bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Sexual Minorites as a Challenge to Christian Fellowship
Authors: Pinnington Judith 
Published: July 2007

It may be that the following comments will appear to some readers applicable to all ‘sexual minorities’. I myself do not so apply them. I have trans+exuak, entirely in mind as I write, and not merely because they tend to be the most seriously discriminated against. However, it is not for me to dictate to others how they should or should not make use of these ideas. If readers wish to see the trans-sexual’s dilemma as a paradigm of some larger or even quite different dilemma, then so be it.The Open Church Group in Great Britain has been campaigning to persuade homosexuals who “feel separated from their churches because of their nature to reconsider their position and return to the practice of their faith”. The problem which the group envisages is a real, though variable one. Attitudes among theologians may be slowly changing (though not all of us would agree that in this field all change is for the good); but, as two American writers on female homosexuality have put it, “Inroads into religious thought and re-evaluation are a slow and cumbersome process. [Lesbians] live in the now.” It is scarcely sufficient to shrug the shoulders and say “In time, it will all work out”. This is not enough for Christian fellowship, because Christian fellowship belongs to the now, not to the contingent future.Attitudes in the Churches which go so far as to deny Christian fellowship to ‘sexual minorities’ may be reduced to one simple, if generally unrecognized factor: dread. Mystery misconceived is dread: it is distracting, zwiespältig — dividing the mind against itself, making neutrality impossible. It is the negative side of holy fear: it is what St Paul presumably meant when he warned against the destructive consequences of unworthy communion. Whatever the aetiological reasons which might be adduced in hard clinical fashion to ‘explain’ what has been called ‘sexual deviance’, it remains at the end of the day for a great many ‘normal’ people, and therefore for a great many Christians, an object of dread, something which unsettles their security.
Visual Metaphors, Theatres and Courts
Authors: Swanston Hamish F. G. 
Published: July 2007

There was, earlier this winter, a great deal of ribald talk about a scene in the National Theatre’s production of Howard Brenton’s play The Romans in Britain. There is likely to be more talk of the same sort now that the Secretary of the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association is proceeding with her suit against Mr Michael Bogdanov for procuring the commission of an act of gross indecency between Mr Peter Sproule and Mr Greg Hills on 19th December last. And all this talk will doubtless be excited by public interest in Mr Timothy Sainsbury’s Indecency Displays Bill and the Government’s promise to assist the progress of that Bill through Parliament. We are, it seems, again about to debate the meaning of ‘indecency’.Though Sir Peter Hall has not followed the distasteful example of another theatre director, I would yet like to suggest that The Romans and indecency should be considered with the Old Vic production of Macbeth in mind.I had secured my ticket for that Macbeth some weeks before the production opened, so I was not required to join the line of those who had been excited by the critical notices which quickly made Mr Brian Forbes’ production and Mr Peter O’Toole’s performance notorious. The opportunities for happiness, or even a little pleasure, are not so common in my life that I would easily forego a performance of any of Shakespeare’s plays, and among them, Macbeth has especial claims. Once, when quite a small boy, I surprised the greatest Macbeth of my time rehearsing to himself across the lawn: ‘Learning me lines, dear laddie’, Godfrey Tearle admitted with a flourish.
An Ethics for Behaviour Modification
Authors: Meynell Hugo 
Published: July 2007

To assure ourselves of the benefits of the theory and practice of behaviour modification, and to avoid the dangers, which are obviously immense, we urgently need a comprehensively critical ethical theory, on the basis of which what is good for individuals and for society may be reasonably determined on the evidence, and not depend simply on arbitrary flat or the whim of the majority or arty powerful group. Once such a theory is outlined, it will, I am afraid, be found to be incompatible at first sight with the theoretical basis usually taken to underlie the most sophisticated techniques of behaviour modification. However, I shall argue that an appropriately restricted and modified behaviourism will be quite consistent with the required ethical theory.In reading the literature on this and related topics, one is made most painfully aware of the yawning gap which there is in the place where a rational ethics ought to be. (If anyone is to be blamed for this, it is the moral philosophers rather than the psychologists.) One can hardly wonder at the fear expressed by some members of the public that, the more efficient our techniques of behaviour modification become, the less notion we have of what ends we ought to aim at, what states of affairs we ought to avoid, in our employment of such techniques.
Making Peace at Spode
Authors: Wicker Brian 
Published: July 2007

