bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Indian Approaches to the Theology of Liberation
Authors: Abeyasingha N. 
Published: July 2007

That there are social, political and economic problems in India is a fact that needs no proof. The task of the believer in this situation can be spoken of in line with the general understanding of revelation which encourages the Christian to act like Christ, who gave himself unto death; to act like the apostles who spent themselves for their brethren, because our fellow men are members of Christ and in order that the peace willed by Christ may reign in this world. Yet such a description of the task of the Christian leaves his role as regards the structures of human society relatively undefined.In India today, there is the effort to analyse the structures themselves and establish Christian positions in dealing with them, so as to re-construct a social order in which sin as a structuring element is less present.The present article seeks to present the general lines of the approach followed by Indian theologians and then try to offer, for the information and comment of Western theologians, certain approaches by which the theology of liberation as formulated for and in India could have an impact in regard to other approaches to the theology of liberation.Even the most systematic considerations in the matter of the theology of liberation are formulated as “hypotheses”. The present article seeks to present some of the present approaches to the theology of liberation in India. Admittedly, it is a difficult task to synthesize the perspectives of the analyses of Indian society already made and the “projects” suggested due to the “particularity” of the viewpoint of each author. But it is necessary to make some attempt in order to set our comments in perspective.
4: The Conflict between the English Bishops Vatican I and the Papacy
Authors: Kerr Fergus 
Published: July 2007

The decade that preceded Vatican I saw what was by far the most intensive and exciting theological debate there has ever been in modern English Catholic history. Compared with the pious torpor of the decade that preceded Vatican II, certainly, the zest and odium of theological exchange prepared the clergy and educated laity in England more thoroughly for the proclamation of the doctrine of papal infallibility than was the case anywhere else in the Catholic world. It is true, of course, that nobody elsewhere expected papal infallibility to be so high on the agenda at the Council. The English debate, through Manning’s extraordinary influence at the Council, may even be described (with little exaggeration) as the key factor in ensuring that papal infallibility was moved to the head of the agenda.The Dublin Review, from 1863 onwards, was the principal organ of the “New Ultramontanism”. In that year the editorship passed to William George Ward, the most brilliant of all the ex-Anglicans from Oxford who dedicated their energies to “Romanizing” the English Catholic community. A fellow of Balliol College by 1834, when he was twenty-two, Ward of course took minor orders but it was in mathematics and logic that his brilliance lay. As the DNB entry delicately puts it, “his union of a severely logical intellect with a craving for more concrete assurance in matters spiritual than reason can afford” led him inexorably to seek communion with Rome. Censured by Convocation on a famous occasion in the Sheldonian Theatre, because of his “Romanism”, Ward at once resigned his fellowship, married, and became a Catholic six months later. Six years later, in 1851, much to the horror of most of the Catholic clergy, Ward had been installed, against strong opposition both within and without the college, as lecturer in moral philosophy in the Westminster archdiocesan seminary.
Vatican I and the Papacy 5: Defining “defining”
Authors: Kerr Fergus 
Published: July 2007

That ultimate responsibility for true Christian doctrine is included in the universal primacy which the bishop of Rome as successor of St Peter possesses in the universal Church is a claim that should surprise no one who is prepared to entertain the notion of a universal primacy in the first place. This is, at any rate, the burden of the famous chapter 4 of “Pastor Aeternus”, the document in which Vatican I defined the infallible teaching of the bishop of Rome. What, with the approval of the Council, Pope Pius IX defined in the text that was promulgated on 18th July, 1870, as “dogma divinely revealed” runs as follows:“The bishop of Rome, when he speaks ex cathedra, i.e. when, in discharge of the office of pastor and teacher of all Christians by virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine regarding faith or morals to be held by the universal Church, is, by God’s, help promised to him in St Peter, possessed of that infallibility with which the divine Redeemer willed that his Church should be endowed in defining a doctrine regarding faith or morals; and such definitions of the bishop of Rome are therefore of themselves, and not from the consent of the Church, irreformable”.Assuming, then, that the bishop of Rome as successor of St Peter must in some sense be “the mouth of the Church and of the episcopate”, and must thus be able on some occasions at least to give voice to the faith that all alike hold, what are the problems of interpretation that this text contains? The fact that these problems have often been raised before, and that, in trying to resolve them, we have little new to say, will not deter us from covering the ground once again.
Faith And Experience VIII Beyond Reason And Language?
Authors: Tugwell Simon 
Published: July 2007

