bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Heard and Seen
Authors: Butcher Maryvonne 
Published: July 2007

As presented to us in Europe at the moment, the American film is in a rum state of disproportion. Hurtling around in circuit like so many giant satellites go the blockbusters—El Cid and Ben Hur and West Side Story—and not yet generally released are the near three hours of The Cardinal, the three hours plus of Cleopatra, looming like Easter Island figures in the West End or on the boulevards of Paris.And yet, in contrast to films of such enormous magnification, spatial and temporal, financial and technical, we have now been able to see a handful of American films which would almost appear to have been made by directors looking through the wrong end of the telescope, so deliberately small-scale are they.The first of these was, I suppose, the memorable Shadows, made by John Cassavetes to please himself in a kind of sophisticated near-improvisation, which ran for months at the Academy Cinema, with the longest queues of the most enthusiastic young audiences that London had seen since foreign films reached us again after the war. This study of race relations in New York, made in a minor key but with major intelligence, was most absorbing, apart from its sheer cinematic interest, for the insight it gave one into the lives of real people, as distinct from film stereotypes, as prolific in the American cinema as in the British, but less easily detectible by the stranger. And now that one has read James Baldwin’s Another Country, Shadows seems even more impressive in retrospect. Then came Shirley Clarke’s The Connection—I do not think one can include The Savage Eye in this category, for it was essentially a documentary—which was a wonderfully entertaining piece of work. It dealt, you will recall, with the existence of junkies whilst they await the appearance of Cowboy—sinister black boy in white dungarees—who will bring them their dope, without which they cannot survive.
Religionless Christianity
Authors: Ryan Columba 
Published: July 2007

You would be surprised and perhaps disturbed if you knew how my ideas on theology are taking shape . . . The thing that keeps coming back to me is, what is Christianity, and indeed what is Christ, for us today? ... We are proceeding towards a time of no religion at all; men as they are now simply cannot be religious any more . . . Our whole nineteen-hundred-years old Christian preaching and theology rests upon the ‘religious premise’ of man . . . But if one day it becomes apparent that this a priori premise simply does not exist, but was a historical and temporary form of human self-expression, i.c. if we reach the stage of being radically without religion . . . what does that mean for Christianity . . . ? How can Christ become the Lord even of those without religion; If religion is no more than the garment of Christianity—and even that garment has had very different aspects at different periods—then what is religionless Christianity?In this passage, written from prison twenty years ago (30 April, 1944), Dietrich Bonhoeffcr raised an issue to which wide currency has now been given by the Bishop of Woolwich in the chapter of Honest to God entitled Worldly Holiness. Not that the question is confined to that chapter alone. Indeed I believe it to be the central issue of the Bishop’s whole book, more central in some way than the question of what image of God we are to have. For, if I am not mistaken, we have here the central anxiety which made Dr Robinson write his book.
Sartre as a Critic of Camus
Authors: Thomas Charles 
Published: July 2007

Jean-Paul Sartre as a critic has been harshly judged in Western Europe, indeed he is one of the more notable victims of cold war mental attitudes. This is well illustrated by the quarrel with Albert Camus brought into the open by Jeanson’s harsh review of ‘L’Homme Revoke’ in ‘Les Temps Modernes’, a quarrel in which a very large number of western readers have taken Camus’ side. Camus is seen as the upholder of human dignity and values, over against Sartre, the system builder, infatuated with the marxist myth of history. This attitude very much undervalues Sartre’s contribution—he points out clearly the essential weakness in Camus’ position. Moreover the whole debate is an excellent illustration of the difficulty involved in building any coherent, materialist system of ethics.This difficulty is rooted in their common ground; both start from the atheism of Nietzsche and its consequence the absolute freedom of man. Yet both belong to the long line of French moralists and are passionately concerned with what a man ought to do, granted this double premiss. However they begin to differ even in the ways they accept this atheism. Sartre is very matter of fact, for him the death of God is so self-evident that there is no point in talking about it. Towards the end of ‘Le Sursis’ Mathieu receives a letter from Daniel in which the latter very interestingly explains his half-conversion to Catholicism. Mathieu reads part of the letter, loses patience with its to him utter irrelevance, and throws it into the waste paper basket. This contrasts sharply with Camus’ interest in the way the individual accepts atheism.
The ‘Summa’ in the Sixties
Authors: Gilby Thomas 
Published: July 2007

