bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The Latest Vatican Statement on Christianity and Other Religions
Authors: Hick John 
Published: July 2007

Last year the Vatican issued a document, Christianity and the World Religions, prepared by its International Theological Commission and approved by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The document arises from a recognition that ‘The question of the relations among religions is becoming daily more important’, and that circumstances today ‘make interreligious dialogue necessary’. Accordingly, the Commission sets out to ‘clarify how religions are to be evaluated theologically’ by offering ‘some theological principles which may help in this evaluation’. And the Commission adds that ‘In proposing these principles we are clearly aware that many questions are still open and require further investigation and discussion’ (3-5).Although the Report’s title continues the traditional conceit that Christianity is not itself one of the world religions, these opening statements suggest a tentative and relatively undogmatic approach which contrasts with the 1996 address by Cardinal Ratzinger himself, in which in presenting the traditional absolutist position he attacked two theologians extensively by name, seriously misrepresenting their views as a result of not having read their writings for himself. His Eminence’s failure to check the accuracy of the tendentious secondary source on which he relied is all the more surprising in view of the accurate and up-to-date section on the state of the discussion, based on a wide knowledge of the existing literature, in this Report of his own Theological Commission. Here all the main competing schools of thought, both Catholic and Protestant, are included and discussed. The Report was first drafted in 1993 and its expertise must have been available to the Cardinal, had he wished to have more reliable information.
Sexing the Trinity
Authors: Loughlin Gerard 
Published: July 2007

For George Batailie (1897-1962) the world is ‘purely parodic'. Each thing we see is ‘the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form’ (Batailie 1985: 5). For Batailie, everything in the world is ultimately relatable to everything else, everything can be substituted for another thing, in a ceaseless process of metaphoric exchange. It is the circulation of language that makes this possible; and since it is possible in language it is possible in the world(s) that language constitutes. The coupling of words performs the copulation of bodies.For Batailie, parody utterly eroticises the world, so that in the running of the ‘locomotive’s wheels and pistons’ he sees the world's ‘two primary motions’ of ‘rotation and sexual movement'. In the image of the steam engine's pounding pistons and turning wheels, he sees the coupling of animals and the movements of the planets, always moving from ‘their own position in order to return to it, completing their rotation'. These ‘two motions'—the thrusting of sexual frenzy and the circling of the stars—are ‘reciprocally transformed, the one into the other', so that the turning of the earth ‘makes animals and men have coitus’ and—since ‘the result is as much the cause as that which provokes it'—the coupling of animals and men turns the earth (Batailie 1985:6).In this article I want to trace the similar parodying of the erotic in the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar. While Batailie couples the sun and moon with the sea, with clouds and plants, with the coitus of animals and the ‘amorous frenzy’ of men and women (Batailie 1985: 5)
Von Balthasar and the Dialogue with Karl Barth
Authors: Quash Ben 
Published: July 2007

Karl Barth suits the role of a kind of theological Petruchio. Petruchio, you will recall, bursts upon the stage in The Taming of the Shrew, with the ‘shrew’ herself, Katherina, in his sights. He is determined to win the right to the hand of a maiden whom he construes as hostile, just as Barth (the early Barth at least) saw the theological establishment representing all the arrogance and vanity of a liberal theology in thrall to bourgeois complacency. He invades this hostile world in the name of the Word of God; he elects to be ‘rough, and woo not like a babe’, as Petruchio puts it. And as much of the theological establishment in Europe at the beginning of the 1920s reeled back in shock at Barth’s onslaught in The Epistle to the Romans, so Katherina is thoroughly taken aback by this
‘ ... one half lunatic A mad-cap ruffian and a swearing Jack,That thinks with oaths to face the matter out’. (II i)Petruchio will not deal with Katherina on her own territory. He whisks her away to his own remote and inhospitable house, and then turns her every expectation on its head. This is ‘crisis wooing’. Just as, in the early Barth, for the world of the creature to cross over the threshold into the divine world would entail its destruction and immolation, because of the utter difference of God’s ways and humanity’s ways, God’s eternity and humanity’s time, God’s holiness and humanity’s sin, so Katherina’s entrance into Petruchio’s house is entry into an environment in which all her expectations and routines tire altered.
‘Great Cemeteries Under the Moon’: Bernanos and the Spanish Civil War
Authors: Cervantes Fernando 
Published: July 2007

