bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
On Misleading the Clergy in Matters of Marriage
Authors: Hoskin Michael 
Published: July 2007

So much has been written in recent months on the problem of family limitation that one must hesitate before adding to the mountain of literature. Yet the situation is desperate: as Catholics try to observe the recent teaching, marriages are wrecked and the toll steadily mounts of those who formally leave the Church, or lapse, or give up the sacraments, or live with a constant sense of bad conscience. Meanwhile we find ourselves isolated on this issue not only from the rest of the secular world – this in itself would not disturb us – but from other Christian bodies; and on a matter on which the New Testament has little to say.The anguish of individual souls is matched by the physical suffering of whole nations that live in continual hunger. The problem is recognised at last but its vast scale is not always appreciated: on February 6 the Population Reference Bureau in Washington reported that if present trends continue the world population will more than double – that is, there will be over 3,500,000,000 extra mouths to feed – by the end of the century. None of us can grasp a number of such magnitude, so let us put the issue another way. In more and more countries the infant who survives his first few weeks is nearly certain to reach maturity; since the great majority of mankind marry and have children, it follows that if the average family contains only four children the population will almost double with each generation; and it is then only a matter of simple arithmetic to work out how long it will be before there is insufficient standing room on our planet and we shall literally have filled the earth.
Love and Heresy
Authors: Webb Geoffrey 
Published: July 2007

‘Time was’, wrote William, ‘when the corrupt love of the flesh had its masters, who were so skilled in their subject that the most famous of them was constrained, even by the lovers and companions of his depravity, to recant by praising the opposite of what he had originally taught’. The reference to Ovid is clear enough. The Ars Amatoria, to a monastic mind of the twelfth century, is the testament of a pastmaster in corruption and perversity, of a persistent follower of the bent of fallen nature, which is away from God, back to the flesh, and downward to the earth.The due order of nature, for William, is the upward direction that fire takes, for the soul is created to look heavenward, to rise in pure spirituality and be identified with God whose image it is. And it is meant to spiritualise the body, and carry it in that same upward direction – as far as that is possible on earth – aiming at least toward some position between earth and heaven. If heaven is unattainable before death, at least one can strive to be lifted up from the earth. But fallen man, with such as Ovid for his guide, is only too prone to cleave downward, to the flesh, to the earth, and to corruption. And this is the opposition that William traces in the first chapter of his Nature and Dignity of Love, the work which was called Anti-Masonem in the middle ages, on account of its avowed attack on the Ars Amatoria.
Are We Reforming the Liturgy?
Authors: Lash Nicholas 
Published: July 2007

The period since the promulgation of the Constitution on the Liturgy has seen, in this country as in every other, a considerable number of alterations in the ceremonies of the mass, the most obvious of which has been the introduction of English. These changes have been received with a mixture of enthusiastic approval, quiet acceptance and strongly expressed antipathy. But the time is overdue when we should have stopped asking: ‘Are the changes going well?’ and should have begun to ask: ‘Are we reforming the liturgy?’.It is the purpose of this essay to suggest that, whereas the nature of liturgical reform and the radical principles that must be kept in mind in working towards the goal have been clearly stated in various documents promulgated by the Vatican Council, they have not yet been sufficiently received into the general consciousness, with the result that there is still a danger that we shall fail to achieve the task set us by the Council. This failure would not consist simply in nonachievement. Now that the whole question of reforming the liturgy has been explicitly raised in the minds of all church-going catholics, misconceptions concerning the goal and the radical principles of reform will, in turn, give rise to false ideas about the nature of the liturgy and, indeed, of the church herself. Once fundamental mistakes are made, it is too late to say: ‘Let’s start again; we will forget the past two years’. History moves one way, and takes an inexorable toll of wrong decisions.
The Flight to Woman
Authors: Stewart J. E. 
Published: July 2007

Karl Stern writes in The Flight from Woman of a male-female polarity which runs through life, and suggests that it is a kind of ultimate, ‘anchored in the absolute’. One is reminded of D. H. Lawrence’s ‘two principles’, a male and female polarity at the heart of things. To Lawrence the work of the male is to actualise, to bring into being, the turbulent potentiality of the Flesh, a disturbing darkness which is prior to rationality, morality and value, and which is ambivalently savage and tender.This conviction that there is an area of dionysiac darkness and force within men, to be tapped, to be entered, a further resource of power beyond the polite liberal enclosures of conscious awareness, may go back to the nineteenth century to Schopenhauer (who believed in and feared it) and Nietzsche (who affirmed it) but it is a twentieth-century creed, confirmed by Freud and by the shock with which men have recognised their own violent depths. What are we to do? The familiar answer is that we are to accept the dark, this female pre-rational source, as the really ultimate thing which defines us as what we really or intrinsically are. So – obviously – this is what we ought to be. The hunger for extreme situations, for shock, for the perverse, which one meets for example in Antonin Artaud or in Genet, is a sign of this almost metaphysical belief in a deeper passional ground to which we must break through by violence, abandoning the tight restrictive world of morality and conduct.
The Renovation of the Old Jerusalem
Authors: Haughton Rosemary 
Published: July 2007

