bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The Writer as Creator
Authors: Vann Gerald 
Published: July 2007

Thou waterest the hills from thy high dwelling: the earth shall be filled with the fruit of thy works’: St Thomas took this verse from Psalm 103 as the text of his inaugural lecture as Master in Theology at Paris, for, he says, it is ordained from eternity by the king and lord of the heavens that the gifts of his providence should come to his lowest creatures through the mediation of those that are higher, and so teachers and doctors are as mountains watered from on high by divine wisdom that they may pass on that wisdom to those they teach.What is true of the theologian is true in a different way of every creative writer: he too is a mediator, he communicates a vision. But in what sense is he a creator? My concern here is to suggest questions rather than the answers to them: and here at once two different types of problem suggest themselves. The writer creates with words, but he also creates words. I am not thinking of the invention of neologisms: words are like living things, they grow, change, decay, die; and the fact that great Christian words can thus decay and die presents us with one of our most pressing problems. Some words become sterilized by over-familiarity, become labels empty of real meaning: do we stop to think what we really mean when we speak of grace or redemption? Some of the great Christian words have lost their virility, like ‘meekness’ and ‘mildness’.
Dating the Past With Radiocarbon
Authors: Hodgson P. E. 
Published: July 2007

One of the most striking manifestations of the underlying unity of all knowledge is the way in which a discovery in one branch of science often finds fruitful application in another. A recent example of this is the development by Professor Libby in America of a new method of dating archaeological samples using the techniques of nuclear physics. The basic fact underlying the method is that all archaeological specimens containing carbon also contain a small amount of radioactive carbon, or radiocarbon, which becomes progressively less in quantity as time goes on. The fraction of radiocarbon present can be measured, and hence the age of the sample deduced. To explain this in more detail, it is necessary to explain what is known as the carbon cycle and then to discuss some of the radioactive transformations which take place in the earth’s atmosphere.The chemical element carbon, which plays an essential part in all vital processes, continually takes part in a cyclic series of interchanges between the earth and its atmosphere. Plants obtain the carbon they need to grow by absorbing carbon dioxide from the air and, with the aid of sunlight, build up complex chemical compounds containing carbon by the process known as photosynthesis. Some carbon is also absorbed by roots from the soil, where it is present as a weak solution of carbonic acid. When a plant dies it is often burned, and the complex compounds are broken up and the carbon returned to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.
Morals and Language
Authors: Ernst Cornelius 
Published: July 2007

In his study of the tradition of thought in the early Middle Ages, a distinguished historian (Mr Richard Southern) remarks that it should be easier for us today than it was a hundred years ago to understand the fascination of logic for scholars of the eleventh century; for them as for us, ‘Logic was an instrument of order in a chaotic world’. Mr Southern speaks as a historian and a humanist, for whom thought is more immediately apprehended as an orchestral scoring of the themes of human need and of moral concern than in its own proper cogency. Yet the paradox of moral philosophy lies in just this incommensurability of the humane and the analytic: the task of moral philosophy is somehow to mediate; to explore the complexity of the humane and to map it with a disciplined fidelity.It might very well seem that the scholastic metaphysical tradition exhibits its inadequacy more patently here than anywhere else, with its manuals of moral theology, its solutions of problems of conscience by the numerical assessment of probable opinions, its approximation of moral philosophy to a demonstrative science, and more radically, with just this very metaphysical character itself. It is this last reproach which will specially concern us here. How, it may be felt, can a metaphysics, admittedly taking its point of departure in a physics, practise a fidelity to the complexity of a moral sensibility? Such a metaphysics can only be a bogus physics, setting up a fictitious world of quasi-physical entities, the behaviour of which could only serve as an excessively crude model for the delicately particular moral decisions and options of our humane activity.
The Church and Worker Education in the U.S.A.
Authors: Fitzsimons John 
Published: July 2007

The first attempts in the realm of worker education in the United States were made by Father Paul Dietz, a priest of the archdiocese of New York, more or less at the same time as Father Plater, S.J., was laying the foundations for the Catholic Social Guild in England. In 1910 he started to organize the scattered activities of individual Catholics in the fields of social education and action. He was spurred on by the hostile attitude of a number of Catholics to the American Federation of Labour (AFL), an association of craft unions headed by Samuel Gompers, and so with a group of Catholic AFL officials he founded the Militia of Christ for Social Services. The object of the Militia was to prevent socialist influence from increasing in the unions and to combat the ‘integrist’ Catholics who would have condemned the AFL out of hand. In the following year the Social Service Commission of the American Federation of Catholic Societies was formed with Father Dietz as its secretary, and with its growth the Militia gradually declined. In 1920 came the National Catholic Welfare Conference, the peace-time successor of the National Catholic War Council, set up by the American bishops to minister to general Catholic life in the U.S.A. They appointed as head of its Department of Social Action Mgr John A. Ryan, who had been the author of the progressive ‘Bishops’ Programme of Social Reconstruction’ published in 1919.Until the depression of the 1930’s most of the social study and social action of Catholics in the U.S.A. was stimulated, encouraged and initiated by the Social Action Department under Mgr Ryan’s dynamic leadership.
Garthewin: A Welsh Festival of the Drama
Authors: Evans Illtud 
Published: July 2007

