bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Ars Moriendi
Authors: Márkus Gilbert 
Published: July 2007

In the BeginningPerhaps I should begin by saying that the origin of this paper lies in the discussion of the North European diffinitors when they met last year to begin thinking about this General Chapter. We met in Edinburgh, one of the most northerly houses of the Order in Europe, in October as the all-enveloping darkness of a Scottish Winter began to make itself felt, and in a city known for its particularly gloomy Calvinist establishment. So perhaps there was a certain inevitability about our finding this topic. What I want to say is partly drawn from our conversations in Edinburgh, and from our correspondence with each other since then, and partly from the depths of my own sense of mortality.I suppose we should also take into consideration the fact that one of the provinces represented at that meeting, Flanders, doesn’t have a single novice or brother in formation at present, and has had no ordination for two years. Only two men have been professed there in the last 25 years. Houses are closing, projects are dying. The Dutch province also has its difficulties: having had 600 members in 1957, it now has about 190, and most of these are old men. One novice was professed three years ago, and now they are asking themselves whether they can receive any more. They have had to sell the Albertinum, one of their major historical projects. It’s hardly surprising that the Dutch diffinitor, Ben, asks “Are we coming to the end of religious life?” This is certainly the impression given in some parts of the world.
The Question of Believing
Authors: Giard Luce 
Published: July 2007

For Michel de Certeau, believing was rooted in a foundational experience, situated in a Christian tradition where the relationship to scriptures is central. Now, in this immense inheritance, he chose as object of election and familiarity mystical texts, not ‘mystical experience’ but the writings of mystics, that is, a particular type of writings implying a mode of believing. He loved the mystics not because they would be ‘elect’ but because he saw in them the wounded and often the relegated to the margins of the social group, disgraced people, the monastery idiot in the patristic tradition (see chapter 1 of la Fable mystique), Surin long regarded as mad by his Jesuit brethren and whose writings were dispersed, corrected, partly lost. There, in shame and suffering, madness or defection, the ‘corruption’ that haunts President Schreber in Freud,’ something essential is tied between believing and its defection. It seems to me, to take up an expression he employed about Foucault, that that is the ‘black sun’ of his thought and that it explains the turn to ‘history of mysticism’ as well as the turn to ‘cultural anthropology of the present’ in his work.The platform that provided the force and originality of I'Invention du quotidien was the reflection on believing, beyond ecclesial institutions on every side. The disclosure of ordinary life as ‘mystical', in the proper as well as figurative sense, inspired the analysis of practices. He hoped to complete volume 2 of la Fable mystique in 1986 and counted then on writing an Anthropology of believing , which he had already announced as the theme of his seminar at the Ecole des hautes etudes in 1985-86.
What is Heterology?
Authors: Buchanan Ian 
Published: July 2007

Heterology is Michel de Certeau’s great unfinished project. Begun while still in the U.S., it was put on hold so he could complete his work on mysticism,—and regrettably—never resumed. This work holds such great promise that the thought of continuing his project, of somehow bringing it to fruition, has long been a fancy of mine. But besides the obvious difficulty of creating what is practically a new epistemology, there is the more immediate difficulty of establishing just what heterology is meant to be. Since Certeau died before he could formulate either a specific thesis, or a particular method, we have no certain way of knowing what he actually meant by the term, or indeed intended it to mean. So until now the fancy has remained idle. However, it now occurs to me that it may be possible to construct a workable impression of what heterology is by determining what it decidedly is not.While it is true that we do not really know what heterology is meant to stand for, there is one thing, at least, of which we can be certain and that is what Certeau did not want this book “we will never ready” to be. It is quite clear from his existing work that he wanted to steer what at the time of his death was then emerging as cultural studies away from what might be called, to coin a phrase, ‘interpretative semiotics’. He objected to ‘interpretative semiotics’ not because its result is more allegory than analysis, but because it presumes that the state of affairs called culture is, through being composed of ‘symbols’, a purely relative, or else quid pro quo, structure, without any substantive base.
The Shattering of Christianity and the Articulation of Belief
Authors: Ahearne Jeremy 
Published: July 2007

