bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
English Versions of the Bible
Authors: Colledge Eric 
Published: July 2007

History reveals to us few spectacles more awesome than the long procession of mortals who, undeterred by considering their mortal frailty, have set out to revise, re-edit, redecipher, retranslate the text of the sacred scriptures. Seventy-two Greek-speaking Jews locked up in a library, a hermit in a rocky wilderness, a whole monastery given over, year after year, to the collating of photostats: should the line stretch out to the crack of doom, we may be sure that the last newcomer will still believe that where his precursors have erred, he will find the right way, the just word. We may be sure, too, that his ‘Azymes’, his ‘Feast of the Skipover’, his ‘Give each other a hearty handshake all round for my sake’ will earn for him the unkind criticisms of those by whom, usually, he has not meant his version to be read at all. The translators, the emendators, the excisors, interpolators, forgers, the Urtexter-finder have all had their way with us, and yet we still contrive, century after century, to know more or less what the Bible is about; surely a most striking fulfilment of St Matthew xxiv, 35.The late Father Hugh Pope, o.p., was attracted to the history of these undertakings as they have affected Britain and the United States; and in English Versions of the Bible (B. Herder, London, 1952; 75s.) we have a revision, first by an anonymous Benedictine and then by Father Sebastian Bullough, o.p., of the book which he had not completed at the time of his death in 1946. It is a vast work, beginning with Caedmon and bringing us down to 1950. It is questionable whether Fr Pope was well advised in seeking to compile such an exhaustive treatment of what is not one subject but three.
Fruit of Adversity
Authors: Smith Naomi Royde 
Published: July 2007

Last year the 24th of August fell on a Sunday. A plaintive convert coming away from High Mass that morning was heard to wonder whether the Church commemorated any saint on November 5th. He was told that in the English Calendar the day, occurring in the octave of All Saints, is appointed for the honouring of such relics as any parish church might possess: elsewhere it is sometimes observed as the Feast of the seventh-century Abbess of Chelles and sometimes as that of St Zachary. These facts were of course not what the enquirer really sought. His had been an oblique request for information about the Catholic retrospect on Gunpowder Plot. A full, probably an exhaustive answer to this demand has been given by Father Anstruther in his monograph The Voux of Harrowden.Beginning with the fifteenth-century Northamptonshire lawyers, father and six sons who all married money, Father Anstruther follows the history of the Vaux family and their collaterals the Treshams, through prosperity to affluence; through knighthood to baronage; through recusancy to ruin; through martyrdom to 1829 and the re-establishment of their title in 1835’ . . . .That the family survived the Armageddon of the Popish plot is, says Father Anstruther, partly due to the fact that in Northamptonshire there remained scarcely any Catholics to persecute.
The Meaning of Martyrdom
Authors: Ryan Columba 
Published: July 2007

No age in Christian history has gone without the grievous accompaniment of martyrdom. We are not singular in this affliction. And so it seems vain upon its occasion merely to protest as if at some monstrous political anomaly. Should we not rather suspect and seek to uncover the profounder connection between it and the economy of our redemption which was effected upon the Cross?In this enquiry a natural starting point is afforded by St John’s vision of the Apocalypse. He wrote the record of that vision about the year 96 A.D., when the Emperor Domitian’s systematic oppression of the Christians impended. They were a prey to the deepest discouragement. They had already undergone the capricious cruelty of Nero’s persecution. Was there to be no end to their suffering? They must call Domitian, now, Lord and God; this would be the test of their civic loyalty, and it would be a loyalty enforced at the point of the sword. Less and less did it seem possible for the elect to live at peace with the world. St John’s vision brought them the answer. He saw all time stretched over age upon age of persecution and struggle; but he saw simultaneously the same ages gathered in a single syllable of time, made over to victory in the blood of the Lamb. Through the ages Satan, the great dragon—cast down to earth where alone his power remains unloosed—persecuted the Woman whose children are the brethren of Christ. Deprived of power against her and her Firstborn, he ‘went to make war on the rest of her children, the men who keep God’s commandments, and hold fast to the truth concerning Jesus’. ‘Day and night he stood, accusing them in God’s presence. But because of the Lamb’s blood, and because of the truth to which they bore witness, they triumphed over him, holding their lives cheap till death overtook them.’
Fra Angelico
Authors: Mathew Gervase 
Published: July 2007

