bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Memory, Nostalgia and Repentance
Authors: White Allan 
Published: July 2007

A few years ago vehement opposition to the idea of further European cooperation and integration came from an unusual quarter. The Moderator of the Free Church General Assembly used the occasion of his moderatorial address to warn of the dangers to Protestantism posed by the existence of the European Economic Community. He was particularly concerned to warn the church that the Roman Catholic Communion was perhaps more dangerous to the Protestant polity at that time than at any other point in recent European history. In his view the Common Market was nothing more or less than the foreign policy of an imperialist papacy. He pointed out that, at that time, Catholicism was the religion professed, at least nominally, by the majority of inhabitants of the Community, that the founding document was the Treaty of Rome and that large numbers of the Community’s officers were associated with Christian Democratic parties which were closely linked with the Catholic Church.The speech caused some embarrassment to his co-religionists and was widely reported in the press. Many people immediately assumed it was nothing other than the theocratic ravings of a small and paranoid body and dismissed it out of hand. However, it cannot be denied that many of the founding fathers of the pan-European movement were clearly influenced by Catholic social teaching and motivated by a strong desire to ensure not only the prevention of another European war but also the promotion of reconciliation amongst former enemies. The vocabulary of European integration was often theological in tone and conveyed the resonance of Roman juridical formulae.
Understanding Germany
Authors: Boyle Nicholas 
Published: July 2007

The feelings of trepidation and resentment aroused in Britain by the imminent unification of East and West Germany, and too accurately voiced in July by Mr Nicholas Ridley, derived as much from the disturbance of illusions about ourselves as from any rational insight into the affairs of our most powerful and important neighbour. ‘Don’t mention the War’ was a good joke because it precisely identified a British obsession: since 1945 a mythologized version of the Second World War (‘the War’) has stood in as the image of a national identity which neither the twilight of Empire nor our ever shabbier political institutions, let alone our industries or our culture, could provide. Mr Ridley’s outburst expressed the fear that soon we should not be able to tell the joke any more. We may even, in the Europe of tomorrow, be forced to face the truth about those forgotten, untried, unpunished, uninvestigated war- crimes: not just a few wicked old collaborators who escaped to Britain rather than Latin America, but the collusion of an entire supposedly civilised ruling-class in the deliberate and systematic burning, machinegunning, dismembering, and burying alive of hundreds of thousands of women and children in what until a few months ago were regularly and not incorrectly referred to in GDR official publications as ‘the Anglo- American terror-raids’ on German cities. ‘Murder is murder’ are words that we must hope will return to haunt the British popular conscience.Yet, at the same time as the Ridley affair, the revelations about the Chequers seminar on Germany showed that even at the highest level at which in modern Britain the political and intellectual worlds can interact (and quite evidently not all of the seminar was conducted at that level) the subject of Germany is peculiarly beset by illusions.
Religion after Ceausescu
Authors: Almond Mark 
Published: July 2007

Easter, 1990, was the first time that the greatest Christian festival could be openly celebrated in Romania for forty years. The coincidence of the Orthodox and Western calendars gave especial significance to the celebrations of the Easter Vigil in both Patriarchal and Catholic cathedrals in Bucharest and in churches throughout the capital and elsewhere. Romanian television celebrated the feast as it had Christmas, treating viewers to the incongruous sight of the presenters, all familiar faces from the past, surrounded by Easter eggs, intoning throughout the weekend, even before the weather forecast: ‘Hristos invitat’ (Christ is risen).Although the joy of the crowds of worshippers able to process freely for the first time at midnight was common to all denominations, disputes about the relationship between Church and State under the Communist regime bedevilled the atmosphere. Shortly before Easter, more than forty leading intellectuals issued a petition calling upon the Patriarch Teoctist to abstain from celebrating the Easter liturgy. Teoctist had already abdicated once before in January after fierce criticisms of his compliant behaviour under Ceausescu and most particularly for his public congratulations to the Conducator for his stern measures to repress the ‘hooligans’ in Timiscara before Christmas. Teoctist’s abdication had placed the Orthodox Church in a dilemma, since his natural successor, the Metropolitan Antonius of Sibiu, had distinguished himself still more vigorously than the Patriarch when it came to rendering unto Ceausescu. For instance, Antonius was an indefatigable traveller to the West always ready to deny that the programme of ‘systemization’ had led to the demolition of churches and monasteries, insisting it had affected only ‘redundant’ buildings, of which there were apparently at least twenty-four, including some of the most ancient, in Bucharest—all concentrated in the area designated as the new Civic Centre containing Ceausescu’s Palace of the People.
A Kingdom of Priests?
Authors: McCabe Herbert 
Published: July 2007