The world being what it is, a ‘peace movement’ is bound to be a haven for odd-balls, eccentrics, the awkward squad: people who go against the direction of the current and resist the conventional wisdom. On the other hand, a movement composed solely of such people will always lack effective organisation, and its protests will peter out into mere idiosyncrasy. I think that these two facts go far to explain why the English Dominicans have been somewhere near the centre of the Catholic peace movement in Britain ever since it began (if one can talk of a beginning) with the founding of PAX in the mid-thirties of this century. For the English Dominicans — at least as far as my experience goes — are themselves an awkward squad: a regiment of misfits and individualists. I don’t know much about the Dominican Order elsewhere in the world: I suspect that outside Britain they may be very different. Neither do I know much about their history in this country. So I speak ‘existentially’, as the jargon goes, from my own personal observation only.My first experience goes back to the Oxford of the early nineteen-fifties: and to feel the difference then between, say, the atmosphere of Jesuit Campion Hall and the atmosphere of Dominican Blackfriars was to experience an almost tangible shock. As I remember it now, Campion Hall was like something out of Henry James: a rich tapestry of dark browns and reds, complex and subtle in its visual as well as its intellectual organisation. Its inhabitants wore their black suits and soutanes as a uniform: one had to dig quite deep to discover the person within. Dominican Blackfriars, by contrast, was light and airy; a set of variations upon the theme of whiteness and transparency.
A Theology For Britain In The 80s ?
Authors: West Angela , Ruston Roger 
Published: July 2007

Has Liberation Theology taken root in Britain? The Times (28 August) detected it as an alien influence when the Archbishop of Liverpool and other local churchmen supported the BCC grant of £500 to the Liverpool 8 Defence Committee. The complaint was that although it might be appropriate in its countries of origin, with their acute poverty, cruelty, exploitation and political corruption, in Britain it can do nothing but play into the hands of political extremists. But £500 won’t go very far towards a revolution these days. It will soon be eaten up in fares and lawyers’ fees. It is clearly the sign of the churches taking sides — that is, changing sides — in a political struggle, that the Times doesn’t like. Whatever we may think of the Liverpool events, the 80s is clearly going to be a dangerous decade. There have been warnings of deepening social division, more urban conflict and a police force changing its main concern from crime-prevention to national security. If this is the way things are going, there will certainly be serious attempts by British Christians to learn lessons from the Liberation Theologians and apply them on their own ground.It was concerns of this kind that caused a group of politically- minded Christians to organise a conference entitled “A Theology for Britain in the 80s” at Easter time this year in Digby Stuart College, Roehampton and to get funds from — the BCC. The event had been planned for two years and the participants were personally invited months beforehand and asked to prepare themselves through discussions with their “base groups”. However, judging by the lateness of some invitations, the organisers had difficulty in attracting many of the people they had first asked to this theological banquet. Some of the guests, it seems, had pressing reasons of their own for not turning up; and the organisers had been obliged, to go out and compel others to come in and fill the empty places.
Christianity and Politics: The Case of Gerrard Winstanley
Authors: Turner Denys 
Published: July 2007