St Thomas is one of those people who, like Queen Victoria, have become a myth : I use the word in a Jungian sense and by no means in depreciation. She became one during her lifetime, and on that count made an earlier start; still he was already five centuries ahead, and his image has been more variously encrusted with the tastes of different periods and regions, so much so as almost to have grown into several myths.To discover what the real person was like, the prosopon of Patristic theology, you cannot do better than go by the biographical documents edited by Father Kenelm Foster, which record the witness of those who were as near to him as we are to the characters of the 1914 war. Yet it is with the prosopon in its earlier histrionic and later juridical sense, the personage standing for a cause, the legal person and sometimes, it must be confessed, the legal fiction, that the historian of philosophy and theology is occupied, for such is the public figure that engages the gears and sets into motion the vehicles that carry the ideas of groups.
Christian Unity and Institutionalism
Authors: St John Henry 
Published: July 2007

In a notable speech at the Vatican Council on November 20 last, the Archbishop of Westminster undertook, in the name of the hierarchy of England and Wales, to promote a fuller and more frequent dialogue with all Christians in this country of whatever denomination. The occasion was the opening debate on the Constitution de Oecumenismo. The Archbishop said that the hierarchy, for whom he spoke, gives its ready approval to this document and receives it with joy. It gives us the guidance of the Church’s supreme authority, which we have been awaiting, and clearly shows us its mind. Without this our ecumenical work could not make progress.Soon after the publication of this speech it was announced from Lambeth Palace that the Archbishop of Canterbury had set up a Commission on Roman Catholic Relations, to be composed of experts from strategic areas throughout the whole of the country. They will be responsible, from the Anglican side, for the arrangement of dialogue with the Roman Catholic Church. It can hardly be doubted that there has been a causal connection between the Vatican speech and the Lambeth announcement, and we may hope therefore for the setting up, on our side, of a similar body to co-operate in organising this work.It will not be out of place then to consider, on as wide a basis as possible and in a spirit of experiment, not only what are the most suitable topics, at the theological level, to embark on in dialogue, but, and this is more important, what are the presuppositions on either side with which eirenic discussion of these topics will inevitably be approached.
The Council and the Bomb–Casuistry or Witness
Authors: Stein Walter 
Published: July 2007

-‘Would you press the button you know is going to annihilate millions of people ?’-‘If the circumstances demanded it, I would.’This reply, under oath, by Air Commodore Magill to Pat Pottle at the British Official Secrets Trial of February 1962, distils the essence of nuclear deterrence. In the light of common sense, and especially with reference to just-war principles, it also defines its essential immorality.As a prosecution witness, the Air Commodore was being cross-examined by one of the accused who had invaded a nuclear base in protest and who was later sentenced to imprisonment for this offence. The Air Commodore’s reply is of course in no sense surprising; everybody knows that the backbone of nuclear strategy remains the threatened icineration of enemy cities. (Even is so-called tactical nuclear combat and in so-called strategic counterforce strategies it is precisely the ultimate threat against enemy cities which seeks to enforce the proposed restraints.) What is notable about Air Commodore Magill’s colloquy with his objector is simply that it spells out, with a clarity we cannot evade, the moral cost of nuclear defence.This cost lies not merely in the risking of future enormities; it involves gravely immoral intentions here and now. These declared intentions to execute city-hostages ‘if the circumstances demanded it’ are no less immediately and categorically genocidal for relating to a future hypothetical condition. No doubt there is a difference between murder accomplished and murder in one’s heart, but it is not a difference between murderousness and non-murderousness.
The Quest for Gravity
Authors: Stewart James 
Published: July 2007

The Quest for Love published a year ago, is the best of the dozen books – of poetry, of criticism, of short stories, of works on teaching and of anthologies for teachers – that Mr David Holbrook has put out in the last five years. Something of his programme, and of a distinctive overtone that accompanies it, can be seen if we go back to his dispute with a Times Literary Supplement critic in 1962. Writing in reply to a fairly stinging review of Llareggub Revisited, his book on Dylan Thomas, Mr Holbrook affirmed (and that seems the right word for it): ‘It is true that I feel strongly that literature is of little value unless it brings us deeper perceptions and insights into our own nature, and the nature of our living conditions, in time and mortality. For this reason I seek to write with gravity .. .’What he intended, he suggested, was ‘a quest for gravity, in the art of writing, and in personal living’. Yet there is a kind of quest for gravity, and a kind of quest for love, which makes us pause. To care so much is a great thing, to declare oneself openly is an honest act which we see too seldom, but aren’t the references to time and mortality uncomfortably over-large, embarrassingly imprecise? A quality of Puritanism, as Hooker knew, is to think too little of the multiple lesser needs and laws that govern our lives, to concede a kind of hypertrophy to the greatest and (at worst) to dismiss with rancour those who cultivate the less.
Objections to Roman Catholicism
Authors: Foster Kenelm 
Published: July 2007