It was time, evidently, that someone should make a thorough study of marriage as an institution in the twentieth century, and do so from a Christian point of view. It was time to look at the way people actually think and live their marriages and consider those of others. It was time to be unsatisfied with the Christian or Catholic label as sufficient indication of what the labelled ones think and feel. It was time to do all this in a way that would make clear to priests (priests both at work and in the process of education) the real nature of the problems they have to cope with in their parishes, and help them to do so with compassion but also with understanding. It is important that this should be done because the state of the institution of marriage in a particular community, and the attitudes and situations that attend it, dictate the structure and growth of that society, form its behaviour in other departments of life, and decide its future for good or ill.Father Haring is nothing if not thorough. His 488 pages examine every conceivable aspect of marriage and family life from the sociological, theological and practical points of view, and every point he makes is supported by statistics of public-opinion polls (mostly from Germany, Holland and Belgium). And since my final, depressing conclusion at the end of all this hard work is that the book is a monumental disaster I had better begin by saying all the nice things I can find to say, and there are plenty.
The Devil and his Angels
Authors: McDermott Timothy 
Published: July 2007

There is a parlour-game in which a whispered message is passed down a line from player to player and comes out unrecognisably distorted at the end. Sometimes the result is whimsical, sometimes hilarious, sometimes it is merely flat. Invariably it is ridiculous. Now this is not merely a game for parlours. It is a game which the succeeding generations of mankind have been playing with one another throughout history; and there we call it tradition (which is after all only a Latin word for handing on). Men of one generation after another have handed on their thoughts, their customs, their institutions to succeeding generations who have often made extraordinary and unrecognisable use of them. Sometimes the results are whimsical, more often they are tiresomely childish.We in the Christian church have on our hands a great number of conceptions that started their life as adult, but, because they have been let slip from generation to generation by mere tradition without understanding, are now thoroughly and tiresomely childish. This article is an attempt to rescue one such conception from the childishness in which it is wrapped: namely, our conception of the Devil and his angels. It is an attempt to unroll tradition, so to speak, and catch our present conception in the making; to watch generation pass on its message to generation, and ask what message we would have received if each generation had made sure it understood what the previous generation was saying. Perhaps such an article can serve to start the original message on its way again.
Gill Sans….
Authors: Cunningham Adrian 
Published: July 2007

Writing of Eric Gill some years ago Graham Greene remarked that ‘Catholicism in England instead of producing revolutionaries, produces only eccentrics, and that Gill was a disturbing intruder among the eccentrics . . . That overpowering tradition of eccentricity simply absorbed him until even his most outrageous anticlerical utterances caused only a knowing smile on the face of the faithful.’ And we have seen quite a lot of those silly weary smiles yet again in the reception of Mr Speaight’s biography of Gill. Rarely can such a beautifully produced and expensive book have received such accolades for the biographer’s skill and such a confident dismissal of the subject. One sees the book being read with a nostalgic regret for the sunny days of such delightful chesterbelloc buffoonery with all the home-grunnit food, tunics and sandals, and placed on the shelf with a sad shrug, ‘Poor Gill’.I do not want to be misunderstood, Gill was certainly eccentric in many respects, his views on monarchy and the indecency of husband and wife kneeling together in church, for example, and Mr Speaight has valuably stressed Gill’s Victorian formation which plays an important part in all this. He has also filled in many of the gaps in the Autobiography, particularly the incidents leading up to the removal from Ditchling, his documentation is wide and admirably integrated. Gill’s biography is perhaps an unenviable and delicate task, but I think the reception of the book and the confirmation of Gill’s place among the wayward cranks of English Catholicism owes something to the biographer’s interpretation of his subject, or rather the interpretation he fails to make.
German Christians and Germany's Boundaries
Authors: Boxer Charles 
Published: July 2007

