bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Religious Life: A Dialogue
Authors: Boulding Cecily 
Published: July 2007

I should like to question strongly the assertion made in Fergus Kerr’s article Priorities in Religious Life (October 1973), and repeated from the essay by Jerome Murphy O’Connor, that: ‘What is distinctive about religious life is that religious consent to live according to the evangelical counsels, but in community. That is the difference’.I would maintain that what is distinctive about religious life is that religious undertake to live in consecrated celibacy, and I think that the writer of the article referred to implies this when he says, in his third section: ‘It is time, too, that there were religious communities to demonstrate that men and women can live together in consecrated celibacy,’ alluding to the fact that the cradle of the Dominican Order, Prouille, was by St Dominic’s legislation a double community (but there was a good deal more to that story!)’If community, if living together, why celibacy? Surely this is contrary to the idea of community taken in its most radical and absolute form, which is the ideal the writer seems to be advocating. If celibacy is still to be maintained and consecrated even in the most ‘communitarian’ situation, this must surely be because it is prior to the ideal of community, and of the essence of religious life?I freely admit that, historically, this has not always been considered so. There have been cases, such as that of the Order of Knights Templar, where the Church accepted as an authentic religious vocation a way of life combined with the married state, and I would not wish to suggest that the life of married clergy is not a religious vocation; I submit, however, that consecrated celibacy has come to be the defining characteristic of ‘religious life’ as we understand it in our era, and that participation in a formal ‘religious community’ is secondary to this.
From Secular City to People's Religion
Authors: Kee Alistair 
Published: July 2007

In what must have been one of the most dynamic decades in the history of theology the name of Harvey Cox has constantly appeared. It would be enough for a theologian to have made a substantial contribution to one development within the period, but Cox has been at the centre of several different movements, not all of them mutually compatible. The history of his own progress during the eight years from 1965 is an interesting commentary also on what has been happening to theology in the period, more particularly the status of religion in Europe and North America.Cox suddenly emerged on the theological scene in 1965 with his bestseller The Secular City. It may be seen as an appropriation of the work of the later Bonhoeffer. He spent 1962 in Berlin, participated in the Marxist-Christian dialogue of the time and was much influenced by Bonhoeffer’s idea of ‘religionless Christianity’. Perhaps Marx had been right and religion should be superceded. On his return to America he wrote The Secular City. ‘Much of that book represents my attempt to do for the American scene what Bonhoeffer had done for his’. Whether or not Bonhoeffer knew what he meant in writing of religionless Christianity we may doubt if he would have recognised Cox’s book as a continuation of the same theme. The link is rather with Bonhoeffer’s theme of ‘world come of age’. Bonhoeffer was the first Protestant theologian of standing for a generation who dared to put in a good word for the secular world. Under the influence of Barth the secular world was constantly condemned for Promethean tendencies. The enemy of the Nazis, the prisoner of the Gestapo was under no illusions of the reality of evil in the world, but he could see also the strength and achievement of that world.
Law and Liberty, Church and Gospel
Authors: Moiser Jeremy 
Published: July 2007

The ProblemIt is not difficult to show from the New Testament that dialogue is built into the structures of the Christian community. Ep. 4:11-16, for example, ‘proves that in the New Testament there is no opposition between ministerial authority and an emancipated laity. Rather the relation between the two is the fact that the first gives rise to the second.’ Other texts (for example, Rm. 1 :12; 2 Co. 1 :24; 1 Pt. 5 :3) show that the apostles’ authority over the local communities was not all one way: the latter had something to give the apostles. The same conclusion follows, too, from the fact that the Word of God has been committed to the whole community. As Augustine once said, God speaks to every member of the Church ‘from the bishops right down to the last of the faithful’. There is thus a pooling of experience, a fruitful interchange of opinion.Now there is a sense in which this dialogue in the Church between ministers and laity takes the form of preaching on one side and obedience on the other. The official proclamation of the Gospel in the community provokes a response which Paul calls ‘the obedience of faith’ (Rm. 1 :5; 16:26) and Peter ‘the obedience of truth’ (1 Pt. 1 :22), so that to genuine exposition of the Gospel message the people respond by accepting the Word in faith. However, no human dialogue can be totally active on one side and totally passive on the other. Every form of communication involves a giving and a receiving on both sides if it is not to degenerate into monologue and silence.
Marriage: A Sign of the Kingdom
Authors: Bishop Jordan 
Published: July 2007

As the spirit of the age proclaims a new freedom from the traditional sexual ethic, discussion about marriage in the church today runs the risk of becoming bogged down in what are in one sense peripheral issues. Marriage is seen as an institutionalisation of eros, as the expression of a sexual ethic, and the question of any specifically Christian meaning of marriage is lost in ethical discussion.This is not to imply that the ethical dimension is unimportant; but it is not the only dimension to be considered. The revolt against the late medieval and modern tradition, with its attendant rigidity, should not be allowed to obscure the search for a theology of marriage as a sign of the Kingdom, as a sacrament.This has been tied to a hard line on the question of divorce and remarriage, to a doctrine of indissolubility that has been seriously questioned in recent years. Even more common perhaps is a pastoral praxis that, while freeing people from the more oppressive features of the old ideology, may also reduce the discussion of marriage as a sacrament to the status of a non-question. In justice it should be pointed out that the defence of an absolute indissolubility has been driven back to the question of sacramentality. In the practice of the modem church, as expressed in the Roman Curia, non-sacramental marriages are not indissoluble. Nor in fact are all sacramental ones; the maze of technicalities involved in this practice often defies the comprehension of the layman.Consideration of marriage as a sacrament often appears indissolubly linked to this world of the canonists, to a legal structure that is more easily bypassed than challenged. At the same time, questions of sexual ethics retain their relevance against the background of the new praxis as they did against that of the old.
The Black Friar and the Catechism: A question of words and meaning
Authors: Williams Michael E. 
Published: July 2007

At the time of the Reformation the catechism began to assume a new importance. The rapid diffusion of printed works coincided with the spread of new reforming ideas. Luther had a catechism printed in 1529. This was followed by a Catholic catechism published at Augsburg in 1530. Most of the leading reformers produced similar manuals and Peter Canisius and John of Avila were in the field before the Catechism of the Council of Trent. But catechisms can tell us more than the way in which Protestant differed from Catholic. Not all correligionists agreed about the relative importance of doctrines nor indeed about method. We are reminded of this by the appearance of a new edition of the ‘Commentaries on the Christian Catechism’ by Archbishop Carranza. This work was first published in Antwerp in 1558, put on the Spanish Index of Prohibited Books in 1559 and officially condemned by Pope Gregory XIII in 1576. Four hundred years later in 1972, a new critical edition, with the Imprimatur of the Bishop of Salamanca, was published to commemorate the International Year of the Book.Bartholomé Carranza, born 1503, was a Dominican of the Province of Castille. He was a consultor to the Inquisition at Valladolid and also censor of books, he attended the first two stages of Trent as one of Charles V’s theologians. At Trent he was a powerful advocate of episcopal residence and his experience at the council gave him first hand contact with religious controversy and the political situation outside Spain.
The Gulag Archipelago: History Betrayed I
Authors: Barker Francis 
Published: July 2007

In plotting the artistic course of Alexander Solzhenitsyn the two texts which may be taken as datum points of particular importance are the first short novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago. Writing previously on Ivan Denisovich I proposed an interpretative model which saw the book’s empirical and ‘valueless’ character as having twofold importance: it represented a clean break with previous official ‘illustrating literature’ and simultaneously reflected central characteristics of Soviet society atomised and depoliticised by the rule of the Stalinist bureaucracy. This duality I saw as a threshold which could pave the way for a new and radical, analytic, Soviet literature and yet could also remain tied to an empirical and static reportage of phenomena subsumed under a structure of concepts constituted of abstract, superhistorical, and in the end desperately reactionary values. It is this latter possibility, the rehearsal of the terrible facts of Soviet history organised in the service of a retrogressive ideology, that is realised in The Gulag Archipelago.The book appears to be a history of the repressive apparatus and of ‘that amazing country of Gulag’, but most editions of it (although not the English language version) are subtitled ‘An experiment in artistic investigation’ which has, as I shall show, a quite different and less authoritative epistemological status. It extensively and repetitively catalogues the entire repertoire of the Stalinist atrocities from the moment of arbitrary arrest, through the process of interrogation, mental and physical torture, to trial or extra-judicial sentencing; it recounts the intermediate stays in the transit prisons, the MVD internal prisons and the ‘boxes’ in which prisoners en route were kept at railway stations.
Recent writings on the Miracles
Authors: Maher Michael 
Published: July 2007