Garthewin is the name of one of the most gracious of Welsh houses, but by this it has come to mean even more for the life of Wales. For here, serenely set in the hills and looking down to the vale of Elwy, a Georgian mansion, with all its privilege of place, has become a centre for the Welsh theatre. In 1937, Mr Robert Wynne, the owner of Garthewin, decided to convert a bam on his estate into a little theatre. The barn itself was built about 1770 of undressed stone, but within it had two remarkable features—a pair of brick arches—which lent themselves to the perfect adaptation of a simple building into a place where plays could be worthily, and audibly, performed. One arch forms the proscenium, and the theatre itself can accommodate about two hundred people. At Christmas it is the setting for the celebration of Midnight Mass.To begin with, Garthewin was used for occasional performances by amateur companies. It is not easily reached, and its immediate audience is drawn from the villages and scattered farms nearby. But at once its autonomy as a theatre, free from the irrelevant associations of chapel vestries and village halls where plays are generally only a means of raising funds for some local cause, gave a new seriousness to Welsh drama. Experimental plays and translations of European classics found a home at Garthewin, and the theatre, lying in the very shadow of the mansion, seemed to symbolize the emergence of the Welsh drama as the new inheritor of that unbroken cultural tradition which is the glory of Wales.
The Seventh Skin: The Novels of François Mauriac
Authors: Braybrooke Neville 
Published: July 2007

Above the bedclothes, over the sheets, sometimes men awaking will stare at their hands in amazement—dead fish gleaming in the moonlight; and, if it is stormy outside and the wind is howling, sometimes those fish will seem to twitch as if a fin or flipper moved. But reach for the nearby lamp, flick it on and such ghostly imaginings vanish. Like the rest of the body, the hands become taken for granted: men forget the mystery of their flesh, and not for one instant when they look at it do they remember those seven mysterious layers of skin which protect them. Custom has dulled their eyes to the miracle of consciousness.François Mauriac, I would submit, might be described as a novelist of the seventh skin. He is concerned not with outward appearances, but with the heart; not with neat artistic designs executed as an end in themselves, but with words as a means of testifying to the Word. Reality is the aim of his fiction—a reality whose drama is heightened because it is played against an eternal background. He has written a Life of Jesus (1937) and knows that only Jesus, had he so decided, could have written the perfect novel because, being perfect man, his vision was perfect. Others can only hope to report upon the world as they see it and, being fallen creatures, their vision may be faulty. It is the load that all artists who are Christians must accept and carry on their backs.
The Authority of St Augustine
Authors: Schlegel Dom Desmond 
Published: July 2007

In his ‘Traite des Études Monastiques’ Dom Jean Mabillon quotes with evident approval the opinion of a contemporary writer that whereas all the Greek Fathers are summed up in St John Chrysostom so all the Latin Fathers can truly be said to be contained in St Augustine. From the year 431 when Pope Celestine I sang the praises of Augustine in his well-known letter to the bishops of Gaul, the teaching Church has not ceased to recommend in an altogether exceptional way his writings and doctrine.Of course it is in the realm of divine grace that his authority is pre-eminent, but it would be inexact to confine his influence within such a limit. He is the Father of the Western Church, bridging the gulf between the old and the new; providing us with a summary of what had been thought out by his predecessors, and preparing the way for the great medieval development which was to follow. Living his life about midway between the councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon—probably the most vigorous period of the Church’s history—he brought to bear on Christian revelation the elements of pagan philosophy which his powerful and essentially courageous mind had duly assimilated.With Pelagianism in the fourth century something new appeared. It was almost as if the growing distance between then and the time of our Lord called for an increased self-reliance in him who would follow Christ, in order to bridge the gap. St Augustine, ever strongly aware of God’s transcendence and of man’s impotence before it, opposed and crushed this mistaken self-confidence by insisting on the exclusive omnipotence of love in grace.
St Augustine and Religious Life
Authors: Smith Aloysius 
Published: July 2007

