bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The Cultural Adaptation of Apocalyptic Imagery: A Case Study
Authors: Stancil Wilburn T. 
Published: July 2007

The full head of hair and the moustache are still there, though flecked with grey. The sideburns have disappeared and the sixties’ sports shirt with the rolled-up sleeves has given way to the coat and tie of an elder statesman. The ‘father of modern-day Bible prophecy,’ as the blurb on one of Hal Lindsey’s most recent books anoints him, is now 70 years old. For almost 30 years Lindsey has held his position as the guru of popular premillennial dispensationalism.This article will compare the apocalyptic themes of Hal Lindsey’s 1970 best-seller, The Late Great Planet Earth (hereafter LGPE) with his recent 1997 work, Apocalypse Code (hereafter AC). The purpose of the comparison is to demonstrate the resiliency and adaptability of apocalypticism in face of changing cultural situations. The article will also demonstrate ways in which Lindsey intertwines culture and theology to produce an eschatological system that, ostensibly, is rigid and inflexible, but in fact turns out to be capable of almost endless mutations.
‘Fides et Ratio’, articles 64–79
Authors: Webster John 
Published: July 2007

Two things ought to be said at the outset. The first is that it is an event of some significance far beyond the confines of Catholicism that the Bishop of Rome should address his fellow bishops on matters of the relationship of theology and philosophy. Whatever else we may say about the document before us, it emerges from a style of church leadership which refuses to absolve itself from the task of addressing questions of the intellectual articulation of the faith. Thereby it (quite properly) asks us some hard questions about those modem conventions whereby serious intellectual work is thought to be properly located only in the open fields of free enquiry (that is, in the institution of the university) and not in the cramped domestic culture of the church. I wonder if what has made some academics cross about Fides et Ratio is that the document refuses to stay behind the sanitary cordon with which institutions of higher learning sometimes surround themselves in order to protect their interests.That is the first thing to be said. The second is this: it’s a pity that an episcopal judgment on these issues doesn’t do a better job of staking its claims. Partly it’s a matter of style: at times the document adopts the threateningly paternalistic tone of communications from the Kremlin in the 1940s and 1950s, urging Socialist realism in art or music: not the sort of thing to provoke thinkers to do their best work, so much as a summons to produce the goods to an officially-approved set formula.
Three Ways to Love an Animal
Authors: Atkins Margaret 
Published: July 2007

Animals are in the news these days. As so often, the world of the image and the soundbite encourages muddle, and we need to take a step back if we are to sort and integrate our conflicting ideas and emotions Let me begin with a popular caricature of the animal-lover: he, or more probably she, keeps a garden full of goats and chickens; she takes a break at weekends to liberate the odd rat from its laboratory; and she spends the little spare time she has left in campaigning to save the rainforests. The caricature, however, soon begins to reveal its contradictions when we are faced with a concrete problem. Take, for example, the release of mink into the countryside by members of the Animal Liberation Front In this case, the people most affected, and most angered, by this action were those directly involved in the welfare of animals: farmers, conservationists and pet-owners. The problem with the ‘liberation’ of mink is, precisely, that it is bad for other animals; and it clearly reveals that concern for the welfare of animals is a complex business. Our lack of clarity about this complexity is the main reason why debate about issues such as fox-hunting has proved so confused and inconclusive.In this article I shall describe three types of animal-lover, whom I shall nickname, for reasons that will become obvious, Libbie, Connie and Aggie. In exploring how, in their different ways, these three care for animals, I examine different possible ways of understanding the Christian claim that creatures are good.
The Spirituality of Piers Plowman: A New Look
Authors: Davlin Mary Clemente 
Published: July 2007

In memory of Conrad Pepler OP (1908-1993)Sixty years ago, Conrad Pepler wrote “The Spirituality of William Langland,” a short study of the fourteenth-century poem, Piers Plowman (Blackfriars 20 (1939): 846-854). This book-length medieval religious poem, by a Londoner usually called William Langland, narrates the life story of a commoner, Will, in a series of ten dream-visions which give him insight into life, the community, evil and sin, and the search for God. In this poem, Father Pepler found “a truly English and liturgical type of spirituality that must have been characteristic of the devout members of the Church, both ecclesiastical and lay” ("Spirituality” 846). In his Blackfriars essay and in a chapter of his 1958 book, The English Religious Heritage, Father Pepler saw Piers Plowman as “delineating the beginning and growth of the spiritual life in the common man” {ERH 56). He defined the spirituality of Piers Plowman as “objective,” reflecting “the restrained, austere and majestic treatment of the liturgy” in sharp contrast to the subjective, “realistic and emotional devotion to the humanity of Christ, so typical of fourteenth century piety” ("Spirituality” 853). He noted the centrality in the poem of the idea of relationship: “from the very fact of the Incarnation all mankind has become related to God in common brotherhood, even those outside the Church” (ERH 56; cf. “Spirituality” 850).Father Pepler's article was written at a time of great scholarly interest in Piers Plowman as a religious work. It was preceded by the work of such giants as R. W. Chambers (1924, 1939) who compared Piers to the Divine Comedy.
“Mother” and “Father” as Theolinguistic Antonyms
Authors: Hook Donald D. 
Published: July 2007

