bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Does Moral Philosophy Pay?
Authors: Benson John 
Published: July 2007

Thirteen years ago Professor G. E. M. Anscombe gave reasons for thinking that it is not at present profitable for us to do moral philosophy. The steady flow of books since then shows how little notice was taken. The three I shall be considering in this article present an opportunity to consider the case she made and its continuing relevance.Miss Anscombe’s essay, ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, is included in The Definition of Morality, together with twelve others which are meant to hang from the same peg: the question, ‘What is the meaning of “morality”?’ The most interesting of them get up and walk away with the peg, opening up issues beyond the matters of usage which the editors tidily catalogue in their introduction. This is certainly true of Miss Anscombe’s. Her quarrel with modern moral philosophers is not that they are wrong in the way they use or define ‘moral’ and ‘morality’, but that in the way they use them these terms mean nothing at all. She argues that the concept of obligation, with its related moral sense of‘ought’, which has been given pride of place by moral philosophers since the eighteenth century, is intelligible only within a law-conception of morality. To speak of a moral ‘law’, of being ‘bound’, ‘obliged’ and so on, makes no sense unless one believes that there is someone who issues the law. The decay of divine law as a basis for morality has left these terms bereft of content, but not, unfortunately, of their ‘mesmeric force’. The smell remains for some time even when the gas-works has been dismantled. When ‘ought’ lacks the content provided by some actual law, telling a man that he ought not to commit adultery gives him no reason at all for not doing so.
Monnica: My Mother
Authors: Bickford H. D. C. 
Published: July 2007

It seems strange, at the time the Oedipus complex was being unravelled, that the case history of Augustine of Hippo (A.D. 350-434) and his mother Monnica should not have been more generally used as basic illustrative material. Perhaps it was too firmly embedded, in the lay mind, in the bracket of salvation-history to be eligible for general use. Fortunately, however, the portrait of this provincial Roman-African mother has been preserved simply because it was safely insulated within the pages of a ‘devotional’ book—the Confessions of Augustine, a writing that itself has barely begun to disgorge its total psychological treasures. To excise and examine the history of Monnica will tell us a lot about Augustine, which in its turn could tell us a lot about Augustine-style Western Christianity—a grass-roots examination that is becoming a popular lay pastime.The biography of Monnica presents a complex study. At times Augustine almost persuades us into believing that she is actually the theme of the Confessions:‘Do Thou inspire, O Lord my God, do Thou inspire Thy servants, my brethren, Thy sons, my masters, whom I serve with heart and voice and pen, that whoso reads these pages may remember before Thy altar, Monnica, Thy handmaid ... so shall her dying request be granted to her in richer abundance by the prayers of many, through my Confessions, than through my prayers.’But even when he presents her ‘straight’ he depicts a complicated love-hate relationship, however much he attempts to polish up the love aspect. Added to which is the immense difficulty presented by Augustine’s own dichotomous style of writing and thinking whereby he presents Monnica to us through a series of quite contradictory lenses.
The Burden of the White Man's God
Authors: van der Hart Rob 
Published: July 2007

In the land of our fathers there are many strangers. They have drifted away from their homes, across the sea, into the New World which they held to be ‘undiscovered’. Why did they seek a new land, and why did they leave their own? Why did they leave behind the soil from which they were born; why did they break away from the womb to which they belong?With their minds disconnected—and freed—from the earth, they could master the forces of nature. And so they took possession of the land that seemed so empty, so much there for the taking, because no one claimed it. They did not know that man does not naturally possess the land to which he belongs; he does not say: T own this soil’. For how can we own the soil from which we are born and to which we will return? Is not man’s life encompassed by the earth and her dark forces, as in a wider dimension from which things and deeds receive their meaning?
Koch on Apocalyptic
Authors: Robinson Bernard 
Published: July 2007

‘(Jesus’ audience) thought that the Kingdom would be a place like the old kingdom of David, with armies and a king’s throne. Jesus knew that it was not a place, but the action of God ruling over our hearts.’ So John Hargreaves, though it is perhaps unfair to pick on him, for similar pronouncements can be found in hundreds of popular, and indeed scholarly, theological writings. It is the way most of us were brought up to think. Perhaps it is the right way of thinking, but there are, I think, increasingly good reasons for feeling unsure about that. When the Jews talked about ‘the kingdom’ (without further qualification) they certainly were not thinking of some invisible operation: they meant the Roman Empire. The ‘Kingdom of God’ on the lips of Jesus may well have referred to something equally tangible—to a world order, not a concept. He may well have been speaking not of the invisible activity of ‘grace’ in the ‘soul’, but of a kingdom, however spiritual, with visible, material attributes. A recent writer on the Fourth Gospel, for instance, has interpreted the scene before Pilate in these terms:Jesus’ kingship is not ‘unworldly’. Instead one of the characteristics of the Johannine treatment of the trial and of the events that lead up to it is that the political implications are emphasized. In 11, 48 a specifically political motivation is injected into the plotting of the Jewish authorities. John alone mentions the presence of the Roman soldiers the spaira kai ho chiliarchos) at the arrest of Jesus. In the trial itself, the political-realistic element is introduced by the Jews at 19, 12: ‘If you release this man you are not Caesar’s friend; anyone who makes himself a king opposes Caesar’.
An Anglican on the ‘Two Witnesses’
Authors: McNabb Vincent 
Published: July 2007

