decision: on the one hand technological rationality, and on the other the question of the meaning of human action.

The question also of the relationship between human hopes and expectations by self-liberation, and the God-given salvation: the question of God as connected with the context of mankind’s striving for liberation. The question of God-talk is intrinsically connected with the question of human integrity and wholeness in such a way that this question of identity cannot be solved in purely theoretical terms: it includes the question of a particular life-style — contemplative and political as well. Talk about God stands under the quest of our way of life; it is governed by the question of our real concerns in life.
Rahner Retrospective III Transcendence or Finitude
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

Karl Rahner’s Foundations of Christian Faith, published in 1978, which is no doubt a masterpiece, nevertheless relies fundamentally on a very controversial picture of man as the being who transcends his finitude just by recognizing it — and this transcendence is something pretty substantial even if difficult to put a finger on. It enables Rahner to make the idea of God intelligible and even quite obvious and natural. The speed with which Rahner draws the reader into .his “system”, and the immense rewards in theological assurance and in spiritual stimulus if one goes with the tide, dissipate the difficulties about the initial move. The text is in any case very hard to understand in detail, or else the Anglo-Saxon reader, putting it all down to the foreign idiom, gives it the benefit of the doubt. This paper is a preliminary exploration of the basic epistemological problems in Rahner’s philosophy of man, with the tentative proposal that a quite different starting-point needs to be accepted.
The Church in Peru
Authors: Kirby Peadar
Published: July 2007

Maria is 21 years old. She lives in a poor barrio in the suburbs of Lima and studies economics in one of Lima’s universities. She also works as a catechist in her local parish. “I think that in the past two years there have been great advances,” she told me, “the people now are very much more conscious than before”. She sees her work as a catechist as a preparation for what she calls “political militancy”. As an example of this she told me of a march which the catechists had been involved in a month before when 2,000 people went to the Ministry of Housing banging empty cups demanding a decent water supply for their area. “Us young people accept marxism, communism, without any problem”, she added.

Senora Isabel lives in a nearby parish and at 79 has seen some more of life than Maria. When she first arrived in the area 19 years ago she used to make a meagre income by selling holy pictures of St Martin de Porres. Through the ‘hermendad’ or sodality of which she was a member she began to go along to meetings organised by a local priest. From there she progressed to be a member of the Movement of Christian Workers and for the past number of years has gone along to the annual summer schools in theology organised by the Catholic University. As her understanding of her faith changed so too did she begin to get involved in the struggles of the people.
Genesis and Patriarchy: Part II Women and the End of Time
Authors: West Angela
Published: July 2007

In a previous article, (New Black friars Jan 1981) I argued that the eschatological interpretation of biblical theology is, ultimately, the only possible site for the creation of a feminist discourse. To put it in more assimilable terms: the contradiction of being a woman and a feminist is only finally resolvable in the context of Christian eschatology. This is rather a large claim, so I shall try to substantiate it.

Most theology hitherto has been based on an essentially androcentric perspective as a result of the fact that it is founded on an essentially androcentric anthropology. In recent years, attempts have been made by some anthropologists to bring an alternative perspective to bear on the material of their discipline: thus, Michelle Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, the editors of a recently published collection of essays by a number of female anthropologists state in their introduction that the aim of the book is to ‘demonstrate the importance of women’s lives for our understanding of the human record’. I think it is important to consider what implications their conclusions, and those of other feminist scholars, have for non-androcentric theology, for a feminist hermeneutics.

At first sight, their conclusions wouldn’t seem to be very comforting to feminists. ‘The current anthropological view draws on the observation that most and probably all contemporary societies, whatever their kinship organisation or mode of subsistence, are characterised by some degree of male dominance’. And further on they say ‘. . . although the degree and expression of female subordination vary greatly, sexual asymmetry is presently a universal fact of life’.
Problems and the Rhetoric of God‐Talk
Authors: Wörner Markus
Published: July 2007

In this paper it will be argued that the type of situation in which the question, Does God exist, becomes urgent for the questioner is fundamentally a rhetorical situation. It is also a situation where theology is forced to provide rhetorical answers — in the special sense of ‘rhetoric’ outlined here (as well as in last month’s edition of this journal). This is partly because of the influence on theological language which is exercised by its recipients’ needs, and partly because rhetorical discourse is, from an epistemological point of view, uniquely suitable for talking about God.

