bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Towards An Urban Theology
Authors: Vincent John J 
Published: July 2007

The origin of the Urban Theology Unit resides, I fancy, in a quite fundamental question which has seemed to me to be elemental in any search for Christian discipleship. It was something like: Where do I have to place myself so that Gospel things happen to me?I had satisfied at least myself that the peculiar and distinctive genius of Christianity lay in its uncovering and empowering certain secular dynamics which were for the wholeness of humanity.The call to be a disciple, in this light, was therefore the call to place oneself strategically, so that the dynamics of the Christ-events could be recognised and entered into. The evangelical motive, “What must I do to be saved?” was therefore secularised into “Where must I be that salvation happens?” The church therefore had to be discovered around and within those events, people and movements which could be part of the on-going secular dynamic which continued the acts of Jesus. The acts of Jesus, in turn, were the immediate and often microcosmic happenings which embodied and pointed to the Kingdom of God.It seemed to me, further, that the calling of a theologian always had to be secondary to the calling to be a disciple — or, more pertinently, that a theological vocation was impossible except as a development of a discipleship vocation. This meant that theorising had to issue from commitment, speaking from acting, systematising from experimenting. Indeed, I later learned that the whole life pattern of Jesus reflected this kind of dialogue between engagement and withdrawal, conflict and spirituality, politics and privateness, and that the peculiar group that he called into being likewise existed as alternative communal society (the New Israel) and as his own alternative inner being (the Body of Christ).
The Problem of Evil and Modern Philosophy — II
Authors: Davies Brian 
Published: July 2007

Is God morally good? Is he morally bad? Confronted by the reality of evil his defenders have sometimes said that he is morally good, or, at least, that there is insufficient proof of his moral badness. Why? Because, so they say, the following argument is acceptable:
1In creating, God brings about or allows various evils.2These evils are justified since they go along with some good or goods which depend on them in some way.3Evil can therefore be seen as part of God’s justified plan in creating or allowing for certain goods.But does it make sense to say either that God is morally good or that he is not? This is the question I raised at the end of my previous article on God and Evil.Many people would find it odd, or even offensive, They would say that since God is good, he is bound by moral requirements in the way that human beings are, that the goodness of God is moral goodness, where that is understood in the same way as it is when ascribed to men and women. Richard Swinburne is a good representative of this view. God, he says, is perfectly good. What does this mean? It means, says Swinburne, that God knows which actions are morally good and which actions are morally bad, and that God always does actions which are morally good and never does actions which are morally bad. According to Swinburne, ‘God’s perfect goodness follows deductively from his omniscience and his perfect freedom’. Since God is omniscient he will ‘know the truth value of all moral judgments whether or not they are true or false’. Since he is perfectly free he ‘will always do any action which he recognizes to be over all better to do than not to do, and so one which he judges to be morally obligatory’.
Why are most Christians on the defensive with respect to Marxism?
Authors: Roy Louis 
Published: July 2007

The quality of Christian life partly depends on how those who believe in Jesus understand what religion is about. As a theologian I am not directly concerned with the pros and cons of Marxist theory and of Communist practice. My preoccupation is rather firstly to pay attention to Marx’s denying any permanent value to Christian ethics and religion; secondly to ask whether Marx’s assessment of Christian practice is compatible or not with the way most of the faithful have interpreted Christianity in the last few centuries; and thirdly to offer a few considerations on the possibility of partially overcoming religious idealism with the help of both psychology and Marxism.I hope that it will become evident in due course that a certain number of Christians have been, are and will be on the defensive with respect to Marxism inasmuch as they are a very definite brand of believers, whom we may call ‘idealist’ believers. I shall argue that so far as we are idealist believers, we cannot but forthrightly reject Marxism en bloc, because to our idealist eyes, it necessarily looks like pure materialism. Being two extremes, sheer idealism and sheer materialism cannot but repudiate each other. And in contrast to this main reason for banning Marx from being a partner in fruitful dialogue, I consider as secondary all the other — often legitimate — reasons that we may have to criticize many aspects of both Marxist theory and Communist practice.
Prophecy and the Poor: Fr Vincent McNabb and Distributism
Authors: Cunningham Angela 
Published: July 2007

