bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The Private Conscience and Legitimate Authority
Authors: Zahn Gordon 
Published: July 2007

Let me begin with a joke, a rather grim joke attributed to a popular Bavarian folk comedian named Weiss Ferdl. It seems that he would innocently inform his Munich audiences that the Nazi regime had just opened a new camp at nearby Dachau, and he would proceed to describe the elaborate security measures taken there – the armed guards, the dogs, the encircling rings of barbed and electrified wire. And then, when he felt the moment was right, he would deliver the punch-line: ‘But no matter what they do, they can’t keep me out if I really make up my mind to get in’.It takes nothing away from the thousands who did ‘get in’ to Dachau or from the millions who ultimately peopled the other camps like Dachau to state the obvious fact that the great majority of individuals in Nazi Germany did not ‘make up their minds to get in’ but, quite the contrary, did what they were told to do so that they might be sure of staying out.This obvious fact led many to embrace the doctrine of ‘collective guilt’ that was so popular as World War II drew to its close with the total collapse of Hitler’s ‘Thousand Year Reich’. This was the time when the question of the form of peace would take was already engaging the attention of the political and intellectual leaders of the Allied World. The prevailing tone was one of stern vindictiveness. The enthusiasts of the so-called Morgenthau Plan in America had their counterparts in the followers of Vansittart in England.
Contraception–Tradition Revisited
Authors: Egner G. 
Published: July 2007

In giving the fullest account ever of attitudes to contraception throughout the history of the Church, Professor Noonan has done us all a service and written an important and valuable book. His perception and industry are admirable; so, I would add, is the intellectual and physical stamina which has brought him across so vast a Sahara of human folly. He does not disguise his opinion that the tradition is open to change, but his account contains a wealth of texts and references that provide matter for the reader’s verdict without dictating it. I should like to pick out some of the themes in his story – some only, by no means all – and reflect on them.Two extreme conclusions about sex were drawn in the early Church. One denied that it was a matter for legislation among the redeemed; the other obliged the redeemed to abstain from it under pain of sin. The outrageous consequences of the former opinion made it less dangerous than the latter, in favour of which there were texts enough in the New Testament which, taken out of context, could be cited. The curiously lame replies of the orthodox Alexandrian theologians to this encratism appealed less to Scripture than to the contemporary philosophy of Stoicism, which conceived legitimate sexual activity in purely procreative terms, and drew strict analogies with agriculture and stock-breeding. For Christians to use sex in such a way was, theologians contended, legitimate; its use inspired by passion was sinful; and any use of it where procreation was impossible (as in pregnancy) or prevented (by drugs) removed the one bulwark against the rigorist objections, and so was also wrong.
Contraception and Eve
Authors: Cahill Jane Furlong 
Published: July 2007

‘ ... and one of them, a lawyer, put a question to try him: Master, which commandment in the law is the greatest? Jesus said to him: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart and thy whole soul and thy whole mind. This is the greatest of the commandments and the first. And the second, its like, is this: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments, all the law and the prophets depend.’ (Matt. 22, 35-41)With these words Jesus pointed out the Way for man to come to God and the essence of that Way is a continuing love affair between each man and God, each man with himself for the love of God, and each with his neighbour whom he is commanded to love as he loves himself. Christianity is not only an intensely personal religion, binding each human person man and woman, directly to God in the love of friendship which we call charity, it is also an intensely social religion, because it commands that we love all of our neighbours as we love ourselves. As Christ clearly states, all of the commandments of the Law may be reduced to these two, because all of the commandments pertain to the ordering of self-love and love of neighbour to the love of God.The love of God is both the means to the end and the end itself of human life, insofar as we must continually be in love with God in this life, and ultimately be personally united with Him in life eternal.
Setting Europe Ablaze
Authors: Allen Louis 
Published: July 2007

The most surprising thing about Mr Foot’s book is that it is there. When one considers the scale of the official war histories, one volume for the momentous events of El Alamein and Tunisia, one volume for Normandy, one volume for Singapore, one for Mandalay, military operations involving the deployment of hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of men over wide areas of the globe, with final strategic issues in the balance, it comes as rather a shock to find that the compass of one volume is also required for a branch of operations directly involving a force of British and French agents numbered merely in hundreds. The reason is quite simply that these operations have become the focus of at least as much interest and concern as any other single aspect of the war in Europe. There can have been few supposedly clandestine operations bathed in a brighter glow of publicity. The organisers and agents of Special Operations Executive have written about its activities in many countries, and it was high time someone dredged through the archives and at any rate attempted a balanced and neutral account of what happened after Winston Churchill set Hugh Dalton at the head of the organisation with the dramatic order: ‘Set Europe ablaze!’Mr Foot has worked under severe limitations. SOE controlled a good many activities in France, not all of which are fully covered by this book. He deliberately excludes the running of escape routes, and of the two sections which ran saboteurs into France, RF Section and F (French) Section, the latter is his real concern.
Education in East Africa
Authors: Smith Iain R. 
Published: July 2007

