bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
What does it mean to be a Muslim today?
Authors: Hassan Riffat 
Published: July 2007

To be a Muslim today—or any day—is to live in accordance with the will and pleasure of Allah. Muslims often say, with joy and pride, that it is easy to be a Muslim since Islam is ‘the straight path’ leading to paradise. What this means, in other words, is that the principles of Islam are simple and straightforward, free of ambiguities, confusions, inconsistencies or mysteries, and that comprehending them or living in accordance with them is not difficult. The assumption here is that if one somehow comes to ‘the straight path’ by accepting Islam, which is Allah’s last and final revelation to humanity, one will fairly effortlessly arrive at the destination which is a state of eternal blessedness in the presence of Allah. I must confess that I am totally amazed, and overwhelmed, by this assumption. To me, being a Muslim today—or any day—seems to be exceedingly hard, for to be a Muslim one has constantly to face the challenge, first of knowing what Allah wills or desires not only for humanity in general but also for oneself in particular, and then of doing what one believes to be Allah’s will and pleasure each moment of one’s life.In view of the stereotyping of Islam and Muslims which has gone on in the West for many centuries, and especially since the Arab oil embargo of 1973 and the Iranian Revolution of 1979, it is necessary to state at the outset of this article that ‘the world of Islam’ is not a monolith and that Muslims differ as sharply within their “ummah” of one billion persons as do adherents of other major religious traditions within their own respective communities.
Islamisation and Women: the experience of Pakistan
Authors: Shaheed Farida , Mumtaz Khawar 
Published: July 2007

During General Zia-ul-Haq’s tenure, the escalating conflict in neighbouring Afghanistan brought Pakistan to the centre stage of international politics. However, at the popular level, it was Zia’s Islamisation campaign, particularly its more brutal manifestations, that drew shocked world attention. Following hard on the heels of the Iranian revolution, it raised fears of another Muslim fundamentalist sweep in the region. These fears were unfounded. Comparisons between the outcome of a mass movement and the impact of state-imposed measures introduced by a military dictator are unwarranted and one needs to remember that the religiously defined political parties (Islam-pasand) in Pakistan have consistently failed to mobilise wide-spread popular support. Furthermore, the current use of the term ‘fundamentalism’ is so loose that it obscures important differences between various religious political forces.Described by some as the high point of fundamentalism in Pakistan, the last decade should be seen as one which witnessed the convergence of interests between the military rulers and the Jamaat-e-Islami. The former needed political support for credibility; the latter saw in the situation the possibility of access to power, otherwise remote. Thus the slogan of Islamisation became the meeting point. If viewed in terms of social configuration this was the opportunity for the emerging class of traders and entrepreneurs to attain political power.
Friday, Saturday, Sunday
Authors: Lash Nicholas 
Published: July 2007

The Aquinas Lecture given at Blackfriars, Cambridge on 29 January 1990.1. Telling the timeBy current standards, St Thomas Aquinas did not have very much to say about time, and even less to say about Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. When discussing the commandments, however, he did say something rather interesting about the Sabbath. Human beings, he tells us, owe a threefold duty to the head of their community: a duty of faithfulness or single-hearted loyalty, of reverence, and of service. This threefold duty is, according to St Thomas, the subject-matter of the commands to worship only God, to refrain from taking his name in vain, and to keep the sabbath holy. It is, he says, the servant’s duty to repay through service the good things received from his lord. But what we have received from this Lord, the Creator, is—everything. Hence the command to sanctify the sabbath in grateful remembrance of the creation of the world: ‘sanctifica(re) sabbat(um) in memoriam creationis rerum’. In due course, I shall return to this suggestion that it is in keeping our very createdness in mind that we keep the Sabbath holy. But, first, I want to reflect on what is entailed in learning how to pray.But surely, you may say, we know how to pray? Jesus taught us how to pray: he taught us to say ‘Our Father ...’.But do we really know how to say ‘Our Father’ here and now, in this place, at this time?
J.‐K. Huysmans: The First Post‐Modernist Saint?
Authors: Flanagan Kieran 
Published: July 2007

