bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The Passage of Bob Dylan
Authors: Wall Alan 
Published: July 2007

Tomorrow is a long time At the time of John F. Kennedy’s assassination Dylan was afraid that he too might be killed. Leaving aside his proverbial paranoia, what this fear showed is the extent to which Dylan considered himself ‘involved’ : he obviously thought that he was making a statement in his music radical enough for him to be made the target of a politically- directed bullet. Dylan was connected professionally with the Civil Rights Movement and was made into a young hero by that amorphous political and social group, but at certain points in his early career his own perspectives transcended the liberal optimism of the Civil Rights slogans.Some of Dylan’s early songs were not in that one-dimensional rhetorical accusative one came to expect of the New York City folk crowd. Dylan became aware very quickly that there was only a simple answer to everything if you were simple enough to accept it. He did not wish to be made into a solo version of Peter, Paul and Mary, megaphoning easily-digestible platitudes to an auditorium full of hungry college students. In an early, unreleased song about Heze- kiah Jones he ‘accuses’ the white ‘rednecks’, the undifferentiated, anonymous, philistine mass who hide behind their respectable beliefs. But he was really more intelligent than that: he knew that the poor whites were as much victims of ‘society’s pliers’ as the exploited blacks (though often less spectacularly so).His song, Only a Pawn in their Game, must surely rank as one of the most intelligent contemporary political comments upon the murder of Medgar Evans.
Poverty: The Christian Response
Authors: Wesfon Alban 
Published: July 2007

Theological Dictionaries are a valuable asset for any preacher. They can usually provide a helpful bibliography or perhaps the germ for preaching or lecturing on most theological topics. The Sacramentum Mundi article on Poverty is no exception; not however, because of its theological profundity, but because of the response evoked by the badness of parts of the section on the moral theology of poverty. Here are some of the offending passages:In the Western world only isolated individuals lack the bare necessities of life. The understanding of poverty has largely disappeared from these countries. Instead of material poverty we often find other forms of poverty—desolation of heart, a sense that life is meaningless, anxiety, isolation—which must be interpreted as a kind of longing for redemption and love. A Christian who finds these things in himself or in others must accept them in the spirit of Christ as a means of encountering God.Poverty must first be recognised by the sufferer as a fact. By nature every form of poverty demands admission of one’s own inadequacy. It is part of the human condition that distress can never be altogether abolished, whatever our efforts. . . . Certain privations are thrust upon us.I think the passages quoted are bad, firstly because of the factual errors they contain, but more seriously because they show a misunderstanding of what Christians understand by poverty and what underlies the Christian’s response. ‘In the Western world only isolated individuals lack the bare necessities of life. The understanding of poverty has largely disappeared from these countries.’ That may be a convenient myth reinforcing the mistaken belief that the Western world is on its great march of progress, but it muffles the truth about the real situation.
Scarlet and Black: The Silent Pistol
Authors: Tatham Michael 
Published: July 2007

Any political idea in a work of literature is like a pistol shot in the midst of a concert.—Stendhal.I.It was Silone, I believe, who proposed that we might be communists without the Party and Christians without the Church. Individually, perhaps : collectively, it can scarcely be doubted we lack the necessary courage and self-discipline. Belloc, I suspect, came closer to evaluating our gifts when he advised ‘always keep ahold of nurse. . . .’ The difficulty is, of course, that most of our nurseries are empty of nurses—the last wraith of a political nanny had disappeared some time before Mr Wilson sent for his famous removal van, and now that those long-serving retainers, the Latin Mass and the 1662 Anglican Communion, are skipping among us as vernacular folk masses and Second and Third Series, it is understandable that we should be in some confusion. Indeed, despite Silone, our predicament is such that we cling yet more tightly to the only security available. It is perhaps pleasantly ironic that for many of us the last and most esteemed resource is none other than Progressive nanny. Orwell could see the way of it a quarter of a century ago.‘Almost everyone nowadays, even the majority of Catholics and Conservatives is progressive, or at least wishes to be thought so. . . . We are all of us good democrats, anti-fascist, anti-imperialist, contemptuous of class distinction, impervious to colour prejudice, and so on and so forth’, (England your England. Seeker and Warburg.)Regrettably, some of the pleasanter aspects of such a position are now more in question than they were when Orwell wrote—colour prejudice wears all the dignity of democratic consensus—but for the most part the position remains unaltered and has probably been strengthened by the dominant position of television as a means of influencing public attitudes.
I will forgive their sin and heal their land
Authors: Bucher Hubert 
Published: July 2007

