Catholics are so accustomed to be shocked or disillusioned by popular books on social science, that they may well be tempted to give these new Pelicans a wide berth. This would be a mistake, for both are well-written, pleasantly informative, and contain much encouragement for those who do not despair of welding Catholic principles info the British way of life. In Peter Archer’s symposium one will find a keen recognition of the importance of stable family life, a warm acceptance of the need for voluntary effort to supplement state action and a thoroughly wholesome attitude to officials. They should be supported and assisted in the performance of their duties, one gathers, but firmly protected by a wide-awake proletariat from any temptation to dictatorship.

Social Welfare and the Citizen makes no pretext of giving a complete picture of the modem Welfare State. Those topics have been selected for discussion which prove to be ‘the most constant source of practical difficulty to the citizen’. Several of the essays are entirely factual, those for example which deal with Income Tax, National Insurance, Landlord and Tenant, Public Health, Property and Town Planning, Law and the Motorist. No comment is required except a word of praise for their clarity and accuracy. But most of the contributors have made some effort to show the historic background of the service they are describing and to indicate in what ways it needs reform. In an excellent chapter on National Assistance Mr R. E. Prentice reminds us that the old Poor Law of 1601 established a ‘public responsibility for the relief of distress’, impeccable in principle, but discharged over the centuries ‘with a strange mixture of charity and harshness’. A curious feature of the relief of the destitute in this country has been the movement away from local to centralized administration in the interests of humanity. The old Boards of Guardians based on the parishes were notoriously the best-hated institutions

Henri de Lubac's Corpus Mysticum, published during and immediately after the conditions of wartime France, had a profound influence on the theology and actual practice of not only Catholic, but also much Protestant liturgy in the course of the unfolding liturgical movement. The interpretative keys of the text were established primarily by Michel de Certeau and Hans Urs von Balthasar, and have emphasised a historical shift from understanding in the connections between a threefold hermeneutic of Christ's ‘mystical body’. The ‘mystical body’ is variously understood as the Eucharist itself, the extant body of the Church, and the actual body of Christ. The conventional reading of this text is to claim that de Lubac traces a shift, occurring in the High Middle Ages that points away from the body of the Church to an objectification of the eucharistic species, resulting in the highly individualistic piety that manifested itself in the Catholicism of the nineteenth century. This paper challenges that hermeneutic key as an oversimplification of a much more subtle reading suggested by de Lubac himself and intrinsic to the text of Corpus Mysticum, and suggests that de Lubac understood the real shift to be the triumph of a certain kind of rationalism, exemplified by Berengar's thought, emerging to assert itself as the basis and ground of theological thinking, eclipsing the grounding character of the liturgy as the source of meaning in theology. It examines de Lubac's late claim that Corpus Mysticum was ‘a naïve text’ and asks what kinds of naïvety are indicated in this statement.

Aquinas holds that after death, the human soul can no longer change its basic orientation either toward God or away from him. He takes this to be knowable not only from divine revelation but by purely philosophical reasoning. The heart of his position is that the basic orientation of an angelic will is fixed immediately after its creation, and that the human soul after death is relevantly like an angel. This article expounds and defends Aquinas's position, paying special attention to the action theory underlying it.

The article argues that philosophers of religion and theologians should pay less attention to the so-called ‘classical attributes’ of God and more attention to the neglected, but venerable, tradition of the divine names. Grounded in Scripture, these reflections are predicated on the doctrine of Creation, and what it is for human beings as creatures to speak of their Creator. The article demonstrates that, even the so-called ‘classical attributes’, when placed in the divine names tradition, are far from being mere ‘natural theology’ but Christological to the core and lead us, through intellect, into the mysteries of awe and prayer.

‘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.

The term ‘solidarity’ is in danger of developing into a clich?. It has been employed so often as a kind of ‘compassion football’ between a guilt-ridden (for some) oppressor ‘First’ World and an indignant (for some) oppressed ‘Third’ that its significance has become opaque. That lack of precision undermines its value for clarifying the relevant Christian response to the divisions between North and South, powerful and powerless, in our world. Solidarity shows us a way which eschews both a patronising attitude and a sense of guilt on the part of the North, and a feeling of being alone in the struggle on the part of the South. Solidarity empowers both and leads to a deeper understanding of what Jon Sobrino, recalling St Paul’s injunction, calls ‘bearing with one another in faith’.

In this article I wish to explore the theological roots of solidarity in an attempt to recapture the flavour of its deeper meaning in a belief that solidarity is a key concept for those who ‘hunger and thirst for what is right’ (Mt 5:6). I follow Albert Nolan’s argument that its roots are found in the Old Testament, but that it broadens its scope when Jesus begins his mission. The new theology of neighbour then becomes the model of solidarity for later thinkers, theologians and activists (‘militantes’ to the Latin Americans) in both the Third World and the West, in their struggle to live an authentically human, and therefore authentically Christian life. Lying at the core of solidarity is co-responsibility for the planet, and the humanisation of life for every being on it, by ridding the world of the structures of widespread injustice and deep-seated division which disfigure the created oneness of humanity.

This article aims at exploring some recent developments in Catholic Church's recent relationship with religious others. It does so by exploring the theological‐anthropological sources behind Vatican II and some subsequent Papal teachings concerning the Church's mission of dialogue. Specifically, it discusses the notion of common origin, destiny and common humanity as sources for praxis‐oriented and faith‐based initiatives in a Christian‐Muslim dialogue. This article is divided into three sub‐sections. First, it considers the Catholic Church's renewed dialogue with non‐Christian believers, with particular focus on the theological‐anthropological turn in recent Church teaching. Second, it examines the prospects and challenges of Christian‐Muslim dialogue based on belief in God the creator and divine revelation, and human beings' response to divine manifestations in history. Finally, it considers some faith‐based humanistic and dialogic initiatives that emerge from the Christian‐Muslim confession of one creator God. The paper suggests that a theology of dialogue that understands the world and human beings as the realm of encounter, uncovering and necessitating the divine and the Church's (salvific) activity in human history, can foster faith‐based humanistic and dialogic initiatives between Christians and Muslims.

In the autumn of 1993, I found myself called upon to give the concluding address to a conference in Stockholm—jointly sponsored by the Royal Dramatic Theatre of Sweden, the Royal Institute of Technology, and the Swedish Center for Working Life—entitled: “Skill and Technology: on Diderot, Education and the Third Culture”. One focus of the conference was Diderot’s Dialogue, Rameau’s Nephew, my appreciation of which has, I hope, been properly enhanced as a result of having sat through not only a dramatisation of it in German but also an operatic version, by a Finnish composer, with a Swedish libretto.

Nobody knows for sure whether or not Denis Diderot had a conversation with Jean-Francois Rameau, nephew of the composer, in the Café de la Régence in Paris, in April 1761. Nor does it matter. Diderot certainly wrote the first draft of the Dialogue in that year, reworking it in 1773, 1778 and 1782, the year before he died. The history of this short text (less than seventy pages in the Flammarion edition) is so extraordinary that one almost suspects Diderot himself of having somehow arranged it.

Although it has been described as “the very centre of his writing” and has provoked a still burgeoning library of commentary and interpretation, the Dialogue was never published or referred to by Diderot in his lifetime, and it first saw the light of day in a German translation, done by an admiring Goethe from a French manuscript which he had been lent by Schiller, who seems to have obtained it from a German officer in St Petersburg. Goethe’s translation appeared in 1805.

That there are social, political and economic problems in India is a fact that needs no proof. The task of the believer in this situation can be spoken of in line with the general understanding of revelation which encourages the Christian to act like Christ, who gave himself unto death; to act like the apostles who spent themselves for their brethren, because our fellow men are members of Christ and in order that the peace willed by Christ may reign in this world. Yet such a description of the task of the Christian leaves his role as regards the structures of human society relatively undefined.

In India today, there is the effort to analyse the structures themselves and establish Christian positions in dealing with them, so as to re-construct a social order in which sin as a structuring element is less present.

The present article seeks to present the general lines of the approach followed by Indian theologians and then try to offer, for the information and comment of Western theologians, certain approaches by which the theology of liberation as formulated for and in India could have an impact in regard to other approaches to the theology of liberation.

Even the most systematic considerations in the matter of the theology of liberation are formulated as “hypotheses”. The present article seeks to present some of the present approaches to the theology of liberation in India. Admittedly, it is a difficult task to synthesize the perspectives of the analyses of Indian society already made and the “projects” suggested due to the “particularity” of the viewpoint of each author. But it is necessary to make some attempt in order to set our comments in perspective.

