bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Gravissimum Educationis 30 Years on
Authors: Bayldon Michael 
Published: July 2007

The Vatican Council issued Gravissimum Educationis on 28th of October 1965. On the 30th anniversary a few reflections may prompt a reconsideration of the document.Education and schooling are not the same thing. Education, correctly understood, is a lifelong process. Schooling occupies our young days. Although it is a generalisation, I think it is true to say thal modern schooling is the product of the Industrial Revolution.’ Education, by contrast has a longer pedigree. We have schooling because an industrialised nation requires skills best imparted by a schooling process. Recent education reforms (1988 onwards) — particularly under the influence of Toryism — have tried to cement schooling to current economic theory.The Catholic Church cannot afford to dedicate too many of her resources to reinforcing a particular economic or social theory. Indeed, history shows that the Church has demonstrated wary resistance to such trends. A turning-point arose at Vatican II. In the Decrec Gravissimum Educafionis we read: “Holy Mother Church … is under an obligation to promote the welfare of the whole life of man.” (In modern — politically correct — speech, we would say person, of course). Many, though not all, diocesan education departments concentrate on schooling. This falls under the spell of a myth. The myth suggests that schooling educates. Reality suggests that schooling may open avenues, but education is a most complex process. As the Church slowly climbs out of the shadows of medievalism, we are discovering the need for broader minds, broader concepts of formation. Trends are gradually changing.
An Ambrosian Right: Church and State after Evangelium Vitae
Authors: Barrett Richard J. 
Published: July 2007

IntroductionThe question of the relationship which should obtain between Church and State has vexed Christians for two millenia and will probably go on doing so for another two. Nonetheless this problem has become the subject of renewed debate following the publication of the recent papal encyclical Evangelium Vitae. Towards the end of the encyclical the Pope urges that those in public office are obliged unequivocally to defend the rights of the unborn. A practical conundrum is, therefore, posed for those who exercise public office in lay States and who at the same time consider themselves to be members of the Christian faithful. Put very concretely, the question may be posed like so: Is there a conflict between my responsibilities to the Church and my duties to a democratically elected government which espouses laws that do not cohere with the Church's positions on human rights? At times the potential conflict of allegiances that may result poses the broader theological problem of the autonomy of the lay sphere. More specifically, in the case of Evangelium Vitae, it raises the problem of the relationship between the civil law and the moral law and the claims of the magisterium to interpret the latter as a criterion of legitimacy for the former. In the short space available to us we cannot hope to explore both of these questions comprehensively. The following thoughts are offered as reflections on the current problems which vex the theological and legal statement of the Church's relationship to the State and of the allegiancgs of the faithful owed to the civil legislature.
Consider Catherine Cambridge University Sermon 30 April, 1995
Authors: Loades Ann 
Published: July 2007

Yesterday, 29 April, happens to mark the anniversary of the death at die age of thirty-three, of Catherine of Siena, in Rome in 1380. And for that day we find her listed in the Church of England’s Alternative Service Book under the heading of ‘Lesser Festivals and Commemorations’ as a mystic — a designation she shares with Julian of Norwich and Teresa of Avila. In the Roman Catholic tradition she also shares with the latter the dignity of having in 1970 been accorded the title of Doctor of the Church. I note in passing that no women in the Church of England’s list are yet deemed to have been Teachers of the Faith!By comparison with Teresa, Anglicans at least seem to have neglected Catherine and what she may represent for us — with the notable exception of that remarkable nineteenth century reformer, Josephine Butler, whose own day of commemoration falls on December 30. With these preliminary points in mind, therefore, I would like to take the opportunity provided by this occasion to make a small contribution to the consideration of Catherine.Catherine’s book, her Dialogue, a biography and other memoirs of her, were among the earliest books in print, her Dialogue indeed in an English version by 1519. The book, the biography and the memoirs, copies of her letters and prayers, — all would be needed by those who wanted to advance her claim to sanctity, declared as it happened some eighty years after her death. And all these writings are now available to us in new translations and editions to provoke us to ask in our time what we might now make of her.
A Prologue to a Theology of the Atonement
Authors: Evans Michael 
Published: July 2007

Watch any of the world’s great sporting events and you are likely to see carefully placed placards with the simple message ‘John 3.16’, drawing our attention to the heart of God’s good news of salvation in Jesus Christ. That God’s own Son became a human being, died a human death on the cross and was raised from the dead ‘for us and for our salvation’ is the core of any truly Christian faith. But what does it mean to be ‘saved’, and how was — and is — that salvation achieved?‘Save’ and ‘salvation’ are increasingly common words. A goalkeeper who makes ‘great saves’ is seen as the ‘salvation’ of a soccer club facing relegation. There are even governments of ‘National Salvation’. We are persistently urged to save the whale, our planet — and our money! It is not too difficult to grasp this use of the words, but it is often another matter altogether when it comes to salvation in its deepest, richest and ultimate sense.In theological circles ‘salvation’ is but one of many different words for what God is offering humanity, each with its own nuance of meaning. Some prefer ‘redemption’, ‘justification’, ‘liberation’, ‘divinisation’ or another. But for ordinary English-speaking Christians, ‘save’ and ‘salvation’ are still the usual words for expressing something which we recognise lies at the very heart of our faith.
Scepticism and Sovereignty: The Significance of Lamennais
Authors: Nicholls David 
Published: July 2007

