bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Genesis and Patriarchy: Part II Women and the End of Time
Authors: West Angela 
Published: July 2007

In a previous article, (New Black friars Jan 1981) I argued that the eschatological interpretation of biblical theology is, ultimately, the only possible site for the creation of a feminist discourse. To put it in more assimilable terms: the contradiction of being a woman and a feminist is only finally resolvable in the context of Christian eschatology. This is rather a large claim, so I shall try to substantiate it.Most theology hitherto has been based on an essentially androcentric perspective as a result of the fact that it is founded on an essentially androcentric anthropology. In recent years, attempts have been made by some anthropologists to bring an alternative perspective to bear on the material of their discipline: thus, Michelle Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, the editors of a recently published collection of essays by a number of female anthropologists state in their introduction that the aim of the book is to ‘demonstrate the importance of women’s lives for our understanding of the human record’. I think it is important to consider what implications their conclusions, and those of other feminist scholars, have for non-androcentric theology, for a feminist hermeneutics.At first sight, their conclusions wouldn’t seem to be very comforting to feminists. ‘The current anthropological view draws on the observation that most and probably all contemporary societies, whatever their kinship organisation or mode of subsistence, are characterised by some degree of male dominance’. And further on they say ‘. . . although the degree and expression of female subordination vary greatly, sexual asymmetry is presently a universal fact of life’.
Problems and the Rhetoric of God‐Talk
Authors: Wörner Markus 
Published: July 2007

In this paper it will be argued that the type of situation in which the question, Does God exist, becomes urgent for the questioner is fundamentally a rhetorical situation. It is also a situation where theology is forced to provide rhetorical answers — in the special sense of ‘rhetoric’ outlined here (as well as in last month’s edition of this journal). This is partly because of the influence on theological language which is exercised by its recipients’ needs, and partly because rhetorical discourse is, from an epistemological point of view, uniquely suitable for talking about God.When it seriously matters to someone whether God exists or not, at least this much can be said about his situation: it is one where it is felt to be urgent that some position should be reached or some decision made, but where the grounds for doing so fall considerably short of theoretical certainty. They fall short, too, of the ordinary logical and empirical grounds on which we are used to reaching decisions on simpler matters. Nonetheless, when the problem of God’s existence becomes compelling, its very importance means that no solution to it is likely to be experienced as adequate unless it conforms to the highest standards of reasonableness available for dealing with such a question. At the same time, the questioner is putting his enquiry not only as an intellectual being but also as a person with emotional and moral dispositions; he requires conviction from a source which he can respect in these terms, and in order to understand an answer and to gain any satisfaction from it he needs to perceive it from an emotional situation which at least allows of its appreciation. Though one need not, for example, feel hilarious in order to believe in God, one is not likely to be able to do so from a position of total despair. The affective state of the questioner must in some way, then, be taken into account when he is provided with any attempt at an answer.
The Use of Heidegger
Authors: Kerr Fergus 
Published: July 2007

Nobody could be more kosher than Jaakko Hintikka in the bracing climate of Anglo-American analytic philosophy. In the festschrift recently offered to him, nevertheless, Dagfinn Follesdal evidently thought nothing of writing as follows: “Heidegger’s main contribution to philosophy, it seems to me, is to focus attention on the idea that all human activity, all our ways of relating to the world, to one another and to ourselves, contribute to constituting the world”. A few pages further on he writes: “Heidegger’s analyses of the many ways in which we may relate to the world . . . anticipate in many respects some of Wittgenstein’s later analyses of forms of life”. That last statement, of course, implies a somewhat controversial reading of Wittgenstein’s later work. The only point here, however, is that, for an analytic philosopher, such statements as those just quoted represent an unprecedentedly positive assessment of Heidegger’s work. This is of particular interest to students of recent theology, both Protestant and Catholic, where, for better or for worse, Heidegger’s influence has been considerable.Scandinavian philosophers have always been well placed, culturally and linguistically, to mediate between the analytic and the phenomenological camps into which philosophers are still largely divided. Roughly speaking, the genealogy of the analytic line begins with Frege (1848 - 1925) and runs through Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein and Carnap to such philosophers as Quine, Donald Davidson, Elizabeth Anscombe and Michael Dummett. The alternative line descends from Hegel (1770 - 1831), deviates by reaction into Kierkegaard and Marx, and is disseminated diversely through Nietzsche, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, to such contemporaries as Foucault, Derrida, Gadamer and Habermas.
The Church in Argentina
Authors: Kirby Peadar 
Published: July 2007

Quilmes is a large, predominantly working class suburb on the eastern side of Buenos Aires. With a population of some 800,000 it was constituted as a separate diocese five years ago and Bishop Jorge Novak was named its first bishop. To mark their five years as a diocese Quilmes held a synod last September whose aim was, as Sr Justa Tello told me at the synod office, “to help the people commit themselves”. The two-week synod last year was however just the beginning of a process of getting to know the socio-political and religious realities of the diocese; further sessions planned for 1982/83 hope to evolve pastoral responses to these realities. It is, as Sr Justa Tello explained, based on the ‘See-Judge-Act’ methodology and the September session of the synod had limited itself to the first of these.Fr Orlando Yorio, who himself ‘disappeared’ for five months in 1976 just after the military coup in March of that year, is secretary of the synod. He pointed out to me that in the early years of the Spanish conquest of Latin America “evangelisation took place through synods”. Among the ample documentation prepared by various commissions for the synod is one which gives an historical background in the early councils of the church, various diocesan synods held in Europe at different times and especially the 51 diocesan synods held in many different regions of Latin America from 1539-1638. To my great surprise Fr Yorio pointed out to me that canon law insists that each diocese hold a synod every ten years. This major event in the life of the Quilmes diocese then was, in the words of Fr Yorio, “to put us in touch with a renovating tradition of the Latin American Church”.
Ideological Disputes
Authors: Grimes Alistair 
Published: July 2007

Since the term ‘Ideology’ and ‘Ideological’ are used in a variety of ways, I shall start by saying something about how I intend to use these terms in this paper and indicate what I understand to be the nature of my remarks about them.For the purposes of this paper I shall take Marxism, Conservatism, Liberalism and Nationalism to be examples of political ideologies. This is not intended to be an exhaustive list; I could, for example, have included Fascism or National Socialism. It is merely intended to provide me with enough material to make the main points of this paper without becoming too involved in matters of exegesis. It should also be noted that in calling Marxism, Liberalism and the rest ideologies I am not using the term in a pejorative manner. That is, I wish to distinguish at the outset between my thesis and that of those who would argue that in calling a belief, doctrine or argument ideological, we are also condemning it as unreasonable or irrational. My aim is simply to discuss how we can best characterise ideological arguments, by comparing and contrasting them with other kinds of arguments. That said, it ought to be clear that my remarks will be philosophical rather than historical in nature. Though I shall be referring to disputes between ideologists that took place in the past, my interest in them will not be that of the historian. I shall be concerned with their conceptual structure rather than their chronological development.
The Church in Bolivia
Authors: Kirby Peadar 
Published: July 2007

Izara doesn’t appear on the map of Bolivia. It is a tiny village of some 100 people lying in the foothills of the range of mountains that mark the edge of the Altiplano, the 14,000 foot high plateau on which most of the country’s five million people live. It is just one of the 50 communities served by three priests who live in the village of Paria some 30 miles away by an unpaved dusty road. I went with one of the priests, an Englishman, Fr John Sullivan, on his quarterly visit to Izara during which he married a young couple, baptised two babies and said Mass. But the small Indian community of Izara doesn’t have to wait another three months to celebrate their faith or receive instruction since every Sunday Luis, the village catechist, leads the community’s liturgy.Luis is just one of the 4,000 adult catechists who have become the leaders of the church in their traditional and isolated communities. They have grown up in the communities and they get their formation as community leaders by going away for week- long courses every few months organised for the catechists of a particular area. It is this network of catechists which has become the single most important influence in the growth of a grass-roots church in Bolivia. They are, Mr Pedro Duran, the co-ordinator of the episcopal commission on catechetics, explained to me a phenomenon in Bolivia where the church relies on foreign missionaries for 90 per cent of its clergy. For the first time Bolivians have become not just helpers of foreign missionaries but an autonomous force evangelising their own people from within their highly distinctive culture and not from outside it.
John Coulson: Religion and Imagination
Authors: Cockshut Anthony 
Published: July 2007

It is a delicate and difficult matter for me, a professional student of literature, and an amateur of theology, to review a book by a professional theologian and an amateur of literature. Odium academicum is usually a much greater danger than the more-publicized variety, theologicum. But at least I have the advantage of having already acquired a deep respect for Dr Coulson’s work, and of having learnt a lot from him about Newman in reading his earlier volume.The main thesis of this book is clearly stated as follows:
The argument of this book is that the real assent we make to the primary forms of religious faith (expressed in metaphor, symbol, and story) is of the same kind as the imaginative assent we make to the primary forms of literature.At first sight this claim is so improbable, and indeed extraordinary, that we feel it cannot mean what it appears to say. If we can appreciate Homer and Dante and Henry James because they all make a powerful appeal to the imagination, it would seem that by analogy we can simultaneously assent to Greek paganism, Christianity, Islam and Hinduism. Imaginatively, if our knowledge is sufficient, and our sympathies are wide enough, no doubt we can enter into all these and more. Those of us who had a classical education can remember (very likely with pleasure and gratitude) entering into the religious ideas contained in the Oresteia. But we did not for a moment think of believing them to be true. There are other statements, both religious and secular which we believe to be true, without being able or perhaps wishing to enter into them imaginatively.
Lonergan and Hume — I
Authors: Fitzpatrick J 
Published: July 2007

