bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The Vanishing Diary of Anne Frank
Authors: Dworkin Martin 
Published: July 2007

Men of my unit went into two of those places the Nazis had efficiently called ‘concentration camps’, but for which there are other names: Buchenwald, near Weimar, and Ohrdruf, near Gotha. What struck the mind, and remained, was the unbelievable. The greater the horror, the more it was necessary to select details to make the whole have some reality. At Buchenwald, amid the fantastic complex of gas chambers and furnaces, the great sheds filled with human debris piled to the roofs, what seemed to affect the men most of all were some strange decorative plaques. A day or so afterwards, when an article in the service newspaper Stars and Stripes identified the objects as mounted pieces of tattooed human skin, the reaction was not quite melodramatic revulsion, but a more sudden, self-conscious formation of what had actually been seen. The journalistic account put things into place; the sentences, with their plain words and terse phrases, made the entire experience into something that had happened. One man rushed over to say that the things described in the article were the things he had held in his hands. Now, he knew that his experience had been real, and he knew what it was he had experienced.At Ohrdruf, some indignant civilians from the neighbourhood were being put to work digging graves and burying the bodies left untidily about when the camp was hastily abandoned by the guards. There were corpses with blackening gouges in the sides and back. One or two walking cadavers, their filthy rags flapping, explained that some of the starving inmates of the camp were able to eat the livers and other organs of those who died. Then, much as guides denoting sights of interest to passing tourists, they pointed out the ingenious arrangement whereby the furnaces of the crematoria heated the buildings of the commandant’s headquarters.
Heard and Seen
Authors: Butcher Maryvonne 
Published: July 2007

Ever since the dawn of cinema there have been magicians. When Lumière resolutely took the path of realism in those first five-minute films, showing us undeniable trains, veritable fire-engines and disasters and humiliations only too recognisably from daily life, Melies had already chosen, quite as resolutely, to send a man to the moon, to present fairy coaches travelling through sleeping woods, to give us in short marvels instead of documentaries.Two of the greatest magicians the cinema has ever known have been much in the news of late. Cocteau because in October he astonished us once again, as all those years ago he had done in obedience to Diaghilev’s command, dying this time in fact instead of with that hallucinatory backwards fall in Testament d’Orphee, when he commented gravely that since poets on occasion gave the impression of dying then their friends might permit themselves the appearance of weeping. And Orson Welles—so long a film-maker and still only middle- aged—because he has attempted perhaps the most impossible task of his never cautious career in bringing Kafka’s Trial to the screen, which reached London a good six months after it opened in Paris.Cocteau always insisted that all the work he did, in any medium, was the work of a poet. Certainly none but a poet could have made his films, the first of which he even called Sang d’un Poete. Even in films which he did not actually direct himself, such as J.-P. Melville’s version of his play, Les Enjants Terribles, his influence was as immediately visible as those stars so invariably a part of his signature. Of those he did direct, there are some which more brilliantly exemplify bis power to bind an audience in a potent visual spell than others. First, L’Eternel Retour, his version of the Tristan story in modem idiom, which reached us after VE day; one will never forget the extraordinary richness—an almost overpowering richness—of the experience after all our years of cinematic austerity.
Nightmare of Grace: A Note on Morte D'Urban
Authors: Hinchliffe Arnold P. 
Published: July 2007

On the strength of two volumes of short stories the American Catholic writer J. F. Powers seemed conspicuously free of characteristic qualities of our three Catholic novelists. Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and Muriel Spark. Whatever the literary merit of the novels of these three writers their work contains in different kinds of degrees the same basic quality of nightmare; their atmospheres are heavy with the macabre, the ugly, the violent, the symbolic, their plots are full of decadence and despair, and their involvement with Catholicism has a great deal of the Gothic about it. Now Mr Powers has written a novel it is possible to judge him tackling the same problems in the novel form, and Morte D’Urban reveals the same quiet detailed observation of spiritual life in America, a life that simmers and then explodes with nightmare. As the titles of his short story volumes show, A Prince of Darkness and The Presence of Grace, Powers is as much concerned as, say Graham Greene, with the heroic life of the Christian, and equally concerned with what makes a hero. Morte D’ Urban with its immediate appeal to Malory seemed a puzzling but impressive novel in which the hero becomes heroic in spite of himself, and, one is tempted to say, in spite of the reader. The epigraph to the novel is a quotation from J. M. Barrie:The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another. . . .Hence the story of Urban, citified man, seemed to me to finish with his salvation for reasons excluded from the explicit narration of the novel, only gradually realized in terms of qualities praised in that explicit narration; in short a very ironic, compassionate, literate novel on the spiritual life which I thought I had understood.
The Equilibrium of the Social Worker
Authors: Fitzsimons John 
Published: July 2007

