bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Unaccommodated Man
Authors: Tatham Michael 
Published: July 2007

It is of course, a fruitless—if interesting—speculation, to ask oneself what would have happened to Christianity if the camera had been invented during Christ’s lifetime. Most of us probably find it pretty well impossible to picture Divinity trapped between the stiff pages of a family album or to conceive of a God crying out on a cross while, a few yards away, someone discards a flash or fiddles with a light metre. As we actually experience it, the problem arises in muted form, and is largely a matter of reconciling noble architecture, the tourist industry and religious sentiment. We have all seen those glossy volumes with coloured plates of pilgrim multitudes, a white figure with hand blessingly uplifted and that better-looking, younger nun, smiling instamatically over her own viewfinder. Granted then that the camera create; curious problems of credibility, it is perhaps not too outrageous to suggest—at least very tentatively— that if this medium had existed two milennia ago Christianity as we know it with its mystery and its historicity simply would not have happened.If, however, there had been a photographic record dealing with the beginnings of Christianity, I believe that an American, Diane Arbus, who committed suicide in 1971, would have been better equipped than most people to salvage something meaningful from a past that we have magnified and isolated, and interpreted repeatedly into the patterns of our preconceptions. Quite recently her work has been on view at the Hayward Gallery and in March 1974 The Sunday Times ran an illustrated article on the exhibition in its supplement and asked several well-known critics to give their opinions.
Objectivity and Human Needs in Marxism
Authors: Cunningham Adrian 
Published: July 2007

‘Communism is the solution to the riddle of history, and knows itself to be such—Marx, 1844.Whether marxism poses for itself solutions to the riddles of history, or whether, more narrowly, it is a science of social formations and their transformation, or some combination of the two—these are central issues of contemporary marxist theory. They are focussed in the debate over the work of Althusser, and over the ‘neo-hegelianism’ of the earlier Lukacs, Goldmann, the Frankfurt School and others (for present purposes I shall collectively describe this latter position as Critical Theory). It is in this context that the old disputes over the relation between the earlier and the later work of Marx remain so important, for they have implications for the orientation, scope and purchase of the tradition as a whole.Reflexion on these issues is prompted by two recent collections of marxist essays. Whilst Herbert Marcuse’s Studies in Critical Philosophy (New Left Books, £3.25) provides for the English reader essential material for the assessment of the claims of critical theory, Paul Walton and Andrew Gamble’s From Alienation to Surplus Value (Sheed & Ward, £5.50) is an attempt to establish the unity of ‘the total Marx’, without falling back on the critical theory tradition. In both texts, however, there are surprisingly similar lacunae and areas of fuzziness, especially over the definition and analysis of human needs. This is a concept basic to the marxist tradition but one which has rarely been satisfactorily investigated, or its crucial and awkward significance grasped (Mascolo, Meszaros, and Kolakowski not withstanding). It is on this question, and the related ones of the objectivity and universality of marxist theory, that I shall concentrate.
Poet, Mystic, Reformer
Authors: Hibbert Giles 
Published: July 2007

A strict ascetic mystic belonging to a religious reform movement in the heady atmosphere of counter-reformation Spain; a writer of treatises on the techniques of contemplative and mystical prayer; esoteric, strict, demanding, even dry and humourless—strange for a close intimate of the great Teresa, so human, witty and compassionate—but undoubtedly at the same time a man consumed by the love of God. This is most probably the image conjured up by the name of John of the Cross.And yet he is also well known, even famous, for his poems—you will find them tucked in at the back of Professor Allison Peers’ magisterial presentation and translation of the Complete Works, though you will also find them published in the Penguin Classics series. What sort of poet is he? A real poet, or one of those religious versifiers who present their ideas on the life of prayer in this superficial, yet attractive, form for the sake of their simpler listeners? There were many of these to be found in 16th Century Spain.A real poet many will claim; but those who take this side of him seriously and acclaim him as one of the peninsula’s greatest poets are more likely to be found amongst the unreligious, the secular, students of Spanish literature than amongst those who follow his doctrine.John of the Cross was indeed a poet of stature, together with being most of the other things mentioned; but not many people have attempted to present this so that it can be seen as a whole, so that we can get what he has left to posterity in perspective.
The Work of Mother Teresa in Belfast
Authors: Wilson Desmond 
Published: July 2007

