bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Saint Thomas Aquinas and Theological Exegesis of Sacred Scripture
Authors: McGuckin Terence
Published: July 2007

St. Thomas Aquinas is primarily a theologian. He writes of Sacred Scripture not only as a theologian, but because he is a theologian. As a master of theology his essential textbook was the Bible. From earlier theologians St. Thomas received an understanding of theology, which he shared with his contemporaries and which he in turn was to deepen and strengthen: Sacred Scripture provides the auctoritas of theology. It gives rise to theology, enables and governs it. M-D Chenu has emphasized and demonstrated St. Thomas’ fundamental reliance on the Bible as the foundation of his theological work.

St. Thomas says that ‘the truth of faith is contained in Sacred Scripture.’ He understood that a cursory reading of the text would not reveal this truth very clearly, because it is in Scripture, but ‘diffusely, in diverse ways and sometimes darkly.’ Thomas provides an insight into his own approach to exegesis when he continues: ‘the result is that to draw out the truth of faith from Scripture requires a prolonged study and practice.’ Here we see Thomas the theologian approaching the sacred books in order to draw out carefully from them what faith teaches through them.

St. Thomas served the Church as a ‘Master of the Sacred Scriptures’ (Magister in Sacra Pagina) and, therefore, as J. Mahoney states, the systematic works of Aquinas do not constitute his truly magisterial activity. Mahoney notes the valuable work of H. Denifle who, in his discussion of the text-books of the medieval professors of theology, shows the Bible to be the basic text-book and indicates that ‘the theologian of that day knew no book so well as the Bible.’
Recasting a Classic: A Reconsideration of Meaning in the Book of Job
Authors: Green Barbara
Published: July 2007

The goal of this article is to show how all parts of the Book of Job function coherently, co-operatively and brilliantly. Though commentators continue to assert that the frame of the work (1-2, 42:7-17) is easily separable from the body of the work (3-42:6), that contention is simply not true. The prose prologue and epilogue pose the book’s central and crucial issues, which are then partially, and slightly unrealistically, dealt with in the work’s central, poetic dialogue section. The ‘game’ of understanding the work would be much easier to play if the frame—front and back—were not there. But it is there; and it is indispensable. The prologue raises the theological stakes of the dialogue.

Five key issues are posed by the prologue, setting the agenda for the entire book. First, who is God? What sort of deity is God, according to information we receive in the prologue? Why is God employing an adversary (a satan) and what can an adversary do that assists God? What is God’s motive in calling attention to Job? How can the wager between God and the adversary, apparently entered into so casually, be benign? What is God’s presumption regarding the outcome of the wager made with the adversary?
Catherine De' Ricci: Part I
Authors: di Agresti Domenico
Published: July 2007

I have devoted a good thirty years of my life to the study of Catherine de’ Ricci, from the early 60s, when the Collana Ricciana began to appear, up to the two volumes of the Breviario Ricciano which appeared in 1990 to mark the opening of the sixth centenary of the saint’s death. Here I have nothing new to add to all that I have said already, only a brief synthesis of how over the years, I have come to see this extraordinary woman. But any synthesis involves a choice, and any choice involves excisions and gaps and is inevitably wide open to criticism. The risk is real and I have accepted it; I ask for the reader’s understanding. This present essay seeks only to present a simple and clear picture, unburdened by an excess of scholarly apparatus. In it I will try to highlight, often in the saint’s own words, three crucial points in her spirituality: love, which is its source and gives it its scope; obedience to the will of God, which is the golden rule by which this love is lived; and the joyful human and supernatural equilibrium which results from it.

It may seem obvious to the point of banality to say that love, or charity, is the soul and heart and root and fullness of the Christian life, that interior growth is measured by the progressive development of love, that the apostolic life in its entirety derives its fruitfulness from love, that any mystical advance is only the gradual process of union between God and the creature, whose means yet again is always and uniquely love. But no two saints are the same. Each has his or her own proper way, because God’s love for his creatures is not expressed in the abstract or in general. He loves each of us with a love which is quite personal, marked with its own peculiar purpose, and so for each one of us he maps out a path which is particularly our own. So no saint has the same countenance as any other.
Humility and Cosmology
Authors: Hodgson Peter
Published: July 2007

According to the Hebrew cosmology the earth was flat and the sky was like an upturned bowl studded with stars. The earth, and the creatures of the earth, were made to serve man and are under his domination. This view sufficed for many millennia. Careful studies of the regular motions of the stars and the irregular motions of the planets were made by the Babylonians and the Greeks, and Ptolemy devised a complicated system of cycles and epicycles to describe these motions with some accuracy. It was a cosy, man-centred world.

