bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Maurice Wiles and Christian Doctrine
Authors: Weinandy Thomas 
Published: July 2007

This festchrift honours the notable theological career of Dr. Maurice Wiles, Regius Professor emeritus of Divinity at Oxford University. In their Preface Drs. Coakley and Pailin state: “Throughout his distinguished career he has been a staunch supporter of a liberal approach to Christian theological understanding” (p. v). The essays in this volume take up a major, if not the major, preoccupation of Professor Wiles’ “liberal approach”, that of the making of Christian doctrine in the early Church and the remaking of it today.The majority of the authors endorse, and so champion, in some fashion, Wiles’ initiative that Christian doctrine be remade in light of the demands of historical criticism, contemporary philosophy, and cultural experience. Thus J. Barr, J. Hick, M. Hooker, G. Kaufman, R. Lyman, S. McFague, J. Macquarrie, S. Ogden, and D. Pailin argue, in a variety of ways, that the traditional understanding of Christian doctrine, based on an often unscriptural (Hooker, p. 74), supernaturalist (Macquarrie, p. 168), interventionist (Barr, p. 9), and dualistic (Kaufman, pp. 99-100) understanding of God’s relationship to the world, must be fundamentally reconceived and replaced by an understanding of doctrine where God’s activity is restricted within the enclosed process of history and human activity, and interpreted through human experience and philosophical insight. As Ogden states: “I hold that one of the lasting achievements of revisionary theology right from the beginning is to have shown that the credibility of Christian witness can be validated, finally, only by appeal to what anyone is capable of experiencing simply as a human being” (p. 196).
Christianity and the Welfare State
Authors: Corner Mark 
Published: July 2007

This article looks at a fundamental area of social and political concern in Britain today, that is to say the Welfare State. It sets out initially to elicit some of the different arguments about this ‘institution’, contrasting what is necessarily now, after several years of one political party holding power, to be seen as ‘the Government’s view’, with alternative opinions. It then seeks to analyse these contrasting views in terms of a dialectic between individual and state responsibility, which can be analysed in theological terms. It argues that this dialectic, which in the past has appeared to be threatened by a denial of individual responsibility, is nowadays threatened by a denial of state responsibility. It does not, therefore, seek to go into detail about the various aspects of the Welfare State, analysing what they have achieved or where their inadequacies lie. Rather it concentrates more generally upon the theoretical basis of the system, from the point of view of both its supporters and its detractors.It is worthwhile initially to consider the term ‘Welfare State’ itself. It appears according to most polls to be very popular, but what is it? It is noteworthy that people refer most commonly to a welfare ‘state’ rather than ‘system’, as if they were thinking less in terms of a particular set of institutions than in terms of a particular idea of society as a whole, namely that it be organised for the welfare or benefit of its citizens.
The Exiled Sons of Eve: Robert Liddell's Egyptian Novels
Authors: Guérinot J.V. 
Published: July 2007

Robert Liddell is an unjustly neglected Catholic novelist. Perhaps now that Peter Owen has reprinted three of his novels and promises to reprint them all, his bookes may at last find the audience they deserve. Lovers of Barbara Pym will remember him as Jock in A Very Private Eye; they met at Oxford and remained life-long friends. She greatly admired his novels. So did Ivy Compton-Burnett, Elizabeth Taylor, Francis King, and Walter Allen. But the list of his literary friends and admirers is endless: John Bayley, Fr. D’Arcy, Peter Levi, Iris Murdoch, Olivia Manning, Honor Tracy. All of this suggests that he must be worth reading, and he is.His best and most characteristic works are Unreal City (1952) and The Rivers of Babylon (1959) which follow Charles Harbord from 1944 to 1953 in his teaching posts in Alexandria and Cairo. They are novels of a real and quiet distinction, in the tradition that comes down from Jane Austen. Witty, often comic, highly literate and allusive, they examine with studied understatement the great themes of exile, sin, and faith.On the most obvious level, they provide a highly entertaining account of what it was like to teach during and after the war in such foreign places as Alexandria and Cairo. Both novels are narrated in the third person, almost entirely from Charles’s point of view, and through his eyes we get a vivid picture of both great cities without, however, any scene painting.
Fra Angelico's Deposition from the Cross: The Circumstances Explored
Authors: Prendergast Michael 
Published: July 2007

