bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The Magnificat of the Redeemed Woman
Authors: Beattie Tina 
Published: July 2007

There has been a tendency in recent years among feminist and liberationist theologians to read the Magnificat primarily as a proclamation of social justice and liberation for the oppressed. A publication called Mary, Mother of Socialism, offers a number of essays which evaluate the liberative potential of the Magnificat, including one by Graham Dowell called “The Magnificat — a Christian Manifesto?” which offers a side-by-side comparison of Mary’s Magnificat and Marx’s Manifesto, with some fascinating juxtapositions and resonances between the two.This essay is not intended to detract from these imaginative rereadings of the Magnificat to challenge a dehumanising economic order, but I want to suggest that the prophetic vision of social justice which the Magnificat proclaims is secondary to its message that in the redemption of Mary, womankind is liberated from the consequences of the fall and invited into a new world of integrity, freedom and dignity through the incarnation. This is the way in which a number of patristic writers interpreted the Magnificat, and it has profound implications for some of the vexed questions of sexual difference and equality which risk tearing apart the fabric of contemporary Catholic theology. I should add that I do not think that the seamless robe of salvation history is so easily torn apart by theological squabbles, but I do believe that we could save ourselves much hostility and grief if we could only look anew at our rich theological heritage, and setting aside the rhetoric and polemics of secular feminism, ask in all honesty and faithfulness what it means to be woman who bears the image of God no more and no less than man does.
Theodicy and Blissful Freedom
Authors: Moonan Lawrence 
Published: July 2007

A blunt commentator on the things around us can argue that by failing to choose the ‘obviously better’ possibility of making beings who would act freely but always go right, God cannot be both omnipotent and wholly good ‘. An underlying argument runs:
1 (1) If God does not choose the obviously better possibility of making beings who would accept freely and always go right,God cannot be both omnipotent and wholly good. (Assumption.)2 (2) God does not choose the obviously better possibility...(Assumption.)1,2 (3) God cannot be both omnipotent and wholly good.(1,2 modus ponens.)This, the Underlying Argument, is weaker than the Blunt Commentator’s original one. If it fails, the original one cannot succeed, but if it goes through, the original one does not necessarily go through. I number the main steps, chiefly to keep track of the assumptions.In Part I, I argue that the Underlying Argument fails to prove the conclusion that God cannot be both omnipotent and wholly good; and that it fails, from ignoring a view exploiting the notion of blissful freedom: a theologians’ notion, but one already appealed to by at least one philosopher strongly sympathetic to the Blunt Commentator’s argument. In Part II, I draw attention to an ambiguity in ‘always go right’, with a view to pursuing, in Part III, consequences of a further ambiguity to be seen in ‘God cannot be both omnipotent and good’, demanding attention to two diverse forms of theism. One of these— ‘existence-theism’—is invulnerable to a Blunt Commentator’s argument, but can exploit some of the Underlying Argument’s steps to support a Blunt Commentator’s conclusion in the sense needed to impugn the other form, ‘character-theism’.
God and Alterity
Authors: Mendez Angel F. 
Published: July 2007

In philosophy the question about God has developed, historically, parallel to and intimately connected with metaphysics. In metaphysics, the onto-theological thought of God arises from its dependence on the ontological difference, the thought of the ‘unthought as such.’ Within this philosophical construct, God is ultimately thought as the ‘ground’ of all that is, the Being of beings, thecausa sui.This paper, mostly inspired by the philosophy of Jean-Luc Marion and Emmanuel Levinas, argues in favour of a post-metaphysical way of thinking about God: a thinking which releases God from the onto-theological category of Being, and addresses the radical and irreducible alterity of God; a thinking which critiques thinking, in order to address the dilemma of our discourse of Transcendence to be shared within a community-indialogue.This work is divided into three major sections. Beginning with Marion’s interpretation of Heidegger’s account of the analytic of theDasein,the first section will suggest that one starts the question of God from God alone—thegiftof Love that precedes Being—rather than from Being. The second section will introduce Emmanuel Levinas’ account of the ethical pre-condition of discourse and reason. For Levinas, discourse starts with, or is preceded by, the gaze of the face of the Other who refuses to be reduced into a category of the same. Subsequently, the questions of language and reason, their limits, necessity, and ethical reach will also be addressed. Finally, this paper will revisit the question of God and reflect on the philosopher’s and theologian’s call to dialogue with, and service to, the community.
The Responsibility of Theology for the Question of God
Authors: Moonan Lawrence 
Published: July 2007