The development of modem science destroyed this picture with a series of shattering blows. Firstly Copernicus showed that it was much simpler to suppose that the sun, and not the earth, is the centre of the world. No longer do we think of the sun serving our needs by circling the earth, night and day. It is we who are ruled by the sun. This view of the sun and the planets was firmly established by the dynamics of Newton, which enabled the orbits of the planets to be calculated from his laws of motion, together with his theory of universal gravitation.

In the following centuries telescopes of increasing power probed further into space, and it became apparent that our resplendent sun is but a rather ordinary star situated in one of the spiral arms of a vast galaxy of some two hundred thousand million stars that we see on clear nights as the Milky Way.
Eric Rohmer on Nature and Grace
Authors: Bedouelle Guy
Published: July 2007

It is a rare thing to find a film like A Winter's
Tale, the latest work of Eric Rohmer, in which the
protagonists talk about the knowledge of God and the leap of faith, and
discuss reincarnation, abortion—to refute it—; invoke
the theory of reminiscence; where they go into churches to pray, and in
which the heroine thinks her partner ought to go to Mass, because it is
Sunday and he is a believer. I should probably make it clear at the outset
that this film was neither solicited nor financed by religious authorities,
but was created by a film-writer who, while making no mystery of his
Catholicism, has never paraded it.

Return to the Sources

A Winter's Tale is a masterpiece of
subtlety, of precision in dialogue and photography. It handles people and
situations with understanding, and even if the people happen to talk about
Pascal and Plotinus, there is never a sense of that heaviness which is
sometimes discernible in Rohmer’s previous film, A
Summer’s Tale, where references to Kant were a
little ponderous at times. . . . The setting remains simple and homely, but
we do not get the feeling that it was all thrown together in haste, as with
some other works. To be honest, since 1982, friends of Rohmer and his films
have defended them, at whatever cost, largely on the basis of the admiration
lavished on his previous films. Even so, it has to be admitted that the six
films made during this ten-year period, especially My
Soul’s Friend (1987), were far superior to the
average film production.
New World Order or New World Enemies?
Authors: Northcott Michael S.
Published: July 2007

The rhetoric of ‘New World Order’ came to prominence
in the period of glasnost and its dramatic
denouement in the events of 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise
of communism. First coined by Gorbachev in 1986, the phrase New World Order
became popular particularly with Western leaders, most notably in America
and Britain, as a way of describing the future development of international
relations after the end of the Cold War. At the same time as Fukuyama was
declaring the ‘end of history’, Western politicians were
announcing that a new kind of international order would be established with
the demise of communism. In the Cold War era, so the argument ran, the USSR
and her allies had blocked the enforcement of international legality through
the UN, and had fermented regional conflicts and wars for her own interests.
The New World Order would allow the development of a new peace where the
freedoms taken for granted in the West might be seen to spread throughout
the world without the great obstacle which the enemy of communism, and the
superpower conflict, had previously represented. The United Nations could
now at last take on the role prepared for it after the Second World War.
America and her allies old and new would be able to ensure peace in the
world.
Dominican Ideals in Early America: The Example of Edward Dominic Fenwick
Authors: Lisska Anthony
Published: July 2007

In this article I would like to focus attention on the unique American religious experience as it relates to Thomas Aquinas. For the ideals articulated by Aquinas and his Dominican associates in the medieval university, especially the left bank academic institutions which eventually became the University of Paris, deeply influenced the founder of the American Dominicans, Edward Dominic Fenwick.

To remember, at this time, Fenwick and the historical context in which he devoted his life is quite appropriate. For not only is this the anniversary year of the founding of the Diocese of Columbus, which has offered one hundred and twenty-five years of service to central and southern Ohio, but it is also the one hundred and seventy-fifth anniversary of the founding and dedication of the first Roman Catholic Church in Ohio: St. Joseph’s near Somerset. The person who founded and dedicated St. Joseph’s was the Dominican friar, Edward Dominic Fenwick. It is, in addition, the one hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary of the establishment of the religious community of St. Mary of the Springs where this article was first delivered in lecture form.
Costly Giving: On Jean‐Luc Marion's Theology of the Gift
Authors: Moss David
Published: July 2007

“(A)ll that a man...discourseth in his spirit is nothing but merchandise”

John Wheeler, A Treatise of Commerce [1601]

In a recent review of Jean-Luc Marion’s God Without Being: Hors-Texte (Chicago, 1991), Graham Ward comments: ‘It is possibly presumptuous at this point to say whether Marion’s theological argument for a God without Being succeeds. This book will need considerably more digesting by theologians before a judgment can be made about its success.’ It is a point well made, and the argument I will make in this article is intended only as a further contribution to the appropriation of Marion’s work in a theological climate that remains famously resistant to the roots of his work. That this is an important, indeed even seminal book for Theology should, it seems to me, be granted. And even if it is to be branded ‘postmodern’—which is itself very debatable judgement—it most certainly does not exhibit any of ‘the enthusiastic naivete’ that has marked so much of this expanding genre. Rigorous, even orthodox it may be, but still new.