“For I tell you and your preachers, that Scripture which saith The poor shall inherit the earth, is really and materially to be fulfilled. For the earth is to be restored from the bondage of sword property, and it is to become a common treasury in reality to whole mankind; for this is the work of the true saviour to do, who is the true and faithful Leveller, even the spirit and power of universal love...Thus wrote Gerrard Winstanley in 1650, about one year after the execution of Charles I. Sketching in the economic and political conditions of an earlier revolutionary period, Engels wrote in The Peasant War in Germany:“Even the so-called religious wars of the sixteenth century involved primarily positive material class interests. Although the class struggles of the day were carried out under religious shibboleths, and though the interests, requirements, and demands of the various classes were concealed behind a religious screen, this changed nothing in the matter and is easily explained by the conditions of the time.”
Pointers Towards A Popular Church In Britain
Authors: Kirby Peadar 
Published: July 2007

Peru has a Left-wing daily paper called El Diario de Marka. On the day after Pope John Paul issued his encyclical Laborem Exercens the paper carried a cartoon covering most of its front page which summed up its view of the significance of the encyclical for the Peruvian situation. It showed a determined looking Pope John Paul carrying a banner which read: “Free Trade Unions, Right to Strike, Co-Ownership of the Means of Production and Just Remuneration, Social Justice”. He was bearing down on a rather smug President Belaunde who stood with a banner behind his back saying “Anti-Strike Decree” and thinking “Terrorist”.The fact that such a cartoon would even appear in a Left-wing paper, let alone cover most of its front page, indicates the importance of the popular church for the Peruvian Left. This was further underlined by the amount of space and the sympathetic coverage the paper gave the encyclical in marked contrast to that given by the bourgeois press. Nor is this simply a recognition of the large number of Christians who are trade union and political militants. Perhaps more important is the new image this has given the church and the consequent expectation that a papal statement on social justice would be a broadly Left-wing document.Occasions such as this serve to show just how significant is the popular church, both politically and ecclesiologically. Not only is it new to find large sectors of the church being the natural allies of political progressives but it is even more novel to find that this alliance has caused secular progressives to re-evaluate the meaning of Christianity itself and to come to expect that even some of its more conservative leaders must themselves be progressive if they choose to criticise society from a Christian standpoint.
New Ministries: From Dream to Reality
Authors: Boivin Marcel 
Published: July 2007

Somehow, the subject of new ministries always calls up to my mind the picture of those hundreds of young people who, in the course of an ecumenical session held in Manchester in 1970, had filled a vast auditorium to hear Canon John V Taylor give an address on possible new forms of ministry. Expectations were running high. On the Protestant side, there was the widespread feeling that the pastorate was welded to the establishment rather than in live contact with people. On the Catholic side, there was the vexing combination of decreasing numbers of vocations to the priesthood and growing numbers of resignations from it. The Canon’s address was challenging and one could feel that the crowd was of one mind with him: indeed there was a vital need to re-assess the Church’s ministerial structures and to re-distribute ecclesial functions. The trouble began when he went on to propose his list of reformed ministries. These turned out to be a selection from the wide choice offered by the New Testament, and they rallied no one; to some they appeared to be no match for the priesthood, to others they seemed to be too ancient to again deserve a place under the sun. The question-period soon degenerated into a high-pitched barrage of objections and confusion was the net result of the day.Ten years have passed. In the Catholic Church at least, the question of priesthood and ministry has been studied from all angles and there is a growing consensus on the need to disentangle the two. Some concrete steps have been taken in that direction, as witnessed by a recent issue of Pro Mundi Vita Dossiers (June 1980).
Lonergan and Hume II: Epistemology (2)
Authors: Fitzpatrick J 
Published: July 2007