In at least two ways it can be sensible to ask about the responsibility of theology for something or other, not just the responsibility of individual theologians. They are rather like the ways in which we can ask about the responsibility of the engineering behind some dam, say, not just that of the individual engineers, for the safety of the dam. In one, we may ask about something in the abstract nature of engineering, its concepts or principles: Was it reliance on some daring new engineering concept that was responsible for the dam’s failure? In the other way, we may ask about the received practices of engineers generally, not just about the actual practice of the engineers involved on that occasion. Do they tend, for example, to double the theoretically necessary thickness of certain structural components, and is that practice responsible for their structures withstanding more than their due of wild weather and erratic maintenance? Or do they tend to pare things down to the point where only near-perfect workmanship and near-ideal materials can keep things safe?I consider both kinds of question. But a recurring concern is one the President asked me to keep in mind, when inviting me to speak to the topic: the concern that there may be a ‘modern culture... in which the God-question is vitiated often right from the start in the way in which it is posed’.
The Responsibility of Theology for Spiritual Growth and Pastoral Care
Authors: Endean Philip 
Published: July 2007

‘It seems that theology has no significant responsibility for spiritual development and pastoral care: at best, theology is a harmless distraction which entertains some Christians endowed with certain kinds of temperament; at worst, theology is a positive impediment to proper Christian formation and growth’. So a Thomist videtur quod non might begin, and the documentation would be easy to find. We might, for example, quote the famous adage, ‘by love he may be caught and held, but by thinking never’.We could reflect on how pastoral supervisors often try to get trainee ministers to respond to ‘what is really going on’, and not to think too quickly in terms of articulated theology. Again, many of us will know good priests who will tell us that seminary training in theology was something they survived. They began real learning on the job, on the basis of simple goodness and common sense. Theology is something of which they are in awe, or nervous, or suspicious; it remains remote from their awareness.Sed contra: we should always be able to provide ‘an accounting for the hope that is in us; the bishop, the prime pastor,’ must have a firm grasp of the word that is trustworthy in accordance with the teaching’ (1 Peter 3:15b; Titus 1.9). We need therefore a responsio that engages with the objections, admitting their force, but somehow suggesting a more positive account of what theology might contribute to good pastoral practice.
Sloth
Authors: Casey John 
Published: July 2007

Since this is the last lecture in the series about The Seven Deadly Sins, it might be a good idea to stand back and think for a moment about the point of such a list. That seven is a good, mystical number obviously makes us suspicious about any claim (if one was ever made) that the list of the deadly sins was arrived at by the exercise of pure reason. It is not difficult to add to them. Why is cruelty not a specific deadly sin? Cruelty does not obviously come under wrath, nor, for that matter, under pride, envy or lust. Aquinas lists cruelty (ferocitas) as a sin against temperance. He distinguishes it from ferocity and savagery (saevitia and feritas), which are ‘bestial’ vices. Cruelty, for Aquinas, is the vice of excessive severity in punishment. Its opposing virtue is clemency—the rational tempering of punishment—which Aquinas considers to be part of temperance. These are fairly persuasive distinctions. Yet Aquinas’s idea of cruelty seems to have little if anything to do with the sort of cruelty that has most caught the attention of the modern world, which was touched on by Nietzsche—the deliberate infliction of pain upon another for pleasure. This was philosophised upon even more interestingly by Jean-Paul Sartre as being part of a project to reduce the Other to objecthood, revealing and at the same time cancelling his freedom. That would seem a good candidate for an additional deadly sin.Perhaps, though, we should think about the deadly sins as a sort of mirror image of the virtues—as these appear, for instance, in Aristotle.
A Reply to Tom Weinandy
Authors: Webster John 
Published: July 2007

