bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Hume's “Is‐Ought” Problem: a solution
Authors: Fitzpatrick Joseph
Published: July 2007

David Hume first raised the “is-ought” problem in this famous passage from A Treatise of Human Nature:

I cannot forbear adding to these reasonings an observation which may, perhaps, be found of some importance. In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remark’d, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs, when of a sudden I am surpriz’d to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible, but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation ‘tis necessary that it shou’d be observ’d and explain’d, and at the same time that a reason should be given for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. But as authors do not commonly use this precaution, I shall presume to recommend it to the readers; and am persuaded, that this small attention wou’d subvert all the vulgar system of morality, and let us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded on the relations of objects, nor is perceived by reason.

Behind Hume’s quietly persuasive comments lie at least two questionable assumptions. The first is that the way language is ordinarily used is wrong; rather than take note, in an empirical fashion, of how moral discourse is normally conducted, Hume chooses to be negatively prescriptive in respect of “all the vulgar system of morality”.
Renewing the Moral Life: Some Recent Work in Virtue Theory
Authors: Paterson Craig
Published: July 2007

In responding to the Second Vatican Council’s call for a renewal in moral theological reflection, Servais Pinckaers, Benedict Ashley, and Romanus Cessario, all Dominicans, are engaged in the earnest labour of authentically interpreting that call to renewal via a systematic examination of the sources of ethics contained in Sacred Scripture, Tradition, and natural reason.

The years since the Second Vatican Council have seen many divergent trends in moral method, not least the adoption of a widespread adherence to the methodology of proportionalism, particularly in the United States. The above mentioned Dominicans reject such a method as being incompatible with those crucial sources of our faith. In contrast to the popularity of proportionalism, they are engaged in a quiet, patient, and determined project, centred on virtue theory, that is gradually bearing fruit.

In Sources of Christian Ethics, Pinckaers tackles the distorted picture of an ethic based solely on the demands of obligation. The search for the minimal content of obligation in Christian ethics has been corruptive of a fully integrated approach to ethical understanding, and its latent effects are manifested in the minimalism of proportionalism that reduces the moral life to a form of quasitechnical calculus based on the will of the acting subject. Quite simply, proportionalism as a method seems incapable of adequately accounting for our profound sense of personal integrity, and with it, the control we exercise over the constitution of our character expressed in virtuous and unvirtuous conduct.

Understanding of our acts operates on two layers. The first layer is the externally observable act. The second layer, lying near the centre of our being, goes much deeper.
The Cross of Christ, Sacrifice and Sacred Violence
Authors: Phillips Peter
Published: July 2007

A witness to the events surrounding the crucifixion of Jesus on a hill outside Jerusalem in the early first century would not have been able to identify any aspect of what was going on as sacrifice. Here was merely a judicial murder performed with some cynicism by the Roman administration of a difficult province. For the Temple administration Jesus’s death was understood as a matter of an expediency pointedly ironised by the author of John’s Gospel: ‘You do not understand that it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed’ (John 11.50). There seems little doubt, on the other hand, that the gospels, as well as Paul, place the death of Jesus firmly within a hermeneutical framework provided by the sacrifice of Passover; this, in turn, leads to the early claim that Christ’s death is to be understood in relation to the forgiveness of sins. This theme is already present in the primitive credal statement preserved in I Cor. 15.3, which Paul seems to have inherited from Palestinian Christians and most probably from the Jerusalem church itself.

Such a reading of the New Testament material has been challenged by René Girard in a body of work which represents one of the most profound of recent attempts to explore the meaning of sacrifice in the roots of human society. At the danger of oversimplifying the complexity of Girard’s argument, he suggests, in a series of powerful studies, that human society is born in violence.
The Use of “Night Prayer” at the Vigil for the Deceased with Reception at the Church
Authors: Sullivan Joseph
Published: July 2007

Around ten years ago theOrder for Christian Funerals(henceforthOCF)was published. Given personal extended pastoral and liturgical use, I would like to make one suggestion which may prove equally useful to others involved in preparing the Funeral Liturgy. I have found the use of “Night Prayer” ofThe Divine Officea real boon in celebrating the Vigil for the Deceased with Reception at the Church.
In Defence of the Humanities
Authors: Meynell Hugo
Published: July 2007

While I was preparing this article, I read some remarks on the same subject by a U.S. politician with whom I found myself in substantial agreement. I then discovered, to my consternation, that the politician’s opinions had been compared with those of Adolf Hitler. So the reader must be warned that she can expect something pretty shocking in what follows.

