bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Church: Brotherhood and Eschatology
Authors: Kerr Fergus 
Published: July 2007

The purpose of this paper is to explore the idea that there has been some change in our understanding of the nature of the Church in the last ten years or so. I suggest that we are being encouraged to think now more in terms of the Church as the people of God and as mystery, but that these two themes finally converge. There is, of course, no prospect of tying up all the loose ends that there must inevitably be in a paper as brief and ambitious as this.My first thesis is that we are in the middle of discovering a new sense of the Church as a community, as a community with a mission, as a ‘movement’, and that this springs from our retrieval of the original primitive Christian insight that the Church is nothing if it is not the people of God, and should then issue into a renewed belief in the fraternal structure of the Church. I should emphasize that this is a discovery of what the Church should be, not of what it actually is.It is clear that the documents of Vatican II have made it respectable to talk about the Church in terms of the people of God. It was not always so. While it is, of course, impossible that any single concept could ever catch what one means by any phenomenon as complex as the Church, it is important to decide which to start from, for this will govern one’s whole understanding of the Church.
Faith of the Fathers
Authors: Gilby Thomas 
Published: July 2007

The tide has gone out, and the great constructions of Christian thought seem to lie in their harbours like capital ships no longer in commission for active service, some destined for the breaker’s yard, others to be reprieved and to lie at their buoys, moth-balled and landlocked. Is St Thomas’s Summa among them ?This is where the comparison between theological architecture and naval construction begins to limp. Or rather, where we should be careful about committing our idea of a capital ship to one image. For it has a constant meaning under shapes as diverse as a three-decker, a super-dreadnought, an aircraft-carrier, and a nuclear submarine, and the force of its meaning has to be brought to bear so long as sea-power is required for the life of a nation. Likewise, so long as a grasp on the reasons for things is required in the life of the Church, for in this world it must know what it means and be able to show what it means, the need will remain for the systematic and coherent articulation of the implications of divine Revelation in terms of human experience.
Act and Meaning
Authors: Melling David John 
Published: July 2007

The foundation on which any adequate moral theology or philosophy must be built is an anthropology which does justice to the complexity of human life. The picture of the human agent enshrined in the manuals of moral theology on which the clergy of past generations were reared showed man as an intelligent being making rational decisions. Manualist man was a free agent bound in conscience by various hierarchically ordered systems of law. The ultimate ground of all morally significant law was the positive will of God. This picture has lost its credibility. The insights of contemporary philosophy have shown it to be an arid and distorted representation of the human condition, and moral theologians have already begun to enrich their understanding of man by incorporating into the picture they use elements drawn from existentialist, phenomenologist and even logical positivist analyses.For moral theology as such, not only must an adequate picture of man be developed, there must also be a serious reconsideration of the traditional images of God. The God of the Divine Plan, Lawgiver, Judge, is no more credible in this century than is homo manualensis. Once again the work of demolition and reconstruction has already begun: philosophers and theologians (in this country one is tempted to add ‘respectively’) have already gone far in the work of dissecting and reconstructing or replacing the outmoded images of God. As yet, there is little sign of the more radical aspects of theological revaluation having a transforming influence on many moral theologians.
What is a Church?
Authors: Hill Edmund 
Published: July 2007

The ecumenical movement is now old enough to merit a second volume to its history. It covers the twenty years from 1948 to 1968; or in the esoteric language of the movement, from Amsterdam to Uppsala. The book inevitably abounds in this kind of esoteric language; conferences, committees and consultations have been held at innumerable places, and the name of every such place thereupon becomes the name of an event as well. One is used to the habit in general history, in which it seems normal to talk about before and after Trent or Versailles; but the over-employment of it in specialized history creates an atmosphere of a close little world of people in the know. So, too, councils and associations and conferences have multiplied, each equipped with its proper set of initials. Under the heading ‘Abbreviations’ eighty-six of these code names and letters, with their meanings, are listed at the beginning of the work.All this makes it a book that is hard—indeed, I would say impossible—to read. Had the fifteen contributors to the volume been literary historians of genius, it is doubtful whether they could have made it much more readable than it is; the material is too intractable. What they have provided is an indispensable reference book for the study and understanding of the contemporary ecumenical movement.
The Dry Salvages‐Topography as Symbol‐II
Authors: Boyd John D. 
Published: July 2007