Any study of any aspect of the life of the historical Jesus is complicated because of the fact that the gospel accounts of his ministry are interpretations and applications of what he did and said rather than straightforward accounts of his life and activity. Add to this the fact that many Christians today seriously question the possibility of miracles and either dismiss them as fables or explain them as the result of Jesus’ extraordinary psychic gifts, and one becomes aware of the difficulty and delicacy of the task of drawing any conclusions about the miracles, about their historicity, and about their place in modern Christianity. Yet the complexity and sensitivity of the topic has not daunted the exegetes, and recent years have given us a constant flow of books and articles on the miracles. The aim of the present essay is not to attempt the impossible task of reviewing this immense body of literature, but to draw attention to some approaches and trends in modem miracle studies and to examine at some length a few of the more recent books. We will pay special attention to the historical questions raised by the miracle stories, and we treat only of the synoptic miracles, omitting those of John which give rise to somewhat different problems.One of the striking things about the works of recent writers on the miracles is the lessening of emphasis on the apologetic value of the mighty deeds of Jesus. Not that these writers would deny the teaching of Vatican I that the miracles are most sure signs of divine revelation (cf DS 3009). Nor would they despise the assertion of Vatican II that ‘the miracles of Jesus also confirm that the kingdom has arrived on earth’ (Dogmatic Constitution on the Church no. 5). But they do not look upon the miracles as events praeter, extra, or contra naturam which prove the divinity of Jesus and the validity of his claim.
The Passing of the ‘Simple Faithful’
Authors: Archer Antony 
Published: July 2007

The Catholic Church is the only Church in England to have had in recent times any substantial following among working class people. Now, as the Church loses this following, it is worth asking what exactly the attraction was. Evidently at one time working class people found something in the Church, and now they do not.For all practical purposes the Catholicism we have now dates from the later half of the nineteenth century. The situation at the time is well known. There were a few, mostly well off ‘old’ Catholics, some pockets of the country where Catholicism had never entirely disappeared, a trickle of converts and the vast number of Irish immigrants working in the new industrial centres. A kind of Catholicism prevailed that found its inspiration in the Counter-Reformation. In Ireland it had been imposed by the Irish hierarchy in the power vacuum which followed the loosing of the English hold on what had not been destroyed of Irish Catholicism. In England it had been adopted after the restoration of the hierarchy in 1850.Certainly there were objections to this kind of Catholicism. The ‘old’ Catholics grumbled at the rococo devotions introduced by Italianate converts and joined their bishops in resisting the ultramontane extravagances of Manning and his friends. To the Irish immigrants, however, ‘Counter-Reformation’ Catholicism had from the beginning a great deal to offer.It is not just that Catholicism was ‘their’ religion, something the English had tried, but failed, to crush. Counter-Reformation Catholicism had the added attraction of its essentially alien nature.
The Gulag Archipelago: History Betrayed II
Authors: Barker Francis 
Published: July 2007

Both the technological and the organic in Solzhenitsyn’s organising imagery seem to propose structures and processes independent of human agency or control; and for Solzhenitsyn’s idea of history, control is a crucial question. The role of the individual within history, the extent to which he can be held responsible or can change his situation, is left unexplained. The imagery of the Great Machine perhaps presupposes a Great Mechanic who originally constructed the device, and indeed when Solzhenitsyn’s technocratic ideology issues into prescriptive injunctions its very substance is a belief in an individual or collective elite who should run society and its institutions; but the technological and structural images are not used in this way. Although one of the intentions of The Gulag Archipelago is to demonstrate a continuity between Lenin and Stalin, to prove the former an architect of later repression, the emphasis in the technological images of history is upon mechanical operations which take place over against the activity of individuals, including that of those people who apparently administer them. Yet the individual is for Solzhenitsyn the absolute subject of history:The Universe has as many different centres as there are living beings in it. Each of us is a centre of the Universe . . . (G.A., p. 3).The individual is consequently expected to have moral responsibility and, in Solzhenitsyn’s phrase, ‘civil valour’ (G.A., p. 462), a concept upon which he puts much emphasis although it is ill-defined. He assigns to each of the Russian people some share in blame for allowing the Stalinist crimes to take place.
For want of Women's Lib: Sex, Religion and Politics under the Catholic Monarchy
Authors: Cueto Ronald 
Published: July 2007

Melveena McKendrick, in a work recently published on Woman and Society in the Spanish Drama of the Golden Age, makes the point that there was during this period of the 16th and 17th centuries no change in the social position of the vast majority of women, that is, those of the rural peasantry, and she then adds:
‘To the remainder of Spanish women, four main courses were open. They could join the ranks of the mujeres de mala vida somewhere in the hierarchy from courtesan to common prostitute. They could enter a convent. They could enter into service as a dueña or a lady-in-waiting. Or they could remain with their families, marrying or not as inclination or opportunity decided. Those who embarked on this last course concern us most, for the life of the prostitute and the nun, by the nature of their calling, ran along fixed and predictable lines . .Initially, I found the throw-away line about the prostitute and the nun quietly amusing, or rather, amusingly sardonic in a low pitch way. The juxtaposition seemed to be sufficiently slightly outrageous to underscore the delicate irony of the order of presentation—prostitute first, nun second, capping it all with the application of the term calling to both. Donnish humour at its best? But, on second thoughts, its clever, quiet and telling effectiveness seemed to me to betray a very bourgeois understanding or misunderstanding of the nature of professional sex, politics and religion. I don’t think Buñuel, Genet or Pasolini would have tried to be so neatly clever about such vital things as prostitution and the religious life. You see, deep down, what is wrong is not the question of coupling the two and regarding them both as vocations, the real trouble is to think for one moment that the lives of these practitioners of the most ancient of female professions run along fixed and prescribed lines. But let’s try and put the question into some sort of perspective.
Can a Christian be a Marxist
Authors: Turner Denys 
Published: July 2007