We desperately need a philosophy of the humanities, both in the popular and in the narrower professional sense of the term ‘philosophy’. That is to say, we need to be able to spell out clearly and distinctly what the place of the humanities is in the good life, why they are important, and why (to put the matter in the most basic terms) they are worth paying for. I read that in parts of the U.S. the obvious obscurity and apparent triviality of the work of many representatives of the humanities has led to a cutting of funds and a precipitous fall in the number of students. I also note with some regret that, for the construction of a philosophy of the humanities in the sense that I have just given, recent trends in philosophy have been of very little help. In general I find a gaping hole in most prevailing modes of contemporary philosophy where the means for defending civilization— sustained reflection on the true and the good, and the best means of achieving them—should be.
The Survival of Reason: Reflections on Fides et Ratio
Authors: Barrett Richard
Published: July 2007

Catherine Pickstock has ably sketched the achievement of Plato and his reports of the academy of Socrates as an early counter-signal to a time when the philosopher has come to embody the empirical rather than reason. But she has also had the courage, in the current philosophical marketplace, to develop the forgotten insights of Plato’s lyceum—that the pursuit of wisdom took place within the context of a cultic association, i.e. within the cycle of prayer and offering which characterised the early activity of the university. So while poetics were abandoned in Plato’s vision for the Republic, hymns to the gods were not. It is in this context that we can take time out of the great putsch of post-war British philosophy with its dismissal of metaphysics as nonsense, and attend to the reflections of a Continental philosophe from a far country. In possibly the last great work of his pontificate, Fides et ratio, we have, arguably, the most far-reaching and mature contribution of his time and one which justifies his election as a philosopher-pope. It is not inappropriate to suggest that Plato could not have wished for more in his designs for a city-state than one headed by a philosopher-king. So it seems appropriate to repristinate that sapiential dimension of philosophy for which the Pope calls in the concluding chapters of the encyclical and suggest ways in which British philosophers might grow as a result.
Unreasonable Faith
Authors: Hemming Laurence Paul
Published: July 2007

I have only one point to make about the recent Papal Encyclical Fides et Ratio in this paper, albeit a complex one. I want to draw attention to the fact that the apparently simple and self-evident term ‘reason’ in English is deceptively so, so that when we hear the term ‘reason’ in the title “Faith and Reason” we hear named a marker for something with a long and difficult history. I do not intend to resolve that history in this paper— which would be much too ambitious a task, but rather to relate its complexity to some of the Encyclical’s underlying themes.

I want to begin by commenting on the sheer awfulness of the English translation of Fides et Ratio. The English translation is often frankly and mischievously inaccurate. Let me give you just one example (of very many). At §49 the English tells us “The Church has no philosophy of her own nor does she canonize any one particular philosophy in preference to others”. The Latin text has “Suam ipsius philosophiam non exhibet Ecclesia, neque quamlibet praelegit peculiarem philosophiam aliarum damno.” Those two last words “aliarum damno” emphatically do not mean “in preference to others” but rather “to the condemnation of the others”. The sense here is quite different: the English implies that one philosophy could be chosen by the Church from a range of systems: rather like preferring white wine to red for a meal. The implication of the Latin is much sharper: to choose one philosophy would be to pronounce a kind of judgement on the others. A quite different inference.
Newman and a Catholic Arnold
Authors: Bergonzi Bernard
Published: July 2007

In the struggles that divided the Anglican community in the 1830s one of the hardest fighters was Thomas Arnold, reforming headmaster of Rugby School and polemical Broad Church divine. He attacked the Tractarians in a notorious article called ‘The Oxford Malignants’ (though the title was an editorial insertion) and regarded Newman as his principal opponent; his opposition was quite impersonal, since he believed that he had never met Newman. He was annoyed when it was reported by a third party that Newman was alleged to have asked if Arnold was a Christian. Arnold’s vehemence spoiled his hopes for a bishopric, but Lord Melbourne, the sympathetic Whig Prime Minister, had him appointed to the Regius Chair of History at Oxford. Early in 1842 Dr Arnold was in Oxford delivering his first series of lectures, accompanied by his family; his eldest son Matthew was already in residence as a Balliol undergraduate. On 2nd February Arnold dined in Oriel, his old college, where Newman had been a fellow for many years. Though Arnold was initially apprehensive and ill at ease, the encounter of these old opponents was courteous and good tempered; they talked of non-controversial subjects such as North African myths. Newman reminded Arnold that they had in fact met once before, when he had been one of Arnold’s oral examiners for the degree of Bachelor of Divinity; Arnold had not identified him on that occasion, believing he was Edward Pusey, another leading Tractarian.
Maria Goretti—a saint for today?
Authors: McNeil Brian
Published: July 2007

I was born in Scotland in 1952, so that I belong to the very last generation of those who personally experienced preconciliar Catholicism. The saints played an important role in the spirituality in which we were brought up. Some were Scottish saints, such as Columba the missionary (+597) and Margaret the queen (+1093); but the Scottish church under Pius XII and John XXIII was not encouraged to be too Scottish. We were proud of being an outpost of the international church, and our spirituality was to be that of the universal church. This meant that most of the stories we heard concerned persons whose veneration was officially approved by Rome. Some were to be admired (great missionaries and martyrs, but also still living persons such as the stigmatised Padre Pio), while others were consciously presented as models to be imitated. Maria Goretti (1890-1902) belonged to this second group.

