bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
On Non‐Infallible Pronouncements
Authors: Rahner Karl 
Published: July 2007

On the 22nd September, 1967, the German bishops published a pastoral letter concerning the Church’s doctrinal authority and mission to teach. In view of a certain incident that has occurred since, a few remarks need to be made about one passage in the document. The passage runs as follows:‘17. On this point there is a difficult problem which needs careful appraisal, since it concerns the faith or the relationship to the Magisterium of many Catholics today even more than in the past. We refer to the fact that in the exercise of its task the ecclesiastical magisterium can fall into error, and indeed has been known to do so. The Church has always been aware of this possibility, has catered for it in her theology, and has developed rules of procedure for such a situation. This possibility of error does not arise with those decisions whose promulgation demands the absolute assent of faith, namely those promulgated by the solemn definition of a Pope or General Council or through the ordinary magisterium.It is historically incorrect to maintain that subsequently the Church has been found to be in error on such dogmas, though a given dogma is inevitably liable to be understood differently (while preserving its original sense) as it acquires greater precision in the face of past and contemporary misunderstandings.
Post‐Pill Paradise Lost: John Updike's Couples
Authors: Lodge David 
Published: July 2007

Reviewing some books about Utopia recently (Encounter, April, 1969), I ventured the suggestion that ‘Eros is traditionally an anti-utopian force, though he is catered for in the specialized utopias of pornography—what Stephen Marcus has called “Pornopia”. I used the word ‘traditionally’ because we have seen in modern times the emergence of a school of thought that may properly be termed ‘utopian’, in that it is concerned to construct ideal models of the good life, but which inverts the values we normally associate with Utopia, recommending not the enhanced exercise of rationality but the liberation of instinct, not the perfecting of the mind, but ‘the resurrection of the body’. The latter phrase is adopted by Norman O. Brown as a concluding slogan in Life Against Death (1959), a representative text of the new utopianism. It is not, of course, wholly new, and may be readily traced back to earlier sources—to Nietzsche, to Lawrence and, pre-eminently, to Freud, on whom Life Against Death is a commentary.Brown begins with the paradox propounded by Freud, that civilization or ‘culture’ (which is prized by traditional utopists, and which they wish to perfect) is based on the repression and sublimation of erotic energy. Freud himself was shifty about the proportionate loss and gain of this process, but Brown is quite certain and uncompromising: civilization is self-evidently neurotic, and the only solution is to end the tyranny of the reality-principle, to substitute ‘conscious play’ for alienated labour as the mainspring of society, and to restore to adult sexuality, narrowly fixated on genital and procreative functions, the ‘polymorphous perverse’ of infantile eroticism.
Atheism and The Avant‐Garde
Authors: Wicker Brian 
Published: July 2007

On the face of it, the ‘neo-modernist’ aesthetic is radically atheistic. (I borrow the term from Frank Kermode’s essay Modernisms, in Innovations, edited by Bernard Bergonzi.) For example Jean Alter has pointed out that in Robbe-Grillet’s world everything is meticulously present except that which is associated with God. Wallas, in Les Gommes, on the lookout for ways of finding his correct route without giving himself away, asks for the post office but not the cathedral: for the town has none. The island in Le Voyeur has a cinema, a café, a garage and a hotel, but no church. In L'Immortelle the religious manifestations are treated simply as tourist attractions, having no religious meaning. Now, the absence of all reference to religion, despite the meticulous rendering elsewhere of visible detail, is itself highly unrealistic. It points to the real message of Robbe-Grillet’s apparently neutral and value-free fiction; namely the discontinuity between human beings and the material environment. There can be no ‘complicity’ between man and the world for ‘les choses sont les choses, et l’homme n’est que l'homme’. (Pour un Nouveau Roman.) In so far as religion, and the objects associated with it, exist for the sake of establishing some rapport between the world and the people God has put in it, religion for Robbe-Grillet is simply a false trail, a cul-de-sac. The whole apparatus of symbolism, sacraments and prayer is therefore ignored, as something of no account in a fiction that concerns itself with life as it really is.Now, if Alter is right, Robbe-Grillet’s deliberate and calculated refusal to include anything to do with religious activity shows that his aesthetic is not ideologically neutral, but critical. It keeps its distance from the world of ‘bare facts’, takes up a stance towards them.
Wrestling with the Word—4
Authors: Ernst Cornelius 
Published: July 2007

