bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Maria Goretti—a saint for today?
Authors: McNeil Brian 
Published: July 2007

I was born in Scotland in 1952, so that I belong to the very last generation of those who personally experienced preconciliar Catholicism. The saints played an important role in the spirituality in which we were brought up. Some were Scottish saints, such as Columba the missionary (+597) and Margaret the queen (+1093); but the Scottish church under Pius XII and John XXIII was not encouraged to be too Scottish. We were proud of being an outpost of the international church, and our spirituality was to be that of the universal church. This meant that most of the stories we heard concerned persons whose veneration was officially approved by Rome. Some were to be admired (great missionaries and martyrs, but also still living persons such as the stigmatised Padre Pio), while others were consciously presented as models to be imitated. Maria Goretti (1890-1902) belonged to this second group.Churches and chapels were built in her honour, pious associations were founded. We heard about her in sermons and in religious instruction in school. Pamphlets with her biography could be bought for a few pence. Holy pictures in our prayer-books reminded us of her. Indeed, her face was very familiar to us—in classrooms, in churches, sometimes in our own bedrooms. What kind of image was this?Against the background of an Italian landscape, one saw the radiant face of a beautiful girl, perhaps seventeen or eighteen years old. A narrow halo encircled her head. She looked up to heaven with a smile. Sometimes she carried red roses as a symbol of her love for Jesus, sometimes there were snakes at her feet as a symbol of her struggle against the devil.
The Real Presence
Authors: Charlton William 
Published: July 2007

The final book of The Imitation of Christ is an ‘exhortation to Holy Communion’, and the last chapter begins: ‘Beware of a persistent and useless intellectual examination of this most deep sacrament, if you do not wish to be immersed in deep doubt.’ Useless, I am afraid, to warn philosophers. In what follows I distinguish two or three different ways of understanding the Real Presence in the Eucharist and, without rejecting any of them, say how far they are compatible and indicate some of their merits and drawbacks. But since this doctrine is sometimes confused with the doctrine of Transsubstantiation, I begin with a word about that.In 1551 the Council of Trent declared that ‘through the consecration of the bread and wine, there comes about a conversion of the whole substance of the bread into the body of Christ our Lord, and of the whole substance of the wine into his blood. And this conversion is appropriately and properly called “transsubstantiation'” (Denzinger/Schönmetzer 1642). The doctrine of transsubstantiation here endorsed is relatively clear. It states that when bread and wine are changed into the body and blood of Christ, the matter of the bread and wine pass away into the matter of the body and blood of Christ. The purpose of the doctrine is to distinguish the Eucharistic change from natural changes such as occur when water evaporates into air or when bread and wine are consumed in the ordinary way. The Fathers of Trent and the mediaeval philosophers from whom they took the doctrine believed that these natural changes are, strictly speaking, only transformations, conversiones formales (Aquinas, ST 3.75.4).
Homily at Herbert McCabe's Funeral
Authors: Ryan Columba 
Published: July 2007

This is the story of one Dominican’s following the Gospel with faith, hope and above all charity.There was a restlessness about Herbert. All his life he was in some ways an adolescent. He had the virtues of an adolescent, and sometimes an adolescent’s infuriating ways. But our weaknesses, under God’s grace become our strengths. Immensely loyal to his friends, he liked to shock. Questing, critical, radical, ever seeking for the meaning of life, and for ‘meaning’ tout court, he could be quite arrogant in his own convictions. It did not mean that he could not brook disagreement. Intolerant he could be of what he called ‘playing games’, but he delighted in argument. He could not resist being outrageous at the expense of pompous authority. His Catholic orthodoxy, expressed in contemporary idiom, was unshakeable; his Dominican, questioning, obedience was absolute. Like adolescents, when asked questions which they find intrusive, he was economical in speech; this he honed into a fine precision, admirably editing out superfluous words. The adolescent’s unsureness of himself he turned into the humility of loving himself not for his own achievements, but for God’s gift of being God’s lover, able to speak with, and thank God. Still he hated going into print and agonised over sermons. Leaving instructions to any literary executor he talked about the “the bits of paper I leave behind. ... If I hear you have burnt the lot I shall merely add this to the eternal (no! perpetual) sufferings I shall be undergoing”
XX Mariological Marian International Congress, Rome 2000
Authors: Loades Ann 
Published: July 2007

