bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Making the Connections: The global agenda of feminist theology
Authors: McEwan Dorothea , Poole Myra 
Published: July 2007

What is the connection between the cross-cultural phenomenon of the gender subordination of women which has led to domestic violence, genital mutilation, Indian widow-burning, Chinese foot-binding etc., and, on the other hand, the contemporary ‘received’ Christian theological tradition on women? This was the fundamental question underlying the reflections and discussions at the 1989 Maryknoll Summer School on the ‘Global Agenda of Feminist Theology’This is not a report on that Summer School; rather, it is a presentation of ideas that emerged at it. The 65 participants were drawn from 20 countries and all continents, and were made up of single women, married women, single men, religious sisters and priests. They came from a variety of Christian faith commitments, though the majority were Catholics, and from a variety of academic backgrounds and life experience. From their perspective of involvement with grassroots organisations, local support groups and women church communities, they addressed themselves to many issues which face humankind, but primarily in order to integrate their conversion to Christian feminism into a global discernment on the position of women. They gathered at Maryknoll to look at developments in churches and societies and critique them from a feminist point of view, pointing to the areas where the holistic, inclusive and non-competitive aspects were missing.Feminism stresses the need to recognise ‘difference as a crucial strength’, to quote Audre Lord. If we do not do this, we will fall into the trap of patriarchy. The terms ‘feminism’ and ‘patriarchy’ are used to encapsulate different cultural and power systems, and ‘patriarchy’ is a system which is dividing and conquering, and doing this as a norm of control.
Bonebound Spirituality
Authors: Phillips Peter 
Published: July 2007

The hall-mark of a genuine spirituality must lie in the honest recognition of our rootedness in the world of matter. It is the theme of poets as various as John Donne and Dylan Thomas. Perhaps in Donne we find its chief expression in the Devotions on Emergent Occasions and Severall Steps in my Sickness of 1624, but it is present as the background of many of his poems:
To our bodies tume we then, that so Weake men on love reveal’d may look;Loves mysteries in soules doe grow,But yet the body is his booke.Dylan Thomas refers to Donne with approval and comments in a letter to Pamela Hansford Johnson in similar vein:
Through my small bonebound island I have learnt all that I know, experienced all and sensed all. All I write is inseparable from the island. As much as possible, therefore, I employ the scenery of the island to describe the scenery of my thoughts, the earthquakes of the body to describe the earthquakes of the heart.This rootedness is our greatest glory. It must drive us towards engagement with the stuff of creation, in contrast to a spirituality which offers us ways of putting up with things as they are.This suggests a spirituality which must face up to the concrete particularity of our daily life. As Jon Sobrino has remarked recently:
The ‘being human-with-spirit’ that will measure up to reality’s cargo of crisis and promise, that will unify the various dements of reality in such wise that reality be, in the event, more promise than crisis, is what I call spirituality.
People with AIDS
Authors: Webb Christopher 
Published: July 2007

Hans was twenty-two. Except for a rather shabby greyish sheet, he lay naked on a double bed. His body was covered with large ugly black sores. I wondered if it was catching.Earlier that evening I had been in my room, reading. I had been ordained about a year, it was 1984, and I had never even heard the word AIDS, though in fact three years had already gone by since, in Los Angeles, the first signs of a new viral infection had come to light. The telephone had rung, and a man called Carl, with a young voice, had asked if he were speaking to a priest. I had said I was. He had told me that his friend was dying. He himself was not a Catholic but his friend was. He had asked me to visit them.At that time I was a curate in West London, at the Catholic Church of Our Lady of Victories, Kensington. The Parish takes in the Earls Court area. Earls Court has a large homosexual population, and Hans and Carl were part of that community. I call it ‘a community’ because, in many ways, that is just what it is. Earls Court has many pubs and places where homosexual men can go, and there is a feeling of support and acceptance among them. In fact, there is something rather ‘cliquey’ about the place.Carl, Hans and I did not begin a heated discussion about the rights and wrongs of homosexuality. There were far too many more urgent problems. Carl had given up his job so as to be at home to look after Hans. They had no money, little hope, and Carl was coming to the end of his tether.
Through the eye of a needle
Authors: Robson Simon 
Published: July 2007