Scepticism has frequently been associated with authoritarianism both in politics and in religion. Those who have emphasised the limitations and fragility of human reason have needed to look elsewhere for a basis for certitude—some solid foundation to support a viable political or religious system. Few sceptics have been prepared to accept the view that knowledge and certitude are impossible; there is indeed something paradoxical about the very assertion. Although I shall refer to Lamennais as a sceptic, he firmly rejected pyrrhonism—for he believed that certitude is possible at least in some matters. Nor did he say that reason, or empirical knowledge (arrived at through sense experience) is useless, though he did emphasise the limits of these human faculties, stressing their dependence upon faith and authority.Lamennais’s life and writings raise questions of perennial importance both for theology and for political philosophy. What is the nature of authority? How are claims to authority legitimated? Are there any independent criteria by which to judge the decisions of political or religious authorities, if so how are they constituted? If custom and tradition are ultimate, does this imply ethical relativism? Can one ethnic group or religious party which happens to wield power (for example the British in nineteenth-century India, or Calvinists in sixteenth-century Geneva) justifiably impose its ideas of right and wrong on those of a different tradition.
A Catholic View of Orthodoxy
Authors: Nichols Aidan 
Published: July 2007

In this article I attempt an overview in four parts. First, I shall discuss why Catholics should not only show some ecumenical concern for Orthodoxy but also treat the Orthodox as their privileged or primary ecumenical partner. Secondly, I shall ask why the schism between the Catholic and Orthodox churches occurred, focussing as it finally did on four historic ‘dividing issues’. Thirdly, I shall evaluate the present state of Catholic-Orthodox relations, with particular reference to the problem of the ‘Uniate’ or Eastern Catholic churches. Fourthly and finally, having been highly sympathetic and complimentary to the Orthodox throughout, I shall end by saying what, in my judgment, is wrong with the Orthodox Church and why it needs Catholicism for (humanly speaking) its own salvation.First, then, why should Catholics take the Orthodox as not only an ecumenical partner but the ecumenical partner par excellence? There are three kinds of reasons: historical, theological and practical — of which in most discussion only the historical and theological are mentioned since the third sort — what I term the ‘practical’ takes us into areas of potential controversy among Western Catholics themselves.
Abstracting Passion: Hazlitt's Ideal of Power
Authors: Natarajan Uttara 
Published: July 2007

Hazlitt’s writings as a whole are distinguished by his close attention to the structures of power, political power not excepted. In a Morning Post article of March 1800, he writes,... power is the sole object of philosophical attention in man, as in inanimate nature; and in the one equally as in the other, we understand it more intimately, the more diverse the circumstances are with which we have observed it to exist.?(“Pitt and Buonaparte”, Political Essays; vii. 326)“Power” in Hazlitt’s metaphysic refers to the mind’s innate faculty, its freedom from subjugation to external influences. His philosophy also connects power with liberty: the mind is free since it is subject only to the laws of its own innate constitution. By affirming innate “power”, Hazlitt refutes the empirical account of epistemology in which the mind, moulded from without, remains passive or subjected. He asserts in its stead that the process of knowledge is ab intra, directed by the mind from within. The creative genius celebrated in Hazlitt’s literary and artistic criticism exemplifies intellectual power in its highest degree, and so vindicates the core principle of his metaphysics.
What Makes a Christology into a Christian Theology?
Authors: Braine David 
Published: July 2007

What makes a “Christology” count as a “Christian” Christology? Evidently, there is some distinction to be made. Presumably the reverent accounts of Jesus’ person and role offered by Islam, by notable non-Christian Jews of modem times, by Jewish writers such as Vermes, or by Gandhi and others in the Hindu tradition, do not count as “Christian” Christologies — and clearly a respectful account of his person and role offered by an agnostic or atheist could not count as a “Christian” Christology. Whether we situate the sentimental nineteenth century Renan, or modem theologians such as Maurice Wiles’ and John Hick, on the “Christian” or “non-Christian” side of the divide in respect of their Christologies, waits upon some clarification of what it is that makes a Christology a “Christian” one.The term “Christology” does not mean a “Messianology” which would have to do with the role of a Messiah the question of whose identity lies open. Rather it means what would have better been called a “Jesuology”, that is an account of the person and role in human existence and the universe of the historically identified person, Jesus of Nazareth.
A History of Blackfriars and New Blackfriars
Authors: White Allan 
Published: July 2007

