bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
‘Glorify God in your bodies’: 1 Corinthians 6, 12–20 as a sexual ethic
Authors: Radcliffe Timothy 
Published: July 2007

Based on a talk given during a Catholic People’s Week“‘All things are lawful for me,” but not all things are helpful’ (v. 12). The Corinthians have a sexual ethic which starts from the question, ‘What is allowed? What may I do?’. And doubtless they could quote Paul back to himself to show that since they were free from the law, they could do anything; ‘For freedom Christ has set us free; stand fast therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery’ (Galatians 5:1). It follows, then, that there can be no restrictions upon what is permitted to the Christian. We are allowed to perform any sexual acts that we wish.Paul’s reaction is not to revise his view that we are not under the Law but to suggest that asking what is permissible is not the right starting point. A proper sexual ethics is not, in the first place, about what is lawful, but about what is ‘helpful’. In this passage Paul subverts the Corinthians’ basic presuppositions in thinking about sexual ethics. Two thousand years later most Catholics need to submit to the same gentle subversion. The Church’s teaching on sexuality is normally seen in terms of what is allowed or forbidden; sexual ethics are classified as ‘permissive’ or ‘restrictive’, and the Church authorities are usually happy to oblige by stating the limits of acceptable behaviour. We all need to submit to the Pauline therapy, and this works, like any decent therapy, by means of a dialogue between the patient and the therapist.
Permanent Creation in Saint Thomas Aquinas
Authors: Brown Montague 
Published: July 2007

The intellectual climate in which Aquinas matured was one of conflict. The arrival of the works of Aristotle in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries brought to the Christian West an awareness of the natural world as an integrated, self-sufficient entity. Aristotle, as the first historian of philosophy, expressed the Greek philosophical tradition that ‘from nothing nothing comes’, a challenge to the Christian notion of creation. Let us mark but a couple of sayings discoverable in the tradition. Heraclitus, for example, wrote: ‘This world order (the same for all) did none of the gods or men make, but it always was and is and shall be: an everlasting fire, kindling in measures and going out in measures. Empedocles is even more adamant in his refusal to entertain any notion of making from nothing: ‘Fools—for they have no far-reaching thoughts—who fancy that that which formerly was not can come into being or that anything can perish and be utterly destroyed.’ Aristotle’s position, although subtler than his predecessors’, is consonant with the tradition: ‘We ourselves are in agreement with them in holding that nothing can be said without qualification to come from nothing.’ To the ears of a growing population of Aristotelian disciples who equated Aristotle with truth, this seemed to amount to the philosophical denial of creation from nothing.This and other doctrines apparently incompatible with Christianity caused a reactionary movement among many theologians, and what was already a fairly well-established theological tradition became more explicit. It was argued that, since the world was created from nothing, it tends towards nothing and will, in fact, finally return to nothing.
The Theology of Robots
Authors: Furse Edmund 
Published: July 2007

The initial reaction of nearly all theologians and religious people to the very idea that it is possible to talk about ‘the theological dimensions’ of the existence of robots would—today—be dismissive, and, more often than not, scornful. ‘It makes no sense,’ most theologians would say. Before beginning to argue that one day, on the contrary, it will make a lot of sense, something much more general must be said about robots, or, more specifically, about Artificial Intelligence.Artificial Intelligence, or AI as it is usually abbreviated, is the study of computer models of intelligent behaviour. Some scientists are interested in using AI to understand human behaviour, others in designing intelligent mechanisms. As a discipline in its own right, it has existed since about 1950, with the pioneering work of John McArthy. It has two separate strands in its historical origin. Psychologists after the dark ages of behaviourism, which banished all talk of mental models as unscientific, started to study cognition (commonly called thought), which formed the subject of cognitive psychology. In devising models of mental processes they naturally turned to computers for an appropriate language of description; thus were born information processing models of human cognition. In order to formulate precise and testable theories of mental processes computer models were found to be indispensible. Models have been developed for memory, understanding natural language, vision, learning and, more recently, emotion.Computer science has probably had a longer historical interest in AI, although one could argue that cogwheel and pneumatic models were an early attempt by psychologists to understand the mechanics of the mind.
A Sermon
Authors: Ombres Robert 
Published: July 2007