“We feel that, even if all possible scientific questions have been answered, our existential problems (Lebensprobleme) have not been touched at all”. suppose many people would agree that we feel that there must be more to life than just getting sensible answers to sensible questions, there must be more to life than “sweet reasonableness”. “He who does not dance, does not know what is going on”. In a short story by the Russian writer, Olga Larionova, a rebellious young lady who has fallen in love against instructions laughs at the “poverty-stricken wisdom” of her thoroughly rationalist commander from Logitania. In the words of e. e. cummings:since feeling is firstwho pays any attentionto the syntax of thingswill never wholly kiss you;wholly to be a foolwhile Spring is in the worldmy blood approves,and kisses are a better fatethan wisdom
Watercress Theology or What the Abbess said to the Bishop on the Road to Samarkand
Authors: Pinnington Judith 
Published: July 2007

The semi-official working party of members of the General Synod’s ecumenical council made its initial visit to Zamind only a matter of months after the area became accessible for Western visitors following the Soviet relaxation of the restrictions which had applied to foreign travel in the Taghiz Republic. The ‘Beeson Report’ of the B.C.C. working party on religious conditions in the U.S.S.R had suggested the existence of hitherto unknown autonomous Christian Churches in remote forest and mountain regions, and it was one such report which led us to Taghiz. But what we found there exceeded our wildest expectations and poses a serious challenge to all our ecumenical thinking.Let me first sketch in the physical context. We descended from the plateau of Qudukh at 9,400 feet through an area of bleak marshes and lava fields which one of the group imaginatively likened to a petrified sea in storm. In due course we reached a vast basalt plain bisected by a large fast-flowing river. This river was flanked by a large expanse of rich black alluvial soil dotted with many small trees and berried shrubs. Before us was a lake of the deepest blue edged by sands of an orange colour, and beyond, rising up mysteriously in the midst of the plain, a stark massif scored with many small tumultuous mountain streams. In the upper reaches of one of these we could see a vast triangular platform of rock standing out from the mountain-side surrounded on all sides by branches of the stream; and on that platform stood the Monastery of Zamind existing in happy symbiosis with a sizeable and prosperous-looking village. We began to ascend, and as we approached more closely we saw a wealth of luxuriant vegetation -terebinth, tamarisk and yew predominating with a sprinkling of willows at the edge of the stream. Daisies and poppies abounded.
Eucharist, Baptism, Church Oneness And Unity
Authors: Tillard J. M. R. 
Published: July 2007

The theology and practice of the Eucharist is undoubtedly at the heart of the ecumenical task. The discussions on intercommunion and eucharistic hospitality have become the focus of nearly every ecumenical dialogue and of many ecumenical gatherings. Nevertheless I do not want to discuss this issue again here. For I am convinced that there will be no serious answer to the problem as long as we do not agree on some basic ecclesiological principles.I want to deal with one of these basic principles. It is very strange indeed that so few theologians or churchmen have written on the link between Eucharist, Baptism and Church taken all together. Usually one studies the relation of Baptism with Church, of Eucharist with Church, of Baptism with Eucharist, but without putting together the result of these three analyses. I shall try to do it here. It will lead us to the very basic question of the distinction between the oneness (unicitas) and the Unity (Unitas) of the visible Church.
Rahner's Grundkurs revisited
Authors: Kerr Fergus 
Published: July 2007

Can it really be the case, as Hugo Meynell makes out in his meditation on Karl Rahner’s Grundkurs des Glaubens (New Blackfriars February 1980), that “the best living Catholic theologian” (p. 77) neither believes the doctrine of the resurrection in a recognisably traditional sense (p. 87) nor distinguishes the doctrine of purgatory from the belief in reincarnation which characterizes some Eastern religions (p. 88) — to cite but two charges in Dr Meynell’s arraignment? Can it really be the case that, in his ripe old age (for he is 76 this year), as he delivers what is plainly conceived as his theological testament, and prepares to die in the serenity of that faith which has never wavered since his proudly old-fashioned Swabian Catholic upbringing, and throughout his life-long grounding in the Spiritual Exercises (“I think that the spirituality of Ignatius himself, which one learned through the practice of prayer and religious formation, was more significant for me than all learned philosophy and theology inside and outside the order”), Karl Rahner’s Christology is not significantly different from that of a Nestorian or a Liberal Protestant (p. 87), and his idea of eternal life little different from that of (horrendous to relate) Professor D. Z. Phillips?Well, in the epidemic of reactionary intransigence that is affecting so many of the best educated and the most formidably intelligent Catholics at the present time, no doubt such suspicions of Rahner’s orthodoxy may occasion little surprise and may even pass without notice. But Dr Meynell’s published work, for fifteen years and more, bears witness to his great knowledge of, and imaginative sympathy with, modem theological movements, as well as to his unremitting fidelity to Catholic doctrine in its most classical formulations.
On the Fringe
Authors: Quinn Edward 
Published: July 2007