About two years before his actual conversion St Augustine evinced the first signs of the kind of life he would embrace. He had reached the stage when it was no longer a matter of being sure of God but of ‘how to become more steadfast in God.’He hoped to be directed by Simplicianus as to which should be the best course for one in his case to walk in the way of God. He witnessed the church full of faithful and one went this way and one went that, and he felt unhappy that although he had renounced all desire of honour and gain because of the attraction he felt for the ‘sweetness of God and the beauty of his house which he loved’, there yet remained entanglements which he found it hard to sever.Augustine was aided in the last stages towards his conversion by the Striking accounts he heard of the numbers of those who devoted themselves to the monastic life. Pontitianus, his fellow countryman, a high official of the Milanese court, related to him the history of the Egyptian monk, St Antony, who on reading in St Matthew (19, 21): ‘Go, sell what thou hast and give to the poor and come follow me’, entered upon the religious life. He discovered that at that very time there was flourishing just outside Milan a monastery ‘full of good brethren’ under obedience to St Ambrose and this interested Augustine intensely. ‘Hitherto’, he says, ‘we knew nothing of it.’
The Muddled Marriage
Authors: Lumbreras Peter 
Published: July 2007

Having heard that some persons involved in ‘muddled marriages’ thought they could find a justification for their condition in an article written by my English confrere, Father Gerald Vann, O.P., and had so quoted it to their parish priests, I am reminded of the old story of the prisoner at the bar who at the question of the Court: ‘Guilty or not guilty?’ promptly replied: ‘Your Honour, I always thought myself to be guilty; but after listening to my lawyer’s plea I am beginning to wonder if I did any wrong’. The accused was misled by his counsel’s speech, and those Catholics have been misled by Fr Vann’s article.In each case, the source of the error lies in a misinterpretation, a misunderstanding over who is being addressed. The plea of the counsel for the defence was addressed to the court, and Father Vann’s paper was addressed to the clergy. The defendant thought his lawyer was speaking to him; and the Catholics in ‘bad marriages’ thought that Fr Vann was writing to them.St Thomas, in drawing a comparison between a judge and a lawgiver, shows that the latter is in much the better position in that he deals with human actions as future, while the former must deal with them as present; towards that which is present one is easily moved by love or hate, whereby one’s judgment becomes vitiated.
Anglo‐Catholic Sociology Today
Authors: Slesser Henry 
Published: July 2007

It is now some thirty years since a group of High Anglicans, moved by the disorder of the times—the first world war having recently ended and the promises of its ending being unfulfilled—were inspired to study and promote a Christian sociology which would be based on definite doctrinal assumptions. Before their decision, two approaches to the social problem were in vogue in the Church of England, the one an attempt to encourage amity between employers and their men, an endeavour illustrated by the work of the Industrial Christian Fellowship, a cautious movement encouraged of late years by many of the Bishops, and the other, more specifically aggressive and political, a propaganda which found expression in the Church Socialist League by a body indifferent, on the whole, to doctrine, but persuaded that Socialism was not incompatible with, if not essential to, true modern Christian practice.To neither of these objective did the new ‘League of the Kingdom of God’ (later to be renamed the ‘Christendom’ group) subscribe. Its principal inspirer, much influenced by the earlier beliefs of Maurice and his follower, Canon Widdrington, insisted that Christian living postulated a common life in which Christian values are embodied. He criticized what he called the ‘Mani- cheism’ of the modem Church in ignoring social justice as essential. The loss of the regulative, basic idea of the Kingdom of God, come out of the Passion, the Resurrection and the Ascension, had been disastrous.
Science and the Map of Knowledge
Authors: Caldin E. F. 
Published: July 2007

There are many unresolved questions about the relations of the natural sciences to Aristotelean-Thomist philosophy, and the accurate placing of science on the map of intellectual activities is one of the most important objectives of our time. The prestige of science is still so high that the relative neglect of it by Thomists is unfortunate, and a positive approach is of great value. The American Dominicans have therefore done wisely as well as boldly in setting up a permanent institution where scientists and philosophers can meet and collaborate, with a permanent staff most of whom have been trained in one of the natural sciences as well as in the Thomist tradition. This institution is called the Albertus Magnus Lyceum for Natural Science and is situated in a suburb of Chicago. Its leaders hope that, by bringing men engaged in specialized research into contact with a homogeneous intellectual tradition, they will be able to help scientists towards a synthesis that they feel to be necessary for the health of science itself as well as for modem culture generally. Clearly this venture could be of the greatest importance.The present volume is a report of an ambitious five-week meeting held in 1952, at which a varied group of experts in philosophy, logic and the natural sciences considered the relations between modem science and the Aristotelean tradition. Physics, chemistry, biology and psychology were allotted a week each, and the final week was devoted to an attempt at synthesis.
Sacred, Holy or Religious Art?
Authors: Chute Desmond 
Published: July 2007

