bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Mary Magdalene's Touch in a Family Church
Authors: Eggen William 
Published: July 2007

Recently, the anthropologist Mary Douglas has pleaded for a space within the Church's pastoral life, in which women’s contributions could be fully valued. Her article might appear to some as a make-do solution, because it advocates using the area which has not been claimed by the hierarchy so as to spell out a proper task for women. The misgivings of some feminists might actually be heightened even further by her last paragraph, on the caring role of women. For has this not been the age-old role pattern? Maybe it has. But as the article was printed in a special issue on the sacramental life of the Church, there is a strong case for its argument, looking at a much neglected side of the Eucharistic tradition. I wish to highlight this by reflecting on an insight of the Nigerian sister and exegete Teresa Okure, and especially on a most revealing, new definition of the Church which emerged from the African Synod (three years ago, April-May 1994), calling the Church ‘the Family of God'.In keeping with the hope that African perspectives may also inspire the Church at large—as the papal exhortation Ecclesia in Africa expresses it—I venture to join the research on this concept. Although the papal text openly endorses this term at the outset of the third phase of the synodal process, it does not wish to advance any specific interpretation of it yet. It sees it clearly as a notion that is still to mature in the interchange between pastoral practice and reflection.
Rewriting the Liturgy: the theological implications of translation
Authors: Duffy Eamon 
Published: July 2007

The transformation of the liturgy of the Catholic Church in the wake of the Second Vatican Council was, by any standard, a landmark event. It represented the unfreezing of a liturgical tradition which had seemed to many to be sacrosanct and immemorial, beyond question or change. Almost a century ago the greatest of all English liturgists, Edmund Bishop, could write without a hint of irony that “With the Missal and Breviary of St Pius V ...the history of the Roman liturgy may be said to be closed”.Bishop himself was too good an historian to harbour romantic illusions about the timelessness or changelessness of liturgy. He had a highly developed sense of the historical evolution of worship and in fact he was a strong sympathiser and fellow-traveller with the Modernist movement, and its attempt to demythologise the doctrinaire nonhistorical orthodoxy of post-Tridentine Catholicism. But neither Bishop nor the two generations of liturgists who laboured after him to reclaim for the present the forgotten riches of the Latin liturgical tradition could have dreamed of the cultural and theological revolution which would come upon the Church in the late 1960s and 1970s, a revolution which swept away not only many of the accretions of medieval and baroque liturgical and para-liturgical practice which they so deplored, but many of their own most treasured convictions about the nature of liturgy and liturgical theology. They hoped that the liturgy, duly cleansed of accretion and distortion, would become, in Joseph Jungmann’s words, “a school of faith”. In the ancient prayers and ceremonies of the Church, Jungmann believed, would be found an endless resource, a great well of wisdom and truth.
Learning and the Mind of God
Authors: Haldane John 
Published: July 2007

Jesus said “Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a nation producing the fruits of it” (Matthew 21: 43).Holy Scripture is often tough; indeed I cannot think of passages that simply tread water or offer bland affirmation. When God speaks, he calls us to attention, and generally to reform and renewal. Also, what sounds like condemnation is often a warning to relocate one’s heart, to shift from false to true goals and values, and to be aware that God and not man is the measure of all things.One reading of God’s authority, of his being the ruler, is the familiar moral or legal one. The idea that duty derives from divine commands can be traced back through figures such as Calvin, to the medieval philosopher-theologian William of Ockham, and from there through an Augustinian tradition back to interpretations of scripture, particularly the books of the Old Testament such as Isaiah. But there is another sense in which God may be thought to be a ruler of reality and this is worth mentioning in connection with higher learning. In discussing truth, Ockham’s near contemporary, Thomas Aquinas, draws on the philosophy of the Greeks filtered through the commentaries of Arabs and Jews. What Aquinas arrives at is the idea that the human intellect is ‘measured’ by things and that things are ‘measured’ by God; so that, indirectly, God is the measure of our minds. What he means is that knowledge involves conforming our minds to the structure of reality—grasping the way things are—and that the way things are in the world is a reflection of God’s own mind.
Conrad Pepler's ‘Lent’
Authors: Nichols Aidan 
Published: July 2007

