bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Persons and Metaphysic
Authors: Moore Sebastian 
Published: July 2007

‘The thinking, presenting subject—there is no such thing. ... In an important sense there is no subject. . . . There is (therefore) really a sense in which in philosophy we can talk non-psychologically of the I. The I occurs in philosophy through the fact that the “world is my world”. The philosophical I is not the man, not the human body, or the human soul of which psychology treats, but the metaphysical subject, the limit—not a part of the world.’ Wittgenstein, Tractus 5.631-5.641.One may disagree with this. But it gives the mind that jolt which is absolutely needed before we can think truthfully about ourselves and our world. Only genius, with its preternatural command of words, can give this jolt, can really make us see.The study of man has made unprecedented advances in the recent centuries. And all would agree that the major advance has consisted in a new emphasis on the concrete. We are no longer content to define man—as rational animal, say: we seek to know how he ticks, what goes on in him. The emphasis is on experience.But the very placing of this emphasis makes us forget a very simple fact: that all experience is somebody's experience. In order to keep open to the puzzling nature of this fact, ask: what can be meant by attributing ‘experience’ to ‘somebody’? What sort of ownership is referred to?
Chairman Mao and the Parish Revolution
Authors: Hunter Deirdre 
Published: July 2007

‘Eat up your dinner’, my mother used to say. ‘Think of the starving millions in China.’That was before 1949. When 1949 came round, no one bothered to tell me what had happened. The ploy simply changed to ‘Think of the starving millions in India’.Even at that age I knew there was something funny about this argument. Whether I ate my dinner or not, the starving millions weren’t going to get a whiff of it.It is interesting, especially after nearly two years in China, to look back and laugh at my mother’s trick. More interesting, though, to realize that the new generation in the West has still not grown out of thinking in my mother’s terms.‘What is to be done about Vietnam?’ people say, in intervals between working at their meaningless jobs, or keeping up with the Joneses. ‘And what about India?’ And now that the Cultural Revolution is in full swing in China, such people might add ‘And poor China. . .’.There is no end to the ‘problems’ that confront Western suburban man. He revels in solving (in his head) the population explosion, the bomb, famine and flood, war. It seems to be little more than a game, an entertainment to take his mind off himself, off the apparently insoluble problems of his own society.
Catholics and Racial Crisis
Authors: Linden Ian 
Published: July 2007

‘I’m speaking as a victim of this American system. And I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don’t see any American dream. I see an American nightmare.’—Malcolm X.‘And the white Lt.-Colonel from the civilized USA jumped back, snorted and said: “My good man, where I come from we don’t eat people when we kill them. We’re civilized.” And the chief said, “Well baby, why you kill them?” ‘—Stokely Carmichael.By Summer the American public will be as accustomed to the idea of racial riots as to a well-advertised eclipse of the sun. The actuality of events, sifted through the mass media into print, polls, radio and television, stays comfortably once removed from the affluent. Most Americans watch the auguries of doom on the TV with the numbing disbelief of a rabbit caught in a truck’s headlights; erudite predictions of urban chaos substitute for immediate reform; election charades are played out with unusually large audience participation, and the administration plead for unity and patriotism. It all seems unreal.In March while President Johnson played golf in Puerto Rico, conspicuously absent from the communal confiteor of churches and liberal establishment, the public glanced at the findings of his commission on civil disorders. The report, a literary genre popularized by the 1966 McCone Commission report on the Los Angeles riots, told them that there was a racial crisis. In New York it was the time of the interregnum; priests were working feverishly on a policy statement while the laity passively awaited a seventh Irish-American Archbishop to ascend the throne of 451 Madison Avenue.
The Contempt of Ritual. II
Authors: Douglas Mary 
Published: July 2007

Ritual is pre-eminently a form of communication. Let us turn therefore to a modern sociologist who conducts research among ourselves into different patterns of communication. Professor Basil Bernstein says thatdifferent speech systems or codes create for their speakers different orders of relevance and relation. The experience of the speakers may then be transformed by what is made significant or relevant by different speech systems. As the child learns his speech, or, in the terms I shall use here, learns specific codes which regulate his verbal acts, he learns the requirements of his social structure. The experience of the child is transformed by the learning generated by his own, apparently voluntary acts of speech. The social structure becomes in this way the sub-stratum of the child’s experience essentially through the manifold consequence of the linguistic process. From this point of view, every time the child speaks or listens, the social structure is reinforced in him and his social identity shaped.He distinguishes two different types of linguistic codes. One, he calls the elaborated code, in which, as he says, the speaker selects from a wide range of syntactic alternatives, and these are flexibly organized; this speech requires complex planning. In the other, which he calls the restricted code, the speaker draws a much narrower range of syntactic alternatives, and these alternatives are more rigidly organized. The elaborated code is adapted to enable a speaker to make his own intentions explicit. It is adapted to the elucidation of general principles.
Has the Church Opted for Revolution?
Authors: de Broucker José 
Published: July 2007