In 1920 Father Bede Jarrett, then provincial of the English Dominicans, wrote to a friend saying that he had just bought the Catholic Review for the province. The Catholic Review was a quarterly journal edited first by Father Benedict Williamson and then by Father Henry Rope. The new publication was to be called Blackfriars. In the view of its first editor, Father Bernard Delany OP (1890-1959), Father Bede had wasted the forty pounds he had paid for it since the journal was defunct and there was to be only a notional continuity between it and the one that was to replace it. In purchasing the title Father Bede was fulfilling a long-cherished ambition to establish a Catholic periodical which would express a specifically and characteristically Dominican voice in England.As early as 1910 a similar project had been mooted by Father Hugh Pope OP (1869-1946), a celebrated apologist and exegete who had taught at the Dominican house of studies in Hawkesyard, Staffordshire, but who was then teaching Scripture at the Angelicum, the Order’s Roman university.’ In the Hawkesyard Review, an in-house journal mostly edited by the Hawkesyard students, Father Hugh argued the case for a Dominican review suggesting that, in the contemporary world, it would be a sign of the Order’s commitment to the ministry of the Word. In the midst of the Modernist crisis, whatever Scripture scholars wrote was of interest to those in higher authority and was often carefully scrutinised. It was for this reason that Pope’s article in an obscure English Dominican publication with a tiny circulation attracted the attention of the Master of the Order, Father Vincent Cormier (1832-1916).
The Mystery of God: Aquinas and McCabe
Authors: Davies Brian 
Published: July 2007

Herbert McCabe was the first Dominican I ever met. He answered my ring on the front door of Blackfriars, Oxford, when I came there in 1977 to see what Dominicans were like and whether I might be interested in joining them.’ came to learn that Dominicans are not quite like anything. They are not easily typecast. But Herbert, as I also came to learn, is someone who holds that they have something which unites them in spite of their differences. His thoughts on this subject emerge in a sermon he preached to most of the members of the English Dominican province at their Provincial Chapter in 1982.The sermon begins in a spirited fashion: “We are the ‘Friars Preachers’, the preaching brethren, a community which specialises in talk.” It then goes on to suggest that Dominican talkers are part of a mystery in which what they preach is also a mystery. The mystery of which Dominicans are part, says Herbert, is nothing other than the work of God in Christ. The mystery they preach, he adds, is nothing other than God. And God, Herbert insists, is indeed a mystery. God is “the unknown beyond and behind the whole universe” who “does not come within the scope of our interpretation of the world or our language”.
The Neglected Virtue
Authors: Finn Richard 
Published: July 2007

In the contemporary recovery of virtue ethics some virtues have fared better than others. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy has entries for justice, wisdom, courage, self-control and the good of friendship integral to the life of virtue as understood by Aristotle and Aquinas. Yet between Hume’s fork and Humour there is no mention of humility. Why so? Aquinas wrote that “after the theological virtues, after the intellectual virtues which regard the reason itself, and after justice, especially legal justice, humility stands before all others.”The reasons for this eclipse of humility are several. One is the absence of humility from the Classical Greek and Roman account of virtue or excellence. Not only is it missing from that account, but for many in the Ancient world to be humble or lowly was to suffer evil. Humilitas meant first a lowly and despicable origin. It was to be born a nobody. In the Tusculan Disputations Cicero’s privileged interlocutor M, discussing that chestnut of ancient philosophy, whether happiness is a matter of virtue alone, or virtue in conjunction with good fortune, lists those evils, or apparent evils, which can afflict us and lie largely beyond our control, beyond the self-definition of character: “poverty, obscurity, insignificance, loneliness, loss of property, severe physical pain, ruined health, infirmity, blindness, fall of one’s country, exile and, to crown all, slavery.” The word ‘insignificance’ here translates the Latin humilitas.’ To some this humility was incompatible with virtue. If excellence is a matter of character, of who one is and not merely what one does, and if who one is in a patriarchal world is to be the son of this father, to claim these ancestors, to be a nobody is already to fail in excellence, to be base.
Cartesianism According to Karl Barth
Authors: Kerr Fergus 
Published: July 2007