‘No one has ever seen God’; this is the text which was read to us from the first Epistle of St John, and which also occurs at the end of the Prologue to St John’s Gospel. ‘No one has ever seen God’: an appropriate text, perhaps, for the Sunday after the Ascension and before Pentecost, in that pause which the liturgy has contrived for our meditation between the departure of the Son as risen Lord and the coming of the Spirit, an experience of absence through which we may more profoundly recover an experience of presence—absence, presence, of what, of whom? Of God, whom no one has ever seen.Let us recall what must be a familiar experience to all of us at some time in our lives: the sleeping city, the lights shining in the empty streets, oneself, the solitary watcher withdrawn from the human community of sleep, to which one is all the more deeply drawn. This is the before and after of all the active business of the day, the multifarious contradiction of human project, plan and purpose, the coming and going: all rises from and returns to sleep, movement back to stillness, the rising and falling of a single biological rhythm of breathing, unconscious, at rest. Are these sleepers dreaming their personal dreams, or are they united in the single impersonal dream of the worl? Even those who do not sleep in this sleeping stillness, the sufferers awake in their white nights alone, the lovers involved in their private intimacy, aren’t they too enacting in this universal dream a typical human destiny of pain and sex, death and procreation, sounding a ground bass of human existence? The sleeping city: a human community realized in a unity before and after, below if not above, the community of active function and conscious purpose: this underlying community finding itself in a deeper unity of typical man. And who or what sustains this deeper unity—is the dream of the world really impersonal, or does the dream unfold in some deeper dreamer?
The Earthbound Pangolin
Authors: Edwards Adrian 
Published: July 2007

Having once berated (by letter) the present editor of New Blackfriars for feeding his readers on the ersatz provender of bloated book-reviews, I find myself involved in the same offence. My excuse is that I have rarely read a book which has aroused in me such ambivalence of reaction as Dr Mary Douglas’ Natural Symbols. My hope is that this extended reviewed will encourage other people to read this book, which it would be unjust to ignore totally, and pernicious to accept entirely. The book is of significance in both anthropology and theology; is it perhaps the turn of an intellectual tide, a theological anthropology moving in to the vacuum left by secular theology?This, I believe, is the author’s intention: to carry out a counterrevolution in the social sciences, so that anthropology and sociology, whose origins were so deeply rooted in the wish of the French positivists and British agnostics to reveal and shatter the foundations of faith, will now become instruments for demasking the social causes of all religious attitudes including atheism, agnosticism and indifference, and for indicating the social patterns which favour faith in the Incarnation and the Eucharist. This intention does credit to Mrs Douglas as a Christian, and the examination of ethnographic material which it has provoked reveals her brilliance as an anthropologist. Underlying it all, however, is, I consider, an appalling error, or paradigm of errors. But let us see what she has to say.
The Falling Number of Confessions—Development or Deviation?—II
Authors: Linley Piers 
Published: July 2007

Although, if we are to grasp at all the fundamental reasons behind the falling number of confessions, we must not only trace the development of the sacrament but also try to look at the theological principles involved, this could easily divert us away from the urgent problems of the moment into a tedious and complex historical survey. To avoid this we shall restrict ourselves to quoting a suggestive conciliar text, drafted more than eleven centuries ago. In 813 the Emperor Charlemagne, as part of his programme of ecclesiastical reform, summoned a number of councils. One of these met at Chalon, and the following is one of its canons:‘Some say that sins ought to be confessed only to God but others believe that they are to be confessed to priests: both of which are practised within the Church not without great fruit. And so let us confess our sins to God in so far as he is the Remitter of sins . . . and according to the institution of the apostle, let us confess our sins to one another, and let us pray for one another that we may be saved. And so confession which is made to God cleanses sins; but that which is made to the priest, teaches us how these same sins are cleansed. For God, who is both the author and dispenser of salvation and health, frequently offers this by the invisible ministry of his power, frequently by the work of physicians.’ (P. F. Palmer, Sacraments and Forgiveness, p. 157.)The exact interpretation of this canon is difficult and need not delay us. It is clear, however, that a tension was felt to exist between the confession of sins to a priest and the direct repenting of them in the sight of God. It is clear that this tension is still with us and underlies the falling number of confessions.
The Castaways‐The Mariner
Authors: Braybooke Neville 
Published: July 2007

In the William Golding canon, his first novel Lord of the Flies (1954) remains his most famous, and his third Pincher Martin (1956), his most controversial. Both are concerned with castaways and their fight for survival.When Lord of the Flies opens, nuclear war has broken out in Europe and a school from the English Home Counties has been evacuated by air to an unknown destination. On the way there, they are attacked, the crew killed, but the ‘passenger tube’ released so that it can crash-land on the jungle below. At the moment of impact, a fierce storm is raging and only a number of boys manage to scramble out of the ‘tube’ before the wind sweeps it out to sea. Those who do, scatter in the forest undergrowth. They are castaways —though it is some time before it dawns on them that they are marooned and consequently ‘island castaways’.The island itself is never named. But the description of its coral reef, beaches and fruit trees that bear all the year round, suggests that it might be one of those lying south of Sumatra or Java. The ways in which the boys adapt to their new tropical background is the book’s main theme, and ‘interpretations’ of it depend largely upon a reader’s own particular preoccupations. Freudians, for instance, have already noticed how the boys’ behaviour fits the theory that if parental, state, or Church authority is taken away, children will evolve their own gods, totems, and taboos. Others have found the story a parable of man stripped of the sanctions of custom and civilization.
The Falling Number of Confessions—Development or Deviation?—I
Authors: Linley Piers 
Published: July 2007

