bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Animals—the need for a new Catholicism
Authors: Oderberg David S. 
Published: July 2007

On 8 February BBC 1 broadcast a programme on the work of Dr. Robert J. White, the American neurologist based in Cleveland, who is world-renowned for his experiments, which he calls ‘body transplants’, in which the body of one monkey is transplanted onto the head of another, through a joining of the carotid arteries and jugular veins, and a clamping together of the two spinal columns. In his most successful experiment, the creature remained alive for seven days, though it was paralysed from the neck down. A photograph showed it lying down, its face contorted in a grimace.Hundreds of such experiments, involving primates of all sorts, dogs, cats, and various other animals, have been carried out in many countries, notably the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union. Dr. White has been showered with awards by his peers, both for his research and for his work with brain-damaged human accident victims. At the same time he is vilified by animal rights campaigners.He says he can ‘understand’ why some people feel outraged at his experiments and his proposals for further research; people also felt outraged at the thought of kidney and heart transplants—but they are now commonplace. True, he admits, the brain is different, as it seems bound up with the very existence of a person in the way that their heart or kidneys do not, but as long as helping human life is the goal, there is no reason why the brain should not also be treated as transplantable, either with its original head, or into another brainless head (though the latter operation has never succeeded and is technically much more difficult).
Continuity Underlying Discontinuity: Schillebeeckx’s Philosophical Background
Authors: Kennedy Philip 
Published: July 2007

It is occasionally said of Edward Schillebeeckx that he is a difficult theologian to understand because in the last analysis he does not have a theology! Instead, he is thought to have produced two, three, or more, quite distinct theologies, whose characteristics depend on the kinds of philosophical equipment he has marshalled in order to give conceptual embodiment to his theological convictions.Over the past five decades, Schillebeeckx has published about four hundred and seventy theological studies. A perusal of these divulges that at different stages his writings have freely borrowed philosophical ideas from such diverse contexts as phenomenology, existentialism, Anglo-American-Scandinavian analytical philosophy, structural linguistics, semiotics, neo-Marxist critical theories of society, and twentieth-century revivals of Thomism—a list by no means exhaustive.A survey of his publications further uncovers that for a period of about nine years, from 1963 to 1974, he did not write a single book. These years, particularly from 1966 onwards, were devoted to a determined study of hermeneutics and biblical exegesis as a preparation for interpreting Christian faith in a new way. In 1974, at the end of this incubatory period, he published Jesus: An Experiment in Christology, the monograph in which he effectively gave notice that he had radically changed his theological method. From the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s, he had employed a method which took classical theological theories and texts as its point of departure. With the book Jesus, however, references to patristic, medieval, and papal documents have to a large extent been put aside in favour of an avowedly hermeneutical method, which is dependent on a bountiful array of exegetical data and which seeks to set past and contemporary human experiences in a mutually critical and interpretative relationship with each other.
Speaking of Death
Authors: Mortimer Iain 
Published: July 2007

A talk given in a retreat for eucharistic ministers in November 1988.Sooner or later, in Christian ministry, we find we are having to talk to somebody about death, their death or the death of a loved-one, and we are not going to do this very well if we have avoided thinking about death ourselves, avoided asking ourselves what death means—or should mean—for the Christian.In St Peter’s, Rome, there is a statue by Michelangelo. We have all at least seen photographs of it at some time or other. It is a pieta. That’s to say, a statue of the dead Christ with his mother. We see the broken bloody corpse of Christ lying gently in the arms and lap of his grief-stricken mother, his head facing upwards, his torn limbs drooping down. The statue tells even the most casual tourist a simple story: this is a mother holding the dead body of her son.But Michelangelo’s Pieta does far more as well. It shows the deep trusting relationship that existed between the mother and the son. How many of us who have seen it cannot be moved by the face of Mary? She is truly beautiful and in a strange way serene. Her skin soft, gentle and warm. And in her beauty she shows her grief. In her tenderness is shown her pain. In the motherly embrace of her dead son is shown her great grief. The agony and joy of being a mother cry out at us from the stone.Michelangelo uses other images to heighten our understanding and our empathy. We see, hidden under her garment, the gentle curve of her breasts—breasts which sustained life in the early months of her baby son. But above all there is the gaze of Mary into the face of her son—that gaze of total pity, total loss, total love.
Gabriel Marcel, Philosopher of Mystery: A Centenary Appraisal
Authors: Nichols Aidan 
Published: July 2007