When I was young a book with this sort of title and written by Catholics would have been intended as an answer; the Church would have been defended. One can plausibly imagine some of the contributors: Belloc and Chesterton, not yet, respectively, too old or dead; Fathers Martindale and McNabb; Mr Waugh speaking for youth and perhaps Eric Gill (a bit uneasy with some of the company) for art. Count de la Bedoyère's team are of a different kidney. All but two of them seem far more concerned to raise than to answer objections, and if the formula of our imaginary book might have been ‘Yes, but . . . ‘, that of the present one is rather ‘Yes, and...', followed by a strong recommendation that it is high time something was done about it. The common mood, in short, is one of protest, the common aim is reform. Hence it isn't surprising, given the Church's established structure, that the general tone may fairly, if loosely, be described as anticlerical. And it is perhaps here, rather than in the particular views and arguments put forward, that this book's chief interest and significance lies, – not, of course, simply in its being slanted towards anticlericalism, but in its being so in a new, contemporary way.In the twenties and thirties there were currents of anticlerical feeling in English Catholicism, but they were small and scattered, and, more important, they neither claimed nor expected much support from theology.
Heard and Seen: Critic in the Cinema
Authors: Butcher Maryvonne 
Published: July 2007

Today the conflict in critical opinion over controversial films often seems more pronounced when it comes to the kind of film that is most likely to engage the interest of Catholics. Never has it been more important that the intelligent Catholic should make up his own mind over a difficult picture than in the present state of the cinema; and by and large there is not, in this country, a great deal that will help him enlarge his cinematic critical apparatus. In France, Belgium or Italy the highbrow Catholic is not ashamed to admit to enthusiasm for the cinema: in England one only too often finds him saying that he cannot be bothered with films. This puts us at a considerable disadvantage when it comes to international gatherings concerned with any form of mass media and, worse still, at a visible loss when it comes to discussion with alert non-Catholic cinema-goers in this country about any particular film on which we should certainly have clear views one way or another.The eighth London Film Festival held last autumn provided a pertinent case in point. Owing to the massive rebuilding that is still taking place on the South Bank, the films this year were shown in the West End; in consequence a much larger proportion of the general public (as opposed to members of the British Film Institute) came to the performances. Three of the films shown were OCIC (Office Catholique Internationale du Cin?ma) prize winners – one of them the Grand Prix for 1964 – and several others were of lively interest to Catholic audiences.
Music in Vernacular Liturgy
Authors: Milner Anthony 
Published: July 2007

what generates the plan itself in the first instance is liturgical requirement.Then don’t let him engage a decorative artist of the second, third or any subsequent rank to apply fiddling little bits of art to a structure which will probably at least have the humble merit of plainness. Again and again as one turns these pages one is struck by the pity of it ‣ messy ceramic plaques, vacuous mural reliefs, busy semi-abstract stained glass windows of overblown cosmological significance, facile streamlined statues of sacred personages appliqué to fine blank walls with about as much relevance as if one were to stick a Valentine card on a Mondriaan abstract … if only they’d refrained! So unless you can afford the prices payable to the Chagalls, Rouaults or Légers of this world, let the architecture do the talking: it has a far better chance of avoiding the arbitrary, the personal, and therefore the distracting.
On Clericalism
Authors: Blenkinsopp Joseph 
Published: July 2007

There is one side to the transformation of the Church going on today which might seem to have a purely liturgical bearing but which in fact goes wider and deeper – the general abandonment of the Latin language. This doesn't just imply the return to an intelligible and genuinely public liturgy but the abandonment of the lingua franca of what has been for centuries a clerical world and the moving out into the open and as yet largely unchartered waters of a lay and secular church – a church of the people, fully in the world.Anti-clericalism is a lot easier to recognize than clericalism and therefore a lot easier to deprecate. Rather than merely deprecating it, however, with its long and ugly history especially in some Latin countries, we would be better employed in finding out to what extent it was justified and in fact at times made necessary by circumstances. It might, for instance, be considered rather significant that the part of Italy where communism and anti-clericalism is strongest, where there are still people who ‘baptize’ their children in wine out of contempt for the Church's sacraments, is precisely that part which formed the Papal states.Clericalism is a historical phenomenon and has to be studied historically. It is, of course, a pejorative term and does not refer to the existence in the Church of a section of people called clerics, those who, in the definition of canon 108 of the Code, are ‘tied to divine service, having received at least first tonsure'.
Man is a Gorilla with a Gun: Reflections on an American best seller
Authors: Merton Thomas 
Published: July 2007

