bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Charles Taylor and John Milbank: A Footnote
Authors: Sparrow M.F. 
Published: July 2007

In his recent study of the sources of the modem identity, Charles Taylor coined the phrase, ‘the affirmation of the ordinary life.’ He argues that modem culture has been marked not only by a growing recognition of the dignity and worth of human beings but also by a growing recognition of the dignity and worth of the ordinary life—the life of production and reproduction, of work and family. Taylor calls this affirmation of ordinary life ‘one of the most powerful ideas in modem civilization.’ It has certainly become one of the predominant themes in Catholic theology in the second half of this century.Taylor notes, however, another ‘extremely important fact about modern moral consciousness. . . . We are in conflict, even confusion about what it means to affirm ordinary life.’ So for example, Catholics may, almost unanimously, describe the post-Vatican II era as the age of the laity, but particular attempts to live the Gospel in the modem world and to theologize about that experience create storms of controversy. The debates surrounding liberation theology, which with its turn to the economic, social and political life of man is nothing if not an affirmation of ordinary life, are one such example.One particularly illuminating instance of the debates surrounding the affirmation of ordinary life and liberation theology is Juan Segundo’s Theology and the Church: A Response to Cardinal Ratzinger and a Warning to the Whole Church (Minneapolis, 1985). In it Segundo responds to the ‘‘Instruction on Certain Aspects of the Theology of Liberation’ issued by the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Newman on doing theology
Authors: O'Loughlin Thomas 
Published: July 2007

Newman’s writings on the nature of theology, the role of the theologian in the Church, and the nature of personal faith and assent, all receive a great deal of scholarly attention. However, one text where he characterises the nature of the work of a theologian as a continuing activity has been passed over in studies of his writings on theology and seems only to be known in studies of his marian doctrine.The text is from the Sermon 15 of his University Sermons which was preached on the feast of the Purification, 2 February, 1843 upon the text: ‘But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart’ (Lk 2:19). The sermon begins by introducing the notion of Mary as a pattern of faith (paragraph 1) and then develops the theme by reflection on the significance of Mary “pondering” what was said to her (paragraph 2).Then he continues:Thus St. Mary is our pattern of Faith, both in the reception and the study of Divine Truth. She does not think it enough to accept, she dwells upon it; not enough to possess, she uses it; not enough to assent, she develops it; not enough to submit the Reason, she reasons upon it; not indeed reasoning first, and believing afterwards, with Zacharias, yet first believing without reasoning, next from love and reverence, reasoning after believing. And thus she symbolizes to us, not only the faith of the unlearned, but of the doctors of the Church also, who have to investigate, and weigh. and define. as well as to profess the Gospel; to draw the line between truth and heresy; to anticipate or remedy the various aberrations of wrong reason; to combat pride and recklessness with their own arms; and thus to triumph over the sophist and the innovator.
Hegel and ‘The End of History’
Authors: Boyle Nicholas 
Published: July 2007

In September 1989, while the dominoes were falling in the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe, a very minor revolution occurred in our national newspapers: the face of the German philosopher Hegel suddenly and briefly, and surely for the first time, was allowed to dominate the centre pages.The deputy director of the American State Department’s policy planning staff, Francis Fukuyama, had published an essay entitled ‘The End of History’ in the right-wing journal The National Interest, suggesting that contemporary events were vindicating Hegel rather than Hegel’s unruly disciple, Karl Marx: that ideas and ideology were a genuinely motivating force in history, rather than mere economics; that Hegel had seen the ideas of the French Revolution, which Fukuyama identified with modern liberal democracy, as the ultimate goal of history; that we were witnessing the worldwide extension of those ideas through the collapse of the Soviet bloc; and that since no further ideological conflict or development was possible, history had come to an end. In other words — and though Fukuyama did not say it, it was soon enough said— America had won the Cold War and though things would undoubtedly continue happening, nothing much, nothing big, would ever change again. In the Independent the much-regretted Peter Jenkins aptly quoted Arnold Toynbee’s childhood memories of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897:
I remember the atmosphere. It was: well here we are on the top of the world, and we have arrived at this peak to stay there — forever!
On New Testament Scholarship and the Integrity of Faith
Authors: Meynell Hugo 
Published: July 2007

