bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Fragment of an Autobiography
Authors: Evans‐Pritchard E. E. 
Published: July 2007

One has often been asked by incredulous, though well-meaning, people—and almost apologetically—‘Why did you become a Catholic?’ The suggestion being that there must be some explanation to account for such a strange, even a remarkable, lapse from rational behaviour on the part of one supposed to be some sort of scientist. The question is not well put. I suppose that none of us can say truthfully and certainly why we do anything. It would be better to ask not why, but how, did a man become a Catholic; and this is the question I shall attempt to answer, so that next time I am asked why I became a Catholic I can just hand over this number of New Blackfriars. Perhaps even more alarming and difficult to give a direct answer to is the question: ‘When were you converted?’ Perhaps I had better deal with that one first.Some people, it would seem, have peculiar notions about what is called ‘conversion’, as though it were some sudden and dazzling experience (it may be with some people; I do not know). So, we are led to suppose, this is what happened on the road to Damascus, but if that dramatic incidence, that traumatic vision, occurred as described, we might recollect that Paul was a highly religious Jew, and so was Jesus, a Jew preaching unto Jews in the tradition of Jewish thought and expression. And we might also bear in mind that when we read that Augustine was converted by Ambrose that Augustine was a Neo-Platonist and was already, so to speak, half-way there. So, if we may compare little things with big things, we come to me, which is embarrassing, but obviously I cannot talk about myself without some ‘I’s and ‘me’s.
God's Flesh
Authors: Tugwell Simon 
Published: July 2007

Two years ago, under the pretext of reviewing a motley collection of books, I offered some reflections on the play dimension of life and spirituality. Now, two years later, a little sadder perhaps if no wiser, I want to take up my cudgels again, on a similar pretext. In 1970 I suggested that one of the crucial issues, often veiled by the more popular conservative-progressive polarity, is that of Tradition—a glance at the behaviour of children revealing a close relationship between tradition and play. In various ways Tradition is again the issue raised by the books under consideration this time.Mauss’ General Theory of Magic, already quite a classic, but now for the first time translated into English, and Furst’s collection, Flesh of the Gods, demonstrate how far experience is socially determined—to such an extent, it appears, that sorcerers in some societies, even though they are aware of the sleight of hand and other tricks involved in their own practice, nevertheless remain convinced of the validity of the whole magical system within which they operate.Flesh of the Gods is a collection of essays by American ‘ethno- botanists’ on the ritual use of drugs in tribal societies. There are some signs that ethnobotany is a bit of a tribal religion itself (there is a kind of credo by R. Gordon Wasson), but all the same much of the material presented here is quite interesting. One thing that emerges over and over again is that members of a drug-using culture spontaneously all have the same, and the expected, experiences, often with no prompting from the shamanistic leader; outsiders, however, taking identical doses of the drug in an identical setting, experience nothing of the sort.One consequence of this is, of course, the possibility of building up utterly self-contained and invulnerable systems of self-delusion. Such seems to be Mauss’ verdict on magic, though he recognizes its social significance. Although there may be much talk about experiences, in fact there is a tendency towards ritualization and formalism, the emphasis being on form rather than content.
The Myth of the Bagre
Authors: Edwards Adrian 
Published: July 2007

Dr Jack Goody has over a period of twenty years done extensive fieldwork in northern Ghana, mainly among the LoDagaa (more commonly known as the Dagarti) and the Gonja. In both areas, he has exercised very satisfactorily the normal skills of the anthropologist dutifully recording the size of farming groups, and the ways inheritances are divided. However, farms are cultivated, and inheritances shared by human beings, who use language and live in time; and Goody’s awareness of this has made him responsible for three books which related the history and literature (both written and oral) of northern Ghana to a wider world. In Technology, Tradition and the State in Africa Dr Goody argued that Ghanian history is significantly influenced not only by the means of production, but also by the means of destruction, the horse, associated with Islam and the savannas, and guns, associated with Christendom and the forests. In a contribution to Literacy in Traditional Societies Dr Goody showed in the West African context, but with obviously much wider relevance, that the break-through to literacy may lead not towards secularization, but rather to mythifying and mystifying to a much greater degree than before. In The Myth of the Bagre Goody has not only increased the available corpus of African oral literature by giving us the original texts and annotated translations of the two long Bagre poems, but has also indicated its place in the religion and world-view of the LoDagaa and its relevance to contemporary discussions of myth.The LoDagaa are not, strictly speaking, a ‘tribe’ in the colonialist sense of an obviously distinctive group, sharply distinguished from their neighbouring tribes. As happens in a number of areas in Africa, this particular area of northern Ghana is marked by a lack of coincidence between cultural and linguistic boundaries, and by the gradual way cultural differences appear with gradually increasing distance. Even the term has been selected for use to cover a given area by Dr Goody, albeit with some justification in local usage.
Some Eighteenth—century Remarks on Clerical Celibacy
Authors: Holmes J. Derek 
Published: July 2007