We go on and on learning about AIDS. I first became aware of AIDS when I started reading the early press reports some ten years ago. Eventually I knew of people who were ill because of AIDS, I knew that lovers of friends of mine were ill, and in due course they died. I remember the very first time I saw the skin cancer Kaprosi Sarcoma: it was on the hand of a friend whom I was visiting in Amsterdam. I remember helping in 1987 to light over a thousand votive lights in the Dominican Priory Church at Oxford at an all-night vigil, to represent the current number of people in the United Kingdom known to be HIV Positive, and, of course, those candles also represented those who had died. My experience also included explaining how HIV infection is transmitted (and how it is not), talking about ‘safer sex’, and giving advice about the HIV test.However, nearly two years ago I came to Edinburgh, and in my time there my experience of AIDS has broadened tremendously. I knew nothing about drug abuse whatsoever, although I knew that was how the HIV virus had been spreading so widely in Edinburgh, making it the worst-hit city in Britain after London. I had no idea how relevant my experiences of AIDS and of how it affected gay men in England would be. As it turned out, they were of great value. What, though, I was not prepared for was how AIDS affected children. Of course, gay men have parents and brothers and sisters and grandparents, all of whom are affected in one way or another when someone becomes HIV Positive.
The Therapist and the Suffering Servant
Authors: Cooper Rabbi Howard 
Published: July 2007

He appeared at the end of the day. Suddenly. Out of nowhere. I had seen my last patient. I was ready to go home. The end of another day. Thank God.I opened the door to leave my consulting room—and there he was. Standing still, staring—or so it seemed to me—fixing me with that gaze, that look I cam to know, and hate. And love. Those eyes which looked inside me until I could not bear it any longer. The emptiness. The loneliness. The endless horror of it all.But now, that first time, he just stood there, passively, waiting. Waiting for me, it seemed. How long had he been there? What did he want? How could I get rid of him?—these were my first thoughts. Later I asked another question, simpler still: who was he?Moments passed. I stood there awkwardly and as I looked at him I became aware of a kind of disgust rising in myself. He seemed hardly human. I couldn’t tell if he was young or old, carefree or past caring. His face was wrapped up, as if he had something terrible to hide. A wound, a scar, something so deep it would be there for all to see. But all I could see were the eyes, watching. Watching my disgust trying not to show itself.He must once have been the tallest of men but now, now he was bent over, as if he was carrying a great weight on his back. The thought, the cliche, came into my head: he looks as if he’s carrying the problems of the world on his shoulders.
The Vocation of the Theologian—an ecumenist's comments
Authors: Thomas J. Heywood 
Published: July 2007

My aim is to make some observations on the recent Instruction from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (summarised in The Tablet of 30 June, pp. 838—841) in an attempt to clarify certain issues and assist the debate which has been initiated, of which this journal has revealed ample evidence. These are observations bom of the awareness that the language of this document finds interesting echoes within my own tradition and consciousness as a Reformed theologian.The very notion of a vocation of theology is an interesting reflection of the sense that theology is a church-related activity. As terminology employed to specify a certain view of ecclesiastical polity it is in fact reminiscent of Calvin’s Institutes and so—naturally—this view of theology and the theologian has been one of the main features of 20th Century Protestant theology, with its rediscovery of Classical Reform. Part of that lovely sense of theology as a church-related and indeed church-based activity has been the realisation that theology is of necessity an ecumenical task. When this is ignored its practice is less than its profession and its efficacy is at once frustrated. Hence my title; for it is neither as an onlooker judging somebody else’s concerns nor as an outsider with no interest or involvement in the issue that I would make these comments. Rather, this is the deliberate attempt to bring what assistance one part of the Church can offer to another—and this on the basis of the unity of our common faith and the singleness of theological purpose.
The Language of Splendour: Fra Angelico's ‘Madonna and Child Enthroned’
Authors: Prendergast Michael 
Published: July 2007