In August and October, 1926, the Anglican Quarterly, Theology, published two remarkable articles written by the Ireland Professor of Exegesis at Oxford (C. H. Turner) and entitled ‘St. Peter in the New Testament.’ Their writer was a scholar of such competence in Biblical and Patristic studies that his advocacy of the Petrine claims made his articles the most important work on Anglo-Roman controversy since Newman’s Development.One point especially was almost a startling innovation which might have identified an anonymous writer not with England but with Rome. Let the writer make the point in his own words :‘It cannot be reasonably questioned that the thought of Rome, the imperial city, the stronghold of the anti-Christian power, is very close to the mind of the seer (i.e. St. John in writing the Apocalypse) in certain points of his vision.‘The Beast is the emperor and the head slain to death and his death-wound was healed (Apoc. xiii, 3) can be no other than Nero, the expectation of whose return from the East was so vivid till the end of the first century.
The Paths of Israel
Authors: Lampert E. 
Published: July 2007

The Jewish problem has become one of the most ominous and terrible issues of contemporary consciousness, which is tested by new waves of terrifying anti-Semitism. It must, however, be said that this ppves the way to a deeper realisation of the problem itself. It is raised to a new level, receives new definition and new illumination. Beneath the surface of the elemental outburst something far more essential, significant and decisive than all this sounding storm around the ‘Jewish question ‘is taking place. Above all, it becomes clear that it is not enough to oppose moral or legal standards to antiSemitism ; that the answer to the whole tragedy of Israel must be sought in its mysterious bond with the destinies of world-history.There are several ways of approaching the Jewish problem. For sociologists, economists, for historians of culture and for moralists, Jewry will always be a social, economic or cultural unit, or an object of moral valuation. Racial nationalism turns the whole issue into biology. At the present time anti-Semitism is primarily concerned with racial arguments; yet often these only Conceal feelings of hatred and resentment. I will not speak of the approach to the problem which has become the chief source of the delirious ideas about the ‘Jewish conspiracy,’ the ‘Wise men of Sion,’ etc.—legendary tales, or rather blood-stained slanders, which still confuse some minds, not so much in this country as on the Continent.
The Sacrament of Marriage
Authors: Vann Gerald 
Published: July 2007

God is love. God is creator, God’s creation is the expression of his love.Man is created in the image and likeness of God. Man too is lover and creator. But for him, to love and to create is hard.It is hard to love, because so often when he sees a beautiful thing man wants to clutch at it, possess it, dominate, domineer, use it for himself, destroy it.It is hard to create, because creation comes only from love.There is no love and no creation without worship and humility and fear; and in order that we may have these things God takes us by the hand, and leads us to the trackless and waterless, places, and gives us the gift of pain.Man’s destiny is to create, in the image and likeness of God. We are not men and women unless we are makers, whether what we make be ships or sealing wax or cabbages or kingdoms. But for most men and women the primary creation is procreation; the primary work of art is married life. God gives us in each case the ecstasy of creation : the joy that follows the agony of making, the joy that follows the anguish of child-bearing. If we had only these gifts of joy and ecstasy we might forget the giver, and rest in the gifts and regard them as our own possession; we might cease to love and worship, and become beasts of prey. Love is worship. ‘With my body I thee worship ‘; the body conveys the message, but it is the whole I that worships, the whole of the body and its deepest roots, the whole of the spirit and its deepest roots, in one act of recognition and acceptance of oneness, of adoration and offering.
The Decline of Discipline
Authors: Albemarle Diana 
Published: July 2007

