bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Family Planning in India
Authors: Floris George 
Published: July 2007

Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s Prime Minister, has given free hand to the Indian ruling classes in their campaign against the Indian babies. Under the unofficial, yet distinctly recognizable, leadership of Lady Dhanvanthi Rama Rau, wife of India’s prominent banker and diplomat, the male and female representatives of wealth and high society gather around the banner of ‘The Family Planning Association’. With official blessings they hold meetings and distribute their propaganda with the avowed purpose of pressing for more drastic measures against over-population.Progress has been made during the last ten years; from moderate beginnings with the advocacy of the ‘safe period’, the Association and the Health Ministry went on to endorse artificial contraceptives and sterilization, so that today there is a growing demand for legalized abortion. No Tibetan crisis or Chinese threat is capable of turning these people’s minds from their single goal—the decimation of future Indian generations.Justification is provided by the humanitarian and patriotic motives that inspire their relentless struggles against the natural expansion of the race. Arguments are invoked about world peace, which is to be promoted by their efforts; others claim that population limitation is vindicated on religious grounds because it prevents millions of souls ‘cascading into perdition’.For many it has already become a way of life, and an end in itself that no longer requires any theoretical or practical justification. As one of the ladies at a recent meeting of the Family Planning Association summed it up: ‘We are on the lookout for children everywhere. Where there are children there must be parents.
Saint Augustine and the Just War
Authors: Windass Stanley 
Published: July 2007

It is normal today to defend the right of one state to make war against another by comparing a war against aggression with a private individual’s exercise of his right of self-defence. If I have a right to live, it seems that I must have a right to protect my life against violent and unjust attack; it is probable that in order effectively to protect myself I may have to use violence, even such as to cause the death of the aggressor in a case of extreme necessity. If an individual can do this, then clearly an organized group can do the same, and this implies the use of an army by a state. Such an army would be used as an individual uses his fists or his sword or his gun in a lawless land; it would be used to protect the life of the country in an internationally lawless world.Such is the commonsense approach to the justification of war today; and such, if we make allowances for the lack of theological refinement, is the current Catholic view of the just war. It depends for its cogency on an extension of the rights of the individual to the rights of the state.It may cause some surprise, therefore, to those who regard Saint Augustine as the main source of the just war tradition to find that not only is such a line of reasoning absent from his writings, but that it is in fact directly contrary to his teaching.In his treatise on Freewill, he states clearly that an individual has no moral right to kill an assailant in defence of life, liberty or honour. A law permitting such killing may well be objectively reasonable, since it permits the lesser of two evils; it is a lesser evil for a robber to be killed than for a good man to be killed.
Kokoschka
Authors: Reyntiens Patrick 
Published: July 2007

Kokoschka is one of the few great modem painters that the art-publishing trade has not preconditioned our minds to. The usual jading influence of a torrent of monographs so bamboozles the mind that, by the time one gets to the pictures, an assessment is the last thing the mind is capable of or inclined to do. The reason for his escape from this kind of attention is, I suspect, because Kokoschka has nothing in common with the art movement that nearly monopolizes our attention, the school of Paris; he is outside the tradition of Paris, owing nothing to the discoveries of the early years of this century there. His unique personality is so secure in its own conviction that far from being in need of lateral help from a ‘school’ he defies any categorization at all. He cuts across any attempt to label him. The question of style which is so central to any evaluation of modem art is brushed aside with protean energy, and it is this unexpected impatience that is the most disturbing and individual quality of the retrospective exhibition at the Tate Gallery.However extreme and exuberant the artists of the school of Paris were, they possessed that precise instinct for balance and interval in drawing and painting, that instinct for measure that enables even their more unconsidered pictures to retain an authority because of it. Kokoschka’s balance in drawing and painting is imprecise; not only the more obvious lack of it in the paintings but the subtle lack of it in the drawings, gnaws away at our confidence, however attracted we are by the verve and vitality which almost persuade us that the qualities we miss are not central to the problem of all art. In Kokoschka’s painting the intuition seems to have been given full scope and a decisive divorce from any idea of intellectual clarity. One might think here is the ultimate ideal of what the romantic artist aspires to be—always protean, verging on the inchoate, with more than a dash of madness.
Desmond Chute, 1895–1962
Authors: Shewring Walter 
Published: July 2007

