A year ago, in an editorial, New Blackfriars was complaining that the theological understanding of what Mrs Thatcher had been doing to Britain had ‘hardly even begun’.

The complaint could have been generalized. To judge by the standard of the public debate at the 1987 General Election, any in-depth understanding of Thatcherism, despite the decade of evidence on which it could draw, was non-existent. Even now it is still in its infancy. A government which claims to have wrested intellectual supremacy from the left and to be full of ideas, and which is if anything rather pleased with itself when its opponents accuse it of sacrificing something or other on the altar of ideology, has nonetheless provoked no coherent theoretical critique to speak of from its public opponents, hardly anything other than mesmerized horror.

Is it the indisputable authority of seemingly unending power that has reduced the critical mind to silence? Or is Mrs Thatcher perhaps right? Has a philosopher-queen inaugurated a republic in which all the questions of political economy, having been answered, no longer need to be asked?

Hardly. The massive paradoxes of the Thatcher years—their blatancy must partly account for the opposition’s bewilderment— demand explanation, and, like any explanation of human affairs, that explanation will of course have a theological dimension. I am not, though, a theologian. Surely, however, the launching of a really satisfactory ‘theological critique’ of Thatcherism at least partly depends on the opening up of a rather more general discussion of Thatcherism, and what I am offering here is a contritibution to this.

The concept of cultural identity is illustrated by the example of Latin America. At the same time Latin America is shown to be a true part of the Western world and understandable only as such, and the reasons for other cultural identifications of Latin America are examined. Then the cultural development and identity of the West as a whole is considered, with special reference to two competing accounts of Western cultural development, both of which focus chiefly on the econonmic development of Europe and North America, in contrast to its cultural or spiritual roots. Finally the special case of the United States is looked at, and it is asked how her peculiar self‐understanding affects her cultural identity as part of the Western world.

One has often been asked by incredulous, though well-meaning, people—and almost apologetically—‘Why did you become a Catholic?’ The suggestion being that there must be some explanation to account for such a strange, even a remarkable, lapse from rational behaviour on the part of one supposed to be some sort of scientist. The question is not well put. I suppose that none of us can say truthfully and certainly why we do anything. It would be better to ask not why, but how, did a man become a Catholic; and this is the question I shall attempt to answer, so that next time I am asked why I became a Catholic I can just hand over this number of New Blackfriars. Perhaps even more alarming and difficult to give a direct answer to is the question: ‘When were you converted?’ Perhaps I had better deal with that one first.

Some people, it would seem, have peculiar notions about what is called ‘conversion’, as though it were some sudden and dazzling experience (it may be with some people; I do not know). So, we are led to suppose, this is what happened on the road to Damascus, but if that dramatic incidence, that traumatic vision, occurred as described, we might recollect that Paul was a highly religious Jew, and so was Jesus, a Jew preaching unto Jews in the tradition of Jewish thought and expression. And we might also bear in mind that when we read that Augustine was converted by Ambrose that Augustine was a Neo-Platonist and was already, so to speak, half-way there. So, if we may compare little things with big things, we come to me, which is embarrassing, but obviously I cannot talk about myself without some ‘I’s and ‘me’s.

‘The Catholic liturgy is the supreme example of an objectively established rule of spiritual life.’ ‘The liturgy is the lex orandi'. These were the principles of Romano Guardini’s liturgical writings, both theological and pastoral. He sought to bring the liturgy into the centre of the Christian’s life, at the heart of the many other, more private, expressions of prayer and reverence. He offers an overview of Christian public prayer:

According to Aidan Nichols, if the principles of Romano Guardini on liturgy had been consistently applied to contemporary sensibility in the 1960s and 1970s, his influence might have stopped the post-conciliar liturgical reform from backing modernity as a winning ticket, just at the point when it became converted into postmodernism. This short sketch points to some of Guardini’s insights in the liturgical area, especially on questions which have recently been taken up anew by liturgical thinkers.