In response to accusations leveled against the integrity of confirmation as a distinct sacrament, the author searches magisterial documents for a theology of confirmation. Two main theological explanations of the sacrament are explored: the ecclesial significance of the bishop's office as the original minister of confirmation; and the grace of the sacrament – that is, the gifts and Gift of the Holy Spirit. This grace is characterized as both defensive and offensive, from the perspective of defending the faith of the individual and the Church, and sharing in Christ's mission to evangelize the world. In a final section, the author addresses several popular but mistaken or one-sided approaches to explaining confirmation that have had negative pastoral consequences in recent decades.

Some three years ago I was asked to write an introduction to a new journal of radical catholic opinion. I sent along, to what proved to be Slant, what seemed to me at the time a slightly rash note of welcome, and was much impressed, when the first number appeared, to find that I had been understood as cautious, suspicious, and even vaguely minatory. Such ambivalences will doubtless recur. The Slant position, if we are to believe Catholics and the Left, is now well established. It has already been honoured by an attack in the Spectator, and I suppose it is just another mark of its success that it must now face the rigour of its friends.

The Slant manifesto, which is what Catholics and the Left amounts to, is very uneven: not so much in quality as in level. Its first part, Christians against Capitalism, by Adrian Cunningham and Terry Eagleton,is a vigorous piece of pamphleteering, of a properly manifest kind. I hope I do not wrong it when I say that it seems to me the best short statement that I have read of the general position of the New Left. Its Christian interpretation of community, which is inevitably its starting point, is unforced and organic, and it gains in specificity by being able to talk frankly (as in other traditions is not always possible) about loving relationships as the heart of community. At the same time it is powerful in negative criticism: the chapter on Liberalism is especially astringent and wholly convincing.

The Homecoming is, in one sense, a play about two women, one absent from the home, the dead wife and mother, Jessie, and the wife of the son, Teddy, who comes into the house and takes Jessie’s place, but in taking that place converts it into new functions.

The house is quite clearly associated with the absent wife and mother, the home’s centre, because of its very unhomely qualities. Where there had once been a ‘living-room’ with enclosing walls to make it both warm and safe, there now is an open back wall (‘The back wall, which contained the door, has been removed’). This is quite positively identified for us with the missing woman by her son, Teddy, when he and his wife are first in the room:

As so often in Pinter, suggestions build up behind the formal language, and we can think of the house as having tried to get rid of Jessie, or as having been opened up to more light and more air. But the domestic arrangements have now altered so that Lenny has what he calls ‘a kind of study, workroom cum bedroom’ (p 25) downstairs next to the ‘living room’, much as he might have a room in a large house which had been turned into bed-sitter accommodation.

Englishmen curious about the New Morality, and fatigued by the well-known but amateurishly incompetent exposition it has suffered from certain domestic divines, are benefited by the publication here of Joseph Fletcher’s Situation Ethics (SCM: 1966; 25s). The author is professor of social ethics at the Episcopalian seminary in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and has been active in ethical debate since the days when the Old Morality was the Newest thing around.

Dr Fletcher, if I understand him correctly, repudiates the Old Morality because it is legalistic. It takes the form of a code, a list of commandments which assign an invariable moral value to certain acts. The circumstances attending these acts may, it is granted, slightly modify their morality. But the ultimate and over-riding source of good and evil is the very nature of the acts. Against such a view Fletcher urges that no action is good or evil in itself. It cannot be judged in isolation from its meaningful and meaning-giving context of circumstances. The morality of any action is correlative to the love it expresses. Admittedly there are many deeds which are usually sinful (e.g., abortion, lying, arson, extramarital intercourse). This is not because they are intrinsically evil acts, but because they most often embody selfishness, exploitation of one’s neighbour, and irresponsibility. In certain extraordinary circumstances these actions might so bespeak commitment and caring and sincerity that, viewed in their contextual totality, they would be adjudged good and virtuous. Since morality is not intrinsic to acts, we can never resort to inflexible ethical laws or norms.