Whether we deplore it, or welcome it as a deliverance, it is a fact beyond controversy that parental authority has decreased in the last fifty years, and. that this has been accompanied by a decline in family discipline. The battle is joined, but the issue is still in doubt, between those who see in this a breakdown of the family group pattern, and those who believe that the development of the psychologists’ ‘free’ child is the forerunner of a new age of enlightenment, a new family relationship of pure love—although, apparently, the obligations in this new relationship are entirely material ones and entirely onesided. It may not be inappropriate in a number of Blackfriars devoted to the Family to glance briefly at some of the implications of this phenomenon.When seen against its historical background the first thing to strike the observer is that this decline is not an isolated fact, but that it appears to be bound up with a general decline of the concept of authority, and a growing tendency to pragmatic thought. Sovereignty is no longer looked upon as delegated by God, but as residing in the group, whether this group is defined as an individual group, or an ideal group ol humanity to which all subordinate groups owe allegiance, and with reference to which their separate authorities are limited. The parent has progressively, during the last half-century, come to doubt his ‘right’ to exercise discipline, has forgotten the real source of his authority, and has accepted more and more State interference. The rapid contemporary advance in Social Services, excellent in so many ways, has often undermined ‘the parents’ sense of responsibility, and narrowed the field of their authority, still further. Moreover, once the origin of that authority nad become obscure, the mother, and to a lesser degree the father, became an easy prey to the popular versions of current psychology.
Where Do We Go From Here?
Authors: Mackinnon D. M. 
Published: July 2007

Of course others have faced this problem, and found their answer. It would be wanton, spiritual arrogance for the author in his academic seclusion to suggest otherwise. Yet sometimes, as he lays aside one or other of the various handbooks of Christian reconstruction with which the market is flooded in these days, a horrid doubt crosses his mind which passes into a nightmarish sense of unreality. We draught our charters, we hold our luncheons, we address our public meetings. We go to the world outside the conference-hall door with a smile, with a handbook, nearly always with a sense of assurance Again, we search the Scriptures not that we may have life, but that we may find a slogan for a Christian mass-movement, in which the demands ot the platform will blunt the sharpness of our truly Christian perception. Our attitude seems sometimes a curiously sorry compact of assurance and desperation. We are assured because we think we have a solution for the frightful torments of the present; we are afraid because we see the dreadful possibility that men will not listen to us, may in fact opt finally for other gods.Is this altogether unfair? The picture is not intentionally spiteful. But there are moments when it seems hard to escape the conviction that some contemporary forms of Christian social activity are little less than highly subtle forms of escapism. They are ‘idealist’ in the sense assigned to that term by Marxist writers, for they rest on unconscious desire to escape the pressing demand to wrestle with social actualities in the here and now by passing into a world that analysis points out to be one of ideas only.
Trends of Catholic Thought in Modern Germany
Authors: Marinoff Irene 
Published: July 2007

It is of profound significance that since the end of the last war Catholic thinkers in Germany should have devoted themselves almost exclusively to the preparation for the struggle for the Faith which is now raging. It is as though they had sensed the impending danger and were concentrating all their energies on the twofold task of arriving at a true appreciation of the present spiritual situation, and of providing the means to solve its problems in the spirit of Christ. This struggle for the Faith, for the very reason that it is fought on the spiritual plane, is by no means identical with the present war, which only becomes relevant as it serves to clarify the situation, and affects the spirits of men. The decisive events will take place in the depths of the human heart; it is here that the future of mankind will be decided. The crucial question is the same, which has at all times determined the fate of the individual as well as of nations : ‘What think ye of Christ?’This question was asked in the days of the Roman Empire, when to acknowledge the Kingship of Christ meant torture and death. It was asked in ages when belief was easy, when the individual was not yet torn out of community with his fellows, and lived in a world which bore in every detail the stamp of God. It is characteristic of the present situation that the very conditions which enabled such a question to be heard and answered in the past, seem no longer to exist.
An Eagle Whiter Than A Dove
Authors: Fressanges G. A. 
Published: July 2007

During four generations Poland has been specially dear to the hearts of English Catholics. One reason assuredly for this attachment arises from the strong Irish element in our make up, with its memory of suppression of the faith and violent persecution. Yet the native Catholics too share an affinity with the Polish people that is strong and peculiarly English. The English have always shown a keen sense of injustice. The enemies of our race would say it was a sense only outraged by injustice of a continental brand. It is, however, a commonplace that England has afforded an exile’s home for every kind of Ishmael : The Seers of the Enlightenment followed by Bourbons and Eugenie: Dom Manoel and Don Sturzo; Garibaldi and the French émigré clergy, whose names are honoured in the history of many London parishes; Marx and Chateaubriand; Einstein and Chopin. But more than this, for English Catholics Poland typifies splendidly the spirit of resurgent Catholicism. The English remnant can take heart from the example of Poland.The first lesson I ever learned in the study of the European scene was that there were two bastions in Europe, Ireland and Poland; both were rooted in tradition, both were vital in a dying world, because established on the four-square gospel of a sane social creed : a Faith, the land, family and patriotism—i.e. the love of the hearth I was taught later in the insularity of English University life with its fear of metaphysics and again in the cosmopolitan fever of the Sorbonne that Poland and Ireland were despicable blockhouses of superstition and reaction. It was taken for granted that Weygand had saved Warsaw : so miraculous in achievement was that strategy that it seemed incredible otherwise.
Cardinal Hinsley: His Last Words on Unity
Authors: Marchant James 
Published: July 2007