Preached at Blackfriars, Cambridge, on Sunday, 9 February, three days after Kenelm Foster’s death, to a congregation that knew him well. The readings for that Sunday were: Isaiah 6:1—8 (the call of Isaiah); l Corinthians 15:1—11 (Paul’s testimony of Christ’s death for our sins’ and resurrection); and Luke 5:1-11 (the call of the first disciples).Kenelm would have been delighted at finding this Pauline reading, if he had been preaching today. He loved St Paul. He was his clear-favourite New Testament writer. Paul, who often spoke in the First person. Paul, who was like a boxer, and not in vain. Paul, who was always arguing, full of polemic and self-polemic. Paul, who could chart in his experience, even on his own body, the workings of grace, of grappling with the Saviour. Paul, who wrestled with meaning. We can even imagine Paul to be like his thought—tough, full of wiry strength. Kenelm had been a boxer at Downside and always kept some of the instincts and reactions of a boxer. Kenelm, who always asked awkward questions, even as a Dominican student; so he was banished to a parish as a kind of punishment, he who was so obviously clever. (But questions were not encouraged by all in the Study House in those days.) Kenelm on his death-bed, listening to a fellow-friar reading to him Hopkins’s poems—but not just listening, arguing about the meaning; getting impatient. Tenacious, dogged in style. You will never understand Kenelm properly unless you read some of his writings.
Friend and Colleague
Authors: Limentani Uberto 
Published: July 2007

Kenelm was appointed a Lecturer in Italian in the University of Cambridge from 1 October, 1948. Professor Vincent showed flair and imagination when he made this far from obvious choice for the post which had become vacant following the retirement of Miss K.T. Butler. He had been one of the two examiners of Kenelm’s thesis on St Thomas and Dante, and was impressed by its quality. Kenelm had, I believe, some family connection with Italy and had spent some time there in the past, but he had had no formal training in Italian literature, apart from the deep knowledge of Dante he must have acquired while preparing his dissertation.We were never formally introduced. After three years as Lector, I became an Assistant Lecturer on the same date on which Kenelm was appointed to a Lectureship, and a few days later, in the morning of 18 October, we bumped into each other in the Departmental Library, a gloomy and not much frequented room now occupied by University offices on the top floor at the back of the Old Schools, facing Clare College. I vividly remember that the first thing he said after a few words of introduction was a defensive and characteristically modest ‘I don’t know any Italian’. We must have felt a liking for each other from the beginning. Five days later he came to the house my wife and I rented in the Hills Road area for what was meant to be a brief afternoon visit and to meet my wife, and stayed till late in the evening.
Back to the Ark
Authors: Dowell Susan 
Published: July 2007

The alarming resurgence of biblical speculation by the nuclear war-lords of the West in the last few years has drawn peace-movement Christians to sober biblical scholarship. New Blackfriars writers have pioneered the reclamation of ‘the most symbolically-rich eschatological language of the Bible, from Isaiah to Revelation, ... captured by abstentionist sects and a politically hostile movement’ and made ‘virtually unavailable to Christians who do not share those views about politics and God’s action in the world’.The question I would like to explore here is: how, if at all, can this kind of investigation, which draws on academic exegesis but clearly goes beyond it, also help us to reclaim and wrestle with symbols and stories which superficially appear to be of a different kind, namely, the symbols and stories which speak of our earliest beginnings? With the Garden of Eden, Noah’s Ark and the Tower of Babel? This might be termed the ‘pop’ culture of the Bible, not being seen as belonging to the specialist or to any political faction with a biblical axe to grind, but as the mythic heritage of all—timeless, beloved of Hollywood as the stuff of Epic spectacle. It is, however, the area which has long been of interest to the Western Women’s Movement, because it has come to reckon with the power of these foundational myths over our culture’s perceptions of gender. Feminists see these myths as captured and distorted by patriarchal religion and hence by patriarchal power in general.
The Church's Option in Hull
Authors: Doyle Patrick J. 
Published: July 2007

