bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The Sermon on the Mount: A Jewish View
Authors: Wright Rabbi Alexandra 
Published: July 2007

The Jew is never more uneasy than when faced with a text from the New Testament. Aware of the scriptural authority that such a text holds for the Christian, the uneasiness is compounded when what, basically, the Jew is offering is an opportunity for Christians to listen in, as it were, on a Jewish interpretation of one of the most important texts in the New Testament.There are, of course, historical considerations that determine how a Jew understands the New Testament. For much of the past, if Jews read or studied the gospels, it was only for polemical purposes. One of the first figures to abandon such an attitude was Claude Montefiore, an English Jew, founder of the Liberal Jewish movement in Britain. In 1909 Montefiore published The Synoptic Gospels, consisting of an introduction, translation and commentary on the first three gospels. The aim of such a book was two-fold: to dissipate the patronising and negative attitude which Jews held towards Christianity and to reveal the true spirit of the Jewish religion to Christians.Montefiore’s attitudes roused dissent and suspicion among the Jewish community. For him, Jesus linked on to the prophets and sometimes seemed to go beyond them. But as Montefiore revealed, for the Jew it was not the personality or life of Jesus that was important but the teaching:
We persist in separating the one from the other, whereas to Christians they form a unity, a whole. From his childhood upwards the Jew’s highest conceptions of goodness and God have never been associated with Jesus. (Vol. 1)
Marian Symbols and Marian Doctrines: Lonergan's Contribution
Authors: Garafalo Rob 
Published: July 2007

The celebrating of a Marian Year in 1987—8 helped to stimulate reflection on the process by which faith in God is evolving through the medium of the Church’s Marian tradition. By highlighting the figure of Mary, it posed the question: how are the Church’s Marian doctrines able to articulate their truth within the variety of contexts in which they are received?In the period between Lumen Gentium and Redemptoris Mater* we have witnessed a theological debate concerning the symbolic character of statements made by the Church about Mary—a debate that questions whether the Church’s Marian doctrines are necessarily grounded in historical events. The purpose of this paper is to describe briefly the contours of the debate concerning theological statements about Mary and to suggest that Bernard Lonergan’s notion of conversion can provide a more adequate contemporary understanding of the ongoing role of Marian symbols and doctrines in the lives of believers.
Adam as Analogy: Help or Hindrance?
Authors: Kreitzer Larry 
Published: July 2007

The use of ‘Adam’ in the New Testament is by no means extensive. The name itself occurs only nine times (Luke 3:38; Romans 5:14a and b; 1 Corinthians 15:22; 45a and b; 1 Timothy 2:13 and 14; Jude 14), but in a wide variety of senses. Sometimes its use is built upon the Genesis account’s portrayal of Adam as the first human creature: Adam is seen as the historic progenitor of the race. This is most clear in Jude 14 (a quote from Ethiopian Enoch 1:9), where Enoch is described as ‘the seventh generation from Adam’. Here the meaning is quite straightforward. ‘Adam’ is simply spoken of as an historical figure. In the same way, the Lucan reference to Adam is set within the genealogical table of Jesus, beginning with Jesus himself, and running backwards until it climaxes in the first created man. By such a structure the historical relationship between Jesus and Adam is emphasized and Jesus is seen to fit within the flow of human history. We who live in the 20th century are immediately presented with a difficulty by such an emphasis upon the historical side of the Adam stories.Fortunately, the complete meaning of ‘Adam’ within the New Testament is not restricted to such a narrow historical basis as we see in Jude and Luke. We do find, in some of the other passages, hints of typological significance of ‘Adam’. ‘Adam’ as a theological category is thereby rescued and is able to have some contemporary meaning.
Bishops and Other Teachers: Some Signs of the Times
Authors: Lash Nicholas 
Published: July 2007

In his President’s Report three years ago, Jack Mahoney considered whether a theologian’s relation to the episcopate should not be more like that of artist to patron than mandarin to minister, and he ended by suggesting that ‘part of the role of our Association is ... to have a sacramental function’ within the local Church, both reflecting on our common faith and aiming to communicate that reflection.During the past year, a series of in themselves apparently unconnected developments convinced me that it might be helpful as part of our fulfilment of the tasks which Jack indicated, if we were to set aside an hour for their consideration. The developments that I have in mind may be listed under seven headings:
1.First, and most diffusely, I sense a growing thirst, on the part of Catholic laypeople, for continuing theological (and especially biblical) education—the impetus for which comes variously from parental responsibility, from questions of justice and peace, increasingly (I think) from concern for creation and, most generally, from the recognition that, in an ever more barbarous and philistine society, only faith appropriated and purified through prayer and shared reflection can hope to stand.2.Secondly, there is a disturbing tendency towards polarisation in our perception of the relationship between ‘form’ and ‘content’ in religious education. This is surely an area which cries out for improvement in the quality of dialogue and collaboration between bishops, catechists, and theologians.3.Thirdly, the ‘Cologne Declaration’ signed in January by 163 theologians from Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands, was followed by statements from theologians in France, Belgium, Italy and Brazil.
Rex Gentium: History, Nationalism and Christ
Authors: Nichols Aidan 
Published: July 2007

