bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The option for the poor in South Africa
Authors: Nolan Albert 
Published: July 2007

‘This phrase (the option for the poor) burst upon the ecclesiastical scene only a few years ago. Since then it has become the most controversial religious term since the Reformers’ cry, “salvation by faith alone’’.’These are the opening words of Donal Dorr’s recent book on the option for the poor and Vatican social teaching. He is not exaggerating. I should say that the challenge to the church, to almost all our churches, represented by this term ‘option for the poor’ goes far beyond anything envisaged by the Reformers. It challenges both Catholic and Protestant, and it challenges us in a very fundamental way.Here, I should like to do little more than open up the debate about the option for the poor in South Africa. The question has been raised here and there in a variety of forms, mostly without the term ‘option for the poor’; but in South Africa there has been no systematic Christian practice based upon it and not much research and reflection around this controversial phrase. My intention, then, is to open up the specific approach implied in this new theological term for further research, reflection, debate and practice.There is a great deal of confusion and misunderstanding about the meaning of the phrase itself, and even a measure of deliberate distortion of its meaning. Hence, in the first place, it will be necessary to state quite clearly what we are talking about and even more importantly what we are not talking about.
God and Freedom: A Discussion
Authors: Davies Brian 
Published: July 2007

‘If there is no logical impossibility in a man’s freely choosing the good on one, or on several occasions, there cannot be a logical impossibility in his freely choosing the good on every occasion. God was not, then, faced with a choice between making innocent automata and making beings who, in acting freely, would sometimes go wrong: there was open to him the obviously better possibility of making beings who would act freely but always go right. Clearly, his failure to avail himself of this possibility is inconsistent with his being both omnipotent and wholly good’.(J.L. Mackie, ‘Evil and Omnipotence’, Mind, April 1955, p. 209)A. So we are agreed that since God is the Creator he is responsible for everything that happens in creation.B. That would seem to be so.A. But how are we to understand ‘responsible’ here? Could it mean that God does everything that is done?B. Apparently it does. For what is done is done either by God or by something else. Yet what something other than God does is created and God is therefore responsible for it. So everything that is done must be done by God.A. That seems to follow. But it is subjects who do things, is it not?B. If that means that what is done is done by something or other, then, of course, I agree.A. And does not this mean that what is done is done by an agent?B. Certainly.
A Long Sermon for Holy Week
Authors: McCabe Herbert 
Published: July 2007

I am here concerned with the paschal mystery; so, first of all, a few words about mystery.Mystery is a depth of meaning. There are two things to notice here. Firstly, mystery belongs to what has meaning, to the signs and symbols and gestures through which we understand. (If we see event as mystery it is because we see it as word.) Secondly, mystery always refers to the not-so-obvious, deeper meaning that is perhaps hidden at first. So mystery concerns what shows itself but does not show itself easily. Mysteries are not for concealment but for revelation; it is because the revelation is so important and so profound that we have to work to understand it.This is not meant to be a very difficult idea. Take, for example, a play like Macbeth. It is quite clear that you can appreciate the meaning of this play at many levels. In the first place it is a good thriller about murder and intrigue at court. At another, slightly deeper, level it is a piece of English political propaganda slandering the memory of a perfectly decent king who was, however, Scottish. At a deeper level still it is a tragedy about a man over-reaching himself; about the relationship of human life with nature and especially with time. It is about how we belong to the cosmos and to the time that is given to us and yet seek to transcend this and to belong to ourselves, and it is about the revenge that time and nature take upon us.
Lonergan and Systematic Spiritual Theology
Authors: Helminiak Daniel A. 
Published: July 2007

Popular enthusiasm for spirituality has mushroomed in the past two decades. The analyses of the human sciences and the impact of secular self-help programs have challenged the religious basis of spiritual pursuit. The influence of gurus from the East has transformed the problematic. The need for a systematic spirituality that can sort out the issues and relate them insightfully grows more urgent. In different ways, the thought of Bernard Lonergan, summarized in Method in Theology, speaks to the present need. Here I shall suggest some of those ways.Introduction: The Need for TheorySpirituality is a broad field. It entails many practical issues. These include: prayer and how one does it, from vocal prayer and lectio divina to discursive meditation and contemplation and mysticism; the possible physiological correlates of religious experience: postures, breathing, fasting, sensory and sleep deprivation, sexual abstinence, anatomical and neuro-chemical bases, and even drug ingestion; spiritual direction and questions of discernment of spirits; the social dimensions of public prayer and liturgies, group prayer, and group psychic and religious experience; prescriptions for ‘holy’ living; and study of the various traditions, both Western and Eastern, and of modern psychology. These all have to do with practice, and they are not to be minimized. If spirituality has any real significance, it must be in the practice. This field can less tolerate mere thinking and talking about the subject than can other fields of theology as currently conceived.
Apocalyptic and the Peace Movement
Authors: Ruston Roger 
Published: July 2007