Churches and chapels were built in her honour, pious associations were founded. We heard about her in sermons and in religious instruction in school. Pamphlets with her biography could be bought for a few pence. Holy pictures in our prayer-books reminded us of her. Indeed, her face was very familiar to us—in classrooms, in churches, sometimes in our own bedrooms. What kind of image was this?

Against the background of an Italian landscape, one saw the radiant face of a beautiful girl, perhaps seventeen or eighteen years old. A narrow halo encircled her head. She looked up to heaven with a smile. Sometimes she carried red roses as a symbol of her love for Jesus, sometimes there were snakes at her feet as a symbol of her struggle against the devil.
Theology and the Culture of the Sciences
Authors: Deane‐Drummond Celia
Published: July 2007

The idea that theology might have something to say to science, especially if we see this as one of its responsibilities, might seem to us to be an odd question to ask. Ever since C.P. Snow proposed the idea of the ‘two cultures’, the impression of many, apart from those with a keen interest in interactions between science and religion, is that sciences are best left to their own devices. It seems obvious, at first sight, that it is primarily in the realms of history, language, literature, art and music that theology can find welcome dialogue partners. In popular culture, too, there is a residual memory that over-zealous religious fanatics in some way constricted science. The stories of conflict between Thomas Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce, Galtleo and the Holy See, have become inflated into mythologies of distrust and suspicion. The fact that the real historical accounts show many more nuances than this is important to establish, but is not really the point I am making here. Rather, I am suggesting that we have become so used to seeing the two areas of theology and science as separate, that we fail to notice in what ways the culture we live in is also one shaped by science, and that science itself is a profoundly cultural activity.
Incognito Ergo Sum: Political Theology and the Metaphysics of Existence
Authors: Fletcher Paul
Published: July 2007

Even if politics and theology are perceived to be fundamentally distinctive areas of enquiry, they share a common problem. Indeed, one could even suggest that thought itself—as a practice among disparate practices—is subject to the formidable difficulty of the formation and subsistence of community. ‘The gravest and most painful testimony of the modem world,’ suggests Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘the one that possibly involves all other testimonies to which this epoch must answer ... is the testimony of the dissolution, the dislocation, or the conflagration of community’. This crisis of community, or its very possibility, is illustrated in a contemporary unwillingness to engage in the hard labour of politics that is part and parcel of either the espousal of individualistic, psychologistic and spiritualistic solutions to the existential problems of subjects and communities or the arrogation of secure and unequivocal identity claims based on nation, race or some other undifferentiated category. Nevertheless, a constant remains in the midst of this confusion. In the western context of modem liberal governance, the possibility of identity, whether individual or national, is predicated on the division of religious and political idioms and practices. There is no room for a tension-filled political/religious nexus which, according to Kierkegaard, produces an ‘arousing restlessness’. In the wake of religion comes a political subjectivity that is marked and re-marked by somnambulance and atomisation.
The Marcel‐Teilhard Debate
Authors: Latzer Michael J.
Published: July 2007

More than fifty years ago, on January 21, 1947, a debate took place in Paris between Gabriel Marcel and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin on the following question: “To what degree does the material organization of humanity lead man to the point of spiritual maturation?” As Teilhard’s biographer Cuenot observes, “it was a fine subject for two great, but very different, minds to discuss.”’ In essence, the debate concerned the value of technology in human culture, and the character of the social organization attendant upon technical civilization. Do the astounding technological advances of the last century represent a true enhancement of human existence in all its dimensions, as Teilhard believes, or is Marcel right in suggesting that technological progress is of dubious value in relation to the authentic purpose of life? Clearly, this debate has not lost its relevance. In a time when technological mastery of human life itself, through the mapping of the genome, is a reality, and when the Internet has ushered in a global connectedness which has transformed the planet’s “noosphere,” there is reason to reflect on the spiritual value of these attainments.
MacIntyre on Morality
Authors: Meynell Hugo
Published: July 2007

As Alasdair MacIntyre sees the matter, moral discourse in the sense in which it once existed has broken down. This may be illustrated by numerous issues debated in contemporary society, none of which is in the nature of the case capable of being settled. Once there was a generally-accepted theistic world-view in which human beings had in general terms a definite direction or aim in life; against that background there were clear criteria for settling moral disputes. Since the Enlightenment this has no longer been so. It is true that ‘in everyday discourse the habit of speaking of moral judgments as true or false persists; but the question of what it is in virtue of which a particular moral judgment is true or false has come to lack any clear answer’. This is because ‘moral judgments are linguistic survivals from the practices of classical theism which have lost the context provided by these practices’. Many efforts have been made, by Utilitarians, Kantians and others, to plug the gap; but they have all failed.
The Real Presence
Authors: Charlton William
Published: July 2007