'Extrapolation', says the dictionaries, ‘is the method of finding by calculation, based on the known terms of a series, other terms, whether preceding or following.’ The method is proper to mathematics and works efficiently when dealing with number and quantity. When it is transferred to the realm of quality and of organic life, more still to that of history and of culture, it tends to lose its precisely exact scientific quality and becomes a venture in creativity, or, at any rate, a work of fantasy. Imagination now takes the place of calculation. There can be no doubt that the scientist who seeks to learn the origin of man from a fossilized remnant of a skull that might have belonged to a man or to a baboon, must be blessed with a creative imagination as well as with a scientifically exact intelligence. I suppose that when Robert Ardrey, a playwright rather than a professional scientist, sub-titles his book ‘A personal investigation into the animal origins and nature of man’ he is serving notice that he intends to extrapolate with unrestrained imaginative abandon. At any rate, this is what he does !.There is of course a good basis of scientific evidence in African Genesis. The most recent discoveries of paleontology made in Africa, especially the most notable, those of Dr L. S. B. Leakey at Olduvai in Tanganyika, give very convincing indications that the origin of man was in Africa not in Asia.
Father Daniel Callus, 1888–1965
Authors: Knowles David 
Published: July 2007

The Order of Preachers, which has such a clear individuality in the Church, has nevertheless among its gifted sons many different shades of character and fields of achievement. To the outside world it is the order of the great theologians, the order of strict orthodoxy, the order of St Thomas, of Cajetan, of Bariez, of John of St Thomas, and in our own time of P?re Gardei! and P?re Garrigou-Lagrange. The historian thinks also of the great inquisitors, of Jacob Sprenger and his Malleus Ma/eficarum, of Torquemada and the formidable Melchior Cano. By contrast with these there has always been a strain of the revolutionary, of the liberal and of the avant-garde, Savonarola, Las Casas, Lacordaire Vincent McNabb and Yves Congar. And finally, there is the recurrent type of the dedicated scholar, William of Moerbeke, Heinrich Denifle, Pierre Mandonnet and P?re Vicaire. And where shall we fit in Eckhardt, Tauler and Suso ? Into which of these groups shall we place Fr Daniel ?His curriculum vitae is a varied one. Angelo Callus was born in 1888 in Malta, of Maltese parents but ultimately of Greek ancestry, and I am told the first Callus in the island was Greek physician to the Grand Master De La Vallette, the hero of the first siege of the island. He became a friar sixty years ago at the age of seventeen, and studied at Florence and Rome with a brilliant record, becoming Master of Sacred Theology at the unusually early age of thirty-six in 1924.
Missionary Thinking in the Context of Today
Authors: Hastings Adrian 
Published: July 2007

An approach to this theme must be very tentative. Enormous shifts in emphasis and sense of direction are taking place in the Church today and it is not easy to see the effect they can have in fields of thought and action which have of late been less explored. It is strange that one of these should be the missionary field, but it seems true. The Council's preoccupations hitherto have been elsewhere. The outright rejection of the schema on the Missions in the third session was evidence not only of its own inadequacy but also of a possible general consciousness among the Fathers that this crucial subject had not yet been considered by them with requisite seriousness. The great project on The Church in the Modern World’ will obviously also be of the deepest significance for missionary thinking. To attempt any sort of a rounded statement on the subject at the moment would seem then to be out of the question. All one can do is to present some of the intellectual problems behind mission work today and also to gather together what new insights into the meaning and strategy of our work already published conciliar decrees and current theology can offer us.Certainly mission thinking today must undergo a thorough renewal; our work cannot continue to be carried on with the attitudes and methods that have prevailed with relatively slight changes over the last century. Doubtless the need for this renovation has not been recognized as yet sufficiently or at a deep enough level by those engaged in the work.
How Progressive is German Catholicism?
Authors: Boxer Charles 
Published: July 2007

That the question should protrude out of English Catholicism and start prodding about in German Catholicism seems like irreverence, biting the hand that fed, or just plain scandalmongery. The revival of theological interest amongst English Catholics owes, after all, much to the activity of German-speaking theologians like Rahner and Kung. Here, we have said, is a Catholicism that takes theology seriously. The German bishops brought this activity in their train to the Council in the form of theological advisers. They were very well advised theologically. The Council was for German Catholicism something like a Trade Fair; its stands were stocked with the latest models of German theology, and the bishops quite overreached themselves in attempting to express it.Meanwhile back in Germany there was considerable surprise in many quarters that the German episcopate should be, as Simplicissimus put it in a front page cartoon, marching like a mitred army on Rome behind its two cardinals. The weekly magazine Der Spiegel rummaged through its considerable files and produced a number on Cardinal Frings setting out dialectically his record as a conservative churchman in Cologne, and his activity as leader of the progressives at the Council. How were the two conflicting images to be reconciled? Certainly the German Church can never be the same again. Things have been said by its leaders in Rome which will have to be said in Germany.