bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Thank God Our Time is Now
Authors: Hume Basil 
Published: July 2007

The search for God of necessity entails a commitment to the Kingdom and its values. That Kingdom is a present and future reality. Out of our fumblings and failures, our confusion and darkness, our dreams and ceaseless striving, the Lord of history reveals his kingdom among us and brings to pass his purposes.Inevitably the process involves repeated death and resurrection. When everything seems lost and darkness reigns, the power of God is most clearly manifested in our weakness.The Church, we know, has no political agenda. It has, however, a divine mission to proclaim the Kingdom, witness to its values, be a sign and source of universal reconciliation and human renewal. The Church and its members must be a prophetic voice in society. We must seek always to discern the signs of the time and be agents of constructive change at every level. Experience, however teaches us that members of the Church may not speak with one voice for the way ahead is sometimes unclear.The Church’s mission is both universal and particular. There is a global responsibility as well as one which is national and continental. The concern for our immediate country and its neighbours must never for instance blind us to the needs of the Southern hemisphere. To the best of our ability we must keep alive in our continent the sense that solidarity, interdependence and practical concern embrace the whole planet. In this connection I would remind you of what the Holy Father wrote in his most recent Encyclical Centesimus Annus concerning the universal destination of the goods of creation, both material and spiritual.
Christian Memory and National Consciousness
Authors: Kerr Fergus 
Published: July 2007

My original title for this paper asked a question: The Church—Focus for European Integration? Of course there is a great deal that the Church, whether we mean those of us in communion with Rome or include Christians of the Reformed and Orthodox Churches, is able and likely to do to focus integration in Europe. But as I come now to write it I find that the emphasis in what I want to say suggests a fairly modest proposal for some work at national level which would necessarily be ecumenical in character.Christians, in Europe at least, are perhaps more of an obstacle in the way rather than any kind of focus of integration. True, not all the ancient and venomous conflicts that you see almost wherever you look in ‘Europe’ have religious or if you like ecclesiastical origins or dimensions. The problem of Basque separatism in Spain doesn’t have any religious dimension. But whether it is Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, or Croatian Catholics and Orthodox Serbs, or Christians and Muslims in Cyprus, to mention only the three bitterest conflicts (and religion is not the only factor in any of these cases), it is tempting to suggest that if there were a lot less religion around it would be easier to see how Europeans might be united in peace and prosperity. There are ancient Christian countries in Europe where anti-semitism isn’t totally absent and it may be wondered whether Christians in Europe are any better placed to cope with Islam than our ancestors were at the gates of Vienna in 1683.
The New Europe and the Third World
Authors: McDonagh Francis 
Published: July 2007

During this conference, I suggest, we have taken part in a process of demystification of various illusions about the spiritual or moral roots of the new Europe.Garrett Fitzgerald suggested that the European Community had brought about a revolution in consciousness in three areas: it had abandoned war as a means of settling internal disputes; it had produced a Convention on Human Rights enforceable by the European Court; and it had recognised Europe’s duty towards the Third World both in the Lomé Convention and other Community structures and in individual country aid programmes. Dr Fitzgerald anticipated criticism, and backtracked a little to say that these were all revolutions in principle. With regard to the church, he was much less positive. He said that in Ireland there was an underground church, waiting for the day when the values of Vatican II would be proclaimed anew. This note was struck in all the other reports from local churches. From France and Italy too we heard of an institutional church failing to meet the needs and aspirations of many of its members, who were turning to a variety of small groups, often viewed with concern by the hierarchy. George Vass, too, discussing Eastern Europe, questioned the assumption implicit in many discussions of lux ex Oriente. The light shining in the East is less a beacon than scattered sparks. Even the small communities which have carried the weight of renewal, he suggested, may not survive emerging from the cosy excitement of the underground into the cold wind of a pluralist society.
The Challenge of Héloise—Language, Truth and Logic Revisited
Authors: Grey Mary 
Published: July 2007

Latin-American, Asian, black and feminist Liberation theologies have in common that theology becomes re-defined from and by the perspective and experience of the oppressed group. The hope was that through doing theology from the margins—or from the ‘underside of history—the central models (paradigms) of traditional theology would be transformed: ethics becomes Liberation Ethics, concepts of God, Christ, and Spirit are grounded in the experience of the struggle for justice, the Bible is read as a text of Liberation, and a new readiness would appear to dialogue with the ‘submerged’ faiths of oppressed peoples.My argument here is that the paradigm shift did not go deep enough. Looking around at the worsening crises of the world—African famine, environmental disasters, structural violence and the ineluctable spirals of poverty—it seems to me that Liberation Theology has not succeeded because it has not as yet tackled the roots of oppression in language and logic itself. Tracking the roots of oppression to their theological and philosophical sources is a necessary activity of liberation. It means questioning the foundational myth on which our western civilisation is based. Even the feminist attempts to construct a new ethics have not gone far enough. For example, American psychologist and educationalist Carol Gilligan attempted to construct an ethics of care and responsibility, based on her research, as opposed to an ethics of justice and fairness, (the categories of her colleague, Lawrence Kohlberg).
The Energy Crisis and Nuclear Power
Authors: Hodgson Peter 
Published: July 2007