‘I wouldn’t belong to this bunch of macaroni merchants for another second if it wasn’t the way of laying hold on Christ’. My own feelings about the Church are not exactly the same as those of Stanley Morison when he made this statement many years ago to Tom Burns, but something like this principle has enabled me to remain in the Church as the body of Christ, without feeling obliged to belong to the Catholic club, throughout my three score years and ten. Unlike Morison, I am not a convert, but Catholicism intervened effectively in my life only after childhood. And my first contacts were not with an Italian but with what appeared to be a very Irish and clerical institution.For those inside and outside the Church in 1908 Catholicism in the West Riding town of Keighley was personified by the parish priest, Joseph Russell, a fine figure of a man who until his death in 1945 was always seen outside wearing a top hat (except on one occasion when he realised halfway up Highfield Lane that biretta and frock coat did not go together). After studies at Waterford and Maynooth, he soon made his mark in the Leeds diocese as preacher and administrator, a successful money-raiser who established four parishes from St Anne’s in Keighley and largely paid for their churches before they were cut off. He was very concerned tor the rights of the Church, reluctant to accept English curates, but on excellent terms with the Anglican rector and active on the local board of guardians.
Rahner Retrospective: I‐Rupturing Der Pianische Monolithismus
Authors: Fergus Kerr 
Published: July 2007

In the preface to the thirteenth volume of his Schriften zur Theologie, which appeared in 1978, Karl Rahner speaks of a fourteenth volume as nearing readiness for the press and to be published in late 1979 (to the best of my knowledge it has not yet appeared), and, although he does not say so in so many words, his tone suggests that the fourteenth will be the last of the series which began in 1954. Since the appearance in 1961 of Cornelius Ernst’s translation of the first volume, and the inauguration of Rahner’s Theological Investigations (with an allusion to Wittgenstein in the title), the English version has kept pace very creditably, despite inexorably rising costs and perceptible decline in concern with systematic theology, not to mention the difficulty of finding competent translators. The publication of Theological Investigations XVI, admirably translated by David Morland of Ampleforth, giving us the first half of Schriften XII (1975), the volume which Rahner dedicated to his mother on her hundredth birthday, offers an opportunity to review the series so far, and perhaps to underline the author’s most characteristic perspectives and concerns, or at any rate to outline pathways in this forbiddingly massive corpus of some 7000 pages of text.It should be noted at the outset that the first six volumes of the English translation correspond exactly to the first six volumes of the original. As Rahner’s productivity was released in the wake of the Vatican Council his collected essays became increasingly substantial. The densely printed German volumes proved too unwieldy for us, with the result that the next four volumes to appear were split in two and thus yielded eight volumes in the English edition. The eleventh volume of the Schriften is the only exception to the rule that the series is devoted to miscellanies of articles, lecture texts and so on, by being confined entirely to Rahner’s work on the history of the sacrament of penance.
Rahner's Grundkurs Revisited Again
Authors: Meynell Hugo 
Published: July 2007

I do not think that ‘arraignment’, the term used by Fr Fergus Ken, quite hits off my comments on Rahner’s Foundations of Christian Faith. I said as clearly as I knew how that I thought the book was in most respects of very high quality indeed. It is true that I devoted most of my comments, partly for reasons of space, partly because panegyric is uninstructive and tiresome, to what I felt were its limitations.I agree that it is often necessary to qualify the meaning of one’s statements carefully, if misunderstanding is to be avoided. But there is a difference between the kind of qualification which makes one’s meaning more precise than it would otherwise be, and the kind which seems rather to destroy it. Thus I can say, I love that lady, but I don’t intend to marry her’, and my qualification serves to clarify my feelings and motives. But if I say, I love that lady, but I don’t mind in the least if I never see her again, or if she falls under a bus tomorrow’, then I may cause a certain amount of confusion, and may reasonably be asked what I do imply in saying that I love her.A propos of Christian expectations of a future life, Rahner says that we must resist the temptation to think of them as ‘anticipatory, eyewitness accounts of a future which is still outstanding’ (p 431). Perhaps it is stupid of me not to be able to see what is being denied here, unless it is that Christians have some kind of expectation for the future, after the end of the present life. If Rahner’s point had been merely that the expectation was not arbitrary, or that the afterlife to be expected was not unconnected with the moral dispositions and the relation to God which a person was building up in the present life, it would surely have been expressed in some other way.Certainly I have a use for qualifications, believing as I do that to contrast Christian faith with myth in the way that Rahner does (p 291) is an important strategic error in apologetics, unless one mitigates the contrast with a great many qualifications.
Magisterium Vel Ministerium?
Authors: Hill Edmund 
Published: July 2007

