bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The Terrorism of Reason in the Thought of Zygmunt Bauman
Authors: Torevell David 
Published: July 2007

This article is concerned with the social theory of Zygmunt Bauman. It will highlight recurring themes within his writing with particular reference to three of his works, Legislators and Interpreters, Modernity and Ambivalence, and Mortality, Immortality and other Life Strategies. It will trace his argument that Modernity constituted a process of gradual de-animation of Nature and disenchantment of the world, a condition that post-modernity aims to reverse. It will discuss his contention about the catastrophic effects of the strategies of instrumental Reason and Modernity’s relentless urge to design and order the whole of human existence. It will demonstrate some of the awful consequences of such strategies. The tension between human attempts to structure the world and its self-defeating failures to do so, becomes the central motif in Bauman’s work: a tension witnessed most visibly in the on-going confrontation between Reason and ambiguity.Bauman learned the limitations of structuralism from Levi-Strauss. What fascinated him was the Modem urge to structure everything, the constant attempt to find the social structure, the underlying structure of everything; that ambivalence could be eliminated.
“Mission … Where Possible”
Authors: Doyle P.J. 
Published: July 2007

To many outsiders the Catholic Church still appears authoritarian and monolithic, yet closer inspection reveals a very different picture. Indeed it could be argued that in some instances the Church gives the appearance of quasi-congregationalism, set within networks of prayer groups, which themselves reflect a spirit of loose independence and quietism. This paper raises the question of the place of the laity within the organisation and structure of the hierarchic church. Recently The Universe carried the headline “More power to the laity”, suggesting radical changes as the increasing priest shortage begins to bite. The report cites concerns in Scotland, Hexham and Newcastle, and Hallam Dioceses. It appears as if at last the Church is beginning to take up matters first raised at the Second Vatican Council.The Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity makes specific reference to establishing national congresses and pastoral councils at diocesan, deanery and parish levels. Unfortunately the decree permits a “cop out” by adding the phrase “where possible”. This provokes the obvious questions: why has this aspect of the Council been virtually ignored, or, at the very least, haphazardly implemented, and further why has the laity so tamely acquiesced? Even more interesting is the knowledge that the Church in this country immediately before and after the First World War seems to have been well organized, with federations at city and diocesan levels, a national Confederation and annual National Congresses, which admittedly became triennial in 1920 before petering out after 1929.
Holy Texts of Deception: Christian Gnosticism and the Writings of Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh
Authors: Loughlin Gerard 
Published: July 2007

John Milbank, in his important and magisterial study Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (1990), advances the claim that ‘secular reason’ is but a form of Christian deviancy. By secular reason Milbank intends ‘secular social theory’ or sociology. Milbank offers an ‘archaeology’ of secular social theory which is also an archaeology of the secular, since for him ‘the genesis of discourse is intertwined with the genesis of a new practice’. His genetic account of the construction of secular reason traces it first in ‘the discourses of liberalism— “scientific politics” and political economy’, where the human construction of the cultural world is discovered, and where human making is thought to ‘mark out an autonomous human space’, as in Hobbes. The secular is not that which is discovered when the sacred is removed, but that which is first constructed within the space of the sacred.It is Milbank’s contention that, as he puts it, ‘secular discourse does not just “borrow” inherently inappropriate modes of expression from religion as the only discourse to hand ... but is actually constituted in its secularity by “heresy” in relation to orthodox Christianity, or else a rejection of Christianity that is more “neo-pagan” than simply anti-religious’. Thus for Milbank ‘“scientific” social theories are themselves theologies or anti-theologies in disguise’. The Hobbesian construction of man as the maker of society, the myth, as Milbank puts it, of the ‘self-present and self-sufficiently initiating “person” who echoes the pure will of a creator God’, is not, as the idea of ‘voluntarist sovereignty’, simply a notion transferred from the divine to the human, from the sacred to the secular.
Reason, Fools and Rameau's Nephew
Authors: Lash Nicholas 
Published: July 2007

In the autumn of 1993, I found myself called upon to give the concluding address to a conference in Stockholm—jointly sponsored by the Royal Dramatic Theatre of Sweden, the Royal Institute of Technology, and the Swedish Center for Working Life—entitled: “Skill and Technology: on Diderot, Education and the Third Culture”. One focus of the conference was Diderot’s Dialogue, Rameau’s Nephew, my appreciation of which has, I hope, been properly enhanced as a result of having sat through not only a dramatisation of it in German but also an operatic version, by a Finnish composer, with a Swedish libretto.Nobody knows for sure whether or not Denis Diderot had a conversation with Jean-Francois Rameau, nephew of the composer, in the Café de la Régence in Paris, in April 1761. Nor does it matter. Diderot certainly wrote the first draft of the Dialogue in that year, reworking it in 1773, 1778 and 1782, the year before he died. The history of this short text (less than seventy pages in the Flammarion edition) is so extraordinary that one almost suspects Diderot himself of having somehow arranged it.Although it has been described as “the very centre of his writing” and has provoked a still burgeoning library of commentary and interpretation, the Dialogue was never published or referred to by Diderot in his lifetime, and it first saw the light of day in a German translation, done by an admiring Goethe from a French manuscript which he had been lent by Schiller, who seems to have obtained it from a German officer in St Petersburg. Goethe’s translation appeared in 1805.
The Dominican Experience in Russia
Authors: Knowles Peter 
Published: July 2007

