bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
A Philosopher for Today?: Max Stirner's Egoistical Nihilism
Authors: Holbrook David 
Published: July 2007

I believe that the underlying philosophy of our culture has become nihilistic. If we pursue the implications of nihilism to their ultimate conclusions, where do we arrive? Very few have dared to do this: Max Stirner, who published a book on this theme in 1845, was one who dared. If we turn back to him we can see that he is the unacknowledged prophet of today’s fashionable culture.The ultimate problems posed by nihilism are examined in a book on this German philosopher, by Dr. R. K. Paterson, The Nihilistic Egoist: Max Stirner, (Hull University Press, 1971). Stirner grew out of the neo-Hegelian movement, and published his one important work in 1945: Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum— ‘The Unique One and His Property’.Stirner belonged to movements which Marx rejected as ‘intellectual nihilists’. Following the nihilist logic to its ultimate implications, he denied God and Christian values, the State’s authority, and all traditional morality.But he went still further, and denied all ethical obligations. In the face of nothingness he embraced nothingness, and he sought no commitment or ultimate responsibility, to man or the universe. ‘What is the commonweal to me?’ All that he was left with was— self. The self and the world were ultimately Nothing—but the Unique One ‘makes Nothing his cause’.
Schooling or Education?: The Inner City
Authors: McAleese Mary 
Published: July 2007

I come here then, simply as a Parish Sister; yes, I have had a background of teaching. I still consider my basic missionary thrust educational but I can only speak as a Sister in Pastoral work. I will speak from nine years experience in a dockland area of Liverpool, of living and working with people there, of being there from nine in the morning till eleven at night—sometimes till one or two the next morning—for seven days a week, forty-eight weeks of the year. Just being there, living there, working there, trying to be a neighbour, a friend—in the name of Jesus. From that experience I may say things that may not make sense to you—that you may not agree with—that you may not find helpful—but just now at the beginning I want to say that I am trying to explain, as honestly and forthrightly as can, what the phrase The Sister and Education means to me in Inner City Liverpool—what my new ministry there has shown me.Up there in Liverpool, if you are going north from the Pierhead, along the Dock Road and if about three-quarters of a mile along the docks you turn left and come “up the brew” through three sets of traffic lights, you will find a solid Victorian building-ancient but freshly painted—on the edge of Smith Estate with the name ‘The People’s Centre” in strong white lettering on the black door.
Tillich and Bonhoeffer Exile and Death
Authors: Turner Geoffrey 
Published: July 2007

On 1st February 1933, two days after his election as Reichskanzler, Hitler published a proclamation in the Völkischer Beobachter in which he promised to take Christianity, ‘the basis of our whole morality’, under his ‘Firm protection’. This meant that the state religion would have to conform with and support National Socialist ideology. For some who rebelled against this it meant exile and for others death.The universities were among the earliest of state institutions to be purged after the confirmation of Hitler as Chancellor of Germany and as early as April 1933 Bernhard Rust, the Prussian Minister for Cultural Affairs, had suspended the theologians Emil Fuchs, Professor at Kiel, Karl Ludwig Schmidt at Bonn and Paul Tillich at Frankfurt where he was Professor of Philosophy and Sociology, together with teachers of other subjects in other universities.Tillich had lived a curious life in Germany up to that time. Having been an Army Chaplain in the 1914-18 war and having endured the battle at Verdun, he became firmly identified with the political fate of Germany after the war. He became a Religious Socialist and had a very reserved and equivocal association with the institutional church. Yet he managed to combine his socialism with an enthusiastic participation in the parties of upper class society, and he combined his Lutheran Christianity with a still more enthusiastic participation in a wide variety of sexual adventures. Despite his detestation of the thuggery of Nazi university students he was loath to leave Germany even after the accession of Hitler and his desire to return from New York in 1934 and be given a university job led him to produce a most compromising letter to Rust in which he appealed for employment in Germany.
New Books on Spirituality
Authors: Tugwell Simon 
Published: July 2007