To stop, then, at the mere recital of topography would be like having ‘had the experience but missed the meaning’. Yet the meaning of the symbols which rise out of the topography enjoy a peculiar character precisely because, as Miss Gardner has already been quoted as saying: ‘The landscape of The Dry Salvages is a landscape remembered.’ I suggest that this symbolism, especially of the sea and the rocks and of the plight of the fishermen, has a peculiarly realistic quality. I use the word ‘realistic’ largely in an epistemological context, with, however, psychological and anthropological overtones. This quality refers to structure, theme and tone. Further, transforming and intensifying this realism is a structure best seen as deriving from a Christian imagination—an ‘approach to the meaning restores the experience/In a different form’.It is commonplace to say that Eliot’s poetry is deeply indebted to the French Symboliste tradition. It is also commonplace to say that this tradition, as its theory and practice developed from Baudelaire through Rimbaud and Valéry, became more and more self-enclosed and private in tone and meaning.The strong idealist tendencies of its epistemology and its premises of the poet’s isolation from society are well known.
Aelred of Rievaulx
Authors: Barrow G. W. S. 
Published: July 2007

Aelred, or Ailred, Eilaf’s son, of Hexham, whom we know as Aelred of Rievaulx, was a wholly remarkable man for several quite distinct reasons. In the first place, he was English, or perhaps, to be more precise, Anglo-Scandinavian. The number of outstanding figures in the history of twelfth-century England who were English in this sense, ‘of fine old English stock’ as his disciple and biographer Walter Daniel put it, was so small as to be almost insignificant. The world which Aelred knew was one where lordship, both as ownership of land and as control of government and administration, was in the hands, almost exclusively, of Normans, Flemings, Bretons, Lorrainers, Frenchmen, of almost any save Englishmen, in fact, and a member of the governing order (such as Aelred was from 1143 till his death in 1167) who was also a thoroughly native Englishman was a prime rarity. Secondly, Aelred was a man of the north country, a Northumbrian born and bred in an age when it might be said that Northumbria had lost a culture and had failed to find a role. Thirdly, Aelred was a profoundly religious man in a characteristically English fashion—essentially unacademic, unintellectual, despite the great breadth of his reading and his undoubted facility for writing. Fourthly—but not lastly, by any means, for there were many sides to this complicated man—he seems perfectly to epitomize, in his career, his interests and his influence, the age through which he lived.A deeply-felt inner pride is not incompatible with outward signs of lack of confidence, even of inferiority. Aelred moved among the great but in his relations with them he seems a little unsure of himself. He never quite took their measure or became one of them. In an almost naively idealistic way he expected too much of them.
A Neglected Principle of Christian Association
Authors: Coulson John 
Published: July 2007

Suppose we had the revolution! and that an upheaval comparable to that of 1789 were once more to sweep away much of the existing Catholic fabric. How, in the light of the theology of post Vatican II, would we reconstruct our forms of Christian association?The most obvious prophecy is that such associations would not be primarily or purely clerical in form. But they might well lead to a distinction between the originating association, which would be lay, and the foundation (or Congregation) which might become clerical, growing out of and serving the permanent needs of the association. An association would no longer be confined to a neighbourhood: it might be formed by lay-people living at a distance from each other, but united by a common aim and determination to develop a homogeneity of spirit. To form such an association would take many years, so that its character could not be pre-determined by simple manifestoes or rules: it would need time ‘to work clear’.When the usefulness of the association had been proved, and its character made manifest, then and then only would it be time to see how a foundation could be established which would function as the permanent nucleus or heart. Some members of the association might be called out to minister on this more permanent basis. If Catholic, the membership of the association might want its foundation or congregation to be priests, the better to associate the work with the bishop and, through him, the universal Church. On the assumption that ‘the higher your building is the broader must be its base’, a slow growth to personal maturity would be the qualification for such candidates.
The Eucharist: Development or Deviation?—I
Authors: Preston Geoffrey 
Published: July 2007

In the first of a series of lectures under the general heading, ‘Theology-Development or Deviation’, Fergus Kerr considered shifts in the way people are accustomed to think of the Church. He suggested that the central insights which have been recovered in recent years, though the beginnings of this recovery can be traced back well into the nineteenth century, are those of brotherhood and eschatology;- and he further suggested that this was not just a recovery of a long lost insight into the mystery of the Church but had been a real experience, though under a somewhat different guise and under very different names, in the English Catholicism of the inter-war years, in the ‘loud and draughty’ singing at benediction in a northern city parish for example. These two notions of brotherhood and eschatology are likely to recur constantly in discussing whether in any theological area there has been development or deviation, and certainly when the eucharist is in question.It is probably in the area of the eucharist more than in any other that Catholics tend to suspect that there has been not so much development as deviation. That, no doubt, is because there has been a not insignificant change in eucharistic worship over these last ten years, a change altogether unlooked for by most Catholics, unlooked for, unexpected, and therefore viewed with some suspicion.
I'm Nobody—Who Are You?
Authors: Tugwell Simon 
Published: July 2007