Equilibrium means maturity, a harmony and balance of tensions that comes from intellectual, emotional, social and spiritual maturity. Clearly the first essential is professional competence, the possession of those varied techniques and skills which can give a sense of adequacy. The social worker is often in a certain sense a lay spiritual adviser whose role, at its own level, is comparable to that of the confessor and spiritual director. For that reason a deepening knowledge of techniques and skills must be accompanied by a corresponding desire to appreciate the importance of moral and supernatural means. In this connection we may adapt the words of the famous physician and say that the social worker tends the wounds of the psyche but it is God who heals them. One can never leave out of account the working of God’s grace, and must remind oneself again and again that one’s role is secondary and subordinate. To do otherwise is to fall into the heresy of good works.Intellectual maturity also implies a true humility. By this I mean a serene acceptance of one’s limitations with the corollary that one is not ashamed through vanity or human respect to seek from others the knowledge that one lacks. But at the same time humility also means a sense of security in one’s strengths. Humility in the face of the mystery of this person, my client, who confronts me here and now, is essential if I am not to be overbearing and patronising, and consequently insecure because I seek security in my attitude of superiority.
Comprehensive Schools and the Catholic Community
Authors: O'Connell P. J. 
Published: July 2007

In a previous article it was assumed that the English segregated school school system based on selection at eleven years and the intellectual theories sustaining it were passing away and were being succeeded by various forms of comprehensive secondary education. If this be so, and the events of last summer on the political, social and academic scenes would seem to add confirmation, can the Church sit idly by without examining the meaning that this educational revolution may hold for Catholics and the general community? Understandably the Catholic administrator is concerned, at parish and diocesan level, with providing adequate places for the increasing numbers of children committed to his care; nevertheless the Church has a primary concern for the education of youth whether inside or outside the Church and he will surely wish to ascertain whether any assets of permanent value to Christian life may be obtained from a re-organization of our own sector paralleling the changeover to comprehensive systems in state schools.Catholic authorities may be reassured that, from the known achievements of comprehensive schools, the adoption by them of the new pattern could have an extremely favourable outcome, if cast within the mould of Christian ideals, on the development and character of the English Catholic community. Initially it may be noted that at such schools a far greater proportion than normal remain on beyond the usual leaving age: for example, in some London comprehensive schools between 40% and 60% is quite common, compared to a national average of 20 % in Local authorities which operate a separate school system.
St Augustine as Psychotherapist
Authors: Versfeld Martin 
Published: July 2007

During many years of consideration, I have grown into a firm conviction that two of the greatest masters of the human psyche have been Plato and St Augustine. There is a close connection between them. Both considered philosophy to be a sort of therapeia, both were personally and theoretically concerned with the problem of integration, and both saw clearly that the personal and the social problem are at bottom one and the same. That is why we can take so much of our material from Augustine’s City of God.Everybody knows that Plato declares in the Republic that the individual is the state writ small. Usually this is taken to be a proposition of political philosophy, and this is true enough if we have a right understanding of what Plato intended by politics. If we read the Gorgias we shall find a remarkable sentence in which Socrates says that the science which takes care of the health of the body is medicine, but that that which takes care of the health of the psyche is—politics! The argument with Polus, near the commencement of which this statement stands, concludes by saying that the man who is sick with guilt ought to go to the judge and legislator and beg them for the punishment which will cure him. If we consider how much profit we ourselves could expect for our guilt-ridden souls by approaching Parliament or the minister of justice as the agents for our release, we can imagine the incredulity of Socrates’ hearers. But his point is clear: politics should be regarded as psychotherapy. The right environment for integrated personal living is a community under just laws.
African Culture and the West
Authors: Hindmarsh Roland 
Published: July 2007

Within the last seven years Britain has shed political responsibility for most of the areas she formerly governed, and France for all. With the waning and extinction of political power over Africa by former colonial countries, would it not be appropriate to disengage culturally as well?The case is arguable. To survey the cultural confusion and desolation left in the wake of the withdrawing colonial powers is a deeply disturbing experience. It disturbs not merely the thoughtful Westerner, but, much more profoundly and lastingly, the sensitive African. Chinua Achebe shows the beginnings of disintegration in Things Fall Apart. Ferdinand Oyono in Le Vieux Nègre et la Médaille and Une Vie de Boy shows the growing cultural disorientation. Achebe, again, in No Longer at Ease and Cyprian Ekwensi in People of the City take the process a stage further into the cultural confusion and jumbled values of urban living in modern Africa. Surely the tale of harm is long enough; it is time to withdraw, with bowed heads. It is the West that is in need, of cultural and spiritual regeneration. Why send our disenchantment, our aridity overseas? Let us put our own house in order. If any African wishes to come and make his own gleanings amongst us, let him be welcome, but let him be warned that the pickings are thin.But the snug haven of withdrawal is no longer open today. Suzerainty has gone but interdependence between states has taken its place. No country can withdraw into political isolation. Britain is still politically involved in Africa, and Africa in Britain, and the involvement will increase. Cultural withdrawal makes even less sense than the spurious neutrality of political disengagement. Cultural interrelationships will grow closer, and will provide the setting and much of the matter of political interdependence.
The Secular World and the Church
Authors: David Julian 
Published: July 2007