First, two reprints, one of an undoubted classic, Brother Lawrence’s Practice of the Presence of God, in Donald Attwater’s excellent translation, with a relatively new introduction by Dorothy Day. This must be the most attractive English edition available now. It may be doubted whether Cardinal Suenens’ A New Pentecost? will survive the test of time, but it is likely to endure long enough to justify its new paperback edition. (For a review of the original edition, see New Blackfriars, November 1975).There is also an anthology of the Cardinal’s dicta compiled by his devoted biographer, Elizabeth Hamilton, Ways of the Spirit, and this makes a pleasant book to dip into, and could be used as an aid to meditation.The SPCK offers us a new edition of Bishop Appleton’s One Man's Prayers, revealing a generous and trusting spirituality, expressed in simple prayers which many might find helpful on occasion.John Gunstone, The Beginnings at Whatcombe is a lucid and readable account of the growth of one of the more convincing communities to emerge from the “charismatic movement” in this country, and offers wise advice about the difficulties of living together in community without simply fleeing to naive supematuralism.
Trial Marriage: An Alternative View
Authors: Boivin Marcel 
Published: July 2007

A good friend of mine from Montreal, by profession a notary, told me two years ago that, judging from his experience since 1970, of the couples who come to register their marriages before proceeding to the Church, at least one in five gives the same address; meaning to say that, in the proportion of 20%, couples now seeking a Church-Marriage have been cohabiting for probably no less than a year. That figure, while not providing statistical evidence, is indicative of a trend which is gaining popularity among young people in my country—making sure their union has a chance to last before committing it to the punctilious care of the Church and Law—a trend not infrequently lamented by a sizable section of the clergy as a sad result of those young people’s loss of faith and lax morals.Since then, I have crossed the ocean and settled in the country parish of Ngote, Tanzania, ministering to a Christian community hardly three generations old and, by God’s grace, still little touched by the mixed blessings of industrialisation. Yet of the 18 marriages celebrated in the parish in 1975, only five were between couples for whom Church-Marriage would mark the beginning of conjugal life. In 1970, such marriages had numbered 19 out of 37, while last year they were down to three out of 22. Those figures suggest that ‘trial-marriages, a troubling new fashion at home, are here becoming the norm.Clearly linked to the issue of trial-marriage (in the sense, for this part of the world, of a matrimonial alliance locally acknowledged as legitimate even though still lacking the Church’s sanction and thus officially regarded as void by the Church) considered in this article is the problem of the decreasing ratio of Church-Marriages in relation to the overall number of conjugal unions entered upon by Church members.
Women and the Priesthood
Authors: Ruston Roger 
Published: July 2007

One of the factors that has constantly bedevilled the debate about the admission of women to the priesthood is the uncertainty about what a priest is in Christianity. It must be obvious that we can’t come to any sound conclusions in this matter until we have a theological understanding of the meaning of priesthood and how it relates to the other ministries in the church. The relationship with other ministries is one of the important things to establish if we are going to arrive at a clear idea of what priesthood is. Is it a universal category that in some way comprehends all the other ministries in the church? Or is it just one among many, the central one perhaps, yet not including the others? (One of the questions we have to face after all is why many women who seek to take their rightful place in the ministry feel that they will have got nowhere until the priesthood itself is open to them. What idea of the priesthood lies behind this ambition? Is it the right one? Or is it a historical distortion?)It is a fact that many theologians in modern times have deplored, that in the Roman Catholic Church there has for many centuries been a gradual absorption by the ordained, sacrificial priesthood of nearly all the other ministries in the church. This is well illustrated by the way in which the sacrament of Orders has been administered since the early middle ages. Ordination meant essentially giving to a man the power of celebrating the Eucharist. The climax of a long series of preparatory rites was the anointing of the hands of the candidate and the bishop’s handing over to him the sacred vessels.
Science and Ideology
Authors: Barker Francis 
Published: July 2007

