bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
A New Book On The Dead Sea Scrolls
Authors: de Vaux Roland 
Published: July 2007

The Dead Sea scrolls are still, and for a long while yet will continue to be, a matter of major interest. And now Penguin Books have devoted a volume by J. M. Allegro to this subject. The author is Lecturer in Comparative Semitic Philology at Manchester University, took part in the editing of manuscript fragments which are assembled at the Palestine Museum of Jerusalem, and has already published some of these fragments in technical journals. Up to now it has been his broadcasts and the resultant controversies that have made him known to the general public. These alone would suffice to draw attention to this book which, further, is well-written, lively, pleasant to read. As it is published at a moderate price in a series of wide circulation, the book is straightway sure to be a success. I may say that the success is deserved by reason of some real qualities in presentation and facts. But this very success may unfortunately give credit to some conclusions which are hazardous or quite simply erroneous.The first half of the book covers the history of the Qumrân discoveries, the work of editing, and the excavations (pp. 15-93); this part is generally excellent despite some small errors which we need not dwell on here. Mr Allegro furnishes us with new information from reliable sources on the long-drawn negotiations which enabled certain lots to be bought; yet this new information needs to be correlated with the narratives of other writers. It will be found to complement rather than contradict. The four appendices (pp. 163-184) on John the Baptist, on ancient finds related to the Qumrân documents, on Murabba’at and the other caves outside Qumrân, on the copper scroll, are all useful and only have a few inexactitudes.
Sidelights on Electronic Computers
Authors: Hoskin Michael 
Published: July 2007

Electronic digital computers or ‘brains’ were originally designed, as we saw previously, for use in the computations which occur in business and in scientific research; they carry out at great speed ‘programmes’ of elementary arithmetical and logical instructions which have been precisely formulated in advance. But there are many scientists, from linguists on the one hand to neurologists on the other, who are not confronted with heavy computation but who are keenly interested in other applications of electronic computers. In this article I shall discuss briefly a few of these applications, because although they are of less immediate practical importance they are fascinating in themselves, and in one case at least they have helped in the formation of a new discipline, that of cybernetics, which is helping to break down a little of the excessive specialization which is the curse of modem science.Machines which play games. The mathematical theory of games which has been developed in recent years can be applied to much more serious matters such as economics and even military strategy. The possibility of similar applications of game-playing machines may help to justify the time and money which have been spent on programming a computer to play such games as noughts-and-crosses, draughts, chess and two-handed whist.
The State of Israel in Biblical Perspective
Authors: Congar Yves M‐J. 
Published: July 2007

Christians cannot look at Israel from a purely human point of view, for they must see Israel as an essential part of God’s plan for men. In a sense, of course, every nation is a part of God’s plan; human history is governed, or at least supervised, by God, and all the national groupings that arise in the course of history fall under his Providence. But Israel belongs to the plan in a unique way, not just as one people among others, but as the People of God. Israel has no significance as a nation except in a divine perspective. For Israel is the Chosen People, chosen as a people, loved by God as a people.The life and destiny of Israel then is a mystery in the strict sense. This is a word which is often abused, but I am using it as the Fathers of the Church used it to mean ‘that which plays a part in the realization of God’s plan’. This is the sense in which the Fathers could call the events of the Old Testament mysteries; the episode of Jacob and Esau, David’s flight from Saul and later from his sons, the sufferings of the prophet Jeremias. All these were stages in the realization of God’s plan, types and figures of fulfilment to come, types and figures of Jesus Christ. Christian thinkers have always been aware that Israel was a mystery in this sense. But in the last two decades our attention has been increasingly directed to the fact. We have realized, for instance, that anti-semitism has a theological significance for us: it is an attack upon God, upon charity, upon the continuity of biblical revelation ; an attack in fact upon the roots of Christianity itself. Must we not also say then that the recent establishment of a free Jewish state, the re-emergence of a Jewish nation—and that in the Land promised to them by God—is theologically significant? an answer indeed to the innumerable prayers addressed to God by the Jews since the occupation of Jerusalem by Titus in 70 A.D.? There is no valid reason to think that such fervent and continuous prayers should remain forever unanswered.
A Casting Out of Beams
Authors: Hill Edmund 
Published: July 2007