Hermes and Athena consists of the proceedings of a conference of philosophers and New Testament scholars. I think the sponsors of the conference are to be congratulated on bringing members of the two groups together; the interaction was salutary, for all that one of the most significant exchanges is very angry, and makes painful reading. The issues raised appear to me to be of quite fundamental importance.As Michael Dummett sees it, the most influential New Testament scholars of the present day operate with two axioms, that the Gospels are not a reliable witness to Jesus’ words and deeds, and that Jesus had no powers and no source of knowledge that were not available to other human beings. In so doing, they not only offend and bewilder ordinary believers, but effectively deprive Christianity of any rational basis. However, there is good reason to disbelieve what these scholars seem to take for granted, that the central doctrines of Christianity were derived not from what was taught by Jesus himself, but from later reflection on his life. For this to have been the case, the disciples must have been either deliberate deceivers or mentally unhinged, and their subsequent behaviour is not consistent with either hypothesis. Another mistake that these scholars make is to assume that one should prescind from faith in trying to determine what is or is not likely to be historically true in the Gospel narratives; in general, probability cannot be assigned to alleged events without reference to background beliefs.
Hegel and ‘The End of History’
Authors: Boyle Nicholas 
Published: July 2007

Now I have already indicated that the picture I have painted of what I believe to be post-1945 socio-economic reality corresponds after a fashion to the picture of the cultural and intellectual world to be found in the works of writers who concern themselves with what since 1975 has been called ‘postmodernism’. I should like as the next stage in my argument just briefly to survey the correspondences.Firstly there is the question of politics, which seems to me intimately linked with the term ‘postmodern’ itself. I regard ‘postmodern’ as corresponding to what I have today called ‘post-1945’, for I believe that post-modernism is inseparable from the development of the global market. This is not an obvious point, for there has been much discussion among those who have taken up the term on whether ‘postmodern’ is a chronological term at all. Most have taken the view that it is not, that what they mean by postmodernism is something that runs in parallel with modernism or is even a permanent possibility of the human spirit — it is suggested that Montaigne, in the 16th century, is postmodern, but the brothers Schlegel, in 1800, are only modem. (It is of course a Frenchman who makes the suggestion.) As it is part of a postmodernist approach to deny — at any rate from time to time — the significance of chronology this is an understandable ploy. Indeed the term ‘postmodernist’ is a good one precisely because ‘modernism’ in all the arts depended on the belief in an opposition between the present and the past. To be modern was to do things differently.
Modern Women Mystics: Etty Hillesum and Simone Weil
Authors: Bowie Fiona 
Published: July 2007

If the life of the twelfth century Flemish mystic Christina Mirabilis is anything to go by, intimacy with God should carry a health warning! After the death of her parents Christina’s elder sisters arranged that she should have the menial job of looking after the family’s herds. ‘Immediately’, we are told in her Life, ‘Christ did not fail to the lower and more humble office and He gave her the grace of an inward sweetness and very often visited her with heavenly secrets’. As a result of the ‘exertions of her inner contemplations’ Christina died. That was not, however, the end of the story, indeed it was the beginning of Christina's extraordinary vocation; to suffer for souls through voluntarily imposed penances. During the requiem mass the following day ‘the body stirred in the coffin and immediately was raised up like a bird and ascended to the rafters of the church’. When finally forced to descend Christina explained that she had been granted a vision of heaven and hell, before Christ commanded her soul to return to her body.After this return from the grave Christina, her Life continues, ‘ran from the presence of men with wondrous horror and fled into the deserts and into the trees and perched on the peaks of turrets or steeples and on other lofty places’. She went on to develop mortifications which included standing in ice-cold rivers and throwing herself into hot bread ovens, not to mention suffering the cruelty of her alarmed family and other villagers who bound her in chains and put a heavy yoke on her shoulders.
Passive and Deformed? Did Aristotle Really Say This?
Authors: Nolan Michael 
Published: July 2007

Belief in the passivity of the female survives few honeymoons, and would appear to be largely confined to people of celibate life and retiring disposition who do not visit supermarkets and have little opportunity to note the skilled use of what the French appositely call un chariot. Aristotle was not long married — happily, it would seem — when he wrote his biological works, and if he says that in the act of reproduction ‘the male is the active partner and the female qua female is the passive one’, he goes on to remark more discreetly that ‘that which acts, is acted upon in return’. Indeed, ‘sometimes the extent to which it gets acted upon is greater than that to which it acts’. Quite so. Horresco referens, the male may on occasion be ‘mastered’ and then a female is born, one, to boot, taking after her mother. All of which suggests that Aristotle’s beliefs are not to be summarised in the simple schema: ‘female passive, male active’. The seemingly absolute assertion is attenuated when set in context.The same applies to the much-cited statement ‘the female is as it were a deformed male’. One can appreciate the anger this phrase can cause when it is taken to encapsulate Aristotle’s metaphysical and ethical understanding of Woman. Phrases, however, have contexts, and this phrase occurs in a work on biology. A little reading of this biology shows that Aristotle also says that that elegant and beautiful creature, the seal, is ‘deformed’.
Post Critical Contemplation and Do It Yourself Religion
Authors: Echlin Edward P. 
Published: July 2007

