For most Catholics, a prayer meeting is a new and perhaps disturbing experience. However, in recent years an increasing number of Catholics have been meeting to pray together, in silence or in spoken prayer as they feel led by the Spirit; so it may be useful, for both enthusiasts and critics, to consider in general terms the advantages, objectives and principles of prayer meetings, and to face frankly the dangers and possible errors to which they are liable.

The basic principle of group prayer is the teaching of our Lord, that ‘where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in their midst’ (Matt. 18, 20), and that ‘if two of you agree about anything on earth in prayer, it shall be granted’ (18, 19). For we are together the Body of Christ, and as such ‘members of one another’ (Eph. 4, 25). As Christians, we belong together; it is therefore natural and proper that we should exercise our most specifically Christian privilege of prayer together. This is what much of the recent liturgical renewal has been about.

Group prayer obviously falls into two kinds: formal, liturgical prayer, and spontaneous, free prayer. Originally, of course, these two were not separate. Even the Eucharistic Prayer, the Canon of the Mass, was originally extemporized by the celebrant. And it is clear that in the worship of the early Church the whole assembly would take part in various ways (except perhaps the women—and there St Paul may have been dealing with the particular situation!). Whether we shall ever return to this, or even whether it would be a good thing to return to this, I do not know. In any case, our situation is different, and we do have to distinguish between set prayer and spontaneous prayer.

Since Vatican II great progress has been made towards an ecumenical understanding and appreciation of our Blessed Lady, even as there has been a certain development in Catholic understanding. This essay looks briefly at Reformation mariologies, those of Luther, Calvin and Zwingli before moving on to consider three Scots: John Knox, Edwin Muir and John Macquarrie. Arguably, John Macquarrie has shown one of the most careful retrievals of Marian theology, not least in his Principles of Christian Theology and Mary for All Christians. His final mariological sounding took him back to his Celtic roots, and is summarized here. John Macquarrie died in 2007, and this essay is dedicated to his memory.

In March 1217 brother Dominic, a Castilian canon of the chapter of the diocese of Osma, returned to Toulouse from a visit to Rome. He, and the small community he had gathered round him, had been preaching against the Cathar heretics of Languedoc for the previous ten years. Soon after his arrival he summoned the community of canons which had just settled into their newly restored monastery to meet him. It rapidly became clear that the situation every religious dreads had arisen: the superior had an idea. The strategy involved the creation of a new religious force in Catholic Europe which was to take the form of an entirely novel religious Order. Its mission was to be wholly given over to the preaching of the Word of God. This was to take precedence over every other conventual observance. The Order was to be international; its members were to be called friars, brothers, they were to be bound to stability within the Order and not to any one particular house. They were to go wherever the needs of evangelisation and the defence of doctrine took them, living in poverty, holding no property, not even the houses in which they dwelt. They were to live out some elements of the monastic life, celebrating the divine office and the Eucharist solemnly and in common with, but without undue fussy ceremonial. They were to elect their own superiors, who in turn would be members of Provincial Chapters.

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.

In the previous article, (New Blackfriars October 1980) I spoke of the radical questionableness of the universe and suggested that it seems anomalous to ask “How come?” about individual events or things or whole classes of things and yet refuse to ask this question about the whole world. The belief that such a question is unaskable is based, firstly, on the fact that we have no answer to it, and, secondly, on the fact that the language in which it is asked is exploratory; we are using words in ways that are stretched beyond their familiar use. I suggested that both these things are characteristic of the creative growing points of our understanding whether in science or in the arts. To assert the existence of God is not to state a fact within an established intellectual system but to claim the need for exploration; it is to claim that there is an unanswered question about the universe: the question “How come the whole thing instead of nothing?”

By “creation” we mean the dependence of all that is, in so far as it is. We do not know what it is that it depends on, we do not know the nature of God. There is, as I suggested, a great gap between creation and making or causing in our familiar sense. Other causes bring things about in a “world without them”, (X is brought about in a world with an X-shaped gap in it). What is caused comes about in a world in which it is in some way potential, a world, for example, containing what can be made into it, but there is nothing within which resides the possibility of the whole world before.it is created. Creation is a matter of the existence of the world over against nothing at all.