The Church’s liturgy calls on Christ as Rex gentium, ‘King of the nations’, the One whom they all ‘desire’, the Corner-stone that unites them. It appeals to him, therefore, to ‘come and save man whom you made from clay’. In this celebrated Advent antiphon, the Church affirms the relevance of Christ to world history and, more specifically, to the fate of the many peoples of the world whose histories contribute to the single history which is that of the world as a whole. The text intimates that this history constitutes an implicit call for his Coming, and it states quite explicitly that only Christ can unify their different and (presumably) divergent histories, and make them one.My concern here is a vast subject which, it is probably fair to say, historians and philosophers in England, even when believers, would by and large regard as taboo ... and in this they would doubtless be joined by the majority of theologians. The relevance of Christ to world history, and, in particular, to the fact of its multiple national differentiations, is, they would say, simply too large a subject to talk sense about. English historians, with occasional exceptions like Arnold Toynbee, do not think it a proper part of the historian’s task to identify the structure of the historical process as a whole. The philosophy of history is not, in England, the study of the wider meaning of that process but, rather, the justification of any limited statement about the past. English philosophers of history avert their gaze in horror from their Continental counterparts, whose vaulting metaphysical ambition has produced schemes like Hegel’s (history as the coming of Reason to selfconsciousness) or Marx’s (history as the formation of a socialist society where the specific essence of humanity will be realised in uncoerced labour).
Nuclear Deterrence and Christian Vocation
Authors: Finnis John 
Published: July 2007

If there is, as I believe, a temporal mission for the Christian, how would it be possible for the terrestrial hope by which such a mission is quickened not to have as its most comprehensive aim the ideal of building either a better or a new Christian civilization? ... At each new stage in human history ... it is normal that Christians hope for a new Christendom, and depict for themselves, in order to guide their effort, a concrete historical ideal appropriate to the particular climate of the age in question.Lecturing On the Philosophy of History in the United States in 1955, Jacques Maritain thus restated a theme he had elaborated in Spain in the high summer of 1934, 23 months before Franco’s uprising. I shall argue that we should answer Maritain’s rhetorical question, No: it is a philosophical and theological mistake to suppose, as he did, that the temporal vocation of the Christian—or the Christian’s conscience in political matters—requires a ‘comprehensive aim’ such as the ‘concrete historical ideal’ of building a new or better Christendom.In March 1955 the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, speaking in the House of Commons, used words which have survived as expressing the reality of the nuclear age, and the hope which has guided the masters of the age: ‘safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation’. The West’s new armaments, he said, would increase ‘the deterrent upon the Soviet Union by putting her ... scattered population on an equality or near-equality of vulnerability with our small densely-populated island’—a vulnerability matched by that of the West’s populations. The threat expressed by Churchill, to destroy Soviet populations by ‘a crushing weight of nuclear retaliation’, has remained the indispensable element in the deterrent threats and accompanying operational plans of the U.S., Britain, and France ever since.
The Gospel, the State and Education Rights
Authors: John Gus 
Published: July 2007

There can be little doubt that British education is in a state of crisis, and that Kenneth Baker’s so-called education reforms have simply compounded that crisis. We are likely to witness in Britain in the next decade perhaps more than at any other time since the passing of the Shaftsbury Act over a hundred years ago, the fiercest ideological battles around issues to do with the purpose and function of education and schooling in a liberal democratic society, the rights of the child and of the student, and the relationship between education and the national economy. In such battles the Church will be heavily involved—Catholic schools will see to that. Government legislation may hit Catholics hard in other areas and receive scant criticism, but schools are where the hierarchy believes the Catholic community finds and passes on its own identity. Perhaps bishops also think that Catholic schools are among the last places where the hierarchy has real power. Thus in recent months we have seen the dispute between Cardinal Hume and parents over whether one school should or should not ‘opt out’ of the State system. The danger, exemplified by the case of the Poll Tax in England and Wales, is that the Church will fight what it sees as its own corner, but will then keep silent in the wider battle. Its intervention may be dangerously misplaced.This article seeks to set out what has happened to British education and the vision which a prophetic Church should champion.Our sense of history should tell us that we have a responsibility to safeguard and to extend the hard-won rights that generations before us have secured through their struggles and their blood, even to the point of sacrificing their very lives.
Origins of England’s Urban Catholicism
Authors: Every George 
Published: July 2007