No description quite captures the fragmentation through which our culture is passing. Post modem, new age, deconstruction, immanentism, emotivism, all are usefully employed — none quite turns the key. In general we may say not that there are no narratives, but that the received narrative, the foundational cosmology, the consensus about ultimate reality upon which our societies formerly concurred have receded. Moreover, at least in affluent cultures, the mourning about dwindling consensus is past. Rather than writhe in anxiety before religious fragmentation, people simply accept as the one “luminously self evident reality” that they are alone in the universe making their own meaning. Confusion exists as to what theology is, and what real theologians are. Walter Kasper writes, “It is unfortunately not a redundancy to say that, especially today, a theological theology is the need of the hour.”Do It Yourself CulturePerhaps our present phase can be fairly described as a spiritual do it yourself culture in which God, faith, morality and the future are for each and every person what each decides they are. Appreciation of expertise, theological training, the religious wisdom of the centuries, is suspended. Religion, says Cambridge’s Don Cupitt, is “wholly of the world, wholly human, wholly our own responsibility”. Eclecticism, picking and choosing from traditional religions and from new constructs, is increasingly common. The “spiritual” remains important. But the wholly transcendent is questioned. Far from being without spiritual narratives, ours is an age in which there are almost as many stories as there are tellers.
Reading Heidegger: Is God Without Being? Jean-Luc Marion's reading of Martin Heidegger in God Without Being
Authors: Hemming Laurence 
Published: July 2007

Jean-Luc Marion is one of the first theologians to take seriously the force of Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics as a whole, which means he takes seriously Heidegger’s claims about the “overcoming” (Überwindung) of metaphysics. In other words, when in the work of Martin Heidegger the whole of metaphysics is thrown into question, any and all of its determinations become “questionable”, that is, worthy of being questioned. Marion concedes the impact this may have for theology.This study concerns itself with how Jean Luc-Marion attempts in the work God Without Being to speak of God after Martin Heidegger’s claims for the overcoming of metaphysics. This arises as a question about the extent to which Jean-Luc Marion has been attentive to what Heidegger says. Marion appeals to an accepted philosophical reading of Heidegger in order to inaugurate a fresh theological reading of Heidegger. Underlying this study is the view that Marion is insufficiently attentive to the complexity of Heidegger’s thinking.In order to show how this is so in the limited space available here, I propose to undertake a re-reading of two of the key texts upon which Marion rests for his case against Heidegger in God Without Being, with, I hope, surprising results for Marion’s project. Finally, I wish to conclude with some more general remarks about the Icon, which may at least point us in the direction of a more constructive reading of Heidegger’s work.
In the Beginning was the Gift… A Marginal Note on God Without Being
Authors: O'Donoghue Noel Dermot 
Published: July 2007

IA gift implies a giving and a giver distinct from the gift. But what if the giver is all giving? What if the gift and the giver is one? What if the giving alone names the giver? But surely the giver must first in some sense exist before it can be understood to act as giver (actio sequitur esse, said the old manuals that now languish in the deepest stackrooms of our libraries). But what if the esse is essentially agere, actio?This line of inquiry has surfaced for me once again in reading Jean-Luc Marion’s book (as presented in the University of Chicago translation), resuming a meditation that had its first airing in a paper prepared for the 1990 conference of the Catholic Theological Association of Great Britain. The paper was entitled ‘Celtic Creation Spirituality,’ and it tried to identify the understanding of God and creation as shown in the Carmina Gadelica of Alexander Carmichael and the people of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland in the 19th century, and as it remained in my memory from my own boyhood in the South-West of Ireland. I felt that the common faith of all these people could be summed up in the Johannine variant: ‘In the beginning was the gift and the gift was with God and the gift was God’. My reading of Jean-Luc Marion’s brilliant and challenging book has pushed me towards recalling that icon of the creator that was/is at the centre of Celtic Christianity and also at the centre of Jean-Luc Marion’s thinking.
Aquinas after Marion
Authors: Kerr Fergus 
Published: July 2007

