bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Thinking about Jesus
Authors: Ernst Cornelius 
Published: July 2007

Perhaps I’d better make two preliminary remarks. One is that, inevitably, I am speaking out of tradition which is quite clearly marked in a confessional sense, that is to say quite definitely in the Roman Catholic tradition, and so some of the problems which vex me may be peculiarly Roman Catholic problems. I mention that because certainly I shall not only be looking at thought that has been located in our Roman Catholic continuum, yet at the same time there is no doubt that for various reasons (in the way I have been philosophically brought up, and so on) this particular tradition will be exerting pressures, even of an unconscious kind, on me.The second preliminary remark is of a rather different kind. I understand that I am supposed to open this discussion — that is to say to talk for twenty minutes or half an hour, but not more than that, so I think I can allow myself a certain amount of freedom. I would like to raise questions, rather than get answers.So, two preliminary remarks. One to protect myself against seeming over-confessionally characterised, on the other hand I want to protect myself against being thought too questioning altogether.The title has been quite definitely chosen as “Thinking about Jesus Christ”. I mean that title fairly strictly, because I wouldn’t like the title to be “Jesus Christ”. Obviously, thinking about Jesus Christ can’t ignore the object of the thinking! But I would like to stand back a bit from actually thinking about Jesus Christ, and think about thinking about Jesus Christ, because at the moment it seems to be a most difficult area.
The Vatican and Communism from ‘Divini Redemptoris’ to Paul VI: Part 2
Authors: Higginson Paul 
Published: July 2007

Pope Paul VI elected in the summer of 1963, after the first session of the Vatican Council, presided over a Church that was to continue and extend the new policies of detente and co-operation with the Communist world that were begun under the previous pontificate. Diplomatic agreements were reached with many Communist countries, notably Hungary in 1964 and Yugoslavia a year later. Meetings between the two sides were frequent: when the Pope visited the United Nations in 1965 (and incidentally seemed to favour the admission of China to the Assembly) he had a long talk with Gromyko afterwards. Paul met the President of the Soviet Union, Podgomy, in 1967 and 1968, and both the Rumanian Prime Minister and Tito in 1968 and later in the early 70’s. In 1971 Casaroli became the first Vatican representative to visit Moscow since the Revolution, and the Vatican has had frequent contact with Polish government officials throughout the period. The Soviet authorities also allowed an increase in the contact between the Roman Catholic Church and the Russian Orthodox Church which had previously been very limited.The new Pope’s first encyclical, Ecclesiam Suam issued in November 1964 tentatively suggested that Paul was thinking on more reserved but similar lines to his predecessor. One section was completely devoted to dialogue with the modem world. “Speaking generally of the dialogue which the Church of today must take up with a great renewal of fervour, we would say that it must be readily conducted with all men of good will ...” (p. 93 CTS translation). Paul goes on to point out that although dialogue is difficult with communism “we have today no preconceived intentions of cutting ourselves off from the adherents of these systems and regimes” (p. 102). He even suggests that Communism could be a form of secularized Christianity and he holds out the hope that one day Communists may be led “back to the Christian sources” (p. 104), which lie behind many of their actions. Finally Paul, like John wanted a dialogue in order that the Vatican could fulfil its mission for peace in the world: “a disinterested, objective and sincere dialogue is a circumstance in favour of a free and honourable peace”(p. 106).
How Not To Undermine Theology
Authors: Attfield Robin 
Published: July 2007

The doctrine of creation is theologically central. If God is not our Creator, we humans are not his creatures, much less made in his image: and still less can we fall short of the divine glory or be recreated in accordance with it. It is therefore vital for theists, and for those theologians who are committed to any of these doctrines, not to commit themselves to positions which entail or presuppose the denial of the creation doctrine.So far, I should imagine, Brian Davies, O.P. who recently contributed to New Blackfriars a review of my recent book God and the Secular, would agree. The review was a generous one, which endorsed the need for natural theology, and indeed for maintaining the doctrine of creation. But Davies also contended that my own claim that God is an individual, and as such a member of a class, makes this doctrine collapse, and thus effectively undermines theology. My present purpose is to explain how, far from undermining theology, belief in God’s individuality and membership of a class is indispensable for upholders of the creation doctrine. At the same time I shall take the opportunity to expound the state of a discussion about these matters in philosophical books and journals which may have escaped attention.
Remembrance of Things Past
Authors: Wall Barbara 
Published: July 2007