Education is a subject which should engage our keenest interest, our most careful provision, our deepest thoughts. Yet one of the most depressing aspects of education in Britain at the present time is that it is not doing so.Professor Castle writes about education in East Africa. As he is concerned with education in its widest sense – clearly formulated in ancient Greece as that which makes a man – his enquiry is not only into existing educational institutions but also into the whole nature of the societies in which African children are growing up in East Africa today.He is uniquely well-qualified for his task. After spending most of his life in education in Britain – as teacher, headmaster, and Professor – he went in 1961 to Makerere in Uganda, as Visiting Professor of Education. From 1961-65 he was in East Africa travelling widely, visiting all types of schools and colleges. In 1963 he was chairman of the Uganda Education Commission, whose Report is likely to form the basis for educational planning in Uganda for the foreseeable future. Here is no fly-by-night ‘expert’, but a man whose knowledge about educational institutions in East Africa is probably unparalleled at the present time. To these highly professional qualifications one must add that extra quality of an author who has a deep personal sympathy and concern for his subject.The result, in this book, is a picture of education as it is in East Africa today, clearly presented, acutely observed.Such a wide and general subject is fraught with obvious complications.
Black Nuns in Africa
Authors: Power Elizabeth 
Published: July 2007

I was teaching in a secondary school in ex-British Africa for fifteen months. The following article is written from notes I made while in Africa. The situation may have changed in the two years which have elapsed since I left. I would imagine that if anything, relations between white and black nuns will have deteriorated still further with the growing African sensitivity to racial undertones in white endeavour among black people.When I arrived at the Mission, on the first evening, one of the teachers said as he showed me around, ‘There is the convent for the white sisters and that other building is for the black sisters’. My immediate reaction was to be shocked that there should be two separate establishments, one white, one black. But there were several reasons for this separation. The African sisters formed a diocesan community under the local bishop. The Missionary sisters were directed from Europe, and theoretically were working for their own replacement by converting the Africans. Also there was the argument that the African sisters would never develop responsibility and independence if they joined an established European community. And it would be detrimental to the growth of the African church to have Africans in missionary orders, ready to move on to new fields, instead of staying after the Missionaries had left to consolidate the Church among their own people. I was also told that Africans were bashful and inhibited in front of Europeans. So the ‘separate development’ made good theoretical sense.
Sterilisation and Human Reason
Authors: de la Bedoyere Quentin 
Published: July 2007

In view of the Church’s divine mission it is not surprising that some of her moral teachings are not self-evident to secular man. However she has usually offered supporting reasons for her position and no disloyalty is involved in questioning whether these are really valid. In the case of direct sterilisation Pius XI, in Casti Connubii, presents the classical argument for prohibition (frequently to be repeated by Pius XII) and specifically states that his conclusion is one that ‘the light of human reason makes most clear’. In this article I want to suggest that there are many good men, even within the Christian tradition, to whose reason the prohibition of sterilisation is far from clear and, furthermore, that even the classical arguments may need to be reviewed in the light of new developments. I am not going to discuss the various medical, psychological and economic factors involved, since their bearing on the central moral problem is indirect.The argument that secular man might put forward to support direct sterilisation could take the following form: There are many instances in which a married couple would have reasons of conscience to refrain from further conceptions; such possible reasons are in fact suggested by Pius XI in his encyclical. They could be of such gravity that the only way in which the risk could be responsibly avoided would be by permanent abstention from sexual intercourse or by sterilisation. The first solution, it would be readily admitted, carries certain dangers such as the straining or even breakdown of the marital home with consequent damage both to the existing family and to society at large.
Indirect Communication,
Authors: Poole Roger C. 
Published: July 2007