The scientific and technological advances of the present century have brought about an unprecedented increase in the standard of living of millions of the world’s inhabitants. This has however created new problems that have recently come into prominence. We are acutely aware that the resources of the earth are finite, that we are using them up at an accelerating rate, and that many of our activities are polluting the earth to an unacceptable degree. If we persist along our present course we are heading for an irreversible disaster that will make our present worries pale into insignificance.These problems are widely debated; books, articles and television programmes tell us about the threats to our fragile earth. Many organisations demand rapid action. It is recognised that the Church has a vital part to play in this debate, and indeed has already made important contributions. In many respects, however, it has failed to rise to the occasion, and does no more than repeat the errors and distortions of the media.A basic requirement, generally not well understood, is that those who contribute to these debates should have a certain level of understanding of the basic scientific and technological facts. Without this it is almost impossible to say anything useful, and very easy to talk dangerous nonsense. It is thus necessary to begin by a brief summary of the present situation and, with this as a basis, to pass on to wider political and moral questions. It is convenient to begin with the energy crisis, a definite a clear-cut problem that faces us now. We all depend on energy in its various forms, and the amount available to us is directly related to our standard of living. Hundreds of millions of people are now living in the direst poverty because they do not have enough energy. Where are we going to get the energy to give them life, and to support us all in the next century?
Christians Telling Stories
Authors: Swanston Hamish F.G. 
Published: July 2007

Jesus has a reputation as a story-teller. He is known for his announcement of the Reign of God in stories of a merchant buying a pearl, a traveller being mugged on the road, a woman sweeping her floor. His theology had always the form of fiction. ‘He did not speak to them without a parable’. This was a peculiar theological method. Whatever likenesses there may have been between the people of the Dead Sea scrolls and the first company of disciples, they did not have such a story-teller at their centre. And though there have been several attempts to establish that speaking in parables was an ordinary style of preaching with Jesus’ rabbinic contemporaries, these attempts have resulted rather in some further confirmation of Jesus’ individual distinction. There was no preacher like him. No one telling such stories. Paul, as a youngster, had clearly enjoyed the hebrew Exodus legend about a rolling stone, and the greek fable of Menenius about a talking stomach. But, if he is anywhere near as representative of the pharisee tradition as he claims to be, it must be significant for our view of contemporary jewish teachers that he thought it sufficiently daring in his theologising to elaborate a little allegory from the story of Abraham.Jesus’ story-telling talent has proved to be as singular in the history of Christian theology. The vaster number of those who have thought it their vocation to articulate the peculiar Christian appreciation of God have been as useless at story-telling as Paul. It may be, confronted by a demand for imaginative narrative, determinedly unfictionalising theologians should have claimed that ‘the logical consistency which frames all dogmas into a consistent whole’ is to be understood, as Leslie Stephen observed in a fine essay on ‘Wordsworth’s Ethics’, as ‘an aspect of the imaginative power’ by which we harmonise our strongest and subtlest feelings.
Sharing the Universe with Angels
Authors: Ombres Robert 
Published: July 2007

A Sermon preached at Evensong in St John’s College, Oxford on 1 March 1992. The readings chosen were Isaiah 6:1—8 and Revelation 22:1-9. The poetry is from Rilke's Duino Elegies, the passage in St Thomas is from Summa Theologiae I q. 61 a. 3.I am honoured and excited at being invited to preach in College on a theme of my choice. Honoured for obvious reasons—excited because as a Roman Catholic I am used to everything being forbidden unless it is compulsory. It is an exciting change to taste Anglican freedom, and to choose one’s texts and one’s theme.So, I have chosen to reflect on angels, basing myself on those intriguing biblical texts we have just heard from the prophet Isaiah and from the book of Revelation. But has the subject of angels been a wise choice? Is there not something irresponsible in preaching on such an abstruse and specialised subject in our day and age? Is this going to be an exercise in Christian day-dreaming and telling fairy tales? It might be said that if angels prove anything, they prove the irrelevance of our faith today. Some will say that this is what you should expect if you invite a Dominican friar to preach; antiquarian theology. Some will say that this is the kind of concern that makes Christianity beautiful but of no real use; well-meaning silliness.
Icons and Glory
Authors: Navone John 
Published: July 2007