When I went on 23 September to a meeting of the Peace and Justice Commission called to discuss plans for next Peace Sunday, I had no idea that I was going to be presented with a Bene merenti medal. Bishop Mahon, who was presiding over the meeting, suddenly started talking about people who spend thier lives in obscurity beavering away for a cause, and I thought he was going to tell us about some little-known curé in Lyons or Marseilles, when suddenly I heard my own name mentioned as someone who had been beavering away for peace ever since 1936 when PAX was founded. I was too astonished and abashed to make a speech at the time, so I am going to make it now, among my friends at Spode, where it will be several times longer.I would like to begin by saying that I feel I was given the medal under false pretences, because for years I didn’t beaver away for peace at all and had nothing to do with PAX. I was in it at the beginning in 1936 and vividly remember Eric Gill arriving in his smock and biretta-type headgear at one of the early meetings in London; there was much discussion as to whether PAX should try to stop the impending war or try to help those who wanted conscientiously to object to fighting in it — the latter alternative was the one chosen by the more realistically minded. But then, owing to living abroad and the subsequent dispersions of the war, I lost touch with PAX. It wasn’t until the fifties — at the time when an improvement on the atom bomb was discovered by the scientists, namely the hydrogen bomb — that I wrote a letter to The Catholic Herald asking what on earth had become of that Catholic Peace Society of the thirties called PAX ... whereupon I was inundated with literature from Charles Thompson and John O’Connor, the organisation’s then Bulletin editor and secretary. So I immediately rejoined PAX, met those two gallant men, and not long after was asked to be a speaker at a PAX conference here at Spode — that would have been in 1959.
Abortion — A Christian Feminist Perspective
Authors: Campbell Liz 
Published: July 2007

A major difficulty in any discussion of abortion is the immediate impulse that most people experience to label one another as either pro- or anti-abortion. The abortion debate has been stultified by this facile stereotyping and authentic dialogue rendered virtually impossible.On the one hand, the anti-abortion camp is characterised as populated by conservative Catholics blindly following male-originated absolutist directives. While on the other side, the ground is depicted as thick with radical feminists driven by self interest while despising children, marriage and men.
Authority and Ministry in the New Testament
Authors: Hill Edmund 
Published: July 2007

In a previous article (New Blackfriars, September 1980) I launched an attack on the ultramontane party and policy which appears to dominate the Vatican at the moment, and to be attempting a return to the high centralisation in the Holy See of all authority, all decisive control over the Church that marked the epoch between the first and second Vatican Councils, 1870 — 1962. I said this looks to many people like an attempt to dismantle the work of Vatican II, or at least to quench the spirit of that council.Many Catholics assume, wrongly, that this concentration of authority and controlling power in the hands of the Holy See, i.e. of the pope as an institution, is how the Church was instituted by Jesus Christ. They assume that in essentials the Church has always been like that from St Peter onwards. This is an assumption that the pervasive ultramontane theology — or rather ideology — does nothing at all to discourage. A trivial illustration may be had from the new English breviary. The old Latin breviary (and the new Latin one also, I presume) used to give saints their ecclesiastical rank in naming their feasts or in heading selections from their writings; so we would have “St Elizabeth, widow”, “St Edward, king”, “St Bede the venerable, priest”, “St Thomas, martyr and bishop”, “St Augustine, bishop”, “St Gregory the Great, pope”, and so on. The new English breviary has dropped this old-fashioned formality — whether rightly or wrongly is a matter of taste. But it has made one exception. Holy popes remain popes first and saints second; so we have, for example, “A reading from the letter of Pope St Clement I to the Corinthians”, or “From a sermon of Pope St Leo the Great”, but not “A reading from the first letter of Apostle St Paul to the Corinthians”, and certainly not “From a sermon of Bishop St Augustine”.
A Note on Mr Pinter's Book of Ruth: The Homecoming
Authors: Doherty Francis 
Published: July 2007

The Homecoming is, in one sense, a play about two women, one absent from the home, the dead wife and mother, Jessie, and the wife of the son, Teddy, who comes into the house and takes Jessie’s place, but in taking that place converts it into new functions.The house is quite clearly associated with the absent wife and mother, the home’s centre, because of its very unhomely qualities. Where there had once been a ‘living-room’ with enclosing walls to make it both warm and safe, there now is an open back wall (‘The back wall, which contained the door, has been removed’). This is quite positively identified for us with the missing woman by her son, Teddy, when he and his wife are first in the room:
What do you think of the room? Big, isn’t it? It’s a big house. I mean, it’s a fine room, don’t you think? Actually there was a wall, across there ... with a door. We knocked it down ... years ago ... to make an open living area. The structure wasn’t affected, you see. My mother was dead.(Act I, Methuen, 1967. p 21).As so often in Pinter, suggestions build up behind the formal language, and we can think of the house as having tried to get rid of Jessie, or as having been opened up to more light and more air. But the domestic arrangements have now altered so that Lenny has what he calls ‘a kind of study, workroom cum bedroom’ (p 25) downstairs next to the ‘living room’, much as he might have a room in a large house which had been turned into bed-sitter accommodation.
Unity: Present and Future
Authors: Goodridge Sehon 
Published: July 2007

