bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Sir Herbert Read (1893-1968)
Authors: Shewring Walter 
Published: July 2007

I have just returned from the burial of Herbert Read at Kirkdale Minster, in the same remote churchyard where he himself saw his father buried, by the church of grey stone with slated roof and against the dark wood of firs.As I try to collect my thoughts about him, I wonder if others will find it easier than myself to say what he stood for most. He had many friends and many audiences, but they were often, I think, isolated from each other. Teachers and children inspirited by his books or presence to find new confidence in their own painting might be dismayed by the bloodless forms of geometrical art which he praised elsewhere; painters and sculptors of the vanguard, who owed him much and who often seemed his predilection, were baffled perhaps by his acceptance of this or that Old Master, by his enjoyment of eighteenth-century porcelain or glass, by his admiration of recent things that were not of the vanguard at all—the early ‘non-abstract’ work of Ben Nicholson, the engravings and paintings of David Jones, the pictures and letters of Stanley Spencer, certain drawings of children by Eric Gill. His continued encouragement of new and experimental writers went side by side with an unquenchable devotion to Shelley and Emily Bronte, to Flaubert and Henry James; and the acute and sensitive interpreter of these classics was perhaps not known also as the masterly and precise and imaginative writer of The Green Child and the autobiographies.
The Last Supper: A Study in Group Dynamics
Authors: Maguire Una 
Published: July 2007

In 1942 Fritz Redl put forward a paper in which he considered group formation around a central person. He formulated ten categories and one of these seems of especial interest when we consider the formation around Christ at the time of the Last Supper.One might have thought that the apostolic group would have fallen into Redl’s fourth category, that of a group which has ‘The central person as a love object’. Tentatively it is here suggested that this was not the case and that the apostolic group might more fittingly be considered as falling into Redl’s fifth category, that of a group that has ‘The central person as the object of aggressive drives’.It must be stated at the outset that the suggestions put forward by Redl concerned a group in which there was recognition of the aggression that was prevalent. For the purpose of this article it is assumed that the apostolic group not only gave no overt sign of their aggression but it is likely that it was so repressed that they did not even know it was there.
Our Aim of Truth
Authors: McNabb Vincent 
Published: July 2007

‘The true speaking absolutely is prior to the good, as appears from two reasons. First because the true is more closely related to being, which is prior to good.... Secondly,... knowledge naturally precedes appetite.’ (Summa, la Q. 16, Art 4, Eng. trans.)The object of the intellect (i.e. Truth) ‘is more simple and more absolute than the object of the will’ (i.e. goodness). Therefore the intellect in itself and absolutely is higher and nobler than the will— yet ‘the love of God is better than the knowledge of God; but on the contrary, the knowledge of corporeal things is better than the love thereof. Absolutely, however, the intellect is better than the will.’ (Ibid., Q,. 82, Part 3.)These two texts from the Summa of the Blackfriar St Thomas Aquinas must outline the attitude of Blackfriars towards truth.At the risk of failing to express what is in our mind, let us say that we fully accept the consequences of St Thomas’s principle: ‘Truth is more simple and absolute than goodness, therefore the intellect is higher and nobler than the will.’ In our aim of finding and telling the truth we will not primarily concern ourselves with what is good; or only with that highest good, the Truth. This is but to realize that transcendentals, such as truth, must be sought for their own sake or they will not be found in their fullness. Truth-seeking and truthtelling must not be blended and weakened with enquiries into the economic, political, ethical or theological value of the truth.
The Three New Eucharistic Prayers
Authors: Milner Paulinus 
Published: July 2007

The decree Prece eucharistica of 23rd May ushers in what will be the most striking and the most effective of all the changes in the Mass. The recital out loud and in the vernacular of the canon of the Mass has made many aware of the defects and poverty of this ancient Roman prayer. The latest reform makes good some of these defects of the Roman formula by adding eight new prefaces to the existing collection in the missal: two of these are for Advent, one for the Sundays in Lent, two for Sundays throughout the year to avoid the repetition of the special preface for the feast of the Trinity, a new preface of the Blessed Sacrament and two new common prefaces. All these will help to add variety and to restore the element of thanksgiving for God’s wonderful works, which should be the essence of every eucharistic prayer, but which is so lacking at present.A more radical remedy, however, is the promulgation of three completely new eucharistic prayers which may entirely replace the Roman canon except on certain occasions. Two of these new prayers may be combined with the variable prefaces according to the season and thus the central prayer of the Mass will once again take on some of the variety it had in the early centuries of the Church and which is still maintained to a certain extent by the Eastern Churches.
From Jesus to The Gospels
Authors: Lindars Barnabas 
Published: July 2007

