bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Church and Family V: Feminism, Church and Family in the 1980s
Authors: Ruether Rosemary Radford 
Published: July 2007

In the late 1960s, American women and women throughout the world began to awaken to the fact that the victories of women’s rights to work, to vote and to be educated had not solved the problem of women’s inequality. A silent problem was gnawing away at women of the middle classes in industrialized nations, a problem “without a name” as Betty Friedan put it in her pioneering book, The Feminine Mystique, in 1962. In the 1950s all the media of culture and socialization had been directed toward convincing women that their place was in the home, that full-time child-raising and domesticity was their highest vocation. The women who had accepted the “feminine mystique” felt increasingly entrapped and stifled.At the same time, the Civil Rights Movement and the Peace Movement were raising American consciousness about the structures of social oppression. Many young women responded enthusiastically to the call to win equality for Black Americans and to end the war in southeast Asia, only to find themselves treated as second-class citizens by their male colleagues, expected to be sexually available, to do the rote labor of the movement, but not to make the real decision. Out of these various forms of discontent, an explosion was gradually building, the explosion of a new movement for women’s liberation.Betty Friedan had called women to seize their discontent by leaving their exclusive homemaking roles, returning to school for further education and seeking interesting jobs. Entrance into the public world of work was to be the panacea. But many women already suspected that this was not enough; that the world of work was also a place where women were marginalized and exploited.
In the Cave of the Heart: Silence and Realization
Authors: Bruteau Beatrice 
Published: July 2007

A paper presented at a symposium on East-West monasticism held in Kansas City in August 1983, commemorating the tenth anniversary of the death of Abhishiktānanda (Henri Le Saux OSB).Hidden in the depth of the heart and in the highest heaven Is that mystery of glory and immortality which only those can find Who have renounced all things and themselves.This verse is freely translated from the Mahānārayana Upanishad and was apparently a favourite of Swami Abhishiktānanda’s, for he quotes it, in differing guises, several times. I think it fairly epitomizes his insight and his realization.I have only recently made the acquaintance of Swami Abhishiktānanda and am not really entitled to speak of him. There are those who can, foremost among whom would be Dom Bede Griffiths. But I am so attracted to Swami Abhishiktānanda, so moved by his inspired writings on the life of renunciation and the non-dual experience, that I would like to offer the little I have to say to his memory.Swami Abhishiktānanda was a French Benedictine monk, Dom Henri Le Saux, who, after thirteen years in a Benedictine monastery, received permission to go to India in 1948. There he and Fr. Jules Monchanin founded the ashram of Shantivanam (Forest of Peace) as “an attempt to integrate into Christianity the monastic tradition of India”.In 1949 he met Śri Ramana, called the Maharishi or great seer, in the south of India, at the foot of the sacred mountain Arunāchala.
Religious Art and Religious Belief
Authors: Howes Graham 
Published: July 2007

Few sociologists of religion have been tempted to explore the visual dimension of religious change. The problems—both theoretical and methodological—are formidable.In the first place, when scrutinizing religious art in any culture we have to be very careful about our assumptions concerning the iconicity of religious symbols and the so-called creative character of visual images. Richard Wollheim, for one, has argued persuasively that when we discuss iconicity in any cultural setting we have to take account of the relation of the sign to the sign-user as well as what is represented by the sign, i.e. the referent. It is, he says, “when signs become for us ... ‘fuller’ objects, that we may also come to feel that they have greater appropriateness to their referents”. The problem for sociologists of religion is just how to tease this kind of sense data from respondents.Secondly: as Hugh Duncan has noted, “the problem is not that of asserting that there is a reciprocal relation between art and society, but rather of showing how this relationship exists” ‘Proof’ might be arrived at by establishing either valuative congruence, social structural influence or interpersonal influence within the artistic vocation itself. But here we also need to postulate a psychological mechanism through which the individual artist transmutes social, cultural and credal themes into tangible artistic statements, as well as a theory of perception and symbolic process to account for art’s effect on the disposition and behaviour of the audience.
Finding God in Motherhood: Release or Trap?
Authors: Pepper Mary , Hebblethwaite Margaret 
Published: July 2007