Today probably the majority of practising Roman Catholics in England would identify themselves as English, even if their origins are not altogether English, but how deep are the English roots of this English Catholic community? The answer to that question is important because the self-understanding of any community depends, to some degree, on its understanding of its own history. Twenty years ago it was almost universally assumed that the English Catholic community was dwindling away at the end of the eighteenth century and only saved from extinction by the ‘second spring’— the great influx from Ireland and the flow of well-educated Anglican converts in the nineteenth century. Now it is known that Irish immigrants went where Catholics were in industry already, but detailed studies are needed of how so many English Catholics came to be in those places. In the May number of Recusant History’ I have done one such study for a place in the heart of industrial England, Walsall, within reach of Oscott, between 1720 and 1824, using evidence from a variety of local records. I now want to point tentatively to some elements in the situation there that have parallels elsewhere.The first is memories of the Civil War. After defeat at the Battle of Worcester in 1651 Charles the Second took refuge in woodlands in and around the parish of Walsall from the Presbyterian party who dominated the borough after the war and during the Commonwealth. In 1715 and 1751 the Presbyterian Meeting House there was wrecked by a mob who in 1750 celebrated Oakapple Day, the anniversary of the Restoration of Church and Throne in 1660, by hanging and burning an effigy of King George the Second with an orange in one hand and a bunch of turnips in the other.
Wittgenstein, Theology and Wordless Faith
Authors: Mark James 
Published: July 2007

The inexpressible (that which appears to me mysterious and which I cannot express) gives perhaps the background against which what I was able to express gets its meaning.Culture and Value, p. 16To look at Wittgenstein’s influence on our contemporary religious thought raises all sorts of problems. The first is that, as a philosopher, he gave little attention to religion; his main writings contain no more than a few enigmatic references here and there. Nevertheless it is hardly possible to pick up a book on philosophical theology (in English at least) which does not refer to him. That might perhaps be explained by the pervasive influence that he has exerted on philosophical thought generally. But we must recognize that the leads which emerge from his thought in both periods of his philosophical activity seem to be predominantly negative. He offers two successive challenges to us to examine the ways in which we use language and what we communicate in doing so, each of which seems radically to question the language of theology.The first came in the Tractatus, when he set out to show that the method of formulating the problems of philosophy rests on a misunderstanding of the logic of language (Preface). He was concerned, as Pears puts it, ‘with the general theory of factual language, and with the general theory of reality which he believed that he could deduce from it.’ The structure of reality determines the structure of language, and the structure of language is such that ‘What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak on that one must be silent’ (Preface). He was not prepared, like the logical positivists, to deny the existence of mysteries of which he did not think it possible to speak; ‘We feel that even if all questions in the field of scholarship are answered the problems of our lives are still quite untouched.
Seeking Roots
Authors: White Allan 
Published: July 2007

One of the best-selling Scottish books of 1989, The Root of the Matter (Mainstream Publishing, Edinburgh, £9.95) recalls the earlier part of the life of its author, Anthony Ross OP, a convert from Presbyterianism who ended up as a Dominican priest widely known in Scotland for his work with young people, and who was elected Rector of Edinburgh University and then Prior Provincial of the English Dominican Province. Allan White OP, who was one of the first two Dominicans since the Reformation to take a degree in Scotland and for six years was Superior of the Dominican Community in Edinburgh, here puts the story of Anthony Ross in the context of a wider story.I have caught a glimpse of the seamless garment And I am blind for evermore.Hugh McDiarmidAn old friar once remarked to me that, whilst he was glad to live in the midst of a community of young and high-spirited Dominicans, he often missed the companionship of a brother of his own generation with whom he could share his memories. At various stages in our lives we cast backward glances over our shoulders but there comes a time when we look to our beginnings, uncovering the summer in the seed. Father Anthony Ross’s book is an exercise not only in the uncovering of memory but in the sharing of memories, and in the sharing there is a healing too; the work is dedicated to his parents and step-mother in the belief that ‘love covers all offences.’ In this book he offers us a lyrical account of his boyhood in the north of Scotland, somewhat reminiscent of the work of Tomas O’Crohan’s The Islandman and Maurice O’Sullivan’s Twenty Years A ‘Growing, his subsequent university career, his entry into the Roman Catholic Church and admission to the Dominican Order. Father Anthony is a historian by training and it is his particular gift to disclose ‘the past quivering in what is’. His own life has coincided with major developments in the political and cultural life of the Scottish people with related implications for the Catholic Church in Scotland in general and the Dominican Order in particular. His book is part of his own story but is also a chapter in the history of his country and his Church.
Singular Iniquities: Josephine Butler and Marietta Higgs
Authors: Cashman Hilary 
Published: July 2007