Ward depicts Marion’s ‘odyssey’ as a ‘relentless foray into sophisticated, abstract thinking’, which is true enough. But this should not allow us to dismiss it to the rarefied stratosphere inhabited by Parisian intellectuals. As I read it, its concerns are real and immediate, and by way of illustration of this fact I will begin with a brief anecdote.
What Englishness Is
Authors: Every George
Published: July 2007

All communities tend to develop an account of their own origins. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People has this advantage, that all but twenty-two chapters at the beginning of the first book deal with matters in his own lifetime or so near it that he could collect testimonies from eyewitnesses or from those who had seen and heard them, as well as from written materials. His history has therefore held its place as a source, despite some criticism of his selection of evidence. It remained in English libraries through the critical years of the Reformation, and was printed in the seventeenth century in England as well as on the continent, in Latin and in King Alfred’s and in another English version. This contributed something to the Anglican view of the origin of the Church of England, in tales of conflict and reconciliation between Celtic and Roman missions. On the question of Easter Bede’s details were relevant to disputes about the change in the Roman calendar in the sixteenth century. He also said that an Archbishop of Canterbury supplemented what was lacking in an ordination by bishops whose status was in doubt.

What came to be called The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was put into shape more than a century after the death of Bede, in the days of King Alfred. It was copied and continued at Peterborough until the end of the reign of Stephen, but it did not find favour with the Norman ruling class who occupied the important positions in church and state after 1066.
Throne and Altar
Authors: Williams C.J.F.
Published: July 2007

This book is astonishing. Its subject matter is not something that the modem educated reader is likely to have encountered before: a longish Latin poem together with a dedicatory epistle and several shorter poems published by what one cannot help describing as a court poet in the court of Pope Urban VIII—a man who was, surprisingly, a priest. The Latin is not easy, and one is grateful for the translation the Newmans have supplied. But the medium is not half so strange to the modem eye and ear as the message. It is adulation of a monarch of a kind which old fashioned Republicans like Tacitus found so unwelcome in the world of the Emperors: bad enough under Augustus; how much worse under a Nero or a Domitian! And it is to Domitian that the editors look as a precedent for the adulation accorded to Pope Urban.

The particular topic is the canopy recently made by Bernini for the central altar in St Peter’s, which the poet, Guiddicioni, refers to as the “Ara Maxima”. This is indeed the title of his poem, and one does not have to be a Protestant to feel uncomfortable with the paganism of the title itself. Worse still, a few lines into the epistle dedicatory, and one finds that the altar has become a throne—not the throne of God and his Christ, a theme which would have respectable Christian and Judaic precedents stretching back to the Holy of Holies and the Ark of the Covenant, but a throne for the Pope himself.
Other Discourses
Authors: Loughlin Gerard
Published: July 2007

There are ambiguities in the title: Other Discourses. What are these discourses and who speaks them? Discourses of others, of those who are not the same? Discourses by the same about those who are other, and about otherness itself, about an absolute Other, which would also be the other of discourse itself? And then, almost immediately upon these questions, as if folded within them, come other questions. Can we hear the discourses of others, if they really are other? Can we have discourses about others which do not reduce them to the limits of our own discourses? Can there be any discourse about otherness itself, about an absolute Other, if it is indeed the other of discourse, beyond discourse?

Even if it were possible to pursue all these questions in a single essay, this is not that essay. Here I pursue only some of the questions in the direction of the philosophical authorship of Emmanuel Levinas.
Nature and Sexual Differences
Authors: Moore Gareth
Published: July 2007

In this article I wish to argue against a particular conception of nature as a tool for the understanding and appraisal of people’s sexual lives. That conception is one which sees people as having a determinate sexual nature as part of their biological inheritance, their physical constitution. This sexual nature is then used to determine sexual norms: what is in accord with nature is good, and what is against nature is bad. I believe that this approach to human sexuality is mistaken and misleading.

Human sexual behaviour is very various and, as far as we can tell, always has been. But human societies have rarely if ever been content to allow free range to the full variety of sexual desires and tastes. Human societies develop conventions governing sexual activities, encouraging some and restricting others, and limiting them to certain contexts. Modem anthropological, literary and historical scholarship has placed a great deal of emphasis on the fact that these conventions too are very various; the rules governing what kinds of sexual behaviour are acceptable and which are not have varied greatly from time to time and from place to place. And, whatever the rules, transgression has been constant. People have for one reason or another not wanted or have found themselves unable to behave themselves sexually as required by their society. They have not done what they were expected to do or, more often, they have done what they were expected not to do. In every society some transgressions are treated as more serious than others, and societies have varied in which transgressions they treat as serious.

