bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Where the Television Critic Comes In
Authors: Lockhart Freda Bruce 
Published: July 2007

Excuses that television is still only in the experimental stage are platitudinous but inevitable. Television criticism too is still forcedly exploratory, critics being of their nature parasites unable to advance beyond the medium which provides their material.Television criticism hitherto stems from two sources: radio criticism and film criticism. To both the radio critic and the film critic television is, at present anyway, a more cumbersome, unwieldy, more realistic medium, more concerned with what it presents than how it presents it. Enjoying neither the incorporeal detachment of radio, nor the manoeuvrability of celluloid, it lacks the fluidity and flexibility of both radio and cinema. Until now, too, it falls far short of the purely visual achievements of the cinema, so that programmes of any visual appeal at all stand out in lonely splendour in the viewer’s memory: the Coronation of course (among its many other and more important achievements) was one, the St Denis High Mass another; but an otherwise often tedious and heavily criticized programme, Lime Grove’s Elizabethan evening, was also a pleasure to the eye as few TV programmes are.Television in fact overlaps at many points with radio (not always to the disadvantage of ‘steam’ radio); at others it complements the cinema (by now it should be clear that each is going to need the other). More important for the critic is to determine where television differs from the other mechanised media of communication; what its own properties are..
The Appeal to Sound Learning—I
Authors: St John Henry 
Published: July 2007

The apologetic defence of the central Anglican position, if the extremes of Anglo-Catholic papalism and Protestant fundamentalism are excepted, finch its final justification in an appeal to sound learning. The formula is Bishop Creighton’s. It was the application of this principle, he maintained, that brought about the changes made in the English Church in the sixteenth century. Not that the Church of England claims a monopoly of learning, but that it owes its present existence to the fact that the theology and devotional life of Western Christendom, of which up to the Reformation it was an integral part, had become overweighted and distorted in its development, and was maintaining an ecclesiastical system that obscured rather than illustrated the vital principles on which the Christian life is founded.Efforts at reform from within were defeated because the logical fabric of scholastic theology on which it rested was so strong that it was difficult to deal with it in detail; it was hard to see where reform was to begin or where it was to end. Reforming efforts resulted in a sense of hopeless weariness, and at length it became apparent that reform was only possible by returning to the principles of sound learning. It was these principles that were applied during the formative years of the Reformation, not by any one great leader whose personality impressed itself upon the changes that were made, but by the long process of the aspirations which have sprung from these principles, producing by gradual evolution the formularies, and in particular the Prayer Book, from which the Anglican oudook and ethos derive.
Religion as the Writer's Theme A Blackfriars Conference
Authors: Evans Illtud 
Published: July 2007

In an age of conferences the hope of an agreed conclusion most often overshadows the discussion, and the reassurance of public opinion can be a more powerful motive than the painful search for the truth. In July, the third of a series of Conferences being held this year at Spode House, Hawkesyard, on ‘Religion and the Arts’ was devoted to the Christian writer, and if its theme seemed vague it was at least happily free from the larger generalizations. The intention was not to produce a manifesto or to try to resolve the difficulties of a Catholic writer confronted with a world which at so many points rejects the religious and moral premisses that must be his. It was, rather, an opportunity for considering some of the factors in a debate that has suffered from lack of definition, and this was done in a setting of common faith and common life (if only for a few days), for want of which the writer or critic who is a Catholic can feel a special isolation.Forty people came to the Conference and they represented no one but themselves. For the most part they were either contributors to this journal or critical readers of it; professionally they included university dons, working journalists, students, booksellers, creative writers of (as they would admit) varying degrees of achievement, and priests whose work requires them to be specially concerned with the written word. ‘Religion as the Writer’s Theme’ was the general subject of the lectures and discussions.
Faith and Words
Authors: Attwater Donald 
Published: July 2007

‘We have on the one side auoided the scrupulositie of the Puritanes . . .; as also on the other side we haue shunned the obscuritie of the Papists, in their Azimes, Tutiike, Rational, Holocausts, Praepuce, Pasche, and a number of such like.’. . . [Catholic] correspondence of a singular freshness, authentic eighteenth-century, and authentic English, mere English, indeed, and utterly free from the stereotyped halfforeign jargon that later generations were to experience.’‘The fruits of the bloody sacrifice are superabundantly applied by the unbloody sacrifice.’‘I saw Pfuff’s “Interrelated Harmony” described in the catalogue as a neo-amorphist experiment in intra-abstractionism. It is also an embodiment of universal mode-concepts, and the absence of stress emphasizes the integral tranquillity. Whirlpools of space would be a more accurate description of these non-emotional facets of dynamic passivity.’The first of these quotations is from the address to the reader of the translators of the Authorized Version of the Bible; the second is from a review in The Times Literary Supplement; the third is a contemporary theologian quoting from cap. 2 of session xxii of the Council of Trent; the fourth is from a satirical jape of ‘Beachcomber’. They are part of the harvest of a little desultory reading, and serve well enough as an indication of what I want to talk— or rather, muse—about: words.Everything, however small, that can be a hindrance to faith is of importance; and as an experienced missioner has said, ‘language can in fact be a pretty effective hindrance’.
Vaughan Williams and the English Tradition
Authors: Taylor Eric 
Published: July 2007

