bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The Sense of an Ending
Authors: Navone John 
Published: July 2007

Life stories have a beginning, a middle and an ending. Our sense of the ending depends on our basic faith concerning the ultimate meaning and value of our life story. The entire life story of Jesus Christ and its particular ending in the resurrection equips Christian faith with its sense of the ending of both our individual life stories and of the universal story that is history. The resurrection expresses the belief that the Storyteller’s Creator Spiritus of life-giving love, which enabled Jesus Christ to find his true story, also enables us to find our true stories with the same love that survives death in the resurrection of the just.The story of the Last Judgment, which also expresses faith’s sense of an ending, implies that the love which survives death is a responsible love. We are responsible for the incipient life stories that we have gratuitously received; and we are responsible for finding our true stories in virtue of the life-giving love that we have received. Our freedom is such that we are not necessarily predetermined by the gift of the life-giving love to the finding of our true story. What has been freely received may be freely rejected.
Judaism and the Universe of Faiths
Authors: Cohn‐Sherbok Rabbi Dan 
Published: July 2007

Recently there has been considerable discussion in Christian circles about the relationship between Christianity and the world religions. Traditionally Christians have insisted that anyone outside the Church cannot be saved. To quote a classic instance of this view, the Council of Florence in 1483-45 declared that: ‘no one remaining outside the Catholic Church, not just pagans but also Jews or heretics or schismatics, can become partakers of eternal life: but they will go to everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels. Unless before the end of life they are joined to the Church’.Increasingly, however, for many this view has seemed highly improbable in the light of contact with other faiths. An important document issued by the Catholic Church in 1965 (Nostra Aetate) for example declared that the truth which enlightens every man is reflected also in non-Christian religions. Nevertheless while recognising the value of other religions, this declaration maintains that the Christian is at the same time under the obligation to preach that Christ is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
Liberation Ethics and Idealism
Authors: Fourez Gerard 
Published: July 2007

Liberation theologies provide a framework for serious reflection about systemic issues. But some liberation theologians, while urging social change, foster a guilt-inducing process which actually prevents both personal and social change. The tendency to moralize individual life is thus simply transposed into moralizing and collective issues. Absolute search for justice can even sometimes become offensive. The content of normative ethics is changed but the same guilt-inducing attitudes remain.This article is concerned with the construction of a “liberation ethics” which goes beyond the mere transposition of idealistic moral philosophy to a new set of issues. It deals with the meaning of ethical principles and of sin, while constructing an ethics based on historical accounts of liberation. Interestingly, this approach is consonant with the “different voice” of women in ethics, as it has been analysed by scholars like Carol Gilligan.The Shortcomings of Idealistic Ethics
“My Lord and my God”: The locus of confession
Authors: Radcliffe Timothy 
Published: July 2007

Most New Testament scholars would agree with Raymond Brown when he claims that there are only three passages in Scripture which indisputably call Jesus God, and that two of these are in John’s gospel, in the first verse and at the very end, in Thomas’ confession (20:28). And theologians are divided in their reaction to this “high” johannine christology between those who welcome it as an unambiguous declaration of the divinity of Christ, the first step towards Nicea, and those who find it very odd, perhaps intolerably odd, to address any man, even this man, as God and so can only accept it as an eccentric way of claiming that Jesus is the definitive revelation of God, or that, at worst, this is the beginning of a dogmatic tradition that betrays the man Jesus. I would like to suggest that the way forward is to recognise that something very curious is indeed happening in the Prologue and in Thomas’ confession but rather than cope with these odd statements by pretending that they are actually saying something much less scandalous (“Jesus is the man who definitively reveals God”), we must admit that they only have meaning within a particular context.It should be possible to write a sociology of the early church which would show that particular sorts of christological claims only came to be made at a certain point in the history of the church because it was only then that the ecclesial context existed in which such claims could make sense.
Strikes: Reformulating Catholic Thinking in Britain
Authors: Ombres Robert 
Published: July 2007