The casting out of beams is inevitably a more ponderous process than the discerning of motes. It has about it the heavy-handed inelegance of fly-swatting, in contrast to the darting agile dancing of dragon-flies in the sunlight. God forbid that anyone should wantonly swat a dragon-fly, or that I should attempt to toss a caber at the dexterous mote-discernment of Fr McCabe. I would, in any case, almost certainly miss. But dragon-fly antics, while they delight our gaze, are liable to leave us a trifle dizzy; and the virtuosity of Fri McCabe’s logic, sound and brilliant though it is, may easily reduce the holders of the opinion he attacks to a sad confusion. Now the confusion of the enemy is a legitimate object only of military, not of didactic, attack. Accordingly, in the hope of disentangling some of this possible confusion, I intend to poke about among a few of the fine threads of Fr McCabe’s weaving with my clumsy beam.He establishes the wholly blameless position that it is possible to judge people’s morals by their actions, that we can say not only ‘That was a wicked thing to do’, but also ‘It was wicked of you to do that’, and even, though less often and with less assurance, ‘You are a wicked person for doing such things’. He does so in terms of two gospel texts, ‘Judge not, etc.’, and the one about discerning the mote in thy brother’s eye. Let us set out in full the passage from the Sermon on the Mount in which these texts occur. I give them in an unauthorized translation in order to avoid the incantation-like quality the well-worn words have acquired, which so insidiously blurs their meaning. ‘Do not judge, in order not to be judged yourselves; for by the judgment you judge by shall you be judged, and the measure you measure out shall be measured out to you. But why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, while you do not notice the pole in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother “Let me get the speck out of your eye”, and just look at the pole in your own eye! Hypocrite, first get the pole out of your own eye, and then you will be able to see clearly to get the speck out of your brother’s eye’ (Matt. 7, i ff.).
Psychology—An Alibi for Sin?
Authors: Strauss E. B. 
Published: July 2007

I wonder whether the subject which is under discussion could best be tackled by the psychiatrist, the lawyer, the philosopher or the moral theologian, for it seems to me that it is only the old question of determinism versus free will over again, even if it is presented in somewhat modern dress. Therefore, to prevent the discussion developing on too abstract lines, may I assume that free will can never be proved philosophically, any more than can the existence of God, for instance; but that, unless it be admitted as a valid operative factor in the human situation, the whole debate would become woolly?Our Common Law depends entirely on the axiomatic acceptance of the principle which accords a large measure of freedom of choice in matters of conduct to adult members of society not deemed to be insane or grossly mentally defective.Is the whole applecart to be upset because certain psychologists of the unconscious come along and say that our behaviour is ineluctably determined by the emotionally significant experiences occurring in the first four years of life? In other words, is the modem psychiatrist, especially the psychiatrist with a psychoanalytical bias, undermining society by destroying man’s belief in his capacity for making moral choices? Or is he perhaps to be regarded as an angel of enlightenment bearing a new concept of justice by relieving man of an intolerable and crippling load of guilt which he has carried unnecessarily over the millenia of his organized existence? It seems to me that both points of view have something to be said for them; nor are they necessarily mutually contradictory.
Muhammad at Medina
Authors: Daniel Norman 
Published: July 2007

This book is intended to be read both by the specialist and by the more enterprising general reader. From the point of view of the specialist it reviews and makes new use of familiar material and also exploits the field of social anthropology in an experimental way. At the same time it is written clearly and readably and, together with the same author’s Muhammad at Mecca, constitutes a very full guide both to the life of Muhammad and to his social, political and religious background, for any reader who is already interested in, or is at least not put off by, themes and settings outside the European tradition.In Muhammad at Mecca Dr Watt presented the prophetic call as a response to the individualism of the tribal system in decay. In his new book he shows himself particularly aware of two aspects of the Prophet’s reforms: of the individualistic trend of the legislation, and of the institution of the religious community. It is the sense of this community which has always been so characteristic of Islam, and this aspect appears especially clearly in the chapters on the ‘Unifying of the Arabs’ and on the ‘Character of the Islamic State’. Dr Watt expressly sees the whole of Muhammad’s work as a ‘building on religious foundations’, equally when it is political, social or economic. The early unifying of the tribes under Muhammad prefigures and leads onwards to the later unity of the Islamic world under the Caliphs. The section on the character of the ummah is one of very great interest. The community (ummah) to which a prophet is sent, and which may reject him, develops as the Qur’anic revelation continues into the ummah which is itself the religious community.
The Word in the Liturgy
Authors: McCabe Herbert 
Published: July 2007

