bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Just for a Riband to stick in his Coat?
Authors: Allen Louis 
Published: July 2007

Mr Roe’s book comes as something of a surprise; not because of its contents or its presentation, but simply because it has not been done before. Of all the comparative literature theses of the ‘Jones in France’/‘Dupont in England’ variety, it is natural to expect that someone would have examined the role of Lamennais in this country. From any point of view, he is one of the greatest names in the history of ideas in the nineteenth century. He lived in England for awhile (a crucial while: it led to his much controverted decision to take orders), and had many English connections and admirers. No matter: Mr Roe has done the job very well indeed, though, as he is careful to warn us himself, he has been more concerned with the effect of Lamennais upon England, as exemplar, than with the influence of English ideas upon Lamennais.By the development of current religious and political ideas in his own person, Lamennais offered to English observers the essence of certain key notions in religion and politics which were otherwise diffused throughout the pages of books and periodicals and the actions of very different groups of men. He was one of the most articulate exponents of the renascent Bourbon legitimism with de Bonald and Chateaubriand in the days of the Drapeau blanc and the Conservateur.
The Case for Mao
Authors: Allen Louis 
Published: July 2007

Anything written about China, other than for the daily press, risks being out of date long before it gets into print. By the time this is being read, the differences between Chairman Mao and the administrative set-up in Peking may have been finally resolved, or shelved; there may even have been an intervention — though it is difficult to conceive of the Americans being foolish enough to back it — from Chiang Kai Shek. In theory, he has been awaiting just such a time of internecine strife to send an expeditionary force across to the mainland. That is, of course, if the strife is really as violent as we have been led to believe. English visitors recently (January 1967) in Canton suggest that although a few months ago there was a serious likelihood of the army under Mao moving from Shanghai against an army raised from Peking by Liu Shao Chi, this clash has been averted, and rumours of violent deaths by the hundreds in cities like Nanking seem to lack foundation.No doubt a movement with the youthful intensity of the Red Guards will not fade back into obscurity without some violence somewhere — you can’t summon up this massive support from a nation’s youth (their ages seem to range from 10 to 18) and then deprive it of an active outlet. But before we jump to hasty conclusions we should be very wary of press reports, particularly from correspondents who, though they may have been inside China for a week or so (it doesn’t seem to be all that difficult to get in) can’t converse with the Chinese without an interpreter,
The Limits of Liberalism
Authors: Eagleton Terry 
Published: July 2007

Rosemary Haughton’s latest book is an interesting and original attempt to connect literary, psychological, personal and Christian insight in a way which illuminates the meaning of being human for a Christian and at the same time creates common ground between Christian and non-believer. As such it is a significant achievement: the explorations of love, freedom, maturity, community are done with a sensitivity and intelligence which comes from a blending of common experience, in the psychology of personal relationship, with a sense of Christianity as a depth within this common knowledge. There are excellent individual accounts of the relation of childhood attitudes to the gospel, of the experience of passion and community and communication, and these add up to a book which represents the most deeply creative point in one important contemporary Christian tradition – the tradition of liberal, open, personal concern with the concretely human in actual relationships.To say this is also to indicate, negatively, the book’s weakness. For the liberal tradition is not the only one in modern Christianity and when it stands alone, as it does here, it demonstrates at once its strengths and failures, as an account of ‘the human’. It is dangerous to quarrel with a writer’s self-imposed limitations, and yet in a book which treats of the ‘human’ these can be indicative: the focus, very firmly, is on the personal, psychological, the immediately known and experienced, not on history, politics, institution, society, structure.
Benedictine Aggiornamento
Authors: Stacpoole Alberic 
Published: July 2007