As the book of Exodus tells it, when the People of God was formed out of liberated slaves from Egypt (a kind of early Liberia), Aaron and his sons were made the first priests of the new community. Like all the peoples around them the Hebrews took it for granted that a real established society needed a priesthood, just as we take it for granted that a society needs some kind of civil service or some kind of school system. Aaron was the first high priest of the children of Israel, he had a job, an important job, within that community. The priest’s job was to arrange the transactions with the gods of the community, to ensure that the gods did not become hostile, for this could be disastrous for the people. The priest had to find out what the gods wanted and arrange for the people to give it to them. So he stood as mediator, on the frontier, looking both ways, to the gods and to the people; communicating to the people the messages of the gods, communicating to the gods the offerings of the people.But, of course, the Children of Israel were no ordinary society, they were something unique in human history; they made a gradual but huge revolution from which all subsequent humankind has benefited and (as with all revolutions) suffered too. For by the time the Book of Exodus was put together it was becoming clear that their God was not one (or more) of the gods, and this was going to make a difference to what such things as priesthood meant.
The Sources of Moral Disquiet
Authors: Mounce H.O. 
Published: July 2007

Disquiet in ethics, or moral philosophy, has its main sources (a) in an irreducibly subjective or personal element contained in moral judgement, (b) in a tension between virtue and happiness, and (c) in the nature of moral disagreement. It will be useful to consider each of these in turn.(a) It is evident that people worry more often about the objectivity of morals than about the objectivity of fact. A statement about, say, the conditions on a certain planet, even if it cannot be verified, seems to them objective in the issues it raises, because although the human mind is involved in making the statement, it is not involved in what makes it true or false. Thus, what makes it true that there are mountains on the moon would hold even if the human species had never existed. Moreover, the same point applies to factual statements much greater in their complexity. For example, one cannot verify the theory of evolution as one can a simple statement in astronomy; nevertheless, everyone believes that what makes it true or false is independent of human views about it.The term ‘objective’, no doubt, has many uses; but none is more fundamental than the one discerned above. My view is objectively true, when in holding it I am in contact with reality, when I am forced into believing it by reality itself. So long as I believe that of my view, I shall never be shaken free of it. It is of secondary importance whether I can get others to agree with me or whether I have reasons for my view. For many of my beliefs about the past, for example, I have no evidence at all.
Dominus Illuminatio Mea
Authors: Radcliffe Timothy 
Published: July 2007

When I received a letter from The Summoner of Preachers inviting me to preach this Sermon before the University, I felt deeply honoured. But this turned to alarm when I discovered that there was no set text or topic. I was invited to talk about anything I wished. And this disturbed me because, within my tradition at least, what differentiates a sermon from a mere expression of opinion is that it starts from a text, a text that you have not chosen, may not like, and may well not understand.Anyone who attends the Eucharist will have to listen to some extraordinary texts, which celebrate the squashing of the Amelekites, Moab becoming one’s footstool, the cleansing of houses suffering from leprosy, and the torments of the damned. And after we have listened, we say: ‘Thanks be to God’. The purpose of the sermon is to help us to be thankful, to discover some apparently bizarre or alarming text as a gift. The preacher should be the perfect host who shows us how to welcome the strange text, an exercise in hospitality of the heart and the mind.But there was no text. And then I spotted a text at the top of the letter, Dominus Illuminatio Mea, ‘The Lord is my light’, the motto of the University. It is a quotation from the beginning of Psalm 27 in the Vulgate, Dominus illuminatio mea et salus mea. Quem timebo? The Lord is my light and my salvation. Whom shall I fear?’
The Nature of Revelation
Authors: Lamont John 
Published: July 2007

I wish to argue against the widespread view that divine revelation does not consist in a set of propositions. I think that I can show conclusively that a non-propositional view of revelation cannot be reconciled with Christianity.What are propositions? I cannot do better than quote from Natham Salmon and Scott Soames:... If you utter the words ‘Snow is white’ and a French speaker utters the words ‘La neige est blanche’, there is some sense in which both of you say the same thing despite your having used different words. This thing that both of you said is a proposition: the proposition that snow is white. When uttering or writing a declarative sentence (in a given context) one asserts (or records) a piece of information, which is the semantic information content of the sentence (in the context). Since they are the contents of declarative sentences—and what one asserts in uttering declarative sentences—propositions are the sorts of things that are true or false. But making true or false assertions is not the only thing we do with propositions. We also bear congitive attitudes towards them. Propositions are what we believe, disbelieve, or suspend judgement about. When you fear that you will fail or hope that you will succeed, when you venture a guess or feel certain about something, the object of your attitude is a proposition. That is what propositions are.
‘I gotta use words when I talk to you’: A literary examination of John
Authors: Cook Cornelia 
Published: July 2007

‘I gotta use words when I talk to you’ says Sweeney in T.S. Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes. Sweeney is telling the awful parable of the man he knew who ‘did a girl in’ and wasn’t sure which of them was alive and which dead. In the world of Sweeney’s experience ‘That’s what life is. Just is ... Life is death’.When you’re alone like he was alone/You’re either or neither/I tell you again it don’t apply/Death or life or life or death/Death is life and life is death/I gotta use words when I talk to you/But if you understand or if you dont/That’s nothing to me and nothing to you ...Words here are strained to accomplish their explanation (how can ‘life’ be ‘death’ when the words signify opposites) and as they stretch they give up multiple significances to unfold un-thought-of meanings. If Sweeney’s friend Doris says (whether of Sweeney’s ‘canibal isle’ where life is ‘birth, and copulation, and death’, or of the proposed ‘crocodile isle’ idyll of ‘Morning/Evening/Noontime/Night’), ‘That’s not life, that’s no life/Why I’d just as soon be dead’, she may not only be expressing a simple equality of preference, but saying that on an isle with no telephones, gramophones, cars or trains, only fruit and flowers and sameness, death will come just as surely and as soon as in the busy world of sights and sounds and doings. When Sweeney picks this up and says ‘That’s what life is. Just is’, he may allude to the quality of life—hurried, mechanised, or slow-dropping hypnotised—as death or to the incontrovertible fact that the end, the fulfilment, of all life is death.
A Century of ‘Pontifical’ Thomism
Authors: McGuckin Terence 
Published: July 2007

Theological attention to St Thomas Aquinas, from over one hundred years ago to the present day, has featured in the work of a great number of theologians, many of them outstanding in the formation of twentieth-century theology. There is, however, another important aspect to the revival of interest in Aquinas: the very effective official ecclesiastical promotion of Thomistic philosophy and theology led by the succession of popes from Leo XIII to John Paul II.A point of entry for these observations is provided by the occasion of the inauguration of the Chair of St Thomas Aquinas at the Lateran University, Rome on 10 March 1963. Archbishop Dino Staffa, as Secretary of the Congregation for Seminaries and Universities, delivered a paper on the ‘Revival of Thomism’. His comments, as indeed much in the early years of the revival of Thomistic studies, had been largely inspired by another inauguration, that of the officially stated fundamental place of St Thomas in Catholic philosophy and theology by the encyclical Aterni Patris of Pope Leo XIII, dated August 4, 1879. The specific interest of the encyclical was the restoration of scholastic philosophy in general and that of St Thomas Aquinas in particular. It emphasized the Church’s concern for teaching ‘true philosophy’ because of its relation to theology. Declaring false philosophy to be the root of ‘many modern evils’ and mentioning the esteem in which St Thomas had been held, the encyclical urged the revival of St Thomas’ philosophy and of the spirit of investigation.
Thinking of That Than Which Nothing Greater can be Thought
Authors: Loughlin Gerard 
Published: July 2007