1. The man himself.An incapacity to read French led me to the discovery of the significance of J.-K. Huysmans. In his book A Time to Keep Silence, Patrick Leigh Fermor used Huysmans’ term ‘les paratonnerres de la société’ to refer to the monastic calling, the time spent in ‘silent factories’ reducing ‘the moral overdraft of mankind’. One would expect monks to act as tuning forks for the holy, but hardly in this dramatic fashion, which seemed more the preserve of liberal theologians with advanced views. The phrase resonated in this sociological imagination. It seemed to be an answer to a long-standing effort to link sociology to an understanding of liturgical performance, where the actors endeavour to attune those present to signals of transcendence emerging from the absent. Huysmans appeared to be awarding monks a striking success in their social activities in attracting Divine attention. Apart from needing to find out the context of the phrase, a puzzle arose as to who was J.-K. Huysmans.Initial inquiries were perplexing. Huysmans was infamous for his work A Rebours, the classical pioneering study of the art of decadence. This was the book that so influenced Wilde in The Portrait of Dorian Gray, and which elicited the lofty mot at his trial that he never spoke of the morality of an author. Further inquiry indicated that Huysmans had become bored with decadence and had returned to Catholicism. An account of his return was given in his book, En Route. The paths of both authors crossed oddly in the present day, for the only copy of this work that could be located by the interlibrary loan service at Bristol University was at Reading. His dalliance with vice in A Rebours was well known; his return to virtue in En Route seems to have been overlooked.
Critical Theology and Education
Authors: Jones Gareth 
Published: July 2007

IntroductionTo many, linking the two words ‘critical’ and ‘theology’ will seem at best a tautology. After all, since Saint Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae, theology has been regarded firmly and explicitly as second-order reflection, which is of necessity ‘critical’ if it is genuinely reflective. And yet there is a sense in which this understanding of theology—and this understanding of reflection—as in some sense one single identifiable discipline is very uncritical. Some of the more recent developments in narrative theology, for example, do not lend themselves to such a generalised analysis. A concern with hermeneutic theory, too, leads one at least to doubt the notion that ‘theology’ is ‘always’ the same sort of enterprise; one need only consider the diversity of ‘local’ theologies in Central America, or Black Africa, to recognise the possibility of there being many different interpretations of ‘theology’. David Tracy’s magisterial study, The Analogical Imagination (London 1981), in which the vexed question of the relationship between theology and cultural pluralism is addressed, is arguably the finest recent examination of these issues.What I want to do in this short essay is to reflect upon our modern definition of ‘theology’, and to consider to what extent it is genuinely critical. To facilitate this, I will concentrate upon two texts: Tracy’s The Analogical Imagination; and John E. McPeck’s Critical Thinking and Education (Oxford 1981). In the light of their work, I will advance some ideas and suggestions concerning the way in which theologians might conceivably go about their tasks.
Francis and the Dark Night of Creation: A meditation on foolishness and discernment in St Francis of Assisi
Authors: Ayres Lewis 
Published: July 2007

In some ways we ‘know’ so little about Francis. We have many legends and accounts of his life, some written by those who were closest to him, some collated from earlier accounts by the Order as it grew in the century after his death. However, all of these chroniclers and interpreters shared one thing, they did not write as would an academic historian of today: they wrote to explain their devotion, to explain why one man should have had such a devastating and transforming affect on the religious life of his day. We can neither ignore these accounts because they do not fit the criteria that we demand of ‘history’ , nor unthinkingly accept them as a ‘scientific’ biography. We are called always to interpret.We know that Francis underwent a conversion and gave up a wealthy life to become one of the poorest of the poor. We know that gradually there gathered around him a body of followers who formed themselves under his guidance into a Brotherhood, and were eventually transformed into the more organised structure of an Order. He travelled far from his base in Assisi, from France to the Middle East, but always returned. Francis continually struggled to resist the urge to become anything but one of the poor, always fighting the acquisition of houses, possessions, learning, or any self-conceit. Eventually he gave up control of his Order to people with a different vision of their mission, preferring to become just another brother to fighting for control as the head of a large and expanding organisation. Two years before his early death he received the stigmata on the feast of the Holy Cross. His standing when he died in 1226, the victim of a life of fasting and near continual illness, was as great as it had ever been.
God and Repression
Authors: Lascaris Andrew 
Published: July 2007

In his attempt to defend the Declaration of Human Rights against criticism from both the second and the third world, the Belgian philosopher Guy Haarscher admits in his book Philosophie des Droits de l’homme (Brussels, 1987) that this would be easier if modern men could still believe in God. Why? Because God is the embodiment of what is common to all people. He represents the universal truth of human values on which human rights are based.Ever since Durkheim we have been strongly aware of the fact that there is a close relationship between society and faith in God. But Guy Haarscher states that God is dead. We cannot go back to a faith in God, he says, for it would entail accepting a hierarchically structured cosmos and thus a hierarchical society. Society before the French Revolution was such a society, one in which all individuals had their place, their definable rights and obligations. It was a society in which the value system was clear and persons enjoyed quite a lot of security, but in which they were not allowed to leave their places lest they endanger the society’s unity. In the third century Plotinus had argued for the inner goodness of such a social order, and his impact on Christian theology can hardly be overestimated; many Vatican declarations cannot be understood fully without some knowledge of Plotinus’ philosophy.For modern human beings this hierarchical society is repressive. The French Revolution marked the death of of hierarchical society and the dawn of an age in which (in theory) all individuals were allowed to find the places in society which suited them most.
Lefebvrism–Jansenism revisited?
Authors: Fisher Anthony 
Published: July 2007