What binds together the three steps or stages in Lonergan’s theory of knowledge — experience, understanding, judging - and makes them into one dynamic activity, is the pressure in the inquirer to discover the truth, what Lonergan has called ‘the eros of the mind’, the free, unrestricted desire to know. Knowing is a conscious, intending activity and what is intended is the truth. It is this intention to know, this psychic drive or thrust and not sensory extroversion to what is presumed (as in Hume) to be ‘already out there now’ that is the overarching criterion of truth. What is known is related immediately to this self-transcending nisus; understanding and judgment are simply answers to the questions generated by the desire to know. Put another way, the questions leading to understanding and judgment are an unfolding of this basic intentionality. The desire to know is something that arises spontaneously and irresistibly in human beings and is present in the reader who is attending to what is being said in this article, striving to understand it and asking if this understanding is true. But while this striving for the truth is the overarching criterion of objectivity, each level of cognition has its own peculiar function to perform and so its own criterion of objectivity; or we might say that the quest for objective knowledge is manifested in different ways at the different stages of knowing.

What is peculiar to the data of experience is their givenness — they are there — and hence the criterion of objectivity at the level of seeing, hearing etc, is to see or hear what is there and not to see or hear what is not there. At the level of sensation the subject must be submissive to the givenness of the data (and not, for example, fabricate his own evidence or grounds).

There is a danger in separating out just a small portion of Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae for a detailed study while neglecting the larger framework from which this section comes. Yet students of Aquinas have failed to recognize the import of Thomas’ discussion of ends, both final and proximate, and how these are related to his later discussion of acquired and infused moral virtue and their relation to charity and prudence in the Prima Secundae of his Summa. In asserting that charity is necessary for all true virtue, the roles of the Church, the state, their members and even the place and role of grace and nature are confused. A proper understanding of the distinction between acquired natural moral virtue and infused moral virtue and their distinct ends assists in a more complete understanding of the position and responsibilities of each of these in building up a more just earthly society and the ultimate attainment of eternal beatitude.

“He’s way into the merchandising. It makes me crazy because you can’t escape it.” This is the way the mother of a four-year-old described herself faced with 1997’s blitzkrieg of product tie-ins associated with Disney’s movie Hercules. The same syndicated newspaper article from which the above quote is taken introduces a selection of this merchandise (which includes such must-haves as glow-in-the-dark Hercules shorts and an official Hercules silver coin) with the following: “OK, maybe you can’t afford to shower your offspring with all 7,000 official ‘Hercules’ tie-in products. But here’s a sample of the superhero merchandise that your kid’s best friend soon will be bringing to show and tell. Not that you should feel guilty, of course...”

Wink wink, ha ha. Surely the woman who claims Hercules is inescapable is indulging in hyperbole, as am I when I tell my students that Disney merchandising is evidence that we do not live in a free country. Nevertheless, one can observe that the woman quoted above is not alone in feeling coerced by Disney magic. I was struck, for example, by the reaction of the press last year to the boycott of Disney launched by the Southern Baptist Convention. One article begins with a long list of Disney owned networks, publishers, sports franchises, music producers, etc., capped by the categorical statement from a Smith Barney analyst, “Disney blankets our culture, and it’s impossible to avoid.” Even many of the Baptists interviewed acknowledged that they felt compelled to continue frequenting many of the heads of the Disney hydra.

The problem of the relations of Christianity to History has been very much complicated and, I think, obscured by the influence of nineteenth-century philosophy. Almost all the great idealist philosophers of that century, like Fichte and Schelhng and Hegel, constructed elaborate philosophies of history which had a very considerable influence on the historians, especially in Germany, and on the theologians also. All these systems were inspired or coloured by Christian ideas and they were consequently eagerly accepted by Christian theologians for apologetic purposes. And thus there arose an alliance between idealist philosophy and German theology which became characteristic of the Liberal Protestant movement and dominated religious thought both on the continent and in this country during the later nineteenth century.

Today the situation is entirely changed. Both philosophic idealism and liberal Protestantism have been widely discredited and have been replaced by logical positivism and by the dialectic theology of the Barthians. The result is that the idea of a Christian philosophy of history has also suffered from the reaction against philosophic idealism. It is difficult to distinguish the authentic and original element in the Christian view of history from the philosophic accretions and interpretations of the last century and a half, so that you will find modem representatives of orthodox Christianity like Mr C. S. Lewis questioning the possibility of a Christian interpretation of history, and declaring that the supposed connection between Christianity and Historicism is largely an illusion.