Recently the Dominican Order has been formally and canonically established in Russia and the Ukraine. This is an event that would have been undreamt of only a few short years ago. But now the question poses itself very clearly: What lies ahead for this new phenomenon? To frame the question in more precise terms: What should be its field of action?The history of the Dominican Order in the vast lands of Russia over the past five hundred years consists of spasmodic sallies, made by individual members of the Order which have left little trace. In the last decades of the 15th century there was a Croatian Dominican, Benjamin, among the equipe of scholars centred round the bishop of Novgorod, Gennady. One of this group’s works was the translation of the Books of Wisdom from the Vulgate Latin into Slavonic, A more exotic and enigmatic Dominican figure who had a part to play in the history of Russia was Maximus the Greek. An admirer of Savonarola, he entered the Dominican community of San Marco in Florence in 1501. After abandoning that life he is next heard of as a monk on Mt Athos at the monastery of Vatopedi. From here he was invited to travel to Moscow to help in the labour of translating Greek texts into Slavonic. As was the policy of the Russians at that time, Maximos was never permitted to return to Mt Athos (it was thought that he had learned too much about Russia’s internal affairs) and he was imprisoned for some years. He eventually died in the Monastery of the Holy Trinity and St Serge outside Moscow in 1556.
The Feminine in the Cross of David Jones
Authors: Dye Jenifer 
Published: July 2007

Exclusive language is becoming increasingly problematic. Not only has the Feminist movement demonstrated the alienation and exclusion felt in male dominated language, but our post-Freudian environment forbids us to accept androgyny as convincing. One is female or one is male. That has to be reflected in our language. This scenario leaves us with great paradoxes in regard to our religious language, particularly in view of our ‘talk’ about the Christian sacrifice. I found an equally paradoxical source of inspiration on this issue in the writings and art of David Jones. His work is paradoxical because while hardly being a feminist (far from it!) or Freudian (he was nearer Jung), he can in the liberation of the artistic communicate the female as well as male.In this limited exploration I am going to focus on his attitude in visual and written form to Mary and her relationship to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, her son and God. Then I will examine the role of the feminine in Jones’ handling of the Eucharist. Finally I will examine the claim that the painting ‘Aphrodite in Aulis’ is a picture of the crucifixion.In Jones’ use of Mary as a picture of the Temple of the body of Christ he creates a layered effect of separate allusions each resting on the one before. The layering of imagery gives a different effect to a lineal arrangement so the finished picture takes on a perspective that is allowed because of all that has gone before.
Necessary Fictions, Real Presences
Authors: Phillips Peter 
Published: July 2007

George Steiner in his subtle and richly suggestive essay, Real Presences, sees in the origins of modernism a breaking of the covenant between word and world which he regards as the significant characteristic of the decades following 1870. For Steiner, this sundering of continuities constitutes ‘one of the very few genuine revolutions of spirit in Western history’. Mallarmé and Rimbaud represent the beginnings of a genuinely new aesthetic, ‘a parting of the semantic ways’. Before this time, he argues, we could have presumed upon a logocentric order, a Logos-aesthetic, which included the assumption of correspondence, understood as something ‘strictly inseparable from the postulate of theological-metaphysical transcendence’. Such a world presupposes ‘real presence’.While there is much to appeal in this argument, I wonder whether the Christian tradition has always had a more healthy suspicion of the innocent collusion of word and world than Steiner allows. The monist ontology at which Steiner hints does not allow for the rich sense of mystery that confronts us in the world of which we are a part: things as things stand over against us, ultimately unfathomable. There are aspects of the Nominalist agenda deeply rooted in the Christian tradition and rightly so. We come to what is real by way of the particular. Steiner, of course, is far from unmindful of this and comments with some force:The arts are most,wonderfully rooted in substance, in the human body, in stone, in pigment, in the twanging of gut or weight of wind on reeds. All good art and literature begin in immanence.
Celebrating Grace in and through the Sacrament of Their Own Lives – Listening to the Urban Marginalised
Authors: Goulding Gill 
Published: July 2007

