bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Group Prayer and Contemplation
Authors: Tugwell Simon 
Published: July 2007

For most Catholics, a prayer meeting is a new and perhaps disturbing experience. However, in recent years an increasing number of Catholics have been meeting to pray together, in silence or in spoken prayer as they feel led by the Spirit; so it may be useful, for both enthusiasts and critics, to consider in general terms the advantages, objectives and principles of prayer meetings, and to face frankly the dangers and possible errors to which they are liable.The basic principle of group prayer is the teaching of our Lord, that ‘where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in their midst’ (Matt. 18, 20), and that ‘if two of you agree about anything on earth in prayer, it shall be granted’ (18, 19). For we are together the Body of Christ, and as such ‘members of one another’ (Eph. 4, 25). As Christians, we belong together; it is therefore natural and proper that we should exercise our most specifically Christian privilege of prayer together. This is what much of the recent liturgical renewal has been about.Group prayer obviously falls into two kinds: formal, liturgical prayer, and spontaneous, free prayer. Originally, of course, these two were not separate. Even the Eucharistic Prayer, the Canon of the Mass, was originally extemporized by the celebrant. And it is clear that in the worship of the early Church the whole assembly would take part in various ways (except perhaps the women—and there St Paul may have been dealing with the particular situation!). Whether we shall ever return to this, or even whether it would be a good thing to return to this, I do not know. In any case, our situation is different, and we do have to distinguish between set prayer and spontaneous prayer.
Plus ça change—Plus c'est la même chose
Authors: Bailey Bede 
Published: July 2007

‘Of course you English Dominicans have had a terrible time recently, losing relatively more priests than anyone else.’ My journalist friend’s job is to know facts and comment on them, and he was saddened at our dilapidated state. So I thought I’d look at the figures. The result is surprising, remembering that in 1860 there were 25 priests, and in 1960, 148.Here are the figures. They include all who left for any reason, but exclude those in South Africa who never worked as priests in Britain. The ten-year periods are those during which religious profession was made; they are therefore the ‘years of formation’. The figures are of priests only and omit all those who left before ordination.
The Experience of Group Prayer
Authors: Tugwell Simon 
Published: July 2007

The only way to find out about the experience of a prayer meeting is obviously to take part; all I can do in these pages is to drop a few hints, in the hope that they will stir a chord or two, so that something will get across.People sometimes talk as if prayer were a purely human act; but this is not Christian doctrine. Prayer is the act of the believer, the one who says T live now not I but Christ’ (Gal. 2, 20). It is only in Spirit and Truth that we can offer prayer to the Father (John 4, 23). It is because Christ prays, that we, in the same Spirit, can pray. Prayer is a divine activity in which we, by grace, participate. (On all this, see Herbert McCabe’s very lucid account in Doctrine and Life, August 1970.) It is always ‘the Spirit and the Bride’ who prays (cf. Apoc. 22, 17); we can only pray because God himself gives us prayer (as the Lord taught St Catherine expressly). All prayer, in so far as it is true prayer, is ‘infused’; the contemplative is the one who knows it by experience. In our prayer groups, therefore, we aim to pray with the prayer that God himself gives us.Now as we become more and more sanctified, our prayer too becomes more and more attuned to the prayer of Christ. That is what we aspire to. But we must avoid two antithetical traps. On the one hand, we must not assume forthwith that anything we utter at a prayer meeting is automatically underwritten by God; we may on occasion get a ‘witness’ of some kind to assure us that our prayer is truly willed by him, but that is a different matter. The other trap is to sit and wait until God actually forces something out of us. Dom John Chapman used to reiterate: ‘Pray as you can, not as you can’t.’ We must start where we are. There may be a great gulf set between our ‘own’ prayer and that of the Spirit, but both are important.
Signs in the Wind
Authors: Haughton Rosemary 
Published: July 2007

If the Spirit speaks to the listening people of God in the events of history, as well as in Scripture, then the events of this time seem to indicate that a renewed search for the springs of Christian spirituality is probably the most urgent task placed by the Spirit before the churches.The visible church is the listening people. It is not all the people who listen, but it is an identifiable collection of those people who are supposed to be listening to God and acting on what they hear, and who indeed have pledged themselves to do so—though in some cases rather casually, or with extensive reservations. The people must listen to the breathing of the Spirit, even if the message be only whispered, but at this time it rises even to thunder.At any time in the history of Christianity it would be taken for granted that the personal pursuit of holiness, or the imitation of Christ, or the experience of the Spirit, are indispensable to the Christian life. The emphasis is different under these three headings, but all definitions of how Christians deepen and increase their be done in the assembly of God’s people, by virtue of incorporation in Christ, with all the others who share that membership, but it also takes for granted that this is a personal matter, in which each one must strive and search, often apparently alone. The task and its rewards may belong to the whole, but they also belong to each member. The need for holiness is not new, but it is being newly demanded, with renewed urgency.In the past two centuries an emphasis on individual holiness at the expense of a sense of social and political responsibility was an easy refuge for good people who wanted to be Christians without rocking the boat too much.
Catholics and Pentecostals
Authors: Tugwell Simon 
Published: July 2007