There are several reasons for undertaking a comparison of Lonergan and Hume. It is my intention to move the discussion on to the realm of philosophy of religion and as the author of the most powerful critique of religion ever written in English, Hume lays strong claims for inclusion. It will, I trust, be interesting to see how Lonergan’s argument for the existence of God copes with Hume’s famous objections and to see further how a Lonerganian response might be fashioned to meet the various facets of Hume’s critique.But before going on to philosophy of religion it will be necessary and profitable to compare and contrast the epistemologies of the two philosophers since these underpin and are presupposed by their respective positions on religious belief. Besides, there is a growing awareness today that the dispute about religious belief is at heart a dispute about rival conceptions of human rationality. It is surely significant that philosophy of religion, as a subject, dates back to the rise of empiricism. Before then there had been, to be sure, disputes, frequently acrimonious, over interpretations of religious doctrines and so forth, but it was not until then that men were affected by a profound unease surrounding religion as a phenomenon. For the first time since the classical age the legitimacy of religious belief of any kind was called in question. From the vantage-point of the twentieth century it is becoming increasingly clear that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the importation into philosophy of what was believed to be the method of science, there arose a new and revolutionary conception of human rationality that rendered religious belief problematic.
A Sermon for St Thomas
Authors: McCabe Herbert 
Published: July 2007

Parents are desperate bores about the cute things their children have said but the Aquinas family preserved a story about young Thomas of a rather different kind. They complained that he was always bothering people with the question: What is God? I expect the story is quite true and totally trivial; it only becomes interesting if we see it as a sort of premonition of his whole life, of what his life was to be like and of what his sanctity was like. The first interesting thing is that it was not a statement, an affirmation, but a question.Some people are saints through their heroic work for the poor, some through their courage in dying for the faith, some through their indefatigable preaching of the gospel; sanctity takes all sorts of forms: the sanctity of St Thomas lay in asking questions.We (and I mean especially his Dominican brethren) regularly get him wrong by thinking of him as someone who provides the answers. He does, I think, provide more and better answers than most, but what makes him central and vital to our tradition (which is quite an important one for the whole Church) is his conviction, which he hands down to us, that there is always a question to be asked to which an answer is either true or false.
Religious Celibacy and Sexual Justice
Authors: Ruston Roger 
Published: July 2007

It is a foolish thing to make promises about what you intend to do in a year’s time, but at the chapter meeting last year I promised the Provincial that I would give a talk on celibacy this year, hoping to provoke some discussion on a topic that is too rarely discussed. I have had plenty of time to regret it. But I have kept to my original proposal because the reasons I had for making it have not gone away.The first reason was a sense of irritation at the way some of the brethren speak about the problems of celibacy entirely by way of anecdotes: how Father A was nearly seduced in the parlour, how troublesome women plagued the life of Father B, about Father C and his “cousin”, about the real reason for Brother D leaving the Order. When I thought about it, I realised that there are two things about this kind of talk that I find unsatisfactory:
its privatisation of the vows: that celibacy is mostly a matter of an individual keeping his vow of chastity, like a precious object to be kept intact under threats, especially threats from certain women; and that the available collective wisdom on the matter consists in anecdotal knowledge of how to do this.the failure to take seriously the lives of the women whose attentions cause so much difficulty when it gets out of hand and — it must be added — so much satisfaction when it is under proper ministerial control. It is a failure to look very deeply into what happens and ask why it happens in such predictable ways and what this tells us about the injured relationships between men and women,which we celibates have to live out as much as anyone else. Men and women in the life of the Church get caught up in processes of interaction which few people understand and which cause humiliation and frustration on all sides.
Lonergan and Hume III
Authors: Fitzpatrick J 
Published: July 2007

Lonergan sometimes calls his epistemology the fully critical position on account of its total rejection of the naive realist notion that reality is an-already-out-there-now and that objectivity consists in sensory extroversion to this already-out-there-now. The residue of the naive realist notion is found in the empiricist assumption of a world of bodies ‘out there’ and in the Kantian assumption of things in themselves, or noumena, with the debilitating consequence for both that the real becomes unknowable since knowledge is confined either to sense data or sensible phenomena, i.e. appearances. By its rejection of naive realism the fully critical position denies the intelligibility of any mere matter of fact that is simply given in experience. It affirms that the real is what is understood on the basis of experience and affirmed in rationally grounded judgments. Besides the real there is nothing. But the real is, in its very constitution, intelligible. Therefore, besides the intelligible there is nothing. The universe is intelligible.In a scientific age many would be willing to grant this much, since science itself seems to assume and support the notion of the universe’s intelligibility, without seeing any reason for proceeding from this to an affirmation of God’s existence. But the fully critical position demands an answer in terms of itself to the question of the universe’s intelligibility. Science is unable to supply such an answer since science is methodologically restricted to investigating the intelligibility of the data of sense by erecting explanatory hypotheses that stand or fall by appeal to the data of sense. Science has its own autonomous realm — the explanation of sensible data. The question of God does not arise from the questioning of sensible data but from questioning our questioning, that is, when we take a global look at the process of coming to know and ask what are the implications of the mind’s demand for explanation at the level of understanding and of the mind’s demand for the unconditioned in its movement towards judgment.
Your Affectionate Son in St Dominic Eric Gill T.S.D.
Authors: Bailey Bede 
Published: July 2007