It is 1429 and in the Chateau of Vaucouleurs, Joan of Arc is being interrogated by the menacing Robert de Baudricourt. Joan claims to hear heavenly voices telling her to raise the siege at Orleans:

Joan claims to say something not only about herself but about the way God communicates to human beings in general. If this is true then it has a lot to say about the role of the imagination in discoursing about God. But, you will object, is this not the role of theology?

It seems a truism to say it, but professional theologians are not the only kinds of people who discourse about God; there are others who theologise in an indirect way—but sometimes just as effectively. Among these must be counted authors from the literary world who, either implicitly or explicitly, through the medium of the novel, short story or poem, mediate aspects of the religious sensibility in human experience. In their work we can discern signs of anonymous theology? Random examples may include C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter, Brian Moore’s The Colour of Blood, Morris West’s The Devil’s Advocate, Rachel Cusk’s Saving Agnes. In these works as in many others one can detect a sifting through the debris of human experience and a concern to view it through the prism of an implicit faith in God.

The admirable work edited by Fr Alberic Stacpoole OSB, Mary’s Place in Christian Dialogue (St Paul Publications, 1982), makes no mention of Fatima. Even Archbishop Eugenio Cardinale’s paper on ‘The Mariology of Pope Pius XIF does not allude to it, which is strange because in Portugal he is known as ‘the pope of Fatima’. Clearly, Fatima has no place on the agenda of the Ecumenical Society of the Blessed Virgin Mary whose papers are collected in this volume. The reason for the omission is evident: Fatima represents the kind of mariology that most alarms and scandalises our Christian brothers and sisters. With its banal ‘messages’, its improbable miracles and its resolute anti-communism, it makes the faith ‘risible’, and St Thomas says we should not do that.

There are probably few theological categories more contested than the image of God. The reasons why are not hard to fathom. Though the priestly writer to whom we owe the phrase nowhere specifies in what this image consists, theologians since Irenaeus have seen in it the key to understanding human distinctiveness. Though Irenaeus’ own interpretation of the imago Dei is remarkably holistic, the phrase has more often been understood in narrowly cognitive terms. And while the faculties cited as the seat of the divine image have generally been viewed as widely inclusive of all human beings, those in power have proved all too willing to question the humanity of those whose cognitive abilities they have judged somehow deficient.

Partly as a protest against narrowly cognitive interpretations of human distinctiveness, the last century has seen an increasing emphasis on the capacity for relationships with others as the defining feature of the divine image in human beings. Insofar as such capacity is also subject to variation among individuals, however, relational criteria seem as open to exclusive interpretation as those pertaining to the use of reason or will. In both cases, an essentialist interpretation of the imago Dei threatens to result in the boundaries of the human being drawn too narrowly.

This article provides a critique of reason for Anglican eucharistic theology. It examines the mutliformity of theological and philosophical assumptions underlying that theology and recognises the difficulty created in the discourse of the Anglican eucharistic tradition where hermeneutic idealism operates in an exclusive manner. Further, the article uses the insights of Habermas, arguing for a critique of reason for the tradition through a dialogue approach based on the intersubjectivity of communicative action where there is distinction between ‘lifeworld’ and ‘system paradigm’ and where there is subject-subject relationship.

In my view to assert that God exists is to claim the right and need to carry on an activity, to be engaged in research, and I think this throws light on what we are doing if we try to prove the existence of God. To prove the existence of God is to prove that some questions still need asking, that the world poses these questions for us.

To prove the existence of God, then, would be rather like proving the validity of science — I don’t mean science as a body of established facts set out in textbooks or journals, but science as an intellectual activity, the activity of research currently going on; and not just routine research which consists in looking for the answers to clearly formulated questions by means of clearly established techniques, but the research which is the growing point of science, the venture into the unknown.

It is perfectly possible to deny the validity of this. It is perfectly possible to say we now have science; (we didn’t have it in the eighth century, let us say, but we have it now). It is just there; from now on it is all really just a matter of tidying up a few details. Now of course all the really great advances in science have come by questioning just that; by questioning, let us say, whether the Newtonian world is really the last word, by digging down and asking questions of what everybody has come to take for granted. But you could imagine quite easily a society which discouraged such radical questioning.