If it is to be of real value, Catholic discussion in Britain on the right to strike must take into account the main strands of reflection so far on the subject. My object here is simply to draw attention to these, not to describe them in detail, much less to make here a theoretical contribution to the discussion myself.It may be of interest to begin with three contrasting examples of clerical reflection born out of social realities. Cardinal Manning’s social thinking had an important influence on trade unionists even in his own lifetime. He seems to have developed personal friendships with some union leaders, described rather ambiguously as ‘some of their most famous agitators’ by the anonymous writer of the 1934 Preface to a collection of Manning’s works on social questions. Manning was deeply and personally involved in the celebrated London dock strike of 1889. Writing a couple of years after that strike, the Cardinal took it as ‘evident’ that between a capitalist and a working man there can be no true freedom of contract. The capitalist is invulnerable in his wealth. Concerning the nature of strikes he reflected, ‘A strike is like war. If for a just cause, a strike is right and inevitable, it is a healthful restraint imposed upon the despotism of capital’. John Lopes was Catholic chaplain at Cambridge from 1922 to 1928. During the General Strike of 1926 he was dismayed to hear of undergraduates volunteering as strike breakers and he warned, ‘If there is ever a class war in this country the universities of Oxford and Cambridge began it in 1926’. The Cardinal, preaching at Westminster, condemned the strike; dons were divided.
Rahner's Score
Authors: Kerr Fergus 
Published: July 2007

With the appearance of its eighteenth and nineteenth volumes, the English translation of Karl Rahner’s Schriften zur Theologie now stands complete in a score of volumes (I reviewed the twentieth, which appeared in 1981, in February last year). Completion was timed for Rahner’s eightieth birthday, which was on 5 March.Some of the essays refer in footnotes to subsequent papers, so a supplementary collection will eventually (even soon) be necessary. The publishers are to be congratulated on staying the course. The translators have sometimes nodded, and some have occasionally been defeated by Rahner’s tortuous sentences and idiosyncratic jargon (it has never been kept uniform). It is pleasant to record that the last three in the series (two volumes of the German edition) have been undertaken by Edward Quinn: needless to say, they reach the standard set by Cornelius Ernst in his pioneering version of the first volume (1961).
Priests, People and Parishes in Change: Reflections of a Sociologist
Authors: Hornsby‐Smith Michael P. 
Published: July 2007

During the past twenty years a massive literature has grown up on the implications for the life of the Roman Catholic Church of modern social changes and shifts in theological emphasis legitimated by the Second Vatican Council. Nevertheless, it would be useful to try to summarize from a sociological standpoint the overall effect of those changes and shifts in the role of the parochial clergy of England and Wales and on their relationship with the laity.The Roman Catholic community in these countries broadly can be said to comprise six distinct strands in terms of social origins and cultural heritage. First of all there is the largely aristocratic and upper middle class strand, derived from the recusant gentry, in decline since the restoration of the hierarchy in 1850. The second strand consists of a significant infusion of converts. The third, by far the most important numerically, is the mass of Irish immigrants over the past century and a half. About the size and significance of the last three strands we know remarkably little in any detail: Catholic refugees arriving in the 1930s and 1940s from Eastern Europe (especially Poland), and Catholic migrant workers and their families from the Mediterranean countries and from the Caribbean.Of these various strands, the most significant from the point of view of the emergence of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales as a significant religious and political force is undoubtedly the Irish strand.
Religious Belief and the Shadow of Uncertainty
Authors: Corner Mark 
Published: July 2007

A paper presented at the International Symposium on Sociology and Theology, Oxford, January 1984In his Earnest Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion, John Wesley spoke of faith as follows:
...as you cannot reason concerning colours if you have no natural sight—because all the ideas received by your senses are of a different kind... so you cannot reason concerning spiritual things if you have no spiritual sight, because all your ideas received by your outward senses are of a different kind; yea, far more different from those received by faith or internal sensation than the idea of colour from that of sound.In Wesley’s mind faith is a ‘spiritual sense’ which enables the believer to perceive a reality beyond the scope of the non-believer restricted to the ‘natural’ senses. Faith, Wesley emphasises, is not a human choice but a gift of God. Those lacking this gift may no more understand what it means to have faith, than those lacking the gift of sight may understand what it means to see. (Note, incidentally, that in this article I am using ‘faith in’ God and ‘belief in’ God as interchangeable terms, and talk of ‘believers’ and ‘unbelievers’ as if there was no such thing as ‘half-belief’.)The model of perception, when used in this way to explain the nature of religious belief, tends to make of believers a privileged group who may have only a limited dialogue with the ‘blind’. Indeed, it is difficult to see what sort of discussion would be possible between believer and unbeliever as to why one should believe.
Etienne Gilson 1884 — 1984
Authors: Harding John 
Published: July 2007

When Etienne Gilson died on 19 September 1978 at the age of 94, medieval studies suffered the loss of one of its most celebrated historians of philosophy. This year witnesses the centenary of his birth. It is perhaps appropriate briefly to recall the memory of this truly great scholar of our age. He was a cultured man in the best traditions of western scholarship, a fact to which his literary output amply attestsBorn on 13th June 1884 in Paris, and after a notable rise through the French educational labyrinth, Gilson emerged as a scholar and teacher of considerable dimensions in terms of the breadth and depth of his learning. Though a dedicated family man, he was never afraid to meet the countless calls to lecture, write and also to attend and contribute to the numerous conferences to which he was invited. Such was his stature to become that on more than one occasion, he was called to represent his country on the international stage in various capacities.His travels in the service of his scientia amabilis were fruitful not only in the sense that they gave him the opportunity to share and enrich his scholarship through the contact he made with so many others on both sides of the Atlantic, but also because it was on one such journey to Canada in 1927 that the idea of establishing a programme of Medieval Studies in St. Michael’s College, Toronto, was seriously discussed. Two years later the new Institute of Medieval Studies was born, receiving Pontifical approbation in 1939.
God as Mother: a necessary debate
Authors: Middleton Deborah F. 
Published: July 2007

The report recently published by a study group for the Church of Scotland on the Motherhood of God for discussion at the Church’s General Assembly caused quite a stir in the popular press, and this reaction, no doubt, had a part to play in setting the atmosphere for the reception of the report at the Assembly itself. However, that there should be such a reaction would seem to reflect the patriarchal nature of the society we live in rather than a resurgence of religious fervour, since I would doubt that the feelings of horror and ridicule expressed came in each case from a devout church-goer.Despite the trivialisation of the report by the popular press and its subsequent dismissal by the General Assembly, this reaction as a whole should be welcomed by theologians and believers alike, and those who produced the report should not be upset by it, because confrontation and controversy are at the heart of the Christian gospel and the tradition of the Church. From the beginning the preaching of the gospel encountered intransigence and resistance to change. St. Paul himself expressed anguish at the seemingly impossible task of preaching the concept of a crucified God, ‘the scandal of the cross’, which he describes as, ‘a stumbling block to Jews and folly to gentiles’ (I Cor. 1:23). But without that leap into new territory the Christian message would have died with the first apostles. This does not mean that the Church must change for change’s sake, but only that it is through confrontation with new concepts that we are forced to study and reflect on our present position.
Doing Theology in English
Authors: Lash Nicholas 
Published: July 2007