The modern urge to dig up one’s roots to inspect their state of health has not escaped the Benedictines, and the spirited winds of the Vatican Council no less than of the September 1966 Rome Council of Abbots have given the urge an added impetus. The issues are broad and ontological, ranging from liturgical adaptation to the question ‘what is a monk?’. But no issue exercises theorists and practitioners alike so vehemently as that of the tension, as old as the ages of man, between Mary and Martha, between the contemplative and the active vocation. Both schools of thought agree that nihil opere Dei praeponatur (RB XLIII); but where the contemplative school believes that laborare et orare embraces the essential Benedictine life, the active school insists on the wider formula orare et laborare et praedicare. The latter believes as a corollory that something of orare which the contemplatives allot to lectio divina (essentially a preparation for prayer, if not an indirect mode of prayer itself), should be allotted in part to the necessary preparation praedicare – i.e. that prayer and apostolic work feed on one another and are mutually supporting in the monk’s proper pursuit of the unum necessarium.Both schools are returning to the fontes of monasticism, to Pachomius, Basil, Cassian, the Regula Magistri, the Regula Benedicti, S. Gregory’s Dialogues, in order to test and substantiate their case for the form of monastic life they favour.
Public Worship and Human Society
Authors: Crichton J. D. 
Published: July 2007

If we were to take a look at human society of some four and a half centuries ago, say, about the year 1500, we should see there a world that was still largely sacral. The whole of life was bound up with religion, the Church, the Sacerdotium, penetrating into every department of human life, and in the civil order the Imperium itself was regarded as sacred. The Sacerdotium may have been corrupt and the Imperium tottering but men still thought of the whole of society as sacred. Even the very processes of nature by which millions of men and women gained a painful livelihood were nearer to magic in their minds than we usually like to think they were. Nature was largely unpredictable, afflicted with mysterious calamities and marred from time to time by what were called ‘Acts of God’.On the other hand, there was an immense surge of new life throughout Europe. Men had rediscovered the ancient literature of Greece and Rome and were luxuriating in it. For more than a hundred years Italy had flowered with a new art in paint and stone, whose products we still admire. Great new buildings were going up, but above all, men felt that they were new beings. They were throwing off’ the restrictions of the old sacral order and were finding themselves, discovering new powers to which they could see no limit. Nature itself was being freed from the bondage of magic and within a hundred years Galileo would demolish the old picture of the cosmos and take the music out of the spheres.
Rome Converted and Paris Preserved
Authors: Allen Louis 
Published: July 2007

‘Has Rome been converted?’ is the question put by the title of Henri Fesquet’s book on Vatican II and its aftermath (Rome s’est-elle convertie? Paris, Grasset, 1966, 12.00 Frs.). Better placed than most to sound the reactions of the French bishops to events in Rome, Fesquet is Le Monde‘s correspondent on religious matters, and a very well-informed one he is. This makes the only slightly muted optimism of his book all the more surprising. He is convinced that the question must be answered in the affirmative, and he selects a number of themes to illustrate this — the new concept of the priest, the concern with the ecumenical spirit, with world poverty, with public opinion, and with the role of women in the Church.‘Thanks to Vatican II,’ he writes in the preface, ‘Catholicism is giving the impression of taking the Gospel more seriously. The Council’s most essential task . . . was for the Church to look at herself in the light of the New Testament. What does the Gospel tell us, if not that all progress passes through death ? The Church will only renew herself by accepting immolation in the image of her Founder.’ Immolation of the old, to direct the development of the new. A renewed Christian eschatology, for example, which will present itself to twentieth century man as the accomplishment and metamorphosis of humanity. And a way has been shown of reducing the tragic opposition between Marxism and Christianity, which only developed in the first place because Christians had forgotten their most urgent duty.
Jerusalem 1966
Authors: Vallquist Gunnel 
Published: July 2007