Desire is examined here with a view to informing a theological response to capitalism. The notion of mimetic desire offered by René Girard is used as a starting point, Girard's ideas being brought into critical engagement with, first, other intersubjective accounts, namely those offered by Alexandre Kojève and by psychoanalysis in its Freudian and Lacanian variants; and then the account of desire as productive becoming offered by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in which the link to capitalism is explicit. It is suggested that both mimetic desire and its productive counterpart can be understood as asserting the priority of desire itself over both subject and object. The possibilities for framing a coherent theological account of desire which is both mimetic and productive are then assessed with reference to Bernard of Clairvaux, Aquinas and Augustine, noting that accepting a metaphysics of participation makes plausible a productive desire which is nonetheless coded as a mimesis of the divine precedent. Such a conclusion brings into relief the inevitable difficulty of reconciling Christian and capitalist economies of desire.

Thomas Aquinas articulated an understanding of nature that sought to maintain together the integrity of created causality and God's providential ordering of the cosmos. Developing and combining Aristotelian and Neoplatonic approaches to nature and to final causality, Thomas formulated a horizontal or linear final causality wrapped within a larger vertical or circular final causality. This formulation balanced two seemingly opposed principles. First, that natures operate through intrinsic principles toward determinate ends. Second, that non-cognitive agents must be directed toward an end extrinsically. Aquinas balanced these two principles by situating the first within the second such that God creates and directs natures toward determinate ends through divinely bestowed principles intrinsic to those natures. In this way, Aquinas's understanding of providence underlies his approach to nature.

The ‘question of Being’ is in a sense deeply against the spirit of the age since the rise of hermeneutics has substantially led to the eclipse of a traditional metaphysics of the self and the world. The central role of ontology in the thought of Hans Urs von Balthasar therefore makes him appear as a figure who is deeply against the grain of much current thinking, and who stands as a bulwark in defence of traditional, or classical, perspectives.

We can trace two primary sources for the role of Being in von Balthasar’s theology. The first is Martin Heidegger, whose vocabulary of Seinsvergessenheit (‘forgetfulness of Being’) sounds throughout von Balthasar’s discussions of Being. The very centrality of Being and of the Ontological Difference (which von Balthasar reads as a thomistic real distinction), is a sign of von Balthasar’s debt to the German philosopher, even if he proves highly critical of many aspects of the heideggerian project in its particularity.’ By far the more important influence is that of Thomas Aquinas, who is discussed in a section from the fourth volume of the English translation (The Realm of Metaphysics in Antiquity) and again in the fifth (The Realm of Metaphysics in the Modem Age). According to von Balthasar, ‘what Thomas does is to use beauty to define being’. This is a resonant statement indeed, since, to a not inconsiderable extent, it holds also for von Balthasar himself and the whole of his Herrlichkeit project. Time and again during these central volumes, von Balthasar will return to the theme of Being as that which governs the most fundamental aspects of aesthetics, philosophy and theology, as well as the understanding of the human and the grounding of human experience.

Drawing especially on Aquinas and Pope Francis, the paper argues that Christians are indeed called to love non-human animals. Human love (amor) for non-human animals follows from the Trinitarian example of divine love (amor), and includes affection, dilection, benevolence, and thus charity as friendship. Love for and fraternity with non-human animals constitutes a necessary dimension of Christian conversion. The specific form this love takes depends on the particular natures inherent in different species. So to show love to a dog will be very different from showing love to a wolf, which is in turn very different from how one shows love to a chicken, or to a frog, and so on.

This paper explores Otto Muck's metaphysical concept of Weltanschauung (world-view). My objective is to argue that world-views can be rational. To this end, I will first explain the notion of Weltanschauung and illustrate its relation to metaphysical convictions. Next, I will defend the meaningfulness of metaphysical assertions against two objections relating to verification and falsification. The core of the paper focuses on the integrative function of world-views and the criteria according to which one can evaluate their rationality, in particular, Frederick Ferré’s criteria for the rationality of metaphysical systems. The thesis is that the rationality of a world-view can be evaluated in terms of the adequacy of the integrative function it performs. Finally, I will show why, within Muck's framework, dialogue between proponents of different world-views is a postulate of rationality.