I had just finished reading in his firm flowing handwriting, but with here and there a marked break, what must have been, alas ! one of his last personal letters, when the sad news came through of the heart attack from which he did not recover. He confessed that he had been having a rather bad time lately and was incapable of real work.Then his thoughts reverted to the subject of unity, one of the clear notes of his episcopacy, rarely absent from his serious mind, and to our grievous disunities. ‘In the mission field, I found,’ he writes, that the awful confusion due to disunion was the obstacle to the spread-of the Kingdom of God. In Europe our enemies—the enemies of Christianity, he calls them—make capital out of our divisions. But the mere mixing together, so to speak, of varying creeds and of different ways of worship would be a mechanical union, not the one body of Christ.’ He develops the I heme again and says that our prayers for the indwelling of the Holy Spirit sent to lead us into all truth must be ceaseless. It was the theme of one of his letters from the Collegio Inglese after his elevation, whilst he waited to take up his great task—’ At my age what can I do? ‘But as a soldier he obeys. ‘The troubled years and the awful movement of evil events have revealed that the Holy Father was divinely guided in his choice of a messenger. As the Public Orator of Oxford declaimed, ‘Cardinal Hinsley has become a true leader, not only in his own Church but in the nation at large.’ His broadcast after war broke upon us showed that he spoke with the voice of the nation—sad, stern, courageous, unfaltering.
The Christian Leaven
Authors: Murray Rosalind 
Published: July 2007

I have been asked to speak on the Christian leaven in the University. It is an important subject and one on which I myself feel strongly. The view which I am going to put forward will not I know be generally accepted ; it does not claim to be the only view which can be taken of the situation, but it is one which, in my opinion, is at the present time too little stressed ; I may therefore be forgiven if in this short space I state my case rather strongly, and I should like to apologise beforehand to all those whom I am now about to provoke. I do not mean to be offensive, but it is difficult to put what I want to say shortly and clearly without seeming to be so.I propose in this paper to exclude all other considerations, and to state as forcibly as I can just one, perhaps rather narrow, view, essentially a convert’s view, of what the Christian Leaven is, and what it might be. I speak moreover not merely as a convert from Protestantism to Catholicism, but from Paganism to Christianity, and this is a far more revolutionary conversion, different not only in degree but almost in kind. ... St. Augustine as compared with Cardinal Newman. It is necessarily of more significance for the modern world in as much as the modern world itself is overwhelmingly pagan and not protestant and for this reason it is important to try and realise what is in fact involved in such conversion; it is not merely a question of Apostolic Succession or the validity of Anglican Orders which is at issue, but our entire conception of existence, the question of God’s existence and the nature of man.
God's Happy Warrior
Authors: Delany Bernard 
Published: July 2007

You are the light of the world. A city seated on a mountain cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle and put it under a bushel, but upon a candlestick, that it may shine to all that are in the house. So let your light shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your father who is in heaven (Matt, v, 14-16).‘You are the light of the world,’ says our Lord to his disciples; and again, ‘I am the Light of the world ‘(John viii, 12). If the world then is to be truly enlightened, these two lights, Master and disciple, must be one; they must glow with a single light and burn with a single flame. The apostle who bears the gospel-message must strive by life and teaching to identify himself with the Lord who sends him.‘Let your light shine before men that they may glorify your Father who is in heaven.’ These words provide a clue to the life-secret of him whose going leaves a heavy burden of sorrow on our hearts—a sorrow not for him, who has gone to his well-earned rest and rich reward, but for ourselves who have lost him for a time and will surely never in this world see his like again. You knew him and what he was; but there must be many who were puzzled and even astonished at this strange figure walking our streets and appearing to be a visitor from another century who had strayed into our modem world.
Rural Schools
Authors: Jebb Reginald 
Published: July 2007

To live in the country and partake of the life of the country is in itself an education, partly because natural phenomena, experienced by the countryman at first hand, are educative, and partly because craftsmen abound everywhere practising their crafts in the open for all to see. These characteristics of the country provide two fundamentals of education : opportunity to study the relations of God with man, and the opportunity to learn through imitation (the only way that one human being learns, from another) the essential crafts of life.
Observation of nature is like looking at the illustrations of a history book. It offers visible examples of life and the way life is ordered. The pictures may be wrongly interpreted—as can be seen by the origin of the word paganism—but, given true philosophy, the countryside is a constant reminder of the ultimate things of life.
As regards the second educational advantage that the country possesses, almost every activity that a child watches—and is everywhere able to watch—explains itself. No one is likely to make a mistake about the purpose and method of milking a cow; the cutting, making and carrying of hay are their own text-book; the hedger, the thatcher, the ploughman, the blacksmith, the cobbler, each teaches a lesson to the passer-by, as do the manifold processes of cultivation in the fields.