Since 1967 considerable impetus has been given to group prayer in the Catholic Church, by the Catholic Pentecostal Movement in North America. This movement began as largely a lay movement of spiritual renewal in Catholic university circles in the U.S.A. It has connexions with the Spanish-born cursillo movement, whose aim is to bring Catholics to a personal knowledge of the Lord Jesus (the evangelical terminology is deliberate), but it actually derives from the encounter with interdenominational Pentecostalism. It received massive and sensational publicity, and grew with amazing rapidity, spreading throughout the States, and penetrating into Canada. In 1969 it was cautiously approved by the U.S. hierarchy, and has also been enthusiastically recommended by one or two individual bishops.Although it is a very variegated phenomenon, running right through it is the insistence that all Christians can and should claim ‘the promise of the Father’ in what they, with other Pentecostals, call ‘baptism in the Spirit’. That is to say, people who are already believers in Christ call down upon themselves or upon each other an outpouring of the Holy Spirit, ‘just as it was in the beginning’ at Pentecost. The usual procedure is for someone who has already had the experience to lay hands on one who is seeking it, with prayer; it is believed that this will result in a sudden or gradual unfolding of the person’s life in Christ into the charismatic manifestations, usually beginning with tongues, followed in due course by prophecy, interpretation, healing, or some such supernatural endowment or ministry.
The Revolutionary Church in Latin America
Authors: Roper Christopher 
Published: July 2007

When thirty tons of stolen dynamite were recovered by the police in the Argentine province of Santa Fe in February, the local police chief told journalists that the entire responsibility for subversion in Argentina could be ascribed to ‘those cursed Third World priests’. He was exaggerating, but it is true that members of the Movement of Priests for the Third World along with other young Catholics in other parts of Latin America—both priests and laity—have become increasingly deeply involved in revolutionary activities. This does not just mean that many Catholics now accept the need for radical change in the structure of Latin American society and sympathize with the aspirations of the extreme left. An Uruguayan professor of sociology, writing last year of contemporary trends in Latin American Catholicism, has suggested that the old antithesis of Christianity or Marxism is disappearing, and that a new revolutionary synthesis is emerging: ‘Latin Americans have no time any longer for the parlour discussions that are so popular in Europe. They want a dialogue in action and for action, focussing on the political and strategic future of the Latin American revolution. They do not consider either Christianity or Marxism as immutable, selfsufficient or mutually exclusive options.’This assumption that there is indeed a Latin American revolution which will lead sooner or later to the building of socialism in Latin America is central to a great deal of Christian thought in the region today. This is perhaps the first great political upheaval of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in which Christians as Christians are in the vanguard.
Bodies and Other Minds: the Mind‐Body Problem in the Last Twenty Years
Authors: Williams C. J. F. 
Published: July 2007

To the generation of philosophers brought up in England in the years immediately succeeding the Second World War it seemed as though the Mind-Body problem had been (in the current jargon) not solved but dissolved. Where the previous generation had toiled at the old Cartesian task of constructing a material world out of, or on the basis of, mental entities, our generation discovered that the mental entities themselves had been eliminated. The notion of sense-data used by Moore and Russell had been shown in Ryle’s Concept of Mind to be incoherent. ‘J. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia’ appeared on the Oxford lecture list in Trinity Term 1948. Austin’s principal target was just that dichotomy between sense-data and material objects from which the whole problem seemed to be derived. He directed attention to the variety of locutions in which ‘look’ can figure: ‘He looks a good sport.’ ‘He looks as if he were going to faint.’ ‘They look like ants.’ ‘They look like Europeans.’ It looked as if statements about how things look could not be the record of a subclass of mental events called visual experiences.Mental events as such were gradually being eliminated. Wittgenstein’s views, already rumoured before the publication of Philosophical Investigations in 1953, seemed to require that, where Ryle had taken twinges, aches, itches and flutters had been for Ryle the only honest citizens of the interior state. Much of the odium that he heaped on claimants to mental existence like acts of will, judgment, understanding or perceiving was aroused by the comparison of the latter to their notable disadvantage with the former, whose claim to be genuine occurrences was unchallenged. But here was Wittgenstein apparently challenging it.
Christ and His Angels
Authors: van der Hart Rob 
Published: July 2007