‘We piped to you, and you did not dance.’ And when people do dance, we tend to look down disapprovingly from our upper window, like the worthy lady Michal. She remained barren, and so do we.It has perhaps become commonplace to say that ours is an age which has forgotten how to play (eutrapelia a forgotten virtue, and all that). There are even therapists to teach us how to play! But somehow, the Church seems to go on, doing all things in moderation and busily turning the Lord’s wine back hto water.Now the books under consideration—admittedly a rather heady mixture—are all about wine, or attempts at wine.Richard Neville in Play Power (the book was previously to be called Flower Power) offers us his, in many ways attractive, version of ‘the underground scene’. He admits to being himself only halfliberated, so perhaps he won’t mind another half-liberated person venturing to offer some comments from a slightly different angle. Richard Neville’s background is political, and his interest in play power is as a form of political movement (when I first met him, he confiied rather shamefacedly to still writing letters to the New Stateman). Earnest protest movements suddenly caught fire (turned into wine), and became parties, games; people began to preach revolution, not because it was important, but because it was fun. People began to have confidence just to ‘do their thing’ (which is highly revolutionary in its implications). The whole thing became ‘turned on’.
Ceylon and the Search for an Asianized Church
Authors: Caspersz Paul 
Published: July 2007

If the present writer could have been suspected of megalomania for his earlier article on The Role of the Church in Asia (New Blackfriars, January 1970), he should at least not be guilty of inconsistency. And so, in this sequel, on the one hand, the minimum view is advanced that the little island of Ceylon is an interesting case-study of the contemporary Church in Asia and, on the other, the maximum view that Ceylon’s place is crucial in the role-context of the Church in Asia and the World.The basic figures of Ceylon’s demographic and geographic littleness are quickly enumerated. In the early 1960s, in a total Asian population of nearly 1,800 million, Ceylon had a population of nearly 11 million. In Asia’s total Christian population of 73 million, the Catholics numbered a little more than three-quarters of a million, while the other Christians numbered a little more than 100,000. Geographically, Ceylon is a small island, 25,332 square miles in area, situated at the southern tip of the Indian sub-continent and separated from it by a narrow strip of shallow water.Yet, Ceylon has an importance far greater than its size would warrant. Her people have a higher degree of literacy than in most other countries of Asia. The standard of living, though very low in comparison with Western attainments, is high for Asia. Her educational, political and religious institutions and her tri-lingual press are highly developed. Her systems of easy island communication and her position as a sea and air port of call between Europe and the East have made her important for world trade and have turned her capital city, Colombo, into a large and crowded cosmopolitan and commercial centre.
Military Repression in Brazil
Authors: de Alencar Lima Tito 
Published: July 2007

‘. . . I persisted in denying, and they continued to give me electric shocks, kicks, blows with a rod and punches in the ribs.Once Captain Albernaz had me open my mouth to “receive the sacrament of the eucharist”. They put in an electric wire. My mouth became completely swollen, preventing normal speech. They shouted accusations against the Church, saying that priests are homosexuals because they do not marry. At 2 p.m. they finished the session. They brought me to the cell where I lay stretched out on the floor.At 6 p.m. they brought me something to eat but I could not swallow a thing since my mouth was one big wound. A few minutes afterwards, I was led to the interrogation room for an“explanation”. There I found the same team of Captain Albernaz. They asked me the same questions and repeated the same accusations. To explain my resistance to the torture, they concluded that I must be a guerilla and I was hiding my participation in attacks on banks.The questioning began again, in order to make me confess my share in the attacks: electric shocks, kicks in the genital organs and in the stomach were repeated. I was beaten with small planks of wood, cigarette butts were snuffed out on my body. For five hours I was subjected to this dog treatment. Finally they had me walk the “Polish corridor” (a torture consisting in having the prisoner pass between a double file of soldiers who are beating him all the while until he falls unconscious). I was assured that this was just a sample of what would happen to the Dominicans.
Power against the People
Authors: de Certeau Michel 
Published: July 2007