The people who write in English about the liturgy have mostly read about it in French or German. The great movement of reform in the Church which has as its centre the revival of the liturgy is arriving in England rather late and with a noticeable foreign accent. There are important studies in the liturgy by English writers but none of them are by Catholics. The Catholic who is dissatisfied, as any educated and normally critical man must be, with what was taught him as Religious Instruction at school gets in touch with the new life in the Church usually through translations of continental books or else through second-hand works based on continental originals.Readers of Blackfriars will presumably not need a detailed account of the manifestations of this new life. Like every other movement of reform within the Church, it has been essentially a return to sacred Scripture. There have been a good many other motives and movements, some good and some not so good, connected with the change: there has been a concern for the reverent and meaningful performance of the ceremonies of the Church; there has been a certain nostalgia for the past—whether the thirteenth or the fifth century—there has been a weariness with a certain kind of seminary textbook theology in which the great rivers of the Fathers and the Scholastics have been reduced to so much damp sand; there has been a characteristically twentieth century emphasis upon the social and communal as against the private. But in the first place it has been a matter of the Scriptures.
Time and François Mauriac
Authors: Moloney Michael F. 
Published: July 2007

Probably no major Catholic writer has been the subject of more controversy among his co-religionists than Francis Mauriac. The generally acrid atmosphere of the novels, the darkly pessimistic view of human nature (‘Why must he write about such unpleasant people?’), the spiritual perturbation of the so-called ‘pre-conversion’ period—singly and conjointly these have inspired an abundance of searching debate concerning the validity of his Catholic position. Yet, it is almost certainly true that Mauriac is the most widely accepted among that gifted group of Catholic men of letters of this century who have gained for Catholicism in France a hearing and a respect unknown since the century of Bossuet. Consequently, it may be relevant to point out one aspect of Mauriac’s work in which his unquestionable Catholic orientation sets him sharply apart from the leading writers of fiction of his day.If there is a single theme more than any other which has attracted the major novelists of the past third of a century it is that of man’s relation to time. Proust in France, Joyce in Ireland, Virginia Woolf in England, Thomas Mann in Germany, Faulkner in the United States, to name only the most eminent, have all been centrally concerned with the time problem. A contemporary critic has even suggested that Herman Melville anticipated these writers by half a century in the development of a metaphysic of time. But leaving Melville aside as representing the possible premonitory intuition of genius, the virtual simultaneity of impact of the time thesis in the works of the foremost practitioners of the contemporary novel in the western world is a striking phenomenon.
The Problem of Christian Democracy
Authors: Langdale James 
Published: July 2007

The rise of Christian Democracy is, as Professor Fogarty rightly says, ‘one of the major social movements of modern times’, yet it is surprising how little has been written about the subject up to now. The ‘People and Freedom Group’, the only Christian Democratic society ever to exist in this country, of which Professor Fogarty was a distinguished member, did a great deal before and during the war to make known the aims and ideals of Christian Democracy, then very much discredited. Apart, however from the excellent study of Christian Democracy in France and Italy, by Francois Goguel and Mario Enaudi, published in 1951 by the University of NotreDame, Indiana, nothing further has appeared in English on the subject, and Professor Fogarty’s scholarly and exhaustive study is therefore particularly timely and welcome. It should do a great deal to dispel the astonishing—and indeed disgraceful—ignorance of both Catholics and non-Catholics in this country regarding the political history and beliefs of Catholics in Western Europe.Those who consider Christian Democrats to be ‘right-wing clerical reactionaries’ as well as those who are honestly if naively convinced that Catholicism flourishes best under an authoritarian regime, have a great deal to learn from Professor Fogarty, and his book should not only find a place on the library shelves of every educated English Catholic, but should also be made compulsory reading in every Catholic Secondary and Public School.Professor Fogarty’s definition of Christian Democracy is very wide and far-reaching. He emphasizes in his introduction that his book is not particularly a study of the political parties or even of current political and trade union tactics. The Catholic social movements and the movements of Catholic Action are in his view the weightier part of the Christian Democratic iceberg.
Dickens: An Essay in Christian Evaluation
Authors: James G. Ingli 
Published: July 2007

It is just over half a century since G. K. Chesterton warned his readers not to insist too urgently on the splendours of Dickens’s last works lest it should be discovered that they were not true admirers of the novelist. Chesterton celebrated the Dickens of the stage-coach and the spirit of Merry Christmas and charity: that aspect of the novelist which Mr Walter Allen has termed the jolly Dickens, Dickens in fairy-land. It is not surprising that he had but faint praise for the later, darker novels. Most recent critics of the novelist, however, have tended to direct their attention chiefly to the later works and to occupy themselves with the task of elucidating and illuminating what is sometimes spoken of as his powerful and impressive rendering of evil and, by contrast, the weakness of his portrayal of goodness.This contrast, and the problem it poses for the critical reader, is strikingly apparent at the very beginning of Dicken’s career. In the early novel Oliver Twist it is the vision of the underworld, the world of the workhouse and Fagin’s lair that most of us remember. The world of the Brownlows and the Maylies fails to grip the imagination. Probably the least thoughtful and least satisfactory way’ of elucidating this weakness is to suggest simply that what we arc confronted with here are characters who fail to impress because they are too good to be true. This explanation appears to be irrepressible; it is capable of appearing, usually in the form of a brief aside, even in the work of critics who have in fact much more carefully considered explanations to offer.
Proxmiate and Ultimate
Authors: Macqueen A. T. 
Published: July 2007