Has the Roman Catholic Church now come round in favour of revolution? It is in South America that the question arises above all. The multiplication of facts and declarations which provoke the question often incline one to give an affirmative answer. In order to see what’s what, it might be useful to review certain recent events that have been particularly noteworthy.Most recent declarations rest on paragraphs 30 and 31 of Pope Paul Vi’s encyclical Populorum Progressio: ‘3o. There are certainly situations in which injustice cries to heaven. When entire populations, deprived of the necessities of life, live in a dependence that prevents them from exercising any initiative or responsibility, or from making any cultural advance or taking any part in social or political life, the temptation to remove such insults to human dignity by violence is great. 31. We know, however, that revolutionary insurrection—except in the case of manifest and prolonged tyranny that attacks fundamental rights of the person and endangers the common good of the country—engenders new injustices, brings in new imbalances, and involves new ruins. A real evil is not to be combated by a greater misery.’These two paragraphs have in general been received as a faithful expression of the traditional thought of the Church. The new factor here is therefore not at the level of thought or of expression; it lies in the welcome it has received and in the way in which it has been interpreted at the hands of a Christian public that is as inclined to justify ‘revolutionary insurrection’ now as it was formerly to discourage or condemn it.
All You Need is Love?
Authors: Moonan Lawrence 
Published: July 2007

It is embarrassing to utter a screaming banality in public: yet love, in all candour, is what the Catholic Church, to say nothing of the world in general, does desperately need. Think of a Christian. Then of Christians as a group. Busy. Long-suffering. Self-effacing. Can you think of them making little sacrifices for one another? Of course. Or perhaps laying down their lives for their brethren? Yes, again. Some of them at least. But do you think of them unzipped and uninhibited, actually loving each other? Ah, well now. . . . Auch unter ihnen sind Helden; viele von ihnen litten zuviel-: so wollen sie andre leiden machen. Amen, Zarathustra.A French magazine carried out a survey among its readers (Catholics, nearly all of them) on birth control: What the readers thought or did about it, what they thought the Church in general should do about it. What is to the point here is not that the views expressed showed wide divergence, nor even that they revealed such a mass of human suffering:‘. . . I would have been completely blind if my husband hadn’t shown great love for me by abstaining from pleasure, when he felt the approach of his sexual emission. That’s what love is, otherwise it’s self-love for the sake of pleasure.’‘Our young couple have been reading a book, The Joys of Loving, which is far too concerned with sex, then Better Love, which is sheer filth, since they ended up knowing more than their parents did after twenty-seven years of marriage.’
St Luke and Christian Ideals in an Affluent Society
Authors: Wansbrough Henry 
Published: July 2007

The tradition that the third gospel was written by Luke the doctor dies hard. We may realize that the ‘Luke the doctor’ of Colossians 4, 14 is not necessarily the same Luke as the one to whom the gospel is attributed (just as there is no shadow of an indication that the Mark of the second gospel is any of the Marks mentioned in the Acts and the Epistles). We may know that all attempts to show that the author of the third gospel used medical language collapse, simply because there was no such thing as technical medical language in those days. Yet there remains a sympathy with human suffering and appreciation of the many-sidedness of men’s characters, a power to make a penetrating yet kindly assessment which is often —rightly or wrongly—associated with the medical man, the Dr Camerons or even the Dr Findlays of this world. But Luke is no country doctor from the highlands or the valleys, and it is because of this that his special preoccupation with rich and poor is especially significant to Christians of an affluent society brought face to face with poverty.Luke stands out among the other New Testament writers by a certain grace and dignity. The gospel of Mark, on which a large part of both Matthew’s and Luke’s gospels is based, is undisguisedly Kleinliteratur, stories told uncomplicatedly in simple, popular form, without literary pretension; he writes the sort of Greek which was probably spoken by the lower classes in the cities of the Roman empire.
Who Were the Modernists?
Authors: Trevor Meriol 
Published: July 2007

