bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Contempt for the Past
Authors: Dummett Ann 
Published: July 2007

‘L’immensite de ces espaces infinies m’effraie’, said Pascal, and we are all familiar with the ways in which European attitudes to the place of man in the universe have changed since astronomy rendered him small, lonely and vulnerable. But the idea of the expanding universe in infinite space, while it robbed man of a central place as lord of creation below the heavens, did not take away the idea of brotherhood between men. That deprivation has to do with another kind of frightening immensity: the unthinkable length of the human past.It is less than two hundred years since educated Europeans believed that Adam was very close to them in time. Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary, first published in 1788, the work from which Keats took his knowledge of classical mythology, begins with a chronology following the guidance of Dr Blair and Archbishop Ussher: the creation of the world is given in 4004 B.C. and the birth of Moses in 1571. Thus the gap between Adam and Moses was of the same length as the gap between Moses and Basil the First at Constantinople in 862 A.D. Chronologies varied, but none placed the first man so far away in time that imagination could not encompass the distance. Moreover, this nearness was a matter not only of time but of human nature. Adam was no less human than they, no less intelligent, no less feeling: there was a real sense in which he was not only an ancestor but a brother. Made in the image of God, he was of noble appearance; fallen through sin, he was a fellow-sufferer of human misfortune; formed out of dust, he was lowly; speaking with God in Paradise he was touched with glory.
Anthony Powell: The End of the Dance
Authors: McCabe Bernard 
Published: July 2007

In 1951, after a twelve-year silence, Anthony Powell, who had produced several Waugh-like novels in the Thirties, published A Question of Upbringing, a gently witty and evocative meditation on the past in which Nicholas Jenkins, soon recognisable as a Powell self-portrait, reviews the course of his life from his late teens at Eton, through Oxford, and into the London social and literary scene of his early twenties and this century’s thirties. The novel, which was well received by the usual people—V. S. Pritchett, Cyril Connolly, Waugh himself—turned out to be the first instalment of an immense roman fleuve, entitled A Dance to the Music of Time, comprising twelve novels, the last of which, Hearing Secret Harmonies (William Heinemann, London, 1975), has now appeared. The first six, in two trilogies, cover the 1930s; there is a war trilogy; and a final trilogy in a rapidly developing time-span covers the post-war years up to the late Sixties. The series deserves attention, apart from any other reason, as probably the last major flourish in the long, honourable tradition of English social fiction.The books are mostly about people meeting and trying to deal with one another—as friends, enemies, rivals, sexual partners, spouses. Jenkins develops and observes a network of relationships both tenuous and intense, friendships and loves that ripen and fade and fall. All this is presented in a huge casual anecdotal recit, a series of largely comic social encounters in which each character is present as himself or herself and also present as a social force, with the narrator’s voice providing the balancing clues about the situation.
The Search for the Self
Authors: Benson John 
Published: July 2007

There is a familiar determinist argument that runs: those of my actions that are most my own are those that express my character. But I did not make my character, it was made for me by heredity and circumstances. Those whose characters have been so made that they do good acts are lucky; those whose characters make them do bad acts are unlucky. Perhaps some people can change certain of their qualities, so that they act better after the change. But to have the desire and ability to make the change is simply something else about the way they are made -they are lucky. Actions that express one’s character may be chosen, but if one can do nothing about one’s character one surely cannot be blamed for it, or for what, given that one is like that, one will inevitably choose to do.There is a curious defence of freewill which accepts nearly everything in this determinist argument. It concedes that character determines action and that character is made by other factors than one’s own choices. But it claims that in the exceptional situation where one’s moral duty requires an action that is incompatible with what one’s character would suggest one becomes aware that the self is more than one’s character, and the common or garden me that is my character can be over-ruled by the transcendent I which sees where duty lies.This is an extreme example of a recurrent theme in philosophy—the identification of the self-observing self with the good rational self. In this version it is surely unacceptable because it implies that the capacity to see where duty lies and the strength of will that enables one to go through with it have nothing to do with the character that is formed by experience, the empirical character.
Christ and China
Authors: O'Collins Gerald 
Published: July 2007

