bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
A Note on Grace
Authors: Hislop Ian 
Published: July 2007

Few topics, to my mind, have been so obscured by inter-confessional debates as that of grace. Particularly, perhaps, among Catholics really everything written or said since the sixteenth century has been conditioned by reaction against, or attack upon, positions asserted to be those of the Reformers. Yet when we trundle out these statements and the arguments on which they rest, it comes as a surprise to be told that we have got the Reformers quite wrong; even their contemporaries, the theologians of the Council of Trent, seem to have been grappling with adversaries of their own making. When we go on to look, far too superficially in my case, at what seems to be the Reformed view about what we hold, the results are even more surprising.Perhaps the Reformed take theologians more seriously than we do, but even given this, they seem, from our point of view, to be remarkably unlucky in the ones they read (but I except Professor Torrance from this).It may well be—because Catholics have been guilty of practically every absurdity—that there are theologians who hold, or have held, that grace is a separate thing, something we can possess; or a reservoir on which we can draw. Some, not of very great repute, have certainly held that a right use of natural powers deserved or brought about a giving of grace. On a hasty reading it might appear that even the great medieval theologians regarded grace as the embellishment of an aristotelian universe. But when it is suggested that even Roman theologians regard grace as an impersonal something, a something detachable from the presence of the living God, I do not recognise anything more than the selection of one set of statements interpreted in the worst possible sense and used out of context.
Christian Journalism
Authors: Bright Laurence 
Published: July 2007

In itself this collection of articles, letters, jokes, editorials and poems from New Christian (1965-1970) has nothing particularly to recommend it to readers five years later. Everything here was written for its own time and place rather than for export. But seen as a reminder of what New Christian stood for, as evidence to draw on should there be any other serious Christian reviews in being or possibility, it seems to me of very great value.However we regard New Christian, praise or blame for it belongs mostly to Trevor Beeson, its permanent editor. I think he achieved remarkable success. He aimed high, and hit a lot of marks, missing only the crucial one—circulation. His short account in the Reader of what he tried for and where he failed is a model for any editor of a Christian journal. I propose to summarise it under eight heads, following each with my own comment, and drawing where necessary on the evidence of the collection.
Jesus the Martyr
Authors: O'Collins Gerald 
Published: July 2007

Men and women martyred for their faith form a coherent and distinctive group—from Socrates and Stephen, through Joan of Arc, Savonarola and Thomas More, down to Dietrich Bonhoeffer in our own day. Violent death came to each in such a way that we can classify them all with Jesus.Particular circumstances may allow us to match their martyrdoms with his passion and crucifixion. At times betrayal by former friends or similar forms of treachery led to arrest and imprisonment. The trials which preceded the death penalty frequently centred on some fatal question. Did Thomas More wish to deprive Henry VIII of the title which Parliament had granted him? How would Jesus answer when the high priest asked him : ‘Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?’ (Mark 14:61). Finally, many martyrs shared the same geography of death with Jesus—public execution. Some were, of course, butchered in their prison cells, or like Bonhoeffer led away to the sinister secrecy of a Nazi hanging. But Joan of Arc died in the Rouen market-place, Savonarola outside the old Palace in Florence, and Thomas More on Tower Hill.Granted these and other similarities, we need, nevertheless, to be sensitive to much that gives Jesus’ passion and death its own particular profile. The differences go beyond the obvious and massive fact that no one even alleges that the other martyrs have reconciled the entire human race with God. We must not let other notable contrasts slip out of sight. Let me examine one of these.
Lonergan's Theory of Knowledge and the Social Sciences
Authors: Meynell Hugo 
Published: July 2007