Fr. Conrad Pepler, sometime editor of Blackfriars and Life of the Spirit, the ancestral pair from which New Blackfriars springs, was an outstanding spiritual theologian among a uniquely gifted generation of the English Dominicans. In a period when ‘ascetical and mystical theology’ was generally separated from the theology of the Liturgy (to the disadvantage of both), he was keen to see the journey of the soul to God within the landscape of the Church’s worship. His exploration of the meaning of the Lenten season is a case in point.Fr. Conrad’s Lent, his first published book, takes the form, as its subtitle tells us, of a ‘Liturgical Commentary on the Lessons and Gospels’. Obviously, the Lectionary which Fr. Conrad used was that of the preConciliar Roman liturgy, more specifically the Lectionary of St. Pius V, the Dominican pope who, in the wake of the Council of Trent, had reformed the liturgical books of the Western rite. In 1969, in response to the appeal of the Council fathers of Vatican II that ‘a more representative portion of the Scriptures be read to the people over a set cycle of years’, Pope Paul VI replaced the Pian Lectionary with another of his own, or rather his experts’, devising. Although there are continuities between these two scriptural anthologies there are also discontinuities which, clearly enough, reduce the value of Fr. Conrad’s book as a Lenten companion. Really, it is only utilisable by those congregations of the faithful or religious communities which still cling to the earlier liturgical pattern, thanks to Pope John Paul II’s clement interventions to assist them.
The Priest as Artist
Authors: Barrett Richard 
Published: July 2007

It is 1429 and in the Chateau of Vaucouleurs, Joan of Arc is being interrogated by the menacing Robert de Baudricourt. Joan claims to hear heavenly voices telling her to raise the siege at Orleans:
de Baudricourt: How do you mean? voices?Joan: I hear voices telling me what to do. They come from God.de Baudricourt: They come from your imagination.Joan: Of course, that is how the messages of God come to us.Joan claims to say something not only about herself but about the way God communicates to human beings in general. If this is true then it has a lot to say about the role of the imagination in discoursing about God. But, you will object, is this not the role of theology?It seems a truism to say it, but professional theologians are not the only kinds of people who discourse about God; there are others who theologise in an indirect way—but sometimes just as effectively. Among these must be counted authors from the literary world who, either implicitly or explicitly, through the medium of the novel, short story or poem, mediate aspects of the religious sensibility in human experience. In their work we can discern signs of anonymous theology? Random examples may include C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter, Brian Moore’s The Colour of Blood, Morris West’s The Devil’s Advocate, Rachel Cusk’s Saving Agnes. In these works as in many others one can detect a sifting through the debris of human experience and a concern to view it through the prism of an implicit faith in God.
A Man and Three Women– Hans, Adrienne, Mary and Luce
Authors: Beattie Tina 
Published: July 2007

This is probably best described as a marginal paper, given in one of the short slots at the conference of the Catholic Theological Association of Great Britain on the subject of Hans Urs von Balthasar. It is deliberately provocative, intended to raise questions about the relationship between von Balthasar and Adrienne von Speyr in the presence of experts who are in a position to defend him against my charges.Von Balthasar made extravagant claims about von Speyr’s influence on his work, and they understood their relationship as the lived expression of their theological insights about the significance of sexual difference. John Roten writes that “The very concrete symbolism of man and woman was retranslated into theological categories” to such an extent that von Speyr sometimes depicted herself as the Church to von Balthasar’s Christ. Given that von Balthasar has become what somebody referred to as the “court theologian” of the Vatican, is there an implicit suggestion in neoorthodox Catholic theology that the relationship between von Speyr and von Balthasar embodies some kind of symbolic ideal, and what are the implications of this for the theological understanding of sexual difference? In asking these questions I draw on the insights of psychoanalysis, and in particular on the work of Luce Irigaray, but I am not suggesting that theology should be answerable to psychoanalysis nor indeed to any other non-theological discipline. I do however believe that Irigaray’s philosophy of sexual difference, informed by her experience as a practising psychoanalyst, offers a rich resource for those seeking to identify both the promises and pitfalls of Catholic sexual symbolism, especially in von Balthasar’s theology.
Religious Passion and the Pluralist Theology of Religions
Authors: Cheetham David 
Published: July 2007

It would appear that there are few things in human life that have the power to override all other concerns. There are few things, that is, that seem to command our unconditional attention. Amongst such things we might include ‘matters of life and death’. Perhaps the most admirable aspects of the human spirit are often found in the setting of life and death situations. Self-sacrifice, life-threatening risks on behalf of others’ lives, self-denying and courage etc. What is it that motivates people to behave in these ways? A common response comes to mind in their defence: ‘it was a matter of life and death’. We all understand the priority of that appeal. At the scene of an accident, an observer runs to an occupied telephone kiosk - ‘please let me use the phone, it’s a matter of life and death...’ A businessman arrives an hour late for a meeting, ‘Excuse me for being late, I was caught up in an accident, I had to stop - it was a matter of life and death...’ Despite the potential rudeness of interrupting another’s telephone call, or the tardiness of the businessman’s entry, we are willing to excuse such behaviour on the grounds that ‘it was a matter of life and death’. Like a verbal skeleton key, it is a plea that demands (and usually obtains) the unconditional unlocking of doors or removal of obstacles.The purpose of this brief preamble concerning the effect life and death situations’ seem to have upon our attitudes and actions, or more particularly, our perceptions of appropriate attitudes and action, is to focus our attention upon an assumption that will be forming part of this paper - that religion itself is a ‘matter of life and death’.
Seeing with Eyes of Faith: Schillebeeckx and the Resurrection of Jesus
Authors: Phillips Peter 
Published: July 2007