What binds together the three steps or stages in Lonergan’s theory of knowledge — experience, understanding, judging - and makes them into one dynamic activity, is the pressure in the inquirer to discover the truth, what Lonergan has called ‘the eros of the mind’, the free, unrestricted desire to know. Knowing is a conscious, intending activity and what is intended is the truth. It is this intention to know, this psychic drive or thrust and not sensory extroversion to what is presumed (as in Hume) to be ‘already out there now’ that is the overarching criterion of truth. What is known is related immediately to this self-transcending nisus; understanding and judgment are simply answers to the questions generated by the desire to know. Put another way, the questions leading to understanding and judgment are an unfolding of this basic intentionality. The desire to know is something that arises spontaneously and irresistibly in human beings and is present in the reader who is attending to what is being said in this article, striving to understand it and asking if this understanding is true. But while this striving for the truth is the overarching criterion of objectivity, each level of cognition has its own peculiar function to perform and so its own criterion of objectivity; or we might say that the quest for objective knowledge is manifested in different ways at the different stages of knowing.What is peculiar to the data of experience is their givenness — they are there — and hence the criterion of objectivity at the level of seeing, hearing etc, is to see or hear what is there and not to see or hear what is not there. At the level of sensation the subject must be submissive to the givenness of the data (and not, for example, fabricate his own evidence or grounds).
Consecrated Virginity
Authors: Rees Elizabeth 
Published: July 2007

During the last ten years, a new form of Christian lifestyle has begun to be lived out — that of the consecrated virgin living in the world. At a time when many people are searching for ways of ministry in the Church that allow for real depth of commitment combined with real freedom of expression, it has escaped many people’s notice that the Church now gives her blessing to the ancient lifestyle of consecrated virginity. The consecrated virgin is a deeply committed woman who publicly vows to remain celibate for life, in order to give all her loving energies to Christ and his Church. But she keeps a real freedom of lifestyle, always choosing where, how and with whom she will live; she is thus free to follow the creative leading of the Holy Spirit in a way unprecedented among women religious in recent centuries.The life of virginity has existed from earliest times. Christ claimed this lifestyle, according to Matthew, with his rather stark statement: “There are eunuchs who have made themselves that way for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let anyone accept this who can”. (Mat 19:12). He too apparently valued the lifestyle for the freedom it gave him — freedom to spend whole nights in prayer without depriving a loving wife of his attentions, and freedom to live how, where and with whom he liked, in order to best do his Father’s work.St Paul, as “one who, by the Lord’s mercy has stayed faithful” to his Master’s celibate lifestyle (I Cor 7:25), several times describes virginity with tenderness and simplicity.
On Being Dominican
Authors: McCabe Herbert 
Published: July 2007

“They began to speak as the Spirit gave them utterance . . . and their hearers were bewildered because each one heard them speaking in his own language.”We are the “Friars Preachers”, the preaching brethren, a community that specialises in talk. This is the mystery to which we have all been summoned. I say this community is a mystery in the sense in which a sacrament or a work of art is a mystery; there is a depth of meaning in it that is by no means obvious on the surface at first sight, a depth that reveals itself only gradually and in hints and glimpses as we enact and re-enact the mystery. Macbeth is a good thriller; but as we grow familiar with it, it yields profound secrets about man and nature and time, secrets that can only be revealed in this way, indirectly, as symbolised, as half hidden. Again, the Eucharist is a commonplace symbolic meal, a token of hospitality and friendship, but as we enter into it, it reveals the depth of love which is God, the love enacted on the cross. And so it is with us; we are a commonplace gathering of men meeting to make decisions about our work, men partly anxious, mainly bored, hoping to get a few things cleared up as well and as quickly as possible so that we can get away: but there is a depth here too.The depth is not something alongside, added on to, associated with the surface significance; the deep meaning of Macbeth is not additional to the story of murder and intrigue; the grace of the Eucharist is not something associated with, linked with, the sacrament; the mystery of our community is not something alongside, additional to, our day to day life and work and difficulties: it is just the depth within them. We do not have a professional job together with a spiritual life, the depth and the spirituality are just in the living together and the doing of the work.
Eric Gill and Workers' Control
Authors: Cunningham Adrian 
Published: July 2007