Feminist religious-language reformers wish to eliminate or make substitutions for such masculine-loaded words as “lord,” “king,” “master,” and “father.” One substitute word, “mother,” is of particular interest because it is sometimes used to replace “father,” and sometimes it serves as a counterweight to “father.” The appropriateness of these terms as encountered in Christian liturgical prayers, Scripture, the Creeds, and the Trinitarian formula “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” is often discussed nowadays. My first contention is that mother/father stand in linguistic opposition to each other, preventing interchangeable or parallel use. My second contention is that the Trinity represents an hypemymy blocking the use of feminine hyponyms.The terms opposition, contrast, and antonymy are sometimes used without careful distinction, for they all illustrate at bottom a linguistic and philosophical fact: to establish the meaning of any word it is necessary to set up oppositional considerations. This hardly profound observation is matched by other, similar assertions by any number of structural semanticists. Trier even goes so far as to attach some psychological association of opposites in the mind of speaker or hearer upon each utterance (Der deutsche Wortschatz im Sinnbezirk des Verstandes, J. Trier, Heidelberg: Winter, 1931) even though perhaps most linguists would consider psychology to be more a part of a theory of language behaviour than structural analysis.Everywhere we look in the universe we see opposites: forces of attraction and repulsion, left and right crystals, concave and convex, rest and movement—the list is very long. In his important little book, Opposition, C. K. Ogden reminds us that Aristotle, in his Metaphysics, discusses the oppositions of unity and multiplicity and being and not-being, and that other philosophers make reference to hot and cold, odd and even, good and evil, and so forth.
‘Magic against Magic’: an atheist priest's use of Christ in Iris Murdoch's The Book and the Brotherhood
Authors: Hardy Robert 
Published: July 2007

In Henry and Cato Iris Murdoch describes what it might be like for a priest to lose his belief in God - God understood ‘in the traditional sense of that term; and the traditional sense is perhaps the only sense’. In two later novels Murdoch returns to the theme of a priest’s loss of belief in God and, as was the case in Henry and Cato, she makes the priest’s acknowledgement of that loss central to her portrayal of his integrity as a man; in one case she also hints at the almost unbearable grief the priest suffers as he drifts into the darkness of atheism. In The Book and the Brotherhood, however, Murdoch takes a different path: she describes how a priest, who lost his faith in God ‘in the traditional sense’ long before, nonetheless uses ‘Christ’ to help a young woman recover from despair.The young woman, Tamar Hemshaw, takes the advice of another character (who suggests that ‘Abortion is nothing, it’s a method of birth control’) to have her pregnancy terminated. Resolving not to ‘think about babies thrown away with the surgical refuse, dying like fishes snatched out of their water, dying like little fishes on a white slab’, Tamar enters the clinic ‘as one in a dream’ and leaves it ‘all raw anguished tormented consciousness’. Murdoch does not spare the details of Tamar’s self-torture:
She saw now, now, when it was so dreadfully absolutely just too late, that she had committed a terrible crime ... against herself, against the helpless fully-formed entirely-present human being whom she had wantonly destroyed. She had condemned herself to a lifetime of bitter remorse and lying.
Anti‐Foundationalism and Radical Orthodoxy
Authors: O'Grady Paul 
Published: July 2007

It has often been claimed in the history of philosophy that great thinkers have been badly served by their disciples. Plato’s genuine doctrines don’t resemble the historical construction known as “Platonism”, Aquinas is a more subtle and rigorous thinker than the Thomists, Hume more interesting than the positivists and so on. This claim is cuirendy deployed for certain thinkers who collectively bear the signifier “Postmodern”. It’s held that Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze et al., are more subtle, deep and dialectically agile than their disciples. In particular, those who regard these thinkers as philosophers maintain that the use to which they are put in other disciplines—literary theory, cultural studies, sociology, and so on, fails to convey the depth of the echt thinker.Be that as it may, it is true that philosophical ideas percolate into other disciplines and have profound general cultural impact, and this is especially true of the so-called postmodern ideas. Theologians in particular have responded with a certain degree of alacrity to the postmodern clarion (probably because modernism proved barren ground for most of them). The kind of views articulated in theology serve also as a model of the way postmodernist views have been used in general in the humanities and social sciences. It’s not unusual for theologians to latch onto the latest philosophical fashion and use it with skill and ingenuity. The medieval theologians of Paris reacted to Aristotle and developed some of the most enduring intellectual works of the western tradition. The Cartesian revolution led to sustained theological reflection—a position still appearing as a bogey for novice theologians to sharpen their dialectical teeth on, or for more senior ones to dramatically unmask in their opponents.
Simone Weil: Patron Saint of Outsiders
Authors: Calvert Timothy John 
Published: July 2007