Based on a paper presented at the International Symposium on Sociology and Theology, Oxford, January 1986.What relationship, if any, is there between contemporary apocalyptic and the contemporary Peace Movement?Whatever it was in its original form, in its current form apocalyptic is the belief that God is moving in history to a violent climax in which he will defeat his enemies, both human and supernatural. The appearance of Christ will mark the end of this age and the beginning of a thousand- year reign of peace for the elect. We are now living in the End Times and it is possible to detect the signs of the End in natural disasters and political/military events. These signs are a warning to human beings. For those who have eyes to see, they have been clearly prophesied in the Scriptures. Repentence and belief in Christ is required for a person to be saved from the great tribulation which is about to come.Such beliefs are shared by a range of contemporary Christian groups, though these differ in important ways amongst themselves, especially over the interpretation of historical events and the nature of the final war: for instance, whether or not it will be a nuclear war. Such beliefs appear to be on the increase in the United States and perhaps also in Britain, even among members of the main-stream churches. It is not difficult to see the increased fear of nuclear holocaust as a major factor in the new popularity of apocalyptic beliefs.
The Return of the Roman Catholics to Oxford
Authors: Stacpoole Alberic 
Published: July 2007

In 1830, three centuries after the Reformation, which had turned followers of ‘the old religion’ into an oppressed minority, there were some 700,000 Roman Catholics (hereafter ‘Catholics’) in England and Wales. The Catholic Emancipation Act had just become law. By 1903 their number had risen to at least a million and a half. During that period the Catholic Church in Britain could be described as made up of three groups: those old families that had hung onto their Roman faith and their English property (the ‘recusant families’); the Irish, new families which had fled from famine and persecution and—devoid of property—had congregated in the larger towns; and the converts from the aftermath of the Oxford Movement. Intermarriage, industrialisation and the emergence of professional classes came to erode these distinctions, as did the power of an increasingly liberalised and fluid secular society to absorb sub-societies into the wholeness of the body. The First World War put the stamp of irrevocability on that process, though Catholics still retain a recognisable community identity.The story of the cautious renewal in modern times of relations between the CatKolic Church and another ancient institution, the University of Oxford, has something to say to quite a number of people interested in the Church, because it is the story of how the Church has tried to cope with an unusual issue in a situation of social and religious change.From the Reformation until the last quarter of the nineteenth century the University of Oxford—described by Catholics of the period as ‘one of the two national Protestant universities’—was an Anglican preserve from which professed Catholics were barred.
Gilbert Márkus's ‘Theologies of Repression’
Authors: Searle Peter , Márkus Rev Gilbert 
Published: July 2007

In his article of this title, which we published last January, Gilbert Márkus OP wrote about the political and social influences of some of the evangelical groups now in Central America, and he mentioned World Vision, which has its headquarters in California. The Director of World Vision of Britain writes:The incidents to which your author refers, predominantly in the present tense, occurred approximately five years ago and this in itself is extremely misleading. World Vision, while we have 75 development projects in Honduras, caring for some 10,000 children and their families, together with some other general development work, has no involvement whatever in relief projects or refugee involvement in areas where fighting is going on. This has been the case for approximately four years so, again, your article is misleading.
Aquinas on Good Sense
Authors: McCabe Herbert 
Published: July 2007

I was asked to contribute something about St Thomas Aquinas to this collection in honour of Kenelm—an activity rather like offering a short paper on Karl Marx in a festschrift for Lenin. Much of whatever understanding I have of Aquinas I owe to the insights and scholarly precision of Kenelm’s writings and I shall not in this paper attempt to play in his league. This will be an elementary introduction to an important part of Aquinas’s thinking which was neglected for some centuries and is only in our own receiving the attention it deserves. I am concerned with the virtue he calls prudentia. I have nothing original to contribute here (except perhaps some mistakes); what I will say will be new only to those to whom Aquinas is new, but there are perhaps, enough of these to justify yet another simple introduction.As is almost always the case with Aquinas’s technical vocabulary, the nearest English word to the Latin one would be a mistranslation: prudentia does not mean what we call prudence. Prudence suggests to us a certain caution and canniness, whereas prudentia is much nearer to wisdom, practical wisdom.Fortunately, however, we have a nearly perfect English equivalent in Jane Austen’s phrase ‘good sense’. I take Jane Austen to be centrally concerned not with presenting the ethos of the new respectable middle class but rather with the failure of the new bourgeoisie to live satisfactory lives because of the inability of the older ‘aristocratic’ tradition to transmit to them a certain outlook and way of behaving and education that came down to the author via the remains of a Christian morality.
Manzoni and Leopardi—Kenelm Foster's Interpretation
Authors: Caesar Michael 
Published: July 2007