To echo Denys Turner, the debate in New Blackfriars has by now ranged over so many different issues and mobilised so many separate arguments that it is impossible to answer every objection that has been raised against my position, nor shall I be able to take all the incidental points not raised directly in relation to my own views but which nonetheless warrant answers from a revolutionary Marxist standpoint. Equally it would be tedious (for anyone can read the debate for themselves) if I were to spend much time simply restating my earlier remarks and taking issue with every instance of their misinterpretation by my opponents.Therefore, I shall rehearse my argument only in very general form, and then attend to the issue which is central to the debate— the differential characteristics of science and ideology.My initial strategy was not to offer a substantive contribution to this debate but to carry out a reading of it, as it exists in certain texts, in order to expose the silences, incoherences and contradictions enforced on a writing that engages in what is, for the whole thrust of my argument, a project which has already failed even before its inception. Because, as I contend, Christianity is an ideology (as well, of course, as an ensemble of rituals, practices and institutions) and Marxism a science, and because they suffer a high level of mutual unintelligibility deriving from their very different epistemological statuses (the one, potentially at least, an object of the other), Marxism has no ‘contribution’ to make to this ‘debate’ except to define its character as an irresolvable ideological encounter.
The Ideology of the French Catholic Revival
Authors: Birkett Jennifer 
Published: July 2007

This is a period tormented by its sins. Before it, the triumph of science and the Republic; after it, the revival of materialism, and then preparation for war makes it much less easy to see the forms in which individual and collective despair find expression. Yet this despair is of long standing: its cause even more so, and is not specifically French. To anyone seeking a radical cure the idea must present itself forcibly that . .. the decline of Christianity in Europe has a great deal to do with it.Robert Bessède’s account of late nineteenth-century Catholic culture in France, in his recent study La Crise de la conscience catholique (Paris, 1975), is typical of traditional commentaries on this period. A particular stance—an attitude of despair in the face of history—with its origins in a minority group caught in very specific historical circumstances is transformed by special pleading into a universal phenomenon, to become eventually one more symbolic embodiment of the eternal crucifixion of man. If we look, for instance, into Bessède’s work, which claims to consider objectively the whole movement of ideas at this period, but has its real centre of interest in traditionalism and in the writers of the Catholic Revival, we find that he wholeheartedly adopts the Revival’s own blinkered perspective, refusing even to try to decipher the historical particularity inscribed in their ideology. Ostentatiously dismissing the contribution which the “historian of ideas” can make in such a domain, he prefers to speak of “mysterious” impulses, “feelings”, always and universally the same, which are “the basis and motive force of history”:The crisis under discussion in this book —more clearly than any other—springs from a nexus of feelings, every one of which is a feeling of lack; it provokes questions whose scope goes beyond the political and social domain.
Recent Catholic Writing on the Resurrection (II) The Appearance Stories
Authors: Kerr Fergus 
Published: July 2007

Having described the new approach to the empty tomb narratives (NEW BLACKFRIARS, July 1977), we must next investigate what some Catholic theologians now believe about the gospel narratives about appearances to the disciples of the resurrected Jesus. As before, we limit our enquiry to The Common Catechism, and to the recent books by Walter Kasper and Hans Kung.Hans Küng in fact says almost nothing about the appearance narratives themselves. He behaves here like the most traditional scholastic theologian. He develops his view in opposition to that of the distinguished young Catholic exegete Rudolf Pesch, and indulges in a good deal of speculation about the metaphysics of the risen body. He leaves aside all detailed reference to the gospel texts.As far as the speculation goes, Kung starts from the assumption that the Resurrection is “essentially a work of God on Jesus” (p. 349): that is to say, he is in no doubt that the Resurrection is something that happened to the crucified Jesus—it was not something that happened in the minds and hearts of the disciples. Kung cannot be accused of subjectivising Easter or of reducing it to any kind of human discovery or projection. Since the Resurrection is “an act of God within God’s dimensions”, Küng believes that it cannot be described as a historical event, as he says, “in the strict sense”:“For the raising of Jesus is not a miracle violating the laws of nature, verifiable within the present world, nor a supernatural intervention which can be located in space and time. There was nothing to photograph or to record. What can be historically verified are the death of Jesus and after this the Easter faith and the Easter message of the disciples. But neither the raising itself nor the person raised can be apprehended, by historical methods” (p. 349).
Angliores Anglis Ipsis
Authors: Gray‐Stack Charles 
Published: July 2007

