bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Forces And Divisions that Contribute to Violence in South Africa
Authors: Dzimba John 
Published: July 2007

Very few people in South Africa are satisfied with the present sociopolitical scene and its prevailing violence; most people agree that change is necessary. But that is the limit of their agreement There are great internal differences amongst both black and white people about the means to be used in bringing about change. These differences amongst people of the same race, national group and even political party complicate the problem, generate further conflict and could contribute to violence.Alternatively, such differences could be an optimistic sign in that people often shape their political goals in terms of their own individual thought and interest, instead of just adhering to a racial or national block. Leaving aside the varieties of political aim and outlook, this article focuses on the models of ‘identity’ different groups are using or are prepared to use (consciously or unconsciously) to generate or provoke violence in South Africa. To make this analysis I have distinguished five categories: race and apartheid; fear and closedmindedness; clash of ideologies; fear and propaganda; and the international implications of conflict in South Africa. These categories should be discussed in the context of the present ‘dominating’ counteridentities existing in South Africa. These, in turn, centre around the idea of National Security, the maintenance of Afrikaner identity through racial separation, Black Consciousness, ‘ Liberalism’, Capitalism, Marxism in its various forms, the Liberation struggle and several forms of ethno-nationalism or tribal exclusiveness. It is through understanding each of these ‘counter-identities’ that we can grasp the complex forces forging South African ‘identities’.
The Incarnation and the Fully Human Life
Authors: Fisher Anthony 
Published: July 2007

Søren Kierkegaard told a story about a powerful king who truly loved a humble maiden. The king’s problem was: how was he to elicit from her a true love not based on mere homage or less genuine motives? He could make her a princess—but that would be an artificial and external act, testifying more to his power than his love. He could, as in the fairytales, disguise himself as a beggar and win her love as such—but true love cannot be based on deception. After much thought he realized that if the union could not be brought about by the elevation of the maiden or by his own pretence, there was only one possibility: he must resign his kingdom, and humbling himself to her station, become a slave. And this he did. God became man. No mere jest. No mere outer garment humanity. God must suffer all things, endure all things, experience all things—because God’s love is genuine.We do not know much about Jesus’ particular temperament. We can glean from the Gospels that he liked periods of solitude, was prayerful, and had a strong sense of mission. He hated hypocrisy and had a special affection for the down-and-outs. One aspect of his personality that has not received much attention in traditional spiritual writing is that Jesus was a great party-goer.
The Women of Muriel Spark Narrative and Faith
Authors: Sproxton Judy 
Published: July 2007

Muriel Spark’s concept of faith is an essential feature of her work.lt
supplies perspective and balance. Without an appreciation of it, her novels
may only be valued for their wit, their irony, their unpredictability. These
are indeed attractive aspects of her writing. However, they do not function
merely to tease, surprise and entertain. They exist to illustrate a life
which is essentially fragmented.
In a world where nothing can be fully grasped, there are dangers; the
most threatening is a misplaced confidence in a single selfish viewpoint.
Such an error constitutes an essential sin in Christian terms: it is
philautia, love of self. St Augustine
described sin as a turning away from God towards the self. Sin in Christian
terms is negative: it is the opposite of all that comes from God. And so we
find certain characters in Spark’s work mistakenly asserting themselves as
the source of power and their own viewpoint as a criterion of truth. On the
other hand we find characters who have a profound need to acknowledge a
truth beyond themselves and who strive to come to terms with the essential
inadequacy of a human perspective. These characters have a determination to
identify what is true and honest in their existence; they have a sense of
irony and sometimes a great sense of joy. All these characters describe
themselves as Catholics. Although they are not portrayed as dependent on
church ritual or practice, the dimension of faith is of the utmost
importance to them.
Caroline in The Comforters is most explicitly
bound up in her faith. She is a convert and finds herself patronized by
cradle Catholics such as Mrs Hogg. She is irritated by this for she has a
sense of her faith which lies beyond the smug platitudes of this woman.
Although Caroline goes into retreat, she does not encounter her faith by
turning her back on her life. On the contrary, the challenges, the
irritations and the mysteries which nurture her faith are in her
experience.
New Insights into Matthew 27: 24–25
Authors: Sullivan Desmond 
Published: July 2007

