The delay in publishing the Dead Sea scrolls, long a quiet academic scandal, was recently thrust into the forefront of the news by The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception?. Its authors, M.Baigent and R. Leigh, two qualified experts in discerning arcane conspiracies, manifestly Find the world a threatening place. They give reality to their nightmare of Vatican world domination by claiming that the moment the scrolls were discovered a prescient Vatican, foreseeing the damage that first-century documents (then still unread!) must inevitably cause the faith, inserted its inquisitorial minions, the Dominicans of the École Biblique in Jerusalem, at the beginning of a process which to date they have consistently subverted. An hilarious thesis to those who know the facts, but disturbing to those forced to rely on titillating innuendo.

A major archaeological discovery is usually a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Time and time again chance, not planning, is the decisive factor. Had Heinrich Schliemann dug another sector of Troy, he would never have found the spectacular gold objects he identified as Priam’s treasure. If Kathleen Kenyon had placed her main trench 15 metres further north she would never have brought to light the 8000 BC tower which is the earliest evidence of urban organisation.

Jesus has a reputation as a story-teller. He is known for his announcement of the Reign of God in stories of a merchant buying a pearl, a traveller being mugged on the road, a woman sweeping her floor. His theology had always the form of fiction. ‘He did not speak to them without a parable’. This was a peculiar theological method. Whatever likenesses there may have been between the people of the Dead Sea scrolls and the first company of disciples, they did not have such a story-teller at their centre. And though there have been several attempts to establish that speaking in parables was an ordinary style of preaching with Jesus’ rabbinic contemporaries, these attempts have resulted rather in some further confirmation of Jesus’ individual distinction. There was no preacher like him. No one telling such stories. Paul, as a youngster, had clearly enjoyed the hebrew Exodus legend about a rolling stone, and the greek fable of Menenius about a talking stomach. But, if he is anywhere near as representative of the pharisee tradition as he claims to be, it must be significant for our view of contemporary jewish teachers that he thought it sufficiently daring in his theologising to elaborate a little allegory from the story of Abraham.

Jesus’ story-telling talent has proved to be as singular in the history of Christian theology. The vaster number of those who have thought it their vocation to articulate the peculiar Christian appreciation of God have been as useless at story-telling as Paul. It may be, confronted by a demand for imaginative narrative, determinedly unfictionalising theologians should have claimed that ‘the logical consistency which frames all dogmas into a consistent whole’ is to be understood, as Leslie Stephen observed in a fine essay on ‘Wordsworth’s Ethics’, as ‘an aspect of the imaginative power’ by which we harmonise our strongest and subtlest feelings.

One of the most important social realities today, one which holds theological importance is the well documented and yet chilling fact of the feminisation of poverty. With the increasing global and national polarisation of poor and rich, the majority of the newly poor continue to be women and children. Overwhelmingly, women with children spend the major portion of their lives in a downward spiral, struggling for economic survival for themselves and their children. Politically, these same women hold little or no social power.

This social reality of the feminisation of poverty in the USA finds its counterpart in the Catholic Church in the economic relationship between the institutional church and women, particularly women religious. In this articler I will first describe the social process of the feminisation of poverty. Second I will briefly demonstrate how and why U.S. congregations of women religious partake in this social process through their relationship with the institutional Church. Finally I will discuss what implications this has for the theology of religious life, for women and for the Church.

Christopher Columbus has been a target of revisionist debunking as the New World prepares for the 500th anniversary of the European discovery. Once praised as a superb seaman by Samuel Eliot Morison, Columbus has shrunk to an incompetent bumbler in Kirkpatrick Sale’s book, The Discovery of Paradise—a paradise, the author argues, that Europeans despoiled. Going further, other protesters hand up the equivalent of a Nuremberg indictment. What happened after 1492, thunders the National Council of Churches, was ‘an invasion and colonisation with legalised occupation, genocide, economic exploitation and a deep level of institutional racism and moral decadence.’ This is partly true, but by the same selective reckoning Jefferson was a Virginia elitist and a slave-owning plutocrat.In his New York Times editorial (June 26,1991), ‘Columbus Was Not Eichmann,’ Karl E. Meyer affirms that, despite their cruelties, Spanish colonisers were not simply war criminals; and, whatever his faults, Columbus was not Eichmann. That anyone would suggest otherwise tells more about our own self-righteous age than that of Columbus.

Nobody can deny that the conquistadores thirsted for gold and glory, slaughtered Indians and imported African slaves. What needs to be added is that their excesses were searingly indicted by Spanish churchmen, notably by the Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas. His Very Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, published in Seville in 1552, remains the prime source for the worst horror stories of the Spanish conquest. His searing narrative, Meyer affirms, was seized upon by English Protestants to justify their own conquests.

Lucio: Why, how now Claudio! whence comes this restraint?
Claudio: From too much liberty my Lucio; liberty,
As surfeit, is the father of much fast;
So every scope by the immoderate use Turns to restraint..
(Shakespeare, Measure for Measure Act 1 Scene 2 )

What we can call ‘greenery’ is all about ordering one’s life. It is about how to live in our common home; to be green it is not necessary to be a Christian. An eclectic mix of cosmology and apocalyptic speculation, politics and sheer commonsense, make up what Germaine Greer has called the ‘Tyranny of the Green Religion’. This embodies both criticism and hope and, more immediately, a call to change the minutiae of one’s life in the face of a perceived threat to that life. In the face of massive pollution outside the private sphere of influence we are trying, rather desperately perhaps, to rediscover personal ways of becoming clean. Ironically, this might be achieved by romantically rediscovering the organic, the soil, dirt, clay itself, the natural, the given in the face of the man made; an attempt to place the moral and political orders once more in the context of the natural order.