Let us not forget that the Son of Man had nowhere to lay his head: that Jesus, the Father of the Poor, had less than the foxes with their holes; and always remember that Jesus worked among the lepers, the prostitutes, the sinners, the outcasts. Yes, Jesus caused scandal by his work among those marginalised by society.Jesus too was called ‘the Nazarene’: ‘Jesus the provincial’; He could just as easily have been Jesus from Middlesbrough, or Jesus from Hull. If Jesus walked the face of the earth today, would He weep again over the city? Over Hull or Middlesbrough? How would He react to such contemporary problems as Aids, the apparent breakdown of family life, the scourge of unemployment, the plight of the homeless, and the tragedy of young drug addicts? Of one thing we can be sure, if he was to visit Hull, he would be on our outer estates of Bransholme, Orchard Park and North Hull—and he would react. But this, of course, begs the question.Jesus is still with us; by his own promise he is with the Church, and in his own words he is in our fellow men and women. ‘Whenever you do it to the least of my brethren you do it to me.’
J.L. Austin and the Book of Jonah
Authors: Eagleton Terry 
Published: July 2007

The surrealist farce known as the Book of Jonah, surely the one consciously witty book in the Bible, is easily summarised. God commands Jonah to go and cry doom on Nineveh, a city whose viciousness has just come to his attention, but Jonah doesn’t reckon much to this mission and takes off instead for Tarshish. A divinely engineered storm threatens his ship, and he requests the crew with remarkable sang froid to pitch him overboard. God sends a fish to swallow Jonah up and spew him out again three days later, whereupon Jonah does manage to get himself to Nineveh and wanders the city proclaiming imminent catastrophe. Unusually enough, the inhabitants of the city, prodded a bit by their king, take Jonah’s prophecy to heart and repent, which infuriates Jonah so much that he goes and sulks outside the city hoping to die. God fools around with him briefly, sending a plant to shade him, then a worm to devour the plant, then a sultry wind to make him faint from heat, and finally treats him to a short homily about divine mercy.Why was Jonah so reluctant to go to Nineveh in the first place? Perhaps because hectoring a seedy bunch of strangers about their vices isn’t the best guarantee of a long life. But in the storm scene Jonah shows scant regard for his own safety, and indeed by the end of the text is betraying a powerful death wish. The fact is that he refused to obey God because he thought there was no point, and tells God as much after he has spared Nineveh.
Religious Experience and the existence of God
Authors: Gross Selwyn 
Published: July 2007

Philosphers of religion sometimes appeal to religious experiences as evidence for the existence of God. To take one notable and philosophically sophisticated example, Professor Swinburne argues that religious experience constitutes good C-inductive ground for belief in the existence of God; and that the contribution of the argument from religious experience to the ensemble of arguments for the existence of God as a whole makes the ensemble a good P-inductive rather than just a C-inductive argument. This is a substantial claim: a C-inductive argument merely adds to the probability of some claim, without making it more probable than not. A P-inductive argument, by contrast, establishes that the probability of the claim it defends is greater than fifty percent.Not all religious experience is covered by Swinburne’s claim. Non-theistic experiences and theistic experiences not claiming to be of God are excluded from this discussion. This article will deal with unequivocal claims to have had experience of God, not with weaker claims (to have had an experience as of God touching one, for example). Weaker claims might be indefeasible, but offer little joy for the theist. Univocal claims, by contrast, are non-trivially true if true at all.What marks an experience as an experience of God? H.P. Owen’s definition of God as ‘the Creator, who is infinite, self-existent, incorporeal, eternal, immutable, impassible, simple, perfect, omniscient and omnipotent’ is useful in answering this question. A claim to have had an experience of an infinite, eternal, omniscient and omnipotent being, say, is a claim to have had an experience of God: here, a sufficient number of attributes secures the identification.
Altruism's Evolution
Authors: Reiss Michael J. 
Published: July 2007