Of course, a serious question deserves a serious answer, but is importance necessarily associated with solemnity, especially if the problem is unlikely to be solved in the immediate future? Might it not be possible or even desirable in such a situation to relax, if only for the moment, and treat the problem neither indifferently nor lugubriously, but with a certain degree of panache or even irresponsibility—for our own sakes, if nobody else’s? Such thoughts were prompted by reading through one particular controversy among English-speaking Catholics during the eighteenth century. At the time, many Catholics were dissatisfied with the attitudes and laws of the Church, not least on the issue of celibacy. Furthermore, these critics, no doubt largely influenced by the temper of the time, regarded themselves as liberal and enlightened in their own religious approach. How then were they to regard the clerical ‘vert’?In 1784, Charles Henry Wharton, one of the first American Jesuits, published A Letter to the Roman Catholics of the City of Worcester where he had previously served as chaplain, giving his reasons for joining the Anglican Church. This pamphlet, first published in Philadelphia and reprinted in London about three months later, was particularly successful because it was, to use the publisher’s phrase, written in ‘a spirit of moderation and liberality’. Wharton was answered by, among others, John Carroll, the first American Bishop, and William Pilling in A Caveat addressed to the Catholics of Worcester (London, 1785). Pilling in turn was answered by a former Benedictine, John Hawkins, in An Appeal to Scripture, Reason, & Tradition which supported Wharton’s Letter, while Joseph Berington replied in his Reflections addressed to The Rev. John Hawkins (Birmingham, 1785).
A Positive Approach to Taboo
Authors: Boivin Marcel 
Published: July 2007

An article by Fr Kevin T. Kelly recently published in The Clergy Review under the title ‘A Positive Approach to Humanae Vitae’ is an attempt at making a dispassionate evaluation of the teaching of that Encyclical on birth regulation. The attempt is successful, in that the article correctly weighs up the teaching of the Encyclical against the other statements of the Magisterium which immediately preceded or followed that Encyclical.The untasty dish served by Pope Paul in 1968 is at last being made palatable; the trouble is that, in the process, the ingredients adduced from more savoury sources are changing the nature of the dish. Contraception, admittedly, remains evil. It is no longer, however, intrinsically evil; that is to say, it is no longer a type of action whose evilness cannot be exorcised by circumstances and that admits of no case in which its performance could be squared with God’s Will and man’s good. Contraception is now evil ‘in the premoral sense’. Like killing, which remains evil even when the total action of which it is a part makes it legitimate to take another man’s life, so is contraception: the total action can be a moral good and so legitimate the inclusion of contraception, without for that reason denying its premoral evil character.The pastoral guidance given by Fr Kelly is in keeping with his assessment of the morality of contraception: ‘If a couple accept Humanae Vitae in the sense suggested in this article, then if they are using some form of contraception they ought to admit that what they are doing is not fully in accord with the objective demands of God’s Will for them’.
What Sort of Bread did Jesus want us to Pray For?
Authors: Baker Aelred 
Published: July 2007

Can you say a prayer prayerfully with words in it you don’t understand? Yes, because for centuries Greek Christians have done precisely that. Wilfully, day in day out, they have asked God to give them epiousion bread in the Our Father. Every attempt to understand this word is more or less guess-work, so that after nineteen centuries of saying the Lord’s Prayer, we are still at square one. Square one being the statement of Origen, early in the third century, that we don’t know what epiousion really means, because it was never used by Greek writers, nor does it exist in common speech, and seems to have been made up by the evangelists.This is a very extraordinary state of affairs. Jesus expressly repudiated meaningless and repetitive phrases, and supplied his disciples instead with this simple and straightforward prayer that everyone can understand. And then somehow or other it first appears in Greek with one quite unintelligible word. And it is an important word. For we are asked to pray for bread; but what sort of bread?— plain brown bread, spiritual bread, eucharistic bread, or food in general, eschatological food and drink, or what? The only qualifying word is this epiousion and we don’t know exactly what it means.
The Ontological Argument and Theological Education
Authors: Haskin Dayton 
Published: July 2007