The Belfast experiment by Mother Teresa’s sisters is over. Suddenly, and to most people unexpectedly, they departed in September, 1973 leaving behind some work completed, some incomplete or merely projected and many friendships bruised by their sudden departure.The Missionary Sisters of Charity, to give them their proper name, came to Belfast with almost equal suddeness and unexpected by most people. About two years ago Mother Teresa expressed a desire to visit Belfast to see for herself what was happening and to try to help. It was by no means clear what she could do but she had in mind to create some ecumenical project by which she believed that the love of God might soften the antagonism there. She was advised by a number of people that what she had in mind was not possible. This was not simply a counsel of despair; it was advice based upon bitter experience. Already a dedicated community worker who had patiently and courageously worked in Cyprus for the Reconciliation of Greek and Turkish Cypriots had declared that Belfast was not right even for that kind of experiment.Mother Teresa, however, was told that she should come to Belfast because her coming would give some encouragement to people who badly needed it. She came on a flying visit on a Saturday afternoon and on Sunday morning attended Mass in the church of Corpus Christi in Ballymurphy. The people at once took her to their hearts and into their homes.
Ecology and the Angels
Authors: Wicker Brian 
Published: July 2007

‘Nature is never spent’ (Gerald Manley Hopkins).‘One day soon, maybe . . . there will be no more Nature’ (Prince Bernhard, at a Wildlife Fund dinner).‘There is no more Nature’ (Samuel Beckett, Endgame).‘Nature fights back’ (Rachel Carson).The disappearance of Nature is a central theme of modem fiction,. Among those novelists who tend to see it as an accomplished fact already, two responses seem to prevail. The first is typified by Robbe-Grillet’s verdict that modern man feels no deprivation at the loss of Nature, for Nature was never more than an illusion, comforting perhaps in a meaningless world but no less illusory for all that. To be rid of Nature is to be at last free. The second response is typified by Beckett’s verdict: there is no more Nature, and the loss is tragic and the deprivation catastrophic. To be rid of Nature is to be in the realm of the lost ones, in a world of sheer ‘lessness’. A third response, however, has to be considered. This is latent in Mailer’s identification of the source of our troubles about Nature in the triumph of what he calls corporation-land: that combination of technology, materialism and exploitative brutality towards the environment which is most evident in the cities of America. However, in Mailer’s case there is also a certain fascination for, as well as hatred of, this massive agglomeration of brutalities : there is pride, energy, vitality in it, as well as regimentation, pollution and despair. Mailer’s ambivalence is characteristic of a general uncertainty about ‘the big plot being hatched out by Nature’.This uncertainty is evident enough elsewhere, in the utterances of people speaking from many different viewpoints.
Theology and Equality
Authors: Ruston Roger 
Published: July 2007

Until very recently Christian theology has never been much concerned with social equality. It would be true to say that, on the contrary, a well-developed theology of inequality has been characteristic of Christianity for most of its history. Before I develop this theme it could be well to define what kind of equality I am talking about. I am concerned with social equality of the kind that is demanded by many contemporary civil-rights movements. It may be called ‘equality of consideration’ by which I mean the presumption against treating human beings differently in any respect until grounds for the distinction have been shown which are relevent to the distinction we propose to make. According to such a principle we consider that to judge an individual not on his merits relevant to the case but on the supposed merits of some class to which he belongs is a fundamental injustice. The onus of proof that membership of some class of human beings disqualifies an individual from equality of consideration in some respect always lies with one who wishes to make or to perpetuate the disqualification.A principle of equality of this kind is not a natural Christian growth. It can be developed without any reference to Christianity but it is likely to be more vigorous if it comes about by the cross-fertilisation of Christian inspiration and humanist ideas. If Christianity has contributed anything to the development of the equality principle in society it is not so much by way of formal Christian ideas as by way of a certain humanitarian impulse at work in a suitable ideological environment.
The Common Man Confirmed
Authors: Moiser Jeremy 
Published: July 2007

One often hears it said, and it is even more often accepted, that it is right to despise the masses. The majority of mankind, it is argued, are subject to a basic shortness of vision and a fundamental inertia which make it necessary for someone else—a dictator, a power elite, a superior—to administer their affairs. On this view the passivity of the mass of people has to be offset, if man is to advance, by being manipulated by the competent, talented few. Progress in history and the growth of civilisation are the work of an oligarchy, while the people constitute merely the raw material out of which history is made.On the other side a number of thinkers have espoused the cause of the polloi. History is the vicissitudes of common folk, and nothing nobler can be contemplated than the numberless multitudes who shape the world’s destiny.It would seem difficult for a Christian to adopt either of these views for his understanding of the Church. If, on the one hand, the Church is thought to consist primarily in the clerical elite, it is hard to see why Christ took such pains to identify himself with the unspectacular masses. If, on the other hand, the Church’s history is seen as the development of the sensus omnium fidelium, it is not easy to explain the cult of exceptional members who are thought to have advanced the spread of Christianity more significantly than any others, and it is even less easy to explain the emphasis placed on the role of the hierarchy in the preservation of God’s truth.
The Italian Devils of Anglo‐Saxon Literature
Authors: Navone John 
Published: July 2007

