bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Therapist and the Suffering Servant
Authors: Cooper Rabbi Howard
Published: July 2007

He appeared at the end of the day. Suddenly. Out of nowhere. I had seen my last patient. I was ready to go home. The end of another day. Thank God.

I opened the door to leave my consulting room—and there he was. Standing still, staring—or so it seemed to me—fixing me with that gaze, that look I cam to know, and hate. And love. Those eyes which looked inside me until I could not bear it any longer. The emptiness. The loneliness. The endless horror of it all.

But now, that first time, he just stood there, passively, waiting. Waiting for me, it seemed. How long had he been there? What did he want? How could I get rid of him?—these were my first thoughts. Later I asked another question, simpler still: who was he?

Moments passed. I stood there awkwardly and as I looked at him I became aware of a kind of disgust rising in myself. He seemed hardly human. I couldn’t tell if he was young or old, carefree or past caring. His face was wrapped up, as if he had something terrible to hide. A wound, a scar, something so deep it would be there for all to see. But all I could see were the eyes, watching. Watching my disgust trying not to show itself.

He must once have been the tallest of men but now, now he was bent over, as if he was carrying a great weight on his back. The thought, the cliche, came into my head: he looks as if he’s carrying the problems of the world on his shoulders.
The Vocation of the Theologian—an ecumenist's comments
Authors: Thomas J. Heywood
Published: July 2007

My aim is to make some observations on the recent Instruction from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (summarised in The Tablet of 30 June, pp. 838—841) in an attempt to clarify certain issues and assist the debate which has been initiated, of which this journal has revealed ample evidence. These are observations bom of the awareness that the language of this document finds interesting echoes within my own tradition and consciousness as a Reformed theologian.

The very notion of a vocation of theology is an interesting reflection of the sense that theology is a church-related activity. As terminology employed to specify a certain view of ecclesiastical polity it is in fact reminiscent of Calvin’s Institutes and so—naturally—this view of theology and the theologian has been one of the main features of 20th Century Protestant theology, with its rediscovery of Classical Reform. Part of that lovely sense of theology as a church-related and indeed church-based activity has been the realisation that theology is of necessity an ecumenical task. When this is ignored its practice is less than its profession and its efficacy is at once frustrated. Hence my title; for it is neither as an onlooker judging somebody else’s concerns nor as an outsider with no interest or involvement in the issue that I would make these comments. Rather, this is the deliberate attempt to bring what assistance one part of the Church can offer to another—and this on the basis of the unity of our common faith and the singleness of theological purpose.
The Language of Splendour: Fra Angelico's ‘Madonna and Child Enthroned’
Authors: Prendergast Michael
Published: July 2007

When he painted his numerous alterpieces on the theme of Madonna and Child Enthroned, Fra Angelico accepted a traditional image and used it again and again, with variations. The archetypal scene of Our Lady sitting in state, holding her Son and surrounded by the trappings of a royal court, was inherited from the Eastern Church, where the underlying notion seems to have been that since the Byzantine Empress was presented in court finery, the Mother of God should be presented in no less splendour; and the idea had an immediate and wide appeal. For centuries, Our Lady was portrayed in painting and sculpture as a reigning monarch, not precisely as Queen of Heaven, but as a queen of men and women on earth, surrounded by angelic and saintly courtiers. So the image was part of Angelico’s mental furniture. It was not, of course, the only image of Our Lady then in vogue.

The impact of Masaccio’s Madonna and Child, now in the National Gallery, London, is hard to exaggerate, and its influence is more evident in an altar panel which Angelico did for the nuns of St Peter Martyr Convent, Florence, than anywhere else. Angelico follows Masaccio in so positioning the figure of Our Lady as to bring the right shoulder slightly forward, presenting an almost straight line from the elbow to the top of the head. The resulting bulkiness of figure suggests maternal protectiveness and an air of mystery. Documentary evidence points to 1428 as the likely date of Angelico’s painting, which is interesting in the light of Orlandi’s surmise that Angelico was ordained in 1429; he must have been still a student of theology when he painted the work.
The Scandal of Suffering
Authors: Reilly Patrick
Published: July 2007

‘We must remain absolutely silent on what we cannot talk about’. Wittgenstein’s interdict would surely apply to the mystery of human suffering; at certain intensities of pain it becomes literally as well as idiomatically unspeakable. Even to allude to the educative value of pain is to risk an inhuman glibness, a coldblooded reduction of the specificity of suffering to chill, abstract formulae. We must begin by confessing the ultimate intractability of the problem. Against pain and death we fight a losing battle; and the mystery, always insoluble, has, if anything, become more agonisingly problematic in our own time. Caring for the chronically and terminally ill has always been intensely difficult; in the modem world, technological advances notwithstanding, it has become immeasurably more so.