Even as organized religion becomes less fashionable in many corners, and perhaps especially in the university, a centuries-old scholastic debate about the existence of God has been resurrected to be pursued by the Academy with a new vigour. The so-called Ontological Argument, which St Thomas and Kant each in his turn demolished, is alive and well and alleged to have been more energetically debated in the last decade than ever before in its history, That this phoenix has risen from its ashes is not necessarily best accounted for by seeing it as an event in the war between belief and unbelief. For in large measure, today’s philosophers have occupied themselves with the new modal arguments of men like Malcolm and Hartshorne because of the fascinating logical problems which they entail. Moreover, in the course of the history of the argument, the sides have not been chosen by a strict division between those of the faith and those outside. St Anselm thought he had come upon a worthy insight when he first proposed the argument. But just as surely St Thomas thought the argument inadmissible—without by any means intending to deny God’s existence. There is a lesson here, albeit an embryonic one, for those who are carrying on another current debate—the one about whether theology can or should be done with detachment or commitmentsTo be academically respectable, some would say, theology must be pursued with scholarly objectivity and freedom from ecclesiastical constraints. Its integrity as a discipline hinges on dispassionate examination of the data and the freedom to draw conclusions wholly in accord with the evidence. One’s faith-commitment as such should not influence his theology.
The Sentimental Clown: The Idea of the Self in T. S. Eliot
Authors: Smith Stan 
Published: July 2007

One recurring premise in much criticism of T. S. Eliot’s poetry is the dissoluteness of his dramatis personae. I say ‘dissoluteness’, because there is usually assumed to be some correlation between the imputed psychological state and a moral dereliction. Thus, Bernard Bergonzi’s recent study, speaking of the ‘deluded’ or ‘corrupt’ narrator of Portrait of a Lady, argues that ‘his consciousness is at all times on the verge of dissolution’. His drawing-room conversation is said to be disrupted by the ‘grotesque musical sounds going on inside his head. . . . He makes an effort literally to compose himself but his impressions remain as fragmentary and disjunctive as the items in a daily paper.’ Yet the lines Bergonzi cites to substantiate this suggest the opposite. In face of a multitude of other lives assembled, but also abstracted, reduced, made safe for him by the newspaper, the narrator maintains a casual equanimity, only mildly stirred by the sense of a problematic otherness:I take my hat: how can I make a cowardly amends For what she has said to me?You will see me any morning in the park Reading the comics and the sporting page.Particularly I remarkAn English countess goes upon the stage.A Greek was murdered at a Polish dance,Another bank defaulter has confessed.I keep my countenance,I remain self-possessedExcept when a street piano, mechanical and tiredReiterates some worn out common songWith the smell of hyacinths across the gardenRecalling things that other people have desired.Are these ideas right or wrong?
All Men are Intellectuals: A Disagreement between Friends
Authors: Edwards Adrian 
Published: July 2007

My friend, Father Marcel Boivin, W.F., sent me a copy of his article ‘A Positive Approach to Taboo’ and asked for my comments. I wrote a somewhat sharp reply, which he received with his usual good nature, standing his ground, however, on the essential point of there being an essential difference between the scientific mentality and the taboo mentality. For me, this theory is, if not a taboo, at least a myth which is perhaps open to critical analysis; however, I feel I ought to sketch out my own way of seeing human thought in action. As Fr Boivin knows, I am neither a psychologist nor a philosopher nor a theologian, but a priest capable of, at any rate, preaching to peasants, children and seminarists, traditionally the three most taboo-ridden categories of mankind; I am also a social anthropologist, a profession whose initiates aspire to explain taboos scientifically, a claim which, if taboos and science are really of such utterly different orders, should mark us as sacred monsters of the quality of the pangolin of the Lele.To understand human thought one needs to reflect on language. Dolphins, honey-bees and apes all transmit information to each other ; human language abstracts and generalizes, and can refer to what is absent, or past, or purely imaginary. It can therefore transmit far more than is transmitted through animal communication systems, and, for this purpose, language is structured by grammar and syntax. One can speak a language correctly without being able to explain the rules of grammar, but whenever a language is analysed it is found to have a set of rules which have a reasonable amount of consistency with each other.
More Thoughts on the Eucharistic Presence
Authors: Egner G. 
Published: July 2007

I am indeed grateful to Professor Mascall and to Fr McCabe for their perceptive and kindly critiques of my article on the eucharistic presence. To answer them adequately would take more room than even the Editor’s generosity would tolerate, so I shall content myself with two things. I shall try to show what I think are the strengths and limitations of their views (in my opinion, although perhaps they will not agree with me, we are closer than might appear). And, in doing this, I shall refer to or cite passages from what I trust is my forthcoming book, In the Breaking of the Bread. In this way I shall at least show that the points they raise have not been neglected by me, whatever may be thought of the answers I offer. References to the articles in New Blackfriars will be by ‘E1, ‘E2’, ‘M’ and ‘H’, with page-numbers. References to the book will be by ‘BB’, followed by chapter and section.Let me start by stressing that we are all agreed that no human language or philosophical system is capable of expressing the the eucharistic presence adequately. I make the point with some generality and at some length in BB iii, 1. The remarks about ‘amnesia’ and ‘confrontation’ in my article (E2, pp. 406-407) are based on later sections of that chapter, and are consequences of the general thesis that in theology ‘not only is our linguistic medium inadequate; it is inadequate to the task of drawing bounds to its inadequacy’ (BB iii, 1). The Aristotelian (or any other) vocabulary of change needs maltreatment of one sort or another for its eucharistic employment (see M, pp. 542-543; H, pp. 548-551). Where we differ is in our verdict on the particular ‘maltreatment’ that is in question.
Me and the Monks
Authors: Galbraith Joyce 
Published: July 2007