‘ . . all decent people are ultimately anarchists — certainly all Christians must be.’[Letter to Stanley Morrison 16.9. 36]The importance of Gill’s political writings lies in their linking of two major traditions of response to industrial capitalism, that of libertarian socialism and that of Catholicism. In the line of Morris and Kropotkin he is a significant figure; in the history of modem English Catholicism, a major one.Industrialism in nineteenth and twentieth century Europe can be seen as consisting of two basic phases. In the first industrial revolution there was a breaking of the traditional vertical links between social strata and a tendency for them to polarise into selfconsciously opposed classes. In the second wave of the industrial revolution the horizontal links of family, workplace and voluntary association which had survived are weakened or broken. A basic strand of socialist thought was preoccupied with the first development. It tended to welcome the polarization of social classes and to stress the conquest of state power and state control of industry as the agent of the liberation of individuals. In their very different ways, anarchists and catholics were as responsive to the second as to the first development of industrialism. Attention to the disruption of horizontal relations of work and domestic life produces an hostility towards, at least a scepticism about, the role of the state, of centralization, and of the mass-organization of work. Issues of control and quality of life predominate, whether the focus is on the family, the individual, or group of workers.
Bernard Sharratt's Little Parallelepiped
Authors: Kerr Fergus 
Published: July 2007

Sharratt has taken the place for which the name of his father predestined him. In Blackwell’s English Literature department his book, if book it is, fits squarely on the shelves, or interlopes roundly, between the texts ascribed to Shakespeare and the works produced by Shaw. Physically, at least, it has the shape and weight of a book. Legibly printed, fondly designed, it also has a marvellous photograph of the Author on the jacket. Apparently taken on a motorway lay-by one misty Kentish dawn, perhaps on his daily jog, he is at first blush gazing truculently out into the far distance. On second inspection, however, like Wittgenstein’s famous duck-rabbit, he turns out to have his eyes slanted resolutely upon oneself — his reader, the innocent eye, his hypocrite lecteur. To go by her latest communication Dame Helen Gardner isn’t going to like Reading Relations. To drop some more illuminating names, the other waiting space into which this little parallelepiped so engagingly enters is the clearing between Terry Eagleton and Gabriel Josipovici (Marx and Nietzsche, or if you prefer: Raymond Williams and Roland Barthes).For a start, the very idea of a book, with an author, has become questionable. In 1969, in a journal rejoicing in the name of Man- teia, Roland Barthes wrote of “the death of the Author” (I don’t say that he was the first to do so). The story goes roughly as follows. Once upon a time, in the pre-modem cultures, the responsibility for a narrative was assumed by a relator, a shaman or a seanachaidh, whose “performance” might be admired, but whose “genius”, “originality”, etc. if such concepts had existed, would have counted as a defect and embarrassment
Reasoning about the Bomb
Authors: Ruston Roger 
Published: July 2007

A few days after the publication of the Church of England report, The Church and the Bomb, a Foreign Office spokesman replied to the suggestion that the Church has a duty to give a moral lead to the nation by saying that “giving a moral lead may be good for the conscience but it is not a valid proposition in the real world”. A somewhat more elaborate version of the morality versus reality outlook occurred in Bernard Williams’s talk on Channel 4 on 15 November (now published in New Society, 18 November). He said that something he called the Simple Moral Argument about deterrence works in the abstract but is useless for coming to any conclusions about how to live with nuclear weapons now we have them. It is the business of practical and political rationality to argue about what to do next. (Unfortunately, he went on to say, practical rationality soon breaks down amid the complexities of deterrence theory and we are left with scepticism as our only intellectual resource.)It is a fact that the apparent divorce between morality and practical reason is brought into sharp focus by the issue of nuclear deterrence. To simplify the picture somewhat: against nuclear deterrence are to be found nearly all those who give priority in international relations as in personal relations to certain inviolable moral principles; in favour of nuclear deterrence — in some form at least — are to be found nearly all those who believe that moral principles must be subordinated to “reason” or “reality”, especially in matters of security. Underlying the difference over nuclear deterrence are undoubtedly some fundamentally opposed value- choices at work, but also some fundamental confusions about the meaning of morality and practical reason.