It was easy to anticipate that there would be some criticisms of Margaret Hebblethwaite’s widely praised book “Motherhood and God” from conservative quarters, and what the criticism would be. And our publishing, in our last issue, of Deborah F. Middleton’s article “God as Mother—a necessary debate” has brought us letters from readers arguing that all who discern “motherhood” in God must be mistaken. But questions about Margaret Hebblethwaite’s book have not come solely from the right. Here Mary Pepper, one of the organizers of Christian Women’s Information and Resources (CWIRES), criticizes the book from a feminist perspective and the author replies. We shall be publishing a review which looks at the book from yet another perspective later.Editor.The publication of Motherhood and God by Margaret Hebblethwaite happened just as the Church of Scotland Study Group presented its controversial report on The Motherhood of God. So the book was launched amid the turbulence of dispute within the Scottish Church, evidence that the questions around gender and theology can no longer be ignored. The report, cautiously and reasonably, gives scriptural justification for describing God as Mother, but a minority of the group felt unable to agree that God might be properly addressed as Mother. (It was the outcry over a woman praying ‘Dear Mother God’ that caused the setting up of the Study Group.)But in her very readable book, ‘about finding God in motherhood and motherhood in God’, Margaret Hebblethwaite has no difficulty at all.
Biblical Inspiration and the Paraclete
Authors: Turner Geoffrey 
Published: July 2007

Never reluctant to provoke their readers, the Hanson brothers declare roundly that,The ancient doctrine of the inspiration and the inerrancy of the Bible not only is impossible for intelligent people today, but represents a deviation in Christian doctrine, whatever salutary uses may have been made of it in the past by the Holy Spirit, who often turns human errors to good ends.This vapid dismissal of an ancient doctrine is discordant with current Roman Catholic tradition represented by the Vatican Council’s document Dei Verbum, which maintains that ‘the books of Holy Scripture were written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit’. So what has led the Hansons, in the name of intelligent people of the present day, to abandon the inspiration of scripture as an untenable belief? One reason is that the Hansons equate inspiration with inerrancy, for they allege that inerrancy has been the only practical outcome of the tradition of biblical inspiration, and certainly it is the case that inerrancy was made to bear much weight in Roman Catholic tradition in the late nineteenth century and, during the early part of this century, in the anti-modernist campaign.
Deity and Domination: I
Authors: Nicholls David 
Published: July 2007

The first part of a paper presented at the International Symposium on Sociology and Theology, Oxford, January 1984.From very early times men have spoken of and to their gods in political images, just as they have ascribed divine characteristics to their earthly rulers. This has been the case no less in the judaeo- christian tradition than in pagan cultures. Some of the most persistent images used of God in this tradition are taken from political discourse: king, lord, judge, to mention but three. Again, abstract concepts applied to God such as sovereignty, power, majesty and dominion have a strongly political connotation. Yet remarkably little attention has been paid to this phenomenon by theologians and historians of doctrine.In the first part of this paper (published here) I wish to consider the way in which analogies between divine and civil domination were employed among some groups in seventeenth-century England, and set this in the context of a more general thesis about the use of such analogies. I shall conclude, in the second part of this paper (which will be published in the next issue), by suggesting certain significant implications which may be said to follow from this manner of thinking and talking about God and the state.
Biography as Theology: Hebblethwaite's Pope
Authors: Kerr Fergus 
Published: July 2007