Jansenism and Lefebvrism arose in profoundly different worlds. Yet there are striking similarities between them in beliefs and practices—common tendencies, attitudes and assumptions.Important similarities in the circumstances of their origins and development help to explain these. Not, of course, that the same weight can be given to all these similarities.For example, both movements have been led by people with charismatic personalities. Central to the development of Jansenism was a series of individuals with powerful personalities such as Saint-Cyran, the Arnaulds, Nichole and Pascal. Their biographies are well recorded—all too well, for the Jansenists loved writing hagiographies of each other—and need not be retold here. Suffice it to say that ‘the personal factor’ was pre-eminent in the direction of the coterie.Though vacillating and, by his own admission, inclined toward inordinate indignation, the personality and strong personal authority of Marcel Lefebvre, leader of the so-called ‘Tridentine movement’, has been central throughout the events linked with his name: his leadership at the Second Vatican Council of the conservative faction known as the Coetus Internationalis Patrum and his attack there against collegiality, against the declarations on religious liberty and against relations with non-Christians; his founding after the Council of the diocesan society ‘The Priestly Fraternity of S. Pius X’ in Fribourg; his setting-up of the seminary boasting preconciliar discipline, training and rites which was soon moved to Ecône; his illicit celebration of ‘Tridentine’ Masses and ordination of deacons, priests and finally bishops.
The Case for a Medicinal Ethic
Authors: de Dinechin Olivier 
Published: July 2007

What are the effects on moral theology of the arrival of the AIDS virus? In society as a whole, both in individuals and institutions, we could say that this virus has functioned as a ‘catalyst’, emphasising the reflexes, the ideologies, what is commonly shared and what is unspoken. In the Church as well, the stir has been significant, and we have more than once commented on the episcopal statements which have appeared in all the countries affected. The moral theologians have had to face questions from journalists, from colleagues or in their relationships with the Magisterium.Besides the strong recommendation to become involved without discrimination in the care of people infected by the virus, a striking phenomenon in this stir is the widely-shared impression—widely shared inside as well as outside the Catholic Church—that a certain kind of moral language is not suitable for those who are in the most direct contact with AIDS: the sick or people who are HIV Positive, their families, those caring for them, those responsible for public health, the scientific researchers and the pastors themselves. This gap was evident even at the international level, at the 4th Conference on AIDs organised by the Vatican, which took place on the 13—15 November 1989. Some of the moral theologians appointed to speak from the platform left speechless the majority of the thousand participants—priests, religious, doctors, directors of institutions—who had assembled from all over the world.
HIV in Britain 1982–1990: the Christian Reaction
Authors: Pendergast Martin 
Published: July 2007

’ “I’d shoot my son if he had AIDS”, says Vicar’, was a tabloid headline only four years ago. Thankfully, most Christians have moved on from that type of reaction. Nevertheless, the variety of Christian responses covers a wide spectrum of opinion and practice. In this respect Christians are no different from many other people in society. The Churches reflect and consolidate the values and mores of the society of which they are a part. The overall challenge for Christians facing HIV/AIDS, as well as many other contemporary issues, is how to be prophetic. This means not simply falling into a reactionary mould, but analysing what is happening in the pandemic of HIV, reflecting upon this reality and after much listening to people’s needs, discerning whether the Churches have anything valuable to say.It is important to distinguish institutional Christian responses, reflected in official statements, and the action on the ground by Christians of all denominations. In some responses there is convergence of view, in others informed dissent from ‘official’ lines. It is also important to note the context within which the debates about pastoral responses to AIDS/HIV take place, for these touch on other lively issues such as the right to life, understanding drug use, sexuality in general and homosexuality in particular. If society at large shows discomfort in dealing with these and some of the other major issues which AIDS raises, such as death and dying or the politics of health care, then it is hardly surprising that the Churches have been faltering in their first steps to respond.
Hear what AIDS says to the churches
Authors: Lion Antoine 
Published: July 2007