The problems involved in human communication in the complex and complexifying modern world, stretching as they do from the cybernetical sciences of ‘communication theory’ on the one hand across to the re-iteration of the modern cinema, theatre and novel that communication is well-nigh impossible on the other, are so complicated and so apparently insoluble, that one might be inclined either to pretend that they do not exist, or to deny their importance, or even to make derogatory reference to the ‘fashionableness’ of the theme of non-communication. To do all of these three things, but especially the last, is to ignore the human moral duty to comprehend and to extend our communicational relations. In considering the subject of indirect communication in these articles, those forms of communication that is to say which are fundamental to any adequate understanding of human intercourse, we have not to pretend that immense problems do not exist, nor simply to decry the popularity of the modern stress upon non-communication, but bravely to make a few inroads. The problems we sketch here are like those mirrors to which Kierkegaard compared his own works; if an ape looks in, no saint can be seen looking out.In the present articles I want to consider indirect communication from five different points of view. They come from thinkers as different from each other as it is possible to imagine. We shall consider communication in the philosophies of Hegel, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Claude Levi-Strauss. It will at once be noticed that we have to deal with an idealist, two ‘existentialists’, a phenomenologist and a ‘structural’ anthropologist.
The Eucharist: Sacrament of Christ's Presence in the World
Authors: Lash Nicholas 
Published: July 2007

I want to take one aspect of the theology of the eucharist and try to show how a shift in our understanding of this leads to a corresponding shift in our understanding of the society in which we live. The aspect I have chosen concerns the presence of Christ in the world.THE PRESENCE OF CHRIST IN THE EUCHARISTWe must begin by being quite clear about one thing. If Christ is simply absent from human history since Easter Day, then there is no such thing as Christianity. There are people for whom Jesus of Nazareth is simply an historical memory. Such people may acknowledge his nobility of character, respect the force of his ethical teaching: but they are not Christians. It is clear from the New Testament that what constituted the primitive Church was the consciousness of this community that it only existed, as a community, in the presence of the Spirit of the risen Christ. To put the point another way: to tell people, on the basis of the New Testament, how they ought to live, does not constitute the preaching of the gospel, the good news, of Jesus Christ. To announce to a society that its attitudes and structures are negative and inhuman, and to tell it that things ought to be otherwise, is hardly good news. It is a depressing statement of what most people are dimly aware of anyway. The witness of Christianity is only the announcement of good .news if its primary statement concerns the here-and-now availability of the resources with which to revolutionize human society in the love of God.
Humanism and Tragic Redemption
Authors: Stein Walter 
Published: July 2007

When George Steiner announced The Death of Tragedy, in 1961, it was already somewhat unclear whether tragedy was said to be dead or dying, or in fact on the way to being reborn. Since then, Leo Aylen’s Greek Tragedy and the Modern World has challengingly affirmed the possibility of actual equivalents to Greek tragedy in our time. And now Raymond Williams flatly entitles his own critical diagnosis: Modern Tragedy.These questions of course extend far beyond the theatre. Ultimately they concern the entire substance of our culture, and especially our age’s increasing estrangement from religion. For Tragedy — whether Greek, mediaeval, Elizabethan or neo-classical – has, typically, sprung from societies rooted in religion; although the greatest moments of tragic art were precisely those moments when received beliefs stood under radical historical challenge. To ask why traditional tragic forms have increasingly been abandoned in the theatre of our time is thus, to raise questions we might otherwise not even be able to formulate about our epoch’s relations to religion – and about the resources of humanist faith.Raymond Williams’ confrontation of these questions seems to me crucial, in several ways. Unmistakably at the growing-point of humanist consciousness, his work is at once a critique of tragic theory, a socio-critical map of modern tragic literature, and a reassertion in depth of revolutionary imperatives in the face of objections to revolution truly wrestled with. Significantly, the book concludes not with any theoretical summing up but with an actual drama of revolution.
Modern Theology: An Exchange
Authors: Meynell Hugo , Jenson Robert 
Published: July 2007

Dr Jenson rightly noted at the beginning of his review that the book was not a survey of contemporary theology in general. But I do not think he should have gone on assuming, against all the evidence provided by the book itself, that it was intended to be such. Perhaps the original title I suggested to the publisher, Problems in Modern Theology, would have been less misleading to him. He observed that I had hardly said anything about contemporary Roman Catholic theologians, and that I had left out a great many important Protestants; he might further have observed that a large part of the book (Chapters 2, 3 and 9), deal very little with ‘theologians’ in the usual sense of the world.He might also have adverted to my own clear statement on page 9 as to what the book was about. I recognized that the chapters did not represent a single sustained argument; but I claimed that they were united by a single purpose: ‘to point out a number of fundamental and mutually related mistakes—philosophical, historical and practical—by which it seems to me that much contemporary theology is vitiated’ (italics restricted to the present context). Two claims are involved in this: (a) that there is a cluster of related propositions and arguments propounded by some influential modern theologians; (b) that these are erroneous. The first claim laid on me the task of accurate exposition of some of the work of some of the theologians influential at the present time.
The Liturgical Movement: Right and Wrong Directions—I
Authors: Cloud Duncan 
Published: July 2007