As a result of the changes inaugurated by Vatican II our eucharistic experience is now very different from what it was a few years ago. But what about our experience of the sacrament of Confession? Here the shift during these same few years has rather been simply from experience to non-experience. Though statistics are hard to come by and motivation difficult to establish, it seems certain that the number of confessions has fallen.Now this is not a shift inaugurated by Vatican II. The Council reaffirmed the value of this sacrament and reiterated the principle laid down in Canon Law that priests should ‘show themselves entirely and always ready to perform the office of the sacrament of penance as often as the faithful reasonably request it’ (Presbyterorum Ordinis, c. Ill, Abbott translation, p. 561). It seems clear that this does not mean merely the provision of regular times on Saturdays and on the eves of feasts but also urges that priests should respond unhesitatingly to a spontaneous request to hear a confession. Beyond this the Council did not go except to recommend a revision of the rites and formulas of the sacrament—a revision that has not yet been carried out. The falling number of confessions has been brought about, therefore, by the decisions of individuals. This growing feeling within the Church that the sacrament need not be received so frequently must be recognized and respected. It must also critically examined. Is it a development, orthodox and legitimate, of the Church’s experience of divine mercy? Or, on the contrary, is it an aggressive, individualistic deviation from the sound tradition of the Church? Rather than rush to any such sweeping judgments we must first ask what it is that this sacrament celebrates and what is the previous experience of the Church in this matter.
Northern Ireland—Dismantling the protestant State
Authors: Boyle Kevin 
Published: July 2007

The past two years in Northern Ireland have been a time of intense political activity among its one-and-a-half million people. The frequency and intensity of street violence has ensured international publicity and attention. Yet the causes underlying the disturbances remain much misunderstood at home and abroad.It is a trite but necessary beginning to emphasize that the Irish problem is not one of religion. It is true that religious denomination neatly divides the political positions. Unionists are Protestant, non-Unionists Catholics. But however compelling it is to see the intermittent guerrilla warfare in Belfast or Derry in terms of Catholics and Protestants it must be resisted. These confrontations may have little formal political character, but in a real sense they represent a clash of different political forces; the resistance of a complex postcolonial social structure to new economic and social influences from within and without.Put another way, the Civil Rights campaign and the British Government’s involvement in that campaign and its aftermath represent attempts to dismantle, what had, under strain, become a semi-fascist state, and to replace it with something approaching social democracy. Just why the ‘Irish Question’ should once again irrupt into British politics, and at this particular time, is problematical. But an important factor which enabled a Labour administration to begin on the unfinished business of Ireland is the impact of economic change on the relationships between the parties involved, the Republic of Ireland, Ulster, and Britain. Economic change alone cannot account for all developments, but an analysis of recent events in Ireland which leaves them out altogether could only help to mystify further the reputedly already amazed Britisher.
The Christian as Counsellor
Authors: Hollings Michael 
Published: July 2007

It was not until a fairly recent visit to the United States that I came across and wondered at the emphasis put on counselling by the clergy over there. It struck me at first hearing that this must be something for which specially selected clergy were specially trained, put through courses, taught techniques—something for which I had never been qualified. A closer appraisal made it clear that though some may indeed have been on courses, most were more likely to be doing not much more than what I have always summed up as ‘being available’—available for what? Well, almost anything—meal, bed, tea, sympathy, cash, a ready ear, a shoulder to be wept on, a sponge to absorb, a tap to turn on, a man to pray with, a person who can be silent, a pillar of strength, a place of peace, a warm area of concern, a vehicle of love, a man of God, a secular human being who will be interested.What I am trying to say is that a counsellor is one who is available to God and to his or her fellow men and women to put at the service of both all that he or she is—and has to give. How much there is depends initially on God, secondarily on heredity, background, education, etc., and thirdly and continually upon the individual’s openness to the Spirit, as the Spirit moves in the world and in him.The Spirit scatters his gifts: none of us possess all. God is God—too great for us—how wonderful that we can and should go on growing in wisdom and grace before God and man, till we meet each other and Him—face to face—and know what we are now ‘seeing in a glass darkly’.
Crisis in the Foreign Aid Industry
Authors: Power Jonathan 
Published: July 2007

