bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Saint Thomas Aquinas and Theological Exegesis of Sacred Scripture
Authors: McGuckin Terence 
Published: July 2007

St. Thomas Aquinas is primarily a theologian. He writes of Sacred Scripture not only as a theologian, but because he is a theologian. As a master of theology his essential textbook was the Bible. From earlier theologians St. Thomas received an understanding of theology, which he shared with his contemporaries and which he in turn was to deepen and strengthen: Sacred Scripture provides the auctoritas of theology. It gives rise to theology, enables and governs it. M-D Chenu has emphasized and demonstrated St. Thomas’ fundamental reliance on the Bible as the foundation of his theological work.St. Thomas says that ‘the truth of faith is contained in Sacred Scripture.’ He understood that a cursory reading of the text would not reveal this truth very clearly, because it is in Scripture, but ‘diffusely, in diverse ways and sometimes darkly.’ Thomas provides an insight into his own approach to exegesis when he continues: ‘the result is that to draw out the truth of faith from Scripture requires a prolonged study and practice.’ Here we see Thomas the theologian approaching the sacred books in order to draw out carefully from them what faith teaches through them.St. Thomas served the Church as a ‘Master of the Sacred Scriptures’ (Magister in Sacra Pagina) and, therefore, as J. Mahoney states, the systematic works of Aquinas do not constitute his truly magisterial activity. Mahoney notes the valuable work of H. Denifle who, in his discussion of the text-books of the medieval professors of theology, shows the Bible to be the basic text-book and indicates that ‘the theologian of that day knew no book so well as the Bible.’
Recasting a Classic: A Reconsideration of Meaning in the Book of Job
Authors: Green Barbara 
Published: July 2007

The goal of this article is to show how all parts of the Book of Job function coherently, co-operatively and brilliantly. Though commentators continue to assert that the frame of the work (1-2, 42:7-17) is easily separable from the body of the work (3-42:6), that contention is simply not true. The prose prologue and epilogue pose the book’s central and crucial issues, which are then partially, and slightly unrealistically, dealt with in the work’s central, poetic dialogue section. The ‘game’ of understanding the work would be much easier to play if the frame—front and back—were not there. But it is there; and it is indispensable. The prologue raises the theological stakes of the dialogue.Five key issues are posed by the prologue, setting the agenda for the entire book. First, who is God? What sort of deity is God, according to information we receive in the prologue? Why is God employing an adversary (a satan) and what can an adversary do that assists God? What is God’s motive in calling attention to Job? How can the wager between God and the adversary, apparently entered into so casually, be benign? What is God’s presumption regarding the outcome of the wager made with the adversary?
Catherine De' Ricci: Part I
Authors: di Agresti Domenico 
Published: July 2007

I have devoted a good thirty years of my life to the study of Catherine de’ Ricci, from the early 60s, when the Collana Ricciana began to appear, up to the two volumes of the Breviario Ricciano which appeared in 1990 to mark the opening of the sixth centenary of the saint’s death. Here I have nothing new to add to all that I have said already, only a brief synthesis of how over the years, I have come to see this extraordinary woman. But any synthesis involves a choice, and any choice involves excisions and gaps and is inevitably wide open to criticism. The risk is real and I have accepted it; I ask for the reader’s understanding. This present essay seeks only to present a simple and clear picture, unburdened by an excess of scholarly apparatus. In it I will try to highlight, often in the saint’s own words, three crucial points in her spirituality: love, which is its source and gives it its scope; obedience to the will of God, which is the golden rule by which this love is lived; and the joyful human and supernatural equilibrium which results from it.It may seem obvious to the point of banality to say that love, or charity, is the soul and heart and root and fullness of the Christian life, that interior growth is measured by the progressive development of love, that the apostolic life in its entirety derives its fruitfulness from love, that any mystical advance is only the gradual process of union between God and the creature, whose means yet again is always and uniquely love. But no two saints are the same. Each has his or her own proper way, because God’s love for his creatures is not expressed in the abstract or in general. He loves each of us with a love which is quite personal, marked with its own peculiar purpose, and so for each one of us he maps out a path which is particularly our own. So no saint has the same countenance as any other.
Humility and Cosmology
Authors: Hodgson Peter 
Published: July 2007