There is much more in this paper about angels than about Christ; but I am sure that you will forgive me this disproportion. Christ, so it seems, is already well known to us: we can take him for granted. But angels are new—there is news in talking about angels: they excite our curiosity.At our disposal are numerous scholary treatises in which Christ’s personality is analysed and this nature is dissected in its several components. About Christ we may think we know almost everything there is to know. But angels. . . ?Of course, we know they have not really got wings like birds, and that in fact they must be quite different from the naked babies that tumble from the skies in our baroque paintings. But what else is there to say?To be fair only in the past century and a half have angels suffered a leakage of meaning ending in the present debilitated condition. Before that they were the objects of much serious speculation. Were they material or pure spirits; what sort of knowledge did they have; could they have intercourse; how many of them were there; etc. ? Indeed, angels were dissected too: Fr Cipolla (Brother Onion) treasured in a box a ‘penna dell’hgnolo Gabriello’ which was left behind on the occasion of the archangel’s visit to the Blessed Virgin (II Decamerone VI 10, 370)—supposing, of course, that Boccaccio is a reliable witness.But alas, for us this wealth of information is buried in the past, unavailable because we do not even know how to make it appear relevant. The break with the past is pretty well complete: angels have been lost definitively in a welter of tinsel and feathers.
He will Baptize you with the Holy spirit
Authors: Tugwell Simon 
Published: July 2007

The most distinctive and controverted doctrine of the Pentecostals is that of the ‘baptism in the Spirit’. This was the hallmark of the original Pentecostal movement, as it still is of all Pentecostal-inspired renewal in all the Churches, including, most recently, the Roman Catholic.Essentially, the doctrine is this: after conversion (and ‘water baptism’), there remains a second blessing, associated usually with the laying on of hands, in which one receives the fullness of the Holy Spirit’s indwelling, experiencing for oneself what the first disciples experienced at Pentecost. Some manifestation, usually tongues, is expected; indeed, strict Pentecostals demand it—‘no tongues, no baptism in the Spirit’. Thereafter a person should increasingly realize in his life that he has been ‘endued with power from on high’, he will know that he is ‘led by the Spirit’, he will expect to receive and, when necessary, to perform miracles, especially healing. The whole doctrine rests on an appeal to texts like Mark 16, 17-18, and the obvious passages in Acts (all the texts that respectable commentators like Chrysostom have had to explain away).I have already argued that we must take the Pentecostal challenge seriously, though expressing some doubts about the propriety of ‘Catholic Pentecostalism’. Here I shall simply examine what they call ‘baptism in the Spirit’. Without wishing at all to devalue the experience, I think it is essential, at least for us in the traditional Churches, to consider how far their doctrine of it is theologically and exegetically sound, and what precisely is the spiritual and psychological significance of the experience. Something must also be said about the gift of tongues.The gospel begins with the appearance of John the Baptist, preaching a baptism of repentance, in view of the impending arrival of the Messiah who is to execute an eschatological baptism of judgment, in Spirit and fire.
The Function of Criticism and Theology
Authors: Beisly Phil 
Published: July 2007

To move away from a dogmatic allegiance, from a commitment to a worked-out system of beliefs, is not unusual today; nor is it unusual, having done this, to retain a profound conviction about the power and richness of the tradition underlying the theology. Many people can no longer assent to Christian theology—not only to the theology they have known, but to any theological system—and yet they may still want to read the Bible and other Christian literature, and, perhaps, to participate in the liturgy. From an older and more established viewpoint their position is curious, even dishonest, for it seems an evasion of the responsibilities of belief and commitment that the Bible and the liturgy are all about. To say this often enough, however, is to provoke an answering attitude which remarks, in tones of pragmatic commonsense, that there is nothing wrong in this at all, for surely the Bible is to be read and the liturgy attended; if the Bible is being read and the liturgy is being attended, then all is well; for the fact of the continuing response not being tied automatically to a dogmatic allegiance does not in itself invalidate the response—whether it does or not is a question which directs attention to the kinds of response which the Bible and the liturgy themselves seem to demand. And to put it like that is to pose not a theological, but a critical, question.To recognize the question thus is to move much nearer to the non-dogmatic person who isn’t starting out with a set of preconceptions called beliefs. That this person continues to attend to the Bible and the liturgy should suggest areas of meaning which the predominant orthodoxies have not taken into account, but of course the very perplexity of established dogmatism at the sight of this new type of reader or participant comes from an inability to entertain this possibility: what the Bible and the liturgy mean is what theology says they mean—surely there is nothing else! To this point of view the newer type of response is necessarily meaningless.
The Manifestation of Baptism
Authors: Tugwell Simon 
Published: July 2007