Gabriel Marcel was born one hundred years ago this year. It seems fitting, then, to attempt a re-evaluation of a philosopher who was one of the seminal minds of Catholicism in the mid-twentieth century. For it follows from the nature of Catholic tradition, as an organically developing communion in Christ and his Spirit, that no such mind ever becomes ‘irrelevant’: that is, out of relation to other spirits that follow it in history. The difficulty with introducing Marcel’s religious philosophy, however, lies not so much in any seeming obsolescence, but in the character of that centre to which, again and again, Marcel returned. He was a ‘philosopher of mystery’.Notoriously, he disliked philosophical systems, which he regarded as an affront to the Socratic spirit of continuous questioning in the search for truth. As a result, Marcel nowhere offers a systematic exposition of his own philosophy of religion. He preferred to present many of his reflections in the deliberately unsystematic form of a journal, a diary or an occasional article. At times, his meditations sprang from crucial events of his own life-time. But undergirding everything he wrote lies a constant concern to highlight the unchanging and ultimate issues of existence. He wanted to restore to words a power of signifying of which, he felt, they had been denuded. In so doing, he would help give back to language its power to reveal le poids ontologique, the ‘ontological weight’, of human experience. This ‘weight’ produces a bias—pondus meus, amor metis, inverting Augustine’s adage about how love carries one away—and this bias, if we follow where it tends, directs us towards the reality of God. In this essay I shall try to retrace the Marcellian path to transcendence whose crucial steps are three: the mystery of human personhood, the mystery of inter-subjectivity, and the mystery of hope. But let us begin with a word about the man and his setting.
Jewish and Christian Understandings of Sin
Authors: Rhymer Joseph 
Published: July 2007

Such a topic as this raises problems. Both Judaism and Christianity consist of a spectrum of organisations loosely associated with each other within a broad tradition, rather than neat, consistent, homogeneous religions. There is also the problem of understanding the thinking of people living in past eras and other cultures, especially as religions tend to behave as if events and experiences from the distant past—complete with detailed laws—still apply with all the force of divine authority. It will be an achievement just to identify a credible method for handling a topic such as this.To start at all we must have a working definition of sin, whatever the difficulties, so the working definition is: ‘Sin is whatever is thought to ignore or defy God’s revealed will’. Some of the consequent questions are: How is God’s will revealed? What does it reveal? What constitutes defiance of it? Most of what follows looks at some of the answers given by Christians and Jews at various times. Finally, a conclusion is reached about common elements in what Jews and Christians understand by ‘sin’, and how to talk about it. Like all true mysteries, sin cannot be described comprehensively, but this does not mean that we have to retreat into silence. There is a way of talking theology which preserves integrity.Both Jews and Christians share common ground in their belief that what Christians call the Old Testament contains the revealed will of God, even though Christians then modify their attitude towards the Old Testament in the light of what is contained in the New Testament.
Refusing to Bless the State: Prophetic Church and Secular State
Authors: Markus R.A. 
Published: July 2007

‘Jesus announced the Kingdom, and it was the Church that came’. The remark (made by Alfred Loisy) locates, with pin-point accuracy, the place of the Church on the map of salvation-history. Its existence here and now, in the time-span between the Lord’s first and second Comings, is to be a sign of that Kingdom where there will be no more need for Church. By its very being the Church proclaims the comings of that Kingdom and is committed to being a question-mark set against all earthly societies and against any particular form of social organisation, institution or project. Among Christian thinkers few can have rivalled Augustine in constructing their thought within such an eschatological perspective. A sense of the huge distance that divides ‘here’ and ‘now’ from ‘there’ and ‘then’ runs like an axis through his mature thought. The first part of this article attempts a brief summary of his view of the nature of human society ; the second part is a reflection within such a perspective on the political tasks of a prophetic Church in a modern secular society.Christian thought in the first three centuries was dominated, as it was bound to be, by the Pauline and, for that matter, the rabbinic tradition of thinking about social existence: the Christian, like the Jew, was necessarily an alien in his society, a traveller with no permanent home in it, The one and only just society was that which God would bring about in His Kingdom. In relation to earthly societies, Christians were aliens; in relation to God’s Kingdom they were subjects, awaiting God’s act to establish the society in which they would be gathered, rather than active participants in its creation, still less, its rulers.
Church and State: The Case of Ireland
Authors: McDonagh Enda 
Published: July 2007

