bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Over the Ashes
Authors: Loughlin Gerard
Published: July 2007

Hume, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida—these names can be made to evoke a certain history of thought, one that tells the rise and fall of foundationalist modernity. It is a history written as obituary: the death of God and the death of Man. The condition of the postmodern person is then like one living among a heap of rubble and ashes, wondering what ‘comes after’. But on looking up, such a postmodern may yet see hovering spirits.

A couple of years ago, in the summer of 1990, the themes of such a history and its aftermath were given an all too rare British voice at King’s College, Cambridge, which was host to an important conference on the postmodern. It was a conference on contemporary Western culture and its religious subtexts. Entitled The Shadow of Spirit, the conference, at least in its plenary sessions, increasingly turned to the unavoidability of the ethical; to the irreducibility of spirit This turning found a particular focus in the discussion—one might even say, the confrontation, the differend—between George Steiner and Don Cupitt. It is possible to gain some idea of the tension it produced by reading against one another, the artificed interrogations of Steiner’s Real Presences (1989) and the manifestos that are Cupitt’s most recent works. For Steiner, the pleasures and freedoms of the ‘market’ (so naively championed by Cupitt in Keynes’ Hall) are no defence against the darkness of the ‘final solution’; the darkness of a culture that thinks itself only human, conceiver of an absolute and arbitrary power.
The Sound of the Analogia Entis Part II
Authors: Murphy Francesca
Published: July 2007

Von Balthasar’s “On the Unfolding of the Musical Idea” contains one of his recurrent stories: the grave suggestion that musical form expresses the beautiful, and therefore touches on the horizon of the divine. Von Balthasar later recalled Ehrenfels’ achievement. He says that the conception of form which undergirds Aristotelian and scholastic ontology, as a “totality of parts” which “transcends its members as parts”,

“. . . was excavated with sufficient success out of the ruins of atomistic psychology ... by Christian von Ehrenfels”.

The first step in the reappraisal of die ontological difference is the recovery of the essentia. As von Balthasar says in reference to Anselm, the theological act needs the grip hold of the philosophical intuition of essences. The realistic phenomenologists showed that this can be achieved, and that, not as a dogmatic exercise, but as a living philosophical enterprise. Any exit into a static essentialism is blocked by Ehrenfels’ starting place in the study of music. The melodic gestalt flows out of a movement in time. Przywara hears the ‘essence’ as an interplay of phonic forces, interweaving in their diverse speeds and velocities. Von Balthasar takes beautiful form as the analogy for the Christology of The Glory. He finds in the Incarnation a design of horizontal and vertical thrusts. He says,

”... Everyone who has listened to Bach knows that in the classical fugue, the slow rhythmical arrangement is oppositional: the first theme is slow and reposeful, the second runs along swiftly, and the third contains a rhythmical hammering; and every hearer knows that this varied thematic construction is determined by the rationale of the fugue‘s total construction. Something similar occurs with the Gospel. The eschatological theme, … is incomprehensible without the cadence of Christ’s suffering. The vertical form of the Son of God who descends from the Father and goes back to him would be illegible without the horizontal fom of historical fulfilment …”
Philosophy and Theology in the Monastery: The Thought of Dom Illtyd Trethowan
Authors: Davies Brian
Published: July 2007

Dom Illtyd Trethowan, monk of Downside, died on October 30, 1993. One of his last publications was a recent review in New Blaclfriars, but his writings, and his efforts to make available works of theology and philosophy by others, go back a very long way. His first article appeared in The Downside Review in 1935 (he subsequently came to be Editor of The Downside Review). His first book, Certainty, Philosophical and Theological, appeared in 1948. Before then he translated Eugène Masure’s seminal study Sacrifice du Chef (1944), and, as early as 1940 (together with Frank Sheed) he translated Etienne Gilson’s La Philosophic de Saint Bonaventure. Between 1948 and the time of his death he published 110 articles, plus numerous book reviews. He also produced seven substantial books, an edition of the writings of Walter Hilton, and several translations of important authors not much known in the English-speaking world—most notably, Maurice Blondel, Louis Lavelle, and Louis Bouyer.

Dom Illtyd was not a monk who travelled to teach and spend lots of time outside his monastery. In 1969 he lectured for one semester in the U.S.A. (at Brown University in Rhode Island), but he was otherwise a fixture at Downside from the day that he joined the community there. Yet simply in terms of pages printed, his published works and translations clearly place him in the forefront of twentieth century British Catholics writing on religion and trying to make available the writings on religion of others.
The Human Person: Animal and Spirit
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

In 1988 David Braine, who has taught philosophy at the University of Aberdeen for many years, published The Reality of Time and the Existence of God, a metaphysical proof of God’s existence. Now, in this second book, The Human Person: Animal and Spirit (Duckworth, London, 1993) which certainly stands on its own although we are frequently referred back to the earlier book and forward to two (if not three) forthcoming volumes, he reconstructs the argument advanced by Thomas Aquinas in favour of our immortality, an even more audacious enterprise in the present intellectual climate.