A little over a century ago Josephine Butler was beginning to learn, with reluctance and dismay, the extent of organised child prostitution in Britain. When she tried to convey what she had learned she was often reviled as dirty-minded, corrupting and unwomanly. Her work did much to erect legal protection for children, but the possibility and practice of child sexual exploitation continued, as shown in the case notes of bodies such as the NSPCC. In 1987 a tide of hostility was unleashed against another woman, paediatrician Marietta Higgs, who had in the normal course of her work discovered signs of sexual abuse in a small and statistically unsurprising proportion of the children she cared for.Why is it so often women—supposedly the weaker sex, less tough-minded than men—who seem to be left to face up to the most cruel and sordid social practices, and even vicariously to bear the blame for them? And why, a century after Josephine Butler’s work, is society still so ill-equipped to deal with child sexual abuse?Josephine Butler’s involvement with girls and women forced into poverty and prostitution began in 1865 in Liverpool, when she visited the city’s vast workhouse and met some of its 5000 inhabitants. Though frightened and horrified at the conditions, and doubtful of her welcome, she sat down on the floor and began to pick oakum with the women and talk to them about their lives. Shortly afterwards she took into her house a girl called Marion who had been seduced at fifteen and abandoned, and was dying of consumption. Others followed and Josephine set up a ‘House of Rest’ for incurably ill women.
Not so Much a Threat as a Challenge: acknowledging the religio‐cultural heritage of others
Authors: Amjad‐Ali Charles 
Published: July 2007

Much has been written on religion and culture from the perspective of the sociology of religion, as well as from the perspectives of anthropologists and sociologists in general. The last two groups have largely tended to absorb the one into the other, and, as has been the case with most modern epistemologies in the social and human sciences, religion is the element which is always dislocated from its rightful place. There has been a tendency to look at religion itself as acultural phenomenon, rather than viewing the dialectic between the two as necessary for a proper understanding of both.In the modern vision, however, both religion and culture have come into disrepute. Religion is seen basically as those myths and superstitions which hold back rational and scientific development in society; and culture is also viewed as an impediment which keeps people from participating in the fruits of the Enlightenment (primarily rationality) and the techno-scientific developments of western society. Emphasis on the social presence of religion and culture is therefore seen largely as a problem of ‘underdeveloped third world societies’.
Sermon: Remembering Romero
Authors: McCabe Herbert 
Published: July 2007

On 24 March Catholics committed to the cause of social justice keep the tenth anniversary of the martyrdom of Archbishop Oscar Romero. Here is the sermon which Herbert McCabe OP preached at Blackfriars, Oxford, at the Mass marking the anniversary last year. The gospel reading was Luke 24:1—10 (Luke’s account of the first Easter morning).When the Brazilian Dominican Frei Betto was in prison one of his interrogators asked him: ‘How can a Christian collaborate with a communist?’. He answered: ‘For me, men are not divided into believers and atheists but into oppressors and victims’. I think this was a witty reply—it certainly wasn’t saying anything so tedious as ‘Truth doesn’t matter; let’s do something practical’. I think it was witty because it turned the interrogator’s question round in a new and surprising way, and because it challenged and disturbed his interrogator: ‘Is it worse to collaborate with atheists as I do or to collaborate with injustice as you do? When I work with atheists I do not become an atheist; but when you work for the unjust you do become unjust’.Frei Betto was saying that it is just because he passionately thinks that truth matters and just because he is not an atheist, that his first concern is not whether people agree with him but whether they are suffering and in particular suffering at the hands of sinful men, from the lovelessness and injustice of others. His atheist comrades may have their own reasons for struggling against injustice, but for him his reason is his belief.
Theologian meets Psychotherapist
Authors: Tillich Paul , Rogers Carl 
Published: July 2007

It is a quarter of a century, this year, since the death of Paul Tillich, the Protestant theologian who has been called ‘perhaps the principal moulder of modern Christian thought’. To mark this we are publishing here a transcript of the dialogue between him and Carl Rogers, the pioneer of person-centred psychotherapy, which took place at San Diego State College, California, on 7 March 1965 and was his last public appearance. The transcript, which was circulated (in a somewhat edited form) as a pamphlet by the College in 1966, is appearing in Carl Rogers: Dialogues, edited by Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Land Henderson and published by Constable of London, price £12.95 hardback, £7.95 paper.Carl Rogers: The importance of self-affirmation: I think that would be one area where we agree. Then I have been much impressed with your thinking about the courage to be, because I see that in psychotherapy; the courage of being something, the risk that is involved in knowing. ... I’ve also liked your phrase about the antimoral act being one that contradicts the self-realisation of the individual, and it seems to me both of us are trying to push beyond some of the trends that are very prominent in the modern world; the logical positivistic, the ultrascientific approach, the stress of the mechanistic and highly deterministic point of view which, as I see it, makes man just an object trying to find some alternative stance in relation to life. I wonder if you feel that we’re in some agreement on issues of that sort?