—The bishops and priests of Ireland have spoken, said Dante, and they must be obeyed.—Let them leave politics alone, said Mr Casey, or the people may leave their church alone.(James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man).The spectacle of Mr Casey waving the pope’s nose over the Christmas dinner table towards the irate Mrs Riordan seems a good place from which to approach the issues of Church and State, not least for its exposition of the prejudices, half-truths and common assumptions that will crown round and must be thought through: the Church is really the hierarchy; the bishops’ word is final in a Catholic country; religion should be kept out of politics. But it indicates also the way Church-State relations in Ireland are the product of a complex history, just as they are in most countries. Without proper attention to that history, it is impossible to analyse the present situation adequately. The description and analysis on offer here are bound to be sketchy and incomplete, yet it is possible and timely to pick out some of the key features of the historically moulded present and then reflect on the potential opportunities and challenges in the immediate future.Historically a predominantly Catholic country, Ireland has known only one established church, the (Anglican) Church of Ireland. Since its disestablishment in 1869 no attempt has been made to substitute any other in law or constitution. This is one simple but important fact of Irish history which immediately sets it off from its nearest neighbours in England and Scotland. Its implications are manifold, something not always appreciated by the churches in Ireland themselves, who have sometimes behaved as if they did enjoy some kind of established status as churches of majority populations, Catholic in the South and Protestant in the North.
Charles Davis versus René Girard
Authors: Lascaris Andrew 
Published: July 2007

In the course of the past twenty years René Girard has offered us a theory of the structure of human desire. Because desire is something very fundamental, his hypothesis is far-reaching and it gives us many original and, I believe, plausible results. However, not everything is explained and put into a new light because of a new insight into the structure of human desire. Thanks to Girard’s hypothesis, I think we can see how many apparently very varied things may have much more in common than we thought, and sometimes we can even perceive much better why there are differences and what they are. But even I, who have restricted myself in the three articles on Girard which I have published in New Blackfriars’ mainly to expounding his hypothesis, consider that hypothesis to be less embracing than Girard himself sometimes seems to think.Nevertheless, although any debate on Girard’s hypothesis is welcome, precisely because it helps us to see what is valuable and what is not, and although it is a pleasure to see Charles Davis in the July/August issue of New Blackfriars contributing to this debate, the attitudes which Davis brings to the debate make constructive discussion difficult. It seems to me that Davis feels akin to the postmodern position which assumes that a universal and unifying vision of reality is impossible and that it is doubtful whether reality is a unity; that perhaps there are more realities than one at the same time. Holders of this view can thus only be suspicious: ‘Suspicion, critique, uncovering: all can be turned upon oneself’ (p. 327) in a never-ending process. I myself feel closer to those attempts which, like Girard’s, try to dismantle the boundary fences between the various disciplines, constituting a parallel movement to postmodernism.
A Vision to Regain? Reconsidering Christopher Dawson (1889—1970)
Authors: Cervantes Fernando 
Published: July 2007

When, in the mid-1930s, T.S. Eliot was asked whom he considered the most influential English writer, he replied: ‘Christopher Dawson’. Such a statement may cause surprise, if not disbelief. For Christopher Dawson, whose centenary is celebrated this month, is today a largely forgotten figure and his once influential books seem everywhere to be gathering dust. The reasons for this will be better understood by considering Dawson’s work in the wider context of his intellectual development. Only then will it be possible to reassess the strength of his scholarship and to highlight the relevance that his vision might still hold today.Dawson is frequently associated with that group of writers and intellectuals who continued the tradition of Chesterton and Belloc to mark the English Catholic ‘revival’ of the 1930s. To some extent this tendency is understandable, since much of Dawson’s work was in fact aimed at making Catholicism intellectually accessible to a largely Protestant or secularized audience. But his association with Chesterton and Belloc can also be highly misleading, for, unlike the latter’s militant and prolific writings, there was nothing apologetic or polemic about Dawson’s work. Indeed, its fairness and serenity came as a breath of fresh air to the Catholic scholarship of the twenties and thirties, even inviting the respect and praise of non-Catholic contemporaries like Dean Inge, Sir James Marriott and H.A.L. Fisher.
Why create Hitler?
Authors: Sadowsky James 
Published: July 2007