The true Church is a believed Church; in a real sense we have to ‘believe’ the Church, for the Church can only be recognised in its essential nature through faith. Yet the Church as the ‘called out’ community of the faithful is not simply invisible; it is both visible and invisible. As the people of God, the Church is essentially a ‘people’, and thus is visible. As the body of Christ, the Church is a ‘body’, and thus is visible. In the concrete visible Church there is a mixture of wheat and tares.’ Because the Church consists of human beings, and sinful human beings, renewal and reform of the Church is always necessary. In every age and generation she is faced with the task of presenting herself anew. It is with this understanding of the constant renewal of the Church — ecclesia semper reformanda — that we approach our subject.The Unity of the Church is not primarily a unity of members among themselves, but is essentially a given unity which has its origin in God himself in his triune being of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This unity was actualized in Jesus Christ himself and made efficacious in the Holy Spirit. The whole New Testament message bears witness to this unity of origin. The classic texts are well known: 1 Cor 1: 10-30; 1 Cor 12; Gal 3: 27f; Rom 12: 3-8; Acts 2:42; 4: 32; John 10: 16; 17; 20-26; Eph 4: 1-6. There was indeed a consciousness of unity everywhere, and it was this consciousness of unity which was one of the factors which constituted the Church. This consciousness of unity became an essential element in the Church’s self-definition, as one of the four characteristics of the Church set out in the Nicene Creed: ‘We believe one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church’.
Political Theology 3: Injustice
Authors: Ruston Roger 
Published: July 2007

Ideas of justice held by those who are continuously in possession of wealth are bound to be different from the ideas of those who are continuously out of it. The basic anxiety of the former is to ensure the stability of the profitable order by which they are enabled continuously to take possession; that of the latter is to escape from the disorder by which they are continuously dispossessed. There is no common moral order, no community of interest between rich and poor by which it might be said that justice consists in its preservation. In a society as unequal as that of Britain, the moral order is already something broken.Theories of justice generated by possessors are concerned with stability, even if — as with liberal reformists — this can only be achieved by a wider spread of benefits. In other words, they are concerned to define and defend a partial community of interest in which the access to wealth of those who already have it is preserved while the poverty of those who don’t is explained and justified in general, if not in particular. So they always imply the presence of a moral order behind the existing social and economic one. Furthermore, possessors are likely to hold the restricted concept of justice (see previous article), favouring commutative and criminal justice and then such distributive justice as will fit with these. The dispossessed however, when they find the voice to talk about these things — which is rare — take naturally to the comprehensive view of justice which looks for a different order altogether. The “greater justice” of the gospels is the justice of the dispossessed.
Shall Work Set Us Free?
Authors: Cunningham Angela 
Published: July 2007

Much of the recent interest taken in work springs from our present plight of high unemployment, united with fears that the microchip technological revolution will increase unemployment such that we shall have to move to a leisure society, where to work is a privilege.This presentation (in the medical sense) of the problem affects the diagnosis and affects, too, the way we think of work. For instance, very few commentators seriously challenge the equation of work with paid employment. This shoft-term focus excludes areas of work which should be included both because they are definitely work, and also because taking cognizance of longer-range matters might help us see the present position more clearly, although at a greater distance from the plight of the depressed ex-steel workers of Consett. Incidentally, here it is worth remembering that if we look at the world as a whole, the vast majority of its inhabitants are not in paid employment — they are either outside the market economy altogether, living in subsistence societies, or, as in Britain, supporting those in paid employment by the hidden subsidy of home work, the cooking, cleaning, child-rearing necessary for the maintenance of society, and the consuming necessary for the maintenance of our kind of capitalist society. Thus out of a British population of some 55 million, only about 18 million are in paid employment. On the old model of society these 18 million were seen as supporting the rest; a shift in the phantasm, partly brought about by reflecting on the possible consequences of the micro-chip, has enabled us to see things a little differently — the old,
Priestly Ministry Or Hierarchy: The Sacrament of Order
Authors: Hill Edmund 
Published: July 2007