A world without anaesthetics would be a hell; deprived of analgesics even so routine an event as a visit to the dentist would be something to be dreaded and shunned. To avoid or to minimise pain is an instinctive natural reflex; the deliberate search for suffering is a perversion to which we give the name masochism. Yet it is equally true that a world without pain would be calamitous. Pain is essential to survival—without it we would perish. It is an early warning system, a defence mechanism, vital in preventive medicine against incipient and impending evil. Without pain teeth would rot insensibly in our gums, limbs quietly crumble to ash in the flames or be mangled beyond repair in the machinery, cancers placidly proliferate in our bodies. Once bitten, twice shy. The old adage crystallises the argument that pain educates, teaches us to avoid certain courses of action harmful or destructive to us. Pain is a necessary part of a rational world, regulating behaviour, signalling the need for treatment.
Spiritual Semetism
Authors: Zananiri Gaston
Published: July 2007

The following text is an extract from the Memoirs of Gaston Zananiri OP, of which copies of the complete text have been deposited in the Bibliothique Nationale, Paris, and the Dominican Historical Centre, Oxford. This extract allows us to relive the Jewish-Arab problem as it existed in the 1930s. Palestine was still under the British mandate, but its inhabitants were waiting for independence. This was the time when Pius XI declared, ‘Spiritually we are all Semites.’ Since then the Near East has witnessed political, nationalist and religious movements which have entirely changed the situation. We think it useful, in the present climate of renewed hopes and tensions, to publish this testimony from someone who was personally involved in this earlier period. The author, a Dominican priest in France since 1956, is an Alexandrian Melkite on his father’s side, and a Jew on his mother’s side.

My discovery of Semitism goes back to my first visit to Jerusalem in 1930, where I found the three religions derived from Semitic monotheism living side by side in the chaos of the Old City. I got the impression of a dense mass of people of various origins co-existing in mutual disdain, under the firm control of the British occupation. As soon as the British left Palestine, the fire hidden beneath the ashes broke out all over the region. A similarity of temperament on all sides, shaped by a common spiritual ancestry, became apparent, in which tenacity and terrorism were the salient features. Jews and Arabs (whether Muslim or Christian) had the same psychological reactions and instincts, shaped by their common inheritance derived from the mystical, spiritual and social teaching of the bible, the gospel and the Quran. These similarities could have provided a basis for mutual understanding, but in fact they led to disagreement, fostered by the interplay of international politics and local interests.
A Green Theology?
Authors: Arguile Roger
Published: July 2007

Before beginning to try to define what kind of Green theology is most likely to have an enduring place, let us try to define what Green theology certainly should not be.

The prophets call us to account. The tone of the call is certain, because there must be no risk of our not seeing the difference between our present failure and what they propose. The ecological problems which now occupy some portion of every week’s news produce prophecies of doom and demands for action. Our inertia, our denials and the plausible reassurances of governments necessitate both subtlety and strong language, if there is ever going to be a widespread change of attitude. For, to our minds, the villains are always other people.

In this situation the voices loudly resound of self-proclaimed prophets who declare that they alone have done the proper thing and bowed the knee to Baal. For it is the fertility rites of Baal that now so they say have first claim on us. So, again and again, when the theology of Environmental or Green issues is considered, Christianity is the system of religious belief most severely attacked.

Its reputedly negative attitude towards a fallen world and its anthropocentrism are set off against the virtues of more earthy religion, religion considered to show a greater reverence for the natural order and to be more in line with modem developments such as feminism and a greater valuation of sensuality, developments with which Christianity has had some trouble.
Imaginative Eschatology: Benson's ‘The Lord of the World’
Authors: Nichols Aidan
Published: July 2007

The advent of the end of the second millennium is unlikely to be greeted, in the historic Christian churches, with the mixture of enthusiasm and alarm which heralded the end of the first. Quite apart from the inroads of ‘de-mythologising’ and ‘existentialising’ before which traditional eschatology has lost ground, the number symbolism of biblical apocalypticism simply does not lend itself to two thousand years in the way believers with misplaced literalism applied it, in fear and awe, to the completion of the first thousand years of the agôn between the Gospel and the world. On the other hand, consider some presumptive ‘signs of the times’: the possibility, admittedly controverted, of eco-catastrophe; the ever-present threat of nuclear war—the more pressing as smaller powers, with less to lose and weaker traditions of rational policymaking, acquire weapons of mass destruction; the victories of secularist materialism which, it seems, only the Islamic powers will challenge—courageously as to substance, injudiciously as to mode; the creation of a medical technology that can encompass, at the ends of the life process, the manufacture of some human beings and the safe disposal of others; the new disparity between the technical means to feed the hungry, never before present, and the political will to do it. These provoke thought, and, in any case, the ending of a millennium reminds the Church of her faith conviction that, in this world, the human project is essentially limited in time.
Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation: A Role for Communication
Authors: Arthur Chris
Published: July 2007

One aspect of modernity which is of particular theological significance, and whose existence is intimately linked to the twentieth century’s distance-shrinking communications networks, is our new awareness of the sheer diversity of human religiousness. Those who live in a world where TV, radio and the press are commonplace features of a sophisticated media environment, cannot be blind to the fact that different people believe different things. This simple insight has profound implications for the way in which we formulate our theologies, communicate with each other and treat the natural world which is our common home.