John Macquarrie in his Jesus Christ in Modem Thought well formulates a criticism which is often raised about Schillebeeckx’s discussion of the resurrection of Christ. Macquarrie suggests that Schillebeeckx is arguing that the resurrection is better thought of as a powerful, but subjective, experience in the minds of the disciples. Macquarrie’s criticism echoes the point made by another of Schillebeeckx’s Anglican critics, David Brown, who is uncompromising in his characterisation of Schillebeeckx as a ‘deist’. Brown is certainly correct in identifying Schillebeeckx’s attempt at a more subtle account of God’s relationship to creation than a classic interventionist account might hazard, but I think the attribution of a deist position is wide of the mark. This is not the place to develop the general point other than to suggest that Professor Brown over-simplifies the issue in arguing that Christian discourse about God is inevitably either deist or theist in so far as it asserts the propriety of an interventionist or a non-interventionist account of God’s dealings with creation.It is important to address the specific point which these critics raise in suggesting that Schillebeeckx is unable to maintain the objectivity of the resurrection. This can be better explored by considering the extended discussion in Peter Carnley’s important study of the resurrection, The Structure of Resurrection Belief (Oxford, 1987). Carnley goes rather further than either Macquarrie or Brown in acknowledging that, for Schillebeeckx, ‘the Easter faith certainly involves a post-mortem experience of encounter with the risen Christ’ (p 200). In spite of this Carnley is ultimately sceptical of Schillebeeckx’s account of the risen Jesus as fulfilling claims to objectivity.
The Power and the Glory Authority, Freedom and Literature: Part 1
Authors: Morris Kevin L. 
Published: July 2007

Authority that does not exist for liberty is not authority, but force. It has no sanction.Lord ActonThe best analogue of a God who reveals himself in strange ways is the wayward imagination of man.Anthony BurgessEnglish Catholic literature, invigorated by Celtic tributaries, has been of fast and luxuriant growth, rich in diversity and broad in achievement, contributing generously to the cultural mainstream. A torrent of poets, novelists, essayists, historians, journalists and spirituality writers have entertained, sustained, instructed, defended and promoted the Catholic community, and rendered it intriguing, even attractive, to outsiders by sharing their belief and their humanity. In so far as they are direct, Catholic writers reflect themselves in relation to Catholicism—their chief reference point. Lapsed writers are relevant if they continue to engage Catholicism in serious dialogue, or maintain Catholic values. Catholic writers can be spoken of as ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative': the liberal values community, freedom and relevance, respects independence of mind, and aspires to understanding and toleration; the conservative values order, law and traditional forms, respects power, and aspires to conformity and exclusivism.Since 1850 non-Catholics have generally thought that Catholicism is inimical to intellect and creativity; and the Church has indeed liked to picture itself as united, uniform, unchanging, righteous,infallible and ideologically lucid to the point of being mechanistic; and consequently there appears to be a conflict between the god-like Church and the human realities in which writers deal, between inflexible ‘Law’ and the fact that literature is of life, with the wind blowing where it listeth.
II: Justice, Peace and Dominicans 1216–1999 The Medieval Rhineland: Eckhart and Popular Theological Preaching
Authors: Mills John Orme 
Published: July 2007

Thirty years ago the very idea of including the Rhineland mystics in a series of articles on the role of the Dominicans in the promotion of peace and social justice would have been seen as intolerably bizarre. At that time it was still widely taken for granted that mysticism and dedication to the promotion of social justice were irreconcilable: that they belonged to profoundly different ways of understanding the world and understanding the teaching of Jesus Christ. There were, of course, some remarkable people who seemed to be able to keep a foot in both the camps, but lesser mortals who attempted this were in danger of not being taken seriously by the occupants of either.In spite of the massive changes which have taken place since then in politics, the culture and the Church, even today the presence of the Dominican Rhineland mystics in this series demands some explanation. By ‘the Dominican Rhineland mystics’ we mean, first and foremost, three friars of the Dominican Province of Teutonia: the brilliant but controversial Meister Eckhart (c.1260-c.1328) and two of his disciples, Johannes Tauler (c.1300-1361) and Henry Suso (1295-1366). At first sight the only things which these men seem to share in common with, for instance, the French Dominican worker-priests of the 1950s or the Brazilian Dominican liberation theologians of the 1970s are membership of the same religious order and considerable strength of character.After all, Frank Tobin has said that Eckhart’s sermons ‘center so exclusively on what is within and are so utterly devoid of any comments that might be used as references to time and place that they might just as well have been delivered on the moon as in turbulent fourteenth-century Strasburg or Cologne.’
The Power and the Glory Authority, Freedom and Literature: Part 2
Authors: Morris Kevin L. 
Published: July 2007