In the previous article of this series, Authority and Ministry in the New Testament, I set out to show how two planks of the ultramontane platform of magisterial papalism not only have no basis in the New Testament, but are actually at odds with the whole spirit of these foundational documents of the New People of God. The major plank is, of course, the concentration of all authority in the papacy, with the inevitable stress on uniformity that will accompany such a policy; the second or supporting plank is hierarchical clericalism, the promotion of the clergy, in particular of bishops, as a ruling priestly class in the Church. In this article I will confine myself to this second plank, and investigate how this particular distortion and obscuration of true gospel values arose in the Church. We shall try to discern as far as we can what is sound in the developing tradition of the Church’s doctrine and practice of ministry from what is sick and in urgent need of reformatory healing.We discovered two things from an examination of the New Testament evidence on the Christian ministry. First, that in the New Testament Churches there was no distinction between bishops and presbyters, these being simply two names for the same persons, one (‘bishop’) denoting the office or function of ‘overseeing’ the community, or being ‘in charge’, the other (‘presbyter’) denoting rank or status, that of elder or senior member. Secondly, that nowhere in the New Testament are these bishops/presbyters talked of in sacerdotal language as priests.
The Ecclesiological Significance of Bad Popes
Authors: Hill Edmund 
Published: July 2007

In my last article, “Priestly Ministry or Hierarchy: The Sacrament of Order”, I surveyed the history of the second plank of the ultramontane platform of magisterial papalism; namely hierarchical clericalism. Now we must examine the roots of the chief item of this distorted ecclesial ideology, the concentration of all authority in the papal institution. For this purpose Church history divides fairly neatly into two halves, the first millennium and the second millennium of our era.The first millennium, we could say, saw the gradual development of the doctrine of the universal primacy of the Roman Church and its bishop in the Catholica, such as it was eventually defined, together with the doctrine of papal infallibility, in 1870. The dogmatic constitution Pastor Aetemus of Vatican I, could have been promulgated (with some modifications to language and style which would chiefly have been improvements) by any pope from Leo the Great (ob. 461) to Gregory the Great (ob. 603), without anyone in Rome or the West thinking it very unusual, though there would no doubt have been demurrers from the East. But the practice of Eastern bishops, throughout the Arian and then the christological controversies that raged in the 4th and 5th centuries, shows that in fact they accepted the unique position of the Roman Church as the touchstone of orthodox faith. Rome was never heretical.
Theology and Sociology: Two Approaches To Religious Conversion
Authors: Archer Antony 
Published: July 2007

This is intended to be a practical comparison between two approaches. Accordingly it would be as well to start with a few truisms that are shared between them. In the first place, people only discover themselves and the world through their relationships with other people and this relationship is primary. Perspectives on the world follow and are fashioned by these relationships. In view ©f this, theology may be said to be reflection on human experience specifically understood as directed towards God. Thus Schillebeeckx (1969:214) describes man, from a theological point of view, as ‘a free being who must define himself in and towards the world in dialogue with God’. This may be contrasted with the definition of one sort of sociology, ‘critical sociology’, described by Hansen (1976:3) as ‘an invitation to become an involved, critical explorer of human and societal possibilities’.Unless the theologian is to consider for the most part his own experience (the source of much individualistic agonizing of an existentialist sort commonly characterized as bourgeois sociology) he must perforce draw on some systematic body of reflection on the human condition. Traditionally, this has been provided by philosophy, but in more recent times the social sciences have rather cornered the interaction business.
Political Theology 4: Property
Authors: Ruston Roger 
Published: July 2007

In the course of an unusually angry article on poverty in Northern Ireland which appeared in the Times of 18 March this year, it was pointed out that in a region already suffering the highest cost of living, the highest unemployment rate (17.3 per cent) and the worst housing shortage (32,000 families homeless) in the United Kingdom, the social security system is passive and waits for people to find out what benefits they might be entitled to and to claim them. Moreover, the claim forms are “impenetrable to all but the well-educated and practised claimant, a contradiction in terms”. And the fear of scrounging has seriously interfered with the system’s ability to meet the crying need. In the UK as a whole £500 million welfare benefits remained unclaimed in 1978. Ulster was well represented. Meanwhile, the Government is pouring the balance of £70 million into a factory making luxury sports cars for the American market in the middle of a world energy crisis, for the sake of 1000 jobs.On 6 April, the Guardian reported that more than 1000 new investigators have been appointed to save an estimated £50 million in social security frauds, while at the same time it has reduced the staff of the Inland Revenue and Customs and Excise dealing with tax frauds, which cost about £5,500 million. As the number of security fraud officers is increased so less and less time is given by benefit officers to ensuring that claimants receive their full entitlement. And more and more people are frightened to seek their legal rights. Moreover, “home visits have been reduced and officers have been told not to help claimants to work out the intricacies of various benefits in order to decide which was the most advantageous”. Meanwhile, it is not known what arrangements the Inland Revenue have to reclaim the vast tax arrears of the Vestey business empire, which paid no tax for decades on its highly profitable chain of butcher’s shops.