The Strozzis were a large, rich and powerful family in the Florence of the 1420s. Like many aristocratic merchant families of the time, they planned a chapel where only they would have the right to be buried. Such privatised funerary and memorial arrangements were not unusual, though in combining theirs with a functioning sacristy in the monastic church of Santa Trinita, the Strozzis started a trend which was to be important in the evolution of Renaissance architecture. Because it was stripped of furnishings and pictures in the seventeenth century, the chapel-sacristy at Santa Trinita now looks bare, but in the early fifteenth century it was full of colour and religious imagery.The head of the family, Palla Strozzi, took a leading part in the planning of the memorial chapel. He negotiated with the monks, engaged an architect, masons and stone carvers and had his deceased father entombed in a wall of the as yet uncompleted building. In a real sense it was Palla’s project His choice of artists to paint pictures for it reveals his taste. He commissioned Gentile da Fabriano, the most famous artist in Italy, to paint the Adoration of the Magi, and Lorenzo Monaco, the leading practitioner in Florence of the International Gothic style, to produce a Deposition of Christ from the Cross. Gentile’s work is now in the Uffizi, but Lorenzo died in 1425 leaving the Deposition unfinished. Twenty years later Fra Angelico completed it, and today it hangs in the Museum of San Marco, Florence.
A New Interpretation of Fra Angelico
Authors: Fisher Anthony 
Published: July 2007

Guido di Pietro, known to posterity as Fra Angelico, was born of peasant stock in Mugello, probably around 1400. He and his brother trained as illuminators and miniaturists and, when Angelico was about 21, they joined the Observant Dominican community of San Domenico in Fiesole above Florence. Professed as Brother John, Angelico’s ‘pastoral work’ while studying for the priesthood was to paint for San Domenico, Sta Maria Novella, and elsewhere. These early commissions made him famous and funded his workshop. If he was still learning priestcraft he was also still learning to paint: for his skills as an illuminator were little preparation for altarpiece design, a duty laid on his shoulders along with his Dominican scapular. So he became acquainted with the works of his contemporaries such as Masaccio, Masolino, Gentile and Sassetta.His most important contact, however, was Cosimo De Medici, a patron not only of the arts but of the religious orders, especially the more radical mendicants. On return to power in 1434, he set about installing the Observant Dominicans in Florence, renovating an abandoned monastery for them which was to represent “the best in Christian humanism”.
Discipleship of Equals or Nuptial Mystery?
Authors: Kerr Fergus 
Published: July 2007

Fifty years ago, as a glance at standard textbooks would confirm, history as taught in school and university was mostly about battles and wars and the doings of kings and queens. Since then, however, there has been a massive shift of interest to the doings and sufferings of ordinary people— much more difficult as it of course is to reconstruct their lives. More recently still, historians have turned their attention to retrieving the experience of women—ordinary women, in different societies, but also (as in such recent books as Woman Defamed and Woman Defended edited by Alcuin Blamires or Medieval English Prose for Women edited by Bella Millett and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne) women who played a distinctive and much more significant part in history than has previously been acknowledged. Here too, it has become possible to read between the lines of familiar material to discover what was (no doubt inadvertently and unconsciously) played down, skewed, marginalized, concealed or so blatantly omitted that the silences themselves have become eloquent. Texts written, by men for men, although nobody realized that, inevitably operated with a male-oriented system of interests and values. Once the ‘androcentric’ agenda of a document or a cultural artefact is allowed for, we can begin, cautiously and tentatively of course, to look for the lacunae and distortions that might reveal the absent and unidentified women’s experience.For once, work in Christian theology has not lagged far behind this much wider shift in cultural interest and awareness. There are, of course, always predecessors, belatedly discovered—above all Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) in this case. She stands as the precursor of Christian feminists for whom equal rights for women is the issue.
Ten Reasons why Thomas Aquinas is Important for Ethics Today
Authors: Keenan James F 
Published: July 2007

Recently several works that study Thomas Aquinas’s ethics have been published. Why is it, too, that a return to Thomas’s ethics yields insights into his writings that have escaped us for decades, even centuries? Why is he a perennial font of reflection that prompts new writers to find fresh insights at the end of the second millennium?The answer rests, I believe, in the fact that he captures an understanding of the moral life that is enormously helpful in forming a vision of the type of people we ought to become. In an age that wants to respect the individual conscience while maintaining a sense of the objectively right and wrong, Thomas provides a framework in which we can achieve both. In order to demonstrate how Thomas accomplishes this, I advance along the way ten key points that Thomas makes that serve as sign posts to our conclusions.1.Rather than retreat from public life. Thomas believes that good religious life, like good theology, can be at home in the life of the city. At the age of six, Thomas’s parents sent him to the famous Benedictine Abbey, Monte Casino, where they (reasonably) hoped that he would become abbot. At fifteen, he leaves the order and, after five years of studies in Naples, enters the relatively new order of SL Dominic. As urban areas emerge for the first time in human history, the fifteen year old Thomas makes his first adult decision to leave an order that requires a vow of permanence and enters a new order already known for their work of preaching in the cities and teaching in the medieval universities.
Dominican Involvement in the Crusader States
Authors: Friedenthal James‐Francis 
Published: July 2007