It is important to realise just how different the norms governing sexual behaviour can be in different societies. I will briefly mention two examples to illustrate this. Much studied has been the case of ancient Greek paedophilia.
Privacy
Authors: Williams Michael E.
Published: July 2007

I am associating Privacy with “Do not disturb, I want to be left alone”. On the face of it, this is an egoistical anti-social standpoint. But is there anything that can be said for being anti-community? In this paper, for the sake of argument, I align myself with this attitude because from this position I can make certain observations and raise questions related to the other.

Whether we like it or not, the mood of the day favours privacy rather than community. Individual privacy is more and more sought and jealously guarded.For many people community is bad news. It evokes a sense of restriction and narrowness rather than openness, conflict rather than harmony .One has only to think of, Islamic community, Serbian community, Protestant community, Roman Catholic community, David Koresh’s community at Waco, the European Community—all these give out negative signals. Even ‘basic community’ has echoes of an in-group and can be seen as a form of protest or elitism. Sometimes it seems as if the only communities that have any popular appeal are fictional ones like Ambridge or Coronation Street. These are fanciful, idealistic creations, real life is much more grim. Survival depends on individual effort. This rejection of community is often the result of its failure to satisfy our needs or its degeneration into such positions as extreme nationalism. But a denial of community often leads to a sense of isolation and loneliness. We can note that both the 1991 General Household Survey of the U.K. (published in 1993 and the recent Report into European Lifestyles by MINTEL draw attention to the fact that over a quarter of all British homes are single person households and about 14% of households are people living alone.
Zionism
Authors: Rist Anna
Published: July 2007

The Editor has responded to my criticism of what has often seemed to me the almost automatically pro-Palestinian “line” followed by this and other journals when treating of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, by agreeing to publish this article in which I set out to redress the balance by supplying some of the crucial facts of Israeli and Jewish history which are ignored by partisan accounts. To omit more recent examples of this kind of bias, the reviewer of Lucas Grollenberg’s book Palestine Comes First in “New Blackfriars” of May 1980, after giving a tendentious resume of the “true facts” of the history of the conflict which glossed over a number of salient facts, ended with the revealing assertion that since Grollenberg’s facts are “right”, any other account is “wrong” and therefore should not be published — an attitude which should speak for itself. Fair-minded people — as one assumes the great majority of the readers of New Blackfriars strive to be — will wish to weigh all relevant facts. This account aims not to deny legitimate Palestinian claims but to supply some facts which are the context of those claims and to invite readers to enter into the minds of the other side in the historical conflict, the Israelis and the wider Jewish community. It will already be clear, I hope, that for me “fair-minded” does not necessarily equal fashionable liberal bien-pensant.
Catholic Social Teaching and Economic Democracy in Eastern Europe?
Authors: Reed Darryl
Published: July 2007

The developing teaching of the Catholic Church on economic justice in recent years has increasingly emphasized the rights of people to active participation in the economy. Although the exact term is not to be found in official documents, some observers find in the Church’s teachings not only the advocacy of increased participation but also a case for some form of “economic democracy”. This paper examines the Church’s teaching on participation in the economic realm and the possibilities of developing a more democratically controlled economy. Specifically it examines the feasibility of and prospects for implementation of economic democracy, with eastern Europe as a special focus of attention.

Over the last one hundred years the hierarchy of the Catholic Church has produced a variety of official documents which reflect upon a range of social, economic and political issues. Collectively these documents have come to be known as the tradition of Catholic Social Thought. Increasingly there has been an emphasis in these documents on both the rights and obligations of all people to active participation in the various realms of human life. These rights and obligations are conceptualized around a three-faceted concept of justice which encompasses procedure, distribution and participation. Procedural justice refers to what is commonly called the “rule of law”. Concerns which fall under procedural justice include the establishment of laws for regulating fair competition in the economic, political and sociocultural realms, as well as laws which guarantee fair and equal protection of civil rights and fair and equal procedure in the courts.
On being cunning as snakes Matthew X 16: a rejoinder
Authors: Geach Peter
Published: July 2007

The doctrine that lying is always wrong (often, of course, only venially wrong) has been defended at length by many authors who ought to be taken seriously: in the Catechism of the Council of Trent, and in the writings of the Doctors of the Church, e.g. Augustine, Aquinas, and Alphonsus de Liguori. Mr. Chappell, maintaining the contrary thesis, presents to his readers none of this literature, not even by allusion; the nearest he comes to that is a reference to what is ‘associated with the Jesuits’. The voice we hear against lying is that of an imaginary nasty boy called Philip.