Name your three best friends, and then name the three nations that you most admire. This test for self-knowledge generally reveals the discrepancy between the truly significant others in our lives and what we esteem as the great and glorious nations. Generally, the three most significant and dear persons in our lives are not particularly wealthy, or powerful or prestigious, or from ‘superior’ ethnic backgrounds. Yet still we persist in identifying glory with manifest power, a fact which underscores the urgent need for Christians to recapture a proper understanding of “glory’, now almost obscured by the modem secular notion of power. For surely it is our Christian conviction that the glory of God has been revealed in the poverty of Christ?God speaks his word of hope and love in human images (in Greek eikones—‘icons’), sacraments or ‘efficacious signs’ which move our hearts and enlighten our minds. We cannot do what we cannot at least in some way imagine or envision. We cannot believe, hope and love—our most significant ‘doing’—without enabling images (’icons’, in other words) or sacraments. We cannot perform the deeds of faith and hope and love without the living icons that constitute orientations to action. The Eternal Word of God became flesh in the perfect image of God that is Jesus Christ, in order to transform all human hearts and minds, enabling us through the gift of his Spirit to love God above all and our neighbour as ourselves. Jesus Christ and his Church are the sacrament or efficacious sign of God’s creative and sustaining and predestining activity in the universal, human story, making possible our responding love and faith and hope in God. The Christian community affirms that it has seen or experienced the ‘glory’ of God in his perfect image Jesus Christ, for the glory is the impact of God’s active presence transforming our lives.
Sublime Policing: Sociology and Milbank's City of God
Authors: Flanagan Kieran 
Published: July 2007

Sociology is a necessary evil on the academic landscape. It is the discipline we all like to hate. Somehow, sociology fits everywhere and yet belongs nowhere in particular. It does not have the finesse of philosophy, the vision of theology or the grace of classics, but as a mongrel child of the Enlightenment it plays about with their deepest insights. Sociology reflects modernity, but in a way that confirms an instinctive dislike of its basis. In the academic game of musical chairs, sociology is left standing, when the waltz ceases, and other disciplines sit awaiting the next score. Yet behind this facade of dislike, an odder and deeper crisis confronts sociology.In the past two decades, philosophy, literary studies, history and classics have all become entwined in sociology which stands at the analytical crossroads directing a busy traffic in concepts up the high road of modernity. But as its rhetoric becomes woven into the humanities, the distinctive voice of sociology has become muted. Critical theory, embracing linguistics, post-structuralism, phenomenology and post-modernism, to name a few, now have squatter’s rights within sociological theory. Textual exegesis forms the basis of much critical philosophy which sociology has to recognise, but is uncertain how to use. Whereas Dilthey laid the philosophical basis for the autonomy of the cultural sciences against the clutches of the natural sciences, an equivalent exercise has yet to be undertaken for sociology in relation to the competing demands of other disciplines also to speak of culture. Despite their sophistication, modern philosophers such as Rorty, MacIntyre, Derrida and Levinas yield slight sociological insights. There are two sides to the analytical coins to be spent in the cultural marketplace. Sociology makes its own purchases, and these are not the debased offerings of the ‘thick’, incapable of reading the classical texts of philosophy in all their nuances. Too often one gets thick philosophical works with a very thin amount of sociology sandwiched in the centre. Anyhow, sociology has its own problems in dealing with culture.
Philip Carpenter RIP
Authors: Radcliffe Timothy 
Published: July 2007

Martha says to Jesus, ‘If you had been here, my brother would not have died.’ (Jn.II:21) Lazarus’ death breaks up a home, a family. The family of Mary and Martha and Lazarus was one of the places in which Jesus rested and refreshed himself, and it is a home that is broken by death and by the apparent absence of Jesus: ‘If you had been here, my brother would not have died.’Many of Philip’s friends will experience his death in much the same way. Whenever one came to see Philip, one was made to feel immediately at home; one was made welcome, as he put a large gin and tonic into one’s hand and one relaxed into a deep, comfortable chair. And he communicated a sense of the Church as a large open home, in which anyone could find acceptance, peace. A place where, as St.Paul said in the second reading no one would be despised.Perhaps the roots of this vision of Christianity lay in his own sense of family. He was devoted to his family, to his brother, Gilbert, a priest of the Church of England, to his sister-in-law, to his nephews and nieces. His house was filled with family furniture and pictures of ancestors. And he shared this open hearth with all sorts of waifs and strays who came his way.This was why he was such a good University chaplain for eleven years. He claimed that this saved him from being narrow and dogmatic; it opened his mind. But that was because he opened himself to anyone who turned up, and especially to foreign students, when he was based at the Overseas Students’ Chaplaincy from 1966 to 1973, before he came here.
The Language of Likeness in the Apocalypse
Authors: Cook Cornelia 
Published: July 2007