The time is right for a good biography of Pope John XXIII. It is, of course, ridiculous that the Catholic Church—all 780 million of us, as I recently read—should be so decisively affected by the personality of a single man. It is only with the invention of railways, telephones, aeroplanes, and now television, that the solitary in the Vatican has acquired such power. The ‘modern world’, which Pius IX sought to keep at arm’s length from the Papal States, soon provided the media for an unprecedentedly intense personal veneration of the ‘Holy Father’. The successor of Peter now enjoys a supremacy in the Church that Peter himself evidently never had (see Acts 8:14 and 11:2, and Galatians 2:11). With the triumph of Ultramontanism, the whole body has been surrealistically distorted by a grotesquely inflated ear (I Corinthians 12:17). The traditional ecclesiology of the Catholic Church as the communion of local churches has been re-established in theory—but, for the most part, we remain captured, and captivated, by media-promoted adulation of the individual. The power of the ‘world’ over the Catholic Church is as insidious as ever.One of the worst effects of media domination is instant oblivion for yesterday’s men. In longer historical perspective, of course, the tolerance and the initiatives of Paul VI will seem obvious. At present, with men in control who cannot see the other side of a question, he is remembered only as a rather sad and dithering figure.
Abortion and the Christian Feminist: I — A Dilemma?
Authors: Smith Carol 
Published: July 2007

It might seem that to be a Christian and at the same time a feminist involves few conflicts for the individual. In John 10:10 Christ said: “I came that they may have life and have it more abundantly”. Surely this is what feminism is about too — enabling women to live their lives “more abundantly”, by utilising all the potential which lies within them. One of the major achievements of the women’s movement has been to give women a growing consciousness of how great that potential is and the realisation that the peculiar gifts of women are not necessarily worthless because a male-orientated world sees little value in them. Women have discovered in themselves a capacity for assessing their own value and utilising their various potentialities as fully as possible. Christians, too, male and female, have a duty to be fully human and to realise their own worth. Offering ourselves unreservedly to God involves of necessity a developing awareness of what it is we are offering. It would seem, then, that the feminist Christian should see her feminism as enriching her Christianity and her Christianity as reinforcing her feminism.Nevertheless, in practice, areas of conflict do arise. One such is the issue of abortion. Feminists have consistently campaigned for abortion on demand and the slogan “a woman’s right to choose” has become one of the most familiar of the women’s movement. Some have even gone so far as to suggest that one cannot be a true feminist while not supporting the notion that abortions should be freely available to all women who ask for them.
II — Prolifers for Survival
Authors: Dowell Susan 
Published: July 2007

Abortion was a hot election issue in the US of 1984. The pro-family rhetoric of the Born-again Right predictably incurred the correspondingly doctrinaire derision of the women's movement and the Left. The National Organisation for Women (NOW) banned from its platform women who in any way opposed abortion. Both sides agree, it seems, that abortion is a primary and integral component of women's liberation and a crucial test of ‘reliability’ for or against.All the more vital, then, is the search for ethical consistency and clarity which is being maintained in some wings of the peace and women's movements. This was given some force by the visit to Britain last autumn of the US Catholic pacifist Juli Loesch, who founded, in 1979, an organisation called Prolifers for Survival. She came to promote a parallel network here. This exploratory visit, (sponsored by Pax Christi, some members of London SPUC and Women for Life) provoked signs of increasing polarisation in UK. One reaction in Peace News-which in 1983 published a reflective consideration of the links between private and public violence-‘was to curl into a ball and puke’.
Aquinas Lecture 1984 Truth: Anselm or Thomas?
Authors: Anscombe G.E.M. 
Published: July 2007