The text of a brief report presented to the Upholland Theological Consultation of April 1984, at which Fergus Kerr OP gave the paper which we published in June.IntroductionNine years ago, the editor of The Month invited me to reflect on the state of English Catholic theology. In preparation for this Consultation, therefore, I turned back to the article I produced on that occasion and asked myself: how much has changed?By and large, I think, very little. Others of you are better placed than I am to comment on the state of theology in seminaries, colleges of education, and houses of study of religious orders. In the universities, the Catholic contribution has continued to grow quite impressively (at least so far as numbers of both staff and students are concerned). But these resources of largely lay theological competence continue, I think, to be insufficiently appreciated by the Church in this country. (I have the impression that the theological preparation for the Liverpool Pastoral Congress illustrates this neglect.)Where the publication of original, scholarly, creative work is concerned, we are still nowhere near making a contribution proportionate to our resources. To be blunt, I have especially in mind here a problem which I call ‘the reticence of the religious’—who have not, for the most part, even the excuse of vows of silence! On the other hand, in the very important area of high level popularisation, we owe a great debt of gratitude to Michael Richards for his series Introducing Catholic Theology.
Half Slave, Half Free: Patrick Macgill and the Catholic Church
Authors: Aspinwall Bernard 
Published: July 2007

I do not singOf angel fair or damosel That leans athwart a painted sky;My little verses only tellHow human beings live and die And labour as the years go by.I do not singOf plaster saints or jealous gods,But of little ones I know,Who paint their cheeks or bear their hods Because they live in doing so Their hapless life on earth below.Patrick Macgill Songs of the Dead EndPatrick Macgill (1889—1962), the Donegal poet and novelist, was an articulate spokesman for a suppressed, inarticulate migrant workforce. He is also effectively an important voice of the sensitive layman in a clericalised church around the turn of the century. To give rather than to acquire is his message; to give freely and to become truly liberated is his ideal of the Church which he loved to hate: ‘If a man is born to the ould ancient faith he’ll never lose it’, it will always be there, (1918 : 200). That tension between the authoritarian clergy and the layman runs through his work. The preoccupation with sexual morality and the only moral issue runs through his scorn for that lace-curtain respectability of his time. His class-consciousness is remarkable in early twentieth-century Catholic writing, when many churches seemed to have lost their sense of personal involvement with the poor as people rather than objects of charity. That, for Macgill was the ultimate pornography. Himself a navvy in Scotland, he knew the bitter experience of the emigrant Irish far removed from the organisational church, from the main stream of secular life and effective personal relationships, and so from God.
Argument, Essence and Identity
Authors: Lash Nicholas 
Published: July 2007

English theology is notoriously ‘lop-sided’. In the historical disciplines, it has an excellent record of intelligent and discriminating scholarship. But, when attention shifts from what was once said and done in the name of Christianity to what might be said or done today, matters are either handed over to the philosopher (whose admirable and indispensable preoccupation with formal and linguistic considerations is no guarantee of competence to perform this task) or else are tackled at a level which, according to the standards operative in cognate ‘secular’ disciplines—from aesthetics and literary criticism to social and political theory—is so strikingly amateurish as to render it hardly surprising that theology plays little part in the conversation of the culture. In this naughty world, Professor Sykes has performed an excellent deed. The Identity of Christianity is a learned, vigorous and original reconstruction of some perennial problems: problems which found particular focus, in the nineteenth century, in discussion of the ‘essence’ of Christianity.Sykes has shifted the theme from ‘essence’ to ‘identity’ partly to counter the widespread but unwarranted suspicion that an ‘enquiry into what makes Christianity Christianity’ (p.3) is likely to be reductionist in character, and partly because his discovery of the importance of Newman’s work for the ‘elucidation of what was at stake’ helped him to see how mistaken was the equally widespread view that the issues under consideration are of central moment only to Protestant Christians.
Liberation Theology and the Holy See: A Question of Method
Authors: Nichols Aidan 
Published: July 2007