To a former student like myself, to whom Kenelm’s conversation about the Italian Ottocento was as stimulating over the years as his teaching on the subject had been sure and authoritative in undergraduate and postgraduate days, it was always something of a shock to remember how relatively little he had published in this area of Italian literature. Two major essays, both of which started life as lectures, two invaluable translations, a scattering of lesser articles and reviews—these, combined with his presence as teacher and talker, were enough to ensure his status as an indispensable point of reference in any discussion of the early nineteenth century in Italy.The two lecture-essays—on the idea of truth in Manzoni and Leopardi (1967) and in commemoration of Manzoni on the centenary of his death (1973)—are not so much the report of specific pieces of research as syntheses, dense and sometimes tense, of what Kenelm judged to be the most important things he had to say about the subject. And the subject mattered to him a lot. Manzoni was important because, as he put it in the centenary lecture, he was ‘that uncommon thing, a considerable Christian artist’—adding in pen to his own copy the word ‘very’ before ‘considerable’—and Leopardi was in some sense his antithesis. What Kenelm had in mind when he thought about Christian art is discussed elsewhere in this issue.
The bumpy road back into Europe
Authors: J.O.M.  
Published: July 2007

Membership of the mainstream denominations in the UK has gone down since 1980 by half-a-million to seven million, and is likely to drop by another half-a-million before 1990. And membership of sects and non- Christian religions in the UK is going up and up.We would be fools if we ignored the message being given to us by those now well-publicised figures from the latest edition of MARC Europe's UK Christian Handbook. On 20 September Cardinal Hume, lecturing in Dublin, spoke of the Pope's call to the European Bishops’ Conferences to re-evangelise Europe. The Cardinal thinks that times are more auspicious for evangelising the old continent, for now in Europe there is a ‘dawning of a realisation that we are entering a new phase of history’. Europeans are discovering the limits of human reason: ‘the age of Enlightenment has evidently run its course’.
Transubstantiation for Beginners
Authors: Moore Gareth 
Published: July 2007

It is a Catholic teaching that when bread is consecrated in the eucharist it becomes the body of Christ, and that when wine is consecrated it becomes the blood of Christ. People have always had difficulty with this. The difficulty is basically a very simple one: what we call and share as the body of Christ bears no resemblance to what we should ordinarily call a body, and what we drink as the blood of Christ has at best a very superficial resemblance to blood.This difficulty, of matching our words with what lies plainly before our eyes, has led some Christians, before, during, and after the Reformation, to deny that the consecrated bread is the body of Christ and the consecrated wine his blood. Rather, they are to be seen as symbols of his body and blood: they are not the body and blood of Christ, but signify them. This mainstream Christianity has always rejected. Though much of our activity in the eucharist is symbolic, and though the consecrated bread and wine are clearly signs and symbols in some sense, they are not to be understood as mere symbols, symbolically the body and blood of Christ as opposed to the reality. To quote Theodore of Mopsuestia as representative of early tradition:Christ did not say: ‘This is the symbolum of my blood,’ but:‘This is my blood.’ A change of the wine takes place.
History, Homosexuality and God
Authors: Bray Alan 
Published: July 2007

An adapted version of a paper given in Oxford at the 1986 conference of Friend. Friend is a national organisation dedicated to the counselling and befriending of homosexuals.Historians are accustomed to listening to the debates of theologians, but the theologians they listen to are usually those of the past; and they do not normally join such debates. I do not propose to alter that. But one of the workmanlike tasks of historians (as it is of philosophers) is sometimes to put aside their own books and see to the task of making tools others use in their work, and if they are to be taken seriously in a wider college of learning they need sometimes to fulfil this obligation. Sometimes they need to pay the rent.In a small way that is what I would like to do in this paper, and the audience I have primarily in mind is composed of those moral theologians and practical pastors who are troubled by the tension that exists between homosexuals and the Christian Church. Inevitably, though, what I have to say is not equally relevant to all Christian churches. I have less to say to those who are ready to construct their moral theology afresh, from the beginning. For good or bad they are free of the past. But for many Christians, in varying degrees, this is not a possible option, and it is fundamentally not a possible option for Catholics, for whom an appeal to scripture and tradition—a willingness to listen to the past—is unavoidable.
East London Pastoral Planning
Authors: Guazzelli Victor 
Published: July 2007