Bernard Lonergan’s theory of knowledge is not yet very well-known among social scientists. But it seems to me that it has implications of fundamental importance for the central problems with which they are concerned. In what follows, I shall try to explain why.What is the nature of the explanation of human behaviour sought by the social scientist, and what relation does it have to the explanations which agents give of their own actions? It is characteristic of the sociological view which one might call ‘positivist’ that it eliminates as quite irrelevant to the scientific explanation of human behaviour the accounts given by the agents themselves. This is justified by the claim that the agent’s point of view is by its very nature individual and subjective; whereas science aspires to a form of explanation which is objective and publicly verifiable. Completely opposed to the positivist view is that which takes the agent’s explanation of his own behaviour as uniquely privileged. On this account, social science is pursuing a chimaera if it looks for any explanation of an action other than that which the agent gives or at least is capable of giving himself. This is a central contention, I think, of the ethnomethodologists; it has also been defended by Peter Winch.A third view is the Marxist one, which differs from that just alluded to in that it insists that what human beings are up to on the one hand, and the justifications which they give of what they are doing, are two very different things ; but does not aspire to the kind of ‘reductionism’ which is practised by the positivist.
Wolf Masks: The Early Poetry of Ted Hughes
Authors: Smith Stan 
Published: July 2007

‘It was a violent time’. Thom Gunn’s description of the Elizabethan age (‘A Mirror for Poets’) could equally be applied to the 1950s. Again and again the poetry of this decade returned to the central theme of violence, yet, constantly, shrank back from engaging with it. Gunn’s own poetry, replete with latent aggression,, nevertheless strove to contain its smouldering energy in couplets and formal stanzas and histrionic poses (‘Even in bed I pose’) as impersonal and self-disciplining as those nazi uniforms and leather-jackets with which his poems abound. The motor-cyclists of ‘On the Move’ seemed to offer an adequate parallel to his own poetic stance:
In goggles, donned impersonality,In gleaming jackets trophied with the dust,They strap in doubt—by hiding it, robust—And almost hear a meaning in their noise.Much of the writing of ‘The Movement’ tried to explore the barbarous hinterland which recent history had shown lay behind the genteel littoral of western civilisation, but most poems had an air of ‘donned impersonality’ which seemed to brand them as exercises rather than explorations. The doubt was too profound, the revelation of depravity too recent and too raw, to make total candour possible. For many poets, an ostensibly empirical interest in the quotidian became, in fact, a rationale for escapism.
Marxists and Christians: Answers for Brian Wicker
Authors: Eagleton Terry 
Published: July 2007

The question which Brian Wicker poses to Denys Turner—how is Marxism to accommodate the notion of ethical absolutes?—is clearly one of first importance to those who, like Denys Turner and myself, would regard themselves as both Christians and Marxists. I don’t think I can give any satisfactory answer to Wicker’s question, but I can perhaps at least prepare the context for such an answer by making some general remarks about the relations between Marxism and morality. In doing so, incidentally, I shall be elaborating on Turner’s own truly pioneering earlier article in this journal, ‘Morality is Marxism’ (New Blackfriars, February and March 1973).The question of the relevance of moral values to Marxism is at the heart of one of the most theoretically crucial debates now being conducted within European Marxism : the conflict between those revolutionary theorists for whom Marxism is in essence a humanism—an historical praxis of love and liberation—and those for whom historical materialism is in the first place a science. The adherents of the former position espouse a Marxism deeply indebted to Hegel and the work of the young Marx; the latter believe that such a case is no more than an idealist ideology of historical materialism, and claim to be restoring Marxism, after this long twentieth-century heresy, on the truly scientific basis to be found in the mature Marx of Capital. The debate—one, roughly, between the followers of Georg Lukacs and the disciples of the most prominent European Marxist theorist of our own time, Louis Althusser—has created a good deal of dust and heat among revolutionary intellectuals.For the Lukacsians, there is an essential continuity between the work of the earlv, humanist Marx and the later scientist of Capital; for the Althusserians, there is radical rupture and discontinuity between the two phases.
On Dissolving Indissolubility
Authors: Boivin Marcel 
Published: July 2007