There is a wide-spread feeling that the recent conference on ‘Salvation Today’ which took place in Bangkok from December 28th, 1972 to January 8th, 1973, under the auspices of the World Council of Churches’ Commission on World Mission and Evangelism, may herald the beginning of a new period in the missionary endeavour of the Christian churches. A significant feature of the conference was that delegates from churches in the Third World outnumbered those from the West. They attacked the sending of missionaries and funds by powerful Western churches to the poor churches in the Third World, urging that the missionary enterprise should become ‘completely mutual and international’, and even proposed a moratorium on the sending of funds and personnel to Third World churches, to allow them to discover their own identity and resources for missionary expansion.Only a few months after the Bangkok conference had discussed the meaning of ‘Salvation Today’, 720 delegates attended a ‘Congress on Mission and Evangelism’ in Durban, South Africa. As in Bangkok, the greater part of those who took part in the South African congress were ‘Non-Whites’. There was a further similarity of great significance: The aim of the congress was ‘. . . to discover together the relevance of the Gospel and the meaning of mission and evangelism in present-day Southern Africa ... to assess the resources and potential of all Christian churches and agencies for mission and evangelism . . . and to give stimulus, inspiration and encouragement to Christians as they face this task’.
Chesterton and Distributism
Authors: Boyd Ian 
Published: July 2007

Chesterton never gave a systematic account of what he meant by Distributism anywhere in his writing, but the outline of this sociopolitical philosophy is clear to anyone who is familiar with his work and that of the circle of writers to which he belonged. As the name implies, Distributism meant first of all that property should be distributed in the widest possible way. Belloc stated the case for this policy in The Servile State, which he published in 1912 and which became the text-book of the movement. He argued that Socialism and State Capitalism were helping to create the same kind of society in which power would be concentrated in the hands of a small ruling-class and security would be given to a permanent proletariat whose econonomic position would be fixed by law. The only alternative to the ‘slave’ state was the Distributist state of small peasant ownership and workers’ guilds. The nearest approximation to this simple society was found in medieval times. Consequently Distributists must be prepared to repudiate modern industrialism in its present form and work for a return to the past. The way in which this theory was interpreted among Belloc’s followers is best illustrated by a quotation from a Distributist manifesto published twenty-five years later:Distributists agree with Socialists in their condemnation of the present system of society, but they think the evil is far more deeply rooted than socialists suppose . . . Distributists propose to go back to fundamentals, and to rebuild society from its basis in agriculture, instead of accepting the industrial system and changing the ownership, which is all that Socialists propose. Apart from their conviction that industrialism is essentially unstable and cannot last, Distributists refuse to accept it as a foundation upon which to build, because they believe that large scale industry may be as great a tyranny under public as under private ownership.
Teach yourself Tongue‐speaking
Authors: Archer Antony 
Published: July 2007

Glossolalia can be produced with great ease—hence the title of this consideration of it. The interesting question is why people choose to engage in this form of pseudo-language, and this can at least be partially answered by describing its essential features, how people become glossolalists, and some of the conditions that favour it.Anomalous speech is not so uncommon as is often supposed. Speech ingredients are used in ways ranging from the rudimentary to the highly sophisticated in both secular and religious contexts. The pseudo-languages of spells, incantations, games, nursery rhymes, and scat-singing for instance; those attributed to spirits and Martians; and those sometimes invented by children and adults can be located on such a continuum. What they have in common is that, unlike language, their meaning is not found in the conventions either of their internal organisation or of their relationship with the perceived world. Tongue-speaking in religious contexts is an improvised language of the same kind.
No Soup Kitchens
Authors: Quinn Edward 
Published: July 2007