My friend Tom Weinandy has taken my admittedly polemical words very seriously, so that a paper which was intended to provoke seminar discussion has also provoked dismay on the part of a theologian and colleague whose judgment I respect very highly. What I have written, I have written; others must judge its truth. But some things in Tom's response call for a brief reply.First, the tone of my remarks, Tom says, betrays ‘almost complete lack of sympathy’ with Fides et Ratio and a ‘dismissive attitude’ bordering on ‘the mocking’; ‘if he tells me, ‘one restrains one's impatience and focuses one's mind'—which it looks like I have failed to do—things can be seen to be a good deal better than I have made them out to be. Maybe, though on re-reading Fides et Ratio I remain unconvinced that it is a first- rate piece of apostolic teaching. What I must make clear—and what the polemical tone evidently obscured—is that I am not at all opposed to bishops intervening in the academy: far from it. I entirely agree with Tom that much in the academy is ‘inimical to the Christian gospel', and that Christian theologians can be victims of academic terrorism. My protest is not intended to suggest that the teaching office should leave the academy alone, but that its interventions must betray a consistently apostolic character. An episcopal judgment, if it is to be received as apostolic, has to commend itself by indicating the truth, and the rather bullying tactics deployed in some bits of Fides et Ratio simply do not help.
Schelling and Onto-theology
Authors: Leask I. 
Published: July 2007

The Schelling revival has never quite reconciled itself to the Swabian’s religious anima. Schelling’s Hegel-critique may now be recognized as something like a proto-deconstruction of Idealism’s ‘paroxysmal’ self-assertion; but, we are told, this ‘anti-logocentric’ kernel has usually to be extricated from a mystical-theosophical shell. Likewise, there may be vast, fruitful depths to Schelling’s stricture that Being is irreducible to thought; nonetheless, Schelling’s “apparently dead theology” is best either forgotten or else ‘translated’ into the lexicon of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Derridean deconstruction, Rortyian postmodern pragmatism, etc. The religious concerns of Schelling’s later work are, it seems, little more than an embarrassment for those driving the revival.Despite profound gratitude towards those (principally Bowie) who have done so much to instigate the current Schelling renaissance, I want to suggest here that we should not be so quick to brush aside, or ‘translate’, Schelling’s theologico-religious interests—for such a dismissal leaves us not just decontextualizing Schelling’s Hegel-critique, but, as well, missing out on a crucial Schellingian contribution to contemporary debate about the question of onto-theology. Schelling’s continuing relevance is more than his blowing open the Hegelian Identity of Thought and Being; it is also his concomitant reinstatement—not merely incidental to but fundamental for his critique of Idealism’s auto-apotheosis—of the ancient Platonic conviction that the divinity ‘is’ epekeina tes ousias, beyond Being or any metaphysical construction.
Imitating God: The Truth of Things According to Thomas Aquinas
Authors: Pickstock Catherine 
Published: July 2007

How should one respond to the death of realism, the death of the idea that thoughts in our minds can represent to us the way things actually are in the world? For such a death seems to be widely proclaimed by contemporary philosophers.In summary, they argue that since we only have access to the world via knowledge, it is impossible to check knowledge against the world in order to see if it corresponds with it. This is a powerful and some might say unanswerable contention, and yet if we accept it, it seems to follow that there can be no such thing as truth at all. But how can Christians accept such a state of affairs, or accommodate themselves to it, since truth has always been held to be a predicate of God himself, and of Jesus Christ, the truth incarnate?
“I have Tears and Hope”: Martyrdom in the Twentieth Century
Authors: Murray Paul 
Published: July 2007