I take the term ‘Anglican’ here to refer primarily to the Church of England, though I think that the positions to which I refer in this paper would also be found in the spectrum of most of its related episcopal churches, especially the Church in Wales and the Church of Ireland whose territory includes Northern Ireland, the Anglican Diocese of Europe, and the Episcopal Church of Scotland. I have no way of ascertaining the position of all the Churches of the world-wide Anglican Communion, though again I expect that within it I would find a similar range of theological conviction about the Trinity and Mary. We also need to bear in mind the existence of the Porvoo agreement with north European Lutheran Churches. The Evangelical-Lutheran Church of Latvia has not yet taken a decision on the Porvoo Declaration, and the Church of Denmark has decided not to endorse it but to maintain links with those who have. There are many difficult issues for discussion in such churches, but my point here is simply that discussion of ‘the Trinity and Mary’ is a sensitive issue not least in the Church of England’s ecumenical negotiations, especially with those Churches with whom we are now in full communion.The second point I need to make by way of introduction is that I do not write as an official delegate of the Church of England to the XX Mariological Marian International Congress, though I hope I do justice to the complexities of my church’s position as a member of its Doctrine Commission — not that at the moment the Commission is likely to discuss the relation between the Trinity and Mary.
Aquinas's Third Way
Authors: Davies Brian 
Published: July 2007

The study of arguments for God’s existence is much more in vogue in English speaking philosophical circles than it was when Fergus Kerr entered the Order of Preachers. In what follows I make no attempt to defend the general project of arguing for the existence of God. Instead, I aim briefly to defend an argument of Thomas Aquinas which is still commonly rejected even by authors who are usually counted among his supporters. This argument is most frequently referred to as the third of his ‘Five Ways’ (to be found in Summa Theologiae la, 2,3). My suggestion in what follows is that, when properly understood, Aquinas’s Third Way is a good defence of the claim that God exists.Here is what I take to be an accurate English translation of the Third Way:The third way is based on what need not be and on what must be, and runs as follows. Some of the things we come across can be but need not be, for we find them being generated and destroyed, thus sometimes in being and sometimes not. Now everything cannot be like this, for a thing that need not be was once not; and if everything need not be, once upon a time there was nothing. But if that were true there would be nothing even now, because something that does not exist can only begin to exist through something that already exists. If nothing was in being nothing could begin to be, and nothing would be in being now, which is clearly false. Not everything then is the sort of thing that need not be; some things must be and these may or may not owe this necessity to something else. But just as we proved that a series of agent [efficient] causes can’t go on for ever, so also a series of things which must be and owe this to other things. So we are forced to postulate something which of itself must be, owing this to nothing outside itself, but being itself the cause that other things must be. And this is what everyone calls God.
Aquinas and Simplicius on Dispositions ‐A Question in Fundamental Moral Theory
Authors: Boland Vivian 
Published: July 2007

One of the areas on which Fergus Kerr has kept a wise eye and to which he has made valued contributions over many years is moral philosophy. In fact he had the task of teaching ‘moral theology’ in the early years of his career but quickly moved on. He was quite relieved to do so, he told me once, not least because he found Shakespeare more relevant to morality than the geography of the fallopian tubes. Leaving behind moral theology in that sense did not mean his leaving behind a concern with moral questions. On the contrary, he has maintained great interest in developments in fundamental moral theory and in the centrality of morality for all theology.In this he is faithful to Aquinas who, as Leonard Boyle has argued, envisagedSumma Theologiaeas a work in which the moral is central. If, as Kerr himself has been arguing recently,beatitudois a key to the unity of theSumma,then this is further support for what Boyle argued on historical and palaeographical grounds. This is not to claim that what Aquinas had in mind was anything like what moral theology came to describe later on, when a strict distinction and even separation of dogma and moral came to prevail especially in seminary training. Aquinas belongs to an earlier world, from which contemporary moral philosophers continue to learn, in which these later distinctions did not apply.
Reading a Quieter, British, Heidegger
Authors: Hemming Laurence Paul 
Published: July 2007

Fergus Kerr, after a recent conference on St. Thomas Aquinas in the Netherlands, remarked on how a certain understanding of Heidegger’s history of being is now all but taken for granted in the Catholic theological imagination. Certainly the trajectory of the history of reason traced by the Holy Father in his recent encyclical letter Fides et Ratio would seem to owe more than just a little to Heidegger’s influence. Yet the genealogy of this influence is not easy to trace, nor is it direct. Heidegger’s work arguably exercises an influence more on those who have never read him, or at least not deeply, than on those who have (John Paul II must be counted among the latter). The increasingly common use of the word ontotheology by theologians, coined by Heidegger in a course of lectures on Hegel in 1930, though with roots at least as early as a course on Leibniz from 1928, and used by him in written texts at least until 1962, is testimony enough; but so is the fact that the vaguer uses of this term become progressively more detached from their precisely definite origins in the very occasions of becoming commoner.British resistance to Heidegger’s work has meant that North- Americans interpreters are much more decisive for how Heidegger is understood in English. Their emphasis has tended to be on explanation and clarification, or the minute piecing together of a narrative framework into which his thought can then be fitted. Fr. William Richardson’s monumental work on Heidegger set both a tone and a framework for reading Heidegger whose reverberations still predominate.
The Problem of Reported Speech: Friendship and Philosophy in Plato'sLysisandSymposium
Authors: Pickstock Catherine 
Published: July 2007