The final book of The Imitation of Christ is an ‘exhortation to Holy Communion’, and the last chapter begins: ‘Beware of a persistent and useless intellectual examination of this most deep sacrament, if you do not wish to be immersed in deep doubt.’ Useless, I am afraid, to warn philosophers. In what follows I distinguish two or three different ways of understanding the Real Presence in the Eucharist and, without rejecting any of them, say how far they are compatible and indicate some of their merits and drawbacks. But since this doctrine is sometimes confused with the doctrine of Transsubstantiation, I begin with a word about that.

In 1551 the Council of Trent declared that ‘through the consecration of the bread and wine, there comes about a conversion of the whole substance of the bread into the body of Christ our Lord, and of the whole substance of the wine into his blood. And this conversion is appropriately and properly called “transsubstantiation'” (Denzinger/Schönmetzer 1642). The doctrine of transsubstantiation here endorsed is relatively clear. It states that when bread and wine are changed into the body and blood of Christ, the matter of the bread and wine pass away into the matter of the body and blood of Christ. The purpose of the doctrine is to distinguish the Eucharistic change from natural changes such as occur when water evaporates into air or when bread and wine are consumed in the ordinary way. The Fathers of Trent and the mediaeval philosophers from whom they took the doctrine believed that these natural changes are, strictly speaking, only transformations, conversiones formales (Aquinas, ST 3.75.4).
An Integral Spirituality of the Paschal Mystery
Authors: Schepers Maury
Published: July 2007

Why do Christians celebrate the Paschal Mystery again and again? “We did it last year,” one might say, “Why do it again?” One reason, of course, is the need to deepen our understanding and appreciation of what is in fact the heart of the Christian religion; and from this point of view the Mystery unfolds in two distinct phases. The first phase is linked with the catechumenate (RCIA). The entire Christian community is invited to journey through Lent toward Easter in company with the candidates for Baptism, who are in the last stage of their preparation for sacramental initiation into the Body of Christ. Here the obvious intention is to promote in the community at large a progressively deeper spiritual plunge into the Mystery of Christ’s Death and Rising. The second phase of the Mystery encompasses the fifty days following Easter, and culminates with Pentecost Sunday. During this period there is a cycle of readings from the Johannine gospel, which taken as a whole constitutes a second catechesis. Here the Catechist is the Risen Christ himself. The teaching unfolds in three stages. It begins with the dialogue between Jesus and Nicodemus on New Birth (Jn 3); then there is his discourse on the Bread of Life (Jn 6); and finally the words he spoke in the Upper Room, which reveal the Gift of the Spirit (Jn 14-17). Taken together these readings are a profound instruction on the Church’s two-fold endowment of Sacrament and Spirit.
Homily at Herbert McCabe's Funeral
Authors: Ryan Columba
Published: July 2007

This is the story of one Dominican’s following the Gospel with faith, hope and above all charity.

There was a restlessness about Herbert. All his life he was in some ways an adolescent. He had the virtues of an adolescent, and sometimes an adolescent’s infuriating ways. But our weaknesses, under God’s grace become our strengths. Immensely loyal to his friends, he liked to shock. Questing, critical, radical, ever seeking for the meaning of life, and for ‘meaning’ tout court, he could be quite arrogant in his own convictions. It did not mean that he could not brook disagreement. Intolerant he could be of what he called ‘playing games’, but he delighted in argument. He could not resist being outrageous at the expense of pompous authority. His Catholic orthodoxy, expressed in contemporary idiom, was unshakeable; his Dominican, questioning, obedience was absolute. Like adolescents, when asked questions which they find intrusive, he was economical in speech; this he honed into a fine precision, admirably editing out superfluous words. The adolescent’s unsureness of himself he turned into the humility of loving himself not for his own achievements, but for God’s gift of being God’s lover, able to speak with, and thank God. Still he hated going into print and agonised over sermons. Leaving instructions to any literary executor he talked about the “the bits of paper I leave behind. ... If I hear you have burnt the lot I shall merely add this to the eternal (no! perpetual) sufferings I shall be undergoing”
The Politics of Disenchantment
Authors: Bauerschmidt Frederick Christian
Published: July 2007