Lorsque les effets d’une politique intérieure menacent de démoraliser et d’exiler des centaines de milliers d’êtres humains, les considerations de correction diplomatique doivent faire place à des preoccupations de simple humanité. Je manquerais à mon devoir si je n’attirais I’attention du Conseil sur la situation actuelle et si je ne plaidais pour que I’opinion du monde, par l‘intermédiaire de la Société des Nations, des Etats membres et non membres, fasse le nécessaire afin de remédier à la situation actuelle et écarter la tragédie menaçante.(James G. McDonald, High Commissioner for Refugees from Germany, Letter of Resignation 27 December 1935.)McDonald’s letter exposing the deep roots of the Nazi persecution of the Jews and all opponents of racialism and other heresies naturally irritated the German authorities at the time, but it was also considered by the British Foreign Office as ‘a very ill-advised document’ and its author ‘a tiresome individual’. Not that our government lacked sympathy for the victims of Hitler’s policy, but it was hoped that a smoother diplomacy might in the long run prove more helpful to the Jews themselves and in the short run it seemed far too dangerous to tackle this still little known adversary on a matter of purely internal policy. And, like Pilate, they had no time to investigate the truth behind this policy. They simply could not grasp the fact that Hitler from the beginning to end was concerned to apply with ruthless logic the Weltanschauung he had worked out in bad German but with utter clarity in Mein Kampf.
The Sleeping Lord
Authors: Hague René 
Published: July 2007

The Sleeping Lord brings together all that has been printed, sporadically, of David Jones’s work since The Anathemata was published in 1952, except The Narrows (in the Anglo-Welsh Review, Autumn 1973) and The Kensington Mass (Agenda, special issue, 1974). These nine pieces are described as ‘fragments’, but the word can hardly be used here in the sense in which it is applied, for example, to the fragments of Ennius (I choose Ennius because that dogged old hexametrist is specially dear to David—what would he not give to have half-a-dozen complete books of Ennius discovered?). There is nothing broken or incomplete in anything that is built into this work. The last piece, it is true, from The Book of Balaam’s Ass, starts with a ragged edge, but the context is restored and the continuity reestablished in a very few lines.The collection falls into four parts: an introductory poem, A, a, a, Domine Deus, which comes close to, but leaves a loophole from, despair; then four sections, The Wall, The Dream of Private Clitus, The Fatigue, and The Tribune’s Visitation, which have in common (to put it crudely for the moment) an imperial Roman setting; then comes The Tutelar of the Place, which may be read as a prayer against the imposition of order at the cost of diversity and personality; and this acts as a natural bridge to the two ‘Welsh’ sections, The Hunt and The Sleeping Lord. Finally, Balaam’s Ass, which comes as an addendum : differing considerably in style, scale, and feeling from the preceding poems, and yet, in spite of its position in the book, serving as a link between David’s earliest and latest work.
Derida's Wake
Authors: Kerr Fergus 
Published: July 2007

The manifold operations with, and upon, a whole chain of representative texts which Jacques Derrida has been performing for more than a decade now, converge and conspire to outwit the continuing force of received metaphysical discourse. On every side, from Carnap to Heidegger, metaphysical discourse has been denounced and repudiated, but, as Derrida writes, ‘the way out of metaphysics is much more difficult to conceive than is generally imagined by those who think they made it with cavalier ease long ago, and who are in general sunk in metaphysics by the whole weight of the discourse they claim to have disengaged from it’ (E. D., page 416). Just how difficult the break with metaphysical discourse must be it is Derrida’s purpose to demonstrate in a multiplicity of contexts. But since it turns out that our whole notion of ‘sign’ is systematically as well as historically implicated in the hegemony of metaphysical discourse, and that ‘sign and deity have the same place and the same time of birth’ (Grammatologie, page 25), one’s theological curiosity cannot fail to be aroused.Put briefly, Derrida’s programme is to dislodge the last vestiges of idealist metaphysics from our field of discourse, in order to open the way to a ‘materialism’ like Nietzsche’s affirmation of the ‘innocence of becoming’.
Chance and the Laws of Nature
Authors: Roberts Noel 
Published: July 2007