On the evening of the first of August, 1996, the Dominican Bishop of Oran in Algeria, Pierre Claverie, was murdered by a bomb placed in a side-road near his house. He had been warned many times about the danger of remaining in the country, especially since an underground group of Muslim terrorists had begun deliberately targeting people like himself. But he chose to stay. In the days after his death, against the wall near the place where he and his driver had been blown up, the local people placed flowers and small written tributes in his memory. Among them was a card from a young Algerian woman called Yasmina. On the card she wrote: “Ce soir, mon Pére, je n’ai pas de paroles. Mais j’ai des larmes et de l’espoir”. (“This evening, Father, I have no words. But I have tears and hope.”) Because these words are both heart-broken and hope-filled, I can think of no words more fitting to use as a title for this paper on martyrdom. “I Have Tears and Hope": Martyrdom in the Twentieth Century.I say “tears”, first, because looking back over the last one hundred years, one soon comes to realize that perhaps no other century in history has witnessed the death and martyrdom of so many people, or has seen so much systematic and deliberate torture of the innocent. And, added to the usual tragic circumstances associated with martyrdom, a vast number of people in the 20th century, found themselves caught up helplessly between the two great opposing ideologies of Fascism and Communism.
The Call to Holy Rest
Authors: Billy Dennis J. 
Published: July 2007

I once read a mystery novel where the main character, an author by profession, always finished one of his books by lighting a candle, uncorking a bottle of champagne, and toasting himself for a job well done. It was his way of celebrating the outpouring of his creative juices. It brought closure to his work, a festive spirit to his life, and release to pent-up tensions. The ritual became so much a part of his work that the two could hardly be separated. His creativity was sparked by the thought of the celebration to come; the celebration, in turn, derived its significance from the many hours of labour dedicated to the writing process. These two very different activities were closely related. Neither made any sense without the other.This simple example from the world of fiction has led me to think of God’s “rest” from his creative action in a similar way. The Book of Genesis reminds us that, after six days, God completed the work of creation by resting, blessing, and making holy the seventh day (Gn. 2:1-3). To say that God “finished” or “completed” his work on the seventh day implies that the very activity of “rest” is itself part of the creative process. Without it, something would be missing; the creative act itself would not be complete; a new creative act could not begin.
Newman's theology in the Dream of Gerontius
Authors: Velez Juan R. 
Published: July 2007

John Henry Newman once remarked to a friend that his Dream of Gerontius. “was written by accident — and it was published by accident”, yet his personal history proves otherwise; it was the fruit of many years of agonizing study and prayer leading him to the Roman Catholic Church. It is rightly considered a major contribution to Roman Catholic spirituality and doctrine which continues to inspire theology and piety.The Dream of Gerontius expresses in poetical form many truths of Catholic dogma concerning creation, redemption and eschatology. This, Newman’s longest poem, composed in 1865, almost twenty years after his entrance into full communion with the Roman Catholic Church, underscores his Catholic beliefs in the mysterious complementarity between God’s justice and mercy whereby at the particular judgment, some souls require a final preparation for heaven. In his Plain and Parochial Sermons Newman had rebutted the 19th century denial of possible eternal damnation. In the Dream of Gerontius, he emphasized God’s merciful dispensation. Eschatology is intertwined with Christology and Christian anthropology. Furthermore, the seeds of an ecclesiology of communion are present as a dominant theme.
God
Authors: McCabe Herbert 
Published: July 2007

‘God,’ ‘Theos,’ ‘Deus’ is of course a name borrowed from paganism; we take it out of its proper context, where it is used for talking about the gods, and use it for our own purposes. This is quite a legitimate piece of borrowing and quite safe so long as it does not mislead us into thinking that the God we worship (or don’t) is a god. We always do have to speak of our God with borrowed words; it is one of the special things about our God that there are no peculiar appropriate words that belong to him, as with the language of carpentry or computer-speak. He is always dressed verbally in second-hand clothes that don’t fit him very well. We always have to be on our guard against taking these clothes as revealing who and what he is.For this reason it is sometimes safer to use clothes that are quite obviously second-hand, words that have been quite scandalously ripped from their proper context and stretched and bent and distorted to suit our purposes. That is one reason for preferring ‘The Father’ to ‘God’ as a name for our God. ‘The Father’ is manifestly being used in a metaphorical or extended sense and so is unlikely to mislead us. It is also the word that Jesus prefers to use.
Cosmological Liturgy and a Sensible Priesthood
Authors: Fagerberg David W. 
Published: July 2007