I start with a quotation from the “Point of View” of the Church of Ireland Gazette for August 19th.“The General Synod of the Church of England ... will consider ‘The Irish Problem and Ourselves’ published on behalf of the Board of Social Responsibility. Since one of its two authors, Canon Eric Elliott, is a prominent member of the (Irish) Committee on the Role of the Church, and since the document itself draws freely from the reports of that Committee, it might be said that the English Synod is being presented with a Church of Ireland viewpoint”.In this article I shall take the Gazette’s language and speak of the English “document” and the Irish “report” to avoid confusion. The Document appears to agree with Dr. Palley former Professor of Public Law in Queen’s University, Belfast. She contrasts the “majority of Protestants” who are “descendants of as the settlers” with “the majority of Irishmen, for the most part Roman Catholics”. Possibly Professor Beckett, who has recently retired from a history chair in the same university may be rather more reliable. I quote from the Appendix he supplied to the Irish Report of 1975.“It is often asserted or assumed that Protestants represent a colonial population while the Roman Catholics are the native Irish. This is at best a dangerous half-truth. It is probably the case that most Protestants are descended in the direct line from English or Scottish ancestors, who entered the country at various times from the later sixteenth century onwards. But such families have commonly inter-married with the earlier layers of population. And besides this there is a very substantial number of Protestants whose direct Irish ancestry goes back to Medieval times and earlier. As for the Roman Catholic population, it contains such a very large inter-mixture of English and Scottish, that it cannot possibly be regarded as representing any single strain”.
Between Prophet and Philosopher
Authors: Clark Douglas Kent 
Published: July 2007

Heu vatum ignare mentes . . .—Vergil, Aenid, 11.63The God of the Psalmists and the prophets was not in nature, He transcended nature—and transcended, likewise, the realm of mythopoetic thought. It would seem that the Hebrews, no less than the Greeks, broke with the mode of speculation which had prevailed up to their time.—H.and H. A. Frankfort “The Emancipation of Thought from Myth”At least until the advent of counter-cultural occultism, we of the post-medieval West, whether we regard ourselves as heirs of the secular Greeks or of the pious Hebrews, have liked to think that our own speculation has broken completely with mythopoetic thought. As successors to the rationalists and empiricists, many of today’s philosophers have attempted to find ultimate knowledge through “scientific” investigation, and, failing, have settled for an understanding, not of the Ultimate but of mere phenomena. Nor have we lacked our “prophets” who, in the footsteps of Luther, have eschewed human reason, seeking ultimate knowledge directly from God’s mouth. Yet both our prophets and our philosophers have tended, at least until very recently, to shun the whole ambiguous realm of mythopoetic thought and expression. To the philosopher, mythopoetry is imprecise, an unscientific and indirect way of dealing with reality. To the prophet, it is unworthy of the transcendent God who has taken the trouble of bypassing myth by revealing himself directly. So the philosopher looks below, to man’s own wits, to find, if not clear and distinct Cartesian ideas then clear and distinct descriptions of phenomena, and the prophet looks above, to God, for his clear and distinct word.
Unity and Difference in Christianity
Authors: Kerr Fergus 
Published: July 2007