Let us begin with dissolving inflated statements on the indissolubility of marriage which do nothing but distort the issue: statements such as marriage is indissoluble, or marriage between Christians is indissoluble, or marriage is indissoluble because it is a sacrament. In point of fact, the Church considers marriage to be generally dissoluble: she claims the power to dissolve marriages between unbaptised spouses and does avail herself of that power when she sees fit to do so. Since by far the majority of spouses that live on our planet are not baptised, the initial proposition must be reworded as follows: in the Church’s view, marriage is dissoluble, with the proviso that in some cases it is not.What are those cases which are exceptions to the rule? Marriages between baptised spouses—or, to use the short-cut formula, marriages between Christians? The trouble is that the Church also claims the power to dissolve such marriages and actually goes on to break some, as when she grants a dissolution of the bond to validly married Christian spouses who have failed to ‘consummate’ their marriage.What, then, about relating indissolubility to the reception of the Sacrament of Matrimony? Doesn’t everybody know that if you are baptised and validly married in the Church, your marriage is ipso facto a sacrament and indissoluble by divine law. . . ? Beware, however, of bringing God into the picture before the Church is out of it: for your marriage is a sacrament even though you may have chosen not to consummate it, yet the Church would have no qualms of conscience in regarding you a free man (or a free woman) if you wished, say, to join a religious order and actually made your solemn profession.
Christianity and Violence: An Alternative Tradition
Authors: Cullen Peter J 
Published: July 2007

During this Twentieth Century, more human lives have been lost as a result of warfare and political strife than have been taken by famine or any natural disaster. Not only have two world wars inflicted unmeasured misery and suffering upon millions of people, but also atrocities have been committed in the pursuit of political freedom or the protection of human rights throughout the five continents. In Vietnam, war was a fact of life for thirty years; relations between the countries of the Middle East are strained to the limit by violence and acts of war; in Northern Ireland, the deaths and injuries of the last five years, with the many who have been unjustly imprisoned or ill-treated, have ensured that it will be some considerable time before the hostility which has characterised the troubles finally disappears.In this Holy Year, with its theme of reconciliation, Christians can use the Old Testament to discover the contribution they can make to a world which is desperately searching for peace. The Jewish understanding of peace is characterised by the prophet Isaiah, who looked forward to the Messianic Age as a time when the swords and spears of destruction would be converted into the ploughshares and pruning-hooks with which men could sustain life (Isaiah 2 :4). Such a positive vision of peace inspired the composer of Psalm 72 to pray for the establishment of the Messianic Kingdom, where ‘Justice will flourish, and peace, until the moon fails’. The poor and the weak will be freed from oppression and material well-being will characterise the times as corn ‘is abundant in the land’ and men flourish in the cities ‘like grass on the earth’.
Sermon at a Latin Mass
Authors: Fitzpatrick P J 
Published: July 2007

Profert de thesauro suo nova et vetera: ‘he bringeth from his treasure new things and old’. (Matt. XIII 52).We have come together tonight, not only from different Christian traditions, but from different areas of thought in our own Church. We have come together to celebrate Mass, the holy mysteries in which, as Our Lord commanded, we shew forth his death and rejoice in him, our risen Saviour. But we have come together, for all our differences, in another way too. We have assembled here to celebrate Mass in a tongue that links us with a remote past older than Christianity itself, and in a form that was for centuries a distinguishing mark of the ancient church of the West. Our ceremony tonight would have been recognised at once by Pascal, by Thomas More, by Cuthbert Tunstall; and, with almost equal ease, by Bede, by Cuthbert, by Gregory. Yet in order that you should join in and recognise the ceremony yourselves, you have needed to assemble from many parts to this place—almost as a new gens lucifuga in its catacomb. It is this paradox that has prompted the reflexions I offer you.Liturgy—the leitourgia, the public work of worship—bears on itself the marks of time and of ages that are past. Examples are easily found. Just as the outstretched hands of the priest recall the frescos depicting the earliest Christians, so his hands folded in prayer are reminiscent of a later age, and of the medieval gesture of homage. In action and posture, in phrase and word, in the very artefacts of worship, the course of our history, as Christians and as men, has left its mark.
Jesus between Poetry and Philosophy
Authors: O'Collins Gerald 
Published: July 2007