Many theologians and philosophers have begun to acknowledge the quantum shift in thinking which the contemporary experience of religious pluralism demands. Langdon Gilkey, for example, considers the encounter with other religions to be ‘the most important new issue confronting Christian theology at the present time’. Wilfred Cantwell Smith predicts that ‘the religious life of mankind from now on, if it is to be lived at all, will be lived in a context of religious pluralism’. And Ninian Smart has suggested that ‘the earth has become in our time more or less a planet, a single globe. It is now a kind of city, the geopolis’ where the different faiths are brought into inevitable contact with each other.
Abraham's Bedroom‐Slippers God, sacred history, and chance
Authors: McDermott Timothy
Published: July 2007

The Aquinas Lecture given at Blackfriars, Oxford, on 29 January 1991.

When I was a student in Cambridge forty-odd years ago a Capuchin friar said to me, ‘God is on the surface of things’. I want to talk about that, and about how it gets obscured by the abstractions of science on the one hand and the make-believe of religion on the other.
About the word ‘revelation’
Authors: Jossua Jean‐Pierre
Published: July 2007

In the Hebrew, Jewish and Christian religions—for there are three religions, the Hebraic, the Judaic and the Christian, and not one or even two, just as there are two new testaments, the Christian and the Talmudic, and not one alone—everything begins with a ‘word’ of ‘God’ and remains founded on that primordial or very topical utterance. A human statement, embodied in a language, concepts and images, is understood as a pronouncement so ‘inspired’ by ‘God’ that we may call it ‘the word of God’. (In a fourth religion of the same family, Islam, the word practically ceases to be human, and that position, regarded by Muslims as fundamental, has been a constantly recurring temptation for the preceding faiths).
Ekaterina Sienskaya Abrikosova (1892–1936): A Dominican Uniate Foundress in the Old Russia
Authors: Nichols Aidan
Published: July 2007

Vladimir Vladimirovic Abrikosov, the future husband and cousin of the central personality of this article, was born on 22 October 1880. When his schooling was finished, he entered the faculty of History and Philology of Moscow University, where he wrote a dissertation on the causes of the Western Reformation. In years to come he would deplore the manner of his historical studies as formalistic, lacking in attentiveness to history’s significance. A constellation of attitudes by no means uncommon among educated Russians liberal families of the period. In 1904 Abrikosov married a cousin two years his junior. Anna Ivanovna Abrikosova was born on 23 January 1882. She attended the first gimnaziya (high school) to be opened in Moscow for the education of girls, and in 1899 won a scholarship to Girton College Cambridge. There she read history, assiduously, earning from her contemporaries the nickname ‘Deadly Earnest’. She was a gifted linguist with an excellent grasp of English, French, German and Italian, as well as considerable knowledge of Greek and Latin.

The household of the newly-weds was free-thinking. God was neither affirmed nor denied. Politically they supported the current which would lead to the constitutional Revolution of 1905. Their inherited wealth enabled them to live a carefree life, devoted principally to European travel and the arts. Thus, with the exception of a single month in 1905, they spent the entire period from 1904 to 1910 in France, Italy and Switzerland.
Mozart and the Guises of Love
Authors: Swanston Hamish
Published: July 2007

If not from the beginning then from a very early time of his life, Mozart knew both that love in all its diverse manifestations is the rare wonder of our experience and that it is always under attack. At a London breakfast party in 1765, the nine-years old boy was asked by the distinguished lawyer, Daines Barrington, to extemporize a song for the castrato Manzuoli. The singer had befriended the little boy on this London visit and Mozart, with a grin, at once sat down at the harpsichord and began an air composed to the single word Affetto. ‘If this extempore composition was not amazingly capital’, Barrington reported to his fellows at the Royal Society, ‘yet it was really above mediocrity, and shewed most extraordinary readiness of invention’. He had asked for another song, one that might be ‘proper for the opera stage’. Immediately, the boy began a song of Perfido. ‘And in the middle of it, he had worked himself up to such a pitch that he beat his harpsichord like a person possessed’. That Love will ever be dogged by Treachery is the continuing theme of Mozart’s dramma in musica. The writing of operas became, as he told his father in February 1778, ‘an obsession with me’, and, taken together, these operas present as rare an assessment of the great matters of our experience as the philosophy of Aristotle, the sculpture of Michelangelo, or the novels of Henry James. ‘I cannot write a poem, for I am no poet; I cannot get the light and the dark into verse. Neither am I a painter.
A Study of the Poem: Noche oscura del alma of St John of the Cross
Authors: Sarmiento Edward
Published: July 2007

Noche Oscura

Stanzas

en que canta el alma la dichosa ventura quo tuvo pasar por La Oscura Noche de la Fe en desnudez y purgacion suya, a la union del amado.