What is it that makes us “modern”? When we think of ourselves as “modern people” —and thus distinguished from medieval or ancient or primitive peoples what are we in fact saying about ourselves? I wish to explore the suggestion of Max Weber that an important element in our being denizens of modernity is the “disenchantment” of our world. Further, I wish to explore some of the connections between Weber’s notion of disenchantment and his understanding of mysticism as a response to this disenchantment, in order to argue that the relegation of religion to “the mystical” is not so much a response to disenchantment as it is the condition for the very possibility of disenchantment. In Weber’s sociology, mysticism becomes the irrational “other” of the rational, bureaucratic use of coercive force that we, in our disenchanted world, call “politics.” In his work we can see clearly a process whereby the categories of the mystical and the political mutually create each other in such a way that mysticism—a private and irrational religious experience—becomes the only viable future for religion, and politics—the rational administration of territory through violence—becomes statecraft. In this respect, Weber seems a paradigmatic modern interpreter of religion and politics, one whose interpretive categories continue to shape our discourse. Finally, I will argue that the power of Weber’s story of disenchantment can be seen in current political and liberation theologies, even when they explicitly seek to reunite the “mystical” and the “political.”
XX Mariological Marian International Congress, Rome 2000
Authors: Loades Ann
Published: July 2007

I take the term ‘Anglican’ here to refer primarily to the Church of England, though I think that the positions to which I refer in this paper would also be found in the spectrum of most of its related episcopal churches, especially the Church in Wales and the Church of Ireland whose territory includes Northern Ireland, the Anglican Diocese of Europe, and the Episcopal Church of Scotland. I have no way of ascertaining the position of all the Churches of the world-wide Anglican Communion, though again I expect that within it I would find a similar range of theological conviction about the Trinity and Mary. We also need to bear in mind the existence of the Porvoo agreement with north European Lutheran Churches. The Evangelical-Lutheran Church of Latvia has not yet taken a decision on the Porvoo Declaration, and the Church of Denmark has decided not to endorse it but to maintain links with those who have. There are many difficult issues for discussion in such churches, but my point here is simply that discussion of ‘the Trinity and Mary’ is a sensitive issue not least in the Church of England’s ecumenical negotiations, especially with those Churches with whom we are now in full communion.

The second point I need to make by way of introduction is that I do not write as an official delegate of the Church of England to the XX Mariological Marian International Congress, though I hope I do justice to the complexities of my church’s position as a member of its Doctrine Commission — not that at the moment the Commission is likely to discuss the relation between the Trinity and Mary.
Dominicans and the Scottish University Tradition
Authors: White Allan
Published: July 2007

In March 1217 brother Dominic, a Castilian canon of the chapter of the diocese of Osma, returned to Toulouse from a visit to Rome. He, and the small community he had gathered round him, had been preaching against the Cathar heretics of Languedoc for the previous ten years. Soon after his arrival he summoned the community of canons which had just settled into their newly restored monastery to meet him. It rapidly became clear that the situation every religious dreads had arisen: the superior had an idea. The strategy involved the creation of a new religious force in Catholic Europe which was to take the form of an entirely novel religious Order. Its mission was to be wholly given over to the preaching of the Word of God. This was to take precedence over every other conventual observance. The Order was to be international; its members were to be called friars, brothers, they were to be bound to stability within the Order and not to any one particular house. They were to go wherever the needs of evangelisation and the defence of doctrine took them, living in poverty, holding no property, not even the houses in which they dwelt. They were to live out some elements of the monastic life, celebrating the divine office and the Eucharist solemnly and in common with, but without undue fussy ceremonial. They were to elect their own superiors, who in turn would be members of Provincial Chapters.
Aquinas's Third Way
Authors: Davies Brian
Published: July 2007

The study of arguments for God’s existence is much more in vogue in English speaking philosophical circles than it was when Fergus Kerr entered the Order of Preachers. In what follows I make no attempt to defend the general project of arguing for the existence of God. Instead, I aim briefly to defend an argument of Thomas Aquinas which is still commonly rejected even by authors who are usually counted among his supporters. This argument is most frequently referred to as the third of his ‘Five Ways’ (to be found in Summa Theologiae la, 2,3). My suggestion in what follows is that, when properly understood, Aquinas’s Third Way is a good defence of the claim that God exists.

Here is what I take to be an accurate English translation of the Third Way:

The third way is based on what need not be and on what must be, and runs as follows. Some of the things we come across can be but need not be, for we find them being generated and destroyed, thus sometimes in being and sometimes not. Now everything cannot be like this, for a thing that need not be was once not; and if everything need not be, once upon a time there was nothing. But if that were true there would be nothing even now, because something that does not exist can only begin to exist through something that already exists. If nothing was in being nothing could begin to be, and nothing would be in being now, which is clearly false. Not everything then is the sort of thing that need not be; some things must be and these may or may not owe this necessity to something else. But just as we proved that a series of agent [efficient] causes can’t go on for ever, so also a series of things which must be and owe this to other things. So we are forced to postulate something which of itself must be, owing this to nothing outside itself, but being itself the cause that other things must be. And this is what everyone calls God.
Aquinas and Simplicius on Dispositions ‐A Question in Fundamental Moral Theory
Authors: Boland Vivian
Published: July 2007