It has been conventional to describe theology as ‘faith seeking understanding’. We might, however, care to shift from the private sphere of understanding to the public sphere of language and call theology ‘watching one’s language in the presence of God’. Either way Christian theology must show itself to be truly Christian. It should seek understanding in the light of Jesus Christ. It should watch its language in the presence of the God-man.Using either version of theology, what might we say about the New China and the recent Chinese experience? What insights and reflections does faith in Christ suggest about the era and the nation on which Mao Tse-tung has put his stamp? Where can belief in the Crucified and risen Jesus take its stand vis-a-vis contemporary China?When asked to confront Christ and Mao’s China I have no short or easy answer to give. Let me single out two themes (suffering and the emulation of heroes), and then conclude by listing some major points of comparison and contrast when we bring together the two figures themselves, Jesus and Mao.First of all, suffering. Over twenty years ago Father Robert W. Greene’s Calvary in China appeared. In 1937 he had begun his missionary career in China. He was imprisoned after the Communist victory in 1949, put on trial in 1952, and then expelled from the country.
What makes America different?
Authors: Black Antony 
Published: July 2007

If we ask what differentiates most Americans from non-Americans, if we want to define American culture qua outlook and values transmitted by family, school, associates, etc., which perpetually underlie these peoples’ approach to problems, moulds their intelligence and stirs their will-power, we must consider their past and their environment, as well as the living molecules of that culture itself. The very question may seem to be inappropriate, but not to a foreigner who has lived here for an appreciable time.There were planned programmes of corporate English settlement in North America, not unlike the traditional pattern of human migration. But by far the greatest number of settlers came to America either as nuclear families and individuals, or, particularly in the 17th and 18th centuries, as distinctive sub-groups which had deliberately differentiated themselves from their earlier national ethos. Among these latter were the English Congregationalists or neo-Calvinists and the German Mennonites. Such groups set up townships or village colonies which for a time— and in a few cases up till now retained a corporate character. But they were different from all earlier migratory enterprises in that the dominant factor that formed them as groups and brought them to the the new lands was religion, and a very particular kind of Christianity. They came because they had been persecuted at home, and they looked for a place where they could establish their own versions of the city of God on earth in peace and freedom from their enemies. Thus the word or concept ‘freedom’ was written on the sails and in the hearts of many of the early European immigrants.
Theology in a Century of Death
Authors: Turner Geoffrey 
Published: July 2007

In the fifth of a series of six Norton Lectures given at Harvard University in 1973 on the semantics of music called The Unanswered Question and recently broadcast on BBC 2, Leonard Bernstein said that ‘ours is a century of death, and Mahler is its prophet’. A history of the twentieth century must inevitably read as a catalogue of death and any authentic prophecy about the twentieth century must have the experience of death at its centre. Since 1914 the toll has mounted as cataclysm has been overtaken by self-inflicted cataclysm until the number of those killed during the last sixty years is no longer calculable. The optimism of the nineteenth century could be maintained until the First World War, but any attempt to perpetuate it after that has been a delusion. We can hardly be optimistic any longer about a civilization that is so self-destructive. The twentieth century experience as an experience of death has its true beginning not in 1900 but in 1914. The first fourteen years of this century were really a hangover from the bouyant bourgeois idealism of the last century. The authentic twentieth century experience was possible only after 1914. Since that first holocaust Europe and North America has moved from an initial optimism about its consequences (Lloyd George’s ‘land fit for heroes’) to disillusion, unemployment, depression and further destruction in 1939. Since 1945 we have had the initial optimism of the welfare state, followed by disillusion, unemployment, successive economic crises, followed by who knows what.Before 1914 there were a few precursors who, we can now see, gave intimations of what was to come. These prophets had already experienced the disintegration of bourgeois culture; Schnitzler, Karl Krauss, Thomas Mann in his early novels, Mahler. Others had even set about reconstructing our perception of reality, the cubist painters between 1907 and 1914, and Schönberg.
Women and the Eucharistic Presidency
Authors: McNeil Brian 
Published: July 2007

There has been much discussion recently about the ordination of women to the priesthood of the Catholic Church. Most writers on this subject agree that there are no theological reasons why women may not be admitted to the priesthood, and so the debate is conducted between prejudice on one side and sentimentality on the other. I do not see how it can be denied that there are many pastoral ministries, including preaching and counselling, where the effectiveness of women ministers would be very great; nevertheless, I believe that there are important theological considerations which tell against the ordination of women to one of the central ministries in the Church, the celebra-of the eucharist.This has nothing to do with the intentions of Jesus: the fact that he included no women among the Twelve is fundamentally irrelevant to the question of whether women today should be admitted to the priesthood, and not because of changed social conditions (that argument is merely one version of the fallacy that man has ‘come of age’ in the twentieth century), but rather because of our changed understanding of how, the Church stands in relation to Jesus as her founder. Even if Jesus did intend to found a Church, we have no warrant to suppose that he drew up detailed blueprints for its structures: and as it appears much more probable that he had no such intention, but exercised a ministry wholly within the parameters of contemporary Judaism, the question of what he would have thought of women priests becomes purely speculative. Further, it is in any case clear that the relation of the threefold ministry as it developed in the second century to the ministry of the Twelve is extremely distant; since the Twelve could not be replaced in their most important function, that of eye witnesses of the ministry and the resurrection appearances of Jesus (cf Acts 1 :2 If), the sense in which bishops or popes may be said to be their successors according to a pipeline model of apostolic succession is far from obvious.
Dramas and Pilgrims
Authors: Edwards Adrian 
Published: July 2007