My reactions to all priests and monks are based partly on my own early memories of my convent school and on my father’s healthy anti-clericalism. ‘Feudal barons . . . that’s what they are, nothing but feudal barons’, he used to roar about the Irish bishops of the thirties and I think he still would have said it had the rooms been bugged and the threat of the salt mines hanging over him. Still, he realized that you couldn’t, at that time (and possibly even now in Ireland), beat City Hall or rather the Archbishop’s House and so he sent me to the care of the nuns. I have written about my hatred of their mixture of hypocrisy, snobbery and sanctimonious smugness elsewhere. All I can say on the credit side of my attempted brainwashing is that its harshness was like Commando training in that nothing, I feel, will ever be quite as bad again. My school days left me with the shaky idea that the Almighty was a Furious Old Man for most of the time and that there just might be a hell, so I went to Mass on Sundays to pacify him and I gabbled daily prayers as if presenting a shopping list.Years in England practising as a psychiatrist diluted whatever bits of bogus religion I had left. This worried me at first, so conditioned was I to the crackles of hellfire if you didn’t go to Mass. I was a reluctant unbeliever and so I tried to do something about it. I mentioned my doubts to a priest in Confession and he said ‘Its your age’ (I was 31 at the time!). I felt just as indignant as most women patients do when their doctor rakes this up when he doesn’t know really what’s the matter with them. Feeling that there ought to be a sort of spiritual clinic where people like myself could bring their symptoms of accidie and religious ennui I even went back to my old enemies, the nuns, because a friend told me that a day retreat might help me. It didn’t. I was put into a small room and given a boring little book written by an old Jesuit whose fertile output gracing the Irish church book-stands must make him the Harold Robbins of the holy book world.
‘Unless you become as little children …’
Authors: Haughton Rosemary 
Published: July 2007

‘Unless you become as little children you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.’ It is possible that this is more literally true than we realize.This article is an attempt to discover what kind of thing is going on in people who get into ecstatic states of one kind or another, whether they are a good thing or a bad thing, and whether they tell us anything about the more ‘normal’ requirements for spiritual ‘conversion’ and growth.‘Ecstatic states’ covers a multitude of—let’s say experiences. The phrase includes the L.S.D. ‘trip’, the ‘speaking in tongues’ of the charismatic movement, the deep trance of the shaman and the dark ‘unknowing’ of the mystic. Can one lump all those together? They don’t seem to be a well-assorted party, especially if we include (and maybe we should) sexual ‘ecstasy’, and the experiences induced by voodoo rituals, or in ‘covens’ of latter-day witches, and possibly even the ‘pink elephants’ of the alcoholic. Imagine a T.V. programme in which the interviewer collected individuals each of whom had experienced one of those kinds of ‘ecstasy’. It seems likely that the discussion would be inconclusive, to say the least, though the affair would probably have some lively moments.’
Humanism and Ideology
Authors: Wicker Brian 
Published: July 2007

I would like to regard this review of Professor James R. Flynn’s book, Humanism and Ideology, as a kind of appendix to Denys Turner’s recent articles on ‘Morality is Marxism’. This is because of Flynn’s thesis that we need to return to classical conceptions of morality if we are to be able to justify the social and political activities of those today who are agitating for social justice. Though it is far from being a Marxist book, Flynn’s work is certainly in line with Turner’s view of what Marxists ought to say about morality.The first thing to say, quite simply, is that not only is Flynn’s a good kind of book, but a good example of its kind. By a good kind of book—and I’m speaking of philosophical books primarily—I mean one which combines a passionate sense of its relevance to the urgent problems of life with scholarly fairness, precision of thought and a due recognition of the difficulties that stand in the way of proving its thesis. Flynn’s book has these qualities. But it also has clarity, economy, and a sense of occasion. And it reads like the best kind of philosophical discussion—i.e. like a serious conversation with an opponent in the civilized atmosphere of a good pub.The task to be undertaken is to show that a sound philosophical case can be made for adopting the ethic of a ‘humane’ humanism rather than any other. Professor Flynn sees the most obvious alternative to such humanism today in some variety of the Nietzschean ethic—that is to say, an ethic which values outstanding personal achievement, the thrill of power and competitive success. He wants to prove that, over against the Nietzschean ethic, a humane humanism can be shown to be best for all mankind and is thus worthy of regard not only by those who already espouse it but also by those who don’t.