Fr Vincent McNabb (1868-1943) was one of the most widely- known Dominicans of the English Province from the years prior to the First World War up to his death in the Second. Apart from his work internally within the Order he was well-known to Londoners for his appearances for the Catholic Evidence Guild at Speakers’ Comer in Hyde Park and for his involvement in social action, which sometimes made the tabloid headlines. He was involved in the ecumenical movement, in speaking and writing prolifically on all kinds of topics on all sorts of platforms and in all kinds of publications, sometimes far beyond Catholic or even Christian circles. He was a spiritual director and retreat giver of distinction, and he gave lectures on Aquinas under the auspices of the University of London Extension Lectures scheme — an unforgettable teacher according to many students. Clearly an apostolate of remarkable range.He was a man who aroused strong feelings, and some within the Order were critical of him. One of the grounds for criticism concerned his involvement with Distributism, the social and philosophical movement most commonly associated with Belloc and Chesterton, and it is this area of his life which provides the focus of this article.McNabb was unique in the influence he wielded in this most lay of movements, although in a private letter of 1932 Fr Vincent denied being a Distributist. His rejection of the label can perhaps provide a point of departure for trying to understand the place of Distributism in McNabb’s thinking.Fr Vincent was quite clear that he was, first, a Dominican priest and, secondly, a theologian. From an early age he had held firmly that priests should not be involved in politics — in 1914 he wrote in The Tablet that ‘Tragic events during my school life in the North of Ireland have given me a deep-seated distaste for the priest-politician’.
Bodiliness and the Good News — I
Authors: West Angela 
Published: July 2007

This paper was originally written for the Glencar Summer School, the theme of which for that year was Liberation. The space for this contribution was entitled ‘Liberation in the Family’. As a Christian feminist, my own concern in the area of family is how women can serve in the family of God; this latter I take to be as different from The Family (of popular and sociological imagination) as the Kingdom of God is different from say, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. In the two parts of this article, I hope to explore the experience of a group of women so as to demonstrate the meaning that is fully entailed by ‘Liberation in the Family’. That is, I believe, that it necessarily involves us in a reappraisal of our whole theological understanding of the Body and the Spirit.Recently there have been several attempts to introduce Latin American liberation theology into this country. These attempts can usually be recognized by their chief catchphrase — ‘doing theology’. ‘Doing theology’ is represented as being a practical and political affair which everyone can take part in, and which is the opposite and alternative to academic theology, which is believed to be remote, abstract and oriented to the elite. But the problem with this approach to ‘doing theology’ is that it tends to leave us with another abstraction. What in Latin America was the result of a historical and political process, and the naming a new reality as a result of this process, becomes in translation to our historical reality simply a new abstraction.
Radical Alternatives: Conceptual Schemes and Expressive Behaviour
Authors: Kerr Fergus 
Published: July 2007

Professor Mary Hesse wrote as follows:“The thought forms of alien cultures may be so foreign to our own that it might make sense to say that I understand my dog, or even my chrysanthemums, better than I understand those people”.No doubt that is a provocative formulation of the problem of understanding other people. In fact, as the context shows, what she means by understanding her dog is that she can teach him tricks and predict his visible behaviour. What she is suggesting, then, is that, confronted with people of a radically different culture from our own, we might find it impossible to teach them anything because their behaviour was unpredictable — so unpredictable as to make communication between us impossible. With the nearing prospect of inter-planetary, and eventually of inter-galactic, travel, of course, the question of communication with deeply alien beings is no longer entirely academic. But for a long time now, certainly, since the expansion of ethnography and social anthropology in the wake of the European colonisation of the rest of the world, we have been increasingly troubled by the thought that, even on Earth, human beings may already be, or may always have been, hopelessly unintelligible out of their own culture. It might even be something of a relief, in view of the appalling atrocities that have occurred this century, to accept that some people may simply see everything in a completely different conceptual framework from others. It would explain the horrifying breakdowns of consensus about moral and political values.
A Note on Cosmological Arguments
Authors: Meynell Hugo 
Published: July 2007

I am very grateful indeed to Fr Brian Davies for treating my work with such sympathy and thoroughness. He has put forward objections to some of my arguments and conclusions which richly deserve some attempt on my part at an answer.Fr Davies approves of a recent suggestion by Anthony Flew, derived from Kant, that one should distinguish sharply between those types of argument for God’s existence which try to establish it from the mere fact of the world, and those which do so on the basis of some particular characteristic of the world. They propose that the term ‘cosmological argument’ should be kept for arguments of the former class. With great respect and suitable trepidation, I would wish to dissent from this formidable team of authorities, preferring as I do a threefold division. For I believe it is very important in this context to distinguish between two sorts of properties which things or the world may have; one sort, by virtue of the fact that they can be objects of our knowledge at all; the other which they just happen to have as a matter of fact, independently of their knowability by us. Let us distinguish these as respectively A properties and B properties. Now the effect of the proposal of Kant, Flew and Davies is to reduce theistic arguments which are not versions of the ontological arguments to two types — those from the mere existence of things or the world, and those from the B properties of things and the world.
Atonement and Moral Apocalypticism: William Styron's Sophie's Choice
Authors: Surin Kenneth 
Published: July 2007