In a previous article, we were considering the Pentecostal doctrine of the ‘baptism in the Spirit’, and concluded that it all really belongs to the full New Testament understanding of baptism, of what it is to be a Christian at all. Baptism should be—indeed (so far as the evidence shows) clearly was—a real spiritual turning point, leading a person into a whole new world of experience, with its own canons of understanding and behaviour, its own distinctive principles of action, moral and charismatic. We saw that there was an indissoluble complex of faith in the exalted Christ, metanoia (conversion, new heart), renunciation of Satan the Prince of this world (dropping out, apotaxis), the experience of the Spirit of God ‘who explores even the hidden things of God’, who ‘convicts the world’, who ‘leads us into all truth’.We then had to admit the fact that this is not, generally, our experience of being baptized, and saw that the Pentecostal theory is one way of coping with this situation, though one that we cannot follow, as such. I shall now mention various other ways, and, with the theological basis thus broadened, shall attempt some theological and practical synthesis, showing how I think we can learn much from the Pentecostals, without betraying anything that the Church has always held dear.Already in the New Testament we find some important guidelines. For instance, there is a very significant shift between Matthew and Mark. For Matthew, faith is a key concept, closely tied to his concluding scene, the exaltation of Jesus. The question Jesus asks is, ‘Do you believe that I can do this?’ (9, 28). The answer must be, simply and totally, ‘Yes, Lord’, an answer that entails a radical abandonment of care, a total upheaval of the normal procedures of social life.
South Africa: Dialogue or Disaster
Authors: Hill Edmund 
Published: July 2007

Perhaps it would be as well to start with the reminder that it is impossible to analyse South African politics in terms of political Right and Left, and quite misleading to try. Neither the United Party nor even the Progressive Party are really to the left of the Nationalist Party in any meaningful way. A case of sorts could be made out for saying that in some respects it is well to the left of the opposition parties, and certainly its policies are far less shy of radical solutions. But as I say, these terms do not really apply in South Africa, where we are living in a different set of dimensions from Europe or America.The two basic drives that power the Nationalist Party are intense Afrikaner nationalism and White colour prejudice. The two are distinct in principle, and there are Afrikaner nationalists of sensibility who take pride in the nationalism and genuinely abjure and deplore the prejudice. But they are few, and in the soul of the average nationalist the two drives are almost identical, or at least serve to boost and intensify each other. One might say, rather academically, that the basic drives of the United Party used to be a kind of Smutsian imperialism and White colour prejudice, but that the imperialism has vanished with the course of events, and so only the colour prejudice is left. It is true, up to a point; U.P. candidates, some of them, have not hesitated to appeal to colour prejudice in their electorates, or in their attacks on some government actions. The Progressive Party bases itself more on reason and the more humane sentiments of the heart, which is why it lacks any potent appeal among the dominant racial group in this country.
Contemplation and Mission
Authors: Tugwell Simon 
Published: July 2007

The Church is both called and sent by God: called to sanctity and to salvation, and sent to preach the gospel to the whole creation (Mark 16, 15), healing the sick and driving out demons (Matt. 10, 8). It is only where action and contemplation have become secularized (or, for that matter, sacralized—it comes to the same thing), that any contradiction appears; that is to say, it is only because we try to apprehend and to practise prayer or good works without seeing how they proceed from the mission of Jesus Christ, that the hoary problem of reconciling and balancing the two arises.‘You shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth.’ ‘As the Father has sent me, even so I send you . . . Receive the Holy Spirit’ (Acts 1,8; John 20, 2If). In their different ways, each of the evangelists (even the unexpanded Mark) concludes with some kind of experience of the risen, exalted Lord, coupled with a command to go and tell people, to bear witness, whether by word or by example. Luke’s Pentecost story is but the most dramatic version of this.Now, as I have suggested, for those who did not live with Jesus on earth, baptism is the appointed way into the whole event of Calvary to Pentecost. In baptism we die with Christ and rise with him, receiving the Spirit that we may live no longer for sin and self, but for God. Of itself, this obviously does not entail any formally apostolic mission; but it certainly includes some kind of obligation to bear witness. ‘To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. To one is given through the Spirit the word of wisdom, and to another the word of knowledge according to the same Spirit ... for just as the body is one and has many members, so it is with Christ. For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body’ (I Cor. 12, 7ff). Tertullian is quite in line with this when he exhorts the newly-baptized, as they emerge from the font, to pray for an ‘apportioning of charisms’.