1 En una noche oscura,

con ansias, en amores inflamada,

oh dichosa ventura!,

sail sin ser notada,

estando ya mi casa sosegada;

2 a escuras y segura

por la secreta escala, disfrazada,

oh dichosa ventura!,

a escuras y en celada,

estando ya mi casa sosegada;

3 en la noche dichosa,.

en secreto, que naide me veia,

ni yo miraba cosa,

sin otra luz y guia,

sino la que en el corazon ardia.

4 Aquesta me guiaba

mas cierto que la luz del mediodia,

adonde me esperaba

quien yo bien me sabia,

en parte donde naide parecia.

5 Oh noche que guiaste!

Oh noche, amable m&s que la alborada!

Oh noche que juntaste

Amado con amada,

amada en el Amado transformada!

6 En mi pecho florido,

que entero para el solo se guardaba,

alii quedo dormido,

y yo le regalaba,

y en ventalle de cedros aire daba.

7 El aire del almena,

cuando yo sus cabellos esparda,

con su mano serena

en mi cuello heria

y todos mis sentidos suspendia.

8 Quedeme y olvideme,

el rostro recline sobre el Amado:

ceso todo, y dej?me,

dejando mi cuidado

entre las azucenas olividado.
The Seven Sayings of Jesus from the Cross: Observations on Order and Presentation in the New Testament, Literature and Cinema
Authors: Kreitzer Larry
Published: July 2007

Ever since Tatian’s Diatessaron (c. 150 CE) there has been a tradition within the Christian Church of harmonizing the life of Jesus and blend together the four gospel accounts so as to compose a biography of the Lord. Perhaps nowhere is this tendency to harmonization more clearly demonstrated than in the sayings of Jesus from the cross. In fact, there are seven so-called ‘sayings from the cross’ recorded within our New Testament, but it sometimes comes as a surprise to discover just how these seven sayings are distributed. We note the following table:

1. The Sayings of Jesus from the Cross

§1.) ‘My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?’ (Mark 15:33/Matthew 27:46)

§2.) ‘Father forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing.’ (Luke 23:34)

§3.) ‘Truly I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise. (Luke 23:43)

§4.) ‘Father into your hands I commit my spirit.’ (Luke 23:46)

§5.) ‘Woman behold your son ... Behold your mother. (John 19:26—27)

§6.) ‘I am thirsty.’ (John 19:28)

§7.) ‘It is finished!’(John 19:30)

2. Distinctives in Presentation within the Gospels

The first thing to notice about the distribution of the sayings is that the sole saying recorded in both Matthew and Mark is the same, probably due to Matthew’s reliance upon Mark for the passion narratives in his gospel. This means that if the only gospel we had was Mark, we would have quite a distinctive picture of the crucifixion. Here, the only statement of Jesus is one of extreme dereliction, of forsakeness and isolation.
Thank God Our Time is Now
Authors: Hume Basil
Published: July 2007

The search for God of necessity entails a commitment to the Kingdom and its values. That Kingdom is a present and future reality. Out of our fumblings and failures, our confusion and darkness, our dreams and ceaseless striving, the Lord of history reveals his kingdom among us and brings to pass his purposes.

Inevitably the process involves repeated death and resurrection. When everything seems lost and darkness reigns, the power of God is most clearly manifested in our weakness.

The Church, we know, has no political agenda. It has, however, a divine mission to proclaim the Kingdom, witness to its values, be a sign and source of universal reconciliation and human renewal. The Church and its members must be a prophetic voice in society. We must seek always to discern the signs of the time and be agents of constructive change at every level. Experience, however teaches us that members of the Church may not speak with one voice for the way ahead is sometimes unclear.

The Church’s mission is both universal and particular. There is a global responsibility as well as one which is national and continental. The concern for our immediate country and its neighbours must never for instance blind us to the needs of the Southern hemisphere. To the best of our ability we must keep alive in our continent the sense that solidarity, interdependence and practical concern embrace the whole planet. In this connection I would remind you of what the Holy Father wrote in his most recent Encyclical Centesimus Annus concerning the universal destination of the goods of creation, both material and spiritual.
Christian Memory and National Consciousness
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

My original title for this paper asked a question: The Church—Focus for European Integration? Of course there is a great deal that the Church, whether we mean those of us in communion with Rome or include Christians of the Reformed and Orthodox Churches, is able and likely to do to focus integration in Europe. But as I come now to write it I find that the emphasis in what I want to say suggests a fairly modest proposal for some work at national level which would necessarily be ecumenical in character.