I The Holy See’s critique of liberation theologyIn its document Certain Aspects of the ‘Theology of Liberation’ the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith not only accepts but welcomes the advent of a ‘theology of liberation’, seen as a theological exploration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ as a ‘message of liberty’ and as ‘liberating power’. The CDF finds fault, therefore, not with the project but with its execution, not with liberation theology as such but with the structure and content of a significant proportion of the liberation theology currently being written. Just how much a significant proportion might be is impossible to determine. On the one hand, some writings of the more extreme members of the school offer the most complete textual confirmation of the portrait by the CDF. Thus in a work put into English in 1977 we read that a theology which accepts the truth of historical materialism (i.e. classical Marxism) will ‘assume his (Marx’s) theory completely in order to see what sort of faith , if any, is possible on that basis’. A moderate liberationist, Gustavo Gutierrez, admits in the preface to a work by a more radicalised colleague thast it would be ‘disingenuous’ to deny the danger of reductionism of just the kind now identified by the CDF. On the other hand, the genre of the document is not textual description so much as logical or conceptual projection. That is, it appears to be concerned with the end-state to which a consistent application of the principles involved in current liberation theology would lead, rather than with a description of a representative mean in the present state of liberation theology.
Kerr on Cartesianism in Catholic Thought: Right or Wrong?
Authors: Trethowan Illtyd 
Published: July 2007

In June we published the paper which Fergus Kerr had given at the Upholland Theological Consultation in April, ‘‘The Need for Philosophy in Theology Today” (p. 248—260). In it Father Kerr set out to establish his case by assembling examples of the neo-Cartesian presuppositions which he believes still pervade a lot of Western thinking, and Catholic theology especially, but are largely undiscerned. The paper has evoked many and varied reactions, ranging from enthusiastic praise to severe criticism. One of its critics, Father Illtyd Trethowan, discusses it here, and Father Kerr replies.The issue of New Blackfriars for June 1984 contains the text of Father Fergus Kerr’s address to ‘the gathering which founded the Catholic Theological Association of Great Britain’ in April 1984. A rough summary of his theme might go as follows. Catholic theology is profoundly imbued with ‘a certain Cartesianism’ from which we need to escape (pp. 248—9). Catholic Scholastic philosophy of 25 years ago, based on Aristotle, presents issues which are the subjects of current philosophical debate (although not of current interest to Catholic theologians) and resistance to Cartesianism would have the added advantage of contact with this philosophical debate (pp. 249—52). Catholic theology since Descartes was a struggle to resist Cartesianism, and Aristotelian Thomism was a weapon in the fight; but the battle was lost because the enemy had infiltrated too deeply (pp. 252—3). Examples of Cartesian influence in Catholic theology today are to be found in ‘mentalism in prayer’, ‘interiorist volitionism in moral theology’, a certain approach to human survival after death, Kiing’s presuppositions and Chirico’s epistemology (pp. 253—7).
Prophet and Apostle: Bartolomé de las Casas and the spiritual conquest of America
Authors: Brading David 
Published: July 2007

I: Defender of the Indians or Satan’s tool?In his De procuranda indorum salute (1589) the Spanish Jesuit, José de Acosta, a former provincial of his order in Peru, lamented that nowadays the gospel and war were all too closely associated. He was at pains to reject proposals mooted by a fellow Jesuit that Spain should invade China so as to bring that great empire into the fold of the Catholic Church. Not that Acosta was a pacifist, since he defended the right of a Christian Prince to establish forts in heathen territory for the protection of trade and the preaching of the gospel. Moreover, in regions like Amazonia, inhabited by mere savages without any law, king or fixed abode, there was a positive duty to introduce some form of political order so that the natives could be taught the elements of civility and Christianity. Any resistance to this imposition of a protectorate could be justly quelled by force of arms, albeit applied with paternal firmness. As for the justice of the previous conquest of the relatively advanced kingdoms of the Incas and Aztecs, Acosta simply counselled a closure of debate, arguing that with no chance of restitution or restoration, any further discussion of the question merely served to provoke dissension between the spiritual and temporal authorities.