Mr. Chappell also alludes to my book The Virtues. The views and arguments of ‘Philip’ are not ascribable to me; anybody curious about what I say should read my bode; if someone does that and still cannot see any significant difference between ‘Philip’s’ view of the matter and mine, nothing I could say now is likely to do him any good.

‘Philip’ and his creator both reason in a recognisably ‘consequentialist’ style: we get drearily familiar arguments and examples. But nobody has a right to treat consequentialist moral thinking as unanswerably sound, thus ignoring the anti-consequentialist writing not only of Catholics but of non-Christians such as Philippa Foot, Arthur Prior, and Bernard Williams. Mr. Chappell likewise fails to mention the refutation of consequentialist thought in the chapter of my book (‘Prudence’) devoted to that.
Moral Absolutes
Authors: Charlton William
Published: July 2007

‘Law’ says Plato in his dialogue The Statesman, ‘can never embrace in one prescription what is best and most right for everyone. The dissimilarities between men and between their actions and the fact that human affairs are pretty well always changing make it impossible for any skill whatever to lay down anything simple in connection with anything that will hold for all cases and at all times.’ Aristotle agrees. ‘It is the mark of an educated mind to aim at just so much precision of detail as the nature of the subject matter admits.’ In mathematics we expect exactitude; but in matters of conduct and what is advantageous, ‘nothing is fixed any more than in medicine’, and ‘the agents themselves must decide each case as it comes, just as must doctors and steersmen.’ The best thinkers of ancient Greece thought it obvious that we cannot achieve what is best for ourselves, cannot achieve the good for human beings, by following general rules.

Today it is sometimes said that there are certain general moral rules that bind without exception, rules that it is always wrong to break, whatever the circumstances. Is there a conflict between this and the ancient view?
Maurice Wiles and Christian Doctrine
Authors: Weinandy Thomas
Published: July 2007

This festchrift honours the notable theological career of Dr. Maurice Wiles, Regius Professor emeritus of Divinity at Oxford University. In their Preface Drs. Coakley and Pailin state: “Throughout his distinguished career he has been a staunch supporter of a liberal approach to Christian theological understanding” (p. v). The essays in this volume take up a major, if not the major, preoccupation of Professor Wiles’ “liberal approach”, that of the making of Christian doctrine in the early Church and the remaking of it today.

The majority of the authors endorse, and so champion, in some fashion, Wiles’ initiative that Christian doctrine be remade in light of the demands of historical criticism, contemporary philosophy, and cultural experience. Thus J. Barr, J. Hick, M. Hooker, G. Kaufman, R. Lyman, S. McFague, J. Macquarrie, S. Ogden, and D. Pailin argue, in a variety of ways, that the traditional understanding of Christian doctrine, based on an often unscriptural (Hooker, p. 74), supernaturalist (Macquarrie, p. 168), interventionist (Barr, p. 9), and dualistic (Kaufman, pp. 99-100) understanding of God’s relationship to the world, must be fundamentally reconceived and replaced by an understanding of doctrine where God’s activity is restricted within the enclosed process of history and human activity, and interpreted through human experience and philosophical insight. As Ogden states: “I hold that one of the lasting achievements of revisionary theology right from the beginning is to have shown that the credibility of Christian witness can be validated, finally, only by appeal to what anyone is capable of experiencing simply as a human being” (p. 196).
Christianity and the Welfare State
Authors: Corner Mark
Published: July 2007

This article looks at a fundamental area of social and political concern in Britain today, that is to say the Welfare State. It sets out initially to elicit some of the different arguments about this ‘institution’, contrasting what is necessarily now, after several years of one political party holding power, to be seen as ‘the Government’s view’, with alternative opinions. It then seeks to analyse these contrasting views in terms of a dialectic between individual and state responsibility, which can be analysed in theological terms. It argues that this dialectic, which in the past has appeared to be threatened by a denial of individual responsibility, is nowadays threatened by a denial of state responsibility. It does not, therefore, seek to go into detail about the various aspects of the Welfare State, analysing what they have achieved or where their inadequacies lie. Rather it concentrates more generally upon the theoretical basis of the system, from the point of view of both its supporters and its detractors.

It is worthwhile initially to consider the term ‘Welfare State’ itself. It appears according to most polls to be very popular, but what is it? It is noteworthy that people refer most commonly to a welfare ‘state’ rather than ‘system’, as if they were thinking less in terms of a particular set of institutions than in terms of a particular idea of society as a whole, namely that it be organised for the welfare or benefit of its citizens.
The Exiled Sons of Eve: Robert Liddell's Egyptian Novels
Authors: Guérinot J.V.
Published: July 2007

Robert Liddell is an unjustly neglected Catholic novelist. Perhaps now that Peter Owen has reprinted three of his novels and promises to reprint them all, his bookes may at last find the audience they deserve. Lovers of Barbara Pym will remember him as Jock in A Very Private Eye; they met at Oxford and remained life-long friends. She greatly admired his novels. So did Ivy Compton-Burnett, Elizabeth Taylor, Francis King, and Walter Allen. But the list of his literary friends and admirers is endless: John Bayley, Fr. D’Arcy, Peter Levi, Iris Murdoch, Olivia Manning, Honor Tracy. All of this suggests that he must be worth reading, and he is.