When it seriously matters to someone whether God exists or not, at least this much can be said about his situation: it is one where it is felt to be urgent that some position should be reached or some decision made, but where the grounds for doing so fall considerably short of theoretical certainty. They fall short, too, of the ordinary logical and empirical grounds on which we are used to reaching decisions on simpler matters. Nonetheless, when the problem of God’s existence becomes compelling, its very importance means that no solution to it is likely to be experienced as adequate unless it conforms to the highest standards of reasonableness available for dealing with such a question. At the same time, the questioner is putting his enquiry not only as an intellectual being but also as a person with emotional and moral dispositions; he requires conviction from a source which he can respect in these terms, and in order to understand an answer and to gain any satisfaction from it he needs to perceive it from an emotional situation which at least allows of its appreciation. Though one need not, for example, feel hilarious in order to believe in God, one is not likely to be able to do so from a position of total despair. The affective state of the questioner must in some way, then, be taken into account when he is provided with any attempt at an answer.
A Need for Tenderness
Authors: Tatham Michael
Published: July 2007

It is sometimes felt that in her ironically sympathetic creation of Emma Woodhouse ‘whom no one but myself will much like’ Jane Austen deserves at least some of those strictures which see her books as damaged by the socially restrictive values of an upper middle-class point of view. It has been widely remarked that Miss Austen’s work suffers because of her cheerful acceptance of a class society, and, that, while it is true snobbery may be consistently ridiculed, her values and standards are, nevertheless, based on the assumption that social and economic inequality is a permanent characteristic of our imperfect world. As the twentieth century draws towards its close it seems that if this was Miss Austen’s opinion it is likely to be regarded as more intellectually respectable than has been the fashion for some time. In his sympathetic and perceptive essay on Emma Arnold Kettle argues that although the clarity of Jane Austen’s observation is matched by the precision of her social judgments — he sees her work as informed by ‘the delicate and unpretentious materialism of her outlook’ — there remains the important reservation that her vision is severely limited by her class background. Kettle asserts that although snobbery is held up to disdain Jane Austen’s characters never question the fundamental idea that ‘it is right and proper for a minority of the community to live at the expense of the majority’. He sees such criticism as justified not so much because Miss Austen failed to put forward a solution, but because she did not even notice the existence of a problem.
Scholarship and Interpretation: or How it Strikes a Contemporary
Authors: Mark James
Published: July 2007

What questions is a non-professional critic entitled — indeed, bound — to put to the scholars concerning the current debate about the New Testament? What kind of comments is he entitled to offer? The studies in question are complex and specialized; they involve languages which he does not know and disciplines which he has not practised. The complexity is such that individual scholars will tell you that no one of them can master it; one has to concentrate, for example, on a single topic, such as textual study, or on only a part of the New Testament material. Communication between the scholars has become difficult, as it has in other learned disciplines, and perhaps no conspectus of what is being done in the field as a whole is possible. And yet the layman cannot leave it to the experts, since the debate concerns the documents which purport to record the events from which his faith derives, and the reactions of those who witnessed them. It is the recognition of this that leads some people to protest that the questions that scholars feel bound to ask should not be asked at all. It is felt that they undermine the faith of those who do not follow the debate but are aware of its repercussions when they reach a wider public, probably in some over-simplified and distorted form. I assume that the questions which scholars (or others) feel bound to ask ought not to be repressed: that intellectual honesty demands this, whether they are answered well or ill. I assume, equally, that the layman should not simply accept the answers that the experts offer him. He could, in fact, hardly do so, given the diversity of opinions which obtains among them. The notion of a consensus of the faithful is important, if Christians are to believe that they are, in some sense, one in Christ; but it cannot, in our present situation, be founded on a consensus of the scholars. So what is he to do if, on the one hand, he cannot ignore the debate while, on the other, it provides him with no firm and indisputable conclusions?