This paper is the result of reflection upon both my doctoral thesis and my present research. There is a four-fold structure: first an emphasis on the voice of people on the margins; this is followed by an indication of how the collection of empirical data was facilitated by listening, dialogue and conversation and the theological significance of these elements; thirdly I give a brief indication of how the mystery of God at work amongst the marginalised is a feature of certain contemporary ecclesiology; and finally I indicate how the dimension of listening may be facilitated through a contemplative imperative, how this is in accord with the spiritual tradition and is a potential source of enrichment for the church.There are striking features about those who are marginalised. Very often they are in a position where they are not involved in the central factors which determine their lives. Dependency is an inevitable development, as they are educated to believe that others will always know best, and that some “professionals” in social security, or housing, or education or local planning, or possibly anybody other than themselves, will have the next determining voice in their lives. From the beginning then, possibly at the early age of childhood, they cease to be participatory subjects in life, but rather form objects of concern for one or another agency. Such a process ongoingly undermines the value and self-worth of an individual and progressively renders them more and more inadequate to cope with life. Considered economically irrelevant, and increasingly impoverished, marginalised individuals and groups present a shocking discontinuity to mainstream society.
Does Creation have a Future?
Authors: Echlin Edward P. 
Published: July 2007

In our scientific age, fascinated with dinosaurs and origins, we readily image creation as beginnings—of people, of life, the cosmos, the Bang. And the beginnings are creation, active creation, all things becoming and developing in dependence upon God. But creation is more than beginnings, creation, all that is not God, is God’s self gift Creation, says the Catechism of the Catholic Church, is “the foundation of all God’s saving plans.” (280) Creation, it must be added, is more than a backdrop to human redemption. Creation is precious in itself.Creation also has a future. The future of God’s creation, the eighth day, what the bible calls the new creation, especially the transformed future of the biosphere, our habitat on this frail planet which is our home, is within “God’s saving plans”. Neglect, indeed avoidance of the reality that our planet in some way shares our future—and that we have responsibility, during our brief mission here, for this planet which shares our destiny, accounts for some of the temporizing within the churches about reintegrating with the earth and renewing God’s earth where it is damaged.If Jesus risen were somehow in discontinuity with the Jesus who lived in Palestine, if the earth did not share our future, despite scientific testimony including the learning of the Hebrew Wisdom literature to our inherent relationships within it, if, in brief, salvation were independent of our relationships with other creatures, then Christianity would be a less ecologically inclusive religion. It must be said that a selective reading of the New Testament, of popular hymns, even of some social teaching, can appear to legitimate flights into psychologized spirituality, the delimitation of Christian mission to “spiritual and social needs of people”, and complacent collusion with economocentric industrialism.
Creation and Creator: Knowing and Glorifying God
Authors: Hill Edmund 
Published: July 2007

A consideration of our human participation in the divine creativity can be regarded as a legitimate, indeed desirable appendix or coda to the theology of creation. It is essentially a consideration of the relationship between creature and creator, of the active relationship indeed of creatures, that is of ourselves, with God. A look at God’s active relationship with us, at what the creator does with and for his creatures, means reflection on God’s providence and on his government of his creation. A look at our active relationship with God, at what we as creatures do for the creator, means reflection on our ability and our need to know and glorify God.But the question immediately arises whether it makes sense to talk about creatures doing anything for the creator; and it is answered by the very firm assertion that God has absolutely no need of his creation at all. We, all creatures, owe him everything, he has no need of us. Our need of him is total, he owes us nothing. Difficult to establish any relationship between such radical unequals, but leaving that point aside, we are faced with the next question that arises, which is why, in that case, did God create the universe. The only possible answer is because he wished to. And why did he wish to? The answer you give to overpersistent children—because he did.
Walking in the Pilgrim City
Authors: Bauerschmidt Frederick Christian 
Published: July 2007

“Therefore Jesus also suffered outside the city gate in order to sanctify the people by his own blood. Let us then go to him outside the camp and bear the abuse he endured. For here we have no lasting city, but we are looking for the city that is to come”(Heb. 13:1 2-14).IBlessed and cursed by a peculiar “hopelessness,” Christians claim fellowship with Christ who suffered outside the city gate, and are called to follow him into that wilderness beyond the camp, that region other than the earthly civitas, from which we might discern another city. This other city shows the structures of this world, which seem so solid and so real, to be afflicted with an ephemeral quality, a kind of unreality, so as to make them a source of anxiety rather than a resting place for our restless hearts (Lk. 12: 12-34.)- And so we exist in a state of perpetual pilgrimage to our true patria, following “Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God” (Heb. 12:2).
Theology and Sociology: the Irish Flâneur's Account
Authors: Martin David 
Published: July 2007