This article is based on a number of texts written by Michel de Certeau between around 1969 and 1974. These texts all explore the ways in which a lucid Christian belief may endure as a resource in contemporary societies. They also indicate a form of transition. In comparison to the probing but orthodoxly circumscribed analyses of L’Etranger, ou Bunion dans la différence (1969), we see the emergence of a more open (more exposed but also freer) mode of reflection. Although Certeau would rarely return in his writings after the mid-1970’s to the question of contemporary Christian belief as such, the analytic and figurative frameworks generated by this reflection continue to inform his thought. They help us to make sense of the apparently disparate heterogeneity of his subsequent publications, taking us as they do in a series of significant zigzags between, say, The Writing of History, The Mystic Fable and The Practice of Everyday Life.Christianity was, in Certeau’s view, in the process of ‘shattering’. While this may have seemed a provocative diagnosis in 1974, it appears today as a basic premiss for a scrupulous sociological analysis. Moreover, Certeau suggests that there is nothing intrinsically new about this process. He recalls elsewhere the major scissions already at work in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as Christendom broke ‘into pieces’, producing here and there new generations of believers ‘without a church’. What is unprecedented, he argues, is now the sheer extent and scale of this shattering. This development is not necessarily synonymous with an imminent extinction of Christian belief, but does modify radically the conditions in which such belief must find a voice and a horizon for action.
Faith becoming culture: theological perspectives
Authors: Gallagher Michael Paul 
Published: July 2007

On 20 May 1982 Pope John Paul II signed a letter founding the Pontifical Council for Culture. In it he spoke of human destiny itself being at stake in the field of culture, and he stressed that “living culture” constitutes the “ethos of a people”. Then he went on to express a key challenge for faith horizons today: “A faith which does not become culture is a faith which has not been fully received, not thoroughly thought through, not fully lived out.”.Kieran Flanagan’s The Enchantment of Sociology could be regarded as a long footnote to that claim (which he does not quote). Even though he is suspicious of much of the discourse of inculturation, he is passionately concerned about how faith embodies itself within culture by constructing its own “habitus”—a favourite term he borrows from Pierre Bourdieu. In this respect he engages in some running battles with theologians who have misread the power of the “living culture” and whose “liberal” options for “relevance” have undermined the power of religious belonging and of the sacred. Even the Second Vatican Council’s important document (issued in 1965) Gaudium et spes, on the Church in the modem world, is accused of naivety over the question of culture, or, more particularly, of ignoring sociological insights concerning the complexity and power of culture as a product. As a result it fell into excessive optimism about the hoped-for dialogue with contemporary culture and is criticised for playing down the necessity of religious distance from the deceptions of culture.
The Radical Vocation of the Catholic Laity
Authors: Davis Claire 
Published: July 2007

Britain in the 1990s has lost its sense of direction and its people are at odds with themselves. It needs to revitalise its economy, modernise its institutions, rewrite the contract between the members of its society and recover self-esteem.These are the words of political economist and journalist Will Hutton in his now famous diagnosis of the contemporary ills of British society, The State Were In. ‘All the malfunctions of the economy are related’, argues Hutton, ‘fused by the government’s overweening desire to establish the market principle as the basis of every policy.’ (p. 14) The character of the British economy has been shaped by the collective aspiration to a gentlemanly life—to have an income for which one does not obviously labour, ideally from land, but otherwise from finance and commerce—speculation on the markets. At all events, industry, the actual work of production, has been regarded by those at the centre of power as an activity from which to keep a distance. This attitude has created a lack of commitment and poor investment on the part of finance in relation to industry which has, according to Hutton, impoverished the economy, preventing real economic growth and stability. In this approach, Britain is unique among her capitalist partners both in the West and now increasingly in Asia.
Life Before The Common Good
Authors: Barrett Richard 
Published: July 2007