And what is that,this something than which nothing greater can be thought? Why it is God of course.‘Now we believe that thou art a being than which nothing greater can be thought’ (Anselm). Here is the stuff of philosophy, or at least of a certain sort of philosophy. Here are thoughts and things and relations between them, and God also. Anselm tied them together in such a complicated knot that thinkers have had difficulty untying them ever since. But perhaps Anselm’s knot is like the knot of the conjuror, a sleight of hand, and all one needs to do is to pull the rope taut and the knot will disappear?Brian Davies (‘Quod Vere Sit Deus. Why Anselm Thought that God Truly Exists’, New Blackfriars,72 (1991), 212—221) has also suggested that Anselm’s knot is often misunderstood, that, for example, Kant untied Descartes’ and not Anselm’s knot. But Davies still thinks Anselm’s knot a good one. When properly understood (tied) it works. Whether Davies has really untied and retied (understood and explained) Anselm’s knot or a similar but different one, just like Gaunilo, Descartes and Kant before him, is not here important. What matters is that Davies has an argument for God’s existence and that he thinks it is a good one.
Accents in Theology
Authors: McDonagh Francis 
Published: July 2007

More than in the case of any other school of theology, it is important to assess liberation theology in its social context. Liberation theology not only asserts a necessary correlation between belief and action; its adherents are also normally active in work with poor communities or one of the many church-linked sectoral support organisations. Liberation theology has also acquired wide influence within the magisterium of the Latin American church: the meeting of the General Conference of Latin American bishops (CEL AM) in Medellin (1968) and Puebla (1979) adopted key concepts, and for the past twenty years a liberationist outlook has shaped the thinking of the Brazilian bishops’ conference, the largest on the continent.The impact of liberation theology in the Latin American church has been profound, though not universal. Where its ideas have been adopted, the church, from being in alliance with the elites and out of touch with the and a new following among the poor, and is treated with a new seriousness by non-Christian radicals. Bishops, who formerly entered the political arena mainly to defend their privileges, now commonly champion the rights of workers, the landless, indigenous peoples and other oppressed groups There has been an explosion of creativity, not only in theology, but in church structure, pastoral practice and liturgy. Liberation theology’s influence has spread beyond Latin America, stimulating similar contextual theologies in other parts of the Third World, and securing recognition of one of its key concepts, the ‘preferential option for the poor’, as an essential element of papal social teaching and a permanent question for Christians in the affluent world.
Why We Enjoy Coincidences
Authors: Roberts Frank 
Published: July 2007

Timothy McDermott’s piece in New Blackfriars, March 1991, raised a number of fascinating themes. In this article, inspired by his, I would like to bring together two areas of thought not usually connected: the study of chance and coincidence and the study of the function of the human mind in the construction of its own perceptions. The link between the two will be a consideration of the metaphysical status of literature.McDermott quotes Jacques Monod on coincidence: ‘The convergence of two totally-independent causal chains of events, the convergence itself being causeless.’ There is nothing unusual about either chain considered in itself. It is in the bringing together of the two chains that the coincidence lies. A coincidence only springs into existence when perceived by an appropriate, a ‘skilled’ observer. For example Leicester’s Moslems were recently excited by the discovery of the word ‘Allah’, in Arabic script, formed by the seeds on the inside of an aubergine. Many were the speculations about what this article portended. Had that aubergine instead been opened in the Leicester of 1931, few would have realised that they were in the presence of wonders.
An Epitaph for the Cold War
Authors: Wicker Brian 
Published: July 2007