In recent times there has grown up a strong feeling that our tradition of sanctity is inadequate, and that this inadequacy is connected with its isolation from the secular world. In Fr Rabut’s words, ‘La saintete traditionelle s’est coupé non seulement du peche mais souvent des espoirs et des travaux du monde’.This period of comparative isolation from ‘the hopes and labours’ of the world has coincided with a period of strong establishment; so that the isolation has expressed itself in practice not in indifference but in active obstruction to most of the advances made in the post-reformation period. Is there a necessary connection between the obstruction and what we may call, for lack of a better phrase, the period of establishment of Christianity in Western society?Certainly, one of the most curious aspects of the Church in its social dimension has been its almost total opposition to change: not to this or that particular change, but to change as such. This has taken the form of an implacable opposition to a succession of radical or revolutionary philosophies which have fomented change over the past five hundred years. Nineteenth-century liberals met with the same treatment as their twentieth-century counterparts, those theorists and reformers who, at various positions left of centre, have learned not to count the Church as among their allies. They are tinged with ‘secularism’ and ‘utopianism’, are irreverent of precedent and tradition, and easily fit into that elastic ecclesiastical category of ‘dangerous’.Since history is, almost by definition, change, it will be seen that this puts a great strain on the relationship between the church and a section of the world which has particular claims on the church’s sympathy.
The Chaplain at Aldenham
Authors: Mathew David 
Published: July 2007

The purpose of this article is to study the outlook on Catholicism of Sir John Acton, later Lord Acton the famous historian, when he was living in Shropshire as a young bachelor. During his boyhood the provision of a chaplain had been arranged with the Bishop by his mother. Lady Granville.A certain light is thrown on Acton's religious approach by an account of his dealings with the chaplains who served Aldenham between his coming of age and the final closing of the chapel. During the eighteenth century such chaplaincies, which were then at the hub of Catholic rural life, had been for the most part served either by the religious orders or by some relative or dependent of the squire's family. With the development of the big industrial populations, it became harder to obtain a suitable priest for work of an increasingly restricted scope. There were certain exceptional cases, like Wardour Castle, where the Jesuits had agreed to make a permanent provision. Aldenham, however, normally depended on the priests available in that section of the old Midland District.At this time the Aldenham appointment had a quite special significance. Lord and Lady Granville had now retired to London and the priest chosen would be the daily companion of the young baronet, who lived at Aldenham when in the country. It would, therefore, appear that the Bishop of Shrewsbury had allowed Acton to make his own suggestion.
Can Mysticism be Christian?
Authors: Zaehner R. C. 
Published: July 2007

Is mysticism compatible with Christianity? With so rich a mystical tradition as that possessed by the Catholic Church, this might seem a superfluous question to ask. But the term ‘mysticism’ which for Catholics has normally meant a direct apprehension of God, initiated by God and leading to the closest union of the soul with God, has nowadays been called upon to cover a variety of states of soul which many Catholics would not consider to be mystical at all since there is no direct confrontation of person with Person, no union between the two poles and no love.Be this as it may, I propose for the purposes of this article to include two well-known types of preternatural experience as ‘mystical’ because, in non-Catholic circles, they are usually considered to be so, and because the characteristic of each is that the ‘mystic feels himself to be transplanted beyond time and space into an eternal ‘now’ in which death can have no relevance and man's natural condition is seen to be one of certain immortality. This type of experience can be ‘extroverted', that is, the soul feels itself to be merged in the undying life of all things; or it can be ‘introverted', in which case the soul plunges into its own deepest essence from which all that is phenomenal, transient, and conditioned, falls away and it sees itself as unfractionably one and beyond all the dualities of worldly life.
The Literature of Africa
Authors: Mathew Gervase 
Published: July 2007