Even though, as these years of AIDS go by, knowledge accumulates, experiences circulate and piles of books about the subject are written, nevertheless everybody seems to advance into an unknown territory, without maps or compass. Humanity has not got this landscape printed in its memory and each person who is HIV positive must rediscover for himself or herself how to cope with life and death, with time and with love, with the future, with sex, with money, in short with all those relations that human beings do not stop more or less consciously creating so that their lives have meaning, and which, among those that that the virus overtakes, are overthrown from top to bottom.Often the man who is HIV Positive must live very much alone, so much is incommunicable. Moreover, he must often live with rejection and avoidance and fears—his own and others—in a society in which (to quote an observation of Olivier de Dinechin’s) it is many people’s opinion that ‘they brought it on themselves’ or even that ‘they have only got what they deserved’ ... whereas cancer is seen as a calamity and a heart-attack as almost an honour: ‘He worked too hard’. It is in a general silence or else censureship that some whole families are going into extinction, as Simon Robson describes in ‘Through the eye of a needle’. And, at least in some countries, to this rejection by public opinion very often is added exclusion from work, from one’s digs, from insurance coverage, from school ... the list goes on and on.
Religious Pluralism in Struggles for Justice
Authors: Gross Selwyn 
Published: July 2007

I am one of many people of faith active in the African National Congress and the Mass-Democratic Movement in South Africa. What I propose to do in this paper is to make you party to a discussion about religious pluralism which presently exercises people of faith like myself in the ranks of the ANC and the Mass-Democratic Movement. As part of a discussion in progress, conducted in a context which values collective work and the achievement of consensus, it is deliberately rough-edged, tentative and open-ended, intended to facilitate the extension of the discussion rather than to say the last word in it.What Hick calls ‘the universe of faiths’ is well-represented in the ranks of this liberation movement. In it people of different faiths are united in a common struggle for justice and peace in their land. People of faith involved in the struggle for justice and peace do not lead lives in which the religious and the political are split one from the other. On the contrary, the political and the religious come to form a seamless whole in the lives of people of faith involved in the struggle. If I may borrow a phrase from Albert Nolan, the struggle is experienced in a religious mode by people of faith, and this religious modality of the struggle for unitary non-racial democracy is a common feature of the experience of comrades of different faiths. But struggling for fundamental change in a country makes theological demands upon people of faith, not the least of which concerns religious pluralism.
BonJour on Foundationalism
Authors: Meynell Hugo 
Published: July 2007

Both the ‘coherentist’ and the ‘foundationalist’ theories of the justification of our claims to empirical knowledge are subject to considerable difficulty, as Laurence BonJour admirably brings out in his book The Structure of Empirical Knowledge. (Coherentism is the view that justification of a proposition is always and exclusively a matter of its coherence with a whole system of propositions; foundationalism, that it is at least sometimes also a matter of its having foundations in things which are not propositions, typically a range of sense-impressions or observations of physical objects.) BonJour argues, however, that while the difficulties encountered by the foundationalist view are insuperable, a version of the coherentist position can be salvaged by considerations which render it proof against the usual objections. I myself maintain exactly the opposite view, which I shall try to defend in what follows.If every empirical belief requires justification by another empirical belief, we seem to be faced with either a vicious circle or an infinite regress; and the sceptical conclusion appears to follow, that there is no reason to think that any empirical belief is true. The foundationalist tries to stop the regress by maintaining that some empirical beliefs are justified in a way that does not depend on inference from other such beliefs. One influential way of doing this (and the one which I shall try to defend) is to maintain that while indeed all empirical beliefs have to be justified, in the case of some of these beliefs, the justification consists of reference to mental states other than beliefs which do not themselves have to be justified; these are described in various ways by various authors, but are usually said to be ‘given’, ‘represented’, or something equivalent.
Secular Discourse and the Clash of Faiths: ‘The Satanic Verses’ in British Society
Authors: D'Costa Gavin 
Published: July 2007

Let us never believe that the way in which the people in power tell us to look at the world is the only way we can look, because if we do that, then that’s a kind of appalling selfcensorship. (Salman Rushdie).In Britain we believe in live and let live ... Moslems, Hindus, Buddhists and Rastafarians are all welcome to our tolerant society. But there is only one law for all of us ... Those who say their deep religious convictions prevent them from obeying the law of this land should quit Britain immediately and go and live in a country where the conflict does not exist. (Sunday Sport, 19 February, 1989 — editorial on Rushdie).So the battle over The Satanic Verses is a clash of faiths, in a way. Or, more precisely, it’s a clash of languages. (Salman Rushdie, The Observer, 22 January, 1989).Britain’s prized tolerant and pluralist society began to exhibit the power of its master code from the beginning of 1989, following the highly publicised second attempt at book burning by Bradford Muslims in January, 1989. (The first protest in Bolton, in December 1988, failed to get any media coverage—so it was repeated after advice that the national media be duly invited!). Text burning was encoded and enmeshed into two curiously related histories: that of Nazism and that of the history of religious bigotry and intolerance. Hence, from a major national quality paper: ‘following the example of the Inquisition and Hitler’s National Socialists, a large crowd of Muslims burnt some copies of the book’ (The Independent, 16 January, 1989).