To come here for three days seemed rather meaningless beforehand. But since the itinerary included this visit, I did not want to miss it. It would at least be a preparation for the real journey one is always hoping for, with unbounded time at one’s disposal. Then there were other reserves: it’s no good hoping to penetrate the religious reality which lies below, behind, especially in so short a time; everything that obscures and blocks this — the tourists, the petty commerce, the local colour of the East, the apparatus of rival devotions — all this asserts itself in a much more clamant way.No contact with the religious reality — that was a foregone conclusion. But man proposes, God disposes. I could hardly imagine a more brutal contact with this reality. I passed those three days in solitude, with the Gospels and Jerusalem. I had little idea that so charged a current would pass between these two poles.Nevertheless, with every year that passes I am more and more seized by fear as I listen to the lamentations of Holy Week. ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem, return to the Lord your God.’ And I know that Jerusalem, which once meant the people ofjuda, the synagogue, now means the Church, Christianity, divided, heir not only of the promise but of the betrayal.
The Future of Belief
Authors: Wicker Brian 
Published: July 2007

Leslie Dewart’s book, just published in England, is the most far-reaching philosophical reappraisal of Catholic belief that has appeared in this country in recent years. It is symptomatic of a shift of emphasis that has begun to appear in Catholic thinking generally — away from ‘progressive’ preoccupations with the modernisation of the church, the liturgy, the parish, the ‘community’ and towards a new way of thinking and feeling about God. The modernisation programme – at least in terms of books — is wearing thin. Its slogans no longer seem much more relevant than the ones they replaced. They do not offer a satisfactory answer to the question ‘What the hell does it all mean?’ As Sebastian Moore rightly says, in his new book God is a New Language (which is another symptom of the same shift in emphasis), ‘what is within the circle (i.e. of progressive theologians) a revolution appears to the wider world to be a purely domestic battle, offering no more than the journalistic interest of a palace revolution’. Whereas — the implication is — what is needed is a real revolution. Dewart’s work is largely subversive: helping to prepare for that revolution and suggesting the outlines of a strategy.I have some reservations about Dewart’s thesis. In one sense I think he goes too far, and almost loses touch with the church as a community at all — and thus what is being hinted at is liable to become only an intellectual revolution, not one that overturns the world.
Fresh and New
Authors: Hastings Adrian 
Published: July 2007

I should like to make a comment on Father Van Straelen’s book The Catholic Encounter with World Religions, reviewed by Agnes Yendell in your February number.Reading it myself I was greatly surprised to discover in various places my own sentences (at times slightly twisted), simply stolen by the author without any acknowledgement. In all he has lifted a good sixty lines from my article ‘Missionary Thinking in the Context of Today’, New Blackfriars, August 1965. The references are as follows:V.S. p. 26, 15 lines from N.B., pp. 630 and 631.V.S. p. 65, 12 lines from N.B., p. 636.V.S. p. 71, 21 lines from N.B., pp. 631 and 632.V.S. p. 145, 12 lines from N.B., p. 639.My name appears nowhere in his book.The dust cover tells us that the fifth chapter on ‘The Council and the Missions’ “was written specially for this book”. How curious when reading twenty-two pages of this chapter to find that no less than eight of them have again been lifted bodily from a writing of Father de Tourigny, W.F. There is, of course, no mention of Fr de Tourigny anywhere.As we are rightly told on the cover Fr Van Straelen, who is a Ph.D. of Cambridge, a Professor of Philosophy, etc., ‘always produces something fresh and new’.How odd too that the book, which includes some long quotations from Cardinal Heenan, was nominated by the Cardinal in the Catholic Herald as his ‘Book of the Year’ for 1965.
Authority in the Church
Authors: Nowell Robert 
Published: July 2007

