The third volume of the Blackfriars Summa Theologiae, translated by Herbert McCabe, is entitled (I have always supposed by him) Knowing and Naming God. These words make a concise brief for the philosopher of religion. Of its two movements, knowing God seems at first glance the more demanding and critical, yet it is evident that for Aquinas and the Patristic tradition which preceded him, naming God was of equal difficulty and weight. In fact the two cannot be separated for to name one must, in some sense know which, for the early theologians, formed an almost insurmountable obstacle to our speaking of God.

Augustine is continuously occupied with how we can know God, and with how we can name Him. It is the problem with which he opens the Confessions, for if we do not know what or whom we address then how can we call upon our Lord? To call upon we need a name, and a name involves definition and definition risks idolatrously presuming to know the divine essence.

The primary Biblical text for the naming of God for Patristic and medieval readers alike was Exodus 3. 1-14, the story of Moses at the burning bush. Moses, herding his father-in-law’s sheep, is addressed by God and in the negotiations which follow Moses asks the Deity for a name,

It is impossible to evaluate Sen’s thought in terms of pure economics, because his humanism takes his thought into other domains, including philosophy, political theory, sociology and demography.

Born in 1933 into a Hindu academic family in Dhaka, before it became the capital of Bangladesh, he studied at the universities of Calcutta and Cambridge, before teaching in Indian and American Universities, and then at Oxford, before returning to Cambridge on being elected Master of Trinity College. This factual curriculum vitae gives little indication of his taking, from the beginning, a standpoint by which he was perfectly at home in all these settings, creative and judicious in every sphere he entered. In his considerable list of puuheauons, some or modest iength, others originally papers or lectures being quite short, and in innumerable articles, one is conscious of a mind which searches out the roots of questions and their interconnections, expressing them in limpid English prose. Sensitive, though not always formally so, to the philosophical dimensions of the material, the resultant thought has a sapiential quality, in which it approximates, for example, to that of the late Belgium Louvain economist, Fernand Baudhuin. One thinks especially of the latter’s Déontologie des Affaires (Louvain 1960). The latter’s range was primarily Western Europe, with extensions mainly into more Eastern Europe and the United States; Sen’s range is world-wide, equally at home in the problems of developing India, of famine-struck Africa, as with those of Western Europe, North America and Asia. He often uses the human factors which accompany the rise of the post-war Japanese economy as a yard-stick to measure the problems of the aging economies of the older industrialised nations.

The ‘Holy Land’ is of particular interest to Christians everywhere, an interest intensified whenever they read their Bibles. There God intervened in human history through his dealings with the Israelites, and in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus was crucified and raised in, and ascended from Jerusalem, and it was there also that the Holy Spirit descended on the Church.

There has been, of course, an unbroken Christian community in the land from the beginning, and it was those residing there who were the architects of a Christian ‘Holy Land’. But Christians outside also have their interests. Well before Constantine, Palestine was a place of pilgrimage. In the middle of the second century, Melito of Sardis went to establish accurately the books of the Old Testament’, and to examine the relevant places. Others went ‘for the sake of the holy places’, and ‘to trace the footsteps of Jesus’, and pray. Some stayed, living piously near the sites. Nevertheless, however important, the Holy Land never attracted more than a handful of (affluent) pilgrims from abroad, and the practice of pilgrimage was virtually moribund by the end of the eighteenth century. As we shall see, Western interests from then went beyond the religious.