The impossible is becoming a reality in Brazil, the unthinkable has become a fact. Methodical violence, unjustifiable repression, systematic use of denunciation and torture are emerging in a country where they were least likely to do so. Nothing is so opposed to Brazilian culture. Yesterday, speech was still circulating freely in the streets as the light and blood of communication. Today, blood is flowing in police cellars where so many men and women have fallen without knowing why: torture and corpses impose fear and silence everywhere, and dumb and terrifying rumours. Tongues fall silent, censorship and suspicion are rife.Yesterday, the intelligence, subtlety and the manifold resources of human relationships were enough to solve or cope with all problems. Today, relationships are shattered by the suppression of all discussion; violence breaks age-old links, the brutality of a military order tends to multiply withdrawals, retirements and breaks, except between those who profit from the rCgime. The liberal tradition which inaugurated the first Brazilian Constitution in 1824 is thrown out as so much refuse.This brutality takes the Brazilians by surprise, in the way in which horror suddenly strikes out of a morning sky which seemed to be dawning like any other. ‘Que cosa!’ Brutality strikes them before they have time to realize that it was possible. And the military may be maiming for a very long time a sort of national Brazilian genius in the way in which they are maiming so many victims of torture.
Notes from the Underground
Authors: Berrigan Daniel 
Published: July 2007

Analogies are a little like the toeholds one grasps on a steep slope; they enable one to take the next step in a dangerous geography. The next step is the point in question: is it possible ? The question, for a climber, cannot be an abstract one; he must create as he goes. And he draws breath, when the air is very thin indeed, from the example of those who went far, who died in the breach, or who made it further.Danger is within and around. Whatever the quality of the air (it is not high, by all reports) this is of its substance. It is not merely that one is hunted in a perpetual open season; this is taken for granted, part of the game today. Much nearer the point is the possession of one’s own life, one’s own soul: not to belong to the hunters, not to inhabit their dreams, not to be hung as a trophy on their walls. Resistance is one way of putting it; the pressures one can olfer against a foul project, unworthy of man, undertaken in that decrepit chain of command which forges one man to another, a chain gang of slaves, blind in authority, blind in obedience.Such thoughts arise on the occasion of the anniversary of Bobby Kennedy’s death. His faults, which were indeed large ones, died with him, extinguished in blood. The questions raised by his life and dramatized in his murder remain to haunt those who were his friends, who, two years later, have tears to shed for a young life, so brutally extinguished. In a sense which is both true and difficult of understanding, his death was irrelevant to his failure; one could still consider him as having won his prize, gone on to the highest political honour—and changed nothing.
On Dogmas and World–Views
Authors: Meynell Hugo 
Published: July 2007

I want to present a difficulty, and to commend a solution to that difficulty. The difficulty is one which frequently troubles Catholics and (to a lesser extent) other Christians; the solution to it is neither original nor new, but I think deserves wider publicity than it has had up to the present time.The difficulty is as follows. Catholic Christians, and also many Christians of Protestant or Eastern communions, hold that the assent of believers is demanded to some doctrines, like those of the Trinity and of the divinity of Jesus Christ, which have been solemnly defined by the Church in the past. Now the definitions are couched in terms derived from earlier philosophical world-views. So, if we assent to the doctrines, it seems that we are thereby committed to the world-views which provided the terms in which they were defined.It seems that the believer is faced with the following dilemma: to reject the world-views as outmoded and therefore to reject the doctrines; or to accept the doctrines and with them the worldviews. No Catholic can really accept either alternative; to accept the second is to be stuck for ever in the conceptual scheme of the ancient world, while to accept the first is, logically, to cease to be a Catholic. ‘Conservatives’ in the Catholic Church tend to emphasize the importance of maintaining the doctrines, and divert attention from the apparent consequence that the outdated world-views must also be retained. ‘Progressives’ tend to emphasize the imam portance of dispensing with the world-views, and to gloss over the problem of in what sense, if any, one can consistently at once maintain the doctrine and abandon the world-view. To raise this question at all is to invite the stigma of conservatism at the hands of progressives, of progressivism at the hands of conservatives.
My Own Death
Authors: Hobson Robert F. 
Published: July 2007

Deal on, Deal on, my merry men allDeal on your cakes and your wine;For whatever is dealt at her funeral todayShall be dealt tomorrow at mine.(Verse at an Irish Wake in 1810)One day I shall be dead.The thought came upon me suddenly, about half-way through a seemingly endless discussion of high medical politics. My mind wandered. This speculative essay is an attempt to make some general sense out of my personal relatively free association, with its clash of clever talk and chaotic emotion.At first, the sentence ‘One day I shall be dead’ provided a subject for an entertaining philosophical word-game. I reflected upon the peculiar logic of the sentence—about how there could be any sense in which an experiencing T is in a state of being dead. I recalled the annoyingly opaque remark of Ludwig Wittgenstein: ‘As in death, too, the world does not change but ceases. Death is not an event in life. Death cannot be lived through.’