Christians, in Europe at least, are perhaps more of an obstacle in the way rather than any kind of focus of integration. True, not all the ancient and venomous conflicts that you see almost wherever you look in ‘Europe’ have religious or if you like ecclesiastical origins or dimensions. The problem of Basque separatism in Spain doesn’t have any religious dimension. But whether it is Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, or Croatian Catholics and Orthodox Serbs, or Christians and Muslims in Cyprus, to mention only the three bitterest conflicts (and religion is not the only factor in any of these cases), it is tempting to suggest that if there were a lot less religion around it would be easier to see how Europeans might be united in peace and prosperity. There are ancient Christian countries in Europe where anti-semitism isn’t totally absent and it may be wondered whether Christians in Europe are any better placed to cope with Islam than our ancestors were at the gates of Vienna in 1683.
The New Europe and the Third World
Authors: McDonagh Francis
Published: July 2007

During this conference, I suggest, we have taken part in a process of demystification of various illusions about the spiritual or moral roots of the new Europe.

Garrett Fitzgerald suggested that the European Community had brought about a revolution in consciousness in three areas: it had abandoned war as a means of settling internal disputes; it had produced a Convention on Human Rights enforceable by the European Court; and it had recognised Europe’s duty towards the Third World both in the Lomé Convention and other Community structures and in individual country aid programmes. Dr Fitzgerald anticipated criticism, and backtracked a little to say that these were all revolutions in principle. With regard to the church, he was much less positive. He said that in Ireland there was an underground church, waiting for the day when the values of Vatican II would be proclaimed anew. This note was struck in all the other reports from local churches. From France and Italy too we heard of an institutional church failing to meet the needs and aspirations of many of its members, who were turning to a variety of small groups, often viewed with concern by the hierarchy. George Vass, too, discussing Eastern Europe, questioned the assumption implicit in many discussions of lux ex Oriente. The light shining in the East is less a beacon than scattered sparks. Even the small communities which have carried the weight of renewal, he suggested, may not survive emerging from the cosy excitement of the underground into the cold wind of a pluralist society.
The Challenge of Héloise—Language, Truth and Logic Revisited
Authors: Grey Mary
Published: July 2007

Latin-American, Asian, black and feminist Liberation theologies have in common that theology becomes re-defined from and by the perspective and experience of the oppressed group. The hope was that through doing theology from the margins—or from the ‘underside of history—the central models (paradigms) of traditional theology would be transformed: ethics becomes Liberation Ethics, concepts of God, Christ, and Spirit are grounded in the experience of the struggle for justice, the Bible is read as a text of Liberation, and a new readiness would appear to dialogue with the ‘submerged’ faiths of oppressed peoples.

My argument here is that the paradigm shift did not go deep enough. Looking around at the worsening crises of the world—African famine, environmental disasters, structural violence and the ineluctable spirals of poverty—it seems to me that Liberation Theology has not succeeded because it has not as yet tackled the roots of oppression in language and logic itself. Tracking the roots of oppression to their theological and philosophical sources is a necessary activity of liberation. It means questioning the foundational myth on which our western civilisation is based. Even the feminist attempts to construct a new ethics have not gone far enough. For example, American psychologist and educationalist Carol Gilligan attempted to construct an ethics of care and responsibility, based on her research, as opposed to an ethics of justice and fairness, (the categories of her colleague, Lawrence Kohlberg).
The Energy Crisis and Nuclear Power
Authors: Hodgson Peter
Published: July 2007

The scientific and technological advances of the present century have brought about an unprecedented increase in the standard of living of millions of the world’s inhabitants. This has however created new problems that have recently come into prominence. We are acutely aware that the resources of the earth are finite, that we are using them up at an accelerating rate, and that many of our activities are polluting the earth to an unacceptable degree. If we persist along our present course we are heading for an irreversible disaster that will make our present worries pale into insignificance.

These problems are widely debated; books, articles and television programmes tell us about the threats to our fragile earth. Many organisations demand rapid action. It is recognised that the Church has a vital part to play in this debate, and indeed has already made important contributions. In many respects, however, it has failed to rise to the occasion, and does no more than repeat the errors and distortions of the media.

A basic requirement, generally not well understood, is that those who contribute to these debates should have a certain level of understanding of the basic scientific and technological facts. Without this it is almost impossible to say anything useful, and very easy to talk dangerous nonsense. It is thus necessary to begin by a brief summary of the present situation and, with this as a basis, to pass on to wider political and moral questions. It is convenient to begin with the energy crisis, a definite a clear-cut problem that faces us now. We all depend on energy in its various forms, and the amount available to us is directly related to our standard of living. Hundreds of millions of people are now living in the direst poverty because they do not have enough energy. Where are we going to get the energy to give them life, and to support us all in the next century?
Christians Telling Stories
Authors: Swanston Hamish F.G.
Published: July 2007

Jesus has a reputation as a story-teller. He is known for his announcement of the Reign of God in stories of a merchant buying a pearl, a traveller being mugged on the road, a woman sweeping her floor. His theology had always the form of fiction. ‘He did not speak to them without a parable’. This was a peculiar theological method. Whatever likenesses there may have been between the people of the Dead Sea scrolls and the first company of disciples, they did not have such a story-teller at their centre. And though there have been several attempts to establish that speaking in parables was an ordinary style of preaching with Jesus’ rabbinic contemporaries, these attempts have resulted rather in some further confirmation of Jesus’ individual distinction. There was no preacher like him. No one telling such stories. Paul, as a youngster, had clearly enjoyed the hebrew Exodus legend about a rolling stone, and the greek fable of Menenius about a talking stomach. But, if he is anywhere near as representative of the pharisee tradition as he claims to be, it must be significant for our view of contemporary jewish teachers that he thought it sufficiently daring in his theologising to elaborate a little allegory from the story of Abraham.

Jesus’ story-telling talent has proved to be as singular in the history of Christian theology. The vaster number of those who have thought it their vocation to articulate the peculiar Christian appreciation of God have been as useless at story-telling as Paul. It may be, confronted by a demand for imaginative narrative, determinedly unfictionalising theologians should have claimed that ‘the logical consistency which frames all dogmas into a consistent whole’ is to be understood, as Leslie Stephen observed in a fine essay on ‘Wordsworth’s Ethics’, as ‘an aspect of the imaginative power’ by which we harmonise our strongest and subtlest feelings.
Sharing the Universe with Angels
Authors: Ombres Robert
Published: July 2007

A Sermon preached at Evensong in St John’s College, Oxford on 1 March 1992. The readings chosen were Isaiah 6:1—8 and Revelation 22:1-9. The poetry is from Rilke's Duino Elegies, the passage in St Thomas is from Summa Theologiae I q. 61 a. 3.

I am honoured and excited at being invited to preach in College on a theme of my choice. Honoured for obvious reasons—excited because as a Roman Catholic I am used to everything being forbidden unless it is compulsory. It is an exciting change to taste Anglican freedom, and to choose one’s texts and one’s theme.

So, I have chosen to reflect on angels, basing myself on those intriguing biblical texts we have just heard from the prophet Isaiah and from the book of Revelation. But has the subject of angels been a wise choice? Is there not something irresponsible in preaching on such an abstruse and specialised subject in our day and age? Is this going to be an exercise in Christian day-dreaming and telling fairy tales? It might be said that if angels prove anything, they prove the irrelevance of our faith today. Some will say that this is what you should expect if you invite a Dominican friar to preach; antiquarian theology. Some will say that this is the kind of concern that makes Christianity beautiful but of no real use; well-meaning silliness.
Icons and Glory
Authors: Navone John
Published: July 2007

Name your three best friends, and then name the three nations that you most admire. This test for self-knowledge generally reveals the discrepancy between the truly significant others in our lives and what we esteem as the great and glorious nations. Generally, the three most significant and dear persons in our lives are not particularly wealthy, or powerful or prestigious, or from ‘superior’ ethnic backgrounds. Yet still we persist in identifying glory with manifest power, a fact which underscores the urgent need for Christians to recapture a proper understanding of “glory’, now almost obscured by the modem secular notion of power. For surely it is our Christian conviction that the glory of God has been revealed in the poverty of Christ?

God speaks his word of hope and love in human images (in Greek eikones—‘icons’), sacraments or ‘efficacious signs’ which move our hearts and enlighten our minds. We cannot do what we cannot at least in some way imagine or envision. We cannot believe, hope and love—our most significant ‘doing’—without enabling images (’icons’, in other words) or sacraments. We cannot perform the deeds of faith and hope and love without the living icons that constitute orientations to action. The Eternal Word of God became flesh in the perfect image of God that is Jesus Christ, in order to transform all human hearts and minds, enabling us through the gift of his Spirit to love God above all and our neighbour as ourselves. Jesus Christ and his Church are the sacrament or efficacious sign of God’s creative and sustaining and predestining activity in the universal, human story, making possible our responding love and faith and hope in God. The Christian community affirms that it has seen or experienced the ‘glory’ of God in his perfect image Jesus Christ, for the glory is the impact of God’s active presence transforming our lives.
Sublime Policing: Sociology and Milbank's City of God
Authors: Flanagan Kieran
Published: July 2007

Sociology is a necessary evil on the academic landscape. It is the discipline we all like to hate. Somehow, sociology fits everywhere and yet belongs nowhere in particular. It does not have the finesse of philosophy, the vision of theology or the grace of classics, but as a mongrel child of the Enlightenment it plays about with their deepest insights. Sociology reflects modernity, but in a way that confirms an instinctive dislike of its basis. In the academic game of musical chairs, sociology is left standing, when the waltz ceases, and other disciplines sit awaiting the next score. Yet behind this facade of dislike, an odder and deeper crisis confronts sociology.