Mr John Pope Hennessy’s recent study on Fra Angelico has already been widely and appreciatively reviewed. Yet it is curious how few of its reviewers seem to have noted the profound originality of his treatment and conclusion.The volume is in itself an admirable specimen of the Phaidon productions at their best. It would be possible to criticise some of the colour reproductions but we are still at the stage when the majority of colour reproductions are liable to criticism. The photographing is excellent, the selection of details ideal for its purpose. The reproductions are predominant over the text as is so often the case in English Art History publications, yet here this is counter-balanced by Mr Pope-Hennessy’s rare capacity for conciseness. In ninety pages of introduction and of catalogue he describes definitively three previouly unknown yet major Italian painters of the Quattrocento.One of these may still be described as Fra Angelico, but there is little in common between this Fra Giovanni da Fiesole, ‘Fr Ioannes Petri de Magello iuxta Vichium Optimus Pictor’, and the Angelico popularised by Rio in De l’Art Chrétien. He is a consummately accomplished and professional painter, employed by many patrons, working from carefully considered and balanced schemes, and consistently influenced by the ideals in the Lucula Noctis of his Dominican master Giovanni Dominici. The author of the Lucula Noctis was familiar with the technique of his contemporary Italian humanists and could write as well as they of ‘Myrrha, Phaedra or Ganymede’, but he rejected so many of their standards of value. To him the art of rhetoric seems over-prized. ‘The beautiful form of the poem is like clothing.
Christian Institutions
Authors: Wegner Arthur 
Published: July 2007

In every age, even in the centuries called Christian, believers have had to lament the infidelities of men. That is a grief which concerns, most of all, our own individual souls. But the lawyer and the statesman are concerned with institutions, and with the fact that these institutions have been Christian for centuries and have ceased to be so in our time. Christian lawyers and statesmen should feel a tremendous responsibility for this decline of Christian standards in their own generation. They cannot be consoled by the sort of sophistry which suggests that Christian institutions are impossible; that to talk about them only betrays an external view and an unspiritual outlook; that there may be more genuine Christianity in the souls of a few human beings in a so-called unchristian age than in all those celebrated centuries of Christian culture, and that it is only this true Christianity in some individual souls which really matters.There is one institution, however, which is so closely connected with the very essence of human personality that nobody should venture to call it external; namely, matrimony. And there have been two fundamental changes in it during the last four or five centuries: one that dates back to the Reformation and one that is a specific development of our own time.
Modes of Thought in Primitive Society
Authors: Lienhardt Godfrey 
Published: July 2007

No one who studies savage societies would say, today, that there are modes of thought which are confined to primitive peoples. It is rather that we ourselves have specialised ways of apprehending reality. The contributors to this series may, indeed, have described notions which we do not easily take for granted, but which are commonplace among many peoples without our modern science and technology. But any historical sense of proportion—and our historical thought, our sense of relativities, is among our distinguishing characteristics—reminds us that it is some of our own habits of thought which are newly-formed and uncommon. We stand more or less alone, for example, in not taking witchcraft seriously, or distant kinship; and our indifference in such matters divides us equally from savages, and from those ancient cultures whose civilisation, in other respects, we are proud to inherit.Further, since the eighteenth century at least, we have been rather disposed to forget that a satisfying representation of reality may be sought in more than one way, that reasoning is not the only way of thinking, that there is a place for meditative and imaginative thought.
House or Home
Authors: Wright Lance 
Published: July 2007

Even those who are most insistent that architecture is an art will admit that there is a limit to what aesthetics can do to gild distressing human arrangements. The truth of this has been brought home to English people in a painful way by the dilemma of ‘housing’. For perhaps no modern building problem has had so much architectural skill lavished on it. But if its fruits are on the whole more seemly than they were forty years ago, this is on the surface only and cannot hide the fact that the conception— whether it is realised, in an estate or a neighbourhood or a new town—is humanly unsatisfactory. If we enquire why and how this is so, all objections lead back to the intractable defect that there is altogether too much of it. ‘Intractable’ because those who still want houses will explain that so far as they are concerned there is altogether too little.It is not only monotony to the eye which is complained of—though this is at least an indication that there is something wrong—but the great distances which everyone must walk to get anywhere and the social defects which these distances produce and which are generally described as ‘thinning of the social fabric’. Distances so ‘take it out of’ people that they do less, participate less, see less of one another. And it is perhaps this toll on social life which we are chiefly aware of when we remark the lifelessness of our new localities. They are an aggregation of units which do not add up to a commune.It is surely clear that no urbanity in the architectural arrangements can make up for defects of this kind; but that the fault must lie, if not with basic requirements, at least with the present mode in which they are supplied.
Anathemata
Authors: Chute Desmond 
Published: July 2007