What reflections might occur to a veteran student of the works of St Thomas Aquinas after reading Jean-Luc Marion’s remarkable book God without Being? Of course, it is not primarily about the thought of Aquinas. But we are persistently encouraged to reject an approach to the question of God which thinks in terms of a concept of ‘Being’, in favour of an acceptance of the reality of God in an economy of ‘Gift’. Thus, one is certainly sent back to the text of Aquinas with provocative questions. For myself, I have to say that I was prompted first of all to return to the magnificent account in the Summa Theologiae of the epistemology of the beatific vision (Section I)—not that Marion himself discusses it (he doesn’t), but his whole approach is a reminder of the radical ‘theocentricity’ of Aquinas’s thought. Next, it proved interesting to compare Marion’s approach with philosophy of religion in the English-speaking context (Section II). Much else might be mentioned, no doubt, but, given that context, the intelligibility of speaking of God either with or without reference to ‘Being’ could not but become questionable (Section III).IQuestion 12 of the Prima Pars must be one of the finest in the Summa Theologiae. Composed in 1266-67, when St Thomas was teaching at Santa Sabina in Rome, it has no precedent or exact parallel in the rest of his work, although of course he treated the same material in several different places.
Hildegard of Bingen, Nicole Oresme, and Conjugal Ethics
Authors: Mirkes Renée 
Published: July 2007

Some persons are, by their nature, trailblazers, innovators, avant-gardists—just generally ahead of their times. In many ways, Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), the subject of this investigation, is representative of such a personality. Embodying enough of the intellectual eclecticism and enthusiasm for the arts and sciences characteristic of the historical period after hers, some twentieth century critics dub this talented polymath a Renaissance woman.A list of Hildegard’s salient accomplishments and personal charisms confirms that appellation at a glance. Hildegard of Bingen, a German Benedictine aristocrat, was a mystic, a visionary, and a prolific writer. Her oeuvre deals with subject matter as diverse as natural science, medicine, theology, biblical exegesis, dramatic poetry, music, hagiography, and linguistics. She was elected Abbess of a community of Benedictine nuns who were attached to the Abbey of Disibodenberg and subsequently founded two other Benedictine houses. Guided by her ecclesiastically sanctioned gift of prophecy, she launched into a missionary style of preaching and teaching aimed at the spiritual and moral reform of the clergy and laity throughout the kingdom of Germany. Undaunted by her lack of formal, classical education or by whatever misogynist tradition prevailed in secular or ecclesiastical circles, she managed to maintain a lively correspondence with kings, queens, emperors, saints, popes, and fellow religious.
Christian Widowhood
Authors: Rees Elizabeth 
Published: July 2007

Ours is a culture which, by and large, does not talk about death. We prefer to focus on life. Widowhood too is something we tend to ignore. Yet widows have a unique experience of death and resurrection to share with us. As they grapple day by day with death and suffering, they more than others can teach the Church about the mystery of Easter. What follows is an exploration of widowhood in the Christian tradition.First century Christians inherited a rich theology of widowhood from their Jewish past. Luke makes this clear in his stories and parables about widows. He portrays Jesus teaching us about giving God all we possess in the story of the widow’s mite (Luke 21:1-4). His hearers would recall the ancient (8th cent B.C.) story of the widow who shared her last scrap of food with Elijah, instead of hoarding it for herself and her starving son. She gave life while staring death in the face, and her love was rewarded by an unfailing supply of flour and oil throughout the drought (1 Kings 17: 7-16).When Jesus entered the village of Naim and brought resurrection to a near-dead family by raising a widow’s son to life (Luke 7:11-16), onlookers would have recalled how Elijah, who worked in the same area of Galilee, raised a widow’s son to life in similar fashion: “Elijah stretched himself on the child three times and cried out to the Lord, Lord my God, may the soul of this child, I beg you, come into him again!’
Complications in Theological Thinking about Other Species: A Reply to David Jones
Authors: Waldau Paul 
Published: July 2007

This discussion concerns some difficulties which occur when we try to think about other, non-human animals. It takes the form of a reply to an article which appeared in this journal in December of 1992. The article, written by David Jones and entitled “Do Whales Have Souls?”, was a free-ranging attempt to ask theologically and philosophically inspired questions about whales and other life. This reply points out difficulties inherent in any thinking about other animals, and in particular those risks which such thinking faces if it relies on primary categories of Catholic theology. Failure to see the limitations of such categories can perpetuate the dismissal of other animals’ possibilities which has been characteristic of the Christian tradition.Jones’ article contains the first mention of whales appearing in this journal, and it aims to be speculative and provocative. While at first we may smile at the range of the questions and the tendency to poetic observation in the article, the general subject matter—the existence of another group of species characterized by large brains, the occurrence of complex inter-individual communication, and both family structure and enduring social networks of distinct individuals—invites speculation of a very pointed sort. This reply argues that two sets of complications arise when Jones tries to think about whales. The first concerns the inherent limitations of familiar theological categories if we use them when trying to assess the significance of other living creatures, and the second concerns the viability of the familiar category of “species” when seeking to understand other animals’ value.