It is not often that a single work of literature can be earmarked as a watershed in its author’s intellectual development, but Les grands cimitieres sous la lune seems to offer an almost incontestable case for such an honour. Before its publication in 1938, its author, Georges Bernanos, had been widely known as conservative royalist who had had no qualms about openly supporting Charles Maurras and L'Action franqaise, even after their condemnation by the pope in 1926. Thus it was only to be expected that a book by Bernanos, inspired by the Spanish Civil War, would at least echo the staunch support that Maurras and his followers were giving General Franco. Yet Les grands cimitieres was not only bitterly critical of Franco and the Falange, but it also wasted no opportunity to launch some especially vitriolic attacks on Maurras himself, attacks which signalled a definitive break with the French conservative establishment. How could Bemanos’ outlook and central convictions have undergone such a radical transformation?I shall argue that to pose the question in such terms can prove highly misleading. For if it is true that Les grands cimiti?res marks a watershed, it is no less true that it was primarily the scandal that the book caused among Bernanos’ French readers, rather than any fundamental change in Bernanos’ basic thinking, that caused such a watershed. Indeed, as the emphatically reluctant tone of the book attests, Bernanos himself was acutely conscious of this danger. ‘I am not a writer,’ he tells us, ‘The mere sight of a blank page fills me with anguish.”
John XXIII and Just Cause for Modern War
Authors: Kane Brian M. 
Published: July 2007

Although other ages have seen a multitude of wars, in the twentieth century, we have developed a chilling efficiency for aimed conflict which seems to rise in intensity with each passing year. Historically, Catholic thought on the moral justification for war has tended to accept the possibility that, in strictly defined circumstances, a state has the right to engage in warfare. Yet, in recent years, papal statements have tended to severely limit even the few circumstances which have traditionally been permitted for the moral use of warfare by the state. In particular, John XXDI is often cited as an example of this trend.This article will explore the thought of John XXIII on the particular issue of his interpretation of the criterion of just cause. This particular element of the set of criteria which govern the prospective use of lethal force by the state against another state, jux ad bellum, is significant for any discussion of modem just war theory. This criterion judges the moral end of the use of lethal force by the state. Traditionally, three reasons have been advanced as just causes: ad vindicandas offensiones (to gain justice over a completed offense), ad repetendas res (to retake property which has been stolen) and ad repellandas injurias (to resist an armed attack which is in progress). The trend of modern just war theories have been toward excluding the first two reasons and giving grudging acceptance to the third.John XXIII unlike his predecessor, Pius XII, was not explicit concerning the moral permissibility of self-defense.
John Caird‐Theologian and Philosopher
Authors: Mander W. J. 
Published: July 2007