According to the Hebrew cosmology the earth was flat and the sky was like an upturned bowl studded with stars. The earth, and the creatures of the earth, were made to serve man and are under his domination. This view sufficed for many millennia. Careful studies of the regular motions of the stars and the irregular motions of the planets were made by the Babylonians and the Greeks, and Ptolemy devised a complicated system of cycles and epicycles to describe these motions with some accuracy. It was a cosy, man-centred world.The development of modem science destroyed this picture with a series of shattering blows. Firstly Copernicus showed that it was much simpler to suppose that the sun, and not the earth, is the centre of the world. No longer do we think of the sun serving our needs by circling the earth, night and day. It is we who are ruled by the sun. This view of the sun and the planets was firmly established by the dynamics of Newton, which enabled the orbits of the planets to be calculated from his laws of motion, together with his theory of universal gravitation.In the following centuries telescopes of increasing power probed further into space, and it became apparent that our resplendent sun is but a rather ordinary star situated in one of the spiral arms of a vast galaxy of some two hundred thousand million stars that we see on clear nights as the Milky Way.
Eric Rohmer on Nature and Grace
Authors: Bedouelle Guy 
Published: July 2007

It is a rare thing to find a film like A Winter&apos;s
Tale, the latest work of Eric Rohmer, in which the
protagonists talk about the knowledge of God and the leap of faith, and
discuss reincarnation, abortion&mdash;to refute it&mdash;; invoke
the theory of reminiscence; where they go into churches to pray, and in
which the heroine thinks her partner ought to go to Mass, because it is
Sunday and he is a believer. I should probably make it clear at the outset
that this film was neither solicited nor financed by religious authorities,
but was created by a film-writer who, while making no mystery of his
Catholicism, has never paraded it.
Return to the Sources
A Winter&apos;s Tale is a masterpiece of
subtlety, of precision in dialogue and photography. It handles people and
situations with understanding, and even if the people happen to talk about
Pascal and Plotinus, there is never a sense of that heaviness which is
sometimes discernible in Rohmer&rsquo;s previous film, A
Summer&rsquo;s Tale, where references to Kant were a
little ponderous at times. . . . The setting remains simple and homely, but
we do not get the feeling that it was all thrown together in haste, as with
some other works. To be honest, since 1982, friends of Rohmer and his films
have defended them, at whatever cost, largely on the basis of the admiration
lavished on his previous films. Even so, it has to be admitted that the six
films made during this ten-year period, especially My
Soul&rsquo;s Friend (1987), were far superior to the
average film production.
Dominican Ideals in Early America: The Example of Edward Dominic Fenwick
Authors: Lisska Anthony 
Published: July 2007

In this article I would like to focus attention on the unique American religious experience as it relates to Thomas Aquinas. For the ideals articulated by Aquinas and his Dominican associates in the medieval university, especially the left bank academic institutions which eventually became the University of Paris, deeply influenced the founder of the American Dominicans, Edward Dominic Fenwick.To remember, at this time, Fenwick and the historical context in which he devoted his life is quite appropriate. For not only is this the anniversary year of the founding of the Diocese of Columbus, which has offered one hundred and twenty-five years of service to central and southern Ohio, but it is also the one hundred and seventy-fifth anniversary of the founding and dedication of the first Roman Catholic Church in Ohio: St. Joseph’s near Somerset. The person who founded and dedicated St. Joseph’s was the Dominican friar, Edward Dominic Fenwick. It is, in addition, the one hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary of the establishment of the religious community of St. Mary of the Springs where this article was first delivered in lecture form.
Costly Giving: On Jean‐Luc Marion's Theology of the Gift
Authors: Moss David 
Published: July 2007

“(A)ll that a man...discourseth in his spirit is nothing but merchandise”John Wheeler, A Treatise of Commerce [1601]In a recent review of Jean-Luc Marion’s God Without Being: Hors-Texte (Chicago, 1991), Graham Ward comments: ‘It is possibly presumptuous at this point to say whether Marion’s theological argument for a God without Being succeeds. This book will need considerably more digesting by theologians before a judgment can be made about its success.’ It is a point well made, and the argument I will make in this article is intended only as a further contribution to the appropriation of Marion’s work in a theological climate that remains famously resistant to the roots of his work. That this is an important, indeed even seminal book for Theology should, it seems to me, be granted. And even if it is to be branded ‘postmodern’—which is itself very debatable judgement—it most certainly does not exhibit any of ‘the enthusiastic naivete’ that has marked so much of this expanding genre. Rigorous, even orthodox it may be, but still new.Ward depicts Marion’s ‘odyssey’ as a ‘relentless foray into sophisticated, abstract thinking’, which is true enough. But this should not allow us to dismiss it to the rarefied stratosphere inhabited by Parisian intellectuals. As I read it, its concerns are real and immediate, and by way of illustration of this fact I will begin with a brief anecdote.
What Englishness Is
Authors: Every George 
Published: July 2007