Stanley Spencer has left it on record how in 1916, among the miseries and the friendlessness of a military hospital in Bristol, he was suddenly aware of someone who, ‘like a Christ visiting Hell’, came walking down a stone passage towards him: ‘a young intellectual named Chute’. In April 1940, a few months before his own death, Eric Gill wrote in his Autobiography: ‘of Father Desmond I shall say little because my love for him is too intimate, too much a matter of daily companionship and discussion and argument, too close a sharing of life and work and ideas and doubts and difficulties - the only man and therefore the only priest with whom I have been able to talk without shame and without reserve.’ Ezra Pound, no blind admirer of the clergy, was present at Father Desmond’s funeral. It falls to me to offer some coherent account of this remarkable man, perhaps the most widely gifted of all English priests of his own time, yet one who through accidents of circumstance remained comparatively unknown. It is easy to gather recollections of him; it is hard now to convey to a younger generation the things he stood for.He was born at Bristol on September 11,1895, a collateral descendant of William Charles Macready, the Shakespearian actor whose surname was his own second name; his family had kept links with the stage, and still owned the Prince’s Theatre at Bristol. In 1906 he went to Down- side; brilliant from the first, a classical pupil of Nevile Watts and later Head of the School, he might well have become a scholar of Balliol or of King’s, and this would have pleased both his parents; but in 1912 he chose instead to enter the Slade.
The Evil of Men and the Evil of Nations
Authors: Windass Stanley 
Published: July 2007

It is a fairly commonplace observation that the morals of groups fall far short of the morals of individuals—far short, even, of the ‘average’ morality of the individuals who compose the groups. The selfishness of nations is proverbial; it was a saying of George Washington’s that no nation is to be trusted beyond its own interests, and this saying has gained wide currency as an expression of political wisdom. The arrogance of powerful nations is as familiar to students of history as their selfishness. The late Professor Dicey, writing before the fear of world cataclysm had begun to darken men’s minds, advanced the theory that wherever British interests were at stake, these were to be advanced even at the cost of war—a theory that could be accepted as a reasonable political attitude, whereas if it were to be translated into personal terms, it would arouse the horror of any civilized person; for who in any circles would dare to assert that he was in favour of always advancing his own interests, however many murders he committed on the way?Why should there be such a gulf between the moral behaviour of individuals towards each other, and the moral behaviour of groups towards each other? For make no mistake about it, this is not a question that concerns only the nation-group. Wherever recognizable social groups face each other, with or without political organization, we may expect scant justice, and less charity, in their mutual relations. There is no need, alas, to go into the world of profit-making industry to verify this fact; we have only to consider the attitudes of different religious groups towards each other—even the attitudes of different religious orders within the same Christian Church; the fact that these groups are composed of men and women individually dedicated to service of the same God seems to do litde to mitigate the conflicts arising from the selfishness and arrogance which everywhere accompany the behaviour of humanity ‘in the gang’.
The Existentialism of Dostoievski
Authors: Novak Michael 
Published: July 2007