John Henry Muirhead once said that British Idealism was from the first in essence a philosophy of religion. He saw it as an appeal to the ideas of the German Post-Kantians for the purpose of defending religious belief against the many new challenges mounted to it during the second half of the nineteenth century, challenges which had rendered untenable the less critical faith of preceding generations. Muirhead’s interpretation could be disputed, for it is not clear that it accurately describes the principal motivation of all members of the British Idealist school, but if there is truth in it, and I think that there is, nowhere is this more so than in the case of the Scottish theologian and philosopher, John Caird, for Caird’s entire oeuvre revolved around the project of reconciling Christianity and Idealism.A celebrated preacher, then innovative professor of theology and finally much respected Principal of Glasgow University, John Caird was in his time a well-known and highly regarded figure. Today however his work is almost entirely forgotten, along with that of many others in the idealist movement; such ways of thinking having passed from favour as completely as they once held dominance of the intellectual scene. Yet we run the risk of misunderstanding our history, and thus our own present, if we insist on simply turning our faces from certain eras of thought or movements of ideas and deeming them fallow or uninteresting. For that way we simply construct a history which reflects our current prejudices but never can challenge them. In this paper I shall outline the work of John Caird in an attempt to show why it deserves to be remembered, but first let me provide just a few biographical details.
Justice, Peace and Dominicans 1216–1999: V ‐ The New World: Bartolomé de las Casas and “the option for the poor”
Authors: Smith Austin 
Published: July 2007

If you look in a popular atlas for the world of Las Casas—in other words, Central and South America and the West Indies—you will find it tucked away at the end. An afterthought, you might say. Our atlases very much help to shape our mental geography.In fact the world of Las Casas covers one-sixth of the earth’s total land surface and now contains over 500 million people, the vast majority of them Catholics (they account for almost half the world’s Catholic population). However, still nearly half of the people in that world are illiterate, and nearly half of them are landless peasants; there is, in other words, still a huge gap between the rich and the poor. Las Casas would be broken-hearted to know that today at least some of the ugly consequences of the colonisation which began five centuries ago are still there for every discerning foreign tourist to see. But who was Las Casas?Men like Dominic and Francis in varying ways powerfully articulated timeless questions in the lights of their times, and we call them men of vision. We must not claim too much for them, for they were in and out of their times. At the same time, we must keep them alive in our collective memory in a living historical conversation rooted in discernment and interpretation. They took hold of the past, immersed themselves in a living experience of their present, decoded from all that some of the timeless questions of humanity, and humbly suggested a possible and perhaps better future by word and action.
Was there a Bishop of Rome in the First Century?
Authors: Jones David Albert 
Published: July 2007

The aim of this paper is to examine the historical question as to whether mono-episcopal government existed in the local Church in Rome in the first century AD. It is not intended to engage upon the related task of theological reflection upon the role of bishops within the Church and their claim to be successors to the apostles in this role.There has been a development in the Church’s understanding of ministry and authority, just as there has been a development in the Church’s understanding of the Trinity or the Incarnation. Leo the Great was as certain of the authority of the Petrine office, as he was of the reality of the two natures of the one person of Christ. The task of showing whether such developments were legitimate is ultimately a theological one, though it is one that will involve reflection upon history. It is not prima facie obvious that a high doctrine of the papacy does require that a single bishop exercised magisterial authority in Rome in the immediate post-apostolic age. Yet this question is only raised at this point so that it may be set aside. Here we consider the simpler historical question as to whether the evidence available requires, suggests, or excludes the supposition that Christian ministry in Rome in the latter part of the first century was mono-episcopal.
How to edit, how to read
Authors: Poole Roger 
Published: July 2007

At last Søren Kierkegaard is beginning to get the attentive reading he deserves. Hegel and Marx, Nietzsche and Freud have all had their day, but Kierkegaard has always rolled along as a kind of fifth wheel. It was suspected that he was as great as the others, but no-one could quite say why. That was partly because he existed, for decades, only in the hasty and sometimes impressionistic translations of the Rev. Walter Lowrie, who began to translate him in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s. These translations were indeed ‘works of love’. Lowrie’s translation of The Concept of Dread, for example, was completed ‘in a month of thirty-one days, working twelve hours a day’. In the 1980’s however, the Princeton edition called Kierkegaard’s Writings, edited by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong began to appear, and these are scrupulously academic translations, with a plethora of learned notes. The edition is complete now—the last of the 26 volumes appeared in 1998.In all this, the Danes themselves played little part. For them, Spren Kierkegaard was an irritation almost too great to borne while alive, and a bore to talk about ever since. The Danes could never understand why, from the 1950’s on, there was a steady stream of scholars and philosophers, coming to Copenhagen, nosing around the second-hand bookshops in the hope of finding first editions of Spren Kierkegaard. Only in the 1990’s did the penny finally drop. A huge grant was made in 1993 by the Danish National Research Foundation, to the tune of 27,500,000 Danish kroner, and a Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre was set up at the University of Copenhagen, under the direction of a handful of Danish scholars, with the aim of setting up and publishing a critical edition of his complete works. Thus, only 138 years late, the Danes took official cognisance of their greatest literary son. The edition, in 55 volumes, with an electronic version to follow, is about to roll off the press. The first five volumes of text and commentary were available as of 10 October 1998.
The Invisible Made Visible: Angels from the Vatican
Authors: Buckley James J. 
Published: July 2007