‘If God knows how people like Hitler are going to behave, why does he create them?’ One reply to this objection goes as follows. It is impossible both for God to know what Hitler is going to do and for God to decide not to create him. If He is not going to create Hitler, there will be no Hitler to do anything and no future act for God to know. God’s knowing what Hitler will do presupposes the decision to create. God does not first know how Hitler will act and then decide to create him. It is the other way around. It is as if God is ‘surprised’ by the results of his decision to create—not that he learns something he did not previously know, but that he knows from all eternity something he would not otherwise have known. The decision to create is, in a sense, taken blindly.While it is true that God does not know what people are freely going to do unless He decides to create them, it is also the case according to many that without having to know whom he shall choose to create he knows what people will freely do in case they are created. He is able, therefore, to take into account these hypothetical choices when deciding to create. If this is true, then the problem of evil becomes more acute. God creates with the prior knowledge of moral evil. One then has to show that the good which comes from creation outweighs the evil byproduct.
Justification and the Constitution of Consciousness: a new look at Romans and Galatians
Authors: Alison James 
Published: July 2007

One of the difficulties in understanding St Paul’s treatment of Justification is that the theme appears in two ‘second order’ documents: the epistles to the Galatians and to the Romans. These are obviously not secondary in terms of their importance, but they are second-order reflections, interpreting something that the recipients already knew. It is clear that, from time to time in his letters, St Paul makes explicit references to the initial Kerygma, the first annunciation of the salvation brought by Christ, but treats it as something already known. The frequency with which the formula ‘Do you not know?’ occurs points to this. When Paul berates the Galatians (Gal 1:9; 3:1—5) it is in terms of their infidelity towards that which they had received, or their bad interpretation of it. Famously, Paul on occasion (as in 1 Cor 11:23—26) repeats part of the original Kerygma—in that case what he himself had given in Corinth.The exegetical problem remains: what we have is an interpretation of the original kerygmatic package, an interpretation of what was evidently a very powerful, exciting message, frequently accompanied (so it would seem) by signs and wonders of one sort or another. Yet our faithful interpretation of this interpretation demands that we supply a good deal inductively. There was clearly a message of salvation centred in Christ crucified (1 Cor 2:2); it was from this that the ecclesial life was to flow; and it was from this that the signs and wonders abounded. It was clearly from this also that interpretations or misinterpretations arose which led Paul to formulate his doctrine of Justification.
Being a Muslim in Britain
Authors: El‐Essawy Hesham 
Published: July 2007

‘How does it feel to be a Muslim in Britain?’ asked a young student during one of my lectures in a British school.Having been brought up in Egypt, where freedom of worship is a matter of course, the question was something of a surprise to me. It just did not occur to me that, in the Britain of today, a young student would wonder about a question like that.‘It is easy,’ I answered. ‘I can pray any time and anywhere, I can fast any day of any month, I can give alms to the poor, I can go on pilgrimage, and I can freely declare my faith. And as for the moral values of Islam, I can see no contradiction there. On the contrary, I see respect for the Islamic moral code.’The question did, however, reverberate in my mind, and, I have to admit, I am one of the privileged few who can do what they want when they want to, simply because I am my own boss. I know of fellow Muslims who are not permitted by their employers to pray on time, or to fast the month of Ramadan. On the major Muslim feast days, many Muslims cannot take time off to celebrate without putting their jobs at risk or losing an important school day. Many Muslims cannot take time off work to go for the mandatory Friday prayer, even though it takes place during their lunch hour.
Harmony in a Multi‐religious Society: an Islamic view
Authors: Engineer Asghar Ali 
Published: July 2007

Historically speaking, human beings have now lived for centuries in multi-religious or multi-ethnic societies. It is very difficult to ensure uniformity of faith or ethnicity in a human society, much less so in a modern industrial one with its own migratory inducements and shifting patterns. Faith as an identity, not as an ideology, has been one of the most powerful factors responsible for much bloodshed in modern history, particularly in the third world countries. Most of the third world countries are multi-religious and multi-ethnic, and these cleavages have often caused grave situations of violence and bloodshed.India saw a great bloodbath in 1947 when it got divided apparently on religious lines. More than a million people were slaughtered then and thousands continue to be killed even now manifestly on account of religious differences. Similarly, the ethnic conflict in far-away Southern Africa and next-door neighbour Sri Lanka is rocking our conscience. Hundreds of innocent persons are getting killed in these ethnic conflicts. It is, therefore, necessary to understand not only the political and socioeconomic causes of this conflict but also its religious and ideological dimensions. If communal violence is to be successfully combated it is necessary to grapple with the religious aspect of the problem too.