Although the Dominican Order was not in existence when the Crusades began, during the thirteenth century the Dominicans developed a strong presence in the Holy Land and found themselves laying the new network of Church administration, as they took over many of the newly created Latin sees, and establishing links with the Greek and Oriental Churches they encountered. Great travellers and great critics, they bequeathed to the Church a closer understanding of what kind of religion Islam really was, what the Eastern churches were really like, and insights into the whole nature of the Crusades just as the Crusader States were finally collapsing. Their findings and opinions may be found in such works as: Burchard’s “Descriptio Terrae Sanctae”; the “Itinerarium” of Riccoldo de Monte Croce, and the “Opus Tripartitum” of Humbert of Romans.In 1221 St. Dominic died at Bologna, having seen his Order approved by the Holy See and established in Provence, Paris, Spain, Italy, Poland, Hungary and England. One of the ambitions of his life remained unfulfilled, however: he had always wanted to go to the East to convert the Saracens. Innocent III encouraged him instead to devote his attention to the Albigensian heretics in the South of France and to similar sects in Lombardy. It was left to his spiritual descendants to fulfill his dream of evangelising the East.The first approach of the Dominicans to the Holy Land came in 1226 when Alice of Champagne, widow of King Hugh I of Cyprus, founded the monastery of St. Dominic at Nicosia in Cyprus, later to become the burial place of the Kings of Cyprus and Jerusalem after the loss of the mainland.
The “Problem” of Homosexuality
Authors: Markey John J. 
Published: July 2007

W.E.B. Dubois, speaking of his experience of being a black man in North America in 1903, wrote:
Between me and the other world is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying it directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.For Dubois, the greatest injustice that African-Americans faced was not the outright malevolence of the ignorant, but the general tendency of even the enlightened to assume that blacks, by virtue of their being physically different from the majority of those in the dominant ethos, posed some kind of problem that needed to be addressed. Even those who “accepted” Dubois and treated him respectfully caused him to wonder why he needed to be “accepted” in the first place, and why he could not assume the respect of others. Dubois realized that the oppression and injustice he experienced was deeply rooted in the very presumption that his physical distinctiveness outweighed the immense commonality he shared with others and called into question his status not only in this culture but in the human community.
The Quarrel over Morals in the Catholic Church
Authors: Kerr Fergus 
Published: July 2007

More than half of this book is taken up with the complete text of Pope John Paul II’s encyclical letter on ‘certain fundamental questions of the Church’s moral teaching’, Veritatis Splendor, dated 6 August 1993. The rest reprints the set of eleven comments published in The Tablet, together with a brief introduction by the editor, John Wilkins.According to John Wilkins, ‘people feel that something is wrong’—‘there is a widespread moral unease’—but ‘the task of establishing a pluralist society which yet acknowledges shared values as the condition of that pluralism is proving beyond the capacities at present being brought to it’ (page ix, my italics). In the judgment of many worried people (not only Catholics), that would seem an unduly optimistic statement. It suggests that, while the task is beyond our intellectual powers ‘at present’, we may be better off in days to come. But what if the ‘shared values’ which would be the condition of the moral pluralism of Western culture are already as substantial as they ever could be—and are diminishing all the time? What if a pluralist society is, by definition, irreconcilably divided over deep moral issues? Where there are ex hypothesi radically conflicting conceptions of the good life which are never going to converge, let alone be unified, what content would there be to ‘shared values’ beyond temporary alliances, occasional trade-offs, and the kind of tolerance that has marked Western societies since people wearied of the religious wars?
Spirituality in Post‐War British Opera
Authors: Fuller Michael 
Published: July 2007

Opera is currently enjoying a great deal of public interest. In its popular understanding, as the most lavish, the most spectacular, the most luxuriant of art forms, it might not seem an obvious form for religious exploration, or the working out of spiritual problems. That, one might think, is rather the preserve of more private and introspective art forms: to be left to writers, poets, and workers in the plastic arts. Yet, in the operatic works produced by British composers in the last fifty or so years, many do take this apparently private subject-matter into this most public of artistic domains. This article is an attempt to draw together some of the more notable examples of this tendency, to compare them in their diversity, and to draw attention to this phenomenon among the non-opera-going public. (In all that follows, dates after opera titles refer to the year of their first production.)Bishop Richard Harries has recently remarked, ‘All works of art, whatever their content, have a spiritual dimension’, in that they can be a source of comfort and solace. He goes on to distinguish ‘a distinctive tradition of ostensibly spiritual art’, which ‘seeks to indicate through symbols the eternal reality behind, beyond and within this world’. In this article, the term ‘spirituality’ is used quite loosely, usually to refer to the use by composers and their librettists of material from sources acknowledged to be of spiritual significance. I have also drawn attention to composers’ uses of myths and legends, since these may be said to have a spiritual content in Harries’ sense, insofar as they consciously direct their hearers to levels of understanding beyond the simple level of the story being told.
Iris Murdoch
Authors: Dykes Anthony 
Published: July 2007