Given at Blackfriars, Oxford, on 16 February 1984.Anselm, called doctor doctorum by those who came after him, died in 1109, 116 years before Thomas Aquinas was born. So the sort of distance in time between them was something like that of Byron, or Napoleon, or even Kant, from us. In the writings of Thomas his name seems only less weighty than that of Augustine. It was not Thomas’ way to express disagreement much with revered authorities; so he does this little or not at all with Anselm. Indeed, it looks as if he had found him very valuable and some things he certainly took from him.Let me first give a brief sketch of the most significant early parts of Anselm’s dialogue On Truth. He proposes to his pupil that they look through the various things that are said to have truth in them. They will begin with propositions, where, he also tells us, most people stop too; in any case, we rather often call propositions true or false. It is clear that he does not mean ‘abstract propositions’, but vocal utterances; and he remarks that the nature of truth in these can be equally considered in any signs that come about to signify something’s being the case or not being the case, e.g. writings or speech with the fingers. .The striking things about his discussion are two. First, the identification of truth with rightness of assertion. What is assertion for—i.e. what has it been created for? Answer: to signify as being the case what is the case.
Once in Khartoum
Authors: FitzPatrick P.J. 
Published: July 2007

There are concatenations of events that prompt reflexion: such as a television programme on the evidence for Jesus; a hand-out in criticism thereof, composed at Cardinal Hume’s request by some biblical and theological scholars; public expressions of disbelief, some episcopal, preceding the consecration of the new Bishop of Durham; the fulmination of York Minster, if you like; and, again if you like, the remarkable scarcity of public expressions, whether of belief or disbelief, from our own hierarchy. New Blackfriars, where in past years articles have appeared expressing a variety of views upon biblical veracity, seems a suitable place for some prompted reflexions. All references are to the bibliography.There is one reflexion I get out of the way before offering my own—I found it in the Universe for June 29 of last year. There it was said that one proper reaction of Catholics to the dissent exhibited in the Church of England is a ‘a sense of humble gratitude for the guidance we have in the Church for our Faith, as well as a deepening fidelity’ (Burridge, col. 4). Whatever else the disagreements in New Blackfriars have done, they at least forbid us to lay to our souls any such flattering unction as that nonsense. There is in the Roman Church much dissent in these matters, dissent that goes very deep and shews no sign of going away. Some years ago, two writers in this journal expressed the dissent with force and clarity, and it is from what they wrote that I begin the reflexions I have to offer.
Freedom, Evil and Farrer
Authors: Hebblethwaite Brian 
Published: July 2007

A revised version of a paper presented in 1983 at the third Oxford conference on the theology of Austin Farrer.Freedom has a central place in Christian anthropology. We may begin our consideration of the notion, somewhat idealistically, by focusing attention on the most exalted sense of freedom, which, according to Christian tradition, is that of man’s true freedom in relation to the God who made him. This true freedom may be defined as the spontaneity of unrestricted and undistorted love, as man realises his true nature as a creature made in the image of God. In the end, in the consummation of all things in the life of heaven, the creature will for ever exercise this true freedom, in both thought and action, as the love of God, now unambiguously manifest, elicits the free, the spontaneous response of love in the communion of saints.Such a conception of man’s true freedom raises many theological and philosophical problems. The most important theological problem is that of the relation between grace and free will. Indeed, the free will spoken of by contrast with grace appears to have little in common with the true freedom which is the fruit of grace. According to the dominant stands of Christian anthropology, man is not free to realise his true freedom. On the contrary, he is in bondage and can only be freed by grace. On this view man’s free will is very limited indeed. The main philosophical problem with this conception of man’s true freedom is whether such freedom of spontaneity presupposes a more basic liberty of indifference whereby man is able to opt for any one of a range of genuine alternatives, not only equally good alternatives,
Demythologising Mathematics: Gödel, Escher, Bach Revisited
Authors: Barker Sean 
Published: July 2007