The first move is to cut off every form of dualism which splits the animals that we human beings are into parts that then have to be related to one another. The traditional mind/body dualism to which Platonist Christians have always been attracted is, so David Braine argues, no different from the brain/mind identity theories which currently flourish under such labels as physicalism, behaviourism and so on. While of course he conducts the argument with reference in general terms to current literature he is surely right in saying that the modern debates raise no issues that would surprise Aquinas. The Platonists paid attention only to the immateriality of the human intellect while the pre-Socratic Ionians believed that knowledge is simply physical (cf Summa Theologiae, la 84, 2). The greater threat nowadays to the unitariness of the human being is, as Braine says, various forms of materialism and, in particular, some of the Artificial Intelligence theories.
Scripture for Christian Conversion
Authors: Navone John
Published: July 2007

The church employs its scriptures for the attainment of human authenticity in Christian conversion, conceived as both event and lifelong process. Its pedagogy aims at the transformation of the cognitive and affective consciousness of human subjects, of the decision-making and activity of responsible human agents, in every sphere of their relational existence (intrapersonal, interpersonal, social, national, international). The theocentric and Christocentric process of self-transcendence in Christian conversion entails four complementary aspects: metanoia (transformation), kenosis (generosity), diakonia (service), and koinonia (friendship).

Scripture is both informative and above all transformative. The Old Testament is a call to theocentric self-transcendence in religious conversion. The New Testament is a call to Christocentric self-transcendence in Christian conversion. Christocentricity guarantees the authenticity of theocentricity in religious conversion.

Conversion entails the transformation of the human and its world in all the spheres of human intentionality and conscious operations. As subjects, our cognitive and affective consciousness undergoes a transformation in both the event and continuous process of conversion. The transformed or ‘converted’ subject has a new way of knowing and loving: it is no longer the center of its world. The theocentric self-transcendence of religious conversion becomes Christocentric when we are enabled by Jesus Christ to know as we are known and to love as we are loved (1 Cor 13:12; 1 Jn 3:2; Gal 4:9). The theocentric sel-ftranscendence of Jesus Christ enables our own, it transforms our cognitive and affective consciousness by making us sons in the Son.
Creating Options: Shattering the ‘Exclusivist, Inclusivist, and Pluralist’ Paradigm
Authors: Markham Ian
Published: July 2007

Organization and classification of material is essential as an aid to effective communication. Good teachers and writers will use labels to organize material, which play a valuable role in simplifying a debate. They provide a way in for the student or reader. However, this organization and classification of material is not a neutral and objective enterprise. One’s classification will hide certain basic decisions and options.

It is the argument of this article that the ‘theology of religions’ debate has been stifled by an over-emphasis on the standard threefold paradigm. I will be taking issue with John Hick’s judgment: ‘the simplest and least misleading classification is the now fairly standard threefold division into exclusivism (salvation is confined to Christianity), inclusivism (salvation occurs throughout the world but is always the work of Christ), and pluralism (the great world faiths are different and independently authentic contexts of salvation/liberation) ‘. I am not alone in wanting to point out the cracks in this paradigm, but I want to go a stage further and attempt to formulate one option which cannot be embraced by the traditional paradigm.

The underlying problem with the traditional classification results from the conflation of three matters:

1. The conditions for salvation.

2. Whether the major world religions are all worshipping the same God.

3. The truth about the human situation.

The traditional paradigm emphasizes the first, is confused about the second, and, with regard to the third, links truth questions with soteriology. This is easily exposed as unsatisfactory.
On Baptising the Visual Arts: A Friar's Meditation on Art
Authors: Nichols Aidan
Published: July 2007

I owe my sub-title to Winefride Wilson, one of the last members of that remarkable English Catholic experiment in the uniting of art, worship and life, the Ditchling Community, That was how she rendered the German name of an important manifesto for the revival of Christian art Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder’s Herzensgiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (1797), ‘Heartfelt Outpourings of an Art-loving Cloister-brother’. Wackenroder’s impassioned appeal for a renaissance of Christian art, so moribund in his period as in our own, has lost nothing of its relevance today. In this article, I propose to indicate, first of all, the significance of this subject; secondly, to place this discussion in its contemporary secular context; and thirdly, to make some proposals for retrieving, and enhancing, the lost riches of the Church’s iconography.