His best and most characteristic works are Unreal City (1952) and The Rivers of Babylon (1959) which follow Charles Harbord from 1944 to 1953 in his teaching posts in Alexandria and Cairo. They are novels of a real and quiet distinction, in the tradition that comes down from Jane Austen. Witty, often comic, highly literate and allusive, they examine with studied understatement the great themes of exile, sin, and faith.

On the most obvious level, they provide a highly entertaining account of what it was like to teach during and after the war in such foreign places as Alexandria and Cairo. Both novels are narrated in the third person, almost entirely from Charles’s point of view, and through his eyes we get a vivid picture of both great cities without, however, any scene painting.
Fra Angelico's Deposition from the Cross: The Circumstances Explored
Authors: Prendergast Michael
Published: July 2007

The Strozzis were a large, rich and powerful family in the Florence of the 1420s. Like many aristocratic merchant families of the time, they planned a chapel where only they would have the right to be buried. Such privatised funerary and memorial arrangements were not unusual, though in combining theirs with a functioning sacristy in the monastic church of Santa Trinita, the Strozzis started a trend which was to be important in the evolution of Renaissance architecture. Because it was stripped of furnishings and pictures in the seventeenth century, the chapel-sacristy at Santa Trinita now looks bare, but in the early fifteenth century it was full of colour and religious imagery.

The head of the family, Palla Strozzi, took a leading part in the planning of the memorial chapel. He negotiated with the monks, engaged an architect, masons and stone carvers and had his deceased father entombed in a wall of the as yet uncompleted building. In a real sense it was Palla’s project His choice of artists to paint pictures for it reveals his taste. He commissioned Gentile da Fabriano, the most famous artist in Italy, to paint the Adoration of the Magi, and Lorenzo Monaco, the leading practitioner in Florence of the International Gothic style, to produce a Deposition of Christ from the Cross. Gentile’s work is now in the Uffizi, but Lorenzo died in 1425 leaving the Deposition unfinished. Twenty years later Fra Angelico completed it, and today it hangs in the Museum of San Marco, Florence.
A New Interpretation of Fra Angelico
Authors: Fisher Anthony
Published: July 2007

Guido di Pietro, known to posterity as Fra Angelico, was born of peasant stock in Mugello, probably around 1400. He and his brother trained as illuminators and miniaturists and, when Angelico was about 21, they joined the Observant Dominican community of San Domenico in Fiesole above Florence. Professed as Brother John, Angelico’s ‘pastoral work’ while studying for the priesthood was to paint for San Domenico, Sta Maria Novella, and elsewhere. These early commissions made him famous and funded his workshop. If he was still learning priestcraft he was also still learning to paint: for his skills as an illuminator were little preparation for altarpiece design, a duty laid on his shoulders along with his Dominican scapular. So he became acquainted with the works of his contemporaries such as Masaccio, Masolino, Gentile and Sassetta.

His most important contact, however, was Cosimo De Medici, a patron not only of the arts but of the religious orders, especially the more radical mendicants. On return to power in 1434, he set about installing the Observant Dominicans in Florence, renovating an abandoned monastery for them which was to represent “the best in Christian humanism”.
Pre‐Renaissance Franciscan and Tuscan Humanism
Authors: Navone John
Published: July 2007

The thirteenth century saw the rejuvenation of the Italian Church by the order of St. Francis. The Franciscans contributed to the new humanism that is identified with the Renaissance and expressed in the Tuscan painters of Florence (Cimabue and Giotto di Bondone) and of Siena (Duccio, Simone Martini and the Lorenzetti brothers). In the Upper Church of San Francesco, in Assisi where Cimabue and Torriti worked in fresco, the new humanism appears in the “Legend of the St. Francis Cycle.” In this work, life-sized human figures, conveying human emotions, made their first appearance in European painting. In the frescoes of the Scrovegni chapel at Padua and in Santa Croce in Florence, Giotto evoked a whole new range of feeling and expression. His immediate followers at Florence, Bernardo Daddi, Taddeo Gaddi, and Maso di Banco, for all their narrative invention and human intimacy, were dwarfed by his genius. But at Siena the school of Duccio di Buoninsegna developed its own more lyrical and illustrative style, with jewel-like colouring and linear grace. If Giotto gave painted figures humanity, Duccio established them in recognizable settings, Simone Martini invested them with poetry, while Ambrogio Lorenzetti set them in their complete physical environment. It was at this time that Florence and Siena produced the tentative beginnings of portraiture and of landscape in painting. The Tuscan painters reflect the Franciscan joy and delight in the goodness and beauty of the world, the Franciscan appreciation of nature as the resplendent reflection of its Creator, and the Franciscan esteem and affection for the poor and ordinary people.
Discipleship of Equals or Nuptial Mystery?
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