What can recent theories in evolutionary biology about the problem of altruism contribute to a Christian perspective on the nature of humanity?Altruism is considered a ‘problem’ because Darwin’s theory of natural selection leads us to expect all organisms, including humans, to be selfish. According to the theory of natural selection those traits which we expect to see in the natural world are the ones which have conferred on their bearers the greatest reproductive success. As altruism means the giving of aid, a preliminary reading of Darwinism suggests that altruism poses a challenge to the whole theory of adaptation by natural selection. Sociobiology has a great deal to say about the evolution of altruism in non-humans. How far does the study of altruism in non-humans help us to understand altruism in us?Sociobiological theories for the evolution of altruism Sociobiology, the systematic study of the biological basis of all social behaviour, dates as a named discipline from only 1975, when E.O. Wilson’s now much-discussed book, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, was published. As altruism manifestly requires social behaviour—an organism cannot be altruistic on its own!—theories for the evolution of altruism lie at the centre of sociobiology.The first biological explanation for altruism was, however, proposed by none other than Darwin himself. Having developed the theory of natural selection, Darwin went on to consider how the sterile castes in many social insects could have evolved. He realised that it might be argued that such castes could not have evolved by natural selection because the bearers of traits associated with sterility leave, by definition, no offspring, but he proposed that sterility in such circumstances could evolve by a process he termed ‘family selection’.
A Symbolic Theology
Authors: Griffiths Bede 
Published: July 2007

Professor Michael Dummett, in the article in New Blackfriars which has stirred up so much controversy, ‘A Remarkable Consensus’ (October 1987, pp. 424—431), seems to have taken as a criterion of Catholic faith what Avery Dulles, calls in his book Models of Revelation a propositional model of revelation. Professor Dummett is a distinguished logician. No doubt, then, he is accustomed to think of abstract logical thought as a norm of human discourse. But, if it is religious discourse we are considering, this is an assumption which can be extremely misleading. As Avery Dulles says, it tends to ‘reduce meaning and intelligibility to the narrow confines of conceptual logic’. In place of this Dulles suggests a symbolic model of revelation, which seems to me to give much more meaning to faith and to present a much more convincing model of the Church.The proposition which Professor Dummett proposes as fundamental to a Catholic understanding of the Church, that ‘it is enjoined on us, whatever the provocation, never to take any step to disrupt the unity of the Church’ (p. 424), seems particularly unsatisfactory. In the first place, as Dummett acknowledges in regard to the schism between the Eastern and the Western Church, there is the problem of who was responsible for the split. And there is the further problem, that Dummett thinks that the Protestant Reformers ‘did not even pretend to form a rival Catholic Church’ (p. 425).This, however, is a minor point. It is the whole idea of a propositional model of revelation which needs to be questioned—even at the risk of repeating here much that is familiar.
The Value of Literature: I—Chaucer's language of forgiveness
Authors: Finn Richard 
Published: July 2007

