bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The Future
Authors: Geach P. T. 
Published: July 2007

Years ago, there was a popular song whose refrain went thus:Che sàrà, sàrà,Whatever will be, will be,The future’s not ours to see,Che sàrà, sàrà.The first line of this refrain is the motto of the noble house to which Bertrand Russell belonged; it serves to express a view of time that has been set forth by Russell in many of his writings, but the view is one widely held long before Russell lived and now held by many people independently of him. We should not be misled by the tautological appearance of the sentence ‘Whatever will be, will be’; in the song it is a way of putting forward a positive thesis, which may fairly be called a philosophical thesis, even though people who hold it are often little practised in systematic philosophical reflection. We may call it the thesis that there is a definite or determinate future. A book may lie open at one page, but it has a definite text from first page to last, irrespective of this; many people think in this way of the book of human history.We should distinguish between the definiteness or determinacy of the future and its being causally determined by the present and past. If there are causes that now exist or have already existed from which the future can issue only in one way, then the future is clearly determinate ; but the converse does not hold. The metaphor of the book may help us again; even if the text of later pages is not determined by the text of earlier pages, there may nevertheless be a completely fixed text on those pages which we have not yet turned over.
The Cardboard Theatre: T. S. Eliot's Idea of History
Authors: Smith Stan 
Published: July 2007

The discussion of Eliot’s cultural lineage has frequently assumed a simple opposition between the rival claims of English domicile and New England descent. Eliot’s writings have themselves encouraged this tendency. Overtly, they require us to observe the landscapes of London and rural England, or the family snapshots of haut-bourgeois Boston. The St Louis of Eliot’s childhood, which furnished the name of his memorable persona (Prufrock-Littau, Hugh Kenner informs us, was the name of a local furniture store), and the image of the river as ‘a strong brown god’ which opens Dry Salvages, rarely occurs as the scenario of the poems. Indeed, the stage-direction prefixed to this poem demonstrates Eliot’s usual attitude towards his mid-western patrimony, distracting our attention from the unsavoury effects of the Missouri mise-en-scene (‘the river with its cargo of dead negroes, cows and chicken coops’) to the properties of a more condign birthright.Yet Eliot’s mid-western origins are not merely a matter of ‘background’; they are a central part of the meaning of his poetry. The complexity of his personality has its sources and resources in the complex negotiation of a complex and contradictory inheritance. But the personal equilibrium salvaged from this inheritance—the spiritual cement for this ‘familiar compound ghost’—owes much to that temporary settlement effected by Eliot’s family in the boom conditions of nineteenth-century St Louis. If the Mid-West is absent as the overt content of Eliot’s poetry, it presides throughout as a determining context of experience, embodied in the very forms of that experience, in the stances and attitudes assumed by the poet.
God, America and the Remnant
Authors: Lllo John 
Published: July 2007

The American assault on the human spirit and upon the salvational work of God began at home as a degeneration of the American character. The European capitalist ethic had always threatened a perversion of the spirit, because it exalted individualism and because it measured religious justification by ownership or wealth or power. And so the American character from its infancy bore the potential of moral disaster: the individualism could become egotism, the productive energy could become technicism and a commodity ethic, the optimism and pride of achievement could become racism and imperialism. Thoreau saw the danger in the 1840s, De Tocqueville even earlier. The American contribution to the decay was a separation of the capitalist ethic from a religious base, a vulgarization of cultural criteria, and an immensely extended dominion over nature. The American people, having perfected a new morality of power, egotism, technicism, and the commodity ethic, became with each generation less culpable and less capable of moral choice, like inebriates or addicts who cannot be judged as the men they once were.American individualism reduces the judicability and therefore the salvability of men because it isolates them not only from their human neighbours but from the divine community of law, love, and responsibility. The moral shrinking can be seen in some of the manifestations of individualism. One is sentimentalism within a dominant savagery. Human ferocity, unlike the natural kind in animals, is often tinged by an apparent and trivial tenderness.
Black Theology
Authors: Hill Edmund 
Published: July 2007