One easy way into Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics is to trace his references to the philosophy of Descartes. He ascribes the liberal-modernism in Protestant theology, to which he was so deeply opposed, to the grip of Cartesian epistemology on theological methodology since the Enlightenment. Paradoxically, he insists on a radicalization of Cartesian considerations about doubt and certainty when he comes to work out the doctrine of creation.Very early in the first volume of Church Dogmatics (henceforth CD), Barth assails ‘Modernistic dogmatics’, ‘theology since the days of the Enlightenment’ (CD 1/1, page 36, first published in 1932, English translation 1936, revised 1975). He means, of course, Protestant theology: a theology, or a family of theologies one might say, in which ‘church and faith are to be understood as links in a greater nexus of being’, so that dogmatic theology becomes ‘a link in a greater nexus of scientific problems, from the general structural laws of which its own specific conditions of knowledge are to be deduced and its own specific scientific character known’. The mistake with this, according to Barth, is that theology is regarded as having the same epistemological status, requirements, methods and so forth, as any other scientific or scholarly discipline. More specifically, this ‘nexus of problems’ is ‘that of an ontology’, a conception of reality, a metaphysics of being, which— ‘since Descartes‘—is the ontology ‘of a comprehensively explicated self-understanding of human existence which may also at a specific point become the pre-understanding of an existence in the Church or in faith, and therefore the pre-understanding and criterion of theological knowledge’.
Natural law and ethics: some second thoughts
Authors: Bishop Jordan 
Published: July 2007

Students of the Thomistic synthesis have always had to deal with the ambiguities inherent in the project of bringing together an Aristotelian vision of ethics and the inevitable-—for a Christian—intrusion of the law-centred vision of the Bible. And because of the centrality of the Bible in Western culture, discourse about ethics has remained largely law-centred. We think of ethics in terms of law, even, as been suggested, long after belief in, or acceptance of, a notion of divine law had been largely eroded. In the Church, in spite of Aquinas's espousal of Aristotelianism, the law-centred idiom remained dominant. And it can be argued that this conception of ethics is a source of many of the problems faced in discussions of ethics in the Church today.In the light of this, it may be worthwhile to look again at Aquinas's attempt to reconcile the ethical discourse of Christianity, based on the Torah, with that of Aristotle. For reasons that may in fact be familiar to readers of G.E.M. Anscombe’s now famous 1958 article on modem moral philosophy, Aquinas chose to make the Aristotelian account the centre of his own thought on ethics, to the extent of incorporating theological elements such as the virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity into an Aristotelian format.
“Then gentle Mary meekly bowed her head:” Some psychological reflections on Mary in Christian Thought
Authors: Callaghan Brendan 
Published: July 2007

Let me begin by thanking in the first instance Dr Sarah Jane Boss for the honour of being invited to give this inaugural lecture, celebrating the establishing of the Marian Study Centre here at LSU College of Higher Education. In offering such thanks, I would like to extend them beyond that invitation to include thanks for the establishing of the Marian Study Centre itself. Without having any sort of “inside track” information, I imagine that thanks for such a timely and courageous move are due not only to the interests and commitment of Dr Boss, but also to the creativity and energy of Professor Mary Grey and the innovative drive and support of the Principal of LSU, Dr Anand Chitnis.If you remember the terms introduced into our national vocabulary by “ Yes Minister”, my characterisation of the founding of the Marian Study Cenlre as “courageous” may begin to sound a little ambiguous. If my memory serves me accurately, bold decisions cost you votes, while courageous decisions cost you elections … But I would wish to stay with the term “courageous”, because I think that in its unambiguous sense it dbes apply. The doyenne of Jungian analysts in the UK, the Baroness Vera von der Heydt, points out the sensitivities that may be involved:To some people it is sheer blasphemy to see Mary other than in white and light blue, untouchable, and unapproachable, and unaware of human suffering, sin or temptation. In others negative emotions are aroused at the mere thought of her: it makes them indignant that a mere human creature should havd such privileges …
What kind of Missal are we Getting?
Authors: Harbert Bruce 
Published: July 2007

The Sunday before Advent has long been known among Anglicans as ‘Stir-up Sunday’, the day for stirring mincemeat, cakes and puddings in preparation for Christmas. Its title is drawn from the opening words of its Collect in the Book of Common Prayer (BCP), Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people, translated by Cranmer from a Latin collect beginning Excita, ‘stir up’, which has been part of the Roman liturgy since the sixth century.The Catholic liturgy, too, has kept this ancient text for the week before Advent, but the version in the current Missal from the International Committee on English in the Liturgy (ICEL) is much duller: Lord, increase our eagerness to do your will. It is good news that this is to be replaced with a version that, like Cranmer, recalls the peremptory crispness of the original: Stir up the hearts of your faithful people. Lord God .... It is unlike Cranmer and the Latin, however, in that the words ‘Stir up’ do not stand alone, and so they are less arresting, less memorable.This new version is part of the revision of the Missal undertaken by ICEL, whose fruits are now being submitted to Bishops’ Conferences for approval. The bishops of England and Wales have voted to accept most of the prayers submitted, including those for the Masses of weeks in Ordinary Time. In so doing, they parted company with their brother bishops in the USA, who have raised objections to a number of texts. ICEL has become something of a tyranny, which individual bishops’ conferences are in effect powerless to resist.