It is curious how the leadership of the musical world has passed from one country to another. This is not always merely the result of fashion or of social causes: it really does appear that the muses are migratory. The commanding influence exerted by any country at one time has tended to swamp or, to change the metaphor, at least obscure the native art of others. One has only to think of the tremendous impact of Italian, and later of German, music in this country to realize this. So complete and far-reaching has the predominance been on occasion that an appearance of a truly international musical style has been given. This was never more clearly true than in the eighteenth century, when the process was aided by a social and aristocratic internationalism. Nevertheless, every nation has a characteristic musical tradition of its own, even though the tradition may sometimes only be traced with difficulty, being continued by a host of minor, forgotten composers. Thus, even in eighteenth-century England, which is popularly regarded as a locus classicus of a trough in a musical tradition, there were composers such as Boyce who spoke in unmistakably English accents.What it is that causes and perpetuates national characteristics is a matter for conjecture. Rousseau attributed it to the influence, via song, of language; but, though there may be some truth in this, it is certainly an inadequate explanation. It is more important to give some account of what is meant by a national tradition, lest the cynic should suspect mere jingoism or an attempt to excuse second-rate music.
The Menace of Mescalin
Authors: Zaehner R. C. 
Published: July 2007

Mr Aldous Huxley has recently published yet another book. It is not a very good book; nor is it a very attractive book; but it is, alas, in its way an important book. Its importance consists in this: that anyone who may feel an inclination to enjoy, here and now, what Christians call the Beatific Vision or the experience which the Zen Buddhists call satori, has merely to buy himself three-pennyworth of mescalin at the nearest chemist’s, and behold, the ineffable vision is his. Whether or not the drug is available in this country in commercial quantities, I am afraid I have been too idle to find out. However, there it is for any who may care to make the experiment—heaven in a capsule.It may be surprising to learn that Mr Huxley, who has for so long written in a tone of such great authority on mysticism and the mystical experience, confesses that before he achieved ‘liberation’ though mescalin, he had not actually had a mystical experience of any kind himself. ‘For’, says he, ‘until this morning I had known contemplation only in its humble, its more ordinary forms—as discursive thinking; as a rapt absorption in poetry or painting or music; as a patient waiting upon those inspirations, without which even the prosiest writer cannot hope to accomplish anything; as occasional glimpses in nature, of Wordsworth’s “something far more deeply interfused”; as systematic silence, leading, sometimes, to hints of an obscure knowledge.’
‘True Religion Now Established’
Authors: St John Henry 
Published: July 2007

With the completion of the third volume of his massive history, Father Philip Hughes brings the story of the Reformation in England to an end, though it is an end only in the sense that the Elizabethan settlement had reached, at the death of the queen, a certain stability in its development. The first duty of a reviewer must surely be to congratulate Father Hughes on a great achievement. He has covered the whole general ground in closely-studied detail, exploring all the printed sources with patient and accurate industry. Yet, immense as is the mass of fact he makes use of to elucidate events and the factors controlling them, we are never allowed to feel that the vital issues are obscured rather than illuminated; they stand out in his narrative with invariable clarity. The disciplined learning of his treatment of the complex evidence will make his book, for a long time to come, a classical exposition of the Catholic point of view in Reformation history. The writing is distinguished by a deep and sometimes passionate conviction, yet it is conspicuously fair; this is acknowledged by scholars who do not share Father Hughes’ presuppositions. ‘An historian’s book for historians’, it has been called by one such scholar, ‘a work of real value to all who wish to study the English Reformation at an advanced level.’The truth of the saying omnia abeunt in theologiam is specially observable in Reformation history. The greatest of the non-Catholic historians of the period, as Father Hughes sometimes shows, can be at a disadvantage in appreciating to the full the influence of theological presuppositions upon thought and action on both sides.
Temptation Bulldozer
Authors: Zacharias H. C. E. 
Published: July 2007