I owe you the truth, at the risk of shocking you, and it gives me the greatest pain to shock you. I love Christ, and the Catholic faith as much as it is possible for so miserably inadequate a creature to love them. I love the saints through their writings and what is told of their lives— apart from some whom it is impossible for me to love fully or to consider as saints. I love the six or seven Catholics of genuine spirituality whom chance has led me to meet in the course of my life. I love the Catholic liturgy, hymns, architecture, rites and ceremonies. But I have not the slightest love for the Church in the strict sense of the word, apart from its relation to all these things that I do love.. .All that I can say is that if such a love constitutes a condition of my spiritual progress which I am unaware of, or if it is part of my vocation, I desire that it may some day be granted to me.Simone Weil (1909-1943) spent the last six years of her life considering whether it was God’s will that she be baptised into the Church. In her many discussions with priests, she sought to translate her mystical experiences of Christ, who had come down to take possession of her, into an acceptance of the Church as Christ’s Body on earth. It is widely believed that she died without the sacrament of baptism, the Church being an obstacle to her faith in Christ, and not a refuge for that faith.
Good News: The Story Teller as Evangelist
Authors: Woods Richard 
Published: July 2007

In recent years, I have come to think that at the risk of stretching hermeneutical principle, the opening line of the Gospel of John could be rendered, “In the beginning was the Story.”In his superb little book on parables, John Dominic Crossan said in Ins good Irish fashion, “we live in story like fish in the sea.” Story-telling is the art of making sense out of life, and because of that, out of grace, God, and revelation. Story does not simply support us cn a sea of chaos, it teaches us how to survive and flourish. When we want to know who we are and where we’re going, whether as individuals or as a people, we tell stories. Personal stories, family stories, corporate myths and legends, the great stories—all of them help us establish identity and build a world. The story-teller is one of the most beloved members of society and, I think, one of the most important. I want to explore the role of the Story-Teller as Evangelist, that is, as Preacher, and the Preacher as Story-Teller.What I hope to do, provisionally and inadequately, is to explore the dimensions of story and story-telling as a way of proclaiming not merely good news, but the good news, the relevance of story to preaching the Gospel. First I intend to look at imagination, dreaming, and memory as the faculty or spiritual power which personally grounds our story-telling. Then, I will look briefly at myths, parables and memoir as examples of stories, ending with a brief glance at some evangelical story-tellers.
Fides et Ratio: A Response to John Webster
Authors: Weinandy Thomas 
Published: July 2007

Professor John Webster is not only a colleague and friend he is also someone with whom I have a good deal of theological affinity. Moreover, and more importantly, while he is an Anglican and I a Roman Catholic, we, on fundamental Christian doctrine, share a common faith. Because of this I read with special interest his article “‘Fides et Ratio”, articles 64-79’ (New Blackfriars, Vol. 81 No. 948 (2000) 66-76). I knew that he might be critical of the encyclical at certain points, as would be expected from any serious thinking theologian examining a particular piece of work. What I did not expect was his almost complete lack of sympathy towards the encyclical’s aim, his almost thorough disagreement with its approach, arguments, and judgements, as well as at times, his dismissive attitude toward the encyclical, which on occasion, so it appeared to me, to border on the mocking. In response to Professor Webster I want to address some of the issues that he raised in an attempt to show that his reading of the encyclical is not the proper reading, and in so doing hopefully demonstrate that the encyclical is not as misconceived and flawed as he thinks.The Philosophical and Theological ‘Rumpus Room’Webster begins by noting the Pope’s leadership in addressing such an important issue as the relationship between faith and reason and in so doing intruding himself into what some academics might consider their privileged and private domain. However, Webster faults the tone of the document.
The Meritorious Human Life of Jesus: Renaissance Humanist Tendencies in the Thomism of Cardinal Cajetan
Authors: O'Connor Michael 
Published: July 2007