Last year the largest aid budget in the world was steered through the American Congress—yet it was the smallest budget since America began giving aid twenty-three years ago. But perhaps this is no cause for alarm. Consider the following vignettes.• Washington. December 18th, 1969 (U.P.I.). ‘Senate Democratic leader Mike Mansfield said that the foreign aid programme had lost its original purpose and he would oppose it. “Foreign Aid is no longer an aid programme. It’s a programme for the benefit of American business”, Senator Mansfield said at a news conference. He added, it was no longer being used for the humanitarian precepts (sic) for which it was established.’• Washington. June 7th, 1970 (A.P.). ‘U.S. Foreign Aid Chief John Hannah acknowledged today that the U.S. aid programme is being used as a cover for C.I.A. operations in Laos.’
Corruption Begins at Home?
Authors: Sharratt Bernard 
Published: July 2007

Anyone sensitive to symbolism must normally shudder at the words of eucharistic consecration. Not because of the current English translation. Something that cuts deeper: the priest takes the chalice and says: ‘And when supper was ended, he took the cup, saying: This is my blood. . . .’ Most chalices are still lined with gold, a mark of respect, the most precious metal alone allowed to touch the consecrated wine. Yet that gold, enshrined at the heart of our celebration of love and peace, is also, still, at the base of the international monetary system; more specifically, it underpins the economy of South Africa, the world’s largest gold-producing country: the blood that is relevant here is also the blood of apartheid. The hasty response, that a gold-lined cup is a mere container, can only be dubious in the light of a sacramental theology that recognizes the sign-value of form. More honest to admit the contradiction, acknowledge indeed the wider interlocking of the eucharistic community itself with that systematic exploitation revealed in a minor, everyday detail.The other words of consecration, ‘This is my body’, have resonance for another sacrament: matrimony. Bellarmine traced a further echo: ‘The sacrament of marriage ... is similar to the Eucharist, which likewise is a sacrament not only in the moment of its accomplishment, but also as long as it remains.’ But the eucharistic bread, one might argue, can decay and corrupt; it may not ‘remain’; an opening, by analogy, towards divorce appears: individual relationships may cease adequately to measure up to the form of marriage; the core corrupts, the sign decays.
Rational Man on the Dark Margin
Authors: Edwards Adrian 
Published: July 2007

The lady in Muriel Spark’s latest novel, eagerly looking out for her murderer, was surely an anthropologist manquée. For one element in the anthropologist’s complex fate is the dialectical compulsion to achieve the synthesis of contraries. The anthropologist’s charter— the cohesiveness and interpretability of all the works of social man— is part of the legacy of the Enlightenment surely; yet this volume suggests that it is in the very area where the hidden and the hateful come nearest to receiving the guilty approval of social man that anthropologists can do their finest work, marked by that passionate rationality and clear-eyed empathy which do at times reward painstaking research and patient reading. It is true that the best essays are by historians, or by anthropologists using history to gain a wider range; but the historians, Professor Norman Cohn, Mr Peter Brown, Dr Alan Macfarlane, and Mr Keith Thomas, have adopted the anthropological approach, which examines the interplay of ideology and institution, rather than work in the historian’s tradition of the placing of men in their milieu.This collection, then, dedicated to exploring the dark margin of society’s self-consciousness, is intended as a commemoration of Professor Evans-Pritchard’s Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the A'zande. Now this is one of the classics of anthropology in more than one sense. The ease of style depends on the extreme clarity of the underlying thought, and this in turn is the fruit of the prolonged, patient absorbing of an enormous mass of material.
Calepin Rides Again: The French Scene
Authors: Allen Louis 
Published: July 2007

Between the promoters of the present discontents and the revolutionaries of the heroic early nineteenth century there seems to be one great difference: the refusal of detailed prescription for the society of the future. Our world is to be violently overthrown, but when we enquire what is to replace it, the answers are usually expressed in terms of a vaguely existentialist adventure, an undefined project thrust into the future, where love and risk will combine to create the millennium.Older Utopias were vastly more specific. In fact it was almost a diagnostic feature that they had to be: either to carry the reader’s narrative interest, as in More’s Utopia or Wells’s The World of William Clissold (a book my provincial 1930s childhood fed on avidly), or to permit the social scientist to roam untrammelled in the realms of gold because his real appetite was a true romantic one for the poetry rather than the mechanisms of a new society. One who attempted to combine both poetry and mechanism was Charles Fourier, a prolific writer who has recently been expensively reprinted, more, I should imagine, for his impact on surrealism than for any residual value he may possess as a social analyst. Fourier was seventeen when the French Revolution broke out and died in 1837, after dabbling in a number of vaguely financial callings, and publishing endless works on the evils of industrialism and how they should be remedied.