The medieval, contemplative tradition for the most part ended with the great 16th century Spanish mystics. The modern period of the 17th and 18th centuries was an age of reason that sought to eliminate mystery. Modern theology kept in step with the rational nature of the period and the contemplative tradition was lost to the modern age. Thomas Merton reintroduced a contemplative theology to the 20th century, but contemplative practices are much more popular today than they were in the mid-twentieth century when Merton was writing. This paper examines what it is about our present 21st century and the end of modernity that is so conducive to the popularity of contemplative prayer, and so conducive to bringing us to a deeper and richer understanding of the Gospel.

This article maps a selection of Pope Francis’ social teaching, which supports respect for diversity. It undertakes this task with the aid of a green theo‐ecoethical lens. That hermeneutical lens is first introduced to the reader via an explanation of its constituent parts. It is then employed to help situate respect for diversity as a Christian ethical principle. With those foundations in place subsequent sections employ the lens to colligate Francis’ teachings which, dialogically, both inform and come into focus through a green theo‐ecoethical perspective concerned with respect for diversity. Here, three sections unfold the Pope’s treatment of themes relevant to respect for diversity in a green theo‐ecoethical light. Specifically, these sections focus on contributions emerging from (1) Francis’ public ministry in general, (2) his first substantive piece of Catholic Social Teaching, Evangelii Gaudium, and (3) perhaps the most anticipated papal encyclical of all time, Laudato Si’. The article's conclusion helps situate the contextual cogency of insights emerging from this multi‐dimensional mapping for what Francis names as our common home, a planet which encompasses an Earth community in a dire need of increased levels of socio‐ecological flourishing.

Arthur Peacocke, a biochemist turned theologian, accepted Christ's personal resurrection but not his bodily resurrection from the grave. He argued from Paul's silence about the discovery of the empty tomb, from Christ's sharing fully in our human condition, and from the irreversible processes of nature. John Polkinghorne, a physicist turned theologian, has maintained that Paul's view of resurrection implies an empty tomb, that Christ's resurrection from the grave has revealed the transformed destiny of matter, and that, for good reasons, God can suspend and change the laws of nature. In Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's vision of an evolving world, Christ's resurrection from the grave released a new force of love and revealed the spiritual destiny of matter. With Polkinghorne he shared a hope for the transformation of the universe, a process initiated by the glorious raising of Jesus’ crucified body.

Pope St Pius X's Pascendi dominici gregis, denouncing modernism as ‘the synthesis of all heresies’, was promulgated in September 1907. The (false) suspicion that its intended target was Cardinal Newman – a suggestion promoted by George Tyrrell, among others – sparked a protracted controversy in the British secular and religious press, with modernists and anti-modernists both fighting to claim Newman. After narrating the early skirmishes of this debate, this paper explores the controversy in light of two main themes: popular views regarding Newman's standing and esteem in the eyes of the curia and magisterium; and his central, symbolic role in the construction of English Catholicism. Both, I argue, fanned the flames engulfing the letters pages of the Times. Particular attention is also given to the key (and perhaps surprising) role of another great English Cardinal in defending Blessed John Henry: St Pius’‘uncompromising ultramontane’ Secretary of State, Rafael Merry del Val.

I offer a brief outline of The Beauty of the Infinite, pointing up its similarities with and differences from John Milbank's Theology and Social Theory (1990), and the violence of its rhetoric. I then take issue with Hart's reading of Nicholas Lash on the death and resurrection of Christ. I argue that not only is Lash closer to Hart than Hart allows, but that Lash recognizes the necessarily unfinished nature of Christian story telling. Hart is led by his rhetoric of out‐narration to affirm an unsustainable completeness that elides the terrors of suffering and death, the very fault for which Hart chides Lash. Having noted Hart's misdirection I conclude with an appreciation of his aesthetics.

Suppose a fairy godmother were to appear and offer you three wishes — not, as in the folk tales, for yourself, but for the future of the world or even just for the future of the country. My guess is that the instant answers from almost everyone would start with No. No more hunger; no more wars;no terrorism-, no nuclear weapons; no more unemployment. But suppose the fairy godmother were to reply, rather acidly, that she was in the business of granting positive wishes, not negative ones, and that you must say what /ou actually wanted to happen, how easy would it be to formulate what you wanted in the few brief moments before, in exasperation, she vanished into the blue?

There would be two kinds of difficulty in stating three wishes. The first kind would be the technical problem of finding positive answers to what is wrong: for example, unemployment is obviously appalling and should be replaced by full employment, but even if a wave of the wand would achieve this, what exactly would “full employment” be? Would it be a situation recognisably better than the present one, with far more people having jobs but with a considerable number still unwillingly out of work, or doing unpleasant and badly-paid jobs, or having to work through every weekend in order to make enough to keep the family going? A world in which nuclear weapons had, by magic, been made impossible to produce, would still be a world manufacturing cluster bombs, napalm, bacteriological weapons and expanding bullets. But the challenge of the fairy godmother would touch a deeper problem than these.

Though many writers have studied the Cluniac achievement from the ecclesiastical, the economic and even the political point of view, none of the standard books on the history of spirituality seems concerned to trace the growth of Cluniac spirituality. Indeed, it seems taken for granted on all sides that Cluny has no spirituality worth mentioning. An elaborate ceremonial, a devotion to the splendours of the Liturgy, accompanied by an easy asceticism, this is the impression that most people have received of it: an impression based solely on a few isolated facts culled from the third century of Cluny’s existence. It may be useful, therefore, to outline a few of the principal ideas that dominated Cluny’s spirituality during the course of its history from its foundation to the time of Peter the Venerable.