Three witnesses of the same event hardly ever give exactly the same account of it, but there is usually a sufficient measure of agreement between them to ensure the general veracity of their testimony, even if many of the details remain irreconcilable. This seems to be true of the first three Gospels. The triple tradition at first sight gives reassurance. The differences between them appear to confirm the essential truth of the account, as they suggest that the tradition has been independently attested.If this is the impression which first strikes the reader of the Synoptic Gospels, more careful study will soon shake his confidence. When the triple tradition is subjected to word-for-word comparison in the Greek, it soon becomes apparent that the similarities are too close to be explained in terms of independent testimony. The Synoptic Gospels are actually interdependent. One evangelist has used the work of another. This means that the differences between them are not due to independent tradition, but are deliberate divergences on the part of the evangelists. And if the two later ones have been so lacking in fidelity to their common source, how can we have any certainty that the original has not been equally unfaithful to the primitive tradition on which it is based ? And if that is so, how can we ever get back to the truth of the matter, and find out what Jesus really did say and do in his life on earth?This is the essence of the Synoptic Problem, and it has been the central issue before New Testament scholars for the past 150 years.
The Medellin Statement
Authors:   The Bishops of Latin America
Published: July 2007

On 24th August the Pope solemnly opened the general assembly of all the Bishops of Latin America in the Cathedral of Bogota, Columbia. This was the second general episcopal conference to be held on the soil of South America, and the first meeting of a local Church on a continental scale since Vatican II. This assembly had been carefully prepared for over a year by bishops, theologians and experts from the whole of South America, in accordance with an express mandate from the Episcopal Commission of Latin America, created in the wake of the fast general assembly of the Bishops of Latin America held in 1955. The text which we publish below (thanks to the kind permission of the editor of ‘Informations Catholiques Internationales’) is the first half of the first part of the entire document, which consists of three parts in all: this description of the situation in the continent, a theological reflexion, and pastoral directions.The general theme of the Medellin assembly was ‘the Church in the present transformation of Latin America in the light of the Council’. The conclusions of the assembly have since been published, but this comprehensive diagnosis of the facts remains striking from many points of view: the catching of a historic moment of awakening on the part of a whole continent, the detail and social awareness, the sense that ‘the difficult progress towards development and integration [in Latin America] could become an important catalyst in the process of unification to which the whole human race is converging today’, and the vivid realization that ‘the upheaval we are experiencing demands new attitudes of us so that we can carry through an urgent, global and profound reform of structures’ (from the Introduction to the Statement)—all these are remarkable in an ecclesiastical document.‘The description could appear to be pessimistic, since we do not dwell on the positive factors, which do of course exist. But it is, nevertheless, a reflexion of the reality of Latin America, which is tragic, and which demands a swift and effective response.’
Fables and Symbols—II
Authors: Sharrock Roger 
Published: July 2007

It was suggested in the first part of this essay that in the modern period concentration by critics and others on the importance of the poetic symbol has had consequences that are unexpected and sometimes unfortunate. We are constantly being told in the most intellectually refined ways that the poet’s function is different from that of the moralist or the philosopher; however, constant repetition is bound to suggest that the poet’s role bears some analogy to theirs.I want in this second part to look at the history of the literary symbol and the changes in its involvement with religious symbolism and belief. In doing so it will, I think, become obvious that just as the post-Romantic critic has, by exalting the symbol run the danger of simply offering, with a ritual gesture and a whiff of incense, a paraphrasable content, so the modern theologian has tended to reduce and translate symbolism on the assumption that what is for salvation must be expressible in immediate historical and social terms (Christian Marxism, aspects of the translated liturgy, the New English Bible, etc.). It is to be suspected that this is another version of the fallacy which would see the image as a mirror-image of some ordinary human experience.
The Indefiniteness of Moral Issues
Authors: McDermott Timothy 
Published: July 2007

Those who cannot conceive of change in the Church’s attitude to contraception rely, according to Mr Dummett’s February article in New Blackfriars, on two main lines of argument. One is described as the ‘Where do we draw the line ?’ form of argument—if contraception is lawful, then perhaps so also are sterilization, abortion, sodomy, masturbation, fornication or even adultery. The other argument is also of the same form (though Mr Dummett does not so describe it) for it asks ‘Where do we draw the line?’—if the Church’s moral teaching is untrustworthy here, how can we be sure that it is to be trusted on any other subject ?Both arguments, it seems to me, presuppose the asking and answering of a more fundamental question: to what extent can lines be drawn at all when moral issues are at stake ? The encyclical takes its stand on ‘what is called the “objective” moral order laid down by God’, and reminds parents that ‘they are not free to define an honest course of action in any way whatsoever that they choose (modo omino proprio ac libero), since they are bound, on the contrary, to act in accordance with the plan of the divine creator’ (para. 10). This again, it seems to me, presupposes a fundamental question: what sort of ‘objectivity’ is here being referred to, in what sense has God indeed got a ‘plan’ ?
Authority and Democracy—I
Authors: Hay David 
Published: July 2007