How do we make the invisible visible? How do we see, or touch, what others have made visible? Such questions can, of course, mean different things. They might be questions about how technology such as telescopes and microscopes have made visible the previously invisible things, and what (if anything) such technology leaves invisible. They might also be political questions about how previously invisible groups are made visible, and how invisible we can make ourselves to each other without ceasing to be. And there are equally important philosophical questions about whether the invisible is, if so what it means to make it visible, and whether in so doing we perfect or destroy it. Such questions are on the back burners of this essay.But my focus is more specific. An exhibition Angels from the Vatican. The Invisible Made Visible has been touring the United States. These are artifacts of angels from the Vatican museum. Embattled church politicians might regard the title as oxymoronic; they would also not be surprised that it is sponsored by the Chrysler Corporation. But I think it is the sub-title rather than the title of the exhibition that raises (perhaps from the dead) many old and new questions about angels, precisely by considering angels under the rubric of “The Invisible Made Visible”.’ The exhibition, in its version at the Walters Art Gallery (Baltimore, Maryland), consists of four galleries and a lengthy balcony-corridor of about one hundred paintings, sculptures, and other artifacts ranging from a sixth century before Christ Assyrian “winged genius” to a twentieth century painting by Salvador Dali.
Was there a Bishop of Rome in the First Century?
Authors: Duffy Eamon 
Published: July 2007

David Albert Jones’ article purports to address a strictly historical question: did the Church in first-century Rome have a single presiding bishop? His argument is designed to examine and refute the view (found in my history of the popes among other places) that the rule of a single bishop was slow to develop in Rome, and that, consequently, the later Roman episcopal lists (most notably that provided by Irenaeus towards the last quarter of the second century) represent a retrospective tidying up of what had been in fact a messier and more complex situation.Behind this apparently straightforward agenda, however—the sorting out of the facts as far as we can discover them—Fr Jones has another and more pressing objective. He wants to suggest that those like myself who hold that the emergence of the monoepiscopate in Rome was a post-apostolic development, still incomplete at the beginning of the second century, do so not on the basis of the evidence, but because they are in the grip of an unCatholic mindset which colours—and in his view distorts—historical judgement. So, on the first page of his article, he identifies the position he is criticising as “the classic Protestant account of the matter dating from at least as far back as Harnack”. I am intrigued by that adjective “Protestant”. What work is it doing in the fabric of Fr Jones’ argument? It is of course true that Harnack read the evidence in this way: but then so did his older contemporary Louis Duchesne, a Catholic priest with a fair claim to be considered the greatest of all Catholic Church historians, and certainly the greatest nineteenth- century historian of the early Papacy.
Law and Theology in Fishacre's Sentences Commentary
Authors: Goering Joseph 
Published: July 2007