In this essay I shall be discussing William Styron’s depiction of a theologically significant incident in his recent novel Sophie's Choice (London: Corgi Books, 1979). Since our discussion will approach this novel from a theological, as opposed to a purely literary, standpoint, it behoves us to begin by specifying the theological context of the argument that we hope to develop in this essay. This essay is concerned with the doctrine of the Atonement. More specifically: we shall argue that Styron’s narration of the episode which gives his book its title provides a basis for a criticism of all purely ‘subjective’ interpretations of the Atonement. The adherent of a purely ‘subjective’ conception of the Atonement emphasizes the manner in which the believer makes the work of Christ his own — the saving significance of Christ’s work is reckoned by the ‘subjectivist’ to lie in the ways in which individuals appropriate that work. That is to say, Christ’s saving work takes the form of a ‘subjective’ process; it is, in the words of Donald Baillie (a notable modem proponent of the ‘subjective’ conception), a “reconciling of us to God through a persuasion in our hearts that is ... a realizing of His eternal love”.‘Subjective’ understandings of the Atonement have come to prevail in recent years. This is mainly because ‘objective’ conceptions are invariably bound up with incarnational christologies, and incarnational christologies no longer totally dominate the theological consensus. Instead, so-called ‘functional’ christologies tend increasingly to be in vogue, and since a ‘subjective’ understanding of the Atonement accords better with a ‘functional’ christology than it does with a fully incarnational (or ‘ontological’) christology, there has been a recognizable drift away from ‘objective’ conceptions of the Atonement.
The Language of Ritual
Authors: Grainger Roger 
Published: July 2007

In this article I shall be making some attempt to look at Christian ritual from the particular angle of its nature as a medium for the communication of theological ideas. Ritual, and particularly sacramental ritual, is itself a specific kind of human discourse, one particularly suited to the description of religious experiences and the codification of religious thought. Ritual is a language. The structural principle according to which all language operates is the identical principle underlying any kind of human understanding: the neurological function of ideas depends on the ability to discriminate between percepts. Just as the formation of ideas depends on the ability to discriminate ‘this’ from ‘that’ - whatever ‘this’ and ‘that’ may actually be — so the communication of ideas both to oneself and to other people has discrimination and differentiation as its main purpose, for the action of distinguishing is also the action of relating, and once we are able to hold the objects of perception in tension we can organise our experience into articulated statements about the world: we can relate our own experience to that of other people.A language, then, is a way of distinguishing between experiences in order to relate them to one another. By relating one thing to another, we are able to alter the meaning we ascribe to similarity and division, so that we now see connections when we were once only aware of oppositions, and logic where there used to be nonsense.
Turner on ‘Operative Rituals’: A Sociological Response
Authors: Flanagan Kieran 
Published: July 2007

In a rather bleak essay, Charles Davis observed in 1970 that ‘the general verdict upon liturgical reform is that it has failed to solve the problem of worship in a secular age’ and ‘that the chief effect of the reforms has been to uncover an insoluble problem’. Any sociological response to liturgical renewal came after the late sixties as a critical reaction to changes implemented as a result of Vatican II. There was certainly no sociological participation in the demands for liturgical change prior to 1963. As a result the Conciliar reforms did not so much answer a sociological scepticism as generate one that has developed increasingly since. The attempt to relate the shape of rite, to what were perceived as the cultural and social needs of a secular modem society, merged with a wish to maximise the active participation of the laity in the liturgy, whose simplicity and clarity of form, would enable a worshipping community to develop as a witness to an increasingly sceptical society.Pre-Conciliar forms of rite were rigid in shape, objectively secured in complex rubrics, but were considered as implausible and irrelevant to contemporary needs. The tenor of the new rites was a mixture of looser simplified rubrics, in the General Instruction ol the Roman Missal, 1969, matched to a sensitivity to pastoral and cultural needs. But this wish for some degree of adaptability (that satisfied neither radicals nor conservatives) pre-supposed some criteria of assessing changes in form as affecting local situations. If indigenization was to occur some form of systematic evaluation seemed desirable. Initially, the changes were met with indifference by sociologists of religion, who have displayed little interest in the social nature of liturgy since.
Reconciliation in the Middle East
Authors: Gross Selwyn 
Published: July 2007