The Second Vatican Council instructs all Catholics that ‘those decrees of earlier times [the reference is to the Second Council of Nicaea, 787, and the Council of Trent, 1545-1564] regarding the veneration of images of Christ, the Blessed Virgin and the saints be religiously observed’. And this bare statement of Lumen Gentium, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, is filled out in its sister text on the Holy Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium. In the latter, we find a distinction (to which I shall return) between ‘religious art’, ars religiosa, and ‘sacred art’, ars sacra, seen as the high-point of religious art at large.
George Steiner and the Theology of Culture
Authors: Ward Graham
Published: July 2007

In 1990 George Steiner was invited to give the Gifford lectures at Glasgow University. They were well received. In fact, in Donald MacKinnon’s words, they were ‘an outstanding series’. They are as yet unpublished. While we still await their publication, the paperback version of Real Presences, his most outstanding explication so far of a theology of culture, has appeared. Furthermore, in 1993 John Hopkins University Press are publishing, under the editorship of Nathan Scott, a collection of essays on various aspects of George Steiner’s work. This article attempts to assess the preoccupation with theological issues evident in Steiner’s work from the beginning.

That culture and its meaning are underwritten by God is a thesis with a long history in literary studies. From the Greeks to Proust, from the Torah to Thomas Mann, the argument that the great artist is ‘inspired’ and communicates that which transcends both himself/herself and his/her public is an ancient one. When George Steiner began defending this argument (in opposition to the formalism of New Criticism in the States) in the late Fifties and early Sixties, he might appear therefore as a late believer in the traditions of liberal humanism. He could be seen as a man ascending a path into the mountains well- trodden before him by the likes of Coleridge, Ruskin, Arnold and T.S.Eliot. Aware, from his examination of the work of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky of ‘genius [who] had fallen into the hands of the living God’ (T.D. p.44), he began by exploring the frontiers of language. In 1961 we find him writing about ‘the retreat of the word’ in contemporary culture in an essay with that title. Silence threatens, he prophesies. But it is the silence of the meaningless, the illiterate; the silence of ossified cliche. In the early Sixties we find him preoccupied with this silence and countering it with another form of silence—the silence of the Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus of Dante’s Paradiso—where language arches back towards its origin, ‘where the word of the poet ceases, [and] a great light begins’ (L.S. p.59). In 1966, in the remarkable essay ‘Silence and the Poet’ Steiner goes on to make the claim that here at the frontiers of language is ‘proof of a transcendent presence in the fabric of the world. . . [W]e experience the certitude of a divine meaning surpassing and enfolding ours. What lies beyond man’s word is eloquent of God’ (L.S.p.58).
On Not Starving the Unconscious
Authors: Fisher Anthony
Published: July 2007

The Hillsborough football disaster in 1989 left Tony Bland in what doctors call a ‘persistent vegetative state’ (‘PVS’). His heart still pumped, he breathed, and most of his other vital organs worked, all unassisted. His eyes opened and shut; he yawned and moved reflexively; he reacted to loud noises with a start. But as far as doctors could tell he could not perceive, think or feel, and would never regain consciousness in this life. The English High Court, the Court of Appeal and (last month) the House of Lords all ruled that all food, water and antibiotics might be withdrawn from Tony Bland and sedatives administered so that he would die peacefully and soon.

The judges were keenly aware of the moral, legal and social dilemmas which the case occasioned. In general they took the view that the law should closely reflect what is ‘morally right’ in such areas, or at least ‘what society accepts as morally right’. They thought there were three principles to be balanced and applied in this case; the sanctity of life; the autonomy of the patient; and the duty of care. The principle of the sanctity of human life was said to be deeply embedded in our law and ethics, in Britain and throughout the world, included in international human rights documents, and strongly felt by people of all religions and none.
Strangers to Ourselves
Authors: Reilly Patrick
Published: July 2007

In our time, solidarity has become a term increasingly used by people in relatively affluent parts of the world to express their sense of pity for, of sympathy with, of reaching out to, some oppressed or disadvantaged section of fellow human beings, invariably so submerged that they are unable to speak for themselves: the starving masses of Africa, the exploited poor of South America, the new underclass who live, surplus to requirements, redundant ciphers, without hope or dignity, in the decaying ghettos of our great western cities. Some such sentiment is the driving- force behind liberation theology—the conviction, justified by that unforgettable passage in St. Matthew’s Gospel, that if we are to find Christ in our world, it can only be in the dispossessed and wretched of the earth (when you did this to the least of these my brethren, you did it to me); together with the chilling corollary that when we ignore the poor, we are slighting the Saviour himself, telling the Son of God that his sufferings are no concern of ours.

It is no purpose of mine to disparage or belittle liberation theology, to fault the modem Church for its wholly admirable decision to identify with the poor, to choose Lazarus above Dives—this is, after all simply a copying of the Master, the imitation of Christ. If he chose to be bom powerless, it would be foolish and idolatrous for his followers to worship power. If he spoke so trenchantly about the risks of wealth, his Church, far from admiring, should feel a special compassion for those poor rich people so at risk of suffering the same catastrophe as the wealthy fool in the parable.
This is the Lamb of God
Authors: Inman Anne
Published: July 2007

‘This is the Lamb of God’. These are the words used at the Eucharist to describe Jesus Christ present in the consecrated bread. Jesus, sacramentally present, is identified with the passover lamb, the sacrifice without blemish, and the dumb sheep of Isaiah 53, representing passivity and acceptance of suffering as in some way redemptive. However, for a fuller picture of what it means for Jesus to be ‘Lamb’, it is necessary to turn as well to the Book of Revelation. Here we find that, apart from brief references in Chapter 1 to other Christological ideas involving a figure which seems to combine the Ancient of Days, Jesus Christ and an Angel figure, Christ is always referred to as ‘Lamb’. The Lamb for the author of Revelation is the symbol of power.

The Lamb of Revelation is seen in heaven. The action that takes place in heaven is the judgement that takes place upon the world. This is an effective judgement which produces the dramatic events that will take the world through the End time to the End, the last Day of Judgement and the Renewal of the Cosmos, that is through the culminating events of world history in the broadest sense. The action is effected through Christ, represented by the image of the Lamb of God, a slain yet living Lamb.

This image holds together the heavenly court scenes and world history at two consecutive levels. The Lamb represents one who, now enthroned in heaven, has acted decisively in world history, one who has conquered (5.5).
The Church As Communio
Authors: Kasper +Walter
Published: July 2007

A sharp-witted analyst of the church’s contemporary situation once said: No previous council spoke so extensively and so profoundly about the Church as the Second Vatican Council. After no other council was there such great confusion over the question of what the church is and which form it should take. Church is, as Luther said, a blind, vague word. Indeed it is not easy to say what we mean when we speak of Church.

For one thousand five hundred years the church has lived out its existence and often enough suffered to sustain it in adversity. But not until the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries did the church begin expressis verbis to reflect on its nature. This reflection originally took place against a background of conflicts: conflicts between the papacy and the up-and-coming nation states, conflicts centred around John Wyclif and Jan Hus and above all against the background of debate and argument in the Reformation era. Yet, although the quarrels of the Reformation were not only concerned with individual ecclesiological questions, but much more with the general understanding of what Church is, the sixteenth century did not get as far as reflecting on what the Church’s teaching on the term ‘church’ should be. Not until the nineteenth century, in the wake of Romanticism, did the understanding of the church as such become the subject of consideration. It was Friedrich Schleiermacher who determined the direction of the Protestant Church. On the Catholic side the thoughts of Johann Adam Mohler, the theologian from Tubingen, led the way.
Collaborators, Informers and Secret Service
Authors: Watkins Clare
Published: July 2007

About a year ago I was asked if I would present a paper on the theology of laity to a conference whose title was “Patterns of Priesthood”, and whose purpose was to “attempt to open up the ground for a discussion of the subject of ministry and communion”. The inclusion of a paper on laity seemed to me then, and seems now, both significant and awkward. Primarily it is a phenomenon to be rejoiced at, in that discussions of priesthood and ministry cannot take place without a thoroughly ecclesial sense of the whole people of God. The point is clearly being made that the theology of laity—or “laicology”—is, like the theology of ministry, or of ordained priesthood, just one aspect of ecclesiology; all these subjects are concerned with looking at what it means to be Church, each from its particular angle. In expressing this we are, of course, indebted to the work of Yves Congar; in his substantial work on laity, he stressed that the purpose behind a theology of laity was fundamentally the reworking of ecclesiology and, in particular, the complementing of a dominant “hierarchology”. Following in this tradition we can recognise the complexity of ecclesiology, where studies of priesthood, laity, religious life and so forth are distinctive, but not discrete. Our basic concern, whether we are talking about laity, the ordained, hierarchical structures or charismatic gifts, is always the same: the Church as a living and structured community, whose identity is found in sharing in Christ’s ministry in a rich variety of ways.
Worship in Spirit and in Truth
Authors: Geraghty Denis
Published: July 2007

In her commentary on St John’s gospel in the New
Jerome Biblical Commentary, Pheme Perkins writes:

It seems to me that an exegesis of Chapter 4 of St John’s
gospel might throw further light on this judgement as well as illustrating
the psychodynamics of ‘conversion’ and interpersonal
encounter with Christ. Chapter 4 stands on its own in the gospel and is a
brilliant theological construction. It is an intricately woven pattern of
wordplay, humour, symbolism, obfuscation, at least on the part of the woman.
An examination of the dynamic of interpersonal relating might begin with a
reflection on how anyone of us feels when meeting someone for the first
time. How do we decide whether or not we want the relationship to go any
further than our simply remaining on polite or distant terms? The decision
we take in such circumstances is very complex, acted out nearly always at
the unconscious level and made in an instant. We decide that the person is
interesting enough to reward further acquaintance or we just move away
uttering a phrase of polite disengagement.
The Panther and the Hind
Authors: Matthews Melvyn
Published: July 2007

While reading Aidan Nichols’ book, The Panther and the Hind: A Theological History of Anglicanism (T & T Clark, 1993) I remembered the story of the country which decided that their young people should be taught to play football and that a national side should be fielded to compete with other countries. So they wrote to the Football Association in England for copies of the laws of football and sent them to their schools with instructions that the young people should learn the rules by heart, be tested in their knowledge and then be sent out to play. There was, apparently, some consternation in high places when chaos ensued and questions were asked as to why people who had learned the rules still could not play the game.

Aidan Nichols has certainly learned the rules of Anglicanism but still appears—at least to this Anglican reviewer who was taught the rules by one of those whom Nichols recognises as a “separated doctor” of the Roman Catholic Church, Eric Mascall—to be unable to play the game. For there is no doubt at all about Fr. Nichols’ scholarship and the acuity of his perspective on the history and development of Anglicanism since the Reformation. But none of his perception enables him to see how or why such a perverse—in his view—beast can continue to survive as it does with such vigour and obvious self-enjoyment, or why all right thinking Anglicans do not immediately see the error of their ways and at least join a Uniate Anglican Church and so regularise their position.
Biology and Theology in Conversation: Reflections on Ecological Theology
Authors: Deane‐Drummond Celia
Published: July 2007

The potential for theology to act as a partner in dialogue with the natural sciences is itself a subject for dispute. Those who argue that dialogue is not possible propose that theology is concerned with questions which are outside the realm of science. Such questions are answered through a mystical approach to God that defies the very presuppositions that are the basis of scientific research. The recent tendency amongst theologians to portray early scientists as the archvillains, rather than the priests of creation is noteworthy in this regard. At the opposite end of the spectrum there is the attitude which treats theology as another science. This is not so much a rehabilitation of the idea of theology as ‘queen of the sciences’, but a redefinition of theology taking into account scientific methods of research. The latter form the basis of an hermeneutical approach to scripture which takes account of recent research in historical criticism. A third and perhaps mediating approach, looks at the history of the philosophy of science and insists that these early scientists considered that their belief in nature as having a supernatural element did not hinder the advancement of science. The call now is for a reenchantment of science so that it recovers a more holistic approach characteristic of these early researchers. The clash between the first and third alternatives is that in the first case the scientists are blamed for the current ecological crisis, while in the latter they are heralded as angels of light from the past.
Jesus, the Fossil Record, and All Things
Authors: Echlin Edward P.
Published: July 2007

As the ecological crisis, fuelled by widespread reality avoidance, deepens, so, fitfully and hesitantly, does the religious response. “Curiously, scientific analysis points toward the need for a quasireligious transformation of contemporary culture. Whether such a transformation can be achieved in time is problematic, to say the least”, writes Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich. Recent Christian reflection has concentrated on the human presence, the place and responsibility, within creation, of people under God. Fruitful discussion continues about metaphors and models for human dominion, such as stewardship, sacral kingship, co-worker, and co-operative letting be.

Other distinctively Christian questions are also being asked — and convincing answers demanded — that go right to the heart of the Christian religion, questions about Christ and the whole scientifically unfolding reality of life through geological history. We now realize that the cosmos is more immense than our ancestors in the faith imagined; and that our own species, redeemed in Christ and the conscious edge of evolution, is both more fragile and more vulnerable and, simultaneously, more damaging a presence within global and local ecosystems than we like to acknowledge. We are aware that there have been mass extinction events taking out whole ecosystems; in particular we are aware of the dinosaurs. Extinction events take their toll, especially through climate change and habitat loss, over millenia, even millions of years. We may be in such an extinction event in this our time, particularly in the decimation of flora and fauna including numerous insect species in the rainforests of the humid tropics.
Frei's Types
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

Of course I bought them when I saw the reference to my own ‘brilliant’ work in these books. With Types of Christian Theology (Yale University Press 1992) and Theology and Narrative (Oxford University Press 1993), both edited by George Hunsinger and William C. Placher, we now have two substantial posthumous volumes of essays by Hans W. Frei, one of the most influential American theologians in recent years. It is not just the glancing mention of my book that invites attention, although that will turn out to be an instructive entry into critique of Frei’s typology of modem theology. The first thing is to outline the significance of his work.

Born in Breslau in 1922, Hans Frei was baptized as a Lutheran but, since the family was of Jewish ancestry, they had to flee to the United States in 1938. Hans won a scholarship to study textile engineering, in which he graduated, but a lecture by H. Richard Niebuhr, visiting from Yale, completely changed his life. He enrolled as a B.D. student at Yale. On graduation he became minister of a small-town Baptist congregation in New Hampshire. After much internal struggle he decided to become an Episcopalian and to pursue an academic career. He returned to Yale in 1947, married a year later, got ordained in 1952, and received his Ph.D. in 1956 for an enormously long thesis, supervised by Niebuhr and still unpublished, reconstructing ‘Barth’s break with liberalism’. In a way, the rest of his life was spent trying to subvert liberalism in theology by making Barth’s Church Dogmatics accessible. He taught at Yale from 1956 until his unexpected death in 1988.
Religious in the Local Churches: Pointers from Aquinas
Authors: Ombres Robert
Published: July 2007

The saint we are honouring today would have found the theme of this lecture all too familiar. St Thomas Aquinas was personally involved in the lively, indeed fierce, medieval debates that surrounded the first appearance of the Franciscan and Dominican friars in the life of the Church. Then, as before and since, religious did not always fit in immediately or obviously into the established patterns of diocese and parish. At the time of St Thomas some argued that all the attributes of the antichrist and his ministers were to be found in the new Mendicant Orders. In Cambridge there survives a medieval manuscript with an illumination showing Archbishop FitzRalph, its author and a critic of the friars, faced by Mendicant friars mingled with devils. At about the time St Thomas was writing his first polemical work, soldiers had to be sent to protect the Paris Dominicans at Saint-Jacques from riots and demonstrations. Troops had to patrol his inaugural lecture, and on Palm Sunday 1259, as he preached, St Thomas was heckled by someone trying to get a hearing for the seculars’ case. No wonder that he went into the matter of when and by what means religious can defend themselves.

St Thomas’s own experience as a Dominican friar was gained in different dioceses, indeed in different countries. He dealt repeatedly with the position of religious in the Church, especially in three polemical works, in Quodlibetal disputations and in the Summa Theologiae, going well beyond the controversy over the organisation of university teaching in Paris. To guide our own exploration, we might do well to start with how St Thomas approached the task. Some problems have a way of recurring. In particular, he had to fight against two errors, the kind of mistakes still made today.
Visions of God
Authors: Turner Geoffrey
Published: July 2007

The notion that one cannot see God was established early in the Jewish tradition. The idea that the vision of Naples is so magnificent that there is nothing further to live for: “See Naples and die”, is taken one stage further in the Bible: see God and you will die. “But”, God said to Moses, “you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live” (Ex. 33.20).

In fact God is said in the Bible to have put in a number of appearances to the Patriarchs. To Abraham: “Then the Lord (Yahweh) appeared to Abram and said, ‘To your offspring I will give this land’” (Gen 12.7); “When Abram was ninety-nine years old the Lord appeared to Abram and said to him I am God Almighty (El Shaddai); walk before me and be blameless and I will make my covenant between me and you, and will make you exceedingly numerous’” (Gen 17.1-2). To Isaac: “The Lord appeared to Isaac and said, ‘Do not go down to Egypt, settle in the land that I shall show you ... for to you and to your descendants I will give all these lands, and I will fulfil the oath that I swore to Abraham your father’” (Gen 26.2-3); at Beersheba “And that very night the Lord appeared to him and said, ‘I am the God of Abraham your father, do not be afraid, for I am with you and will bless you and make your offspring numerous for my servant Abraham’s sake’” (Gen 26.24). To Jacob at Bethel: “God (Elohim) appeared to Jacob again . . . and he blessed him. God said to him, ‘Your name is Jacob; no longer shall you be called Jacob, but Israel shall be your name ... be fruitful and multiply ... the land that I gave to Abraham and Isaac I will give to you, and I will give the land to your offspring after you”’ (Gen 35.9-12). Exactly how God “appeared” is not made clear except in the second appearance to Isaac which was in a dream (Gen 26.24) and this may be true of all of them. It is not clear that anything was seen in any of these stories but in each case something was heard (or at any rate the recipient woke up with the conviction that God had communicated and this, of course, was expressed in certain words). All these five appearances to the patriarchs were covenantmaking events relating to land and descendants.
In Stages or on Wings?
Authors: Chater Mark F.
Published: July 2007

Many of us, if involved in pastoral or educational work, have witnessed a religious misunderstanding in the mind of someone in our care, and have tried to help untangle it For instance, an R.C.I.A. group leader uncovers simplistic fundamentalist contortions in an enquirer; or a primary teacher, preparing a class for their first experience of the sacrament of Reconciliation, is concerned about the children’s readiness to understand and experience God’s outpouring of forgiveness in the sacrament; or a secondary R.E. specialist is alarmed to discover that a child’s practice or concept of prayer has not changed since leaving primary school; or, finally, a parish priest or catechist, in charge of a first communion programme, is disheartened by the literalism and theological poverty of the parents. Sometimes the misunderstandings result in a good comic story to share with colleagues. Such stories can be simultaneously funny and depressing.

One recent encounter caused me to reflect on religious misunderstanding. It occurred when I attended a special-occasion Eucharist, celebrated in a retreat centre, at 5 o’clock on a Saturday afternoon. As we were queuing to go in, a woman in front of me (whom I did not know) turned round to ask: “Will this do us for tomorrow?”

I assumed that this woman, aware of her Sunday Mass obligation, was wondering whether a Mass at 5 o’clock on Saturday would count, or whether it was not a little too early. As she turned the question over in her mind, no doubt she thought that if there were some ruling on the matter, then she would know where she stood, and would also be aware of what she must do.
The Original Power of Golding
Authors: Hanlon Kevin
Published: July 2007

“I am interested in story telling and what gives power to a story”.

W. Golding

The late Sir William Golding, who died on 19 June 1993, was one of only four English writers to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was one of the greatest novelists in the years after the Second World War, for some the greatest. He was forty-two by the time his first and most famous novel Lord of Flies was published in 1954. He went on to write another ten novels culminating in Fire Down Below (1989), which was the final novel in the trilogy of a sea journey to Australia set in the early nineteenth century. The trilogy Rites of Passage, Close Quarters and Fire Down Below, was published in one volume in 1991 entitled To the Edge of the Earth and could be called the journey of modem man.

Golding’s second novel The Inheritors (1955) was his own favourite and the only one which he re-read. Critics regard it as his best novel, with some scholars regarding it as his most ‘perfect’ work. It complements Lord of the Flies, and the two novels together mark Golding’s ‘primitive period.’ “They deserve special reading as companion pieces.”

The Inheritors is a difficult novel and interest in Golding somewhat waned after its publication. By the time of his fourth novel Free Fall (1959) interest was reviving, and with Lord of the Flies and The Inheritors it forms a possible trilogy in which Golding explores the loss of human innocence and the consequent darkness of the human mind i.e. the emergence of evil, violence and cruelty.
Being a Christian in Europe
Authors: Lascaris Andrew
Published: July 2007

What do we mean when we say ‘Europe’ and write about Europe as ‘a challenge to Christians’? What does it mean to be a European Christian, or rather to be a Christian in Europe? What is the identity of Europe? Identity is closely linked to memory. When a person loses his or her memory, this person’s identity is in danger of getting lost as well. There is a common European memory. This memory is weaker than our national memory and our personal memory, but it exists. It is built up out of numerous elements including: the boundaries of Europe, interdependence, cultural heritage, technological civilization, justice, individualism, fear of Islam, and the Christian past.

Boundaries are vital in determining one’s identity. They fulfil the need for belonging and help to structure life. The boundaries of Europe, however, are very uncertain. When I arrived in Oxford in 1966 as a postgraduate student, I was told that this city of dreaming spires and towers was not a part of Europe. Europe was ‘the continent’; the British Isles did not belong to Europe. Ten months later I travelled to Spain. I learned that, surely, Oxford belonged to Europe, for everything north of Spain was Europe; Spain, however, was not a part of Europe. When I lectured for some days in the Catholic University of Lublin, Poland, in 1988, I was told by my hosts that Poland really is the heart of Europe. The little medieval chapel of Lublin castle was supposed to prove their point: gothic on the outside, Byzantine on the inside.
Prophecy and Myth in Daniel Deronda
Authors: Every George
Published: July 2007

Daniel Deronda is the last of George Eliot's novels, and the one that describes her contemporaries. Mary Anne Evans, who became Marian, Polly to her intimates, and concealed her feminine identity under the pseudonym of George Eliot, was a schoolgirl at the time represented in Middlemarch . The religion described in Scenes of Clerical Life and in Adam Bede was in substance hers until 1841. When in 1856 she began to tell tales about it she had already translated The Life of Jesus Critically Examined by D.F. Strauss and The Essence of Christianity by Feuerbach. But she could write of ‘the real drama of Evangelicalism’ as one who had experienced it from within when the Evangelical revival stood for serious religion, for the conviction of sin.

In Daniel Deronda ‘hurrying march of crowded Time towards the world-changing battle of Sadowa’ where Prussia defeated Austria in July 1866, dates Daniel's wait in Genoa for his unknown mother, who will tell him that her father and his were both Jews, like Mirah who in the July of the year before stepped into his boat opposite Kew Gardens with the cloak that she had soaked in the river to hasten her drowning. Something has been told beforehand of his background at home with Sir Hugo Mallinger at Topping Abbey, at Eton and at Cambridge and a German university, and of his suspicion of his illegitimacy; but his meetings with Mirah, with her brother Mordccai, and with Gwendolen Harleth, who became the wife and then the widow of Grandcourt, Sir Hugo’s nephew and the heir apparent to his baronetcy, all belong to 1865 and 1866.
Aquinas on God's Knowledge of Evil Intentions
Authors: Brown Montague
Published: July 2007

In order to understand how God could know evil intentions, two things are requisite: an understanding of how God knows and an understanding of the nature of evil. It is a well-known doctrine of Thomas Aquinas that God knows his creation through knowing himself. As the ultimate explanation of potentiality and change in the world, it could not be that God himself is in any way potential. Hence he does not learn about his creation from his creatures. Rather, God knows all his creatures and their actions through knowing his own simple nature. It is also a well-known doctrine that evil is the privation of good, and that evil is only known through knowing good. Putting these two doctrines together, it follows that God knows evil in the world by knowing the good that he is. While this explanation seems adequate to explain physical evils (e.g., the mouse’s demise is explained by God’s understanding himself as able to be participated by the good which is eagle), it is not clear how this explanation can handle God’s knowledge of evil intentions since these intentions do not seem capable of being explained in terms of something essentially good.