On the face of it, the liturgical movement is one of the big religious success stories of the twentieth century, a paradigm case of the movement of the Holy Spirit in the Churches. From small beginnings, Pius X’s encouragement of frequent communion, his reform of the breviary and his interest in Church music on the one hand and the renewed scholarly concern with ancient liturgical texts, manifested by men like Edmund Bishop, on the other, sprang up in Benedictine monasteries like Mont-César and Maria Laach a movement to rediscover and revive the principles embodied in the great liturgies of the patristic period. These principles have gained wider and wider acceptance and the official seal of approval was placed on them, first of all in a rather grudging manner by Pius XII in his encyclical Mediator Dei (1947) and then wholeheartedly in the Liturgical Constitution of the Second Vatican Council promulgated in 1963. Parallel movements in the Church of England and among the Lutherans only confirm the authentic character of liturgical developments.Yet, despite the evident signs of the movement of the Spirit, there are some disquieting features in the present situation. A substantial minority on the right remains stubbornly unreconciled to any change, while on the left there are some who are preoccupied with ‘underground’ or domestic liturgies and others who question any special concern with liturgical forms as, in effect, a gigantic irrelevance and a distraction from the Christian’s primarily political role. Consequently, it is worth the effort to distance ourselves from the liturgical movement and its principles and enquire if, among the many sound intuitions into the nature of worship which it has promoted, there are some attitudes and approaches which are of more doubtful value.
The School of Conscience
Authors: Deman Thomas 
Published: July 2007

In the course of his article ‘The Encyclical Abstraction’ last month, Fr Thomas Gilby, O.P., touched on the distinction between the notions of conscience and ‘prudence’. He suggested that we should conduct our discussions of the moral issues raised by Humanae Vitae with greater precision and usefulness if we resorted to the suppler and ampler notion of ‘prudence’ rather than to that of conscience. ‘Prudence’ is something of a misnomer, carrying with it unfortunate associations for us today. Yet in much of our present discussion we seem to want to make ‘conscience’ do a great deal of the work that was formerly done by the finely analysed and thereby quasi-technical notion of ‘prudence’. It seems sensible, therefore, to take another look at this classical conception, and we do so by publishing here a translation of an extract from the extended Appendix to the French edition of the Summa of St Thomas Aquinas, dealing with Prudence. This piece thus takes its place as one of a series of contributions to a deeper consideration of the encyclical. We intend to publish further reflections in coming months from Mr Michael Dummett, Fellow of All Souls, and from Frs Timothy McDermott and Cornelius Ernst, O.P.The important place occupied by ‘prudence’, in doctrine as in moral life, in the teaching of Aquinas can be seen clearly enough in his treatise on ‘Prudence’ in the Summa Theologica, 2a 2ae, 47-56. It is only too evident, however, that it has not subsequently kept pride of place in theology, for reasons which are not far to seek.
Priest and Anthropologist
Authors: Edwards Adrian 
Published: July 2007

The points of growth and strain in our personal lives are usually those situations in which we have to fuse together our insights and our duties, or to put it differently to reconcile obligations and calls. These are the points where every Christian has to become in some sense his own theologian, within the terms of the New Testament promise that the children of God are led by the Spirit of God. While most priests are very conscious of not being professional theologians, yet they do develop by pastoral experience a rule of thumb theology in which the insights of grace, mother wit, what the Bishop said, and scraps from the textbooks mingle. Now it is surely regrettable that so little has been done to close the gap between academic theology and this kind of empirical wisdom which often enough needs rethinking and reshaping but which has qualities which are not always flourishing in an academic atmosphere. My own personal tension is not one of pastoral insight grappling with theological analysis but rather of another double focus—for as priest I must strive to see the people among whom I live as so many persons each besieged by grace, yet as an anthropologist I must see them at the level of the masks of culture and the bonds of society.Before becoming a member of the Holy Ghost Fathers I studied social anthropology, and did field work in Angola. At the present time I am in the Diocese of Makurdi, Northern Nigeria, and after experience as a bush curate, I have been given the work of making a study of the Tiv people on whom there already exists an extensive but in several ways incomplete documentation. Here, I am trying not so much to discuss missionary work in the Diocese or Tiv religion and social structure, as work out on paper my own theologizing of my work.