Perhaps in some set of legends there is a story of some book that shrank or swelled according to the capacity of the person handling it to draw knowledge from it. If so, Victor Turner’s new book is of the same stock, since, approaching it at different time, I seem to find some different message in it. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors looks at first sight like a string of separate essays on matters ranging from the cosmology of the Dogon to the martyrdom of St Thomas Becket. On a second glance, it becomes clear that, while several of the chapters did originally appear separately, this is no mere collection of warmed-up leftovers, but does present a set of related themes which run, albeit with varying stresses and counterpointing, throughout the book. But even to describe the themes will be deceptive, since it might seem that Victor Turner has not really moved beyond the positions taken in his earlier books, notably The Ritual Process. It may be granted that Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors largely makes explicit ideas which were implicit in the earlier books; but, even so, the book is certainly not deja vu.I write ‘the book’, and physically, there is only one book; but one has an uneasy feeling that perhaps there are three books trying to get out of this one volume, the first a treatise on sociological method, the second an attempt to apply this method to particular historical episodes and social experiences, and the third a hymn to the power and value of ‘communitas’.
The Demise of Man
Authors: Masterson Patrick 
Published: July 2007

The theme of this article was suggested by an enigmatic remark of the French philosopher Michel Foucault on the final page of his book The Order of Things. “Man”, he writes, “is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.” I wish to reflect upon this suggestive remark though in somewhat different and broader terms than those of its author.Since the time of Hegel’s use of the phrase, and particularly since Nietzsche’s sensational application of it, it has been fashionable to speak of “the death of God”—the death of God at the hand of man. However, the elimination of God which it was hoped would enable the reality of man to become more effectively visible has been superseded by a more radical consideration whose consequences profoundly affect our theory and practice today. It is the consideration that a true idea of man far from emerging into assured and concrete realization is rather breaking up and disappearing into an impersonal anonymous ground. The evidence suggests that the achievement of our age is the death of man at his own hand, at least speculatively if not yet in effect.In this essay I propose to illustrate, and draw some conclusions from, the significance of this phenomenon by situating it in the context of its historical evolution. In what will inevitably involve rather broad generalisations and systematic simplification I will try to indicate how man today has come to be seen chiefly in socio-centric, impersonal and structural terms by contrast with two previous conceptions which can be globally described as the theo-centric and the anthropocentric conceptions of man.
Marxist Science and Christian Theology
Authors: Wicker Brian 
Published: July 2007

Francis Barker’s refreshing contribution to the New Blackfriars debate on Marxism leads me to pursue my own thoughts a little further. Barker and Eagleton have both accused me of idealism: it is part of my purpose to show that this accusation is false. On the contrary, if Marxism can claim to be scientific, so too (I maintain) can Christian theology. Indeed, Marxism will only become completely scientific, i.e. have shed all residual elements of deforming ideology when, ceasing to need to incorporate within itself a systematic misrepresentation of Christianity, it can be said to have become identical with it. But that is a matter for the distant future.To begin with, it is agreed I think that we are discussing questions of theory: the relative claims to scientific status of certain forms of discourse. Neither side is likely to deny that at the level of actual praxis, there is an enormous amount of ideological distortion around. But what we are talking about is what Althusser calls ‘theoretical practice’. And it is my contention that what I shall call ‘scientific theology’ is scientific in the sense that, like Marxist science, it claims to be able to provide a ‘symptomatic reading’ of ideologies. Such a theology will consist of concepts and rules whereby not only the Christian ideology (that is, the Christian religion as a lived praxis) but also the ideological elements in Marxism, can be critically distinguished and dealt with.
Life as Fashion Parade: The Anthropology of Mary Douglas
Authors: Edwards Adrian 
Published: July 2007