Fifty years ago, as a glance at standard textbooks would confirm, history as taught in school and university was mostly about battles and wars and the doings of kings and queens. Since then, however, there has been a massive shift of interest to the doings and sufferings of ordinary people— much more difficult as it of course is to reconstruct their lives. More recently still, historians have turned their attention to retrieving the experience of women—ordinary women, in different societies, but also (as in such recent books as Woman Defamed and Woman Defended edited by Alcuin Blamires or Medieval English Prose for Women edited by Bella Millett and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne) women who played a distinctive and much more significant part in history than has previously been acknowledged. Here too, it has become possible to read between the lines of familiar material to discover what was (no doubt inadvertently and unconsciously) played down, skewed, marginalized, concealed or so blatantly omitted that the silences themselves have become eloquent. Texts written, by men for men, although nobody realized that, inevitably operated with a male-oriented system of interests and values. Once the ‘androcentric’ agenda of a document or a cultural artefact is allowed for, we can begin, cautiously and tentatively of course, to look for the lacunae and distortions that might reveal the absent and unidentified women’s experience.

For once, work in Christian theology has not lagged far behind this much wider shift in cultural interest and awareness. There are, of course, always predecessors, belatedly discovered—above all Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) in this case. She stands as the precursor of Christian feminists for whom equal rights for women is the issue.
Ten Reasons why Thomas Aquinas is Important for Ethics Today
Authors: Keenan James F
Published: July 2007

Recently several works that study Thomas Aquinas’s ethics have been published. Why is it, too, that a return to Thomas’s ethics yields insights into his writings that have escaped us for decades, even centuries? Why is he a perennial font of reflection that prompts new writers to find fresh insights at the end of the second millennium?

The answer rests, I believe, in the fact that he captures an understanding of the moral life that is enormously helpful in forming a vision of the type of people we ought to become. In an age that wants to respect the individual conscience while maintaining a sense of the objectively right and wrong, Thomas provides a framework in which we can achieve both. In order to demonstrate how Thomas accomplishes this, I advance along the way ten key points that Thomas makes that serve as sign posts to our conclusions.

1.Rather than retreat from public life. Thomas believes that good religious life, like good theology, can be at home in the life of the city. At the age of six, Thomas’s parents sent him to the famous Benedictine Abbey, Monte Casino, where they (reasonably) hoped that he would become abbot. At fifteen, he leaves the order and, after five years of studies in Naples, enters the relatively new order of SL Dominic. As urban areas emerge for the first time in human history, the fifteen year old Thomas makes his first adult decision to leave an order that requires a vow of permanence and enters a new order already known for their work of preaching in the cities and teaching in the medieval universities.
Dominican Involvement in the Crusader States
Authors: Friedenthal James‐Francis
Published: July 2007

Although the Dominican Order was not in existence when the Crusades began, during the thirteenth century the Dominicans developed a strong presence in the Holy Land and found themselves laying the new network of Church administration, as they took over many of the newly created Latin sees, and establishing links with the Greek and Oriental Churches they encountered. Great travellers and great critics, they bequeathed to the Church a closer understanding of what kind of religion Islam really was, what the Eastern churches were really like, and insights into the whole nature of the Crusades just as the Crusader States were finally collapsing. Their findings and opinions may be found in such works as: Burchard’s “Descriptio Terrae Sanctae”; the “Itinerarium” of Riccoldo de Monte Croce, and the “Opus Tripartitum” of Humbert of Romans.

In 1221 St. Dominic died at Bologna, having seen his Order approved by the Holy See and established in Provence, Paris, Spain, Italy, Poland, Hungary and England. One of the ambitions of his life remained unfulfilled, however: he had always wanted to go to the East to convert the Saracens. Innocent III encouraged him instead to devote his attention to the Albigensian heretics in the South of France and to similar sects in Lombardy. It was left to his spiritual descendants to fulfill his dream of evangelising the East.

The first approach of the Dominicans to the Holy Land came in 1226 when Alice of Champagne, widow of King Hugh I of Cyprus, founded the monastery of St. Dominic at Nicosia in Cyprus, later to become the burial place of the Kings of Cyprus and Jerusalem after the loss of the mainland.
The “Problem” of Homosexuality
Authors: Markey John J.
Published: July 2007

W.E.B. Dubois, speaking of his experience of being a black man in North America in 1903, wrote:

Between me and the other world is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying it directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.