Simplifications are dangerous at the best of times and the same may be said of applications of general principle to particular circumstance. In this vein it seems appropriate to offer some thoughts on the recent document of the Episcopal Conference of England and Wales entitled The Common Good. A document which purports to offer a moral diagnosis on a specific socio-economic context is, like a surgeon, heavily dependent on antecedent data in arriving at that diagnosis and thence at a remedy for ills detected. In this short study we cannot hope to conflate the entire corpus of Catholic Social Teaching into a few words but it may be helpful to focus on the diagnostic aspects of the recent document of the Conference, viewing it as essentially applicative of previous interventions of the Roman magisterium, and thus be able to discern some possible avenues of interpretation for the future.Diagnosing the problem, especially with regard to socio-economic conditions, must offer the ecclesiastical spectator the most challenging of tasks, given the shifting and undulating nature of the economic landscape. The historio-genesis of the first official contribution to the problem, Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum, bears this out, and yet there are a number of observations from that document which would resonate well with even the most sceptical of economic analyses of our time. Thus Leo XIII observed:
A tiny group of extravagantly rich men have been able to lay upon the great multitude of unpropertied workers a yoke that is little better than that of slavery itself (RN 2).
The Beautiful Death of Thérèse of Lisieux and the Sufferings of the Tubercular Self
Authors: Neal Diana 
Published: July 2007

For those familiar with the themes of traditional female spirituality in the Christian West, the dreary saga of Thérèse Martin and her death at the age of twenty-four in 1897 can only come as a grim reminder of the symbolic burden by which women have carried in their persons the dualistic designation of the spirit at war against the flesh. In the past the story of Thérèse has divided the Catholic faithful between traditional adherents of her cult, and those who opposed it in the name of a more virile postVatican II spirituality. More recently interest in her has extended beyond its traditional bounds. Monica Furlong’s biography, written from outside the Catholic community, provided a long overdue reappraisal of the young woman’s ambiguous character, from a frankly feminist perspective. Furlong concluded that the vitality and strength of determination typical of the young adult Thérèse has often been hidden from view by the sickly cult of weakness and submission that sprang up after her death.Thérèse’s asceticism, which has come to be known as the Little Way, is an asceticism which reaches its apogee in her uncomplaining spirituality of suffering and death. By the time Thérèse died, a few months short of her twenty-fifth birthday, she had developed a spirituality of the body which stood over against a theology of considerable insight.The orthodoxy of her assertion of the gratuity of divine love, and of her conclusion that God cannot be pleased by heroic effort, but accepts the imperfect human being without question of merit, is expressed with all the clarity and conviction of so distant a figure from her in time, if not altogether in temperament, as Martin Luther. But the profundity of her basic theological insight is not the subject of this article.
Hindemith’s ‘Mathis der Maler’: A Parable for our Times
Authors: Fuller Michael 
Published: July 2007

The musical fortunes of the German composer Paul Hindemith (18951963) waxed and waned in his own lifetime. The recent centenary of his birth, however, has brought opportunities for re-assessment of both the composer and his work, and much interest has been focussed on his masterpiece, the opera ‘Mathis der Maler’ (‘Mathis the Painter’). Two recordings of this work are now available on compact disc, and the Royal Opera produced the first ever British staging of the work on what would have been Hindemith’s hundredth birthday. ‘Mathis der Maler’ has been revealed to be an enormously powerful music-drama, remarkable no less for the historical individual who inspired it and for the circumstances in which it was produced than for the beautiful music which it contains. Hindemith wrote his own libretto for this opera, which enabled him to put forward in it a number of his own ideas about both art and music, and also to raise profound spiritual issues. In its exploration of such themes, ‘Mathis der Maler’ has a relevance that transcends Hindemith’s own day, touching on issues both contemporary and timeless. To explain the motivation behind such a remarkable work, it is necessary to set it in the context of Hindemith’s life, and of his theories about music.Hindemith was a precocious musical talent, playing violin and viola in orchestral and chamber ensembles from an early age. He rose to prominence as a composer in the years after the First World War, and his music was much performed, in Germany and further afield, during the 1920s.
Friendship: A Metaphor for Moral Advancement?
Authors: Haggerty Donald F. 
Published: July 2007