In The Anathemata (Faber and Faber; 25s.) Mr David Jones has rewarded admirers of his earlier period—that of opaque paintings, taut images, rare incised or rounded box-woods—by presenting them at length with another major work of sacred art.Anathemata: ‘things patient of being “set-up to the gods”’: for matter, thoughts stirring as often as not ‘in the time of the Mass’; for background, ‘the entire world of sign and sacrament’; for magnet and focus, the Body of the Lord.Incarnation is here ‘no hint half guessed, [no] gift half understood’. In lieu of Mr Eliot’s ‘hardly barely prayable prayer’ we have an epic conterminous with recorded and unrecorded time, one vast eucharistic symphony, whose tempo is the velocity of thought; its music ‘unmeasured, irregular in stress and interval, of interior rhythm, modal’, moves stately as in breves, its tone akin rather to woodwind than to strings: ‘reeds then! and minstrelsy’. Great play is made with the more sombre vowels—‘the stone/ the fonted water/ the fronded wood’. Sharps are not to seek—‘if fifth the fire/ the cadence ice’, nor clash of consonants—‘skirted, kilted, cloaked, capped and shod’.
Moral Dilemmas
Authors: Vann Gerald 
Published: July 2007

Can there ever be such a thing as having a vocation to choose the wrong vocation? A man adopts a career only to discover too late that it is the wrong career; marries a woman only to find too late that she is the wrong woman; settles down into a fixed, narrow groove only to find that at heart he is a wanderer. Perhaps we should see these errors of judgment as being no more than permitted by God; what is certain is that, the false situation once established, the frustration set up, the sufferer must surely see his vocation as being not at an end but at a beginning: something of value has to be made somehow out of the muddle.There are of course many other types of frustration, and they are tragically common. There is the outwardly successful marriage which in reality has become empty of meaning: the husband and wife continuing—for the sake of appearances, or from a sense of duty, or because of the children— to act as a happy couple while in reality there is no longer any real communion between them or any hope of any. There are the men and women who long for married life but never achieve it. There are those who have a deep desire to become this or that, to achieve this or that, but have in the end to admit that they lack the necessary gifts. There are those who long for friends, for companionship, but are condemned to loneliness; there are those who never seem to be able to make a real success of anything to which they put their hands. In the moral sphere there are those who long to make something worthy of their lives but who feel hopelessly defeated by some vice which they lack the strength to conquer; there are the cases of undeveloped conscience or deep character defect where a vague desire to ‘be good’ is at times of emotional exaltation raised to grandiose heights of resolution only to be dashed again into the depths of despair when the next defeat occurs.
The Communist's Confession
Authors: Foster Kenelm 
Published: July 2007

The little story that follows has something in common with Guareschi’s Don Camillo tales, but it has the advantage of being true; and truth is more interesting than fiction even when the latter is written by a humorist of genius. My true story is not funny, but most Italian priests who know communism at close quarters do not—sometimes for different reasons—find the situation at all funny, and are even inclined to blame Guareschi for having, as one of them said to me, ‘joked about things that are tragic’. That may not be quite fair to Guareschi, but it is a point of view which his non-Italian admirers should not overlook.As for my story, its setting is the Tuscan countryside today, where three-quarters of the population are communist and therefore officially excommunicated by the Church. That is the first point to grasp. Try to imagine the more obvious difficulties confronting a priest in this situation. Is he to refuse the Sacraments to everyone who has the party membership card and will not throw it away? If so, he knows that he is shutting the church door in the face of most of the men in his parish and more than half the women. Over large zones of central Italy the peasants just assume, as a thing too obvious to need discussion, that the communist party is their party. E il nostro partito: the phrase comes out pat as a matter of course. Moreover it is widely assumed in Italy (at least verbally) that communism is simply Christianity in practice, and that the priests at the bottom of their hearts know this. In other words it is assumed that the barrier between Church and communism is no more than a legal device erected by the priests because their self-interest ties them to the other political faction.
Moral Dilemmas
Authors: Vann Gerald 
Published: July 2007