Early this year I heard a lecture by Hans Georg Gadamer (a retired professor of philosophy from Heidelberg University) on the history of relations between philosophers and poets. Gadamer mused on the ups and downs, the loves and hates, the convergences and divergences of that relationship. It runs all the way from Plato to the later Heidegger. Plato called the poets’ stories of the gods ‘theologies’. His ideal republic—he believed—would be better off if it severely controlled this kind of theology and even banished the poets. Plato refused to accept that his own master in philosophy, Socrates, had corrupted the youth of Athens, but he clearly believed that poets could be corrupting influences. Other philosophers have been much kinder to poets. In our own century Heidegger turned from his earlier work to draw from poetry the material for his later philosophical reflections.All in all, it was a brilliant lecture by Gadamer. It set a number of questions buzzing in my head. Would a period that was high on poetic imagination prove likely to be low on philosophical thought? Do poetry and philosophy represent completely different ways of approaching reality, which neither match one another nor even have much to do with one another? And then came the question that gave rise to this lecture. Would reflection on some of the ways poets and philosophers work throw light on the mind behind the preaching of Jesus?Let us explore that last question and see what comes up. First of all, the philosophers and their revolutions. Some philosophers like Wittgenstein have stood back from their culture, surveyed centuries of intellectual history, and quite consciously tried to take philosophy and human thought in new directions. In their own way such philosophers could appropriate the sentiment of Jesus, ‘Of old such and such was said to you. But I say to you’.
The Papacy and the Historian V: Popes and Monks
Authors: John Eric 
Published: July 2007

Gregory the Great is important because he was born to the purple of what was left of the classical world—he was related to both Symmachi and Anici, to Symmachus and Boethius—but used the position his status gave him to further the cause of the revolutionary and subversive elements of Christian society, the hippies of his day, the monks. The Rome of his day was the apex of a wedge-shaped territory extending from the Adriatic, near Ravenna, to the Mediterranean, at Ostia. This, like all Italy, was supposed to be part of the Byzantine Empire. To the north, what is now Tuscany and Lombardy were ruled by the Lombards who were bitter enemies of the Byzantines, who could afford to maintain an unremitting hostility to them, and of the papacy, which could not. The so-called exarchate of Ravenna, of which Rome and its environs, the so-called duchy of Rome, were a part, was the object of a policy of covetous nibbling by the Lombards. The exarchate was Byzantine in that it recognised the sovereignity of the eastern emperor, who appointed the exarch, but in practice it had to be self-supporting. Inevitably the bishop of Rome played a greater and greater part in all this and the duchy of Rome at least was often in practice ruled by the pope of the day insofar as it was ruled at all.The ruler of Rome had always had some responsibility for feeding the population: before Gregory became pope in 590 the Tiber overflowed its banks and inundated the city’s granaries. Plague had followed in the wake of the flood and carried off Pope Paschal I, Gregory’s predecessor. Rome was full of refugees from the Lombards, Gregory himself estimated there were 3,000 destitute nuns alone in Rome and appealed for help in feeding them.
Guilty Splendour
Authors: Edwards Owen Dudley 
Published: July 2007