Iris Murdoch is a philosopher and a novelist. Her novels are not philosophy in narrative form: we would not expect her philosophical writings to be categorical formulations of her narrative line.Why should Murdoch, an Irish agnostic, be of interest to the clergy or those with theological preoccupations? Well, perhaps because much modern theology and spiritual writing employs, consciously or otherwise, a neo-Cartesian mentalist individualist epistemology. Or perhaps because we must be attuned to hearing people’s stories, or perhaps because when we understand people’s mental furniture better, many of our tasks will be clarified.Is there some more important reason? Yes. Because our way of praying, lamenting, celebrating, and perhaps what ever counts as prayer, will be affected by the kind of narrative we feel at home in.It may seem odd to speak of us ‘feeling at home’ in a novel, but if we easily see ourselves as the hero of Lucky Jim or This Sporting Life, feeling more at home in that role, than in a piece of more chaotic, fabulist metafiction like, say, The Philosopher’s Pupil it should tell us something about the philosophical anthropology we are employing. Put it this way: there are philosophical reasons for the hero of many modem novels being a rather alienated character, engaged in a more or less fruitless attempt to be ens causa sui, but these are not good reasons.A clue to what Murdoch is getting at may be found in her comment on the existentialist view of evil as found in Sartre’s La Naus?e ‘Sartre as Cartesian solipsist seems especially ... to exhibit a lack of any lively sense of the mystery and variousness of individuals’.
Under the Starry Night
Authors: Billy Denis J. 
Published: July 2007

I once had the opportunity to travel to St.-Rémy-de-Provence and to celebrate Mass in the chapel of the convalescent home where Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) spent two years of his life painting some of his most striking canvases (e.g., Cypress Trees, The Sower, Starry Night). An epileptic who suffered from erratic bouts of depression, Van Gogh came to this former abbey-turned-sanatorium in a futile attempt to ward off the disquieting shadows that haunted him in both his sleeping and waking hours and which eventually caused him to take his own life. The space created by the stone walls of the chapel’s romanesque nave has a chilling effect on the heart. It seems haunted by the spirit of a man whose delicate sense of life’s inner beauty was strangely (and inexplicably) heightened by the tragic circumstances of his waning sanity.The spirit of Van Gogh haunts the air and environs of his one-time place of refuge. During my short time there, I half-expected to catch his passing shadow in the comer of my eye ducking behind a column or escaping upon human detection into the lonely spaces of the nearby cloister. He lurks there, yes, in the chapel and adjoining gardens, down the long row of sycamores and beyond, in the surrounding fields. He lurks there, yes, in solitary isolation, always on the periphery—and never without evoking a deep sense of sadness. This place of healing could do nothing for the very man, whose brilliant swirling strokes and swift, contrasting colours continues to awaken a sense of wonder and yearning for transcendence in millions upon millions of searching admirers.
Styles of Scientific Thinking
Authors: Hodgson Peter 
Published: July 2007

Science as we know it today has a long history stretching back to the Greeks and the Babylonians. It is essentially the results of our continuing attempts to understand the natural world, and as such it is conditioned by our culture, by our beliefs concerning what is important and what is not about the nature and purpose of knowledge, and about the structure of argument and the criteria of proof. These factors vary from one culture to another, and together they determine the style of scientific thinking.It was very difficult to get started, and fatally easy to become trapped in a blind alley. Early civilisations amassed much natural lore, and extensive astronomical observations were made, notably by the Babylonians. But the chief credit for initiating the scientific enterprise belongs to the ancient Greeks.The whole scientific enterprise, as Alistair Crombie points out in his magisterial treatise, depends first of all on the underlying vision of reality, and then on the arguments used to support and verify that vision. The Greek philosophers provided both the vision and the argument. The first idea was that the vast complexity of the world can be understood in terms of simple elements; once we know these elements we can see how everything else follows from them, giving an integrated knowledge of the whole. The rules of rational inference were codified into the science of logic, and an outstanding example of the power of rational argument was provided by Euclid.