Matthew’s gospel contains passages difficult for Jewish Christian
relations for the final text, as we have it, seems to contain passages
hostile to Jews which irritate Jewish Christian dialogue. History, however,
may show these so called ‘anti Semitic’ passages of this gospel in a new,
and quite different light.
The key text which today causes perhaps the greatest agony for those
involved in Jewish Christian dialogue is the verse in the passion narrative
of Matthew’s gospel: Mt. 27: 25 ‘His blood be upon us and upon our
children’. For these commentators, the idiom ‘his blood be upon’ means ‘the
responsibility of the death of Jesus is on our heads’. The action of Pilate
washing his hands, seems to be drawing a contrast between Pilate and the
people: Pilate seems to be declaring his innocence of the death of Jesus and
says ‘My hands are clean of this man’s blood . . .’ By contrast the people
seem to be accepting responsibility for the death of Jesus. Pilate is not
guilty, but the ‘people’ are guilty. By this saying, they also incriminate
their heirs in this guilt Some try to get round these ‘anti-semitisms’
(Matt. 23: 32-36, 7: 21-23, 8:11-12, 23: 33-46, 27: 25) by saying that
‘anti-semitic montages’ are only a secondary element introduced to the text
added at a later, Greek, stage of the development of the gospels.
There is, of course, at present a fairly strong lobby, even among some
Christians, who want to find ‘antisemitisms’ within the new Testament, for
reasons which are sometimes distant from the academic interests of biblical
criticism. It is necessary I think to examine these texts anew, both in the
interest of the historical evidence available and in the interests of
integrity within Jewish Christian relations.
Renew our Days as of Old
Authors: Gross Selwyn 
Published: July 2007

Npstra Aetate, the Declaration on the Relation of the church to NonChristian religions issued by Vatican II, notes that the Church regards God’s election of Israel and the dispensation brought by Christ as intimately connected with one another. It is indeed important for Christians to realise that the dispensation of Israel and the disposition represented by the Church are continuous, that each forms part of a continuous and integral history of salvation. The Church acknowledges the salvific character God’s covenant with Israel, and of divine revelation to Israel in the Torah of Judaism. Indeed, the Church cherishes the Hebrew scriptures, uses them extensively in its liturgy, and views them as fundamental to its Christian faith.Some Christians argue that the new covenant in Christ supersedes and abrogates the older covenant with Israel, and that the coming of Christ marks the end of the covenantal and salvific value of the Torah. Such Christians also argue that post-Christie Jews are rejected by God, and that the Israel of the old covenant is eliminatively replaced in the economy of salvation by a new Israel comprising gentiles who have accepted Christ. On this account, part of Christ’s mission was the destruction of the Torah and the rejection of Israel in favour of the gentiles, and the good news of Christ’s coming is not good news for the Jewish people at all but rather a curse. This flies in the face of some of our Lord’s own sayings. Does our Lord not state that he has not come to abolish the Torah, but rather to bring it to perfection, and that not a jot and a tittle of the Torah will pass away until all things are brought to their eschatological perfection, presumably in the general resurrection and judgement? For that matter, our Lord acknowledges the magisterial authority of the Pharisaic forbears of the Rabbis, saying that they speak with the authority of Moses, and that their rulings in matters of observance must be obeyed. The burden of our Lord’s criticism of the Pharisees is not that their tradition and authority is false or invalid, but rather that they fail to live up to it. As for the claim that our Lord comes to disown and reject the Jewish people, it should be noted that he tells us that he has come to the lost sheep of Israel, that he commissioned the twelve apostles to go not to the gentiles ‘but... rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel’, and states emphatically that salvation itself is of the Jews.
A Critique of Jürgen Moltmann's Green Theology.
Authors: Deane‐Drummond Celia 
Published: July 2007

Jiirgen Moltmann became famous for his brilliantly perceptive studies on the tasks of theology, first: to answer a despairing world with a Theology of Hope, and second: to answer a world which could no longer believe in God’s existence in the midst of evil with The Crucified God.’ While the first book stressed the resurrection of the crucified one as the basis for our hope, the second stressed the reality of Christ’s death in concrete solidarity with our suffering.As we might expect, the dominant question of theology then was in relation to the future of humanity, and the fashion in German theological discussions was a focus on history, rather than a concern with creation as such. However, even at this stage, Moltmann’s vision showed tendencies to look beyond that of a narrow understanding of our humanity, so that he aimed to include creation as a whole within the orbit of both the suffering and future hope in Christ. His novelty at this stage was to reject all ideas of a search for a return to an ideal paradisical state, the so-called ‘myth of eternal return’. Such views had become part of the traditional cosmological interpretation of our world which had been challenged by post-enlightenment science. Once humankind perceived its relationship with the world as one of mastery over nature, the ‘cosmological’ proof of God from creation was no longer convincing. Moltmann does not want us to regain our sense of security by returning to a facile cosmology, but insists that we put our hope in the God of the Future, who promises a new creation as witnessed by the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Do Whales have Souls?
Authors: Jones David Albert 
Published: July 2007