When Berno left the Abbey of Baume in A.D. 910 to accept part of the estate of the Duke of Aquitaine for his foundation at Cluny, monastic life was at a low ebb. For sixty years the Normans had ravaged a country already torn by internecine war. Towns and villages had been depopulated, monasteries had been sacked and destroyed, and the few refugees who had settled in ruinous buildings to restore a semblance of monastic life were undistinguished both for religion and discipline. Berno little realised the magnitude of his undertaking, for his own ambitions were surprisingly modest. He simply aimed at establishing the pure Benedictine tradition, and envisaged nothing more exalted than the literal fulfilment of the Rule.

It was Wittgenstein who said that in order to ‘combat’ a point of view, one first has to establish whether that point of view is within or without one’s own framework. That is to say, one has to establish whether the ‘combat’ is to be a dispute within a framework or between frameworks. For Wittgenstein, that was of the utmost importance if one was to avoid falling into confusion. This is because whereas disputes within a framework proceed by means of reasoned arguments which are held fast and validated by that common surrounding framework, disputes between frameworks do not proceed within a common milieu, and so the common validity of reasoned arguments subsides. Thus, a dispute between frameworks has to proceed by means of quite different methods, that is, methods of persuasion and charm.

This insight has a particular significance when one considers some of the developments that have been taking place in theology in recent years. For the last three centuries or so, theological discourse was conducted within a framework that was, at once, both ‘theological’ and ‘scientific.’ As Amos Funkenstein has argued, it was a framework ‘in which theological concerns were expressed in terms of secular knowledge, and scientific concerns were expressed in theological terms. Theology and other sciences became almost one.’ Virtually all theological disputes in those centuries were located within that framework, and consequently, they were conducted by means of reasoned arguments.

Père Daniélou has expressed in a recent book his opinion that the theology of the Holy Ghost, hitherto so little developed in the Church, will receive definitive form only when it has been formulated in the thought of India: that this indeed is the providential vocation of Indian thought, just as that of Greek thought has been to express the theology of the Incarnation.

This is certainly looking somewhat far ahead, but it will appear extravagant only to those who are wedded to a narrowly Western point of view. Such a point of view becomes ever less tenable in view of the rapid decline of Western civilisation in our day, and there is no respectable authority for persisting in it.

Human systems of thought, no less than the political systems described by Plato, have each their germs of decay which will eventually work themselves out unless neutralised by the influence of another system. While making due allowance for the influence of divine providence in the Christian thought of the West, we must not forget that grace worked by adapting and combining diverse natural elements, and has in fact so worked in producing the Catholic synthesis that we know, built up as it is with stones from Jerusalem, Athens, Antioch, Alexandria, Rome and many other places.

A thousand years of schism were bound to make our synthesis somewhat lopsided in a Westerly direction. The Latin scholastic element has been allowed to grow somewhat disproportionately and has not been slow in manifesting its peculiar danger: a too rigid conceptualism, tending towards rationalism and legalism.

Let us begin with dissolving inflated statements on the indissolubility of marriage which do nothing but distort the issue: statements such as marriage is indissoluble, or marriage between Christians is indissoluble, or marriage is indissoluble because it is a sacrament. In point of fact, the Church considers marriage to be generally dissoluble: she claims the power to dissolve marriages between unbaptised spouses and does avail herself of that power when she sees fit to do so. Since by far the majority of spouses that live on our planet are not baptised, the initial proposition must be reworded as follows: in the Church’s view, marriage is dissoluble, with the proviso that in some cases it is not.

What are those cases which are exceptions to the rule? Marriages between baptised spouses—or, to use the short-cut formula, marriages between Christians? The trouble is that the Church also claims the power to dissolve such marriages and actually goes on to break some, as when she grants a dissolution of the bond to validly married Christian spouses who have failed to ‘consummate’ their marriage.

What, then, about relating indissolubility to the reception of the Sacrament of Matrimony? Doesn’t everybody know that if you are baptised and validly married in the Church, your marriage is ipso facto a sacrament and indissoluble by divine law. . . ? Beware, however, of bringing God into the picture before the Church is out of it: for your marriage is a sacrament even though you may have chosen not to consummate it, yet the Church would have no qualms of conscience in regarding you a free man (or a free woman) if you wished, say, to join a religious order and actually made your solemn profession.

It was my original intention to write this article about black theology in South Africa, where I first encountered the movement. But two things have led me to form the opinion that black theology is of crucial importance to Christianity all over the world, and not just in South Africa, or in the United States, where the idea was born. One has been my reading of two books by the black American theologian James H. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power, and A Black Theology of Liberation ; and the other has been my introduction, very recent and superficial though it is, to the race question, and kindred political questions, in Great Britain. So I will, after all, devote this article to the subject of black theology as such, and chiefly in the form of a review of Cone’s two books. But I will lead into this subject by way of black theology in South Africa.

In writing this article I incur the risk of bringing down on my head the hostility and scorn of black theologians, or quite simply of blacks. As a white man I have no business to poke my long Caucasian nose in. Cone is quite scathing in BTL (p. 194) on two white liberals who presumed to write on the black power movement; and on the same page he writes: ‘To whites who want to know what they can do (a favourite question of oppressors) black theology says, “Keep your damned mouth closed, and let us black people get our thing together.” ‘ Still, just as in the dominant white ethos of today, or at least of a generation ago, it was possible for a black man to be a good nigger, and sometimes even earn the supreme accolade of being told that he was a true white man, in spite of his skin (You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din), so in the black ethos of the dominated which we are going to be looking at, it is possible for a white man to be a good honky.