It was rather as one had supposed. The massive show of solidarity with the CDU in the last election presented by German Catholicism in all its shapes and forms was the last outing before being trundled into the Church History Museum. Much has happened between the General Election last October and the local North-Rhine Westphalian elections in July. Rumour had it that an anonymous article which appeared in the March number of Wort und Wahrheit was written by none other than Bernard Hanssler. Wort und Wahrheit is a periodical that tends to reflect episcopal opinion; Bernard Hanssler is the priest in charge of the Central Committee of German Catholicism; the article was entitled ‘The end of political Catholicism’.Dr Günther Schreiber has recently suggested that catholic authorities have recognised that some basic re-thinking of the official political attitudes of German Catholicism was necessary. His analysis of the situation raises considerable doubts about the motives behind this reappraisal. It has been much more a defensive reaction to the inevitable break-up of the Adenauer ideology than a genuine attempt to think out for instance, the implications of the Second Vatican Council; much more a withdrawal from a position that was distasteful to democratic opinion, than a realisation of what the church’s presence in a modern society might mean. The North-Rhine Westphalian elections were heralded by a pastoral letter stressing the neutrality of the church towards the political parties.
New Left Catholics
Authors: Williams Raymond 
Published: July 2007

Some three years ago I was asked to write an introduction to a new journal of radical catholic opinion. I sent along, to what proved to be Slant, what seemed to me at the time a slightly rash note of welcome, and was much impressed, when the first number appeared, to find that I had been understood as cautious, suspicious, and even vaguely minatory. Such ambivalences will doubtless recur. The Slant position, if we are to believe Catholics and the Left, is now well established. It has already been honoured by an attack in the Spectator, and I suppose it is just another mark of its success that it must now face the rigour of its friends.The Slant manifesto, which is what Catholics and the Left amounts to, is very uneven: not so much in quality as in level. Its first part, Christians against Capitalism, by Adrian Cunningham and Terry Eagleton,is a vigorous piece of pamphleteering, of a properly manifest kind. I hope I do not wrong it when I say that it seems to me the best short statement that I have read of the general position of the New Left. Its Christian interpretation of community, which is inevitably its starting point, is unforced and organic, and it gains in specificity by being able to talk frankly (as in other traditions is not always possible) about loving relationships as the heart of community. At the same time it is powerful in negative criticism: the chapter on Liberalism is especially astringent and wholly convincing.
What is Wrong with God?
Authors: Steeman Th. M. 
Published: July 2007

Come to think of it, Nietzsche’s famous phrase: God is dead, has a peculiar ring to it. It is not an unqualified statement of atheism, a simple denial of the existence of God; it is rather the announcement that someone who was alive at some time has died. God existed, he exists no more. A straight atheism would have tried to prove that God is not, does not exist, cannot exist. Not so Nietzsche: for him God has died. The one who is acclaimed by a long tradition as the Immortal, has disappeared from the scene, his time is over. God is dead.It would be too easy an answer if we decided that, in any case, Nietzsche is dead. We can perhaps qualify Nietzsche’s statement and say that in view of the faith of ever so many theists, God is not really dead yet. But, somehow, we have to agree that something is wrong with God. It would be accurate to say, resuming Nietzsche’s imagery, that if God is not really dead, he is at any rate sick. If he has not disappeared yet, it is at least clear that his appearance is not quite what it should be. And it seems timely to ask: what is the matter with God? Or, again more closely to Nietzsche’s language: what has become of God ?I think we can dispense with arguing the actuality of the problem. Ever since the Bishop of Woolwich wrote his Honest to God, it has been clear that God has become a problem generally, also within the fold of the Christian churches. Bonhoeffer’s program of a life in a world come of age ‘as if God did not exist’ also finds a rather amazing following.
Typology and a Poet
Authors: Foster Kenelm 
Published: July 2007

It is rare that aPh. D. thesis gets turned into a book so readable and so wide-ranging as this one. That it should be well-written is already remarkable in a work of this kind, but even more so is its width of range and scope. Dr Charity, who now lectures on English at York, was bred as a Methodist, so that I suppose he has the bible in his bones, and in due course he made the contact with Dante’s poetry which led to the rather unconventional line of research that bears fruit here. A certain courage, perhaps, was entailed in his virtually staking an academic reputation on a first book addressed to scholars on two quite different fronts, to biblical theologians and to Dantists: the former may be more provoked than disarmed by the author’s warning them that he is ‘a theologian of a sort only . . . and pro tern’, while Dante scholars — even such as can spare time for a little theology – are mostly no better disposed than other specialists to the ‘amateur’. But the result shows that the risk was very well worth taking. This is a remarkable work in many ways – scholarly, perceptive and intelligent, nearly always closely argued, and, so far as I can judge, original.Its general subject is typology, and this has to do, of course, with symbolic or figurative meanings, particularly in the Bible; and in the Bible considered precisely as an historical narrative.
London—A City in Dissolution
Authors: Pearsall Ronald 
Published: July 2007