“O senseless and foolish people, who have eyes and see not, who have ears and hear not.” That would seem to be Kieran Flanagan’s verdict on liberal theologians in The Enchantment of Sociology, though the accused are not named or their unhappy deeds documented by textual reference. As a class they are those who appear to accept the sociological mode of social scrutiny while resolutely avoiding its clear implications, whereas their traditionally-minded opponents appear to reject sociology and all its works while putting forward essentially sociological arguments. Flanagan suggests that one reason liberal theologians are so disoriented in their understanding is because their location in the secular university has made them strangers to the body of the Church. He, on the other hand, is enabled both to see and to hear because he is a stranger and an alien in the body of English society. He walks in our supermarkets and our semi- secularised cathedrals assisted by distance to envisage the true nature of the secular challenge and a possible response.One response is to find unmarked (and unremarked) theological clues scattered in the detritus of postmodemity. At the end of the line in the trajectory of modernity we may discern again our beginnings. As sociology seeks sources of enchantment to reverse the chill closure of Weber’s “iron cage” it may also stumble upon an unexpected preparation of the gospel.The argument is that sociology can locate metaphors of the sacred and of theology lodged in the calculative, administered and commodified culture of postmodemity. The existence of such metaphors in itself points to a deficiency and to a vacancy at its heart where “superstition dances on the grave of positivism”.
Surprised by Grace: the sociologist's dilemma
Authors: Howes Graham 
Published: July 2007

I approached The Enchantment of Sociology primarily as a sociologist of religion who teaches within both the Theology and Social and Political Science Faculties of an ancient University and whose research interests include the impact of the social sciences upon religious functionaries. I am also an intermittently active Anglican. From all three perspectives I was wholly engaged—if not always wholly enchanted—by Flanagan’s quirky originality, capacity for creative polemic, and heady mixture of sociological radicalism and theological conservatism. The prose is often dense, convoluted and subtly nuanced but a close and careful reading brings with it those two rarities, sustained intellectual excitement and an urge to continue the argument beyond the academy and into pulpit and presbytery.At one point Flanagan cites Cooley’s observation that “a true sociology is systematic autobiography” (p.50) and in this case three components of personal biography form an integral subtext to his main arguments. One is his Irish identity. This, when not being acted out in Joycean word-play (eg. “exasperating an individualism” (p.9]),Wildean aphorism (“Satanism... a folk panic invented by Evangelical fundamentalists” [p.45]) or Shavian table talk (“theologians can appeal to the Holy Ghost when all the sociologist can evoke is the ghost of Weber” [p.86]), is nucleated around both a sense of being at one remove from English society and culture, and pride in what he calls “the capricious genius of the Gaelic intellect lying beyond the pale” (p.153).
Giving the Devil his Due?: St. Anselm on Justice and Satisfaction
Authors: Miller Kevin E. 
Published: July 2007

According to the Preface to St. Anselm of Canterbury's Cur Deus Homo, the work, among other things, “prov[es] by necessary reasons ... that it is impossible for any man to be saved without [Christ].” In the course of this project, Anselm must clarify what is meant by salvation— without knowing this, we could not know whether salvation could be brought only by Christ. Anselm develops an understanding of salvation involving a deliverance from the punishment that is our due because of our sin, and a correlative restoration to blessedness, which deliverance and restoration are made possible by Christ’s “satisfaction” for sin. Hence, the question of the meaning of salvation and the need for Christ as savior includes the question of the meaning of satisfaction. Now, the Cur Deus Homo has been received as one of the most significant contributions to the Church's understanding of soteriology; most recently one finds echoes of Anselm's understanding of satisfaction in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (no. 615). For this reason it is worth inquiring into what Anselm means by “satisfaction.”It is my intention in this essay to examine especially those sections of Book I of the Cur Deus Homo which treat the relationship between salvation and our deliverance from the devil, and to propose that one finds in Anselm's understanding of satisfaction a requirement for justice even for the devil (something that Anselm's rejection of the idea that our salvation requires payment of a ransom to the devil has tended to obscure).
Newman on the Doctrine of Original Sin
Authors: Testa Michael A. 
Published: July 2007

In this article I explore Newman’s theological understanding of the human person and the doctrine of original sin. The concept of sin plays a dominant role in Newman’s theological anthropology. He argues that human beings are slaves to sin and are in need of God’s mercy. He describes sin as a pestilence and disease which robs us of our spiritual life. Original sin is an indifference to the very work of God’s grace within us and as such strikes at the very core of our being.Newman’s understanding of the doctrine of original sin admits monogenesis which passes on the fallen state of human beings to descendants of Adam. For Newman the sin of Adam and Eve was different in degree from any subsequent personal sin that we can commit as individuals. Original sin encompasses both the original sin of Adam and Eve and the state of corruption into which all subsequent generations are born. The personal sins of future generations are conditioned by the milieu of original sin and they resemble original sin insofar as they contribute to the overall sinfulness of humanity.