It was my original intention to write this article about black theology in South Africa, where I first encountered the movement. But two things have led me to form the opinion that black theology is of crucial importance to Christianity all over the world, and not just in South Africa, or in the United States, where the idea was born. One has been my reading of two books by the black American theologian James H. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power, and A Black Theology of Liberation ; and the other has been my introduction, very recent and superficial though it is, to the race question, and kindred political questions, in Great Britain. So I will, after all, devote this article to the subject of black theology as such, and chiefly in the form of a review of Cone’s two books. But I will lead into this subject by way of black theology in South Africa.In writing this article I incur the risk of bringing down on my head the hostility and scorn of black theologians, or quite simply of blacks. As a white man I have no business to poke my long Caucasian nose in. Cone is quite scathing in BTL (p. 194) on two white liberals who presumed to write on the black power movement; and on the same page he writes: ‘To whites who want to know what they can do (a favourite question of oppressors) black theology says, “Keep your damned mouth closed, and let us black people get our thing together.” ‘ Still, just as in the dominant white ethos of today, or at least of a generation ago, it was possible for a black man to be a good nigger, and sometimes even earn the supreme accolade of being told that he was a true white man, in spite of his skin (You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din), so in the black ethos of the dominated which we are going to be looking at, it is possible for a white man to be a good honky.
Reflections on a Report
Authors: Edwards Adrian 
Published: July 2007

Fr Hastings has touched on many very serious problems in his report, now published as Christian Marriage in Africa, and in the previous article, with a compassion and sincerity that draw on wide reading and long reflection. Yet I feel myself out of sympathy with much that he has to say. This may be more to my discredit than to Fr Hastings’; at any rate, let me throw down a few words to suggest that at any rate such differences may be permissible.First of all, on a relatively secondary point, Fr Hastings takes a view of polygamy which, while he is not the first to suggest it, is still very much a minority view among both Catholics and Anglicans. The direction of the New Testament is monogamous, not so much in an explicit command, as in defining marriage by the image of the union of Christ and His Church in the New Covenant. For the baptized Christian, therefore, polygamy is not an option. For the non-Christian, however, polygamous unions, when they are in accord with the traditions of his society, cannot simply be written off as ‘immoral’; to force the disruption of such unions as the price of baptism is much more immoral. Polygamists might therefore be admitted to baptism; and while Christians should regard monogamous marriage as the norm, there are cases where a Christian who has taken more than one wife may be admitted to the Eucharist. Fr Hastings claims that this is the only policy which will be consistent with the ‘central precepts of the Gospel’.
Women's Liberation: Has the African Woman settled for tokens?
Authors: Ankrah E. Maxine 
Published: July 2007

The Rights of Women throughout most of Africa are guaranteed, legally. Yet the full participation of women in the life of many African countries is still more a matter of policy than practice. Very few women share in the actual power of state. Former traditional securities are today less assured. Rather than more high-level appointments, the masses of women need more to be awakened to their potential as the changers of women’s position. For this, ‘Women’s Lib’ may have something to offer.* * *‘Women’s Liberation’ is the current development in the United States, although the movement has since spread to Europe. However, a militant reformist movement of African women predates this upsurge of feminist rebellion by nearly two decades. It was born out of national struggles for independence. The women of Algeria fought and worked for their nation’s independence and after the struggle a dynamic women’s organization was founded. Sékou Touré described as ‘decisive’ the contribution of Guinea’s women to the liberation of the country and the growth of the Democratic Party of Guinea. The Mau Mau of Kenya’s forests learned that their women had equally understood the high stakes at risk in the war against European settlers.These activist roles in bringing about independence in many countries facilitated the development of an undoubtedly latent ‘freedom consciousness’. However, this stirring was only for a duration centred on the struggle against the colonial authorities. In some instances, women’s national movements were given impetus because of the gap between what women expected and had been promised, and what they actually received.
Not by words alone
Authors: van der Hart Rob 
Published: July 2007

Religious experience is thickly overlayed by theological speculation and the reality of God is further and further submerged beneath theories that fruitlessly attempt to forge a connection between the Invisible and ‘ordinary’ things, between ‘the living ascended glorified personal Christ and lifeless impersonal objects, bread and wine’, as it was put recently in this magazine. Making sense of this sort of discussion is often difficult, because what is actually disputed is the very experience that the doctrine was formulated to express, the experience of God’s presence in things, which, indeed, sinks beneath the weight of words spoken about it. We are increasingly left with the empty shell of a splendid worship from which God himself has retreated.Of course, many aspects of our faith are well served by serious questioning, but that does not always entitle us to unrestrained reflection. Sometimes speculation obscures its object instead of clarifying it, and the mind creates for itself a vacuum where once there was the immediacy of response: for example, when we begin to believe that a demonstration is required to confirm a reality that can, in truth, only be encountered. Is it not a most peculiar ability of the mind, a strange inclination towards self-destruction, to wonder about the factuality of the world, to wonder about the reality of the forest, or the person we love, or the God we inescapably find in our path ? Perhaps the mightier the experience the less we feel able to cope and the more we feel called to doubt. By putting such things in question they are indeed rendered questionable, and we are confronted with the frustrating task of proving that there is a reality that corresponds to the ideas in our mind.
Gospel or Religious Language?: Engels on the Peasant War
Authors: Maguire John 
Published: July 2007