Just Deterrence by the ‘Pembroke Group’—a ‘distinguished group of civil servants, servicemen, service chaplains, theologians and academics’ to quote the blurb—claims to be about ‘Morality and Deterrence into the Twenty-First Century’. Actually it is about the morality of nuclear deterrence as practised by NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Inevitably, therefore, the book has the character of an epitaph. Of course the corpse of East-West deterrence is still twitching. Nevertheless, old-style deterrence is to all intents and purposes defunct. As Saddam has shown, new-style deterrence is about something very different. Today the question Hugh Beach’s contribution poses is all too relevant: could anything be worse than a war?Just Deterrence is not a great book, like Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars, or Finnis, Grisez and Boyle’s Morality and Realism. For reasons beyond the editors’ control, it is not a strikingly apt intervention as was Walter Stein’s Nuclear Weapons and Christian Conscience in 1961, but neither is it perniciously muddle-headed, like Michael Novak’s Moral Clarity in the Nuclear Age. Like Ethics and Nuclear Deterrence edited by Geoffrey Goodwin in 1982, (with which it has much in common, including certain authors) it has some very closely argued chapters, and others which are certainly stimulating if, in the end unacceptable; together with yet others which are, to my mind, badly wrong. As an epitaph, it is well worth scrutinising closely as we peer at what is written for our edification on the gravestone of the Cold War.
The Misuse of the High‐minded: The British Government's First Campaign Against CND
Authors: Wittner Lawrence 
Published: July 2007

On March 24, 1958, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan sent a remarkable memo to a member of his Cabinet, Dr Charles Hill, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. The memo read:It is most important that we should fmd some way of organising and directing an effective campaign to counter the current agitation against this country&rsquo;s possession of nuclear weapons. This is a question on which the natural emotions of ordinary people would lead them to be critical of the Government&rsquo;s policy, and to accept without question or reason the arguments which our opponents use... .The question is how to ... exploit the differences between those who oppose our policy.Mr. (R.A.) Butler has been asked by the B.B.C. to take part in a discussion on this in Panorama in a week&rsquo;s time, and I have asked him to accept... . Could we not get the I.T.A to take the initiative, but perhaps in a more positive way, by finding suitable people who would speak in support of the U.K.&rsquo;s possession of nuclear arms&#x003F; ...There are no doubt many other ways in which we could press the campaign... . Can we persuade some influential publicists to write articles&#x003F; Are there any reliable scientists&#x003F; Or Church of England Bishops&#x003F; What about Sir John Slessor, or Professor Bullock&#x003F; Mr. Aiden Crawley would probably help.Will you please look into this question, in consultation with the Conservative Central Office, and let me have a report as soon as possible.
Time and Telling: How to read biblical stories
Authors: Radcliffe Timothy 
Published: July 2007

There is probably no more serious threat to the Church throughout the world than the multiplication of fundamentalist sects. According to Robin Gill, ‘Fundamentalism may be defined tentatively as a system of beliefs and practices which treat scriptural absolutism as the way to counter the pluralism and relativism engendered by modernity.’ In our new ‘age of anxiety’, they offer certainty and security. God has spoken and He has spoken clearly and this is what He has said. A proper analysis of fundamentalism would have to examine its rise in various forms in different faiths, including our own, and its political and social implications. In this article I wish to perform the much more limited task of suggesting how it is that a fundamentalist reading of the text relies upon thoroughly modern presuppositions as to how a text should be read. It is as contemporary as the relativism against which it protests. All narrative assumes a particular perception of space and time, the fundamental framework of any story. If we wish to break the hold of such a literalistic reading of the text we must become sensitive to its conventions of chronology and geography. Upon what clock and map does it rely? In particular I wish to suggest that a fundamentalist reading of scripture relies upon a modern understanding of time.Let us start with St. John’s account of the death of Christ:Since it was the day of Preparation, in order to prevent the bodies from remaining on the cross on the sabbath (for that sabbath was a high day), the Jews asked Pilate that their legs might be broken, and that they might be taken away.