In 1971 a Joint Working Party was set up by the Bishops’ Conference, at the request of the National Conference of Priests, to study the question of a Pastoral Strategy for the Catholic Church in England and Wales. It was the result of much heart searching and uneasiness expressed by the priests of the Conference about their own service in the mission of the Church.In The Church 2000 (the first paper issued by the Working Party) the question was asked: ‘What did Christ establish the Church to do?’ We then went on to ask ourselves what the Church in England and Wales should be doing in the years ahead. We tried to answer both in the light of Vatican II applied to our own situation.
Hoping Against Hope: obstacles to the option
Authors: Keating Denis 
Published: July 2007

In his inspiring and moving reflections on the church in Latin America Jon Sobrino can speak of that church as an identifiable and representative community; identifiable in the struggle against poverty and injustice, representative of many different sections of society:
In the Church of the poor the age-old barriers between hierarchy and faithful, priests and workers, peasants and intellectuals, have broken down... In this solidarity there is a sharing of the word ... There is a sharing of the yearning for liberation and of the various struggles that lead to liberation ... There is a sharing of hopes and successes. Above all, there is a sharing of what formerly had been the tragic destiny of the poor alone: martyrdom and persecution.In England there are obviously Catholics who are living an option for the poor, without necessarily appealing to the example of Latin America. During the last few years I have witnessed the commitment to the homeless at Mary and Joseph House in Central Manchester; kept in touch with efforts to improve race relations in Leicester; seen the diversification of the Saint Vincent de Paul Society’s work for the poor at the east end of Newcastle; and been drawn into what seems to be an unceasing quest on behalf of the third world by Justice and Peace groups in Nantwich and Surrey. But, despite such options for the poor in different parts of the country, I do not believe that the Roman Catholic Church as ‘an identifiable and representative community’ will take an option for England’s poor.
Interrogating the Consensus: a response to Michael Dummett
Authors: Radcliffe Timothy 
Published: July 2007

Professor Michael Dummett, in the October New Blackfriars, quotes an article by Thomas Sheehan which asserts that there is ‘a liberal consensus’ among Catholic Biblical scholars as to the historical basis of our faith. This consensus includes such views as that Jesus did not think that he was divine, that Mary was not a virgin and that Joseph was the natural father of Jesus, that Jesus did not refer to himself when he talked of the Son of Man but rather to some future apocalyptic figure, and that the remains of his corpse are still in a tomb in Palestine. Professor Dummett maintains that these views are a denial of the solemn teachings of the Church, and in his subsequent article (the one which appeared in December) he argues that if they are accepted then ‘that teaching is reduced to a demand for the acceptance of certain forms of words, which may be taken as expressing anything one chooses’ (566). I would agree with Professor Dummett, but I would question the existence of such a consensus. In fact, in a letter published in The Tablet of 5 March, commenting on Hie Tablet’s report of the debate between Professor Dummett and Professor Lash, Father Raymond Brown (who is Auburn Distinguished Professor of Biblical Studies at Union Theological Seminary, New York) writes:
... I found no better example of ultra-liberal distortion than the writing of Thomas Sheehan. From personal experience, I know very well the kind of biblical exegesis that is being taught in most Roman Catholic seminaries in the United States and it is a very moderate centrist presentation, almost diametrically opposed to Sheehan’s interpretations of the New Testament.
Acknowledging One's Dependence: the Jethro story of Exodus 18
Authors: Robinson Bernard P. 
Published: July 2007

The two narratives in Exodus 18, in which Jethro joins the Israelites in a sacrifice (w. 1—12) and counsels Moses on how to organize the Israelites (w. 13—27), appear to some highly esteemed commentators to have ‘no substantive relation to each other’ (Noth, 1972:136) except for the prominent role played in both by Moses’ Midianite father-in-law. I hope to show, however, that the two episodes go well together. I hope too that the reader will agree that, as so often is the case with OT material, Ex 18 has light to shed, if only obliquely, on an issue that preoccupies us still; in this case, that of authority.The two accounts are doubtless very ancient; are, indeed, in substance probably historical, for the nation would scarcely without historical warrant have credited a foreigner with the important role given to Jethro in Ex 18 (Welch, 1932:192). It looks, however, as though a redactor has made a conscious choice to insert the story at a different point from that at which it was found in the tradition as it came down to him.The picture of Moses declaring God’s ‘statutes and laws’ (18.16) and using them to resolve judicial disputes implies that the Sinai-revelation has already taken place (cf. Dt 1.9—18), and indeed at 18.5 the location for the episode is specifically stated to be ‘the mountain of God’; yet the redactor has elected to tell the story before the arrival at Sinai (19.2).