English Catholics have been a recognisable body; yet they have also been individuals engaged in a disorderly, energetic,personal and doubt-filled struggle to create, experience, explore and affirm. Catholic literature has been grounded in the tension between liberal and conservative: categories which are a function not only of how an individual relates to doctrine, but also of personality, for Catholics, like everyone else, believe as they must, as their personalities dictate. Cardinal Manning—together with his associates Herbert Vaughan, W. G. Ward and Mgr. George Talbot—may be taken as the archetype of the conservative mentality (Manning the presiding spirit of Vatican I), while Newman may be taken as the archetype of the liberal (the presiding spirit of Vatican II)—even though he was at least as doctrinally meticulous as Manning: temperaments— rather than theological or political stances—which constituted the warp and woof of English Catholic literature.Manning sought an infallible authority, and identified himself with it, so that he aspired to be, as he said, ‘more Roman than Rome', and proceeded to make English Catholicism like himself. He had no sympathy, he said, for ‘the watered, literary, worldly Catholicism of certain Englishmen', and wished to keep Catholics untainted by English intellectual culture. In 1876 he told a gathering of Catholic intellectuals:
when any man comes and talks to you about scientific history, I advise you as soon as possible to change the subject. . . when the Church has decided, [he is speaking of the Vatican Council] defined, or decreed, any man who appeals from that decision to any human history whatsoever is guilty of rejecting a Divine Teacher, and of the sin of unbelief . . . Whosoever appeals from [the decrees of the Council] to human history commits heresy...
“A Woman is not Without Honour…” The Prophetic Voice of Christa Wolf's ‘Cassandra’
Authors: Lacey Antonia 
Published: July 2007

This woman whose voices drive her into exile.(Exile, exile.)...This woman/ the heart of the matter.Heart of the law/ heart of the prophets.Prophets and poets make difficult stable companions and they share the ability to unsettle or subvert the norms of their societies. Because of this they are often silenced or killed. They both, in different ways, offer to the individual or community a two way ‘glass’ in which the individual or community then has to face the truth about themselves. One side of this glass acts as a mirror from which is reflected the breaking of communities; the injustice, the impoverishment, the godlessness, from which our laws and systems normally shield us. The other side of the glass is the window, through which, creative and energising, the prophet/poet offers us a new and radical vision of an alternative future, a place of possibility and change. Change however is always unsettling and never easy, it is usually simpler to shut our eyes. In Cassandra, Christa Wolf turns the mirror/glass onto a society being broken down by war, and through the Scamander Caves, offers a window on an alternate way of being, visioned by women.Walter Brueggemann discusses Israel’s turning away from being a prophetic people to being a people of worldly Kingship. He suggests that we are so enmeshed by our present reality that any other way of being is virtually unthinkable. Moreover, that this present history is one of “briefcases and limousines and press conferences and quotas and new weaponry systems.
Hick and Loughlin on Disputes and Frameworks
Authors: Hyman Gavin 
Published: July 2007

It was Wittgenstein who said that in order to ‘combat’ a point of view, one first has to establish whether that point of view is within or without one’s own framework. That is to say, one has to establish whether the ‘combat’ is to be a dispute within a framework or between frameworks. For Wittgenstein, that was of the utmost importance if one was to avoid falling into confusion. This is because whereas disputes within a framework proceed by means of reasoned arguments which are held fast and validated by that common surrounding framework, disputes between frameworks do not proceed within a common milieu, and so the common validity of reasoned arguments subsides. Thus, a dispute between frameworks has to proceed by means of quite different methods, that is, methods of persuasion and charm.This insight has a particular significance when one considers some of the developments that have been taking place in theology in recent years. For the last three centuries or so, theological discourse was conducted within a framework that was, at once, both ‘theological’ and ‘scientific.’ As Amos Funkenstein has argued, it was a framework ‘in which theological concerns were expressed in terms of secular knowledge, and scientific concerns were expressed in theological terms. Theology and other sciences became almost one.’ Virtually all theological disputes in those centuries were located within that framework, and consequently, they were conducted by means of reasoned arguments.