The difference between Catholics that comes out very plainly in recent writing on the Resurrection (New Blackfriars, October and November 1977, pp 453-461 and 506-515) prompts questions and reflections about the nature and extent of the diversity of belief that exists within the Catholic communion. This is particularly urgent and apposite at the present time, in England, as Catholics seem to be moving, slowly but inexorably, towards some degree of communion with the Anglican Church—long mocked as the home of incompatible beliefs. As Cardinal Hume said, in his address at Church House, Westminster, on 1st February 1978:“We do not yet know what diversity of doctrinal emphasis or differences of practice will not only be permissible but also desirable”. ‘That avowal of ignorance—which is also clearly a word of hope— must seem to many Catholics even now very like an admission of defeat. Surely, they will say, the one thing that Roman Catholics can be clear about is what diversity of doctrinal emphasis and difference of practice are permissible. How is it possible that, on any but trivial and peripheral matters, there can be a serious question about this? Do we not already know, have we not always known, what doctrinal differences we cannot permit—far less desire—within the communion of the catholica? How can a cardinal archbishop ask such a question?
Mary Crawford and the Christian Heroine
Authors: Tatham Michael 
Published: July 2007

It is a matter of commonplace that Mansfield Park is Jane Austen’s most controversial novel—perhaps even, in some ways a failure. Fanny Price who occupies the central position in mediating what is widely thought to be Jane Austen’s point of view, is, in fact, almost completely antipathetic to the attitude to life revealed by Jane’s correspondence with her sister, Cassandra; while Mary Crawford—having won our approval by her good natured intelligence and vivacity—is cast aside, not merely as a threat to Fanny’s romance—what Angus Wilson has called ‘the dusty union’, but as a comprehensive danger to the very foundations of the Mansfield estate, and by extension, to the stability of the whole fabric of society at a critical period of revolutionary ferment. It is also largely agreed that Jane Austen’s supposed intention of writing a novel on the theme of ordination—with all that this implies of a conservative political philosophy—led her to abandon the ironic mode and even compelled her to impose an arbitrary didactic conclusion upon the plot so that virtue might be almost as glibly and sentimentally rewarded as in Pamela.Ironically, much of the misunderstanding and confusion seems to have arisen because it has been believed that Jane Austen wrote her novel under the influence of Evangelical Christianity with all that this implies of regeneration and enthusiasm and disapproval of the smartly decadent values of fashionable London society. This critical response sees Mansfield Park as Jane Austen’s response to the issues of her time—a response in which the religious affirmations of the debate in the chapel at Sotherton and Edmund’s impending commitment to the duties of Thornton Lacey are balanced by secular responsibilities to the management of the estate. In this thematic reading Jane Austen assumes the mantle of Edmund Burke; and clearly, the coherence of such a reading has much to recommend it.
Close Encounters of Another Kind
Authors: Hibbert Giles 
Published: July 2007

It is not so long ago that mysticism was a dirty word, the Reformation was regarded as a ‘good thing’, and a scientific education was seen as having more value than one in the ‘humanities’. But fashions change, and even genuine perspectives alter. The current fortunes of St John of the Cross are an example of what can happen and will repay examination, for this mystic, poet, and outstanding representative of Counter-Reformation Spain is again becoming popular and arousing interest. Lectures about him are attended eagerly and received with enthusiasm; books once again are being published about him.But there is danger in this if what is happening is simply a reversion to earlier perspectives. One suspects this, for example, with regard to the reappearance from the early 1950s of Thomas Merton’s introduction to and presentation of the Maxims, Cautions and Counsels of St John of the Cross (Counsels of Light and Love, Burns & Oates, 95 pages, £1.50). Perhaps this book represents the most attractive of old-style presentations of John and his teaching, based as it is on a liberal humanism tailored to the inadequacies of modern urbanised man; but whether it really represents what John stood for is another matter. Apart from anything else, as with so much that has been written about him, it suffers from an almost total failure to take account of the appropriate context. The lesser writings of St John of the Cross presented in this book, as also his letters, arose from a very particular cultural and social situation which must be appreciated if the nature and significance of his ‘advice’ is to be understood. Even more perhaps than with his major works it is necessary to realise that these writings were addressed to particular people, or groups of people, in very special circumstances, and are dependent upon a very close relationship between him and them.