One of the areas on which Fergus Kerr has kept a wise eye and to which he has made valued contributions over many years is moral philosophy. In fact he had the task of teaching ‘moral theology’ in the early years of his career but quickly moved on. He was quite relieved to do so, he told me once, not least because he found Shakespeare more relevant to morality than the geography of the fallopian tubes. Leaving behind moral theology in that sense did not mean his leaving behind a concern with moral questions. On the contrary, he has maintained great interest in developments in fundamental moral theory and in the centrality of morality for all theology.

In this he is faithful to Aquinas who, as Leonard Boyle has argued, envisagedSumma Theologiaeas a work in which the moral is central. If, as Kerr himself has been arguing recently,beatitudois a key to the unity of theSumma,then this is further support for what Boyle argued on historical and palaeographical grounds. This is not to claim that what Aquinas had in mind was anything like what moral theology came to describe later on, when a strict distinction and even separation of dogma and moral came to prevail especially in seminary training. Aquinas belongs to an earlier world, from which contemporary moral philosophers continue to learn, in which these later distinctions did not apply.
Reading a Quieter, British, Heidegger
Authors: Hemming Laurence Paul
Published: July 2007

Fergus Kerr, after a recent conference on St. Thomas Aquinas in the Netherlands, remarked on how a certain understanding of Heidegger’s history of being is now all but taken for granted in the Catholic theological imagination. Certainly the trajectory of the history of reason traced by the Holy Father in his recent encyclical letter Fides et Ratio would seem to owe more than just a little to Heidegger’s influence. Yet the genealogy of this influence is not easy to trace, nor is it direct. Heidegger’s work arguably exercises an influence more on those who have never read him, or at least not deeply, than on those who have (John Paul II must be counted among the latter). The increasingly common use of the word ontotheology by theologians, coined by Heidegger in a course of lectures on Hegel in 1930, though with roots at least as early as a course on Leibniz from 1928, and used by him in written texts at least until 1962, is testimony enough; but so is the fact that the vaguer uses of this term become progressively more detached from their precisely definite origins in the very occasions of becoming commoner.

British resistance to Heidegger’s work has meant that North- Americans interpreters are much more decisive for how Heidegger is understood in English. Their emphasis has tended to be on explanation and clarification, or the minute piecing together of a narrative framework into which his thought can then be fitted. Fr. William Richardson’s monumental work on Heidegger set both a tone and a framework for reading Heidegger whose reverberations still predominate.
The Problem of Reported Speech: Friendship and Philosophy in Plato'sLysisandSymposium
Authors: Pickstock Catherine
Published: July 2007

It is said that Plato’s discussions of love and friendship in theLysisandSymposium, unlike those of Aristotle, allow little place for love or affection towards individuals. Scholars have arrived at this conclusion by several routes. It is thought that Aristotle more genuinely appreciates the specificity of human affections and friendships: friends for the Stagirite are considered ‘the greatest of external goods’; those who have regulated their passions to such a degree that they are unmoved by particular instances of beauty ‘are simply not human’.

Aristotle’s emphasis upon friendship itself as ‘the beautiful thing’ has been central to the recent burgeoning scholarly interest in the topic of friendship. Studies have appeared in many disciplinary areas and from many perspectives: historical, philosophical and sociological.

Alongside these, a number of theological reflections upon this theme have been produced, addressing friendship in its late antique context, or else examining mediaeval understandings of charity and its link with protocols of personal affiliation and friendship. More recently still, Jacques Derrida has produced his ambivalently- receivedPolitiques de l’amitié?in which his deconstructive impulse applies itself variously from Plato and Aristotle all the way to Montaigne and the controversial political theorist Carl Schmitt. There has also been an increasing engagement with classical negotiations of the theme of friendship.
Christ the Exception
Authors: Milbank John
Published: July 2007