In the field of theological studies, subdivided specialties have been separated from each other with such a watertight seal that those of us who regret such dissociation might find cause to applaud Mr. G. K. Chesterton’s assessment of what made for his success as a journalist.On the whole, I think I owe my success (as the millionaires say) to having listened respectfully and rather bashfully to the very best advice, given by all the best journalists who had achieved the best sort of success in journalism; and then going away and doing the exact opposite. For what they all told me was that the secret of success in journalism was to study the particular journal and write what was suitable to it. And, partly by accident and ignorance and partly through the real rabid certainties of youth, 1 cannot remember that I ever wrote any article that was at all suitable to any paper.... I wrote on a Nonconformist organ like the old Daily News and told them all about French cafes and Catholic cathedrals; and they loved it because they had never heard of them before. I wrote on a robust Labour organ like the old Clarion and defended medieval theology and all the things their readers had never heard of; and their readers did not mind me a bit.
War and Peace and the Environment
Authors: Echlin Edward P. 
Published: July 2007

The flower power of the sixties was ultimately anthropocentric in its, ‘make love, not war’. In America Philip Rule, S.J., observed that flower power died trampling flower beds during a demonstration at Harvard. Nevertheless, the tramplers had a point: love conquers conflict. Conflicts damage the whole earth, or soil, community, for whose health, people, under God, are responsible. Environmentalists, therefore, who increasingly include a significant percentage of Christians, are among peacemakers’— and earth lovers’—best friends. The peace movement, and environmentalists everywhere, are in at least partial ‘intercommunion’, they recognise each others’ ministries.And their mutually supportive ministries are (literally) vitally necessary. For human aggression among people and against the earth, remains wanton and, fortified by modem technologies, increasingly life threatening to all living beings on earth. The causes of conflict are myriad, including transnational corporation led globalization itself. Human beings are neither wise nor clever enough to manage the biosphere without conflict. World banks, trade organizations, and conglomerates fail to understand that the real, fundamental economy is the earth’s economy, within which all other economies are dependant and derivative. For humans to attempt to manage the world’s trade, or services, is like a child trying to manage a panther, which is pretty much the point of God’s words to Job (Job 38-39). Relentless population growth, with unsustainable demands on the earth’s water, soil fertility, and climate, brings conflict, not only in developing regions, but even in North America. Vanderbilt University’s Howard Harrod argues that anthropocentric utilitarianism, which devalues animals, triggers conflicts over human treatment of other animals.
Venerable Catherine McAuley and The Dignity of the Human Person
Authors: Allen Prudence 
Published: July 2007

Over a century before the principles of the “new evangelization” were proclaimed in 1965 in Gaudium et spes (The Pastoral Constitution on the Church and the Modem World) Catherine McAuley (1781-1841), vigorously promoted its two key principles: (1) the dignity of the human person and (2) the virtue of solidarity with the suffering poor, sick, and ignorant. From her First Conferences alter founding the Religious Sisters of Mercy in 1831 in Dublin, Ireland, Mother Catherine consistently taught her Sisters to put these principles into practice in their apostolic work in education and health care.Drawing upon Venerable Catherine McAuley’s original writings and biographies of her life and works, this article will demonstrate how she helped prepare the way for consecrated persons in the new evangelization of the Church in the modem world. The themes are divided as follows: Part I—The Dignity of the Human Person, Part II—Solidarity with the Poor, Sick, and Ignorant, and Part III—Urgent Problems for the Church in the Modem World.