Albert Camus declared in the preface to his last work that Dostoievski was the teacher of his youth, that The Possessed was one of the four or five books most influential in his life. Dostoievski, so influential upon us in his own works and through great men like Camus, liked to maintain that he had a faith that had been tried by fire, that had gone down into the abysses, and had risen up again. He surely had an ardent love for Jesus Christ: perhaps no one has ever written of Christ with words of more intense beauty. Yet Dostoievsky's faith is no clear call to unity; it is as scattered and dispersed as are men’s consciences today. Nonbelievers claim him equally with believers. Orthodox and Protestant spirits hail him as their own, and point to his rather virulent anti- Romanism. Guardini observes that Dostoievski hardly knew Rome, and finds that Dostoievsky's themes expose the profound depths of the Roman faith. William Hamilton writes of Dostoievski’s hesitant faith as an image of our own—the faith of Ivan Karamazov who cannot accept at once both God and his creation. What are we to think? Is Dostoievsky’s faith Christian or is it not? How far can we identify ourselves with it? The question has repercussions upon our relationship to the existentialist and rationalist currents in our modern world.Part of the problem in understanding Dostoievski is due to the difference of his times from our own, and part of it is due to the qualities of his religious vision. Dostoievski—and Nietzsche and Kierkegaard— wrote in and for a complacent nineteenth century. Their protest against scientism and hypocrisy was urgent, passionate—and unavailing. They knew what underrode the surface of that smug age, they knew what could erupt: screaming voices, marching boots, crunching tanks, and bombs, and wire fences.
The Future of the Secondary Modern School
Authors: Robin C. E. 
Published: July 2007

The Secondary Modern School takes about 70 to 75 % of the children of England and Wales for their education from the age of eleven upwards. It is a type of school which is virtually the product of the 1944 Education Act: for what went before had a leaving age of fourteen instead of fifteen, and had a more limited objective: the addition of a year to the school life has brought with it both difficulties and opportunities.Ubiquitous as the Secondary Modern school seems to be, a great many children do not have the choice of Secondary Modern or Grammar School. 141,000 children are educated in comprehensive schools; the number is growing: Anglesey is completely ‘comprehensive’: Coventry, London, Derbyshire, Birmingham are moving in that direction with varying degrees of conviction: Leicestershire has evolved a scheme different from any other, avoiding selection at eleven without embarking upon a scheme of comprehensive schools. The areas which have tried out some degree of ‘comprehension’ are not all controlled by the same political party. Southampton has avoided secondary modern schools altogether by giving every secondary school in the town some speciality of its own, leading up to some particular type of advanced course.The Secondary Modern School is not the same thing in every area. Some areas have a very large grammar school entry; the secondary modern schools get on with a remnant, of which it could truly be said that there are not many gifted or talented among them; their more spectacular achievements are dependent upon the inefficiency of the selection process at eleven.
Alternatives to the Western Deterrents
Authors: Wharton Nicholas 
Published: July 2007

In a previous article I argued that the present Western nuclear deterrents are immoral because they involve their operators, if not the Western governments, in the intention to destroy normal cities. And if this is true, we must stop co-operating with the present deterrent policies and try to change them.The most obvious alternative to these policies is unilateral nuclear disarmament; and some people believe that we should accept unilateral disarmament in any case because the deterrent will sooner or later break down into nuclear war. But many would say that the disastrous immediate consequences of unilateral disarmament would outweigh the remote risk of war which attaches to the nuclear deterrent. If unilateral disarmament is the only alternative to our present immoral defence policy then we should adopt it, no matter how dangerous it may be. But if unilateral action is dangerous, we should not advocate it until we are quite sure that there is no alternative to our present policy which is morally permissible and less dangerous. Many people, including Catholics, view the nuclear deterrent not as an active preparation for mass murder but simply as a means of avoiding the situation which would arise without it. If Russia alone had nuclear power, she could blackmail us into surrender; we must have nuclear power too, not because we want to attack Russia or because we envisage a Russian attack - there is indeed virtually no danger of war - but simply to prevent the possibility of convincing Russian blackmail. One may point out to Catholics who regard the deterrent in this way that however unlikely war is and however much we are keeping the present deterrent just to avoid the consequences of not having it, it does still require its operators to be on the alert to destroy normal cities at a moment’s notice.
‘That Best of All Things, Greek’
Authors: Butcher Maryvonne 
Published: July 2007

