bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Catechetics is Not Enough
Authors: Lance Derek 
Published: July 2007

Gabriel Moran has written an important and disturbing book. It is disturbing because it challenges practically every axiom of modem Catechetics. Just when it seemed we were getting somewhere we are made to wonder if we have to start all over again.For about sixty years now the Catechetical movement has been working away to bring new life into the teaching of religion, to make religion relevant to the lives of the pupils; and in this it has achieved considerable success.One of the first things that Catechetical experts turned their attention to was the danger of verbalism and jargon. Thus, the ‘penny Catechism’ with its archaic, involved and abstract vocabulary was soon under fire. Although not long ago Catechetics was regarded by many as the off-beat hobby of a few cranks, recently (and especially since Vatican II) it has become respectable and even fashionable. Catechetical books pour on to the markets, and phrases such as kerygma, Salvation History and the Four Ways are to be heard in staff-room and presbytery. And it is just this that worries Brother Moran! He is conscious that Catechetics has reached a crisis. There is a danger of complacency and fossilization. We may wake up and find that instead of a renewed theology we have merely a new jargon.
Western Food Surpluses and the Underdeveloped World
Authors: Power Jonathan 
Published: July 2007

We are entering a new period in man’s history. Some men have always been poorer than others; people’s skin colours have always been different. But for the first time there is developing a fusion between those who are poor and those who are ‘different’. The one supporting the other – they have come to rest with odd exceptions side by side. A line has been drawn across the world. On one side are approximately one third who are white and well fed and affluent, whether they be American capitalists or Soviet factory workers. On the other side are the two thirds who are brown, black or yellow, and are either starving, or at least facing the prospect of always being poor and deprived; certainly standing little chance in the forseeable future of being affluent.In the poor part of the world, the so called underdeveloped countries, there is a population growth of 2 to 4%. As well as high birth rates they have some of the lowest death rates in the world because of their over proportioned youthful population. A decrease in their birth rate from even a large birth control campaign would according to the distinguished Swedish economist, Gunnar Myrdal, have no effect on the labour force for 15 years and only a very minor effect for three decades.Again as Myrdal observes even if industrialization were pushed much more rapidly than has been possible in the underdeveloped nations so far, it will not create much employment.
The Radical Gap
Authors: Haughton Rosemary 
Published: July 2007

In the April issue of New Blackfriars, Terry Eagleton wrote a fair and interesting review-article on my book On Trying to be Human. This article is a comment on certain questions that arise out of the review. They are quesdons about politics and philosophy and theology, but what it is really about is the irreducible gap in human awareness of life, the edges of which my book was clumsily exploring, and the reality of which gap the reviewer denies. I hope to throw some light on what it is that makes for growth in a society or in an individual.On Trying to be Human is a mixed book with some extremely turgid passages. Reading it over now, I find much of it unnecessarily complex and lengthy. On the other hand several people, whose scholarship and intelligence is unquestioned, have found it illuminating, and said so. The book was written in an attempt to use Christian ideas as a tool for interpreting the common experience of human life, without calling on support from faith or the idea of revelation. (This was what made some reviewers – Christian and non-Christian — wonder if I were really a Christian at all. As a matter of fact I scarcely was, when I wrote it.) Its starting point was that of many of those who are vaguely called ‘humanist’, and whose prevailing mood is a pessimism which is the only realism they feel is justified by the facts. It was a response to a view of life which can accept nothing but verifiable fact and refuses even to see connections between facts,
The Roots of Radicalism
Authors: Lefebure Pascal 
Published: July 2007

Terry Eagleton’s article, The Limits of Liberalism, in the April number of New Blackfriars is as important as it is absorbing. In it he acknowledges that Mrs Rosemary’s Haughton’s book, On Trying to be Human, represents ‘the most deeply creative point in one important contemporary Christian tradition—the tradition of liberal, open, personal concern with the concretely human in actual relationships’ (p. 353), and he seeks to bring it into contact with another ‘important contemporary Christian tradition’, the radical one, which has been articulating itself in a series of articles in New Blackfriars but which was risking becoming closed in on itself. More significantly still it promises to bring the debate between these two traditions, the liberal and the radical, to issue beyond the rhetoric of mere labelling, so enabling and compelling us to choose between them. The importance of the article to all those engaged in the debate and concerned with the exigencies of contemporary Christian commitment is therefore clear.Terry Eagleton’s contention is that Mrs Haughton’s affirmation and exploration of ‘the meaning of being human for a Christian’ is gravely deficient in that it systematically excludes ‘wider (and arguably deeper) connections of this immediate focus’ (p. 353). He devotes the bulk of his article to criticizing Mrs Haughton for attributing a distorted primacy to the spirit, the inward, the personal, with a consequential devaluation of the flesh, the external, the social and the political, and this on account of a misconception of the relationship between the two.
Sex and Nonsense
Authors: Marshall Patricia 
Published: July 2007