It is said that Plato’s discussions of love and friendship in theLysisandSymposium, unlike those of Aristotle, allow little place for love or affection towards individuals. Scholars have arrived at this conclusion by several routes. It is thought that Aristotle more genuinely appreciates the specificity of human affections and friendships: friends for the Stagirite are considered ‘the greatest of external goods’; those who have regulated their passions to such a degree that they are unmoved by particular instances of beauty ‘are simply not human’.Aristotle’s emphasis upon friendship itself as ‘the beautiful thing’ has been central to the recent burgeoning scholarly interest in the topic of friendship. Studies have appeared in many disciplinary areas and from many perspectives: historical, philosophical and sociological.Alongside these, a number of theological reflections upon this theme have been produced, addressing friendship in its late antique context, or else examining mediaeval understandings of charity and its link with protocols of personal affiliation and friendship. More recently still, Jacques Derrida has produced his ambivalently- receivedPolitiques de l’amitié?in which his deconstructive impulse applies itself variously from Plato and Aristotle all the way to Montaigne and the controversial political theorist Carl Schmitt. There has also been an increasing engagement with classical negotiations of the theme of friendship.
MacIntyre, Narrative Rationality and Faith
Authors: Early Christian 
Published: July 2007

This paper seeks to spell out the consequences of Alasdair MacIntyre's conception of rationality for the debate between faith and reason. In the modem period, commitment to authority came to be understood as a hindrance to the discovery of truth. Understanding rationality as tradition-constituted, however, puts that assumption into question. Traditions of enquiry are the bearers of rational resources; it is impossible for inquirers to perform rational work outside some tradition of enquiry. A tradition’s formative texts and its rational resources occupy a place of authority in the practice of critical reflection. The reintroduction of the notion that commitment to authority can be rational has important consequences for the debate between faith and reason: critical reasoning and acceptance of authority are not antithetical. Rather, reason depends on authority for resources to perform its task. This paper thus argues that the apparent conflict modem philosophers of religion attribute to committed faith and critical reflection dissolves once rationality is understood as tradition-constituted.Understanding rationality as constituted by traditions of enquiry avoids the complaint that commitment to authority entails a pluralism that cannot rationally be eliminated. To see why this is so, it is necessary to attend to a particular feature of traditions of enquiry. Using their standards of rationality, traditions progress as they solve the problems that are inherent within their point of view.If the adherents of a tradition cannot solve a problem using their rational resources, then the tradition lapses into a state of epistemological crisis. At this point, it is uncertain whether the epistemological crisis will be solved.
The Fullness of God: Catholics and Religious Exclusiveness
Authors: Buckley James J. 
Published: July 2007

One hundred and fifty years ago this Spring, John Henry Newman gave a series of lectures that eventually became the collection of those lectures and other occasional essays we know as The Idea of a University. Newman was a nineteenth century English thinker who became modernity’s most famous Catholic convert. He was born at the beginning of the century (1801), died at the end (1890), and converted from the Church of England at mid-century (1845), just seven years before he gave the lectures that concern us. He gave the lectures that formed the basis of his book because an Irish bishop asked him to, as part of an effort to establish a new Catholic University of Ireland. Newman gave the talks, re-wrote them, combined them with other essays he wrote during the 1 850s and published them as The Idea of a University in 1873. The university no longer exists. His book does exist, but (as the essays that accompany the abridged 1996 Yale edition suggest), there is little agreement about whether it points us backward or forward—where “us” includes students and faculty but also university administrators and university labourers and even donors.One of the curious features of this classic work on Catholic education is that Newman makes little explicit reference to the religious orders who were the founders of most Catholic colleges and universities—Benedictine or Augustinian, Dominican or Franciscan, Notre Dame or Jesuit. Yet, as I hope to show, these orders were clearly in the back of Newman’s mind in ways that shed light on the argument of The Idea as well as on our own circumstances.
Postmodernism and the ‘Trinity’: How to be postmodern and post‐Barthian too
Authors: Thompson Ross 
Published: July 2007