In the past two decades, philosophy, literary studies, history and classics have all become entwined in sociology which stands at the analytical crossroads directing a busy traffic in concepts up the high road of modernity. But as its rhetoric becomes woven into the humanities, the distinctive voice of sociology has become muted. Critical theory, embracing linguistics, post-structuralism, phenomenology and post-modernism, to name a few, now have squatter’s rights within sociological theory. Textual exegesis forms the basis of much critical philosophy which sociology has to recognise, but is uncertain how to use. Whereas Dilthey laid the philosophical basis for the autonomy of the cultural sciences against the clutches of the natural sciences, an equivalent exercise has yet to be undertaken for sociology in relation to the competing demands of other disciplines also to speak of culture. Despite their sophistication, modern philosophers such as Rorty, MacIntyre, Derrida and Levinas yield slight sociological insights. There are two sides to the analytical coins to be spent in the cultural marketplace. Sociology makes its own purchases, and these are not the debased offerings of the ‘thick’, incapable of reading the classical texts of philosophy in all their nuances. Too often one gets thick philosophical works with a very thin amount of sociology sandwiched in the centre. Anyhow, sociology has its own problems in dealing with culture.
Philip Carpenter RIP
Authors: Radcliffe Timothy
Published: July 2007

Martha says to Jesus, ‘If you had been here, my brother would not have died.’ (Jn.II:21) Lazarus’ death breaks up a home, a family. The family of Mary and Martha and Lazarus was one of the places in which Jesus rested and refreshed himself, and it is a home that is broken by death and by the apparent absence of Jesus: ‘If you had been here, my brother would not have died.’

Many of Philip’s friends will experience his death in much the same way. Whenever one came to see Philip, one was made to feel immediately at home; one was made welcome, as he put a large gin and tonic into one’s hand and one relaxed into a deep, comfortable chair. And he communicated a sense of the Church as a large open home, in which anyone could find acceptance, peace. A place where, as St.Paul said in the second reading no one would be despised.

Perhaps the roots of this vision of Christianity lay in his own sense of family. He was devoted to his family, to his brother, Gilbert, a priest of the Church of England, to his sister-in-law, to his nephews and nieces. His house was filled with family furniture and pictures of ancestors. And he shared this open hearth with all sorts of waifs and strays who came his way.

This was why he was such a good University chaplain for eleven years. He claimed that this saved him from being narrow and dogmatic; it opened his mind. But that was because he opened himself to anyone who turned up, and especially to foreign students, when he was based at the Overseas Students’ Chaplaincy from 1966 to 1973, before he came here.
The Language of Likeness in the Apocalypse
Authors: Cook Cornelia
Published: July 2007

Sometime around the middle of the third century Dionysius of Alexandria gave his views on the Apocalypse of John. He said

Some indeed of those before our time rejected and altogether impugned the book, examining it chapter by chapter and declaring it to be unintelligible, and illogical, and its title false.

For they say that it is not John’s, no, nor yet an apocalypse (unveiling), since it is veiled by its great thick curtain of unintelligibility....

Many readers have no doubt entertained such views. Dionysius was not inclined to endorse them. He would not, he said, reject a book so highly thought of by many of his co-religionists. But he doesn’t find it any more intelligible for all that. He goes on to say

... but, reckoning that my perception is inadequate to form an opinion concerning it, I hold that the interpretation of each several passage is in some way hidden and more wonderful. For even though I do not understand it, yet I suspect that some deeper meaning underlies the words.

The book must be meaningful, then, because he doesn’t understand it That curious position may actually provide a clue to the way the book works. What the seer saw is spectacular. But more interesting is how he saw it—or rather how he says he saw it, in his book of the vision. The significance of Revelation lies, to a considerable extent, in how the seer wrote it.
The Hippo and the Fox: a cautionary tale
Authors: Atkins Margaret
Published: July 2007

Matthew Fox’s popular but over-simplified retelling of the history of Christian attitudes to creation makes St Augustine the prime enemy. In the table at the back of Original Blessing, Augustine is the first-named spokesperson in the enemy camp, so to speak, of ‘fall-redemption’ theologians. It might seem appropriate therefore to borrow the pages of a Dominican journal to ask whether Fox has somewhat missed the point. It seems important to correct the distorted account for two reasons, negatively because Fox’s sharp distinction into either ‘creation- centred’ or ‘fall-redemption’ theologians allows him to pretend that these two fundamental elements of Christian theology are conflicting rather than complementary; positively, because Augustine himself has a great deal to contribute to serious thought about creation.