The story which Wodehouse seems to have regarded as his funniest —with some reason—concerned a detective novelist, but ‘Honeysuckle Cottage’ was primarily satire on ghost stories with subordinate satires on mysteries and slushy romance. The opening is almost appalling in its realistic reply to the normal ghost story beginning:
‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ asked Mr Mulliner abruptly. I weighed the question thoughtfully. I was a little surprised, for nothing in our previous conversation had suggested the topic.‘Well’, I replied, I don’t like them, if that’s what you mean. I was once butted by one as a child.’ (World of Mulliner, 117.)As the story develops it raises the question of environment and change of predominant literary influence to which Wodehouse adverts in several Mulliner stories. Environmentalism was in many ways fashionable in Wodehouse’s youth and early maturity—the America of his day was still looking respectfully at the shadow of Frederick Jackson Turner when it read history—and while Wodehouse apparently concedes much to the environmentalist he was a little slower in picking up the unconscious influences of his surroundings than most writers. Apart from occasional lapses into American usages, verbal or social, the main impact of America on him is, as I have tried to imply earlier, a fairly subtle and largely undetected one. Orwell saw American effects on Wodehouse in terms which suggest a parallel between Wodehouse and the classic American immigrant: the home country is vivid in the memory, but frozen with virtually no allowance for change from the date of departure. But in fact Wodehouse made long sojourns in England before World War II.
Memories of Dying: The Poetry of Seamus Heaney
Authors: Sharratt Bernard 
Published: July 2007

Clive James, reviewing Seamus Heaney’s third collection, remarked: ‘Soon people are going to start comparing him with Yeats’. Which was characteristic of James, since he didn’t actually make the comparison but could claim first credit for it if necessary. C. B. Cox, reviewing the second collection, was less circumspect: ‘Major poets are as rare as the phoenix, and it is possible that since 1960 only one has emerged in these Islands. He is Seamus Heaney’. In the first Annual Yeats Lecture, in 1940, T. S. Eliot offered a variation on his own attempt to define the difference between a ‘major’ and ‘minor’ poet:Where there is the continuity of such a positive personality and such a single purpose, the later work cannot be understood, or properly enjoyed, without a study and appreciation of the earlier; and the later work again reflects light upon the earlier, and shows us beauty and significance not before perceived.This emphasis on the notion that ‘a major poet is one the whole of whose work we ought to read, in order fully to appreciate any part of it’ (Eliot, ‘What is Minor Poetry?’) is peculiarly apposite to Yeats—at least in Yeats’s own view, since, despite Leavis’s contrary judgement, Yeats intended his Collected Poems to be read together and ordered the poems accordingly: each was to find its place within the pattern of the whole. If we compare Heaney with Yeats at all, this might be a starting-point since a similar patterning intention seems to be at work in at least three of his collections so far. It is an overall pattern in Heaney’s poetry that I want to present—which precludes any very close commentary on individual poems.
Auto‐Catholicism in Britain
Authors: Dann Graham M S 
Published: July 2007

It hasn’t needed an economic crisis to make shareholders and taxpayers in Britain realise that the motor car industry is tottering on the brink of virtual financial collapse and ruin. Poor management, lack of efficiency, overmanning, a deficiency in new ideas and inability to respond to competition, are just some of the reasons for this failure. Excuses are even more abundant. The well worn oil crisis theme is dragged in at every available opportunity (even though it occurred several months ago and does not appear to have affected the sale of foreign vehicles). Allegations are made of overseas competitors ‘dumping’ their products on to the British market (this frequent ploy is used where responsibility is not taken for self-inflicted inflation with its accompanying non-competitive and higher prices). Industrial disputes are blamed, Communists are seen under every factory bench, even inflation itself is used as a scapegoat. But in offering these, and a host of other excuses, including all but the weather, what none of those connected with the motor car industry is prepared to admit is that they are collectively and directly responsible for the state of affairs in which they currently find themselves.It was the first Vatican Council which suggested that a suitable method for a deeper appreciation and understanding of an article of faith was to employ analogy. In making such a suggestion, the Fathers made it quite clear that it was a mistaken view to claim that because a doctrine was a mystery there could be no further theological reasoning employed for a furtherance of understanding (as if to say ‘a mystery is a mystery is a mystery’). Following their example, I would like to suggest that a current appraisal of the Catholic Church in Britain can be aided by use of another British institution, that of the British motor car industry. The comparison of the two institutions will stress similarities, rather than differences, although of course the latter do exist.