There is a very real sense in which everything that is is sacred. We say, or at least said, that life is sacred; motherhood is sacred, and so on. Far be it from me to deprecate this usage. For does not the root evil of our time, the secularization of life, he precisely in atrophy of the religious sense? It was this very tendency of the historical process which caused voices to be raised amid the wilderness of nineteenth-century industrialism, reaffirming the holiness not only of God’s creation but also of the works of man.Holy: holiness: here we have le mot juste. We say God is holy. The word is inadequate but not erroneous. It would never occur to us to say God is sacred: not only would that be erroneous, it would be absurd. Sacred to what? This question alone is enough to make it clear that whereas the concept of holiness is absolute, that of the sacred is relative. It might be said that holy is predicated of God and of his gifts to us, sacred of our gifts to him.Whatever is sacred is holy, but not all that is holy is sacred, save in the very diluted sense of meriting our respect. Be it clear from the outset that in these pages the word is not used in this its most generic meaning but in the truest and most positive sense by which sacred signifies set apart by man for the worship of God.
Architecture and Society
Authors: Purcell Donovan 
Published: July 2007

When church building became possible again after the second World War there must have been many English Catholics who looked forward confidently to an era of vigorous and inspiring new churches enriched with the best examples of contemporary art. Among them were certainly a number of architects who, after a long enforced separation from their calling, longed for an opportunity to express, in the creation of a new church, their gratitude for a safe return and their hope for the future.Now, after nearly ten years during which many new churches have been built or planned, the prospect is so bleak that most of these architects, and many laymen with them, are feeling nothing but discouragement and frustration. A few of the new churches really do express a living art. The rest are pitiful proof of timid conventionality and of the still powerful effect of Pugin’s teaching that Gothic is the only proper and morally defensible style of architecture for churches, or for any buildings even remotely connected with them. Even where the strict Gothic is abandoned, the alternative seems only too often to be a veritable fruit salad of mixed conventional forms, something for all tastes.Art, it has been said, is the mirror of society. Just as Classical Greek culture produced the refined beauties of the Parthenon, so the vigorous and exuberant background of the four centuries following the Norman Conquest produced, by gradual development from the staid Romanesque, all the upsoaring excitement of Gothic architecture.
The Hydrogen Bomb: A Scientist's Description
Authors: Hodgson P. E. 
Published: July 2007

There are basically two types of process leading to the large-scale liberation of the energy locked in the nucleus of the atom: fission and fusion or, more simply, breaking up large nuclei and sticking together small ones. In the fission process, a nucleus of uranium or plutonium breaks up into two approximately equal parts, with emission of energy. A few neutrons are also emitted, and these can cause more fissions in the surrounding material, thus maintaining the reaction. Energy is also released if two nuclei of very light elements like hydrogen or helium coalesce; this is called fusion. This process will only take place if the combining nuclei have sufficient energy to overcome the powerful electrical repulsion tending to keep them apart, and this means that the hydrogen has to be at a very high temperature before the reaction will begin. The required temperature is many hundred of times greater than the highest attainable by purely chemical means but it can be produced by a nuclear fission reaction. A fission bomb is therefore used to detonate a surrounding mass of hydrogen. The resulting thermonuclear reaction, as it is called, is self-propagating until the reacting mass is blown apart by the force of the explosion.It is usual to express the power of a nuclear bomb in terms of the weight of T.N.T. that releases the same amount of energy. The fission bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were equivalent to about 20,000 tons of T.N.T. and since then fission bombs of up to about twenty-five times this power have been developed, together with a wide range of smaller weapons for tactical use.
The Arrival of the Resident Diplomat
Authors: Hale John 
Published: July 2007

So much of what was once held to have been ‘re-born’ about the year 1450 has since been shown to have been lustily alive in earlier generations that as a result historians are reluctant to attribute any notable changes at all to the period of the Renaissance. It is useful to be reminded by Professor Mattingly of an institution—permanent diplomatic representation—that began and rose to something like its full height between the years 1450 and 1550.This book is not only about a formative period in the history of diplomacy, but provides a valuable contribution to one of the most fruitful of recent approaches to the past—the study of international relations. The purpose of this study is threefold; to question the motives which led countries to be concerned with one another, to describe the means they employed to get in touch and to negotiate, and lastly to suggest the background of shared ideas against which negotiations .proceeded: ideas derived from the practice of chivalry, which had provided something like an universal gentleman’s code of what might and what might not be done in time of war, the study of civil law, and the continuing pressure of Christian morality formalized in the canons of the Church—three elements which did much to compensate for the lack of formal International Law.