‘Ancient tragedy, ancient tragedy’, insists Cavafy somewhere, ‘is as holy and wide as the universal heart’. Of late this holiness has demonstrated its universality beyond the printed page, beyond the stone amphitheatre or the wooden stage, to make its impact all over again from the cinema screen; an impact, moreover, which is surprisingly unweakened by its transference to so unfamiliar a medium.The process has not long been at work: Medea and her children, it is true, made a fleeting appearance in Never on Sunday when, Melina Mercouri explained, in spite of all appearances to the contrary they were really on their way to the beach. And when the bodies Uttering the stage rose to acknowledge the applause it was not easy for Dassin, as the American professor, to prove her wrong. The first serious example, however, of the new wave of adaptations from the great Greek dramatists (though not the first to reach this country) was probably the Electra of Michael Cacoyannis, which won a prize at Cannes in 1962; then came another Electra, that directed by Ted Zarpas, which was shown in Venice in 1962 and in the London Film Festival later last year; these two, together with Antigone, directed by George Tzavellas, seen earlier this spring in London, are straight-forward presentations of the original tragedy. Phaedra directed by Jules Dassin, is a modern transposition of the play, with details of the plot significandy manipulated to suit the twentieth-century setting and the geographical expansion of the action.I have not, unfortunately, yet been able to see the Zarpas Electra, which stars the famous Greek classical actress, Anna Synodinou, as Electra and is, it is widely agreed, a revelation. This film avoids any personal angle - it is simply a magnifi- cendy photographed version of an actual performance of the play by the Greek National Theatre in the great stone amphitheatre of Epidauros; the same stage, incidentally, where Melina Mercouri saw Medea and which she so assiduously haunted that the sign ‘Closed owing to Greek Tragedy’ was hung on her door for the duration of the festival.
Words, Facts and God
Authors: Ernst Cornelius 
Published: July 2007

A traveller from a far country has the obligation to entertain his hosts with tales of strange customs and mythical monsters, heroes and spells. The country of which I am to tell you today is a very strange one indeed. I do not know if President de Gaulle ever became acquainted with English philosophy during his stay in England, but certainly it would entirely justify his claim that England does not, today, at least, belong to Europe. Perhaps, however, as a middleman of ideas, I shall be permitted here to enter the intellectual Common Market; fortunately there are no tariffs on ideas, though as we all know only too well, there are more serious barriers to communication, cultural, existential, confessional—and linguistic.It is the strangest of paradoxes that the philosopher who was perhaps more influential than any other in giving modem English philosophy its character and stance was an Austrian, Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein was more utterly dedicated to philosophy than anyone I have ever met; and I think the main benefit I gathered from his lectures, most of which I did not understand when I heard them as an undergraduate at Cambridge in the academic year 1946-7, was the encounter with a living example of philosophical depth and integrity, a standard of seriousness, by which I could, and can now, measure my own deficiencies. It is, I believe, important to remember that he was a kind of philosophical ‘primitive,’ a Douanier Rousseau of philosophy, who came to philosophy by way of engineering and the mathematical logic of Frege and Russell. Like all young Austrians of his time, no doubt, he had read Schopenhauer and been deeply impressed by him; but his acquaintance with the great philosophers of the past was extremely fragmentary. In what follows I shall try to indicate certain features of his thought, with particular reference to the problems it sets for metaphysical theology.
Nuclear Deterrents: Intention and Scandal
Authors: Midgley Brian 
Published: July 2007