Thus did Eric Gill sign his letters to Bede Jarrett, the English Dominican Provincial between the wars. I hope to show that he was saying something true about himself.But it is presumptuous of me to write about him, and especially here in New Blackfriars, which is a development of the Black- friars in which he first published so many of his essays. Blackfriars has also given us many personal witnesses to Eric Gill’s character and shape of mind — David Jones, John O’Connor, Walter Shew- ring, Desmond Chute and a number of others. So there is an element of the absurd in my appearing here. I have tried to get rid of the absurdity in so far as I am able by assembling some of the available evidence about Mr Gill, and especially of course from his Autobiography.Since the publication last November of Dr Yorke’s book, the name of Gill has frequently appeared in all sorts of places. There have been several exhibitions of his work. There has been a sale at Sothebys. He has become someone talked about in the art world. I wonder what E. G. would have thought about that. When I read some of the reviews of Eric Gill, Man of Flesh and Spirit I wondered whether the Gill they portrayed was in fact recognisably the same as the Gill described by those who knew him, or indeed as Dr Yorke recognised him.The Times reviewer wrote that ‘it is certainly true that the literature relating to Gill has up to now been mainly superior hagiography. And Gill’s confreres have most noticeably played down the eroticism’ (3 December 1981).
Eric Gill and the Contemporary
Authors: Kelly Michael 
Published: July 2007

When I was an undergraduate in the early 1950s Eric Gill was a minor cult figure among Catholics whom I knew. As an apologist, a social, political and aesthetic theoretician rather than anything else. Gill’s lettering in stone was something I had learnt to admire at Ampleforth where Dom Patrick Barry was at that time active in calligraphy and lettering in stone himself. I liked Father Patrick’s work a lot and he introduced me to Gill’s. There was a certain general keenness about Gill at Ampleforth then but I only got to his Letters and Autobiography as an undergraduate. In those days Gill and Maritain and St Thomas and Belloc and Chesterton were good company. In a dilettante, amateur way I enjoyed myself among them. As far as Gill was concerned I was particularly pleased with him and myself for discovering him in his First Nudes and 25 Nudes. I had liked Gill’s apologia in his Autobiography for sensuality in giving proper appreciation to God for His ways in His creation, and I liked his nudes. For all their occasional clumsiness and maladroitness of balance and proportion, I still do. I find it particularly a matter of regret that Gill’s deliberate erotic work is still under so much prurient lock and key at the Victoria and Albert and the British museums. When will the English grow up?Gill’s more steamy and obsessive side, his sexy nudes and ex- ultance in sensual experience and joys, appealed more to me than to some of my Catholic friends, and than much of his polemic argumentativeness. Some of the more arty side of my family were enthusiasts for Gill’s way of life via personal acquaintanceship with David Jones and I found that rather tedious. Gill began to smack of affectation and moral-art snobbery at about the time I stopped being an undergraduate and went into National Service.
“Is the Church Licensed to Kill?”
Authors: Pinnington Judith 
Published: July 2007

In an article published in this journal in December 1980 I sought to draw out some of the moral and theological implications of a punitive attitude on the part of the Church towards a kind of minority which it could not comprehend and by which it felt challenged. Since that time it has been borne in upon me, both through experience and through discursive reasoning that the implications are far deeper and more terrible than I had thought. For that reason I beg the indulgence of readers for a further exploration. I am aware that such a fusion of introspection and exospection is spiritually dangerous, since the subjective and objective can only coinhere in one who is pure in heart. Nonetheless, I feel that the effort is worth the risk.I should perhaps explain at the outset that my own theology is rapidly developing in a radical ‘materialist’ direction; that is to say, my understanding of both the Gospel kerygma and Tradition is confirming my intuition that the material, and in particular our being-in-body, has normative spiritual value. I am not at all shocked by Bishop John Robinson’s suggestion in the famous lady Chatterly trial that sexual intercourse has precise sacramental signification. Those who cannot go along with this perspective will not be able fully to appreciate the following argument and may even be offended by it. Reader, be warned!