When he painted his numerous alterpieces on the theme of Madonna and Child Enthroned, Fra Angelico accepted a traditional image and used it again and again, with variations. The archetypal scene of Our Lady sitting in state, holding her Son and surrounded by the trappings of a royal court, was inherited from the Eastern Church, where the underlying notion seems to have been that since the Byzantine Empress was presented in court finery, the Mother of God should be presented in no less splendour; and the idea had an immediate and wide appeal. For centuries, Our Lady was portrayed in painting and sculpture as a reigning monarch, not precisely as Queen of Heaven, but as a queen of men and women on earth, surrounded by angelic and saintly courtiers. So the image was part of Angelico’s mental furniture. It was not, of course, the only image of Our Lady then in vogue.The impact of Masaccio’s Madonna and Child, now in the National Gallery, London, is hard to exaggerate, and its influence is more evident in an altar panel which Angelico did for the nuns of St Peter Martyr Convent, Florence, than anywhere else. Angelico follows Masaccio in so positioning the figure of Our Lady as to bring the right shoulder slightly forward, presenting an almost straight line from the elbow to the top of the head. The resulting bulkiness of figure suggests maternal protectiveness and an air of mystery. Documentary evidence points to 1428 as the likely date of Angelico’s painting, which is interesting in the light of Orlandi’s surmise that Angelico was ordained in 1429; he must have been still a student of theology when he painted the work.
The Scandal of Suffering
Authors: Reilly Patrick 
Published: July 2007

‘We must remain absolutely silent on what we cannot talk about’. Wittgenstein’s interdict would surely apply to the mystery of human suffering; at certain intensities of pain it becomes literally as well as idiomatically unspeakable. Even to allude to the educative value of pain is to risk an inhuman glibness, a coldblooded reduction of the specificity of suffering to chill, abstract formulae. We must begin by confessing the ultimate intractability of the problem. Against pain and death we fight a losing battle; and the mystery, always insoluble, has, if anything, become more agonisingly problematic in our own time. Caring for the chronically and terminally ill has always been intensely difficult; in the modem world, technological advances notwithstanding, it has become immeasurably more so.A world without anaesthetics would be a hell; deprived of analgesics even so routine an event as a visit to the dentist would be something to be dreaded and shunned. To avoid or to minimise pain is an instinctive natural reflex; the deliberate search for suffering is a perversion to which we give the name masochism. Yet it is equally true that a world without pain would be calamitous. Pain is essential to survival—without it we would perish. It is an early warning system, a defence mechanism, vital in preventive medicine against incipient and impending evil. Without pain teeth would rot insensibly in our gums, limbs quietly crumble to ash in the flames or be mangled beyond repair in the machinery, cancers placidly proliferate in our bodies. Once bitten, twice shy. The old adage crystallises the argument that pain educates, teaches us to avoid certain courses of action harmful or destructive to us. Pain is a necessary part of a rational world, regulating behaviour, signalling the need for treatment.
Spiritual Semetism
Authors: Zananiri Gaston 
Published: July 2007