It is difficult to persuade people to reflect seriously about moral questions concerning war. Most people who turn to the subject of war are primarily interested not in the choice between moral and immoral acts but in the search for ‘a practicable defence policy.’ Such people— especially if they are Christians—may occasionally recognise that the possession of nuclear weapons is what moral theologians call a proximate occasion of sin but they often feel that they are faced by a dilemma.I believe that the extent of the duty to avoid the occasions of unlawful warfare is very commonly underestimated. Nevertheless one is bound to recognise that many Christians consider—in view of the magnitude of the Soviet threat to our natural and Christian liberties— that the case against nuclear deterrents of all types remains non-proven.This dilemma disappears once it is shewn that, in a position in which we are bound to be tempted, there is a whole family of acts and omissions which are gravely sinful not after the manner of an occasion— namely, on condition that there is an alternative which is not equally an occasion of sin—but in an absolute manner. This has already been substantially demonstrated. In England, the most convenient presentations of the arguments are: E. I. Watkin’s article ‘Unjustifiable War’ in Morals and Missiles, edited by Charles S. Thompson; Nuclear Weapons and Christian Conscience, edited by Walter Stein, and Father Anthony Kenny’s article ‘Counterforce and Counter-Value’ in the Clergy Review for December 1962.
The Elusive Values: A study of contemporary artistic forms
Authors: Jennings Elizabeth 
Published: July 2007

Perhaps the greatest paradox in modem art, popular or esoteric, is the gap between the sort of music and verse which expresses itself in breathless, banal statements (often, incidentally, employing a diluted version of the poetic diction of the Romantic poets of the last century), and the quiet, withdrawn, secret and mysterious world of Abstract Expressionism and atonal music. It is as if two kinds of art were constantly at cold war with one another, and as if neither knew what war they were fighting in or who were their enemies. There is no communication, either friendly or aggressive, and the reader, the listener, the looker at pictures seems to be in a state of siege which he or she has not chosen and is powerless to explain.Since communications between these two different kinds of art seem to have broken down so painfully, we are left with the spectacle of a world where man seeks stimulus through art, yet is not prepared to admit that art is, in some sense, amenable to reason, and where most people believe that if you are ‘with it’, as the current phrase goes, you will be happy, accepted and fulfilled. The Beat poets appear to have taken this dubious credo to its logical conclusion when they seek peace in the oblivion provided by drugs and in a kind of pseudo-mysticism which has little to do either with discipline or God.Are we then to conclude that this is a decadent, a dead age, a century which is suffering from accidie rather than from violence or masochism? I do not myself think so. In Action Painting, Beat Poetry, and so on, I see an attempt to be realistic and honest, and to achieve something which has nothing to do with nihilism or despair.
Enlightenment?
Authors: Butcher Maryvonne 
Published: July 2007

The peculiar and precarious balance between elegance and brutality which is the hall-mark of the eighteenth century took many forms, varying widely according to country and society; but basically the intelligence, the vitality and the ruthlessness inherent in its self-confidence are instantly recognisable, whether in Versailles or the vernacular. By one of those curious coincidences endemic in the muddle of the film-exhibitor’s world, adaptations of two of the great classics of the period have reached the London screens within a few weeks of each other this summer, one British, the other French.Fielding’s Tom Jones appears in a full-blooded Woodfall production, directed very much in the mid-century manner by Tony Richardson from a first-class script by John Osborne, in variable but, on the whole, beautiful Eastman Colour adorning the camera work of one of Britain’s best operators, Walter Lassally, and a score byjohn Addinsell. Optimus quisque, as you will note. The coruscating collection of stars studding the cast list means, in the event, that even the smallest parts are so well acted that the whole film has a homogeneity of style that is only too rare in historical pictures. Voltaire’s Candide, on the other hand, retains its eighteenth century style but not its manner in the modern version directed, produced, adapted and scripted by Norbert Carbonnaux. Though to be sure this black and white picture begins neatly enough by getting the best of both worlds (even if neither is demonstrably the best of all possible ones) with its credit titles set wittily against dissolving toile deJouy backgrounds; moreover the film opens with a fancy dress dance for Cunegonde in which everybody (except Candide himself) makes a first appearance in eighteenth century costume.