All communities tend to develop an account of their own origins. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People has this advantage, that all but twenty-two chapters at the beginning of the first book deal with matters in his own lifetime or so near it that he could collect testimonies from eyewitnesses or from those who had seen and heard them, as well as from written materials. His history has therefore held its place as a source, despite some criticism of his selection of evidence. It remained in English libraries through the critical years of the Reformation, and was printed in the seventeenth century in England as well as on the continent, in Latin and in King Alfred’s and in another English version. This contributed something to the Anglican view of the origin of the Church of England, in tales of conflict and reconciliation between Celtic and Roman missions. On the question of Easter Bede’s details were relevant to disputes about the change in the Roman calendar in the sixteenth century. He also said that an Archbishop of Canterbury supplemented what was lacking in an ordination by bishops whose status was in doubt.What came to be called The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was put into shape more than a century after the death of Bede, in the days of King Alfred. It was copied and continued at Peterborough until the end of the reign of Stephen, but it did not find favour with the Norman ruling class who occupied the important positions in church and state after 1066.
Throne and Altar
Authors: Williams C.J.F. 
Published: July 2007

This book is astonishing. Its subject matter is not something that the modem educated reader is likely to have encountered before: a longish Latin poem together with a dedicatory epistle and several shorter poems published by what one cannot help describing as a court poet in the court of Pope Urban VIII—a man who was, surprisingly, a priest. The Latin is not easy, and one is grateful for the translation the Newmans have supplied. But the medium is not half so strange to the modem eye and ear as the message. It is adulation of a monarch of a kind which old fashioned Republicans like Tacitus found so unwelcome in the world of the Emperors: bad enough under Augustus; how much worse under a Nero or a Domitian! And it is to Domitian that the editors look as a precedent for the adulation accorded to Pope Urban.The particular topic is the canopy recently made by Bernini for the central altar in St Peter’s, which the poet, Guiddicioni, refers to as the “Ara Maxima”. This is indeed the title of his poem, and one does not have to be a Protestant to feel uncomfortable with the paganism of the title itself. Worse still, a few lines into the epistle dedicatory, and one finds that the altar has become a throne—not the throne of God and his Christ, a theme which would have respectable Christian and Judaic precedents stretching back to the Holy of Holies and the Ark of the Covenant, but a throne for the Pope himself.
Other Discourses
Authors: Loughlin Gerard 
Published: July 2007

There are ambiguities in the title: Other Discourses. What are these discourses and who speaks them? Discourses of others, of those who are not the same? Discourses by the same about those who are other, and about otherness itself, about an absolute Other, which would also be the other of discourse itself? And then, almost immediately upon these questions, as if folded within them, come other questions. Can we hear the discourses of others, if they really are other? Can we have discourses about others which do not reduce them to the limits of our own discourses? Can there be any discourse about otherness itself, about an absolute Other, if it is indeed the other of discourse, beyond discourse?Even if it were possible to pursue all these questions in a single essay, this is not that essay. Here I pursue only some of the questions in the direction of the philosophical authorship of Emmanuel Levinas.
Nature and Sexual Differences
Authors: Moore Gareth 
Published: July 2007

In this article I wish to argue against a particular conception of nature as a tool for the understanding and appraisal of people’s sexual lives. That conception is one which sees people as having a determinate sexual nature as part of their biological inheritance, their physical constitution. This sexual nature is then used to determine sexual norms: what is in accord with nature is good, and what is against nature is bad. I believe that this approach to human sexuality is mistaken and misleading.Human sexual behaviour is very various and, as far as we can tell, always has been. But human societies have rarely if ever been content to allow free range to the full variety of sexual desires and tastes. Human societies develop conventions governing sexual activities, encouraging some and restricting others, and limiting them to certain contexts. Modem anthropological, literary and historical scholarship has placed a great deal of emphasis on the fact that these conventions too are very various; the rules governing what kinds of sexual behaviour are acceptable and which are not have varied greatly from time to time and from place to place. And, whatever the rules, transgression has been constant. People have for one reason or another not wanted or have found themselves unable to behave themselves sexually as required by their society. They have not done what they were expected to do or, more often, they have done what they were expected not to do. In every society some transgressions are treated as more serious than others, and societies have varied in which transgressions they treat as serious.It is important to realise just how different the norms governing sexual behaviour can be in different societies. I will briefly mention two examples to illustrate this. Much studied has been the case of ancient Greek paedophilia.
Privacy
Authors: Williams Michael E. 
Published: July 2007