Dialogue between Marxists and Christians is no longer surprising. It seems to me, however, that it frequently takes place on far too wide a plane. Marxism and Christianity are juxtaposed as two competitive all-embracing ‘philosophies of man’, and the discussion is conducted in ultimate, cosmological and metaphysical terms. I realize that this is all very well, and probably very necessary too; it does not, however, seem to me to exhaust all the interesting and important questions that Christians and Marxists, or Marxist Christians, should explore.I write now for Christians who, in their understanding of society, social change and political controversy, recognize that Marx has made a fundamental and essential contribution to our diagnosis of social ills and our prescription for their cure. Along with these positions, they (probably necessarily) accept Marx’s criticism of the repression, physical and psychological, which have at times been perpetrated and justified in the name of Christianity.I will assume, then, that if my reader has any quarrels with Marxism, it is not on the broad issues that I have just mentioned. We will then be able to look at another kind of question, which I think is equally interesting and important.
Virginia Woolf and the Corinthians
Authors: Swanston Hamish F. G. 
Published: July 2007

Leonard Woolf, in Downhill all the Way, remarked of his wife that ‘the idea of a party always excited her’, and though it is true that on 11th November, 1918, ‘Virginia and I celebrated the end of a civilization’ by ‘eating, almost sacramentally, some small bars of chocolate cream’, for Virginia Woolf, as for the rest of us, eating was generally a celebration of the continuing value of life, where, as at the restaurant meal of The Waves, ‘here and now we are together’ drawn into ‘this communion’, and making ‘something that will join the innumerable congregations of past time’.Talk of that kind about eating is an open invitation for those Christians who would engage in ‘Theology and Literature’, but a man should guard against any quick transition from Virginia Woolf’s talk of sacramental chocolate creams and congregations of past time to his peculiar Christian understanding of meal and communion. It should give us pause, for example, that the chocolate creams were eaten at the ‘end of a civilization’, and that in The Waves the meal is created around a hero who, described in Christ-like terms certainly, is finally ineffective.
Catholics and Politics at the time of Emancipation
Authors: Holmes J. Derek 
Published: July 2007

It has almost become platitudinous to state that the controversial literature at the time of Catholic Emancipation illustrates the fact that the expression of radical political opinion had been muted as a result of the events of the French Revolution. On the whole, it is argued, the controversy tended to be theological or apologetic rather than political and the usual arguments in favour of Catholic emancipation were those of expediency rather than principle. The Roman Catholics themselves, it is argued, would not wish to associate their claims with more radical political demands, while their social and political isolation during the previous century would be reflected in their reluctance to seize the opportunities which became possible after emancipation. As the future Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman himself wrote, the ‘shackles were removed, but not the numbness and cramp which they had produced’.However, the point of this article is simply to show that the most cursory reading of Catholics periodicals at the time would demonstrate that none of these historical claims are necessarily supported by the evidence. In fact, it would be more surprising if the political awareness of the Cisalpines at the end of the eighteenth century had so quickly disappeared; after all, the political tradition of English radicalism did not completely disappear after 1789. Furthermore, Bernard Ward made the interesting point that there were eight English Catholic M.P.s in the Parliament of 1831—a number which was only exceeded in the twentieth century. Of course, not all English Catholics wished to be associated with political radicals and most of them were not prepared to ‘seize their political opportunities’ after the grant of emancipation, but there were significant exceptions.
Priorities in Religious Life
Authors: Kerr Fergus 
Published: July 2007

Nobody who cares about the future of religious life should fail to study the recent essay on the subject by Jerome Murphy O’Connor, an Irish Dominican who teaches at the Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem— an entire issue of Supplement to Doctrine and Life is given over to it (No. 45, May-June, 1973). What he has to say is so illuminating that it is worth repeating the main idea here, adding some comments and observations to back up his argument.1—The raison d’etre of religious lifeThe question of priorities is crucial. What service do religious have to offer the Church and society? As they proceed to retrenchment and reform, the dilemma that confronts religious today is as follows: are they to decide what work they should be doing (teaching, nursing, preaching, whatever) and then allow the style of their life to be determined by that, or are they to make the form and quality of their community life the priority? Fr Murphy O’Connor is categorical : ‘What is important is that religious recognize that the primary service they render to the Church and to the world is the witness of their life together as a community’. Though religious increasingly do regard their service to the Church and to society as teachers, nurses, preachers, etc., as the primary determinant and seek to define the nature of religious life in terms then of work, this job- oriented approach in fact distorts religious life and leads to the disintegration of religious orders and communities.For how can religious define and justify their existence as religious primarily in terms of the jobs they undertake ? Does a woman have to become a nun in order to teach or to nurse ?
Tea with Mr Taha
Authors: Hickley Dennis 
Published: July 2007