There is a number of substantive issues that divide Catholic opinion today, and which have been brought to the fore by the forthright statements of Pope John Paul II – clerical celibacy, for example, and the ordination of women. But the all-important, primary, basic issue that has to be discussed and fought about in the Church today is not a substantive one but, in a sense, a procedural one: how, where and by whom should such substantive issues be decided? The all-important question, in other words, is the question of authority: what is the nature of authority in the Church of God, and where does it reside? At a profounder level you could say it is a question of ecclesiology: what is the nature of the Church? Here I shall only touch on that question by implication.On the subject of authority there are, as there have been for centuries, two rival points of view, two conflicting parties in the Catholic Church. In the middle ages there were the papalists against the conciliarists; in the 19th century the names, and to a slight extent the precise issues at stake had changed, and there were the Roman ultramontanes (direct heirs of the medieval papalists) against the cisalpines and the gallicans.
On Losing The Catholic Faith…
Authors: Tatham Michael 
Published: July 2007

Acquiring the faith in 1946 was a process that lasted a year and a half and was predated by two circumstances that probably had an influence which outlasted the years of belief one was that I happened to have an uncle who – despite never going near a church even at Christmas – was a quite remarkably good man, and the other was that apart from the conventional influences of my Anglican school I was brought up in a fundamentally pagan and easygoing home.No doubt because of this nominally religious background, when the faith did impinge on my adolescence it was all the more virulent – there had been no saving inoculation. Certainly it was quite unlike anything I had previously come across.
God:I — Creation
Authors: McCabe Herbert 
Published: July 2007

In my view to assert that God exists is to claim the right and need to carry on an activity, to be engaged in research, and I think this throws light on what we are doing if we try to prove the existence of God. To prove the existence of God is to prove that some questions still need asking, that the world poses these questions for us.To prove the existence of God, then, would be rather like proving the validity of science — I don’t mean science as a body of established facts set out in textbooks or journals, but science as an intellectual activity, the activity of research currently going on; and not just routine research which consists in looking for the answers to clearly formulated questions by means of clearly established techniques, but the research which is the growing point of science, the venture into the unknown.It is perfectly possible to deny the validity of this. It is perfectly possible to say we now have science; (we didn’t have it in the eighth century, let us say, but we have it now). It is just there; from now on it is all really just a matter of tidying up a few details. Now of course all the really great advances in science have come by questioning just that; by questioning, let us say, whether the Newtonian world is really the last word, by digging down and asking questions of what everybody has come to take for granted. But you could imagine quite easily a society which discouraged such radical questioning.
In Tears With His People: Reflections on the Role of the Roman Catholic Clergy in Four English Parishes
Authors: Hornsby‐Smith Michael P 
Published: July 2007

In this article, a number of findings of a series of focussed interviews with fifteen Roman Catholic clergy associated with four English parishes will be discussed in the light of a recent survey of clergy from three denominations. It will be shown that in a number of important respects the findings of this mail questionnaire survey were not supported by the evidence derived from taped interviews in the present research.All the priests interviewed were or had been recently associated with one of the four parishes selected for the study of change in the Roman Catholic community in England. The parishes had been selected to reflect as far as possible with the resources available, both regional and social class variations. Two parishes were in the London area. One was a middle class commuter parish covering an area of some fifteen square miles, about 20 miles outside the city and with a Catholic density of around 8% of the population. The second was an inner-city parish occupying under one square mile in area with a large proportion of both Irish and New Commonwealth immigrants. In this parish Catholics comprised some 18% of the population. The remaining two parishes, both covering under one square mile in. area were in Preston where Catholics comprised between one quarter and one third of the population. Relatively few Catholics in Preston admitted to having any Irish ancestry. One parish was an inner-city, traditional working class parish in a state of population decline and aging associated with massive but arrested urban redevelopment programmes and the second, on the outskirts of Preston consisted mainly of new housing estates occupied by upwardly mobile people in professional, managerial and technical occupations.