Few confusions are more common, or more perplexing, today than the confusion between two quite different uses of the word ‘natural’; yet both uses are valid enough if rightly understood; and the distinction between them is a very simple one.On the one hand, we are always saying, or hearing it said, that this or that action, though not commendable, is ‘natural enough’ or ‘only natural’. It is only natural for people to lose their tempers or their heads sometimes, only natural if occasionally they oversleep or overeat, only natural if sometimes they let this or that passion get the better of them. What does the phrase mean? It means, in effect, ‘only to be expected’. And why is it to be expected? Because that, to use another common phrase, is ‘only human nature’ as we know it. But what is the human nature that we know in everyday experience? It is, in the language of Catholic theology, fallen human nature.Fallen human nature means human nature, not as it was created by God, not as it was intended to be by God, but as it exists now, warped and twisted by evil. It is not wholly evil, far from it; but the evil tendencies are there, as we all know from our own experience; in our better moments we realize that we ought to be conquering them, integrating the energies which find an outlet in evil actions into the organic unity of the good life; but again and again we fail, or we forget altogether even to try, and then nature-as-we-know-it has its way.
War in Tradition and Today
Authors: Pepler Conrad 
Published: July 2007

Since the later middle ages the Church has commonly taught that five main conditions must be fulfilled before a war may be entered into with justice and therefore graciously. These conditions are that the war has to be undertaken only as a last resort when all other methods of retaining or achieving peace have failed; that there are serious prospects of success; that the war must be waged only for a grave and just cause proportionate to the evils of war; that it must be declared and prosecuted only by the legitimate authority; and that the whole prosecution of the war be guided by the right intention. There is no need to discuss this tradition; it is sufficiently well-known and in certain circles has been discussed at such length as to become wholly complex and unreal. What is urgently needed is an objective view of the application of the principles involved in this tradition to the modem scene of international strife; in other words, we need to discover the full stream of Christian life and thought as it meets the ocean of the present at this point.Tradition teaches—and we will accept it without argument— that war may be undertaken only as the last resort. As things exist today we can say that if and when a country suffers armed aggression and she is forced into a defensive war, then war is permissible under this heading because there is no alternative; but that international politics are so complicated that it is often extremely difficult to discover who is the real aggressor.
Medieval Christendom: Two Presentations
Authors: Smalley Beryl 
Published: July 2007

Scholarship and reflection go together all too seldom. Two new books about the Middle Ages combine them in a quite exceptional way. It is no accident, but a sad commentary on present historical teaching, that one book was written by a professor in retirement, the other by a college tutor in a period of enforced rest. Both convey the rare and delightful impression of learning recollected in tranquillity. One remembers that the great Belgian medievalist, Henri Pirenne, wrote his Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe far away from his books and his students in a German prison camp in the First World War.The Thirteenth Century (1216-1307) by Sir Maurice Powicke falls into two parts; the change in method and treatment is easily discernible. The first part covering the reign of Henry III draws on the author’s earlier book, Henry III and the Lord Edward, published in 1947. This large-scale work in two volumes summarized the findings of recent studies including the author’s minute researches into the reign of Henry III. Here he condenses it into a crisp and exciting narrative. A few details are new, since the first book provoked discussion, and some fresh studies have appeared. But the main difference is that judgments stand out more sharply and the characters have clearer outlines. If Henry remains very much the same, a naive, changeable, but ‘fundamentally decent’ person, his great friend and antagonist, Simon de Montfort, has become more sympathetic and intelligible. The incalculable trouble-maker, while still ambitious and erratic, now stands in closer relations with the knights and freeholders of the shires who supported his cause through their mistrust of royal promises.
The Claims of Sound Broadcasting
Authors: James David Lloyd 
Published: July 2007

As newly discovered television ‘stars’ blaze into incandescence, or at least into headlines, and as one parlour game succeeds another, radio programmes begin to sound a defensive note. The strong emotions which are revealed when the House of Commons debates the future of television colour most discussions by the professionally engaged of the claims of sound broadcasting in a world which is rapidly switching from loud-speaker to screen. In the Autumn 1953 number of the B.B.C. Quarterly Louis MacNeice made ‘A Plea for Sound’. The word ‘plea’, with its overtones of advocacy and partisanship, suggests some of the passion which this controversy can provoke. And one of the unfortunate results is that the opposing sides in this pointless warfare have resorted to that most tedious of stratagems which forbids the praise of X without the condemnation of Y. Not that I think Mr MacNeice guilty of this. ‘Television, obviously’, he says, ‘is an exciting and fertile medium in which many fine things can be done that sound could never attempt. The point is that sound can do many fine things that will never be possible in television. We should all therefore hope both that television may develop to the utmost and that sound broadcasting may survive.’ In which future directions are these fine things likely to be found?Imagine a future in which sound and television are equally available to most people, in which several alternative television programmes are transmitted for the greater part of the day, and in which the present technical limitations of television have been to a considerable extent overcome.