Mr Taha is a model of Muslim piety and exercises a strict control over his household. A family joke has it that he once suffered severely from scruples on discovering that he had eaten some jam which had become fermented. As a member of a distinguished landowning family of Azerbaijan he has never had to work and has spent most of his life as a kind of gentleman scholar, leading an austere existence and devoted to prayer and such pursuits as collecting Old Korans. My impression is that, through leading this withdrawn life, he has allowed himself to become an isolated personality. A timid and nervous man, with a thin ascetic face, he betrays a tendency towards extreme excitability when discussing matters that involve his deepest convictions. On one such occasion I noticed that his features became distorted by his attempts to control his feelings and the veins on his forehead stood out. His family commented on this to me afterwards and said that he had not spoken at such length nor so vehemently for many years. It was evident that though they obeyed him externally he sensed that they were not with him in spirit. Consequently he no longer spoke about what was closest to him, which is to say that he hardly spoke at all. The visit of a Christian priest was like the breaking of a dam. Almost as soon as I arrived in Tabriz I was invited to his house—he is a relative of my Iranian friends—and hints were dropped that religion would be discussed.We arrived at his house about the middle of the morning and after leaving our shoes at the bottom of the stairs were shown up to a long saloon which occupied a substantial part of the first floor, an arrangement which I understand is typical of the better class houses of Tabriz. The saloon has four large windows looking out over the garden which, during the hot hours of the day, are shielded by bamboo mats suspended from the exterior of the frame, so that however hot and glaring it may be outside, the room is shadowed and cool.
Chile: 1970–1973
Authors: Pyle Leo 
Published: July 2007

In December 1972 Luis Corvalán, the general secretary of the Chilean communist party, was asked if a coup d’etat was possible. ‘It is theoretically possible. But I don’t expect it to happen, because I’m full of confidence in the success of the policies being implemented by the Unidad Popular. And, moreover, there are two very important institutions, the Catholic Church and the armed forces, which have, through their leaders, made themselves very clear on this issue.’ Ten months later Corvalán’s expectations and the hopes of people inside and out of Chile were totally destroyed in a savage and brutal coup.Corvalán and the communist party were not the only people to seriously misread the situation. I believe the Christian Democrats also totally misjudged the strength of extreme right wing forces. Certainly Corvalán was tragically wrong: the armed forces were the final agents of the coup; the Catholic Church stood by, and a couple of days later the hierarchy were gathered in prayer with the military leaders. The role of the church and of Christianity in the Chilean process is important and I shall return to the theme towards the end of this account.Most people probably have at least fragmentary ideas of the events which led to the death of Salvador Allende and the installation of the military junta. A complete analysis of the history of the U.P. would need a book. All I can hope to do in a short article is to try to outline some of the main changes in the balance of forces in Chile between 1970 and 1973. Inevitably I shall have to omit discussion of many important factors—for reasons of space there will be little discussion of the agrarian reform, important though it was. However, I believe the outline here to be a reasonably coherent version of events.
The 'Essence' of Christianity: Notes after de Certeau
Authors: Kerr Fergus 
Published: July 2007

The French theological landscape seems to have been lying comparatively fallow for the ten years since the great days of the Vatican Council, but the periodicals are now laden with the first fruits of a new generation. The notes that follow have been made in the course of reading essays by Michel de Certeau, and attempt to transpose his style and preoccupations into terms related to our own out of an idiom that is very different from most theological writing in English (though compare the valuable studies by Bernard Sharratt, hidden in the files of a sadly defunct review: ‘Locating theology’, Slant No 22 (1968), ‘Absent centre’, Slant Nos 24 and 25 (1969).The Empty Tomb as IdeogramOn literary and text-historical grounds, as virtually all scholars now agree, the narrative of St Mark’s Gospel ends at verse 8 of the final chapter; the remaining verses printed in our bibles, though they appear in most of the extant MSS and are worth study in their own right, are clearly by some other writer and must therefore be set aside when we try to understand the message of St Mark. From the point at which the three women enter the sepulchre, then, the concluding verses read as follows