‘It is evident’, wrote Thomas Carlyle a century ago, ‘that an old order of things is breaking up into fragments; and men watch it, as they watch all wrecks, fearfully’. Nothing could be more apt than this when applied to London today. For we see a city in dissolution, a city that has got out of hand.The problem is so vast. The idea that the problem is solely one of traffic does not bear a minute’s examination; traffic congestion is a convenient scapegoat, an excuse for not doing anything, a reason for doing the barest minimum (the odd traffic roundabout here, the odd fly-over there). These muted attempts to solve traffic congestion savour of a sop to the conscience, just as the cornflake packets posing as architecture are acts of tardy defiance against a chaos that was predicted by Ruskin and Carlyle with ineffable accuracy.Had there been no war, had the population remained static, then London might have tottered on for a century more or so, with its prisons disguised as Gothic castles and its abatoirs as Venetian palaces, and its churches built for little more than £4,000 (including fittings and furnishings). However, such was not to be. As Matthew Arnold wrote in another context, ‘For what wears out the life of mortal men? ‘Tis that from change to change their being rolls;’
William of Saint Thierry VI: Faith and Heresy
Authors: Webb Geoffrey 
Published: July 2007

In an age when people ask whether God is better visualised as ‘up there’ or ‘in here’, it could be relevant to recall the medieval and Augustinian approach, which claimed that the best way to think of God was necessarily as that on which the intellectual structure of man is modelled – mens, notitia, amor or even memoria, intellectus, voluntas. In other words, the Trinity. For if a Christian holds in the first place that man is made in the image and likeness of his creator, then one can speculate about the original on the basis of the copy. ‘For things below are copies, the Great Smaragdine Tablet said.’The traditional formula still had validity in the period of William of Saint Thierry because man was even then conceived as being sympathetically in accord with the universe around him, and with God. A divine quaternity related him to the four elements, the four humours, and so on, and divine trinity, in the same way, related him to the nature and the persons of God. It was apparently not difficult for twelfth century people to see themselves as part of the landscape, in an almost Chinese sense, nor was it difficult for them to see themselves as involved in the matter of God, ‘as the body is clad in the cloth, and the flesh in the skin’.We have already considered William’s treatment of the vindication, as he calls it, of the three faculties of man by the three persons of the Trinity, memory, reason and will, each being taken as his own by the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit respectively.
Black Power and the Liberal Conscience
Authors: McCabe Lucy 
Published: July 2007

Norman Mailer has been travelling the lecture circuit with Stokely Carmichael this winter. At dinner one evening, a friend of mine tells me, Mailer said he had begun the tour expecting to support ‘Black Power’ in a general way, but introducing a few cautionary phrases. After the first question period, he realised that he was ‘way to the left of Stokely.’ Many white liberals react like this, criticizing Black Power for its betrayal of the radical ideals they have associated with the civil rights movement. Non-violence is one of these vicarious ideals: very few white Americans are non-violent for themselves, their right to defend themselves or their families has never been called into question. But they had admired Martin Luther King for loving his enemies and turning the other cheek. Now they were hearing Stokely Carmichael’s voice, growing testy at constant requests for reassurance saying ‘I have never rejected violence’. He has two tones of voice, one for white living rooms and one for black crowds and the same words have different overtones. He has a standard response to a question about violence. It goes something like this. ‘If you don’t mess with me, I’ll leave you alone’. Pause. ‘But if you move to strike me, I’ll break your arm.’ Then, on a rising tone, ‘and I might break the other one too.’ When this is greeted by wild cheers, whites come away pretty shaken.The fact is that the white liberal does not live way to the left of Stokely, he just feels that way.
Rhodesia Infelix: Fact and Fiction
Authors: Townsend H. G. 
Published: July 2007

Rhodesia today is an unhappy country. It is unhappy in its divisions, its rulers and the direction they have taken; unhappy in the international ostracism its white citizens have brought upon it and in the kind of friends they are making abroad; unhappy too in that its human and moral problem has been made a bone of political contention in Britain; unhappy especially because its Christian citizens by and large differ so little from the rest in their social attitudes and aims that Christianity seems irrelevant to the solution of the basic problem.It was inevitable, but unfortunate, that Rhodesia should become the centre of a controversy that is assuming international proportions. Its problem is very much a problem of our time: a problem of acceptance of and adjustment to new social patterns and unities which conflict with habits of mind and living acquired in the past and the expectations they have engendered. To those who have enjoyed a dignified and stable existence with a comfortable standard of living, far-reaching social change, however inescapable in the long run, appears as a threat to their own and their children’s security and, if this security has been won by their own enterprise and effort, as an unjust undoing of their achievement. When the required change is one of the integration of two groups of people so different in cultural background, experience and present attainment as are the two major racial groups in Rhodesia – the Africans and the Europeans