‘In the hands of my Superior, I must be a soft wax, a thing, from which he is to require whatever pleases him, be it to write or receive letters, to speak or not to speak to such a person or the like; and I must put all my fervour in executing zealously and exactly what I am ordered. I must consider myself as a corpse which has neither intelligence nor will; be like a mass of matter which without resistance lets itself be placed wherever it may please anyone; like a stick in the hands of an old man, who uses it according to his needs and places it where it suits him.’St Ignatius’s ideals about the nature of authority were derived from sixteenth-century Spanish culture and although perhaps not quite so drastically expressed today, his view of the Superior/Subordinate relationship still constitutes a central element in the thought pattern of many participants in the modern debate in the Church. This dialogue should be of interest to social psychologists, because it illustrates one of the recurring themes of that discipline, the forms of authority and people’s perception of them.Before the war, Kurt Lewin and his associates Ronald Lippitt and Ralph White tried to compare the effects of three kinds of adult leadership on the behaviour of a group of American boys. The setting for the experiment was a number of small ‘clubs’, ostensibly set up to carry out a variety of craft and recreational activities, and the adult leaders of the clubs were described as Authoritarian, Democratic and Laissez-faire.
Education for a New Society
Authors: Haughton Rosemary 
Published: July 2007

It is presumably comparatively simple to overthrow a régime and start a new one if you have sufficient resources, either of good-will, of money or of arms, or a judicious mixture of the three. Whether this is likely to be a practical method of ushering in the millennium, as opposed to more limited goals like making things a bit better for some people, is a debatable problem. The evidence is not coercive, and in any case I have no intention of debating it. My point, to put it crudely, is that in England and America, at least, this method of changing society doesn’t seem likely to be possible for some time to come, and that to assume it is the only way must lead either to the abandonment of effort, or the watering down of aims, or to a lot of self-delusion about what the possibilities actually are. This last is quite prevalent, because if you deeply believe that drastic change is essential, and that life is scarcely bearable except in the hope that it will come, there is a strong motive for persuading oneself that it will come soon. This is bolstered up by much discussion among groups of like-minded people, especially young ones.The trouble about this is that when someone with this kind of belief moves out of the inner circle of the faithful, and comes up against the ignorance, indifference or sheer perverseness of other people, he is appalled and disgusted, and often very much surprised. This is especially likely when the people concerned are very young.
World Religions and Christian Theology
Authors: Ernst Cornelius 
Published: July 2007

It seems to me only fair to begin this paper by inquiring whether the topic indicated by the title actually exists in any serious sense, or whether it has simply been conjured up by a trick of language within the general and familiar process of academic over-production and waste-making. The fact that a considerable literature more or less concerned with the topic does undoubtedly exist provides no guarantee of the existence of a genuine problem; for some at least of this literature tends to heighten one’s suspicions rather than to assuage them.The title is, at any rate, ‘World Religions and Christian Theology’, not ‘World Religions and Christianity’. By ‘world religions’ I understand those religions which have not been confined to a particular ethnic or political unit but are found in more or less diversified forms remote from their place of origin. It is clear enough that Christianity is one of these world religions, in so far as we allow ourselves to use the word ‘religion’ with an appropriate looseness; we need do no more than declare ‘religion’ a family-word, where the different items all to be called religions need not share a single definition but form an irregular network. Now this paper does not attempt to consider the place of Christianity among world religions. This is not only because my own equipment for such a task would be wholly inadequate, but also because I suspect that no one’s equipment would be.
The Four Types of Gospel
Authors: McDermott Timothy 
Published: July 2007