Sometime around the middle of the third century Dionysius of Alexandria gave his views on the Apocalypse of John. He said
Some indeed of those before our time rejected and altogether impugned the book, examining it chapter by chapter and declaring it to be unintelligible, and illogical, and its title false.For they say that it is not John’s, no, nor yet an apocalypse (unveiling), since it is veiled by its great thick curtain of unintelligibility....Many readers have no doubt entertained such views. Dionysius was not inclined to endorse them. He would not, he said, reject a book so highly thought of by many of his co-religionists. But he doesn’t find it any more intelligible for all that. He goes on to say
... but, reckoning that my perception is inadequate to form an opinion concerning it, I hold that the interpretation of each several passage is in some way hidden and more wonderful. For even though I do not understand it, yet I suspect that some deeper meaning underlies the words.The book must be meaningful, then, because he doesn’t understand it That curious position may actually provide a clue to the way the book works. What the seer saw is spectacular. But more interesting is how he saw it—or rather how he says he saw it, in his book of the vision. The significance of Revelation lies, to a considerable extent, in how the seer wrote it.
The Hippo and the Fox: a cautionary tale
Authors: Atkins Margaret 
Published: July 2007

Matthew Fox’s popular but over-simplified retelling of the history of Christian attitudes to creation makes St Augustine the prime enemy. In the table at the back of Original Blessing, Augustine is the first-named spokesperson in the enemy camp, so to speak, of ‘fall-redemption’ theologians. It might seem appropriate therefore to borrow the pages of a Dominican journal to ask whether Fox has somewhat missed the point. It seems important to correct the distorted account for two reasons, negatively because Fox’s sharp distinction into either ‘creation- centred’ or ‘fall-redemption’ theologians allows him to pretend that these two fundamental elements of Christian theology are conflicting rather than complementary; positively, because Augustine himself has a great deal to contribute to serious thought about creation.I should like to trace three themes which Augustine explored in the light of both Biblical thought and ancient (particularly Neoplatonic) philosophy and which run through his reflections upon creation. I want to argue that far from being the pernicious influence that led the Western world to an uncritical anthropocentrism, Augustine in fact provides certain valuable insights for a balanced and properly theocentric theology of creation. The three themes I shall discuss are:
(i) ‘reason’ as the thing that distinguishes humans from animals;(ii) the goodness of all created things;(iii) the dependence of the creation upon the Creator.
Northern Ireland—A Case for Kairos?
Authors: Dowell Graham 
Published: July 2007

This year’s Dominican Peace Action summer school was held at Carlingford, a small coastal town just south of the border with Northern Ireland, a few miles from Newry. A useful vantage point from which to learn at first hand from those who have had to live with ‘The Troubles’ for more than two decades; and to hear from groups and participants engaged in conflict-resolution and the search for further, long-term ‘solutions’—bearing in mind the old adage that Northern Ireland has a problem for every solution’. On the principle that pilgrimages should be made to harassed as well as holy places, we made ours both to St Patrick’s grave at Downpatrick and to the R.U.C. training establishment in Belfast.Families travelling from the U.K. were joined by Irish ‘residents’, Dominican sisters and others, who shared their experience and concentrated our minds. Hosts and guests may have come with differing agenda; but it may be fair to say that our reasons for coming together were three-fold. First, as workers for peace, it would be inconceivable to ignore or turn our backs on the unresolved conflict within our own jurisdiction: the denial of human rights which sparked off the first Civil Rights march in August, 1968,with the repercussions - military intervention, the suspension of Stormont, internment, the Anglo-Irish Agreement etc., with which we live today.Second, considering the physical proximity of the two islands and their intimate historical association, much of that history must fill us with shame and compel us, the ex-colonial power, to metanoia. As Christians we must share in the responsibility for past crimes committed against the Irish people. And if, as the contributors to the Evangelical statement ‘For God and His Glory Alone’ recently declared, ‘the essential nature of repentance is losing face’, then we have, each in our own way, to confess that ‘we are not just victims of history—we have been wrong’.