The notion of ‘chance’ as a cause of the universe has fascinated many minds and nearly always it has been associated with its primeval beginnings. Milton, in Paradise Lost, especially Book II, line 890, et seq., paints a picture of the primeval chaos across which Satan is about to begin his journey from Hell to seek out Man and his earthly paradise.‘Before their eyes in sudden view appearThe secrets of the hoary deep, a darkIllimitable ocean without bound,Without dimension; where length, breadth and highth,And time and place are lost; where eldest NightAnd Chaos, ancestors of Nature, holdEternal anarchy, amidst the noiseOf endless wars, and by confusion stand.For Hot, Cold, Moist, and Dry, four champions fierce,Strive here for mast’ry, and to battle bringTheir embryon atoms; they around the flagOf each his faction, in their several clans,Light-armed or heavy, sharp, smooth, swift or slow,Swarm populous, unnumbered as the sandsOf Barca or Gyrene’s torrid soil,Levied to side with warring winds, and poiseTheir lighter wings. To whom these most adhere,He rules a moment; Chaos umpire sits,And by decision more embroils the frayBy which he reigns; next him high arbiterChance governs all.
David Friedrich Strauss: A Centennial Comment
Authors: Swanston Hamish 
Published: July 2007

In a letter of November 1837 proclaiming the beauties of Agnese Schebest to his friend Rapp, Strauss declared ‘Her speech, too, is thoroughly noble and intelligent’. It is common for a man to note in others his own defects, and particularly common for a clergyman to notice such defects, but Strauss here seems to be admiring a virtue others thought to be his own. George Eliot, for example, in 1858 at her second meeting with Strauss remarked that he spoke ‘with very choice words, like a man strictly truthful in the use of language’. And it has become a commonplace of Strauss criticism in this century to praise the honest purpose of the Life of Jesus. This huge work, like the short attacks on the foxy Schenkel, was ‘directed against counterfeiting’. Strauss was ever striving to state the truth of a matter.But is honesty enough? Was Strauss’ achievement merely, as Albert Schweitzer remarked, and Karl Barth approvingly quoted, ‘uncertain truthfulness?’ To the opening sentence of Schweitzer’s appraisal in the Quest, ‘Strauss must be loved in order to be understood’, Barth, in his Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, put the caution: ‘This can only mean that we must feel sympathy for him. Strauss is not a tragic figure’. He is not, perhaps, quite consistent enough in his statement of the truth to command our awed respect.Barth’s explanation of the uneven quality of Strauss’ work was that he came across a great practical problem almost by accident, by a chance of mood. The problem was that of the relation of revelation and history. And Strauss himself admitted that he was not always ready to deal with it: I am too much dependent upon mood, and far too self-occupied’. His discovery and its disturbing effects made him ‘probably the best-known and influential theologian of the Nineteenth Century in non-theological and non-church circles’.
The Myth and Dream of Paradise
Authors: Navone John 
Published: July 2007