Some time ago, when in San Francisco, I visited the Flood Mansion—a perfect replica of a magnificent Italian palazzo, correct down to the least detail, set on a commanding height of the city, with a glorious view across the laguna to the mainland. The interior more than kept the promise of the exterior—from the grandiose entrance hall and its sweep of a balustraded staircase well to the lovely furniture and interior decoration of the numberless rooms, salons, corridors and landings. Yet for all this artistic splendour, the dominating feeling it evoked in me was one of profound sadness. For the palazzo was dead, as was its former owner, and the heirs, refusing to live there, were making a gift of it to a Religious Congregation, which had moved in—so far quite inconspicuously.What makes a mansion in Europe, of which this was such a faithful copy, to be what it is, is the fact that it is the family mansion—the place where gallant ancestors had lived and where the present head of the house was carrying on a family tradition which was being handed on to another generation, now growing up within its walls. A family—which included not only the actual kin, but tenants, servants, clients and all kinds of henchmen and hangers-on, all together forming a true social unit. The Flood Mansion by contrast was just a museum piece, the costly whim of a mulish individual with no pride of ancestry nor hope of progeny.
What is Europe?
Authors: Hill Roland 
Published: July 2007

The origin of this work goes back to the winter of 1942 when a Conference of Allied Ministers of Education met in London to consider the possibility of producing a European history ‘of an objective character’ which might be available for general use after the war. The results of their deliberations are three volumes on the history of European civilization which, the editors hope, may be translated into other languages in order to communicate ‘to the youth of Europe, as dispassionately and as justly as possible, some sense of the inheritance of Europe and the influence of that inheritance’.In the dark days of the last war England was the hope of an oppressed Continent, and it would have been invaluable if the liberation of Europe, having had its point of departure in this country, could have been followed by an intellectual assessment of the spiritual values of the European past to meet the hopes of a despairing world. If the First World War can be regarded as the real end of the nineteenth century, there are grounds for seeing in the Second World War the end of a whole phase of European history which we would describe as the triumph and fall of human reason. Europe was confronted by a barbarian revolt of unreason. What was this Europe? What could, and indeed can, be salvaged from the past? Or should the question really be: what is the new view of man which the European inheritance compels us to accept?
Catechism for Adults—II: God
Authors: Hislop Ian 
Published: July 2007

The Apostles’ Creed, like all creeds, is a formal summary of salient points in the tradition—in the paradosis, what is handed over in the spirit from the Apostles to the end of time. Though it was not drawn up by the Apostles it does represent a systematic elaboration of the trinitarian formulae and clauses found in the Epistles of St Paul. The evidence suggests that in the primitive Church the creeds take shape first in association with the interrogations which are part of the baptismal rite, and secondly in the catechetical instructions. Be that as it may, there is no evidence for fixed official creeds till the turn of the second century when the Roman Creed was formulated as a declaratory creed for catechumens—this is the creed which, with some modifications, we know as the Apostles’ Creed. This creed follows a basic trinitarian pattern—the first article treating of God the Father, the second to the seventh with God the Son, and the eighth to the twelfth with God the Holy Spirit.Simple though the creed is in language and structure as compared with the creeds for bishops characteristic of the fourth century, each article states a mystery of faith—it is, says St Thomas, the task of an article of a creed to give guidance to the mind of the faithful on points where there are distinguishable reasons for asserting that faith here carries us beyond reason. Hence it is clear that creed-saying is an activity of faith and that the creeds are concerned to direct the faithful mind to supernatural truth.
Fiction and the Age of Faith
Authors: Smith Naomi Royde 
Published: July 2007

At Intervals during the past hundred years the historical novel has turned away from the court and the camp to occupy itself with religion, often with enormous popular success. Between Hypatia and II Santo two of the best sellers of their day were Quo Vadis? and John Inglesant. They are still to be found on bookshelves from which those other historical novels, Barabbas and The Sorrows of Satan, have been cast out. Religion in itself; the religious adventure; the problems of conduct and belief; the opposition of the Church—all have long occupied, and continue to occupy modem writers; but it is only in the present decade, with Miss H. F. M. Prescott’s Man on a Donkey, that historical fiction has returned to the Age of Faith.The immediate gain is immense. We escape from investigations of tortured conscience and the conflicts of post-Reformation theology and practice and are once more involved in the crowded freedom of action based on an accepted creed, an obeyed authority. Haugenier de Linnières, the newly knighted hero of Madame Oldenbourg’s novel, The Corner Stone, goes none too willingly with the pseudo-crusade against the Albigenses. He had heard it said ‘that Raymond of Toulouse had never worshipped the devil; that war against him was not really a holy war. He thought these were quibbling considerations. You go to God’s defence or you do not.’ You also play at I’amour courtois—liberal shepherds give it a grosser name—with another man’s wife who plays at virtue in exquisite raiment and in exquisite vernal settings.
Evil and Mrs Knight
Authors: McCabe Herbert 
Published: July 2007