I am associating Privacy with “Do not disturb, I want to be left alone”. On the face of it, this is an egoistical anti-social standpoint. But is there anything that can be said for being anti-community? In this paper, for the sake of argument, I align myself with this attitude because from this position I can make certain observations and raise questions related to the other.Whether we like it or not, the mood of the day favours privacy rather than community. Individual privacy is more and more sought and jealously guarded.For many people community is bad news. It evokes a sense of restriction and narrowness rather than openness, conflict rather than harmony .One has only to think of, Islamic community, Serbian community, Protestant community, Roman Catholic community, David Koresh’s community at Waco, the European Community—all these give out negative signals. Even ‘basic community’ has echoes of an in-group and can be seen as a form of protest or elitism. Sometimes it seems as if the only communities that have any popular appeal are fictional ones like Ambridge or Coronation Street. These are fanciful, idealistic creations, real life is much more grim. Survival depends on individual effort. This rejection of community is often the result of its failure to satisfy our needs or its degeneration into such positions as extreme nationalism. But a denial of community often leads to a sense of isolation and loneliness. We can note that both the 1991 General Household Survey of the U.K. (published in 1993 and the recent Report into European Lifestyles by MINTEL draw attention to the fact that over a quarter of all British homes are single person households and about 14% of households are people living alone.
Catholic Social Teaching and Economic Democracy in Eastern Europe?
Authors: Reed Darryl 
Published: July 2007

The developing teaching of the Catholic Church on economic justice in recent years has increasingly emphasized the rights of people to active participation in the economy. Although the exact term is not to be found in official documents, some observers find in the Church’s teachings not only the advocacy of increased participation but also a case for some form of “economic democracy”. This paper examines the Church’s teaching on participation in the economic realm and the possibilities of developing a more democratically controlled economy. Specifically it examines the feasibility of and prospects for implementation of economic democracy, with eastern Europe as a special focus of attention.Over the last one hundred years the hierarchy of the Catholic Church has produced a variety of official documents which reflect upon a range of social, economic and political issues. Collectively these documents have come to be known as the tradition of Catholic Social Thought. Increasingly there has been an emphasis in these documents on both the rights and obligations of all people to active participation in the various realms of human life. These rights and obligations are conceptualized around a three-faceted concept of justice which encompasses procedure, distribution and participation. Procedural justice refers to what is commonly called the “rule of law”. Concerns which fall under procedural justice include the establishment of laws for regulating fair competition in the economic, political and sociocultural realms, as well as laws which guarantee fair and equal protection of civil rights and fair and equal procedure in the courts.
On being cunning as snakes Matthew X 16: a rejoinder
Authors: Geach Peter 
Published: July 2007

The doctrine that lying is always wrong (often, of course, only venially wrong) has been defended at length by many authors who ought to be taken seriously: in the Catechism of the Council of Trent, and in the writings of the Doctors of the Church, e.g. Augustine, Aquinas, and Alphonsus de Liguori. Mr. Chappell, maintaining the contrary thesis, presents to his readers none of this literature, not even by allusion; the nearest he comes to that is a reference to what is ‘associated with the Jesuits’. The voice we hear against lying is that of an imaginary nasty boy called Philip.Mr. Chappell also alludes to my book The Virtues. The views and arguments of ‘Philip’ are not ascribable to me; anybody curious about what I say should read my bode; if someone does that and still cannot see any significant difference between ‘Philip’s’ view of the matter and mine, nothing I could say now is likely to do him any good.‘Philip’ and his creator both reason in a recognisably ‘consequentialist’ style: we get drearily familiar arguments and examples. But nobody has a right to treat consequentialist moral thinking as unanswerably sound, thus ignoring the anti-consequentialist writing not only of Catholics but of non-Christians such as Philippa Foot, Arthur Prior, and Bernard Williams. Mr. Chappell likewise fails to mention the refutation of consequentialist thought in the chapter of my book (‘Prudence’) devoted to that.
Moral Absolutes
Authors: Charlton William 
Published: July 2007

‘Law’ says Plato in his dialogue The Statesman, ‘can never embrace in one prescription what is best and most right for everyone. The dissimilarities between men and between their actions and the fact that human affairs are pretty well always changing make it impossible for any skill whatever to lay down anything simple in connection with anything that will hold for all cases and at all times.’ Aristotle agrees. ‘It is the mark of an educated mind to aim at just so much precision of detail as the nature of the subject matter admits.’ In mathematics we expect exactitude; but in matters of conduct and what is advantageous, ‘nothing is fixed any more than in medicine’, and ‘the agents themselves must decide each case as it comes, just as must doctors and steersmen.’ The best thinkers of ancient Greece thought it obvious that we cannot achieve what is best for ourselves, cannot achieve the good for human beings, by following general rules.Today it is sometimes said that there are certain general moral rules that bind without exception, rules that it is always wrong to break, whatever the circumstances. Is there a conflict between this and the ancient view?