The present generation of parents and other educators faces a particular problem: having been brought up for the most part with little or no sex instruction, having been protected to some extent by the pressures of social convention, they find themselves faced by a generation of young men and women who talk freely about sex, who say openly that they are not prepared to accept the traditional teaching of the Churches with regard to sexual behaviour and for whom the fear of an illegitimate pregnancy is no longer the deterrent to fornication that it may have been in the past. To make matters even more perplexing, the young men have long hair which used to be thought a symbol of homosexuality and the young women wear mini-skirts which is confusing for a generation of men accustomed to thinking of the exposed female thigh as a non-verbal communication of a specific kind. What are they to do ? Judging by the number of books currently flooding the market, at least part of the answer seems to be ‘read a book about sex’ for, with no statistical evidence, I’d be prepared to guess that it is this generation rather than the one at risk that is doing most of the reading—perhaps the others are too busy with the field work.The first of these three paperbacks, Sense and Nonsense about Sex, purports to be written for teenagers, and more specifically appears to be directed to Protestant teenagers in youth clubs, but I find it hard to imagine any young man or woman actually reading it.
Church, State and The Vietnam War
Authors: Linden Ian 
Published: July 2007

‘Our bishops have warned us: “There is a grave danger that the circumstances of the present war may, in time, diminish our moral sensitivity to its evils”. We fear that this very danger has become actualized. We face a severe crisis of conscience within our Catholic community that arises from the incongruity between the moral principles enunciated by the Church and the uncritical support of this war by so many Catholics’: from the Catholic Committee on Vietnam—Open letter to the clergy and laity of the United States.Since the beginning of 1965, the Committee of Clergy and Laymen concerned about Vietnam, comprising distinguished figures such as Rev. Eugene Carson Blake, General Secretary of the World Council of Churches, John C. Bennett, President of the Union Theological Seminary, Martin Luther King, Reinhold Niebuhr, together with Protestant bishops and many prominent rabbis, has maintained constant moderate pressure on the administration to bring about a non-military solution to the Vietnam conflict. Although it was reported in Herder Correspondence for September/October 1966 that Cardinal Cushing was on the committee, this report proved to be a misunderstanding caused by a priest from the Boston Diocese who did support the concern. None of the Catholic Hierarchy has supported the committee, though two of the bishops have found themselves able to give private help and encouragement. There has been a number of reports of attempts at dissuading clergy from associating themselves with public protests organized by the group.
The Rule of Saint Freud
Authors: Allen Louis 
Published: July 2007

The monk pointed his pistol. ‘As far as I am concerned, the community no longer exists. The land is mine. I suggest you get out— and quick!’ The two hired thugs made it clear the threat was a real one. Reluctantly, the little group of Benedictine postulants, and their superior, packed up their few things and trudged off into the heat and dust of a Mexican afternoon. So ended the first period of one of the most interesting experiments in the monastic life in this century.The superior was, it turned out, a man of rare courage. Born in Lille in 1912, and educated ih Louvain, Dom Grégoire Lemercier spent seven years at the abbey of Mont-César before accepting the invitation of a Mexican colleague to accompany him and another monk, a Belgian, to found a monastery in Mexico. The project was delayed by the outbreak of war, during which Lemercier served as a chaplain and was taken prisoner. When he was released he left for the United States, and joined his two companions at their abbey of Monte Cassino in the north of Mexico in 1944. The foundation was a double failure: the Belgian threw up his vocation and got married, and the Mexican apostatized and at the end of 1949 took over the monastery by armed force. Two years later, little daunted by this experience, Dom Grégoire founded another monastery, Santa Maria de la Resurrección, a few miles from Cuernavaca, following the strict Benedictine observance.
A West Indian Looks at Race Relations
Authors: Pitt David 
Published: July 2007