Latent in the moral teaching of the Catholic Church since Vatican II has been a conception of morality as a life project, a positive force for the shaping of human character. This marks a shift of focus beyond morality as a science of demarcations, separating good actions from evil, the permissible from the forbidden, a method of problem-solving when ambiguity confronts conscience about a particular choice. A broader vision has been sought in which subjects treated under the heading of the moral life can be concluded aptly only by connecting them to the life of holiness. While in some cases it can be difficult to observe a distinction between a treatment of morality and an exhortation to more serious spiritual life, this overlapping of subject matter is not unwelcome.Veritatis Splendor is a recent case in point. While the middle portion of the encyclical offers a very precise analysis of the relations among human acts, conscience, and the moral law, the encyclical begins and ends with meditative chapters in which the moral life is described as nothing less than the road to sanctity. These sections require little familiarity with moral theology to inspire personal response. The pages on martyrdom, for instance, in their evocation of the cost of moral commitment in the modem world, are a striking appeal to the heroic courage that produces saints.A less well-known example of this ‘spiritual’ approach to moral theology has been the incorporation of friendship as a thematic point of reference for the quality of a person’s moral life.
Jesus Christ and Auschwitz
Authors: de Lange Nicholas 
Published: July 2007

The 27th Cardinal Bea Memorial Lecture 15th May 1997Nineteen years ago, when I delivered the 8th Cardinal Bea Memorial Lecture, I said this:History obliges Jews to take account of the figure of Jesus, because Jewish life is lived in the midst of the gentiles, and for the majority of Jews that means in the midst of Christians. We are compelled to respond to Jesus—not Jesus the ancient Jew but Jesus the Christian Lord.And I concluded with the positive judgment of Franz Rosenzweig:Before God, Jew and Christian both labour at the same task. He cannot dispense with either.I fully share Franz Rosenzweig’s optimistic vision, and it is in the light of this belief, and in the spirit of my earlier talk, that I accepted the invitation to come back and give a second lecture in memory of the man we are gathered to honour. We owe it to Cardinal Bea and to other predecessors who, like him, laboured to clear away the bitterness and hatred of centuries, to continue this work, each one of us in whatever way we can.I would like to take this opportunity to push my own thinking further than I was willing or able to do nineteen years ago. In the intervening years my thoughts have moved on, and so has the climate of Christian-Jewish dialogue. I think we are ready now for some tougher talking. I hope I am not wrong about this.
A New Dawn? The Roman Catholic Church and Environmental Issues
Authors: Deane‐Drummond Celia 
Published: July 2007

IntroductionAwareness of environmental issues, seems, if anything, to be on the increase. In spite of fears that the public debate about the ‘green’ agenda would fade, rather like the anxiety over a threat of a nuclear holocaust, which is now far less prominent compared with the 1970s, politicians today seem even more aware of the need to include environmental concerns in their policy statements. Yet there still seems to be a gap opening up between political affirmations and cries for more radical restructuring. This gap has led to heightened tension, exemplified by the high profile displays of attachment to the land shown by characters such as Daniel Needs, alias ‘Swampy’, who, in January 1997 buried himself underground in an attempt to prevent an A30 ‘improvement’ programme near Fairmile in Devon. Such actions may seem extreme, but they epitomize the dissatisfaction, especially of the young, with the ineffectiveness of politicians to make any real difference and an almost total lack of clear national transport policy. Such dissatisfaction is expressed in other ways as well: now more young people belong to voluntary environmental groups than political parties. Official jargon and teaching feels alienating for those who want to see real practical advances in the way we treat our planet. Such language also spreads into official Church documentation on other issues in a way that alienates many ordinary men and women.
Nature in a ‘world come of age’
Authors: Scott Peter 
Published: July 2007