It is now too little discussed, but one key ingredient of 20th century ‘modernism’ has been its reaction to the writing of James Frazer in The Golden Bough. One can think of course of The Waste Land, but also of David Jones’s Anathemata, besides countless other examples. In some of these instances, notably that of Jones, implicit anthropological critiques of religion are turned on their head. Christ as one more sacred king sacrificed becomes instead the typological fulfilment of the sacrificial drama played out in so many cultural instances (though not all—under the influence of Christopher Dawson, Jones is quite specific) between sacred mother and sacred son. More recently, the debate between anthropology and theology concerning sacrifice and Christology has been dramatically renewed. Now, however, in the wake of the work of René Girard among others, the focus has been as much upon Christ’s exception to prevailing norms of sacrifice and power. Fergus Kerr was among the first theologians to make important contributions to this renewed debate (‘Revealing the scapegoat Mechanism: Christianity after Girard’ in Philosophy, Religion and the Spiritual Life ed Michael McGhee (Cambridge: CUP 1992 161-75) and ‘Rescuing Girard’s Argument’ in Modem Theology 8 1992, 388-390). This was highly appropriate for one whose interests, rooted in literary studies, embrace theology, philosophy and the social sciences, with the cultural broadness so notable amongst British Catholics. The present article aims to continue this debate, and further to extend its scope, with reference both to Christ’s typicality and his exceptionality. I hope that this is a suitable tribute to Fergus Kerr.
The Church and the Johannesburg Summit
Authors: Echlin Edward P.
Published: July 2007

As we approach, and prepare for, the Johannesburg Summit—Rio plus 10—we need all the wisdom we can muster if the human family is to move, beyond the faltering steps of Rio ‘92, into genuine sustainable living on the earth. Anything less than genuine sustainability, considering our present population, consumption, and technology, will spell catastrophes within this century. The Earth Charter, an interfaith declaration of principles, says ‘Every individual, family, organisation, and community has a vital role to play. The arts, sciences, religions, educational institutions, media, businesses, non-governmental organisations, and governments are all called to offer creative leadership.’ The Earth Charter identifies no one religion, nor religion itself, as the global ‘mother church’, or pre-eminent pillar of earth ethics. Significantly, however, several important contributors to the Charter are Christian. One, Steven Rockefeller, observes, ‘Many of the critical concerns and spiritual ideals affirmed in the document resonate with values that have traditionally been important to Christians.’ The Christian religion has a cosmic dimension, for in Jesus incarnate, God unites himself with all humanity, and therefore with the whole earth community. Rockefeller argues that social ethics extends to the whole earth community. More strikingly still, an American astronaut, and Christian, James Irwin, says, ‘It is more important that Christ walked upon the earth, than that man walked upon the moon.’
Newman and Rahner on the Way to Faith — and Wittgenstein came too!
Authors: Logan Ian
Published: July 2007

John Macquarrie has written of John Henry Newman that “in emphasizing conscience, he is thinking along the same lines” as theologians such as Karl Rahner, “who have claimed that the human being has the capacity for transcendence towards God”. The purpose of this paper is to investigate this claim, with specific reference to the similarities that exist in Newman and Rahner in their respective treatments of the ‘way to faith’. I shall show how the role of mystagogy as a way to faith in Rahner can help us understand the role of conscience as a way to faith in Newman. In particular, I shall address the issue of Newman’s proof of God from conscience, and how its effectiveness is dependent on its not being regarded as a proof of God in the sense of the traditional proofs. Finally, having responded to some Wittgensteinian objections to the apparently grandiose claims of Newman and Rahner, I shall show how a passage in Wittgenstein’s On Certainty can help us understand the pastoral effectiveness of the Rahnerian and Newmanian ways to faith, and shall suggest why Newman felt unable to publish the work he planned on the argument from conscience.
MacIntyre, Narrative Rationality and Faith
Authors: Early Christian
Published: July 2007

This paper seeks to spell out the consequences of Alasdair MacIntyre's conception of rationality for the debate between faith and reason. In the modem period, commitment to authority came to be understood as a hindrance to the discovery of truth. Understanding rationality as tradition-constituted, however, puts that assumption into question. Traditions of enquiry are the bearers of rational resources; it is impossible for inquirers to perform rational work outside some tradition of enquiry. A tradition’s formative texts and its rational resources occupy a place of authority in the practice of critical reflection. The reintroduction of the notion that commitment to authority can be rational has important consequences for the debate between faith and reason: critical reasoning and acceptance of authority are not antithetical. Rather, reason depends on authority for resources to perform its task. This paper thus argues that the apparent conflict modem philosophers of religion attribute to committed faith and critical reflection dissolves once rationality is understood as tradition-constituted.

Understanding rationality as constituted by traditions of enquiry avoids the complaint that commitment to authority entails a pluralism that cannot rationally be eliminated. To see why this is so, it is necessary to attend to a particular feature of traditions of enquiry. Using their standards of rationality, traditions progress as they solve the problems that are inherent within their point of view.