The trouble with post-modern theology is that it tends to be pre-Barthian. Indeed, two main strands of English theology that have attempted to write from a postmodern perspective—the ‘Sea of Faith’ school surrounding Don Cupitt, and the ‘Radical Orthodoxy’ school surrounding John Milbank, Graham Ward and Catherine Pickstock— share very little else but their postmodernism and different kinds of pre-Barthianism. I suspect the arguments of this article could be applied equally to the American ‘post-liberal’ school surrounding George Lindbeck, but space forbids treatment of too many variants.For a definition of postmodernism I follow Milbank:The end of modernity, which is not yet accomplished, but continues to arrive, means the end of a single system of truth based on universal reason, which tells us what reality is like.Modernism then represents faith in three things:
1Deductivism: the idea that all meaningful language forms a single deductive system, wherein the truth value of any proposition can be calculated;1Foundationalism: the idea that this system can be securely based on universally accepted premises1Correspondence theory: the idea that statements exist to express truth, which consists in the correspondence between what they assert and what is the case.Modernism hopes one day to get at a text that is consistent with itself, demonstrable to all reasonable people, and adequate to the world. Of course, there is a lot out there in the world that is currently ‘outside the text’, but one day we will expand the text to fit the world exactly, like a glove.
Brer Rabbit Christology
Authors: Murphy Francesca Aran 
Published: July 2007

James Cone begins his book about The Spirituals and Blues by defining this music as ‘the power of song in the struggle for black survival’. The quality of spirituals and blues is ‘an optimism that uses the pessimism of life as raw material out of which it creates its own strength’. The use of human life at its roughest as a source of power is also the meaning of comedy. Comedy is not just a funny ha-ha plot, it is a milieu. It is a milieu over which love presides. Speaking about the earthiness of the blues, Cone observes, ‘People cannot love physically and spiritually ... until they have been up against the edge of life, experiencing the hurt and pain of existence.’ The painful, raw sounds of the blues and the spirituals venture further into the comic milieu than do Hollywood romantic ‘comedies.’Richie Havens used to sing a spiritual called ‘Motherless Child’
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,A long ways from home,A long ways from home.Sometimes I feel like I’m almost gone,Sometimes I feel like I’m almost gone,Sometimes I feel like I’m almost gone,A long ways from home,A long ways from home.Sometimes I feel like a feather in the air,Sometimes I feel like a feather in the air,Sometimes I feel like a feather in the air,And I spread my wings and I fly,I spread my wings and I fly.
On The Sum Total of Human Happiness
Authors: Schall James V. 
Published: July 2007

The most famous book that talks to us of precisely “human” happiness, the proper happiness of man in so far as he is man in this world, is, no doubt, Aristotle’s Ethics. Here he tells us, as if looking into our own souls in our own time, that everything we do, all the particular, singular things in which our actions exist and which constitute the outlines of our lives, we do because we seek to be happy by the doing of these actions. This seeking to be happy in each particular act is what unites all the things that do exist in so far as they are touched by human minds and hands. All human beings reveal the same curious variety of longings in their origins. The world, in other words, is full of things that came to be because someone sought to be happy and did something to attain this purpose, albeit not always the right thing or the best thing..Aristotle next explains to us that we can have differing ideas of that in which this happiness consists, but even here, the general diversity is not so great when we come to examine it. The great variations that seem at first sight evident in human searchings can be subsumed under four general headings. Some think that happiness is money, some pleasure, some honour or power, and still others think it consists in human contemplation of truth, of knowing the things that are. Happiness, Aristotle tells us; is an activity, it is an activity of our highest faculties on the highest objects
A Mystical Moral Theology
Authors: Keating James 
Published: July 2007

The discipline of moral theology is undergoing noticeable self-evaluation. Moral theologians are exploring the connections between moral theology and Scripture, moral theology and virtue ethics, moral theology and Christology, moral theology and Patristics, moral theology and liturgy, and moral theology and spirituality. Moralists are looking for new conversation partners in order to stretch the discipline beyond the now familiar relations that once bore fruit between moral theology and philosophy, and natural law in particular. There are some stirrings to converse again with philosophy, but the noted activity most relevant to the intent of this essay encompasses the explicitly theological.My own “Moral Theology and” discourse has centred on the theme of prayer. In so doing I am looking to reinvigorate a discipline that seems to be dying pastorally. I have come to the conclusion that the best way to form the conscience is not through formal moral theology courses and all the inner disputations that moralists have with one another. The best way to form the conscience is to teach parishioners to pray, to love God in prayer, to come to know God in prayer and worship. In this I would dispute the thematic ordering of the Catechism: the section on ethics should appear last, after a theology of prayer. In saying this, I am not arguing that moral dilemmas are immediately apprehended and solved in prayer. I am not saying that spirituality delineates specific steps to moral decision-making or that it clarifies a method to be used in such decision-making.