Every culture has its images of evil and its personifications of wickedness. The English-speaking world possesses a literature and dramatic tradition rich in devils. There are deceivers, troublemakers, outlaws, corrupters, traitors, chiselers, killers, monsters, parasites, criminal masterminds, and endless other variations of human wickedness and malice.The Anglo-Saxon world’s literature and drama is also rich in foreign devils. Among the foreign devils the Italian villain is the perennial favourite. From the Age of Elizabeth to the present, the Italians have supplied the drama and literature of the English-speaking world with more foreign devils than any other people. Other nations have supplied foreign devils; however, no nation has supplied them as consistently as Italy.The Italian devils possess that mixture of qualities which enable us to recognize them as both descendants of Lucifer and precursors of The Godfather. Sinning against God and society, they are in conflict with their origins. They display an awesome satanic grandeur in their fiendish attempts to control or to destroy the lives of others.The Italian devils are an essential part of the English-speaking world’s centuries-old image-making of Italy. The literary and dramatic tradition of the Italian devil has undoubtedly preconditioned the English-speaking world’s relations with Italians, clerics and laymen. The Italian devil of the criminal monk tradition, affirmed from the Age of Elizabeth to the Age of Victoria and the present, continues to cast his sinister shadow over the Vatican.
St. Thomas and Dante
Authors: Foster Kenelm 
Published: July 2007

The legend of Dante’s ‘Thomism’ arose from the fact that a main component of his culture is obviously ‘scholastic’, and that until not so very long ago the authentic thought of St Thomas had not been clearly differentiated from its general scholastic background. A poet writing within a few decades of St Thomas’s death, and showing a great respect for him, and delighting to reason, even in verse, about form and matter, act and potency and so on, seemed plainly a ‘Thomist’; and when this designation began to be questioned there were not wanting those who went on insisting on it for the greater glory of the Dominican Order or of Catholic culture, which was thought to have reached its apex in the work of Aquinas. But now all that has changed. Since the pioneering labours of Bruno Nardi and Gilson’s brilliant book it has become increasingly evident that Dante cannot be called a Thomist in any strict sense of the term as denoting a body of doctrine characteristic of St Thomas.However there is, I think, a qualified sense in which one may speak of the poet’s Thomism, and which it is one purpose of these notes to indicate. But first a little more should be said about the question in general; and here I may be allowed to bring myself briefly into the picture. When, some years ago, I undertook to write the article ‘Tommaso d’Aquino’ for the Enciclopedia Dantesca, I naturally set about reading or re-reading all the relevant texts, beginning with Dante. My task, as I saw it, was twofold. First, on the abstract doctrinal plane—comparing ideas with ideas—I had to try to decide how far Bruno Nardi had been right in his lifelong effort to detach Dante from Aquinas by expounding the poet’s philosophy as a variant on the Neoplatonist tradition, with traces (especially in the Monarchia) of Averroism.
Ivan Denisovich: Towards the Repossession of History
Authors: Barker Francis 
Published: July 2007

The view of Alexander Solzhenitsyn projected in the press, both popular and literary, in the bourgeois countries is of some kind of embattled Western liberal, who, amid the severities of ‘totalitarianism’, continues resolutely to articulate the values that underpin the Free World. We do not see him treated as a Russian socialist who after decades of official dogma is conducting a genuine struggle to come to terms, artistically, with recent Soviet history, to deal with real problems of common life and its valuation in a transitional society. Nor is he even shown to be the author of a certain kind of typically Russian social novel discernibly in the tradition of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky—but always as the Scourge of Communism.Naturally, it is easy for the champions of the Western bourgeoisie to appropriate Solzhenitsyn to their own ideological purposes (along with many other ‘dissident intellectuals’): do not, after all, the demands most often raised by the ‘cultural opposition’ such as those for freedom of speech and of publication—the civil rights most cherished by the intelligentsia—have the very appearance of ‘liberal’ demands? This mystification is easy to dispel. Noticeably, the Western press only reports the activities of the intellectuals: widespread factory occupations, food riots, work stoppages, street demonstrations, and the storming of the party headquarters in Novocherkask by local factory workers (all of which took place when Kruschev announced rises in meat and dairy prices in 1962, the year of Solzhenitsyn’s first publication) are not reported in the West with such alacrity. And in any case, as Harding remarks, freedom of speech is by no means a liberal call in the Russian context: by raising demands which the state bureaucracy dare not satisfy, the intellectuals must eventually consider the abolition of the bureaucracy itself and a means of achieving this, and thus their dissent falls within the dynamic of permanent revolution.
Seeing, Healing, Reasoning: The Mandari Way of Thought
Authors: Edwards Adrian 
Published: July 2007