If the adherents of a tradition cannot solve a problem using their rational resources, then the tradition lapses into a state of epistemological crisis. At this point, it is uncertain whether the epistemological crisis will be solved.
The Fullness of God: Catholics and Religious Exclusiveness
Authors: Buckley James J.
Published: July 2007

One hundred and fifty years ago this Spring, John Henry Newman gave a series of lectures that eventually became the collection of those lectures and other occasional essays we know as The Idea of a University. Newman was a nineteenth century English thinker who became modernity’s most famous Catholic convert. He was born at the beginning of the century (1801), died at the end (1890), and converted from the Church of England at mid-century (1845), just seven years before he gave the lectures that concern us. He gave the lectures that formed the basis of his book because an Irish bishop asked him to, as part of an effort to establish a new Catholic University of Ireland. Newman gave the talks, re-wrote them, combined them with other essays he wrote during the 1 850s and published them as The Idea of a University in 1873. The university no longer exists. His book does exist, but (as the essays that accompany the abridged 1996 Yale edition suggest), there is little agreement about whether it points us backward or forward—where “us” includes students and faculty but also university administrators and university labourers and even donors.

One of the curious features of this classic work on Catholic education is that Newman makes little explicit reference to the religious orders who were the founders of most Catholic colleges and universities—Benedictine or Augustinian, Dominican or Franciscan, Notre Dame or Jesuit. Yet, as I hope to show, these orders were clearly in the back of Newman’s mind in ways that shed light on the argument of The Idea as well as on our own circumstances.
Postmodernism and the ‘Trinity’: How to be postmodern and post‐Barthian too
Authors: Thompson Ross
Published: July 2007

The trouble with post-modern theology is that it tends to be pre-Barthian. Indeed, two main strands of English theology that have attempted to write from a postmodern perspective—the ‘Sea of Faith’ school surrounding Don Cupitt, and the ‘Radical Orthodoxy’ school surrounding John Milbank, Graham Ward and Catherine Pickstock— share very little else but their postmodernism and different kinds of pre-Barthianism. I suspect the arguments of this article could be applied equally to the American ‘post-liberal’ school surrounding George Lindbeck, but space forbids treatment of too many variants.

For a definition of postmodernism I follow Milbank:

The end of modernity, which is not yet accomplished, but continues to arrive, means the end of a single system of truth based on universal reason, which tells us what reality is like.

Modernism then represents faith in three things:

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Deductivism: the idea that all meaningful language forms a single deductive system, wherein the truth value of any proposition can be calculated;

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Foundationalism: the idea that this system can be securely based on universally accepted premises

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Correspondence theory: the idea that statements exist to express truth, which consists in the correspondence between what they assert and what is the case.

Modernism hopes one day to get at a text that is consistent with itself, demonstrable to all reasonable people, and adequate to the world. Of course, there is a lot out there in the world that is currently ‘outside the text’, but one day we will expand the text to fit the world exactly, like a glove.
Brer Rabbit Christology
Authors: Murphy Francesca Aran
Published: July 2007

James Cone begins his book about The Spirituals and Blues by defining this music as ‘the power of song in the struggle for black survival’. The quality of spirituals and blues is ‘an optimism that uses the pessimism of life as raw material out of which it creates its own strength’. The use of human life at its roughest as a source of power is also the meaning of comedy. Comedy is not just a funny ha-ha plot, it is a milieu. It is a milieu over which love presides. Speaking about the earthiness of the blues, Cone observes, ‘People cannot love physically and spiritually ... until they have been up against the edge of life, experiencing the hurt and pain of existence.’ The painful, raw sounds of the blues and the spirituals venture further into the comic milieu than do Hollywood romantic ‘comedies.’

Richie Havens used to sing a spiritual called ‘Motherless Child’
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,A long ways from home,A long ways from home.Sometimes I feel like I’m almost gone,Sometimes I feel like I’m almost gone,Sometimes I feel like I’m almost gone,A long ways from home,A long ways from home.Sometimes I feel like a feather in the air,Sometimes I feel like a feather in the air,Sometimes I feel like a feather in the air,And I spread my wings and I fly,I spread my wings and I fly.
On The Sum Total of Human Happiness
Authors: Schall James V.
Published: July 2007

The most famous book that talks to us of precisely “human” happiness, the proper happiness of man in so far as he is man in this world, is, no doubt, Aristotle’s Ethics. Here he tells us, as if looking into our own souls in our own time, that everything we do, all the particular, singular things in which our actions exist and which constitute the outlines of our lives, we do because we seek to be happy by the doing of these actions. This seeking to be happy in each particular act is what unites all the things that do exist in so far as they are touched by human minds and hands. All human beings reveal the same curious variety of longings in their origins. The world, in other words, is full of things that came to be because someone sought to be happy and did something to attain this purpose, albeit not always the right thing or the best thing..

Aristotle next explains to us that we can have differing ideas of that in which this happiness consists, but even here, the general diversity is not so great when we come to examine it. The great variations that seem at first sight evident in human searchings can be subsumed under four general headings. Some think that happiness is money, some pleasure, some honour or power, and still others think it consists in human contemplation of truth, of knowing the things that are. Happiness, Aristotle tells us; is an activity, it is an activity of our highest faculties on the highest objects