I should like to trace three themes which Augustine explored in the light of both Biblical thought and ancient (particularly Neoplatonic) philosophy and which run through his reflections upon creation. I want to argue that far from being the pernicious influence that led the Western world to an uncritical anthropocentrism, Augustine in fact provides certain valuable insights for a balanced and properly theocentric theology of creation. The three themes I shall discuss are:

(i) ‘reason’ as the thing that distinguishes humans from animals;

(ii) the goodness of all created things;

(iii) the dependence of the creation upon the Creator.
Northern Ireland—A Case for Kairos?
Authors: Dowell Graham
Published: July 2007

This year’s Dominican Peace Action summer school was held at Carlingford, a small coastal town just south of the border with Northern Ireland, a few miles from Newry. A useful vantage point from which to learn at first hand from those who have had to live with ‘The Troubles’ for more than two decades; and to hear from groups and participants engaged in conflict-resolution and the search for further, long-term ‘solutions’—bearing in mind the old adage that Northern Ireland has a problem for every solution’. On the principle that pilgrimages should be made to harassed as well as holy places, we made ours both to St Patrick’s grave at Downpatrick and to the R.U.C. training establishment in Belfast.

Families travelling from the U.K. were joined by Irish ‘residents’, Dominican sisters and others, who shared their experience and concentrated our minds. Hosts and guests may have come with differing agenda; but it may be fair to say that our reasons for coming together were three-fold. First, as workers for peace, it would be inconceivable to ignore or turn our backs on the unresolved conflict within our own jurisdiction: the denial of human rights which sparked off the first Civil Rights march in August, 1968,with the repercussions - military intervention, the suspension of Stormont, internment, the Anglo-Irish Agreement etc., with which we live today.

Second, considering the physical proximity of the two islands and their intimate historical association, much of that history must fill us with shame and compel us, the ex-colonial power, to metanoia. As Christians we must share in the responsibility for past crimes committed against the Irish people. And if, as the contributors to the Evangelical statement ‘For God and His Glory Alone’ recently declared, ‘the essential nature of repentance is losing face’, then we have, each in our own way, to confess that ‘we are not just victims of history—we have been wrong’.
Adrienne von Speyr and the Mystery of the Atonement
Authors: Nichols Aidan
Published: July 2007

Adrienne von Speyr (1902-1967) is this century’s most remarkable mystical theologian: a mystic, that is, become theologically articulate. Although her place in the history of Catholic theology is, thanks to her influence on Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988), entirely assured, her life and teaching—above all, her doctrine of the Atonement—are of considerable interest in their own right.

Adrienne von Speyr was bom at La Chaux des Fonds, in a Frenchspeaking part of Canton Berne, Switzerland, on 20 September 1902. Her father, an eye surgeon, came from a Basle family distinguished for doctors, (Protestant) clerics and businessmen. Her relation with her mother was bad, but, to compensate, she enjoyed what her biographer, the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, calls ‘a totally childlike existence in God and for God’. On such matters as how to be with God in prayer, and the value of sacrifice and renunciation she was instructed by an angel. Though she lived all her life in an academic milieu and became herself, as we shall see, a professional person, and, moreover, had as her confessor and biographer the most learned Catholic theologian of the present century, we cannot make sense of Adrienne’s mysticism unless we accept that, to her awareness, angels and saints were constantly coming and going in her life, and behind these the Holy Trinity itself. She got on well with her father, who allowed her to go with him on his hospital rounds in order to visit sick children. Similarly, in the holidays, when she stayed with an uncle who was director of a psychiatric hospital near Berne, she was found to have a great gift for calming the patients, getting through to them, and cheering the depressed. From these experiences came her resolve to become a doctor herself. Her own health was below par. She was often ill, and had recurrent backaches caused by inflammation of the vertebrae.
Immortality and the Soul
Authors: Selman F. J.
Published: July 2007

Many people have thought you could have the immortality of the soul without the resurrection through not seeing that the body and soul belong to one another by nature. Now, however, we are getting the opposite view: the resurrection without the immortality of the soul. Although it may be vain to hope for immortality without the resurrection, it is not apparent that the same person is raised up without something of us continuing in existence after death. But there is no immortality of the soul anyway unless we have souls.

To More, however, writing in 1515, and perhaps giving his own answer to those who, like Pomponazzo, denied the immortality of the soul, as well as showing an awareness of the view of those who, like Cajetan, did not think it could be demonstrated by reason, it seemed that a people practising a natural religion would hold that the soul is immortal. In the Second Book of Utopia, he tells us that whenever the Utopians discuss felicity or blessedness they add to the reasons of philosophy certain principles taken from religion, for the inquiry of which they think reason of itself weak and imperfect, and one of these principles is: That the soul is immortal. The Utopians themselves seem to have regarded not believing in the immortality of the soul as something inimical to society, for further on we read that, though their founder, king Utopus, wanted there to be liberty of religion among them, on this one point he laid it down that ‘no one should conceive so vile and base an opinion of the dignity of man’s nature as to think that the souls do die and perish with the body’. We find a similar connection between human dignity and the soul being made a little later, in 1512, by the Dominican, Fr Antonio de Montesinos, who, in his famous sermon pointing out to the Spanish conquerors of the New World that the native Indians possessed human dignity, appealed to the argument that they too had souls. ‘Are they not men?’, he asked, ‘Do they not have rational souls?’