There is a great deal of discrimination in Britain against immigrants, and it is essentially discrimination based on colour. Discrimination must not be confused with prejudice. Prejudice is an attitude of mind. Discrimination consists in giving expression to our prejudices by positive action; in this case by excluding one person from some benefit or opportunity, and not taking the same action against another person with the same qualifications.I have always held that discrimination, from which the native- born coloured suffers as much as any coloured immigrant, was based on colour, and this has been confirmed by the P.E.P. report. In carrying out their survey P.E.P. used an English person, a West Indian, an Indian, a Pakistani, a Hungarian and a Cypriot. If you accept the reaction to the English person as the norm, the findings were quite clear. For example, on one occasion forty places were tested for jobs. The Englishman was offered thirty jobs, the Hungarian twenty-seven, and the West Indian three. This shows the extent to which discrimination is based on colour. It is a fallacy to think that, as most coloured people are newcomers, discrimination will cease, since after a generation or two they will be absorbed. It is much more likely that discrimination will have become greater and segregation will have begun to be confirmed. The P.E.P. report has disclosed that people who have skills which they obtained in this country suffer greater discrimination than others; in fact 70 per cent of the coloured people who have British qualifications suffer from discrimination.
The Fire This Time
Authors: Power Jonathan 
Published: July 2007

In 1960 one person in ten in the United States was non-white. Today it is one in nine. By the end of the decade it will be one in eight. Of persons under fourteen today it is one in seven. Of persons under the age of one it is one in six.The American race problem is too large to be swept under the carpet. In fact it is of such a size as to influence the whole course of world politics: for if one thing is clear in this turbulent world it is that the major source of conflict of the latter half of this century will be the race/poverty problem and that America will, in one way or another, be at the hub of it.Already in America the situation is being polarized to the extent where it is becoming more and more rare for white and black people to do anything together. This was my conclusion after two years in the U.S.: first in the liberal, nearly all white, peaceful university town of Madison, Wisconsin, and secondly in the West Side ghetto of Chicago where no other white people lived and where the crime rate was one of the highest in the country. And since leaving America twelve months ago I have seen the process of polarization accelerate at an astonishing rate. All my white and Negro friends agree that they see no alternative in sight to an escalating number of major explosions that will make Newark and Detroit look like tea-parties.
Pigmentation and Christian Morals
Authors: Cameron J. M. 
Published: July 2007

Every man of sense who has had to fill up a form in which there is a space labelled ‘race’ must have been tempted to write down ‘human’. That ‘Caucasian’ (an echo of a long obsolete ethnological theory) or ‘Negro’ should be required answers has profound moral and political significance in our time. It represents the enchantment of the intellect by a myth comparable in its power and in its forbidding consequences to the myth of antisemitism. The follies and cruelties that go with this enchantment are well known and need not be listed. We may well suspect that the spell that binds so many cannot be broken by argument, that time spent in examining the sophistries of racialist theory (resting for the most part on a radical confusion of phenotype with genotype) is time wasted. But Christians at least have a duty to examine their consciences and their presuppositions, both in order to correct their attitudes and in order to know how to witness to the truth in the world of our day.What we do in unavoidable ignorance of how things are may be excusable or perhaps meritorious, even in those cases where a knowledge of how things are would have prompted us to quite other courses.
Language and Community
Authors: Kerr Fergus 
Published: July 2007

The intention of this paper is to test the hunch that there must be some correlation between theory of language and theory of community. Why this seems worth doing should come out in the course of the paper. It should be said that it was meant to fit between a paper by Raymond Williams and one by David Cooper, in a symposium on the theoretical basis of a ‘common culture’.Raymond Williams writes: ‘We live in almost overwhelming danger, at a peak of our apparent control. We react to the danger by attempting to take control, yet still we have to unlearn, as the price of survival, the inherent dominative mode’ (Culture and Society 1780-1950, Penguin edition, p. 322).We have to unlearn the dominative mode in social relationship. That programme is part of a complex argument, the whole of which I have no intention of spelling out here, in my crude orthography. But the point of the case is that the line of writers and thinkers studied in Williams’ book, the tradition he presents there, from Burke and Cobbett down to George Orwell, is a tradition of criticism of, and protest against, the official ideology and the prevalent consciousness of our society: ‘The development of the idea of culture has, throughout, been a criticism of what has been called the bourgeois idea of society. The contributors to its meaning have started from widely different positions, and have reached widely various attachments and loyalties.
Priesthood and Ministry
Authors: Ernst Cornelius 
Published: July 2007