Do whales have souls and if so what follows ? How would Catholic theology have to change if it was discovered that whales were as rational as you or I ? If whales have souls can they become Catholics ?For a traditional Catholic, to have a soul, in latin anima, is to be animate, to be alive. Having a soul is having a certain form, a certain organisation such that one can move oneself. One part moves another so that the whole moves itself. This self-moving quality, shown in the processes of nutrition, growth and reproduction, is common to all living things. To be alive is to have a soul. St. Thomas Aquinas would affirm that all living things from cabbages to whales, so long as they were alive, were so in virtue of a soul.This broadly speaking, is the scriptural view, though it is often obscured by translation. In Genesis 1:20 God says,‘Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures’. In Genesis 2:7 God breathes into the nostrils of the man so that he becomes a ‘living being’. In both cases the word nephesh is used which in other places we would translate soul. So the waters brought forth swarms of living souls, and Adam became a living soul. Plants are a bit of a borderline case, for though clearly alive they are not very lively. However, with this small qualification, hebrew Old Testament, greek New Testament, and latin scholastic theology would agree.
Twenty‐five Years On: A Catholic Commemoration of Karl Barth
Authors: Nichols Aidan 
Published: July 2007

Karl Barth was bom in Basle in 1886, the descendant of a long line of Swiss Protestant pastors and burghers, who included in their ranks Jacob Burckhardt, the historian of the Italian Renaissance. His family were patricians and devotees of music and the arts, but they also had a simple devotion to Jesus. In the biography of Barth written, on the basis of his autobiographical essays and letters, by his last academic assistant, Eberhard Busch, we hear that Barth’s earliest theological formation came from religious nursery-rhymes in the Basle dialect. His subsequent theological pilgrimage can be seen as a flight from, and then return to, the religious assurance of these children’s songs - albeit in an infinitely more sophisticated manner. As he himself wrote, these songs
were the textbook from which I received my first theological instruction in a form which was appropriate for my immature years. What made an indelible impression on me was the homely self-assurance with which these unpretentious verses spoke of the events of Christmas, Palm Sunday, Good Friday, Easter, Ascension, Pentecost, as though they could have taken place that very morning in Basle or nearby, like any other exciting event. History? Doctrine? Dogma? Myth? No. It was all things actually taking place. You could see everything for yourself, listen to it, and take it to heart by hearing one of these songs sung in the language you were hearing elsewhere and beginning to speak. Holding your mother's hand, you went to the stable in Bethlehem, along the streets of Jerusalem into which the Saviour was making his entry. hailed by children of your own age. You climbed the grim hill of Golgotha and walked in Joseph’s garden at daybreak … Was it all rather naive? Indeed, it was very naive, but perhaps the deepest wisdom, with its fullest force, lies in naivety, and this kind of wisdom, once gained, can cany a man over whole oceans of historicism and anti-historicism, mysticism and rationalism, orthodoxy, liberalism, and existentialism. He certainly will not be spared trial and temptation, but in the end he will be brought back relatively unscathed to firm ground.
Barth and Postmodernism
Authors: Ward Graham 
Published: July 2007

There has been a resurgence of interest in Karl Barth’s work over the last decade in both this country and the States. It has been an interest paralleling a growing recognition that ‘postmodemity’ best characterizes (if such an chameleon noun can characterize anything) our cultural situation. It is no surprise, then, to find studies of Karl Barth’s work which interpret him as a deconstructionist avant la lettre and interpret his Weimar culture as “a first postmodemity”. But, in the main, what is understood by ‘postmodernism’ and ‘postmodemity’ in these studies is left inadequately defined. Therefore, there is a certain lack of clarity about why it is that Karl Barth’s theology resonates with contemporary culture. Furthermore, the majority of studies comparing Barth’s work with postmodern thinking concentrate upon his early, dialectical theology, in particular his metaphor of ‘crisis’ in the second edition of his Epistle to the Romans. In this essay, then, I wish to attempt two things. First, to try and provide a clarity concerning Barth’s relatedness to postmodernism and establish the rationale for the interest in Barth’s work today. Secondly, to show that the profundity of the parallels between Barth’s work and postmodernism lies not in the similar use of the ‘crisis’ metaphor, but in respective approaches to the nature of discourse itself.Read positively, postmodernism is concerned with liberation; a liberation from self-legitimating structures. Postmodern thinkers like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard problematize this legitimation. They ask, what or who authorizes the power certain discourses have to explain the world ?
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Authors: Duffy Eamon 
Published: July 2007