Why should a journal like New Blackfriars be looking retrospectively at books about mathematics? A short answer is that mathematics, or at least the myth of mathematics, affects the way we think. I shall be looking at two books which demythologise mathematics: The Mathematical Experience and Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty by Morris Kline. These help examine the myths of proof—the myths about how mathematicians think. Part of the demythologisation process is to look at alternatives to the myths; in particular I shall look at the role of intuition, and will illustrate this with reference to Catastrophe Theory and Gödel, Escher, Bach.The prompting for this investigation is the emergence of a new genre of books about mathematics following in the wake of Gödel, Escher, Bach, of which The Mathematical Experience is an example. It would be a fascinating aside to trace the rise of this genre from Fourteen Funny Bits of Mathematics in Avuncular Style as found on the shelves of most public libraries, alongside popularisations of pedestrian seriousness. No doubt it would mention the science-as-a-human-activity school as exemplified by Koestler’s The Sleepwalkers, or Watson’s The Double Helix, a vein continued by Catastrophe Theory. It would take a venture into catastrophe theory itself to explain the emergence of Gödel, Escher, Bach—a rogue book which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1980 for general non-fiction, a picaresque which takes in the art of fugue, Zen koans, and the Jabberwocky and leads to questions at the heart of some of the problems in the foundations of mathematics and of artificial intelligence, while remaining accessible to a child of twelve (albeit the one I know is quite bright). The audience the genre aims at seems to be not so much the interested layman, but more the new technical elite whose computer skills and mathematical awareness can be used to outflank the experience of their seniors. In my years in radar design it was interesting to watch the gradual take-over of certain departments by mathematicians in spite of the active opposition of the electronics-trained managers. In my last department over half the people there had copies of Gödel, Escher, Bach.
Spanners and Symbols: God's Action as Communicative Action
Authors: West P.L. 
Published: July 2007

Within the framework of the “empiricist” philosophy widely assumed in English theology, there is a serious problem about how to represent God’s action in the world. This applies equally to God’s action in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, and to God’s action today through the Holy Spirit. Here I will argue that the problem can be eased by a change of philosophical framework. I will do so in dialogue with Maurice Wiles’ The Remaking of Christian Doctrine which reveals with outstanding honesty and clarity the difficulties that the empiricist framework throws up.By the “empiricist” framework I mean a general set of philosophical presuppositions that are deeply entrenched within our culture in general, and widespread within our university departments of science, philosophy and theology in particular. Of these (often only implicit) presuppositions I am interested in just two: firstly, that the chief function of language is to represent or “picture” reality; secondly, that “action” must take place via some causal mechanism, the model for which is given by the causal mechanisms of the natural sciences. Thus the only relation that language can have to action is to “picture” it.This pair of assumptions is peculiarly deadly for theology, because it pushes back our possibilities for conceptualizing God’s action to only two. Either we think of God’s action as the communication of knowledge about a state of affairs—a picture of reality—or else we must see it as an intervention in the causal nexus so as to rearrange the course of events in the physical world.
Leonardo Boff: Complicity and Criticism
Authors: Alison James 
Published: July 2007

Leonardo Boff, a 47-year old Franciscan from Brazil, has become one of the best known names in Catholic theology owing to the controversy surrounding his book lgreja: Carisma e Poder (Ed Vozes, Petrbpolis, 1981). The close coincidence in time of Boff’s interview with Cardinal Ratzinger in Rome about the book, and the publishing of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith’s criticisms of some aspects of liberation theology, has caused some misunderstanding about the issues at the core of the controversy. Two widely-held misapprehensions had better be cleared up now, before we venture any further. They have been repeated over and over again in the press—when Boff and Ratzinger met, at the beginning of last September, one of the things they warmly agreed about was the shoddiness of the media coverage of the affair.First of all, it was not—this time—Rome that made the first move. On the contrary. Boff had appealed to Rome. When his book was attacked by Dom Romer, Assistant Bishop of Rio de Janeiro and President of the Archdiocesan Commission for the Doctrine of the Faith, he turned to the Vatican. His own very detailed account of the affair, “Minha convocaçao à Sagrado Congregaçeo para a Doutrina da Fé: um testemunho pessoal” (which appeared in Revista Eclesiástica Brasileira vol. 44, fasc. 176, Dec. 1984, pp. 845—852) confirms this.Secondly, and more importantly, the book does not in fact appear to be about liberation theology specifically. Any controversy involving so prominent a writer of liberation theology is bound to have a “political” dimension,