In philosophy the question about God has developed, historically, parallel to and intimately connected with metaphysics. In metaphysics, the onto-theological thought of God arises from its dependence on the ontological difference, the thought of the ‘unthought as such.’ Within this philosophical construct, God is ultimately thought as the ‘ground’ of all that is, the Being of beings, the causa sui. This paper, mostly inspired by the philosophy of Jean-Luc Marion and Emmanuel Levinas, argues in favour of a post-metaphysical way of thinking about God: a thinking which releases God from the onto-theological category of Being, and addresses the radical and irreducible alterity of God; a thinking which critiques thinking, in order to address the dilemma of our discourse of Transcendence to be shared within a community-indialogue.

This work is divided into three major sections. Beginning with Marion’s interpretation of Heidegger’s account of the analytic of the Dasein, the first section will suggest that one starts the question of God from God alone—the gift of Love that precedes Being—rather than from Being. The second section will introduce Emmanuel Levinas’ account of the ethical pre-condition of discourse and reason. For Levinas, discourse starts with, or is preceded by, the gaze of the face of the Other who refuses to be reduced into a category of the same. Subsequently, the questions of language and reason, their limits, necessity, and ethical reach will also be addressed. Finally, this paper will revisit the question of God and reflect on the philosopher’s and theologian’s call to dialogue with, and service to, the community.

Developments in technology and communications have enhanced the status and role of imaging. They have resulted not just in the excellent quality of images but also in the speed and ease of distributing or communicating them. But with the welcome advances have also come undesirable and even threatening consequences for both individuals and society generally. These have presented challenges and issues which need to be addressed urgently. The essay considers these from a philosophical perspective. Focusing first on the tension between image and reality, it provides a philosophical background to the debate. It then discusses the question of truth and the related issues of the right to know, freedom of speech and privacy. It provides the foundation for these fundamental rights but also examines the tensions or conflicts in their exercise. The essay then offers and discusses some guidelines to deal with these challenges and issues; namely, the criteria of appropriateness and acceptability and the importance of accountability. It suggests that in addition, given the frailty of human nature and the lessons of history, society also needs the support of laws and policies.

The essay addresses the complex cultural historical claim that with modernity the earlier unity of reason and sensibility underwent a dissociation that has important consequences for our current predicament and for our present understanding of the relationship between reason, faith and sensibility. Three case studies (Géza Ottlik, T. S. Eliot and Blaise Pascal) are examined in order to establish the nature of the divide and provide an archaeology (with the help of Pascal) of one of its first conceptualisations as well as of an early attempt to heal the growing fissure between what is termed by Pascal as reason and the heart. The second part examines current thought concerning the need to enlarge the narrow Enlightenment conception of reason and the recent call to re-envision its theological contours. The argument is then made that the same procedure should be applied to the theologically long-neglected domain of human sensibility. Theology is registered as also being accountable for internalising and perpetuating the cultural dissociation due to its failure to preserve the traditional theological contours of affectivity and its naivety in leaving the exploration of this domain entirely to the competence of secular philosophy.

Taylor addresses A Secular Age to an ‘us’ identified with the West. In this way the book is particularised and entered into a conversation. It is a prime example of the multiculturalism Taylor acclaims. However the paper argues that the commitment to multiculturalism forces A Secular Age to downplay the importance of Catholicism as an institution. It is contended that the book is a great work of catholicity (small ‘c’) but in need of more Catholicism (capital ‘C’).

Theological pluralism has been pressed upon us with increasing enthusiasm over the past twenty years. It has been seen as the only appropriate response to the cultural fragmentation of our world, and also as the continuation of what has in fact been the nature of theological discourse from the first. We had been too easily misled, by a harmonizing biblical exegesis on the one hand, and a Denzinger-based version of doctrinal history on the other, into supposing that the articulation of what is believed by Christians to be true about God and the world naturally falls into a pattern of tidily unified correlations. The pendulum has now swung a fair way towards the opposite pole from this.

Did you know that last December 5 was the Day of the Disabled. No? I’m not surprised. Possibly more people have heard that 1999 is the Year of the Elderly. A large proportion of our population is now over 60, and, frequently with old age comes some degree of disability, so perhaps our disabled citizens will get their share of attention this year. After all, the final part of the Disability Discrimination Act of 1955 (Part III) which requires service providers to review their procedures to make sure they do not exclude disabled people, comes into full force in October of this year. Then there is the new Human Rights Bill several of whose clauses cover the disabled, and the setting up by the government of a Disability Rights Commission which will mean that in future those suffering discrimination will have a body to whom they can bring complaints instead of being faced with the need to bring a private prosecution.