Universities are curious, contrary institutions, and Oxford and Cambridge more curious and contrary than most. At one level they are centres of intellectual innovation and advance, places where the atom is split, new wonder-drugs developed, old orthodoxies overturned. And yet they are also the most conservative of institutions, wedded, with a fidelity which our society hardly grants to any ordinary marriage, to extraordinary rituals and ways of doing things whose sole commendation seems to be, that it has always been so.The contradiction is more apparent than real; a strong sense of tradition is often a help, not a hindrance, to intellectual openness. But is not always easy to see how that works in practice, and much that we do and value in the ritual side of our common life has, to an unsympathetic eye, a faint air of the ridiculous about it. Today’s service is a case in point. Just what is all this about? Some of you may know the spoof commemoration-day address given by a lunatic clergyman at the beginning of W H Auden’s The Orators:
Commemoration: Commemoration. What does it mean? What does it mean? Not, what did it mean to them, there, then, but what does it mean to us, here, now? It’s a facer, isn’t it boys? But we’ve all got to answer it. What were the dead like? What sort of people are we living with now? Why are we here What are we going to do?
An Antidote to Violence?
Authors: Lascaris Andrew 
Published: July 2007

The cruelties committed in the war in former Yugoslavia profoundly shock us. Villages are completely destroyed, children, women and men, even their cattle, are killed. Women are raped and forced to give birth to the children of their rapists. The perpetrators are ordinary citizens, pleasant people, good neighbours. We do not have to look for violence that far away. Bombs go off in the city of London, children are killed in Warrington, and in revenge innocent young men are massacred in Belfast. Violence exists outside war situations as well. Domestic violence is probably the most common form of violence: incest, beating, or simply bullying. It is often hidden; in spite of everything, loyalty to parents and other members of the family overrules the urge to confide in someone, to complain and to accuse in public. Though violent novels and films may be very popular, articles and books on violence are generally not. The Bible is full of violent events, but there is relatively little literature on violence in Scripture.Why do we accept violence relatively easily as a part of life? Why do peaceful people resort to violence in certain situations? It seems to me that violence is closely linked with justice. Violence is used to redress wrongs or to prevent injuries. The source of much violence is the thirst for justice. People always try to justify their use of violence by appealing to their right to restore injustices done to them in the past or in the present.
The Earth as a Gift
Authors: Willey Petroc , Willey Eldred 
Published: July 2007

It is often said that the earth and its creatures are God’s gifts to humankind. Animals and plants are understood to have been ‘sent’ for us, so that we may, by and large, do with them as we will. What we must do in return is express our thanks to the Creator for His generosity. We must say Grace over our meals. So John Locke wrote:
The earth and all that is therein is given to men for the support and comfort of their being. . .all the fruits it produces, the beasts it feeds, belong to mankind in common, as they are produced by the spontaneous hand of nature.In the Christian tradition, discussions on the rights of ownership typically propose definite limitations on the private use of the earth: we may not supply ourselves with luxuries while other persons still lack basic necessities. But no limits are explicitly set on the common human use of the earth. The gazelle, then, would seem to have no right to the land on which she grazes; the lion no right to her prey. Only humans have rights of ownership, even over their own bodies. That anything non-human enjoys food, habitat or life itself is only by the mercy of homo sapiens.A popular belief drawn from this is that certain animals are simply ‘made to be eaten’. A sheep is walking mutton. Within the Christian tradition this belief tends to be justified by an appeal to revelation.
The Way of the Void
Authors: Murray Paul 
Published: July 2007

On the 30 March 1992 Damian Byrne, the former Master of the Dominican Order, wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger:
The Order of St. Dominic has obviously a very direct interest in Meister Eckhart’s life, works and reputation. This is why the General Chapter of 1980 welcomed one petition concerning the great theologian and mystic. It originated in Great Britain from a group of Dominican laity and friends of the Order in that country headed by the late Mrs. Ursula Fleming who founded the association, Friends of Meister Eckhart.If today the fundamental innocence and theological integrity of Meister Eckhart are generally acknowledged, both within and outside the Dominican Order, this is due in no small measure to the efforts of people like Ursula. Today, when we read Eckhart’s work it is not with an inquisitorial gaze or scrutiny—rather, we ourselves feel we are under his gaze, his quiet scrutiny. Eckhart comes towards us almost as if he were one of our own contemporaries and as a master among them. We do not put him to the test, rather his words—ancient words, yet eloquently new in their serenity and freshness—probe and test us.Needless to say there are still many difficulties that remain. But our questions today—my own questions at any rate—are not those bom of suspicion or fear, rather they are the questions of one interested reader, even a sort of disciple, who finds himself gripped and fascinated by what Eckhart is saying, but also sometimes confused and even bewildered by the extraordinary depth and range and daring of the master’s teaching.