Any discussion of authority in the Church today must start from the fact that authority in the political sense has become a dirty word. To adapt a saying originally coined by Sir William Harcourt in 1889 and given wider currency by the future King Edward VII in 1895, we are all anarchists now. There was a time when authority was given the benefit of the doubt: unless there was glaring evidence to the contrary, it was assumed that those in authority knew what they were doing and thus commanded our obedience; and even if the matter was analysed further and it was admitted that authority could make mistakes, it was thought better that the wrong decision should be made and applied immediately than that any decision should be deferred until it might be too late. Today our assumptions tend to work the other way. We assume that those in authority will lurch from blunder to blunder, and we no longer see any great virtue in muddling through: it is apt to be a messy and expensive business.This cannot be put down simply to a widespread cynicism alleged to exist as part of a supposed far-reaching malaise affecting the whole of our national life today. Indeed, there is some justification, if not for cynicism, at least for scepticism: our governments since the war seem to have been singularly unable to avoid leading us into one economic crisis after another, and when we are encouraged to swallow yet another dose of deflationary medicine we cannot help wondering if this cannot do more than alleviate the immediate symptoms of our economic ill-health.
Expo ‘67 and the Mersey Funnel
Authors: Nuttgens Patrick 
Published: July 2007

The coincidence of the opening of a gargantuan international exposition at Montreal and of a new cathedral at Liverpool is provocative of questions about the relationship of architecture to society and of the sacred to the secular. In some ways an international exhibition like Expo ‘67 is to our century what the building of a cathedral was to an earlier one—lots of people and fun and a tempting opportunity for architectural gymnastics on a universal scale.That, in terms of cost at least, is what such an exhibition is; and ever since Paxton’s Crystal Palace patrons and designers have seized their chance. But Expo ‘67 has another dimension. By the manmade islands, near the tense and justified hilarity of rival national displays, is the building of Habitat, permanent housing of an aggressively experimental kind. The units are piled up with a cubist exploitation of spaces between and through and over them. They are homes. They are extravagant; they cost per home about ten times what we would spend on local authority housing. Yet it all seems reasonable.It seems reasonable because an exhibition is a chance to make innovations and experiments unhindered by a realistic budget. And that is one of the few ways in which experiments on a big scale can be made. (Otherwise the costs escalate, as in aircraft development.) In this case the designer can try out a social experiment: exploring ways of additively building up a group of homes individually expressed, the reverse of the tall slabs of storage for people with which we have become familiar.
The Sacred and The Whole
Authors: Buckley Vincent 
Published: July 2007

Brian Wicker’s new book is important not only because of the analysis which he gives of our historical present and of the potencies within it but also because of the sources on which he calls to establish his analysis and the terms in which he calls on them. They are terms particularly congenial to the literary imagination, for one reason because they suggest a renewed life for poetry. Briefly, Mr Wicker argues that it would be a mistake to see our historical moment as one in which a conception of the sacred is fighting unequally against the secular actuality, or in which secularism must be accepted by Christians as a providential subversion of myths no longer acceptable to reason. On the contrary, he says, the most rational account of our condition, both existential and essential, is one in which a conception of the sacred will be not only preserved, not only renewed either, but remade. His account of this may bring unease both to those who think there is only one way to talk about the sacred and to those who think it retrograde to talk about the sacred at all.In speaking in such terms he is of course speaking from within a cultural dilemma whose nature he recognizes; our society in so far as it is opting for ‘secularism’ is opting to sit on one horn of the dilemma; for its refusal of the sacred is not only a refusal of a ‘meaning’ in and for life but an inability to participate fully in the world of meaningful presences and activities.
Contemplation and The Knowledge of God
Authors: Tugwell Simon 
Published: July 2007

This is not an exhaustive study of contemplation, and I omit severa important aspects of the subject; most drastically, I omit any discussion of Christ as the ultimate revelation of God. I feel entitled to do so for two reasons: first, that Christ characterized himself as ‘the way’, and it is therefore permissible to make a preliminary enquiry, such as this present one, into what, in general, one is looking for in an approach to God. And secondly, we no longer know Christ himself in the flesh. To see Christ is to see the Father: but how do we see Christ? To some extent we may re-assimilate the problem of knowing Christ to that of knowing God (though since the Incarnation, one cannot leave it at that, obviously; otherwise the Incarnation would have no enduring revelatory significance, which it clearly has).In English we are unfortunate in having only one word ‘know’ for both savoir and connaître; for the distinction is very important between knowing a fact, and knowing a person, and it is easy to create devastating problems for ourselves by tacitly assimilating contemplation of God to savoir rather than connaître.The most obvious distinction between knowing a fact and knowing a person is that the former is abstract and general, while the latter is particular. The object of the former type of knowledge, being an abstraction, only exists in my mind. In Buber’s terminology, there is an I-It relationship, an It always being only a part of my world.
From Bonhoeffer to Gandhi: God as Truth
Authors: Douglass James W. 
Published: July 2007