The following text is an extract from the Memoirs of Gaston Zananiri OP, of which copies of the complete text have been deposited in the Bibliothique Nationale, Paris, and the Dominican Historical Centre, Oxford. This extract allows us to relive the Jewish-Arab problem as it existed in the 1930s. Palestine was still under the British mandate, but its inhabitants were waiting for independence. This was the time when Pius XI declared, ‘Spiritually we are all Semites.’ Since then the Near East has witnessed political, nationalist and religious movements which have entirely changed the situation. We think it useful, in the present climate of renewed hopes and tensions, to publish this testimony from someone who was personally involved in this earlier period. The author, a Dominican priest in France since 1956, is an Alexandrian Melkite on his father’s side, and a Jew on his mother’s side.My discovery of Semitism goes back to my first visit to Jerusalem in 1930, where I found the three religions derived from Semitic monotheism living side by side in the chaos of the Old City. I got the impression of a dense mass of people of various origins co-existing in mutual disdain, under the firm control of the British occupation. As soon as the British left Palestine, the fire hidden beneath the ashes broke out all over the region. A similarity of temperament on all sides, shaped by a common spiritual ancestry, became apparent, in which tenacity and terrorism were the salient features. Jews and Arabs (whether Muslim or Christian) had the same psychological reactions and instincts, shaped by their common inheritance derived from the mystical, spiritual and social teaching of the bible, the gospel and the Quran. These similarities could have provided a basis for mutual understanding, but in fact they led to disagreement, fostered by the interplay of international politics and local interests.
A Green Theology?
Authors: Arguile Roger 
Published: July 2007

Before beginning to try to define what kind of Green theology is most likely to have an enduring place, let us try to define what Green theology certainly should not be.The prophets call us to account. The tone of the call is certain, because there must be no risk of our not seeing the difference between our present failure and what they propose. The ecological problems which now occupy some portion of every week’s news produce prophecies of doom and demands for action. Our inertia, our denials and the plausible reassurances of governments necessitate both subtlety and strong language, if there is ever going to be a widespread change of attitude. For, to our minds, the villains are always other people.In this situation the voices loudly resound of self-proclaimed prophets who declare that they alone have done the proper thing and bowed the knee to Baal. For it is the fertility rites of Baal that now so they say have first claim on us. So, again and again, when the theology of Environmental or Green issues is considered, Christianity is the system of religious belief most severely attacked.Its reputedly negative attitude towards a fallen world and its anthropocentrism are set off against the virtues of more earthy religion, religion considered to show a greater reverence for the natural order and to be more in line with modem developments such as feminism and a greater valuation of sensuality, developments with which Christianity has had some trouble.
Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation: A Role for Communication
Authors: Arthur Chris 
Published: July 2007

One aspect of modernity which is of particular theological significance, and whose existence is intimately linked to the twentieth century&rsquo;s distance-shrinking communications networks, is our new awareness of the sheer diversity of human religiousness. Those who live in a world where TV, radio and the press are commonplace features of a sophisticated media environment, cannot be blind to the fact that different people believe different things. This simple insight has profound implications for the way in which we formulate our theologies, communicate with each other and treat the natural world which is our common home.Many theologians and philosophers have begun to acknowledge the quantum shift in thinking which the contemporary experience of religious pluralism demands. Langdon Gilkey, for example, considers the encounter with other religions to be &lsquo;the most important new issue confronting Christian theology at the present time&rsquo;. Wilfred Cantwell Smith predicts that &lsquo;the religious life of mankind from now on, if it is to be lived at all, will be lived in a context of religious pluralism&rsquo;. And Ninian Smart has suggested that &lsquo;the earth has become in our time more or less a planet, a single globe. It is now a kind of city, the geopolis&rsquo; where the different faiths are brought into inevitable contact with each other.
Abraham's Bedroom‐Slippers God, sacred history, and chance
Authors: McDermott Timothy 
Published: July 2007

The Aquinas Lecture given at Blackfriars, Oxford, on 29 January 1991.When I was a student in Cambridge forty-odd years ago a Capuchin friar said to me, ‘God is on the surface of things’. I want to talk about that, and about how it gets obscured by the abstractions of science on the one hand and the make-believe of religion on the other.
Ekaterina Sienskaya Abrikosova (1892–1936): A Dominican Uniate Foundress in the Old Russia
Authors: Nichols Aidan 
Published: July 2007