Africa has been concentrated on far too long in isolation; both by exploiters and by sentimentalists. It is only recently that African history has begun to be seen as a part of world history and that attempts are being made to correlate archaeological findings in Africa, Asia and Europe. A new series which is being published from the Oxford University Press at last makes it possible to study African literary forms as an essential part of world literature.The first four volumes of the series have now appeared. The most important of these is Somali Poetry, by W. B. Andrzejewski and I. M. Lewis, both specialists of recognized distinction. The first sixty pages deal lucidly and surely definitively with the social and cultural setting of Somali poetry, the Somali language and the characteristics of Somali verse. Biographical notes on the poets are provided. The next ninety pages consist of Somali poems with the original on one side and the English translation opposite.Somali verse has been transmitted orally; it is a great tradition and still a living one. The editors write of one class of lyric: ‘While the origins of other types of poem go far back into the past the heelo is an innovation which was first introduced in 1945. Its creator Abdi Deeqsi, nicknamed “Cinema”, was the owner and driver of a trading lorry and composed the first heelo when his lorry broke down near Zeila. In a desolate place he sang his love song, beating the rhythm on an empty petrol tin.
The Cartesian Basis of the New Morality
Authors: McCabe Herbert 
Published: July 2007

The Bishop of Woolwich has, I need hardly say, a great number of true and important things to say about morality—notably his magnificent aphorism, ‘Prayer and ethics are simply the inside and the outside of the same thing.’ But the thing I want to discuss here is something he says about prohibitions. Briefly the New Morality is characterised by the doctrine that no moral prohibition is unconditionally valid. That is to say, according to the New Morality you can never describe a course of human action and say that this action would always be wrong in absolutely any circumstances. I think the New Morality is mistaken about this.It is true that prohibitions do not have a very fundamental or important part to play in ethics. I do not think that a man can base his moral life on avoiding prohibited actions, any more than he can base his physical life simply on avoiding poisons. The law, in the sense of a code of prohibited behaviour, could never be the foundation of a human life. This is the clear teaching of St Paul and I accept it as unreservedly as does the Bishop. If a man tries to live simply by the law it will not help him to do right—it will only make clear to him where he has done wrong. The root and life of morality is not the law but love; what is not an expression of love is not good behaviour however much it may resemble good behaviour. Let us agree once and for all that, for example, chastity without charity is not even true chastity, it resembles the true virtue as a corpse resembles a living animal.
The Bird's Eye View: Some Thoughts about the Just War Tradition
Authors: Windass G. S. 
Published: July 2007

Although the teaching and example of Christ clearly call us away from violence and hatred and bloodshed, the world often pulls the other way. The tension which results can be agonising; and it is tempting to get rid of it straightaway by a kind of intellectual manoeuvre. We can for instance pretend that the world does not exist—or that we arc not responsible for it; or we can pretend that the gospels do not apply to it. If we succeed in reducing the tension, then is the time to beware; for the tension between the world and the gospels can only be removed by eliminating one of them; and both are necessary for a Christian-in-the-World.St Augustine felt forced by historical circumstances to admit that a man could serve in the army and still please God; but it was not without a great sense of strain that he gave some kind of approval to ‘such great, repulsive and cruel evils’. From scraps of St Augustine, the Western Church evolved what has come to be known as the ‘just war tradition’, permitting war, and later making it obligatory, in certain defined circumstances. The idea of a ‘just war’ is an explosive one; it provokes extreme responses. The Roman Catholic who still bases his thinking on this tradition, or the more common type, who simply relies on the opinions of ‘experts’ and does not think at all, will regard the just war as part of the Creed and will afford it an unquestioning reverence; those who do not have such faith consider it as just another piece of appalling Roman casuistry.
Christendom and Jewry: a Study in Irony
Authors: Hill Edmund 
Published: July 2007

I take the terms ‘Christendom’ and ‘Jewry’ to mean the cultural and political embodiments of the Christian and Jewish religions. Christendom is the socially visible manifestation and product of Christianity, as Jewry is of Judaism. It is with these products of the two religions that I am concerned, not directly with the systems of religious belief and practice that constitute the two religions.'Christendom', however, the concrete equivalent of the abstract ‘Christianity', is a much less definite term than ‘Church', which is so to speak the official and necessary embodiment of the Christian religion. Now it is in the almost Protean development of the indefinable, ill-disciplined, not always very Christian reality meant by ‘Christendom’ that I see much irony; not in the mysterious theological reality meant by ‘the Holy Catholic Church'. And I am presuming – I hope fairly enough – that as Christendom is to Church, so mutatis mutandis is Jewry to Israel. Jewry in its very different manner I find as ironical a reality as Christendom. My point, in fact, will be that in some ways Christendom would have been a much more suitable correlative to Israel than to the Church, and Jewry more suited to the Church than to Israel.I take it as a starting point that some sort of visible embodiment in human society is of the essence of both religions. And that is why I cannot altogether agree with Dr James Parkes when he makes the generalization in one of his Parkes Library booklets (Jewry and Jesus of Nazareth by Maurice Eisendrath and James Parkes), that, whereas Judaism addresses man as a social being, Christianity addresses man as a person.