In this paper I defend a ‘strong compatibility’ thesis. According to this thesis Marxism is not only not inconsistent with Christianity; Christianity is compatible only with Marxism. I further argue that for Marxists to accept this proposition on the grounds that they have no reason to object to the personal combination of Marxism and Christianity is to miss the point both of Christianity and of their own Marxism. This concession is, from the point of view of the Marxist, quite unprincipled. It is to misconstrue both the true nature of the Marxist critique of religion and the true nature of the religion of which Marxism is the critique. But more about this in due course.First, though, what sort of reasons are invoked against the ‘compatibility’ thesis? They seem to fall, generally, into two categories. First, there are objections to the Christian belief system itself. Secondly, there are objections to the social and historical role of the set of institutions which has espoused that belief-system.To the belief-system of Christianity on almost any account of what it maintains, defenders of the incompatibility thesis have a form of objection which I shall call ‘ontological’. This objection, taken on its own is, it seems to me, both the most widely canvassed and the weakest. It is roughly this : Christians believe that the universe is peopled with entities and agencies and activities and events—a God, an act of creation, an act of redemption, souls, grace, post-mortem survival and all the rest—all of which the Marxist is, as a Marxist, committed to the denial of. Christians are, thus, ontologically theists, spiritualists and mentalists; Marxists, on the other hand are ontologically materialists. Since ontological immaterialism and ontological materialism cannot both be true, one cannot consistently hold both.
Kingdom Without End: A Note on Marcellus of Ancyra
Authors: Swanston Hamish F G 
Published: July 2007

There is a suggestion in the fourth gospel that the saving lordship of Christ is finally manifest at his lifting up on the cross (cf. John 3.14, 8.28 and 13.32). Paul, in a letter to the Corinthian Church (cf. I Cor. 15.12 ff), proposed the anticipation of the general resurrection in the resurrection of Christ as the climactic moment of Christian belief. The church at Ephesus sang a hymn which celebrated the ascension as the triumphant manifestation of the Christian mystery (cf. I Timothy 3.16). The Apostles’ Creed, following the pattern of the old Roman Creed states that Christ’s glory is most tellingly declared at his return to judge the living and the dead. The credal affirmation here has set a number of theologians considering just how the eschatological judgement is related to the immediate judgement of human beings at their deaths. A deal of attention has been given to relating the future coming of the Son of Man ‘on clouds of glory’ to the promise ‘this day you shall be with me in Paradise’ (Lk. 23.43).There has, however, been rather less modern discussion of how the belief, expressed in the Constantinopolitan-Nicene Creed, of Christ coming into a kingdom (or a reign) ‘without end’, is to be reconciled with Paul’s eschatological scenario of the Son being at the end subject ‘to him who put all things under him, that God may be all in all’ (I Cor. 15.28). Is there, then, one kingdom for the Father and another for the Son? ‘By no means’.
Moral Weakness, Self‐Deception and Self‐Knowledge
Authors: Turner Denys 
Published: July 2007

In this paper I speculate about the idea of personal moral discovery. These speculations occur, however, only at the end, for my object is to present genuine, not rhetorical, questions. The substance of this paper concerns moral weakness and self-deception. These topics are relevant because the analyses of moral weakness and of self-deception throw light, in different ways, on what is meant by and also on what obstacles there are to the discovery for oneself of a moral point of view.Briefly the light they throw is this: self-deception is one sort of obstacle to self-knowledge. Insofar, then, as discovering a personal morality is the process of discovering something about oneself—and I merely assert for the moment that it is in part this—self-deception is one kind of obstacle to personal moral discovery. It may follow from this that the contrary process of detecting one’s own self-deceptions is one form of self-discovery which is relevant to moral discovery. If so, it will be important to be clear about how we do discover that we have been deceiving ourselves. I try to solve some of the difficulties there are about how this self-detection occurs in the second part of this paper.The relevance of moral weakness to the topic of self-discovery is more complex. Again briefly, there are two main assertions which I make. The first is that any self-ascription of moral weakness is problematic. This is to say that the subjective evidence immediately available to the moral agent himself on any putative occasion of moral weakness is never sufficient evidence that he was, genuinely, morally weak on that occasion. We do not know, in other words, just from what is going on in our minds at the time, that our failure to act as we think we ought to be acting is moral weakness rather than something else.