In everyday parlance, the term “reconciliation” is used in at least two distinct senses. Think of someone saying: “They were reconciled with each other after all those years”. The picture which comes to mind is the establishment of some kind of peace or harmony after years of disagreement. “Reconciliation” in this sense is seen as eminently good and well worth striving for by active means. In religious terms, when one talks of reconciliation, one tends to think of an almost eschatological situation, when all human beings are consciously reconciled in Christ, and God is “all-in-all”. There is, however, another, more ambiguous sense of the term, although it is not as common, and does not spring as readily to mind as the unambiguously positive usage of the term. Consider hearing someone say: “They have reconciled themselves to the probability of being made redundant next week”, or something of the sort. Here, the term “reconciliation” is used in a manner not unlike “resignation”. “They are now resigned to their situation.” It is not necessarily positive, and implies a passive and perhaps grudging acceptance. It is worth bearing both of these senses of the term in mind, since different models of the tensions created in the Middle East by the existence and behaviour of the State of Israel use different senses of “reconciliation” in positing ways in which the conflict could be brought to a resolution.My brief is to talk about “reconciliation in the Middle East”. It is my intention not to talk about the Middle East in general, but rather to focus upon Israel, to examine those things which demand reconciliation, the actors in the Israeli situation, and factors making for reconciliation.
No to the Nuclear Warriors: The US Bishops' Pastoral
Authors: Ruston Roger 
Published: July 2007

The final version of the US bishops’ pastoral letter, The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response, although it is not without its disappointments, is still an extraordinary document which is going to have an irreversible effect on the way the Catholic Church thinks about nuclear war. It is not out of the blue however, having spent a long time in gestation — at least since the bishops’ 1976 statement on deterrence, “To Live in Christ Jesus”. And it is the fruit of at least two major developments of thinking about modem war: on the one hand Papal and Conciliar teaching on total war, which began with Pius XII’s broadcasts during World War II; on the other hand modern American scholarship in the Just War tradition, which has been stimulated by the sense of responsibility for Hiroshima and Vietnam. If the main moral thrust — their “No to nuclear war” — comes from the former, it is the latter which set up the possibility for intelligent open debate in the United States on the morality of modern weapons and strategy. But one must give due recognition to a third influence: the profound effect which a handful of Catholic pacifists such as Dorothy Day, Gordon Zahn and James Douglass have had on some of the American bishops.The remarkable thing is the confidence with which the bishops have intervened in the debate in their own country: not merely with well-meaning generalities such as normally afflicts church documents, but with tough arguments on particular policies, many of which are clearly opposed to those of the US Administration.
Peace Education
Authors: Moonan Lawrence 
Published: July 2007

In this discussion-paper I look at certain general kinds of peace which certain general kinds of “education” are calculated to bring about, if they succeed; in order first to see which if any of them is ultimately worth having. I find at least one, and at present only one general kind of peace to be worth having; and then examine two broad “realistic” ways — the only “realistic” ways I yet see — in which we might think to achieve that peace. I find neither of those ways to be ultimately capable of delivering that peace, and nearly all the more sensible forms of “peace education” which I have yet heard canvassed, to be tacitly or expressly geared to one or other of those ways. (The present paper came in response to a review of literature on peace education which I was called upon to make, some time ago.) I then consider an “unrealistic” possible way to achieving the same sort of supposedly worthwhile peace, finding that the chances of ever achieving it by that way are slender in the extreme, and that the forms of “education” which I see to be needed in order to achieve it by that general route are themselves so dangerous that the “unrealistic” route too may well find no sensible takers.After a discursive opening I present an argument with “small holes” in it. By that I mean that assumptions would have to be supplied, at various stages, to make the argument even formally valid; and that many of the steps I do express would have to be rewritten for a similar purpose.
Barry Barnes, The Sociology of Relevance, and the Relevance of Sociology
Authors: Edwards Adrian 
Published: July 2007

I thought of putting something in the title about theology. Better not. Juxtaposing theology and any single social science might recall the sermon in The Way of All Flesh in which geology was shown first to be totally without significance for theology and then to be positive evidence for the literal truth of Genesis. If theology is to be explained away by sociology, that shows insufferable presumption. If theology could be helped by sociology, which would mean that theologians could or should learn something of it, then this would seem to burden yet further theological curricula. If sociology has no special relevance, but yet is an honourable way of earning a living, both sociologists and theologians should continue to cultivate their separate gardens; but is this not the old idea that something could be true in theology and false in philosophy, and vice-versa, which so annoyed Aquinas?Fundamentally, the objection to the involvement of sociology in theology seems to be that sociology developed to study things going wrong. There can be a sociology of error; can there be a sociology of truth? The best way of answering this seems to be to look at the work of the American historian of science, T S Kuhn, as presented by the Edinburgh sociologist, Barry Barnes.