It was Tertullian who coined the phrase, anima naturaliter christiana. This means that in the innermost depth of every human being there is alive a sort of natural religion with its standards of true and false, good and evil; it means that man is pre-programmed to a sense of wonder and awe before the mystery of his existence and meaning within the universe.Plays, like The Glass Menagerie and A Streztcar Named Desire in this essay, often imply this basic truth of man's openness to the transcendent when a man's dreams are seen to surpass both his personal resources and those of his society for their attainment, yet dream he must. In fact, his dreams may become more real for him than any other reality of his historical condition, bearing witness to that reality which underlies human awareness and, nevertheless, transcends human definition.Sometimes the dream is associated with madness when a man, tragically deluded about the meaning of his life, destroys himself in his attempt to force reality to conform to the shape of his illusions. There is a profound pathos in a man's faithful response to a destructive illusion, to the wrong dream : even this, however, is perhaps better than no dream at all. In any case the theatre in general and Tennessee Williams's Glass MenaEerie and Streetcar in particular reveal much about man and the quality of his dreams; they reveal how much man and his society can be transformed for better or for worse by them.
All Sorts of Occasions
Authors: John Eric 
Published: July 2007

Wittgenstein once said (to M.O’C Drury): ‘It is impossible for me to say one word in my book about all that music has meant in my life’. I do not think Wittgenstein meant to point to some personal hang up Musical experience is at once very important to those to whom it is important at all and very difficult to talk sense about. It is not quite impossible to do this, but impossible to do it consistently. One thinks of the remarks on music in Cocteau’s Rappel a I’Ordre or Stravinsky’s Conversations where remarks which illuminate sit cheek to jowel with remarks that merely obscure. Or, to take a more academic example, what is one to make of the fact that the same man, Donald Tovey, wrote the brilliant essay on Schubert and Loewes’ setting of Erlkönig that so illuminates the whole world of Lieder, and the utterly wrongheaded paper on Mozart’s fortieth symphony? It is then no disparagement of Hamish Swanston to say that his article, A Redeeming Occasion, in the March number of New Blackfriars, whilst full of interesting ideas, adds up to a general thesis about opera that must be rejected.Dr Swanston likes opera. His taste is good, or at any rate I like most of the same things he does. He sees, what I am sure is just, that Mozart, Verdi, and Wagner are in quite a different category from other composers of opera. He would add Beethoven, on the strength of Fidelio, to this select company—here I strongly disagree but more of that in a moment. Going to one of this select group of operas is a redeeming occasion in the strict theological sense and Dr Swanston does not hesitate from a final conclusion that opera at this level ‘has itself become a way of theologising’. Here I am sure, he is quite wrong but to say why I find difficult because I do not think going to the opera, even to different performances of the same opera, is one kind of experience about which general conclusions can be made.
Analysis, Interpretation, Meaning; The Dilemma of Stuctural Anthropology
Authors: Edwards Adrian 
Published: July 2007

The not unimpressive degree of agreement which prevailed as regards theory and practice among British social anthropologists between about 1940 and the later fifties was produced by a variety of factors, including of course the opportunities for fieldwork in the British colonial empire, on which the sun was unobtrusively, but inexorably, setting. Other factors were the relatively high degree of cordiality between the small number of leading social anthropologists, almost all of whom had been in some way influenced by both Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, and who found it possible to teach and organise research on the basis of what was called ‘structural-functionalism’, a workable synthesis (to simplify slightly) of Malinowski’s fieldwork methods with Radcliffe-Brown’s stress on the classification of social structures. The range of interests of structural-functionalism was unduly narrow, myth and ritual being treated as supporting adjuncts to the social institutions on which attention was focused, and both linguistics and oral literature were very largely ignored. Much of the theoretical basis of structural-functionalism was also of the sort that survives by not being questioned; if ‘the function of exogamy is to increase the solidarity of kin groups’, are those kin groups which allow endogamy therefore lacking in solidarity, how does one measure solidarity, and if exogamy (or any other social institution) cannot be explained as useful, what sort of explanations do we give?The turning away from the structural-functional orthodoxy would have come anyway, with the end of the colonial era and the increase in number of social anthropologists, but it is only fair to point out that the new directions of social anthropology in Britain from 1960 onwards did grow out of work done by the leading apostles of structural-functionalism.