So all that remains is to change the attitude to disability in the general community. How do we do this?

First, (this sounds like a Delia Smith recipe) we must bury the Great Disability Debate as to whether it is personal physical limitations which constrict the lives of disabled people (the physical model) or the fact that society is not prepared to adapt itself to encompass the disabled (the social model). The basis for the first of these two approaches is that the disabled must accept that their life-situation is going to be different to that of the able-bodied ; for the second, that the disabled have a right to equal access and opportunities however difficult the circumstances.

At perhaps no time in recent memory has the temptation to hopelessness been so great or the relative powerlessness of most of the world’s humanity so obvious. As I sit to write this essay, safely complicit in the “protection” afforded by the world’s richest and most powerful nation and yet strangely imprisoned by it, we appear to be careening ineluctably toward war—or escalating an ongoing war largely invisible to the public eye—against a country half of whose population is under the age of fifteen. Vast opposition in the United Nations is greeted with incredulity and incomprehension by President Bush on our half-willing behalf, and massive protests worldwide are countered simultaneously with piety about the blessings of free expression and an indifference which shows that such liberty is countenanced, such displays encouraged even, because sovereign power and a bland pluralism of purely private opinion have drained these expressions of any weight. This impotence is what we have learned to call freedom. In Washington, war protesters dutifully apply for permits to register their dissatisfaction. Could there be a clearer example of modern democracy’s ingenious capacity to domesticate dissent simply by permitting and embracing it?

It is particularly appropriate, as we are plunged helplessly and headlong into war, that we are also invited by the Ash Wednesday liturgy and the season which it announces to contemplate this powerlessness, to offer sacrifices of repentance worthy of it, by dwelling on the fact and meaning—or perhaps the meaninglessness— of our deaths. “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

Asked to name a German city associated with the Lutheran Reformation, most people with any knowledge of the period would, I suppose, cite Wittenberg — the Saxon university town from which that Reformation was launched. But an equally serious candidate would be Augsburg in what is now northern Bavaria where the single most authoritative document of Lutheranism, the Confessio Augustana or ‘Augsburg Confession’ was promulgated in 1530. It was to Augsburg, where the Reichstag, the imperial Diet, was meeting, that the former Master of the Dominicans, Thomist theologian and Catholic church reformer, Thomas de Vio was sent in 1518 as papal legate with a mandate to bring Dr Luther, member of the Order of Augustinian Hermits and professor of biblical studies, to his senses. De Vio — better known from his birthplace, Gaeta in the kingdom of Naples, as il Gaetano or Cajetan, was at first viewed by Luther with comparative favour. Although Luther shared the anti-Italian feelings common in Germany in this period, disliked what he knew of Thomism, and numbered several Dominicans among his harshest critics, he found Cardinal Cajetan learned and humane. There was, however, no real meeting of minds. So far as Luther was concerned, the encounter was to be a debate, like the Heidelberg Disputation from which he had just emerged with flying colours.

‘L’immensite de ces espaces infinies m’effraie’, said Pascal, and we are all familiar with the ways in which European attitudes to the place of man in the universe have changed since astronomy rendered him small, lonely and vulnerable. But the idea of the expanding universe in infinite space, while it robbed man of a central place as lord of creation below the heavens, did not take away the idea of brotherhood between men. That deprivation has to do with another kind of frightening immensity: the unthinkable length of the human past.

It is less than two hundred years since educated Europeans believed that Adam was very close to them in time. Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary, first published in 1788, the work from which Keats took his knowledge of classical mythology, begins with a chronology following the guidance of Dr Blair and Archbishop Ussher: the creation of the world is given in 4004 B.C. and the birth of Moses in 1571. Thus the gap between Adam and Moses was of the same length as the gap between Moses and Basil the First at Constantinople in 862 A.D. Chronologies varied, but none placed the first man so far away in time that imagination could not encompass the distance. Moreover, this nearness was a matter not only of time but of human nature. Adam was no less human than they, no less intelligent, no less feeling: there was a real sense in which he was not only an ancestor but a brother. Made in the image of God, he was of noble appearance; fallen through sin, he was a fellow-sufferer of human misfortune; formed out of dust, he was lowly; speaking with God in Paradise he was touched with glory.