There is still a tendency, which will probably persist as long as this
planet remains inhabited, to belittle the miracles at Lourdes. This is
exemplified by two fairly recent books. I want, in this article, to suggest
that the attempts to explain away, as it were, the supernatural element in
the recorded events, rests on the failure of those who try to do so to
distinguish between what Catholics call proximate and ultimate
causes.
Few modem writers who have taken the trouble to go into the medical
aspects of Lourdes would deny that remarkable recoveries do occur there, and
that, in the prevailing circumstances, the standards of medical detective
work undertaken to exclude mistaken diagnosis, hysteria and fraud, are high.
It is true that the great majority of officials and doctors who make up the
three bodies which handle the evidence (the Medical Bureau at Lourdes, the
Medical Commission, the Canonical Commission set up by the Bishop) are
Catholics; but it is unlikely that these men, concerned with their own and
their Church’s good name, would deliberately deceive both Catholics and
non-Catholics so successfully for so long. I shall not here concern myself
with the consideration of either the cruder explanations put forward to
account for the cures at Lourdes, or with the history of Bernadette with the
growth of the medical services which now supervise the investigation of
alleged miraculous cures. These aspects of the shrine’s activities have been
dealt with in many books, to which the reader is referred.
Italian Catholic Reviews: A Survey
Authors: Foster Kenelm 
Published: July 2007

I have not visited Italy since 1956, so that these impressions of current journalism there are at a slight remove: but I have kept up with various periodicals printed in Italy through 1957 and into 1958. These are mostly Catholic—though very different in other respects—, my recent reading of non-Catholic Italian journalism being almost limited to the two chief ‘neutral’ newspapers of the North, the Corriere della Sera (Milan) and La Stampa (Turin), and to glances at the ‘highbrow’ anticlerical review II Ponte (Florence) and the equally anticlerical but far more widely sold II Mondo (Rome).A word, to start with, on the post-war situation of Italian Catholicism. It seems an odd one, at first sight; powerful yet unstable. Politically, post-war Italy has been run by Catholics. The Resistance was, superficially at least, more Communist than Catholic, and until 1948 the situation seemed very dangerously fluid; but that year the Christian Democrats won their decisive victory at the polls, and they have stayed in power, though with reduced majorities, ever since; in the teeth of a fiercely sustained opposition from right, left and centre, not to speak of their own internal disagreements and such minor nuisances as the Montesi affair. Two chief factors—apart from the deep, if somewhat sluggish, attachment of most Italians to their Catholic heritage— have contributed to this real, if limited, Catholic predominance in Italian public life since the war: the high political intelligence and personal integrity of De Gasperi and the prestige of Pius XII.
Père de Foucauld and His Fraternities
Authors: Voillaume R. 
Published: July 2007

When a saint reaches universality, his original background and personal characteristics sink into comparative unimportance. God’s possession of him has carried him beyond these things. Now, Charles de Foucauld, Brother Charles of Jesus, came from a very old family of the French nobility. His was a rich heritage of ancestral virtues and heroic chivalry. He himself was an officer and an explorer. He was thus quite thoroughly not only a man of his country, but a man of a particular period of his country’s history as well. In short, nothing would have seemed to have destined him in any particular way for a role as world-wide as the one we now know he was to have. Yet, once converted, he gave himself so utterly to our Lord, and his life turned into one so in keeping with the Gospel, that the witness he bore has in fact become universal. In other words, he became like a ‘little brother of Jesus’, as we say, and consequently, as he used to put it himself, a ‘universal little brother’.After seven years generously devoted to life in a Trappist cloister, he felt himself irresistibly impelled towards a very literal imitation of Jesus working at Nazareth. He therefore set out on his quest in the self-chosen abasement of an all-but- penniless vagabond. From then on, he was to lead, first, the life of a domestic servant in Nazareth, devoting every hour he could spare from his chores to adoring Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament.