bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Sengai
Authors: Webb Geoffrey 
Published: July 2007

Reading from right to left, a circle links with the base of a triangle, which in turn touches a rectangle. This is Sengai’s universe, abstract and symbolic. ‘The circle represents the infinite’, writes Suzuki in the catalogue, ‘and the infinite is the basis of all beings. But the infinite in itself is formless. We humans endowed with sense and intellect demand tangible forms. Hence a triangle. The triangle is the beginning of all forms. Out of it comes the square (the triangle doubled). This doubling process goes on infinitely and we have the multitudinosity of things which the Chinese philosopher calls “the ten thousand things” - that is, the universe.’This exhibit, number 6, was the one reproduced on the posters, and the one judiciously placed to be the first seen as we entered the exhibition, still marvelling that we had to pay only a shilling for the superbly presented catalogue that contains a reproduction of each one of the eighty exhibits, together with Suzuki’s comments. Here indeed are ten thousand things, and each a world of its own. This was an exhibition quite unlike any other, needing to be pondered over, communicated with. One needed absolute silence, and it was best to be alone. The ‘fleeting world’, as Sengai paints and models it, is as significantly crystallised in the brush stroke and the moulding as it would appear to be in the flying calligraphy of the accompanying poems. A chummy old harlot offers him a gift of rather special pickles, and Tai-ki smashes his lute as an excuse for not playing at court to entertain a king. A crippled beggar is observed, and Hotei, the patron of children, gesticulates with a perpendicular arm after the manner of Edward Lear or awakes from a nightmare looking like someone from Thurber. A group of old men demonstrate how ‘indispensable are a hood on the head, wrappers, a stick and spectacles ... a hot water bottle, a heating stone, a chamber pot and a back scratcher’. Then there are the gods and devils, pantomime figures full of animation, and a bodhisattva full of reflection and enlightenment. An orchid, a spray of plum blossom, a cluster of bamboos driven by the wind. Two exquisite evocations of Fuji, sailing boats on a fan, and a meditating frog which is no more a caricature than any of the grotesque and humourous human figures. Sengai brings out the character of everything he sees and loves.
Continuous Mediation: the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom
Authors: Shackleton Agnes 
Published: July 2007

Peace on earth—the passionate longing of mankind everywhere. Peace is a word which is on everyone’s lips, and the desire for it in everyone’s heart— statesman and layman alike. The achievement of total and universal disarmament, the biggest step on the road to peace, is, as President Kennedy said only last year, no longer a pipe-dream of a few idealists: it is a stark matter of whether mankind is to survive on this earth or not.Women, by their very nature, have always had the privilege and responsibility of feeding and nurturing the human family—hers the joy of bringing children into the world and hers the main responsibility for them till they are of an age to fend for themselves. She has a unique opportunity of moulding these children into the kind of beings with the kind of outlook she desires. Her power for good or evil is enormous. It is therefore of the utmost importance that women should be fully alive to the problems of the world in which these children have to live. Nowadays in the complicated state in which the human family lives, each nation and indeed each individual so interdependent on other nations and individuals, relying as everyone does on at least some of the produce of other countries for their very existence, women have a very special duty to extend their sphere of influence and their activities from their own immediate family to the family of the whole world. These are at least some of the reasons why women have a special interest in the achievement of a true and lasting peace, more than ever necessary today when the effects of artificially induced radiation, e.g. by the explosion of atomic weapons, are exceedingly grave, not only to the living, but also to the unborn, maybe for generations to come.
Social Work: Professionalism and Catholic Reluctance
Authors: Butrym Z. T. 
Published: July 2007

The attraction inherent in social work and the corresponding reluctance of Catholics to commit themselves wholeheartedly to it has always struck me as a curious paradox.It is too obvious a fact to elaborate that to a Catholic conscious of his calling as a member of the Mystical Body and as a representative of Christ, the opportunities which social work provides for carrying out his obligations to his fellow men and for exercising charity to the fullest possible degree are exceptionally great. No discussion of social work with individuals is possible without reference to the casework relationship as its very foundation and I should like to clarify what I see as the reason for attaching such tremendous importance to the quality of this relationship, which the social worker succeeds in establishing with the client. It would seem to me that the high place allocated to this aspect of social work practice stems from our conviction that in and through this relationship we can offer to a fellow human being the most valuable gift which we possess; that part of ourselves which is most in keeping with our supernatural calling. It is only the intimacy of a relationship which provides an adequate means for a meaningful communication of our committal to the membership of mankind, to the fact that we are all members of one another, and to the implication of this truth. It is through this committal that we ourselves live more fully and enable others to do so. Herein is the golden opportunity which social work offers to Catholics. The recognition and acceptance of the unique importance which human relationships play in life must lead to the conclusion that there is no other occupation (parenthood excepted) which enables the same extent of valid concentration on this area.
Letters to a White Liberal
Authors: Merton Thomas 
Published: July 2007

If I dare to imagine that these letters may have some significance for both of us, it is because I believe that Christianity is concerned with human crises, since Christians are called to manifest the mercy and truth of God in history.Christianity is the victory of Christ in the world, that is to say in history. It is the salvation of man in and through history, through temporal decisions made for love of Christ the Redeemer and Lord of History. The mystery of Christ is at work in all human events, and our comprehension of secular events works itself out and expresses itself in that sacred history, the history of salvation, which the Holy Spirit teaches us to read between the lines. We have to admit that this meaning is often provisional and sometimes beyond our grasp. Yet as Christians we are committed to the attempt to see some meaning in temporal events that flow from human choices. To be specific, we are bound to search ‘history’, that is to say the intelligible actions of men, for some indications of their significance, and some relevance to our present choice as Christians.‘History’, then, is for us that complex of meanings which we read into the interplay of civilization. And we are also (this is more urgent still) at a turning point in the history of that European and American society which has been shaped and dominated by Christian concepts, even where it has at times been unfaithful to its basically Christian vocation. We live in a culture which seems to have reached the point of extreme hazard at which it may plunge to its own ruin, unless there is some renewal of life, some new direction, some providential reorganization of its forces for survival.
Placing Indian Religion
Authors: Griffiths Bede 
Published: July 2007

Professor Zaehner is one of the few Catholics in England to-day who is seriously concerned with the relation of Christianity to other religions. Though his special subject is Zoroastrianism, he has an intimate knowledge of the religious traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam, and has worked out a definite theory of their relation to Christianity. This was made clear in an earlier work, At Sundry Times, where he tried to show how all these traditions ‘converge’ on Christ and find their fulfilment in him. In his most recent work he develops this idea further, particularly in the light of Teilhard de Chardin’s conception of the convergence of the whole creation on Christ, and tries to show how in the evolution of human consciousness the different religious traditions are stages in the progress of mankind under the guidance of the Holy Spirit towards the consummation of both man and the universe in Christ.What is perhaps most original in his vision of human history is that he regards Marxism as an important stage in the development of religion. Marxism, particularly in its most authentic exponents like Marx himself and Engels, is concerned with the ultimate nature of man and the universe and with their ultimate destiny, and in this sense it may be called a religion. In Professor Zaehner’s view the Indian religions, Hinduism and Buddhism, are concerned almost exclusively with the salvation of the individual soul through its escape from this world of time and space. Marxism on the contrary, rejecting both the concept of the individual soul and any world beyond seeks the collective salvation of mankind in this present world through the working out of the ‘inner laws’ of nature, by which the ‘essence of man’ (in Marx’s phrase) will be realised.
Discerning the Real Situation
Authors: Stein Walter 
Published: July 2007

In Spring 1963 the British Council of Churches appointed a Working Group ‘to study, as a matter of urgency, the question of Britain’s continued possession of an independent nuclear deterrent’. The group (which included a Catholic observer, Father Corbishley, s.j.) reported back to the Council that ‘there is no case for independent nuclear action—that is, without prior consultation with our allies—in any part of the world’, and the Council of Churches endorsed the report in a resolution of October 16th, 1963. The Resolution, together with the Working Group’s Report, forms a document of considerable importance.Although it must be said that, like previous similar documents, such as The Valley of Decision (1961), The British Nuclear Deterrent fails to maintain its grip at the most decisive levels, it is a serious expression of concern, and its well-informed respect for the strategic and political realities of our situation is particularly striking after the endless hypothetical abstractions that still disable so much Catholic thinking in this field. One can only heave a sigh of gratitude when one reads that ‘the Churches are bound to bear witness’ where one’s nation ‘is prepared to annihilate vast populations in another country’ and that ‘our concern is to find God’s will in this given situation—the will of a God of whom it may not be said that He does certain things in general but nothing in particular’.
Dr Kildare and the Couch
Authors: Dworkin Martin 
Published: July 2007

Screen psychiatry inherited much of the cinema’s older mythos of medicine. Young Dr Kildare, old Dr Gillespie, and their myriad colleagues easily switched from homey simplifications of the medically arcane to palatable psychoanalysis, the old soap-opera science keeping up with progress, prescribing Freud’s protean penicillin.Of course, the new language had to be learned. And sometimes, the screen refracted the careful terminologies with disconcerting imprecision. The language of the couches and clinics, often beclouded enough, seemed to have been imperfectly absorbed by the popularizers themselves, emerging like the spirited garblings of matrons describing their illnesses and operations over tea—or Thurber’s triumphantly inexact maid, Della, whose sister, she confided, ‘got tuberculosis from her teeth, and it went all through her symptom’.Much of the difficulty had to do with the importunate imperialism of the new depth psychology, whose revelations, formulated in the special language of its own province, could usurp so easily the imaginative essences of works of imagination. Dostoievsky had written psychological novels, and Goethe and Coleridge had projected the turmoil of personality upon creations of action and symbolic meaning. But their terms were always those of the novelist and poet; their characters were not case-studies masquerading as fiction; their claims to universality were persuasively inspired, not dogmatically pre-supposed.
Heard and Seen
Authors: Butcher Maryvonne 
Published: July 2007

The programme for the sixteen days of this year’s Cannes Festival, the seventeenth of the series, was considerably more uneven than it has been for several years past and this, it seemed to me, made it more than usually interesting for the serious student of cinema. With three or four exceptions the great names were absent, and the number of predictable smash hits was surprisingly limited when one first looked at the complete list of entries. But as the brilliantly sunny days passed, it became increasingly evident how stimulating was the great proportion of work by very young or inexperienced directors, and one became used to seeing nervous young men sitting behind the microphone at the post-performance press conferences, waiting to be thrown to the wolves. So nervous were some of them, in fact, that even the journalistic wolves relented sufficiently to temper their bite to the shorn lambs.Apart from one or two quite outstanding pictures like Jacques Demy’s Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, which in the event won the Grand Prix outright and shared the Catholic prize, or Pietro Germi’s Seduced and Abandoned—not at all what you might expect from its title—you could almost divide the entries into films with very interesting ideas made by directors with insufficient experience to make the most of their material; and films made by experienced directors trying to put over insufficient material by means of accomplished technique.For once, I found myself wholly on the side of the first category, many of which provided extremely rewarding viewing. One that I liked almost the best, though I was in a minority here, was a Swedish film made by a young man called Bo Widerberg; Kvarteret Korpen was translated as Raven’s End, the name of an industrial quarter outside Stockholm.
The Second Vatican Council and Religious Freedom
Authors: Ryan  
Published: July 2007

One important issue that confronts the third Session of the Vatican Council is the question of religious freedom. With the recent publication of a number of the speeches made at the second Session we are able to follow something of the lines along which the discussion is likely to proceed, and to understand something of the issues at stake, issues of great significance to the ecumenical movement. The matter arises in fact from the Schema on ecumenism with which the Council was concerned at the end of the second Session. That Schema comprised five chapters—on the principles of Catholic ecumenism, on the practical applications of ecumenism, on the separated Christians, on the Jews, and on religious liberty. Bishop Schmedt of Bruges introducing the fifth chapter expressed his hope that ‘it will be possible to complete the discussion and the approbation of this very brief, but very important decree before the end of this second session’. ‘The whole world’ he said ‘is waiting for this decree. The voice of the Church on religious liberty is being waited for in universities, in national and international organisations, in Christian and non-Christian communities, in the newspapers and in public opinion— and it is being waited for with urgent expectation’. His hope was not in fact fulfilled, and though this was to many disappointing it is surely better that in so difficult and controverted a matter the final decisions should be seen to have emerged from slow and mature reflection rather than by what might have appeared a snap-decision reached under the pressure of a guillotine procedure.The importance of the decree to the ecumenical movement was well put by Pete Le Guillou, O.P., in a conference given at Rome at the time of the discussions.
Colour Bar or Community
Authors: Townsend Henry G. 
Published: July 2007

The Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland is dead. It was buried in January of this year, just ten years old. For its epitaph some would write ‘A Great Experiment That Failed’; others, nearer the truth, ‘The Unwanted Partnership.’Economically the Federation was a great success. Each of the constituent territories—Northern and Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland— benefited much in its own way. Southern Rhodesia enjoyed a remarkable boom, years of extraordinary expansion in industry, commerce and immigrant population, the most striking memorial of which is the present skyline of Salisbury with its soaring buildings. In Northern Rhodesia too there was rapid development and the Copper Belt lived through years of fantastic prosperity. Even Nyasaland, the poor relation, experienced substantial if less spectacular gain. Now all that is over.Expansion has given way to contraction. This is especially marked in Southern Rhodesia, which is now suffering from an economic recession, unemployment, shortage of overseas investment and a large exodus of valuable white settlers. Worse still, there is great political uncertainty and civil unrest breaking out intermittendy into violence, which occasions more and more Draconian laws.
Catholics and the Universities
Authors: Wheeler Gordon 
Published: July 2007

I have been asked to write some account of the place of theology in the new universities, not simply as an academic discipline but as an interpreter of the whole academic process. This is a matter which I have long considered of the highest importance, not only for the Church but for the maintenance of integrated learning in the secular universities. Newman’s writings on this very matter, both in The Idea ofa University and elsewhrre, are too well known to need recapitulation. Indeed his prophetic gifts are only beginning to be realized in this as in so many other matters. The age of the Second Vatican Council is in many ways a Newmanic age and the principles for which he stood, no less than the ethos of true learning which he breathed, interpret, almost magically, the needs of our age.The whole problem which forms the scope of this article has been admirably delineated this year in a book already reviewed in these columns, Theology and the University, ‘an ecumenical investigation,’ edited by John Coulson. It is a documentary of the first order, and I may be forgiven if I begin by a recapitulation of some of the things which it has to say. The editor himself, sums up the discussions in one sentence : ‘Theology can choose; it can remain dead and neglected, or take the pressure of the times and live; but if it chooses life it has need of three things: a university setting, lay participation, and the ecumenical dialogue’.
The Origins of the Just War Tradition
Authors: Draper G. I. A. D. 
Published: July 2007

The Romans can, with some justification, claim the credit for having introduced the most important legal and religious concept of war into the history of human thought. Thereby they made a very notable contribution to the historical development of international law. To the Romans we owe the idea of the ‘just and pious’ war which has for centuries characterized and influenced the thinking of Western Christendom about the place and practice of war. The idea is still with us today. Like the conception of natural law, the story of the ‘just and pious’ war is that of successive contents flowing though an ancient concept.In the Rome of the kings it was the function of a special college of priests, the fetiales, to carry out the somewhat elaborate religious and legal procedures, the Jus fetiale, determining the declarations of war and peace between the Roman people and their enemies. The jus fetiale formed part of the Roman jus sacrum, and thereby imported a moral and legal element, over and above that of religion, into the formal procedures of establishing peaceful and hostile relations between Rome and other political communities. The task of the fetiales was to determine whether the duties owed to Rome by her neighbours had been violated, i.e., whether or not Rome had been wronged. These wrongs were well established and defined in Roman religiolegal thinking and formed part of the substantive content of the jus fetiale. These wrongs constituted the causes of ‘just and pious’ wars, to the Roman mind.
Ecumenical Survey
Authors: St John Henry 
Published: July 2007

When these lines appear in print the third session of Vatican II will be in full swing and some crucial declarations of the Church's mind, which must have a vital bearing on the problems of Christian unity, will be in the making. Not least in importance among these is the revised Schema de Oecumenismo. It will perhaps be useful to examine the attitude of the World Council of Churches to what is happening in the view of representatives well qualified to speak for it.This attitude may, I think, be summed up by saying that while there is generous recognition of progress there is also considerable doubt among a number of responsible non-Catholic ecumenists whether, in view of its well known presuppositions, the Catholic Church can, as such, engage in ecumenical dialogue on the terms now common to all the member-Churches of the World Council of Churches, including the Eastern Orthodox. This doubt is fairly widespread. It is expressed, for instance, by Dr Lukas Vischer, one of the World Council observers at the Vatican Council. Speaking during the Unity Octave in Zurich in 1964, just after Pope Paul's pilgrimage to the Holy Land, he said: The non-Roman Catholic Churches do not question the fact that the Roman Catholic Church must claim to be the one and only Church. But if a permanent conversation is to be established between the divided Churches, then a form of fellowship must be found which does not compel the non-Roman Catholic Churches to accept the Roman Catholic concept of unity and of union.
The Equilibrium of the Social Worker
Authors: Fitzsimons John 
Published: July 2007

The absence of equilibrium implies the presence of tensions; there are tensions in the life of everyone, but nowhere more so than in the life of those who are trying to live up to an ideal. Experience has proved this to be true. But it is the more true of the Christian, continually responding to the urge of grace or failing to do so. Even the great Apostle of the Gentiles was forced to admit that ‘praiseworthy intentions are always ready to hand, but I cannot find my way to the performance of them. It is not the good my will prefers, but the evil my will disapproves, that I find myself doing.’ Yet such tensions can be an asset, provided we are clear about our goals. We cannot hope to eliminate tensions—trying to suppress or ignore them can only lead to worse effects—because they are due to our human nature wounded by the sin of our first parents. But we can hope to arrive at a state of harmony, a balance of tensions which will sustain us and even carry us forward.Again it is even more true of the social worker whose function is, by definition, ‘to assess the disturbance of equilibrium in a given handicapped person, in his family, his social relationships, so as to give appropriate help.’ In order to do his job properly, the social worker has to place himself in a situation that is lacking equilibrium, and through empathy to share—at least to some extent—the client’s problems. The social worker is not to be considered as a person safe and dry who throws a lifebelt to somebody struggling in the water. He has himself to jump in the water and to encourage the person in difficulties to make the necessary strokes to remain afloat, and perhaps eventually to make for the shore.