What is striking about the reception of the account of worldliness in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s prison writings is how few commentators have drawn attention to the fact that Bonhoeffer concentrates on the status of nature. To be sure, nature is not part of the definition of ‘the coming of age of mankind’. But the aim of such ‘coming of age’ is ‘to be independent of nature’. Bonhoeffer writes: ‘Our immediate environment is not nature, as formerly, but organization. But with this protection from nature’s menace there arises a new one — through organization itself.’ So the claim that ‘organization’ is now the environment of humanity is to be understood dialectically: the emancipation of humanity from nature leads to new forms of domination.For Bonhoeffer, the attempt to escape nature thus raises once more the question of humanity. Or, as Bonhoeffer puts it, if the menace of nature is displaced by the menace of social organization, ‘What protects us against the menace of organization?’. ‘Coming of age’ is thus an anthropological development (the theme of worldliness) predicated upon the emerging independence of humanity from nature which, in turn, requires a theological response (the theme of ‘secular interpretation’). Such interpretation must address the fact that nature is now mediated to us by social contexts. So the theological interpretation of a ‘world come of age’ includes judgements about the status and significance of nature for humanity.The difficulties raised here for Christian theology by the place of nature in a ‘world come of age’ are acute for we are driven back to the origins of modernity.
Relativism: Opportunity or Threat?
Authors: Bebb Andrew 
Published: July 2007

The postmodernist perspective is so amorphous as to almost defy description. A good deal of imprecision inevitably flourishes. Its description ranges from the superficial level of popularist culture and its images, to an anarchistic nihilism. Many of its adherents are refugee post-Marxists sheltering under the banner of a relativistic abandonment of all ideological absolutes. Where is one to find the link between the post-structuralism of literary criticism and the postmodernism in the field of architecture and art? There are many who regard the process as a fundamental transformation in human self understanding. They regard it as a radical de-centring of the self and as a comprehensive embracing of relationality and relativism, (which seems to be generating such concern in the breast of Cardinal Ratzinger and his colleagues), as a complete disavowal of the enlightenment project. Others, rather strangely on the other hand, see it simply as the next sequential stage in the modernising process, and equally a threat to the purity of faith. The emphasis, for them, is on its continuity with the past.It is a difficult area and to be approached with diffidence. I am myself heavily dependent upon the contribution of Gerard Loughlin, who gave me my first introduction to the writings of Levinasian ethics in his article in New Blackfriars in January 1994.Both the enlightenment and the reaction against it in postmodernity have at their heart an exploration of the significance of the self as it is confronted by a world in which it feels itself to be an alien.
Eucharist and Hope
Authors: Stancil Wilburn T. 
Published: July 2007

While the Eucharist has a focus on both the past (re-presenting the passion of Jesus) and the present (feeding and nurturing us with the Body and Blood of Christ), it also is a celebration of hope and renewal. This hope provides a vision for the future, challenges the status quo, and prevents the church from falling into despair when faced with a culture that no longer lives sacramentally.Even though hope is one of the three theological virtues, it has taken a beating in recent years. In today's secularized culture hope is synonymous with mere optimism or even wishful thinking. For a large segment of Christianity, hope means little more than heaven when you die. Even our language betrays us. A sentence such as, “I hope it may come true,” structured in the subjunctive mood and filled with uncertainty, casts a pall of doubt.The Christian concept of hope, however, is much richer. It implies expectation, even confidence, and is centered on the promises of God. In fact, the focus of hope is not only on its content but on the act of hoping as characteristic of the community of faith. Therefore, hope is closely connected with patience, because it speaks of future promises which are already authentically experienced now, even though partially and in a preliminary form.