It would seem that literature these days is increasingly a matter of taste. We are helped, not to learn and practise discrimination between the good and the bad, but to buy and consume according to our ‘special interest’. We ask of a play or novel, not whether it will sharpen our understanding, nor whether it may damage our sensibilities, but that it should appeal. It has not always been so. When Chaucer chose to take his leave of the reader at the end of the Canterbury Tales with a formal apology—though no mere formality—for the ‘translacions and enditynges of worldly vanitees’ it was precisely their appeal for which he sought to make amends.The recognition of the power of stories to shape character, and to shape language, has led to the Tradition, a canon judged worthy of study and constitutive of our culture. That Tradition is now under attack. Where it has not already been dismissed as irrelevant, it is rejected as ‘elitist’, a snub too hastily dismissive of Leavis’ wish for ‘an English School ... designed for an elite’ Literature, has even been deemed the creation of a powerful, wicked literary institution in which the universities are prime movers. Terry Eagleton has argued in his book Literary Theory thatliterary criticism cannot justify its self-limiting to certain works by an appeal to their ‘value’ (because) that criticism is part of a literary institution which constitutes these works as valuable in the first place.
Child Abuse and the Reality of Sin
Authors: Doyle Michael 
Published: July 2007

Cruelty to children is not new, though no doubt we are an inventive enough species to come up with some new forms. It could be that some of us may be more disposed to it than others, but it seems safer to assume that we all share a capacity for cruelty. Such a capacity does not have to be exercised: cruelty can be understandable without being right. Some societies and some social situations may increase the likelihood of its occurring, but they neither excuse it nor explain it away.But if cruelty itself is not new, new in our own time is its categorisation. When we talk of ‘child abuse’, we are putting forward views on both cruelty and children which in some ways are new, or at least newly accepted, and which incorporate our contemporary notions of how human beings should conduct themselves. This categorisation is crucial to any discussion, since it provides us with the basic forms which it must take, but it does incline us to treat the phenomenon of cruelty to children as especially characteristic of our own time. The broad range of cruelty from deprivation through violation to murder is fully evident, in England at least, from a succession of court cases and official inquiries, yet it still cannot be asserted with any certainty that child abuse is more common now than in the past. Evidence from the past is lacking precisely because our forebears did not share our categorisations (or our interest in statistics).
Collective Guilt and the Crucifixion
Authors: Turner Geoffrey 
Published: July 2007

‘There is no such thing as collective guilt’ —Kurt WaldheimWell, he would say that, wouldn’t he? Waldheim is one of a generation of Austrians and Germans who have a vested interest in excusing themselves from guilt by association in mass murder, in the absence of hard evidence that they pulled the trigger or signed the warrant or turned the gas on. But the evasions and moral insensitivity of the Austrian President do not merit further discussion here. What is more important is whether it is the case that ‘there is no such thing as collective guilt’, because if there is not then certain aspects of traditional Christian theology are in big trouble.Of course, collective guilt is a deeply unpopular idea. It involves the suggestion that someone who has not perpetrated a crime or some other shameful act in some way carries the guilt for that act by virtue of sharing a social identity with the criminal. Is our reluctance to accept this idea the result of genuine moral difficulties with attributing guilt to someone who might with some justification claim to be innocent, or is it the result of two centuries of social conditioning in a liberal individualistic society? It may be both.Western liberal democratic society is individualistic in a cultural tradition that was traced by C.B. Macpherson some years ago to Hobbes and John Locke, who had prepared a philosophical account of the lone individual who observes the world and constructs a language to talk about it.
Sermon
Authors: Gutierrez Gustavo 
Published: July 2007

In his letter to the Ephesians St Paul says that we must walk as children of light (5:8). We have here an important biblical image: walking, walking as children of light. Probably you have observed how in the Bible people are all the time walking. Walking or eating ... all the time. These two human actions are the expression of life. And it is life 1 am preaching about.The gospel of John is a very long text but a very rich one. And, as miracle stories go, the story in it of the healing of the man born blind (9:1—41) is very long but very rich.Both in it and in the excerpt from Ephesians which is read with it (5:8—14) Jesus is the Light. That is an idea that comes up again and again in the gospel of John. And light in John is always related to life; light and life are linked. From the very beginning of the gospel, from the first chapter, Jesus is the Light, is Life, and all the miracles of Jesus in the gospel of John are done to give life. Jesus does not do miracles to surprise people, but to give life. And this is, of course, evident above all in the story of the healing of the man born blind.