People are beginning to realize that some of the ideas put forward since the Council have roots which go back to the Modernist movement at the turn of the century. Since Modernism was condemned by Pius X’s encyclical Pascendi Gregis in 1907, with unexampled severity, this raises some interesting questions. The history of Modernism is in for reappraisal and already the field is bristling with budding experts, mostly French and American. I am no expert and the views I express here are open to revision.Modernism once seemed to me an interruption, almost an irrelevance, in the development of ideas in the Church. The link between the liberal Catholics of the nineteenth century and the general attitude which emerged at the recent Council is clear enough. The Council has reversed the views implicit in the famous Syllabus of Errors (1864); it has decided that ‘Christendom’ has gone for ever, that the Church must stop trying to govern the world and learn how to serve it. ‘A free Church in a free State’ has been enlarged into ‘a free Church in a free World’—an updated version, surely, of views first promoted by the unfortunate Lamennais and pursued with more caution by Montalembert and Lacordaire in France, the editors of the Rambler (Acton, Simpson, Newman) in England, and others elsewhere.This element in the Second Vatican Council is the one most apparent to the world, which welcomes it, and perhaps it may be called Pope John’s line, for his view was pastoral: how to make the Gospel available to the modern world was his deepest concern and a favourite word was convivenza, which he preferred to ‘co-existence’.
The Wider Ecumenism
Authors: Magrath Oswin 
Published: July 2007

Although the oikumene is the whole inhabited world, the term Ecumenism has been appropriated to relations between Christians. Therefore Fr Eugene Hillman, treating of non-Christian relations with the Church, had to qualify it as The Wider Ecumenism in the title of his new book, which develops previous writings of his.The relaxation of obstacles, largely legal, to relations of Catholics with other Christians has resulted in a short time in widespread changes of attitudes. These, in their turn, are exerting pressures on theology to review old positions, for ecumenical charity finds certain apparently established views incompatible with its experiences. Of such a nature seem to be the calls to revise the theology of the validity of orders, and of intercommunion.In the case of the wider ecumenism with non-Christians, the obstacles have been more theological, and, indeed, due largely to a lack of any theology of other religions. The elements of such a theology are to be found in tradition, and in recent years it has been developing in academic circles, especially in Germany. But so far these developments have had little impact on those who live and work in non-Christian places, where the old views and the consequent attitudes persist, with increasing tension being felt by Catholics and all Christians between them and the signs of the times.
A Penance Service
Authors: Swanston Hamish 
Published: July 2007

There is a trade of manners in the Church. The way one sacrament is celebrated influences, in time, the liturgy of others. This has been most evident in the recent history of the Eucharist and Penance.Penance, in the days immediately before Pius X, had pretensions to be a private business between priest and penitent in a box. It was individual and it was frequent. When Pius X made Communion frequent a great many people set about making it individual. Often enough communion was taken from the community context, and men went daily to communion before or after Mass. Even when communion was received within the Mass, efforts were made to maintain privacy for the communicant. Everyone came up quietly (my seminary Rector made a huge fuss when some of us looked up open-eyed as he passed down the line) and, having been quietly given a host from yesterday’s ciborium, they went quietly back to make a little cave with their hands, opening them a little perhaps when the Leonine prayers warned them that a demon was wandering through the world for the ruin of souls, and quickly shutting them again.All this is done with. The Eucharist has come out into the open again, and now in turn Penance is venturing forth.Penance has become popular. And this in two senses of the phrase. More people are taking part in the ecclesial forgiveness of God, and they are more often doing so as members one of another rather than as single men.
Waiting for 1984
Authors: Berridge Dorothy 
Published: July 2007

Psychologists working in the field of human development are understandably reluctant to make predictions. They prefer to work backwards, attempting to explain later behaviour in the light of earlier experience, but always aware of the multiple factors involved in the human situation and of the unreliability and inaccuracy of what has been recorded, often in retrospect. Reliable studies on a large enough scale are few and far between, especially in this country, while the increasing social and geographical mobility of the general population makes any longitudinal study over the years increasingly difficult to carry through.Meanwhile, theories of child-rearing abound, varying not only from generation to generation but also according to the school of thought involved; more important, large sections of the population remain more or less untouched by such professional advice, even at the level of the popular women’s journals, so that the mores of regional subcultures persist, despite the attempts of teachers and social workers with what are now recognized as essentially middle-class professional goals and expectations.Nevertheless, one factor on which there is increasing agreement is the importance of the earliest years, of the pre-school period spent largely within the family setting. What evidence there is suggests real differences at work within the range of social class, which will facilitate or hamper the work of formal education during the next ten or more years the children will spend in school. What these differences really are, and how they can be met without distorting or destroying what is valuable at each level, still remains a matter of conjecture.
Towards the Recovery of Wisdom
Authors: Ling Trevor 
Published: July 2007