Knowledge that the author of a book between one’s hands died before its publication inevitably affects one’s judgement of it. At first reading, the late Dr Jean Buxton’s Religion and Healing in Mandari seemed to me to lack complete integration as a book, to be rather a collection of extremely interesting and thoughtful chapters loosely strung together. Further reading, however, has suggested to me that this impression is a superficial reaction to a remarkable quality in the book, its capacity to give attention to several different themes in succession, or rather, to give each theme its own value in the overall pattern of Mandari thinking and doing, without either isolating it from the whole, or giving the totality an imposed, schematic unity in the service of some favourite formula. Dr Buxton refused to see Mandari reality as a collection of bits and pieces or as a shapeless mass or as a geometrical pattern.The Mandari are a people of the southern Sudan, numbering, when in the nineteen-fifties Dr Buxton did her fieldwork among them, some 15,000. They are linguistically and culturally different from the Dinka and Nuer, even though in the present century they have undergone considerable influence from the latter. Dr Buxton had already described their social institutions in her earlier Chiefs and Strangers; her theme here is in fact wider than the title suggests, since, in so far as a central theme gradually emerges from the rich and fascinating material here presented, it is how the Mandari order and arrange in a rational way what they see and experience. Nothing is in the mind which is not first in the senses, said the old scholastics; or, as an excited disciple of Chomsky exclaimed: ‘The human mind exists’. Dr Buxton would have accepted both these statements; but it is her merit that she has shown how they apply to an obscure, poor and non-literate people in the circumstances of the culture they have formed and the environment which dominates them.
Dancing with David
Authors: Newman Pamela 
Published: July 2007

Those whose reservations kept them away from the ‘Dance’ Mass at the French Church, Leicester Place, last summer will be relieved to know that the congregation neither indulged in ‘one more time’ of Lord of the Dance, nor flung off garments to give way to unbridled holy rolling. A few jackets and ties were removed (it was a warm evening) but the only sensational happenings were the sincerely vigorous protestations of a few ladies of strong Tridentine loyalties. What, then, was done? And was it worth doing? Above all, was it proper to be done in the context ?‘The theatre is the place for this, not the House of God’ intoned one of the ladies in a recurring and joyless antiphon, received for the most part by the packed congregation in compassionate silence and heroically overlooked by the readers thus interrupted. Well, is it? Were we insulting God by a mock marriage of actress and bishop? ‘But what about David ?’ a young Anglican said to me as we queued to get in. Ah, yes, David . . . but he was one of your ancient royals. And very Old Testament and Jewish. But so—inconveniently?—is the foundation of belief in, and credibility of, the Person who said ‘Before Abraham was, I am’.By this time the moths of misconception have no doubt gathered in large numbers. It will be useful to begin, therefore, with an account of what actually took place. Before the Mass, the celebrant, Father Kevin Donovan, S.J., explained clearly and with infectious enthusiasm what was intended. The Liturgy of the Word would include a number of readings from the Gospels and the psalms which would then be interpreted in dance and movement.
A View of the Resurrection
Authors: Sharkey Michael 
Published: July 2007

It was in the future days—I know time tells strange tales—that the idea first came to me. We had discovered long before how to transmit objects by dematerialising them in one place, translating them into the basic energy of their matter, and directing this energy to another place for rematerialisation. You will appreciate that this in itself had given rise to some pretty wild theories about the Resurrection of Christ. However, in working out how to apply this principle across galactic distances, we accidently discovered a way of tracking the light of past events. As you know, you see a thing when light is reflected from it to your eye. That light never dies but hurtles away, out through space, at the speed of 186,000 miles per second. Somehow, one of our team was able to draw up the formula for finding and reconvening the light of past events, and for showing us these events on the face of our computer.To put it crudely, this involved a leap ahead of the light, by a short-cut method, encountering the light and bringing its information back, by short-cut, almost instantaneously to our computer which translated it into vision on its face. A few seconds was all the computer needed to intercept and interpret events of thousands of light-years’ distance.Even though we could do this with light only, and not with sound, an extraordinary amount of excitement was generated, and many people used the machine to witness once more the happy events of their childhood, etc. On the whole, though, this shattered too many illusions, and it hurt and embarrassed some very nice people indeed. More caution was used.