Dr John Marsh, in his excellent Penguin commentary on St John’s gospel, remarks that ‘the gospels read so very much like historical narratives of what took place that it requires effort not to treat them exclusively as such, but to understand them as much more concerned to indicate what was going on in the narrative provided’ (p. 52). One must make the same effort when faced with the differences between the four gospels: these are not simply re-editions, revisions, expansions of one basic ‘life of the historical Jesus’. As Dr Marsh puts it:If even Mark is not constructed chronologically but theologically (i.e. is not concerned simply to report what took place but always to make plain what was going on), then any correction of Mark made by John could not, in the nature of things, be simply chronological. Any ‘correction’ would primarily be concerned with theology, with meaning, with what was going on and only secondarily by implication, as it were, with chronology, with what took place (p. 49).This is well said, and nowadays commonly recognized. But is it enough? Is one merely shifting from the idea that later gospels were written to correct earlier gospels’ facts, to the idea that later gospels were written to correct earlier gospels’ theological ideas? To shift from thinking of gospellers as biographers to thinking of them as theologians seems still to perpetuate the idea that the gospels are four examples of one type of writing.
The Role of the Church in Asia
Authors: Caspersz Paul 
Published: July 2007

There is no easy way of resisting the impression that of the five continents the Asian has been the least responsive to Christian missionary endeavour. While in Africa the Christians today account for over 20 per cent of the total population, in Asia not even 4.5 per cent are Christians. Yet Asia has a population which is nearly three times that of Europe and Russia, and nearly twice that of Europe, Russia and the Americas. Over Asia’s vast and densely inhabited territory, seventy-three million Christians live (except perhaps in the Philippines) in a diaspora situation—scattered, small in relative number, seemingly of little civic consequence. The question then is whether these Christians who form the Church in Asia have any relevant function towards their far more numerous non-Christian fellow citizens, and whether, beyond the boundaries of Asia, they have anything to say and to contribute to the Church Universal and to the world.Since it is such a little flock, it may seem futile and pretentious to speak of the role of the Church in Asia. Indeed, the claim is advanced—even though the title of this paper may be misleading—that this role spans not only Asia, but the whole world. The title might of course have been framed less ambiguously as the Role of the Asian Church. But this could have carried certain never-intended separatist overtones. For it is the one Church of God which exists in Asia as in all the other continents.
Christian Materialism Reconsidered: An Exchange
Authors: Grave S. A. , Hibbert Giles 
Published: July 2007

We have become used since the Renewal began to seeing the Church slashed at by those who belong to it and might easily take the remark at the end of Father Hibbert’s article, ‘Christian Materialism’ (New Blackfriars, May, 1969), to be only a further, though notable, instance. There is something Christians will be hindered from doing, the article ends by saying, ‘until the Christian Church has put its house into better order and made it look less like what Christ himself referred to as “a den of thieves” What is it that cannot be effectively done at present? Christianity has just been stated to be ‘radically a materialist humanism’ and also ‘something more’. ‘For Christians it is essential to nurture, cultivate and explore their “more”, so that they may be able to offer something in their own right to the world’ (p. 431). It is this nurturing, cultivating and exploration that cannot be effectively done while the Church is like a den of thieves. It might reasonably be taken to be part of what Father Hibbert is implying, that the propagation of some such version of Christianity as his is hindered while the Church is like this.At the risk of appearing as one of the wicked, I am drawing attention to the meaning of Father Hibbert’s materialism. I shall also mention again, but not ambitiously explore, his something more. The following passage shows us plainly the meaning of the materialism but the other thing darkly.
Colour and Citizenship: The Rose Report
Authors: Dummett Michael 
Published: July 2007

The publication of Colour and Citizenship, the report on British race relations prepared by E. J. B. Rose, Nicholas Deakin and seven others, and published by the Institute of Race Relations, was registered by the Press as a major event. It was the first occurrence of a kind favourable to those who hope for the defeat of racialism to have been so registered by the mass media since the publication of the P.E.P. Report on Discrimination. Those who prepared the Rose Report did so with a sense of urgency. The Survey of Race Relations, which did the work on which the Rose Report is based, had originally intended a series of detailed studies, of which four, including Rex and Moore’s Race, Community and Conflict, have already appeared. But, as the situation so rapidly and palpably deteriorated, they saw this response as inadequate: what was needed was a single comprehensive study, to make an impact on public awareness and official policy, and not a library of volumes which only the ‘experts’ would read.The initial response must have been encouraging to the authors. The Press, that very haphazard and often insensitive seismograph for measuring the importance of what occurs, recorded the publication of the Report as an event of the first magnitude. But already disappointment must have settled on those who worked at desperate speed to get the book out before it became pointless to publish such a book at all. The columns devoted in The Times and The Guardian to summarizing the book’s contents have initiated no debate, in the correspondence columns or elsewhere, on Britain’s racial policy; the speeches of politicians contain no reference to it, nor do they seem in any way altered in tone as a result of it.