The world as suffering and as entering transformation is crucifixion. At the heart of the world is the continuation and working out of Golgotha. The revolution of peace is the world in the critical process of overcoming its self-resistance to unity through the upward convergence of love, a process animated by the union of God and man.But the world is creation as well as crucifixion, natural growth as well as divine revolution. Man is born in the cathedral of earth and sky, reaches out to the infinite silence of the universe, and begins to form himself in a rhythm of creation and self-recognition. Man is growing and maturing through time, provoking and provoked by a progressive self-understanding. Today the world as creation is man’s cumulative discovery of himself in time, not at his deepest self-identity—for his deepest manhood is found through his suffering union with God, through crucifixion not creation, or through that unique creation which is crucifixion. But the world as evolving creation is man’s growing discovery of himself as distinct and fully responsible, as that one called from childhood to recognize and affirm the possibilities of a world come of age.In The Secular City Harvey Cox has effectively described the present point of the world as creation in terms of secularization, of ‘man turning his attention away from worlds beyond and toward this world and this time’ (The Secular City, 1965, p. 2). The age of the secular city is a liberation of man from religious world-views whose orientation distracted him from the task of building the earth.
Christian Leadership?
Authors: Haughton Rosemary 
Published: July 2007

We are constantly being told there is a ‘crisis of authority’. Catholics in particular are always talking about authority and worrying about it, in fact they seem to have a sort of obsession about it—for or against. But they aren’t the only ones who worry, it affects all aspects of public and private life. It affects, naturally, the idea of what kind of leadership—if any—Christians can give at a time like this, in a society like ours. Does the ‘crisis’ mean that the possibility of leadership has gone, at least for the time being? Is there any sense in Christians trying to shore up the crumbling walls of authority?In order to answer questions of this kind we need to ask two others, which we seldom do ask because we take the answers for granted. These questions are first, What is authority? and secondly, What kind of society do we live in?It’s important to see exactly what we mean by authority, otherwise we are likely to waste a lot of time talking at cross-purposes.Authority is primarily to do with community, in fact it is an essential ingredient of community. We tend to think of authority as synonymous with power, or government. Authority may involve the exercise of governing power, but that is not its nature.
Irony Ironised
Authors: Poole Roger 
Published: July 2007

‘I sate alone here, by my lamp, nigh to the windows with shutters closed, before me the length of the hall, and read Kierkegaard on Mozart’s Don Juan. Then in a clap I am stricken by a cutting cold, even as though I sat in a winter-warm room and a window had blown open towards the frost. It came not from behind me, where the windows lie; it falls on me from in front. I start up from my boke and look abroad into the hall, belike Sch. is come back, for I am no longer alone. There is some bodye there in the mirk, sitting on the horse-hair sofa that stands almost in the myddes of the room. . . .’Such is the meeting of Adrian Leverkühn, the demonic composer of Thomas Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus, with the Devil, who has come to make the traditional bargain for a soul.It is not by accident that Adrian Leverkühn is reading Kierkegaard’s essay on Mozart’s Don Juan in Either/Or. We might even hazard a guess as to which lines Leverkühn was reading when the Devil appeared:‘When sensuousness appears as that which must be excluded, as that which the spirit can have nothing to do with, yet without passing judgment upon it or condemning it, then the sensuous assumes the form of the demonic in aesthetic indifference. . . . Don Juan consequently is the expression for the demonic determined as the sensuous; Faust its expression determined as the intellectual or spiritual, which the Christian spirit excludes.’