Vladimir Vladimirovic Abrikosov, the future husband and cousin of the central personality of this article, was born on 22 October 1880. When his schooling was finished, he entered the faculty of History and Philology of Moscow University, where he wrote a dissertation on the causes of the Western Reformation. In years to come he would deplore the manner of his historical studies as formalistic, lacking in attentiveness to history’s significance. A constellation of attitudes by no means uncommon among educated Russians liberal families of the period. In 1904 Abrikosov married a cousin two years his junior. Anna Ivanovna Abrikosova was born on 23 January 1882. She attended the first gimnaziya (high school) to be opened in Moscow for the education of girls, and in 1899 won a scholarship to Girton College Cambridge. There she read history, assiduously, earning from her contemporaries the nickname ‘Deadly Earnest’. She was a gifted linguist with an excellent grasp of English, French, German and Italian, as well as considerable knowledge of Greek and Latin.The household of the newly-weds was free-thinking. God was neither affirmed nor denied. Politically they supported the current which would lead to the constitutional Revolution of 1905. Their inherited wealth enabled them to live a carefree life, devoted principally to European travel and the arts. Thus, with the exception of a single month in 1905, they spent the entire period from 1904 to 1910 in France, Italy and Switzerland.
A Study of the Poem: Noche oscura del alma of St John of the Cross
Authors: Sarmiento Edward 
Published: July 2007

Noche OscuraStanzasen que canta el alma la dichosa ventura quo tuvo pasar por La Oscura Noche de la Fe en desnudez y purgacion suya, a la union del amado.1 En una noche oscura,con ansias, en amores inflamada,oh dichosa ventura!,sail sin ser notada,estando ya mi casa sosegada;2 a escuras y segurapor la secreta escala, disfrazada,oh dichosa ventura!,a escuras y en celada,estando ya mi casa sosegada;3 en la noche dichosa,.en secreto, que naide me veia,ni yo miraba cosa,sin otra luz y guia,sino la que en el corazon ardia.4 Aquesta me guiabamas cierto que la luz del mediodia,adonde me esperabaquien yo bien me sabia,en parte donde naide parecia.5 Oh noche que guiaste!Oh noche, amable m&s que la alborada!Oh noche que juntasteAmado con amada,amada en el Amado transformada!6 En mi pecho florido,que entero para el solo se guardaba,alii quedo dormido,y yo le regalaba,y en ventalle de cedros aire daba.7 El aire del almena,cuando yo sus cabellos esparda,con su mano serenaen mi cuello heriay todos mis sentidos suspendia.8 Quedeme y olvideme,el rostro recline sobre el Amado:ceso todo, y dej?me,dejando mi cuidadoentre las azucenas olividado.
The Seven Sayings of Jesus from the Cross: Observations on Order and Presentation in the New Testament, Literature and Cinema
Authors: Kreitzer Larry 
Published: July 2007

Ever since Tatian’s Diatessaron (c. 150 CE) there has been a tradition within the Christian Church of harmonizing the life of Jesus and blend together the four gospel accounts so as to compose a biography of the Lord. Perhaps nowhere is this tendency to harmonization more clearly demonstrated than in the sayings of Jesus from the cross. In fact, there are seven so-called ‘sayings from the cross’ recorded within our New Testament, but it sometimes comes as a surprise to discover just how these seven sayings are distributed. We note the following table:1. The Sayings of Jesus from the Cross§1.) ‘My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?’ (Mark 15:33/Matthew 27:46)§2.) ‘Father forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing.’ (Luke 23:34)§3.) ‘Truly I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise. (Luke 23:43)§4.) ‘Father into your hands I commit my spirit.’ (Luke 23:46)§5.) ‘Woman behold your son ... Behold your mother. (John 19:26—27)§6.) ‘I am thirsty.’ (John 19:28)§7.) ‘It is finished!’(John 19:30)2. Distinctives in Presentation within the GospelsThe first thing to notice about the distribution of the sayings is that the sole saying recorded in both Matthew and Mark is the same, probably due to Matthew’s reliance upon Mark for the passion narratives in his gospel. This means that if the only gospel we had was Mark, we would have quite a distinctive picture of the crucifixion. Here, the only statement of Jesus is one of extreme dereliction, of forsakeness and isolation.