In order to better understand this problem and set up the grounds for some legitimate answer, it is necessary to treat each of these issues separately and in some greater detail. Thus, in the first section, God’s knowledge as it concerns his creation in general and in particular will be discussed.
“Christology”: What's In a Word
Authors: Mansini Guy
Published: July 2007

Yes, Christology is the logos or science of the Christ. But science is the invention of the Greeks, and while Christos is Greek, too, it does duty here for “Messiah.” The word contains the encounter of Jerusalem and Athens that has been the sustaining event of the whole of Western culture, which, in these days, and notwithstanding the abiding vigour of Indian thought, is increasingly the culture of the world. And already thus far “Christology” proves itself a weasel word. For if indeed we speak of an “encounter” of two “cultures,” then Athens bids fair to absorb Jerusalem as just one more collection of human conventions and nomoi. But if we say that “Christology” signifies the destruction of proud arguments (logismoi) and the capture of every thought unto the obedience of Christ (see 2 Cor 10:4-5), then it may be thought that logos can no longer recognize itself here.

Or maybe this meeting of Jerusalem and Athens inscribed in “Christology” is just a confusion. “Messiah,” originally a title, here means the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, and functions as a proper name. So Christology is the science of an individual man. According to the most thoughtful of the Greeks, however, there can be no logos, no science, no episteme, of the individual as such.

Neither for us moderns is science of the individual as such. Chemistry may be about radium, but it isn’t about this radium atom. It’s about the nature of radium, and so tells you about this atom insofar as it has the common nature. But it doesn’t give you the history of this atom, or that one, or any one.
Indissolubility, Divorce and Holy Communion: An Open Response to Germain Grisez, John Finnis and William May
Authors: Lawler Michael G.
Published: July 2007

Gentlemen, I read in the June 1994 edition of this Journal your Open Letter to Bishops Saier, Lehmann and Kasper (hereafter NB) concerning their joint Letter regarding Pastoral Ministry to the Divorced and Remarried (hereafter PL) and their Principles of Pastoral Care (hereafter PPC). Both their letter and yours concern me to the extent that, as you correctly point out, they concern “the entire Church” (NB, 321). As a theologian in the Church, entrusted with the theological education of the Church, married, divorced and remarried and celibate alike, I was both delighted to read your letter and intrigued by its argument. I thought you and I and the body of the Church might benefit from further clarification. You will be aware that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (hereafter CDF) and the three Bishops issued in September 1994 further communications on this topic, published in Origins, October 27, 1994 (hereafter OS). I shall return to these in my final section.

Your letter delighted me because it sought to do the theologian’s task, the pursual in the scientific manner proper to theology of a deeper understanding of the Word of God and the communication of that understanding. I am delighted to pursue the matter further with you, for your argument intrigued me, as much as from what it left unsaid as from what it said. For the sake of conciseness and clarity, I choose to deal with only two focused, and not unconnected, matters which are of concern to me as both a theologian and a marriage (and divorce) counsellor.
Body Symbolism in the Book of Margery Kempe
Authors: Morgan Susan
Published: July 2007

In her recent book Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion, Caroline Walker Bynum once again delineates with consummate skill the profoundly and peculiarly bodily character of Christian medieval piety. The cult of relics with its veneration of the dismembered limbs of saintly people, the belief in the curative powers of bodily effluvia, the austere self-disciplinary practices of certain male and female ascetes — observances such as these are cited by Bynum as illustrating the medieval notion of the human body as a locus of sacrality. The concurrent theological development of the doctrine of transubstantiation, the conviction that behind the external accidents of bread and wine lay the actual flesh and blood of Christ, also laid emphasis upon the corporeal and led to an increasing sense of the eucharist as ‘symbolic cannibalism’ in which communicants ‘ate God’. Christian art and iconography of the period reflected a similarly literalist approach to the humanity of Christ, often drawing attention to his genitalia for example, or depicting the Passion scenes with a force of graphic detail quite repugnant to modem minds.

According to Bynum each of these three strands, theology, piety and art, brought out the religious significance of the body in an unprecedented manner during the Middle Ages as a means of access to the divine, but whilst physicality was a theme which ran throughout all medieval spirituality, it was taken up with particular enthusiasm and intensity in women’s lives and writing. Women, it would appear, were unable to avoid being inculcated with contemporary androcentric articulations of their association with the body, weakness, lust and irrationality.