The remarkably violent storm which raged around the two talks broadcast last January by Mrs Margaret Knight has now happily subsided and I do not want to start it again. Some of the attacks on Mrs Knight’s views looked like simple manifestations of bad temper, if not of actual hysteria, and very few showed much real understanding of her position. Although there is rather more rhetoric than logic in some of what she says, it seems to me that on the whole her talks present an understandable and moderate non-Christian view.One who believes that religion is an illusion could do very much worse than follow Mrs Knight’s line of thought and action. She maintains, quite rightly, that it is inconsistent to ask your children to believe what you yourself think to be false. The Christian, of course, thinks it better that a non-Christian should sometimes be inconsistent in practice; just as a liberal humanist prefers a communist or fascist to act inconsistently with his principles, and rejoices to hear that children in Russian schools are brought up to respect ideals of scientific objectivity and intellectual honesty which a true communist might not accept. However one cannot expect a non-Christian to prefer to be inconsistent, one cannot blame Mrs Knight for wanting to be reasonable, and given that religion is an illusion it seems to me that her views are very reasonable. The question on which everything else turns is simply: Is religion an illusion or not?
Catechism for Adults: III.‘And in Jesus Christ’
Authors: Hislop Ian 
Published: July 2007

The fall of man is the result of man’s choice—he chooses to live centred on himself. This choice cuts him off from God and plunges him into a morass of unreality, for life apart from the Creator loses all meaning. The only reality that remains is the choice, the first sin that parts man from God. All men are born in disobedience, in a situation created by sin. Man by reason of his history, his origin from Adam, cannot fulfil the purpose of his first creation; fallen from grace, with his natural strength impaired, his state is that of original sin. The world is the system man builds up in self seeking; the flesh is man’s desire, greedy for life, asserting itself against God. Each actual sin he commits is his personal endorsement of the state in which he is born.Though he is prone to sin, though he is often sinful, man is not evil by nature; he tries to escape, he longs for beauty, for justice, for truth, above all for love. He can pervert these things, for he is free; for the same reason he can choose them, and pursue them when they elude his grasp. He has imagined beings who will bring these things to him, he has followed prophets and elaborated techniques. He has known failure and he has seen himself as failing; sometimes he comes near to a knowledge of sin.
Morality in International Relations
Authors: Morton Desmond 
Published: July 2007

Before 1914, the mass of the people in this country took little real interest in international affairs, which were commonly regarded as reserved to statesmen and their expert advisers. In Parliament, foreign affairs were looked on as a nonparty matter, about which, save on rare occasions, basic agreement on policy was reached behind the scenes between the Government of the day and opposition leaders. This attitude was by no means confined to England. Since the end of the first World War, public interest in international affairs has grown steadily in all countries, though it may unfortunately be claimed that growth of the knowledge required to consider and weigh dispassionately the many complicated facts involved has not kept pace with the interest displayed.This applies to Catholics and non-Catholics alike, but it is distressing to find that even among Catholics—and well-educated persons too—there is little realization that the proper conduct of international relations by Christians should be governed by as definite a code of Christian ethics and morality as that which should guide the private life of the individual Christian, and one which is indeed directly deduced from the same laws of personal morality as have been revealed by God in the Scriptures and are interpreted by his Church. A little thought will show that this must be so. All Catholics recognize the moral principles of the Natural Law, of the ten commandments given to Moses and of the supernatural extension of these laws declared by our Lord, upon which the Church bases her teaching of man’s moral duties and obligations towards God, the family and himself, and towards others who are not of his immediate family.
The Future of Italian Films
Authors: Butcher Maryvonne 
Published: July 2007

‘After the Steppe-cat—What?’ It is with the feeling of baffled uncertainty posed by Mr Thurber’s wistfully evocative question of long ago that the English filmgoer may look at the Italian cinema today, or at least so much of it as he is able to see for himself or learn about from the writing of those who have seen more, or other, films than he. For after Umberto D —what? This great film is not only the climax of the neo-realist school in Italy, it is also its full-stop, for after this there is really nothing more to be said in this line without repetition or recession. The Italian cineasts must either drive roads across new country or they must fall back on old ones which have for some time been abandoned.This is not the first time that Italian films have had great importance; in the very early days of the cinema the Italians had an influence quite disproportionate either to their output or to their distribution. That taste for the grandiose and the magniloquent which had so far had to express itself in opera (should we prefer not to go back quite so far as the Imperial Games), seized upon the cinema as the perfect vehicle for the spectacle, seeing here no limit to the scale of decor or caste except the financial; and it produced in Enrico Guazzoni’s Quo Vadis (1912) and Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914), two films which set the pattern for a picture which the Italians seem to have been making, on and off, for some forty years—each one bigger and more lush than its predecessor.