The most important task facing the West today is the recovery of that spiritual tradition which, by the fourteenth century, had found widespread expression and had its representatives throughout Catholic Europe, but which was then lost in the convulsions which shook the Latin Church in the sixteenth century, as attention was directed predominantly to questions of institutional authority, dogmatic orthodoxy and political advantage. Such, at least, is the view which in varying ways has recently been expressed by men of learning and perception whose viewpoint is that of non-European and non-Christian cultures, notably Islamic, Hindu and Buddhist. There have been suggestions of a similar kind from Christians who have opened their minds to the testimony of these other religions and cultures. Five recently published books which bear upon this subject are Edward Conze’s Thirty Years of Buddhist Studies, Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s The Encounter of Man and Nature, Frithjof Schuon’s In the Tracks of Buddhism, William Johnston’s The Mysticism of the Cloud of Unknowing, and Sisirkumar Ghose’s Mystics and Society.The malaise of modern Western society, whose symptoms are high rates of alcoholism and other forms of drug addiction, suicide, violence, the increase of mental illness, the steady but lethal pollution of the atmosphere and the earth’s waters, and the prodigal squandering of natural resources with little thought for the future, are seen by more than one of these writers as being connected with the fact that from about the end of the fifteenth century European religion became divorced from the perennial philosophy (with its spiritual understanding of nature) of which until then it had formed a branch.
Ataraxy and Utopia
Authors: Kerr Fergus 
Published: July 2007

This is surely bound to fail, but the need to attempt to make some connections has become irrepressible. In this first article, then, I want to use Perry Anderson’s recent critique of the present state of British culture to introduce some quotations from The Dialectics of Liberation. What I am getting at here can emerge, if ever it does at all, only as we proceed. The point is that there is something wrong with British culture: what Anderson refers to as its ataraxy, its imperviousness to certain disturbing ideas; and there is a chance that the utopian dimension evoked once again by some recent thinking may prove quickening and liberatory. In a second article I want to bring out the ambivalent connections between the work of Herbert Marcuse and that of Martin Heidegger. Finally, in a third article, it should be possible to relate all this to the English literary-critical tradition and to the classical moment in Catholic theology.Ernest Gellner’s Words and Things, first published in 1959 and now widely available as a paperback, has recently been hailed as a ‘classic’, to which ‘all critics of English philosophy owe a great debt’. This salutation of another orthodoxy (that by the standards of a revolutionary and internationalist political consciousness English philosophy is trivial, after all) comes in an important essay by Perry Anderson in the fiftieth issue of New Left Review (July-August 1968). This is the most persuasive and thorough-going offer of new bearings for the critique of contemporary British culture that has so far been made.
Stalinensis: Yurodivy
Authors: Nicholl Donald 
Published: July 2007

This is an essay that I have wanted to write for a long time. Perhaps not exactly this essay but one like it. In fact, I once did so, about twenty years ago. That essay was all about the rights of conscience: how our consciences are formed; and how to be Catholic means to be free. But the article was turned down by the editor of the journal in question because my remarks on conscience were ‘meat being offered to babes who can only take milk’. If the Catholic ‘babes’ had been given such meat twenty years ago perhaps they would not have suffered such pains from the diet which recent events have provided for them. Yet what saddened me most about the episode was the editor’s assumption that anything written by a Catholic must in some sense be ‘definitive’.This notion that an article has to be definitive leads to articles being mass-produced, all of the same form and, above all, identical in tone, very solemn, rather omniscient, final in their judgments, givng an air of finality even to their non-judgments, donning the judge’s black cap even when pronouncing the accused not guilty. This means to say that writers are encouraged to pretend that one of their half-thoughts is a thesis, and two of their half-thoughts a whole book (a publisher once asked me to turn an article of twelve pages that I had published into a book of 140 pages, saying ‘You needn’t add anything of substance to it’; he produced a series of such books).
Thoughts of a Monknik
Authors: Tugwell Simon 
Published: July 2007

I am sometimes asked how I reconcile being a monk with my involvement in movements devoted to the Alternative Society. I think we should turn that question upside down. A monk is ipso facto involved in the enterprise of the Alternative Society, and the wonder is that so few seem to realize it.After all, what do we mean by the alternative society? We mean, I take it, that we have glimpsed, far away, a vision of what it might be like for man to be free; a dream of human society in which love is all you need, in which death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more (that’s from the Apocalypse, actually). And not only that. We have decided to stake all on that vision, that dream. We have committed ourselves to living as if man were really like that, as if society could really live by love alone. We have let ourselves be subverted by utopia, and can never be the same again.And that is the definition of the Church, and most especially of the religious orders. The Church is, according to the Second Vatican Council, the present sign and nucleus of the future kingdom, the new creation; and religious orders are in particular called to live their whole lives as a witness to this future, this Utopia.