The topic of this brief communication, Theology and Law in Fishacre’s Sentence Commentary, emerges, as one might expect, from the decade- long project of producing a critical edition of the commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences by the Dominican theologian, Richard Fishacre. Preparing this edition has been a delightful and often-surprising exercise, and it is one of the surprises that concerns us here. Put in the form of a question, it is this: Why does a Dominican theologian, teaching in the theology faculty of the University of Oxford during the 1240’s, devote so much of his exposition of Book Four, on the Sacraments, to a detailed consideration of the Church’s canon law and to the teachings of the jurists?'The edition of Fishacre’s commentary provides two kinds of clues to the question. The first is what Fishacre says, explicitly, and the second is what he does—the ways in which he utilizes canon law and the teachings of the canonists in his commentary. We will examine each type of evidence in turn.Fishacre, like most medieval teachers, took a great deal of care in writing his inaugural lecture for each term of study in the schools, and these lectures now form the prologues to his commentaries on each of the four books of Sentences. What is striking, at least to this reader, is not what Fishacre says about the relation of Law and Theology, but rather what he does not say. Nowhere in the Prologue to Book Four does he prepare us for the abundant recourse he is about to make to the teachings of the canonists.
Why Medievalists should talk to Theologians
Authors: Kerr Fergus 
Published: July 2007

Philosophers regularly debate with their predecessors, historians of philosophy are often astonished at the results, yet the two seldom exchange notes. The Bounds of Sense, published in 1966 by Peter Strawson, is one of the best books by one of the finest Oxford philosophers of our day: an interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, the author allows in the second sentence of the preface that, ‘as any Kantian scholar who may read it will quickly detect, it is by no means a work of historical-philosophical scholarship’. In the other philosophical tradition, Martin Heidegger brought out a study of Kant in 1929 which immediately sold out: in his preface to the second edition (1950), he allowed that the ‘violence’ of his interpretation, deplored by Kantian scholars, could indeed be substantiated from the text, but fended off the criticism by claiming that ‘historical-philosophical research is always justified when it makes this objection against attempts that want to bring about a thoughtful conversation between thinkers’. He goes on: ‘In contrast to the methods of historical philology, which has its own task, a thoughtful dialogue stands under different laws’. In short, students of the history of philosophy have a job to do; but they have no part in the conversation in which philosophical thought takes place. Heidegger, and even Strawson, clearly regard the work of historians of philosophy as less than vital for the advance of philosophy.University students of philosophy, in whichever tradition, learn within their first few weeks to rehearse the objections to Cartesianism; it is not an objection that, historically, Descartes may never have been a Cartesian.
Pneumatology: Edward Schillebeeckx's Recent Theology
Authors: Bergin Helen 
Published: July 2007

The Christian theological tradition has always found discussion of the Holy Spirit difficult. In early patristic writings, for example, the Holy Spirit was often treated as an adjunct to discussions about the relationship between Jesus and God. For both Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas, the Spirit was ‘love” or “gift”—designations which are indeed real, but also to a certain extent elusive. Today, some contemporary theologians find the task of describing the Holy Spirit no less difficult. William Hill and Colin Gunton both speak of the “self-effacing” Spirit; Leonardo Boff speaks of the Spirit who “cannot be imagined” while Paul Evdokimov speaks of the “mysterious face” of the Spirit. Other contemporary theologians speak of the Holy Spirit in relation to the Spirit’s function of making connections. Some time ago, John Taylor called the Holy Spirit The Go-Between God. Latterly, Mary Grey and Elizabeth Johnson have been exploring the Spirit’s function as that of bringing different entities into relationship. Kilian McDonnell suggests that the Holy Spirit is the “horizon” in which believers pray and reflect, but the Spirit is never an “object.” Such comments about the Holy Spirit from believers prior to and contemporary with Edward Schillebeeckx provide a background for discussing and assessing his treatment of the Holy Spirit.This discussion has three parts. I will first describe the theology of the Holy Spirit presented in the theological writings of Edward Schillebeeckx between 1974 and 1994; second, I will offer some critique on his treatment of the Holy Spirit; third, I will draw on Schillebeeckx’s theology to suggest future directions for pneumatology.