Edmund Lazzari in “Would St. Thomas Aquinas Baptize an Extraterrestrial,” maintains that Aquinas would disagree with those who would baptize a fallen extraterrestrial on the grounds that they “disregard the necessity of a human nature for incorporation into the Mystical Body of Christ,” baptism being the means whereby human beings are so incorporated. Lazzari maintains that, “Because of the crucial role that that assumption of a human nature plays … in Thomistic soteriology, it is not possible to simply transfer the effects of the life of Jesus Christ to other intellectual beings who are not sharers in human nature.” I first intend to show that Aquinas does not hold that a being must have a human nature to belong to the Mystical Body; rather having a rational nature suffices. Secondly, I intend to show that while the effects of Christ's death and resurrection are not such as to be automatically applicable to intelligent extraterrestrials (ETIs), much less to be automatically transferred to them through baptism, Aquinas would maintain that God is capable of ordering things in these ways, as they do not imply contradiction. Thus, if there are fallen extraterrestrials, Aquinas would not assume that it would be inappropriate to baptize them.

Anyone who cares about getting rid of racism in Britain is accustomed to massive difficulties. The disastrous immigration policies of governments of both parties since 1962, the institutionalised racial discrimination built into public and private organisations, the tragedy of human potential lost and destroyed in our educational system, the insensitivity and ignorance of many people in the news industry, racism in entertainment and cartoons, public indifference and private malice, are all too bitterly familiar. But the anti-racist, as if he had not trouble enough with enemies, needs more and more protection from his friends. Government money for ‘community relations’ has recently become more plentiful, but practised hands are holding the purse-strings and know just how and when to draw them tight. Job opportunities brighten a little for specialised social workers, charged with containing the discontents of the young and black : their job opportunities are less than ever. Various groups on the Left are eager to help in the racial struggle, but usually on their own terms. And now we have Women’s Lib as well.

‘Women’s Lib’ is a vague and disputed term; it is more usual to hear of ‘the women’s movement’ now in this country. This includes some formal organisations, some informal groups and some individuals, all in some way or another concerned with women’s rights. These groups and individuals vary in beliefs and in action. Some are old-established reforming organisations, some new community action groups, and so on; their work often overlaps, but there is a marked difference, all the same, between the new ideology of liberation and the old ideology of equal rights for women. The difference is in mood and style rather than in a set programme; the new mood and style can conveniently be called ‘anti-sexism’.

One of the pastoral problems which loom very large in these days is that of the Catholics who, having entered upon a marriage which the Church cannot recognise as such, then find themselves tortured in mind by their consequent separation from the sacramental life of the Church, and long to return to it but see no way of doing so. What is to be done for them? How are they to be advised?

It is as useless as it is heartless to say simply that they have only themselves to blame: that they sinned in contracting a marriage which is no marriage at all, and that the Church will receive them back when, and only when, they renounce it. In practice this is harmful, since it may well drive them completely and finally away from the Church. In theory it is bad theology, because it simplifies what is in reality complex, and refuses to face all the facts of a human situation. Ethics is not an exact science, precisely because its business is with the complexities and untidiness of human action in the concrete; and indeed the ultimate ethical judgment, as to what A is to do here and now, is not a question of science merely but of art, the art of prudence. We might well recall here some wise words of M. Maritain: ‘Some people imagine that morality measures our actions, not in the light of the just human ends which they ought to be aiming at in the given circumstances, but by a forest of abstract formulae which life must copy like a book. ... In reality the principles of morals are not theorems or idols: they are the supreme rules governing a concrete activity the aim of which is something to be done in certain definite circumstances, and governing it through more proximate rules and above all through the rules, which are never set down in advance, of the virtue of prudence. . . . They do not seek to devour human life; they are there to build it up.