In the late 1960s, American women and women throughout the world began to awaken to the fact that the victories of women’s rights to work, to vote and to be educated had not solved the problem of women’s inequality. A silent problem was gnawing away at women of the middle classes in industrialized nations, a problem “without a name” as Betty Friedan put it in her pioneering book, The Feminine Mystique, in 1962. In the 1950s all the media of culture and socialization had been directed toward convincing women that their place was in the home, that full-time child-raising and domesticity was their highest vocation. The women who had accepted the “feminine mystique” felt increasingly entrapped and stifled.

At the same time, the Civil Rights Movement and the Peace Movement were raising American consciousness about the structures of social oppression. Many young women responded enthusiastically to the call to win equality for Black Americans and to end the war in southeast Asia, only to find themselves treated as second-class citizens by their male colleagues, expected to be sexually available, to do the rote labor of the movement, but not to make the real decision. Out of these various forms of discontent, an explosion was gradually building, the explosion of a new movement for women’s liberation.

Betty Friedan had called women to seize their discontent by leaving their exclusive homemaking roles, returning to school for further education and seeking interesting jobs. Entrance into the public world of work was to be the panacea. But many women already suspected that this was not enough; that the world of work was also a place where women were marginalized and exploited.

A paper presented at the International Symposium on Sociology and Theology, Oxford, January 1984

In his Earnest Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion, John Wesley spoke of faith as follows:

In Wesley’s mind faith is a ‘spiritual sense’ which enables the believer to perceive a reality beyond the scope of the non-believer restricted to the ‘natural’ senses. Faith, Wesley emphasises, is not a human choice but a gift of God. Those lacking this gift may no more understand what it means to have faith, than those lacking the gift of sight may understand what it means to see. (Note, incidentally, that in this article I am using ‘faith in’ God and ‘belief in’ God as interchangeable terms, and talk of ‘believers’ and ‘unbelievers’ as if there was no such thing as ‘half-belief’.)

The model of perception, when used in this way to explain the nature of religious belief, tends to make of believers a privileged group who may have only a limited dialogue with the ‘blind’. Indeed, it is difficult to see what sort of discussion would be possible between believer and unbeliever as to why one should believe.

“Fido is wagging his tail in heaven to-night”. According to Evelyn Waugh, this was the greeting sent out from Forest Lawn to the owners on the anniversaries of their pets buried in the cemetrey. No one, of course, asked if the owners would also deserve a place in heaven if they had killed their dogs by overfeeding or whether the latter would have the joy of interrupting the heavenly choirs by their barking. But the false assumption behind this attitude was perhaps less the hope of reunion with animal friends than the idea of a heaven where we shall all congregate cosily with our pets and former neighbours. If some of us do not relish the prospect of an eternal menagerie, can we nevertheless in all charity welcome the company of human beings who never hurt us but often threaten to bore us to death?

Even from traditional theology we get the impression that we shall not be troubled with bores, but equally that our joy in the beatific vision will be solitary and even then frustrated by the delay in the restoration of the body or by a reunion with the soul to which it will be no more than a glorified appendage. We look for the restoration of the whole personality, redeemed in Christ and therefore in Christ’s company and in the company of those we have loved on earth. The lonely person in particular asks if the affection of his or her pet, expressed in an outstretched paw, in a purring response, is not somehow transfigured also and not forever extinguished.

People would like to have reasons for believing that God exists. With its appearance in attractive paperback format Hans Küng’s Does God Exist? certainly looks like the most thorough and scholarly treatment of the subject. For one thing, at seventeen ounces, clearly printed on decent paper, and sturdily enough bound to survive several readings, it is a fine example of modern book-production. The translation by Edward Quinn, is, needless to say, almost faultless. Some of the reviews which the hardback version received were very destructive—Alasdair MacIntyre’s page-long diatribe in The London Review of Books (5—18 February, 1981) comes to mind: “Whenever in future I try to imagine what Purgatory will be like, the thought of having to read Dr. Küng’s book will recur”. Judgements in some of the theological periodicals were rather more respectful. To give only two examples: in Theology (September 1981), after some gently expressed but actually quite devastating criticisms, Brian Hebblethwaite concludes as follows: “So it can hardly be said that this is a great book. But as an attempt to set the scene for a serious engagement with atheism, it serves a very useful purpose”. In The Month (March 1981), while describing Hans Küng as “a sort of Dale Carnegie of modern theology, building confidence, edifying in the best sense of the word”, Paul Lakeland’s judgment of the book runs thus: “He has two ostensible purposes, to present the history of thinking about the problem of God since the time of Descartes, and to define a new concept of God.

When Etienne Gilson died on 19 September 1978 at the age of 94, medieval studies suffered the loss of one of its most celebrated historians of philosophy. This year witnesses the centenary of his birth. It is perhaps appropriate briefly to recall the memory of this truly great scholar of our age. He was a cultured man in the best traditions of western scholarship, a fact to which his literary output amply attests

Born on 13th June 1884 in Paris, and after a notable rise through the French educational labyrinth, Gilson emerged as a scholar and teacher of considerable dimensions in terms of the breadth and depth of his learning. Though a dedicated family man, he was never afraid to meet the countless calls to lecture, write and also to attend and contribute to the numerous conferences to which he was invited. Such was his stature to become that on more than one occasion, he was called to represent his country on the international stage in various capacities.

His travels in the service of his scientia amabilis were fruitful not only in the sense that they gave him the opportunity to share and enrich his scholarship through the contact he made with so many others on both sides of the Atlantic, but also because it was on one such journey to Canada in 1927 that the idea of establishing a programme of Medieval Studies in St. Michael’s College, Toronto, was seriously discussed. Two years later the new Institute of Medieval Studies was born, receiving Pontifical approbation in 1939.