For Dubois, the greatest injustice that African-Americans faced was not the outright malevolence of the ignorant, but the general tendency of even the enlightened to assume that blacks, by virtue of their being physically different from the majority of those in the dominant ethos, posed some kind of problem that needed to be addressed. Even those who “accepted” Dubois and treated him respectfully caused him to wonder why he needed to be “accepted” in the first place, and why he could not assume the respect of others. Dubois realized that the oppression and injustice he experienced was deeply rooted in the very presumption that his physical distinctiveness outweighed the immense commonality he shared with others and called into question his status not only in this culture but in the human community.
The Quarrel over Morals in the Catholic Church
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

More than half of this book is taken up with the complete text of Pope John Paul II’s encyclical letter on ‘certain fundamental questions of the Church’s moral teaching’, Veritatis Splendor, dated 6 August 1993. The rest reprints the set of eleven comments published in The Tablet, together with a brief introduction by the editor, John Wilkins.

According to John Wilkins, ‘people feel that something is wrong’—‘there is a widespread moral unease’—but ‘the task of establishing a pluralist society which yet acknowledges shared values as the condition of that pluralism is proving beyond the capacities at present being brought to it’ (page ix, my italics). In the judgment of many worried people (not only Catholics), that would seem an unduly optimistic statement. It suggests that, while the task is beyond our intellectual powers ‘at present’, we may be better off in days to come. But what if the ‘shared values’ which would be the condition of the moral pluralism of Western culture are already as substantial as they ever could be—and are diminishing all the time? What if a pluralist society is, by definition, irreconcilably divided over deep moral issues? Where there are ex hypothesi radically conflicting conceptions of the good life which are never going to converge, let alone be unified, what content would there be to ‘shared values’ beyond temporary alliances, occasional trade-offs, and the kind of tolerance that has marked Western societies since people wearied of the religious wars?
Spirituality in Post‐War British Opera
Authors: Fuller Michael
Published: July 2007

Opera is currently enjoying a great deal of public interest. In its popular understanding, as the most lavish, the most spectacular, the most luxuriant of art forms, it might not seem an obvious form for religious exploration, or the working out of spiritual problems. That, one might think, is rather the preserve of more private and introspective art forms: to be left to writers, poets, and workers in the plastic arts. Yet, in the operatic works produced by British composers in the last fifty or so years, many do take this apparently private subject-matter into this most public of artistic domains. This article is an attempt to draw together some of the more notable examples of this tendency, to compare them in their diversity, and to draw attention to this phenomenon among the non-opera-going public. (In all that follows, dates after opera titles refer to the year of their first production.)

Bishop Richard Harries has recently remarked, ‘All works of art, whatever their content, have a spiritual dimension’, in that they can be a source of comfort and solace. He goes on to distinguish ‘a distinctive tradition of ostensibly spiritual art’, which ‘seeks to indicate through symbols the eternal reality behind, beyond and within this world’. In this article, the term ‘spirituality’ is used quite loosely, usually to refer to the use by composers and their librettists of material from sources acknowledged to be of spiritual significance. I have also drawn attention to composers’ uses of myths and legends, since these may be said to have a spiritual content in Harries’ sense, insofar as they consciously direct their hearers to levels of understanding beyond the simple level of the story being told.
Iris Murdoch
Authors: Dykes Anthony
Published: July 2007

Iris Murdoch is a philosopher and a novelist. Her novels are not philosophy in narrative form: we would not expect her philosophical writings to be categorical formulations of her narrative line.

Why should Murdoch, an Irish agnostic, be of interest to the clergy or those with theological preoccupations? Well, perhaps because much modern theology and spiritual writing employs, consciously or otherwise, a neo-Cartesian mentalist individualist epistemology. Or perhaps because we must be attuned to hearing people’s stories, or perhaps because when we understand people’s mental furniture better, many of our tasks will be clarified.

Is there some more important reason? Yes. Because our way of praying, lamenting, celebrating, and perhaps what ever counts as prayer, will be affected by the kind of narrative we feel at home in.

It may seem odd to speak of us ‘feeling at home’ in a novel, but if we easily see ourselves as the hero of Lucky Jim or This Sporting Life, feeling more at home in that role, than in a piece of more chaotic, fabulist metafiction like, say, The Philosopher’s Pupil it should tell us something about the philosophical anthropology we are employing. Put it this way: there are philosophical reasons for the hero of many modem novels being a rather alienated character, engaged in a more or less fruitless attempt to be ens causa sui, but these are not good reasons.

A clue to what Murdoch is getting at may be found in her comment on the existentialist view of evil as found in Sartre’s La Naus?e ‘Sartre as Cartesian solipsist seems especially ... to exhibit a lack of any lively sense of the mystery and variousness of individuals’.