The Dominican theologian and cardinal, Tommaso de Vio (1469-1534), known as Cajetan after Gaeta, his birthplace, is best remembered for two things. Firstly, he is the expositor of Aquinas, whose monumental commentary on the Summa is included in the Leonine edition of Aquinas’ works. As a consequence of this canonisation, Cajetan’s commentary is either treasured or vilified, to the extent that it is judged to represent Aquinas accurately or not; meanwhile, more subtle developments, not to mention overt disagreements, tend to be overlooked. Secondly, and more widely. Cajetan is remembered as the Roman prelate who met with Martin Luther for three days in October 1518. At those meetings, characterised typically as a dialogue of the deaf, Cajetan sought to persuade Luther to withdraw a number of unorthodox theological opinions. Several years later, Cajetan was involved, albeit peripherally, with the Roman commission that drew up the formal condemnation of Luther’s teaching.It is commonly and plausibly assumed that the rest of Cajetan’s work is to be understood in the light of his involvement with Luther, especially his commentaries on biblical texts, which he worked on from 1524 until his death in 1534. The conventional view of the biblical commentaries (found in various forms in Iserloh, Weisheipl, Parker, Janz and others), runs roughly as follows: the Reformers had appealed to scripture alone, and on the basis of scripture were challenging the papacy and Roman traditions; Cajetan, therefore, set out in his biblical commentaries to meet his adversaries on their chosen territory, and to demonstrate, with scholastic patience and rigour, that the Roman use of scripture was sound, that the Bible belonged to the Catholic Church.
A Lost Leader? The Course of a Literary Friendship
Authors: Bergonzi Bernard 
Published: July 2007

In the opening chapter of David Lodge’s How Far Can You Go?, set in 1952, two Catholic students at London University are comparing the merits of Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh:
Michael’s favourite novel at the moment is The Heart of the Matter, and Polly’s, Brideshead Revisited. ‘But Greene’s awfully sordid, don’t you think?’ says Polly.‘But Waugh’s so snobbish.’‘Anyway, it said in the Observer that they’re the two best English novelists going, so that’s one in the eye for the Prods.’In the assertive English Catholic culture of the time the achievements of Catholic novelists, like those of Catholic sportsmen or soldiers, could be flaunted as marks of the superiority of the Faith. Waugh was happy to appear before the world as a Catholic writer, but Greene disliked the term and preferred to regard himself as a writer who happened to be a Catholic.
The Recovery of Metaphysics
Authors: Selman Francis J. 
Published: July 2007

One of the most notable features of Faith and Reason is its plea for metaphysics. The twentieth century saw interest in metaphysics recede to a low ebb. There were signs, however, that the tide had already begun to turn before Pope John Paul made his plea. Calls for metaphysics sometimes came from unexpected quarters. At the end of 1996, Clifford Longley wrote in The Tablet:Unless it is grounded in reality, one must doubt whether a sense of the sacred can be much more than a kind of aesthetic sensitivity, an accoutrement of a man or a woman of exemplary taste. And one must doubt whether it can be grounded in reality without something like metaphysics to give it firm anchors.
Not the Whole Story: Another Response to John Milbank's Theology and Social Theory: Part I
Authors: Daniels John 
Published: July 2007

It is the province of knowledge to narrate and the privilege of wisdom to listen. With apologies to Oliver Wendell HolmesIt is already ten years since John Milbank published Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. Its impact was immediately apparent, the journals Modern Theology and New Blackfriars dedicating entire numbers to discussing some of the many issues arising from it. For it is unquestionably a daunting achievement: a relatively simple thesis elaborated at considerable length and taking on in the process a whole range of authors from a variety of disciplines and across history. To do the book justice in a few words is almost impossible; but it surely remains the case that whatever one’s views of Milbank’s conclusions, it is difficult not to respect both the scholarship and ambition which it represents.A number of the many issues raised in the course of the book have already been addressed by subsequent reviewers and authors. It might seem curious that there is still something left to be said fully a decade later; and yet there is so much meat contained in the book that it remains a banquet of inspiration and controversy in many ways. In this paper I wish to focus my engagement with Milbank’s ideas by considering his account of the work of Paul Ricoeur. Although he discusses Ricoeur only very briefly—a few pages (pp. 263-8) out of more than four hundred—I hope to show how dealing with this small part leads us to engage with a central element of Milbank’s thesis. Before embarking in earnest on this task, there are two points which need to be declared.
What does love know? St Thomas on the Trinity
Authors: Williams Rowan 
Published: July 2007

Thomas’s trinitarian theology has a rather bad name in modern literature. He is associated with an artificial separation between the discussion of the one God and the exploration of trinitarian revelation. This, it is said, privileges the most abstract level of talk about God, and inevitably suggests that what reason can know of God as one is prior to what revelation shows us of God’s threefold life and action. And indeed, when we turn to the details of the discussion, abstraction is what seems to dominate. A brief visit to the relevant sections of the Prima Pars will leave a migrainous blur of processions, relations, notions, essential names, appropriations and much more; a certain impatience with the whole register in which he considers the question sets in well before any of the detail is examined.What I want to do in this lecture is not to provide a full exposition of this daunting treatise, but to select certain aspects of them that have, I think, been misunderstood or neglected, so as to point tentatively towards a recovery of some of Thomas’s perceptions, both for anthropology and for trinitarian thought. And my fundamental concern is to challenge the accusation of abstractness levelled against him. The late Catherine Mowry LaCugna, in her intriguing and influential essay, God for Us.