Whatever may have been the case at other epochs of the history of the Church, it is clear that today treatments of confined topics of theology which can afford to take for granted theology and Christianity as a whole are no longer possible. This is true in a special way of the topic which concerns us here, the theology of the priesthood and the ministry, since we have to examine an essential element in the structure or form of Christianity itself, and since we are making this examination not as detached observers but as people who are considering the fundamental sense of our own lives.Consequently it seems suitable to make explicit two presuppositions of what is to be said later. Firstly, Christianity is real. That is to say, it is real not only with the kind of reality which will allow it to be included among other realities in accordance with a scale of reality already set up apart from Christianity itself. Christianity is real in the sense that its reality modifies the scale of reality itself. Whether we say that Christianity is a new reality in a world considered as being without it (say, as being prior to it, or posterior to it, hostile or neutral to it), or whether we say that Christianity has always been and still is ‘anonymously’ present in the world (as, say, prefigured in a total history of humanity within the eternal design of God), we must, in terms of Christianity itself, claim that Christianity is at the very least a dimension of reality which needs explicitly to be taken into account if the ontological scale which we use to assess it and indeed anything else is to function as a true criterion of the real.
Marxism and Christianity
Authors: Hamer Colin 
Published: July 2007

As a result of an educational system no longer the prerogative of the clergy, a multiplication of fields of study, a great diffusion of culture, improved communications, and more rapid social transformations, we live in an age in which man is more ready to criticize and to challenge standards hitherto accepted. Individual persons, political institutions, schools of artistic style, humanist ethical movements, racial and national groups, women’s and youth organizations, economic blocs—all are more conscious of their differentiations within a highly complex society and demand that their freedom and autonomy be recognized, refusing to be dictated to by religious leaders or state authority. The accelerated pace of change in modern life, the movement of populations to the towns, their lack of social roots or stability, overt and subconscious advertising, heavy work, group pressure, mechanical and psychological noise, the shock to routine thinking consequent upon emigration deprive man of the solitude and peace needed for constructive thinking, while technological advance makes man seem less in need of God’s help for his daily bread, and so more ready to pick holes in traditional religion, amidst the heightened fascination and lure of the world.The present religious choice is not simply between Catholicism and Protestantism, nor between Christianity and Natural Religion. It is a choice for or against God. Open, popular, organized and widespread, atheism is no longer hidden and exceptional, but, buttressed by polity and culture, constitutes the world’s most urgent problem.
Gospel and Revolution
Authors:   16 Bishops of the 3rd World
Published: July 2007

As bishops of some of the peoples who are striving to develop, we endorse the anxious appeal of Pope Paul VI in his letter ‘Populorum progressio’, so as to define their duties for our priests and faithful, and to send words of encouragement to all our brothers in the Third World.As they are in this Third World, our Churches are caught up in a confrontation no longer simply of East and West, but of three great groups: the western powers which grew rich in the last century, the two Communist countries that have also become great powers, and finally the Third World, still seeking an escape from the domination of the great powers, and the freedom to develop in their own way. Within even the developed countries there are still classes, races and peoples that have not yet received their rights to a full human life. An irresistible urge is working these poorer elements towards their betterment by liberating them from all oppressive forces. Although most countries may have gained their political freedom, economic freedom is still a rarity. Few also are countries where social equality prevails, an essential condition of true brotherhood, for peace cannot exist without justice. The peoples of the Third World are the proletariat of existing humanity, exploited by the great, their very survival threatened by ones who, because they are stronger, arrogate to themselves the sole right to judge and police peoples less rich in material terms. In fact our peoples are no less wise or just than the great powers.
Change and Revaluation in The Bible
Authors: Wansbrough Henry 
Published: July 2007

It was often said of good Pope John that in summoning the Council he unleashed stronger forces than he had bargained for; there were suggestions that at the end he felt these forces to be beyond his control and overpowering him. There is sometimes a naive enthusiasm in those who are most eager for renewal which blinds them to the problems raised by this renewal. One sphere in which the problems are acute and puzzling is that of the biblical renewal. The problems centre round the paradox which is overstated by the often-heard cry: ‘How is it that we are encouraged to read the Bible more and more, while at the same time we are told that less and less of it is true?’ The paradox is overstated in this form, for what we are told is not that less and less of the Bible is true, but that less and less of it is to be taken at its face value, that less and less of it can be understood without considerable training, that not all of it is of equal importance, some passages or even whole books being of very peripheral value for the Christian life, while others teach some idea which is crucial amid a waste of folklore or rabbinic legalism. The dilemma is at its most puzzling at two moments, readings in the Mass and private reading of the scriptures.It is commonplace that the world of the Old Testament was very different from ours, that their forms of expression are very different from the ones we use today.