I had better begin my review of Mary Douglas’ Implicit Meanings by justifying my title, which might otherwise seem unjustly sneering. If we like to divide human activities into “work” and “play”, fashion parades are distressingly both and neither. People strain for the glory of leisure. Can fashion then be linked with art and sport as an exacting celebration of the human capacity for spontaneous creativity? It lacks surely their moral pretensions, appealing with crude honesty to envy, vanity, and the pursuit of the ephemeral. Yet in the concept of fashion and the event of the fashion parade are certain resemblances to the presuppositions of social anthropology, particularly as expressed in the work of Professor Douglas. They remind us sharply that culture is something made by people, and that choice can bring change, indeed that change should be seen as part of the nature of culture. Again, each set of fashions must, like a culture, have a certain internal consistency, partly explicit, partly implicit. Then, in fashion as in culture, the distinctions which we can make readily enough between the aesthetical, the ethical, and the utilitarian become difficult to apply in practice. Culture, like fashion, is first tailored to the human body and then in turn affects our perception of it.This metaphor criticises, as well as elucidating, social anthropology. Inevitably, social anthropology tends to stress the autonomy and specificity of cultures, and thus tends to blur our perception of the underlying unity of human nature. Inevitably, too, social anthropology is attracted to the analysis of the more elaborate and formal patterns of human doing and thinking, kinship terminologies, the etiquette of gift exchange, ritual and mythology, neglecting the more formless and unspecific aspects of human behaviour.
The Obscurity of Evasion
Authors: Bhabha Homi K. 
Published: July 2007

It is difficult to differ in one’s immediate reactions from the critical consensus on Peter Levi’s Collected Poems. The general impression is of a competent body of verse produced largely independently of the various ‘movements’ contemporary with it, descended in its early phase from Spender, derived in its later style from Eliot, and marked by an obscurity arising, as Colin Falk recognised, from the absence of “an authenticating life…whose depths and anxieties get smoothed over…without being built up into the poetic structure”. Obscurity of this kind is not part of the difficulty characteristic of much significant ‘modem’ poetry: a problem of complex and contradictory things said and shown, often overburdening the signifier, in an already allusive and elliptical discourse. Levi’s obscurity is, rather, part of a process of exclusion and elision, a smoothing over which deprives his work of a memorable presence.To ascribe this as most reviewers have done to the limitations of Levi’s imagination is an inadequate explanation. What is needed is some discrimination, however cursory, amongst obscurities: a distinction between that obscurity which is symptomatic of innovation and gives major works their multivalent character; and the indeterminancy of works where a lack of depth and conception make their resonances finally unmeaningful and insignificant.Levi’s obscurity, I want to suggest, arises from a conceptual naivete. His desire to smooth over conflict results in a suppression of contradictions that is made possible by his belief in an immanent, essential spiritual unity. This influences a mode which, in avoiding argument, is often either sententiously preachy or passive; either distanced from the problem in its generality—“O Great God what is human life like?”—or immersed indistinguishably in the problem itself—“I think England is prison of a kind/and in that prison I am blank wall”.
The Venice Statement: Disestablishing a Church and Reforming the Papacy?
Authors: Kerr Fergus 
Published: July 2007

The Venice Statement on Authority in the Church is a momentous document which it must take some years for us to digest. Starting from “the large measure of agreement in faith which exists between the Roman Catholic Church and the churches of the Anglican Communion”, acknowledged in the Malta Report of the Anglican-Roman Catholic Joint Preparatory Commission (1968), the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission has succeeded, in less than ten years, in reaching a significant consensus on the doctrine of the Eucharist (Windsor 1971) and of the Ministry (Canterbury 1973), and now on the question of the nature and exercise of Authority in the Church.This final document closes a phase. It must surely force Roman Catholics in this country to search their hearts more deeply than ever about how true this series of Agreed Statements is to what they believe, and to ask themselves how far what they believe may be illuminated and purified, in the light of faith, by study of these documents. As a community, we are not accustomed to theological argument, and the documents are in any case much more difficult to read than they appear at first sight. They are immensely rich, opening up perspectives and introducing new concepts which it would stretch the mind of theological students to understand. It has been easy enough for us to delay the effort of settling doubts and resolving difficulties raised by the first two documents because we naturally waited to see if agreement would be reached on the question of the primacy of the Pope. If agreement could not be attained on that question, so we could excuse ourselves, then we did not need to struggle with the unaccustomed language of the previous agreements.