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.

One of the areas on which Fergus Kerr has kept a wise eye and to which he has made valued contributions over many years is moral philosophy. In fact he had the task of teaching ‘moral theology’ in the early years of his career but quickly moved on. He was quite relieved to do so, he told me once, not least because he found Shakespeare more relevant to morality than the geography of the fallopian tubes. Leaving behind moral theology in that sense did not mean his leaving behind a concern with moral questions. On the contrary, he has maintained great interest in developments in fundamental moral theory and in the centrality of morality for all theology.

In this he is faithful to Aquinas who, as Leonard Boyle has argued, envisaged Summa Theologiae as a work in which the moral is central. If, as Kerr himself has been arguing recently, beatitudo is a key to the unity of the Summa, then this is further support for what Boyle argued on historical and palaeographical grounds. This is not to claim that what Aquinas had in mind was anything like what moral theology came to describe later on, when a strict distinction and even separation of dogma and moral came to prevail especially in seminary training. Aquinas belongs to an earlier world, from which contemporary moral philosophers continue to learn, in which these later distinctions did not apply.

For several decades the official teaching office of the Roman Catholic Church has consistently invoked the notion of religious experience as a category for interrelgious dialogue. Moreover, the Church has appealed to the so-called dialogue of religious experience as a means of encouraging its members to constructively engage with persons who are committed to ‘other’ religious traditions. This essay seeks to develop a systematic understanding of religious experience as well as the dialogue associated with it. Subsequent to summarizing the recent magisterial teaching on the dialogue of religious experience, the essay continues by probing the meaning of religious experience as such, particularly with the assistance of the theological insights of Bernard Lonergan and Louis Roy. The essay concludes by acknowledging some of the limitations that persist in connection with the dialogue of religious experience, namely, those that inevitably arise when considering the particularity of the incarnation and the necessity of the Church for salvation.

Just over a hundred years ago, the case of Governor Eyre split English society into fiercely opposing factions: one led by Carlyle and Ruskin included Dickens and Tennyson; in the other J. S. Mill was supported by Darwin and Huxley.

The slave-based prosperity of Jamaica in the eighteenth-century had given place by the early 1860s to an economic decline, the white sugar-planters easily outdistanced by foreign competitors, the negroes now mostly working their own land, but discontented and seeking more. Droughts, disease and the American Civil War had brought the latter’s discontent to a head. The national Assembly was unrepresentative, venal and inefficient. In this delicate situation the task of ruling as Governor was one which called for very exceptional qualities. To this assignment Edward John Eyre was appointed in 1862; Eyre had been an emigrant and explorer in Australia, where he had done much to protect the aborigines. He had been seven years Lieutenant-Governor of New Zealand, six years Lieutenant- Governor of St Vincent, and then Governor of the Leeward Islands. Able and humane, Eyre was obstinate and tactless, and he soon became unpopular in Jamaica.

On 9th October, 1865, a rebellion broke out at Morant Bay, led by a negro demagogue called Bogle. His men killed the German custos and about twenty others, mostly Volunteers, wounding thirty-odd as well. In the next few days sporadic outbreaks took place in neighbouring parishes. Eyre promptly declared martial law in the troubled district, and sent troops there. They found the rebels dispersed or hidden, and there was no organized resistance.

Right intention is but one of the requirements that must be met for a war to be just, according to the Just War tradition. To treat it in isolation, as a basis for analysing the motives of the multi-national coalition which confronted Iraq in the Gulf war, requires isolating and dissecting certain elements of a complex whole, which may distort more than it reveals. That said, the exercise does provide a way of exploring one aspect of the war which was, and remains, the subject of speculation in the Middle East, if not elsewhere.

Both before and during the Gulf war there was much discussion, some of it covered in the Western media, on the war aims of the coalition. Speculation focused on the possibility that the members of the coalition had certain objectives in addition to those publicly professed by the various governments concerned. Any evaluation of the intentions of the coalition members must thus take into account not only what they said their aims were, but also the objectives implied by the strategy they adopted and the terms on which they were prepared to end hostilities. Actions, presumably, reveal as much as words.

Here the emphasis will be on defining the war aims of the coalition, both implicit and explicit, short and long term, so that they may be examined in the light of the requirement, of the Just War tradition, that the intentions of the combatants be just. As a reference point, some assumptions about the meaning of ‘right intention’ will be offered at the outset.

Bertrand Russell, by any reckoning, must count as a figure of central importance in British intellectual history. Many of his books continue to be reprinted, in cheap paperback editions, up to sixty years since he first brought them out. He is standard fare for first- year philosophy students and some of his essays are classical points of reference in current debates in the analytical tradition. In 1915 he was brought to Pulborough by Lady Ottoline Morrell to meet D H Lawrence. By that time Russell (1872 - 1970) was aged forty- three and had already achieved his most original and influential contributions to philosophy. Lawrence (1885 - 1930) was thirty, with Sons and Lovers published (Duckworth, 1913), and The Rainbow about to be so. Their common interest lay in opposition to the War — in which, to place the other main characters in this essay, F R Leavis (then aged twenty) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (aged twenty-six) were both volunteers, Leavis as a stretcher-bearer in Flanders, Wittgenstein as an officer in the Austrian army.

The figures of course are formidable. And the European enquirer can be mesmerized by the catalogue of Catholic achievement in the United States: a population now of forty-five million, with 55,000 priests, 170,000 religious sisters (of whom nearly 100,000 teach in schools), 267 universities and colleges with more than 300,000 students, 10,000 elementary schools with over four million pupils, 850 hospitals of every sort in which more than fourteen million patients were treated in 1960. In the same year nearly 132,000 converts were received into the Church.

The statistics matter, if only because they are the staring facts that declare the vitality of the Church in the only way it can be externally measured. They indicate something too, of the astounding generosity of American Catholics, who, with no help from public funds, have built up a system of churches and schools unparalleled in the Church’s history. But the Church is not merely a corporation to be surveyed in terms of its efficiency or of the successful image it presents to the world. It is easy for the visitor from an older and more casual society to wonder a little at the signs of a high-powered organization—the discreet hum of the electric typewriters in the carpeted rooms of the chancery offices, the multitude of monsignori bearing their hide brief-cases, the jet black Chryslers—and to see in it all the ecclesiastical equivalent of the sort of business set-up commended by Fortune magazine.

English theology is notoriously ‘lop-sided’. In the historical disciplines, it has an excellent record of intelligent and discriminating scholarship. But, when attention shifts from what was once said and done in the name of Christianity to what might be said or done today, matters are either handed over to the philosopher (whose admirable and indispensable preoccupation with formal and linguistic considerations is no guarantee of competence to perform this task) or else are tackled at a level which, according to the standards operative in cognate ‘secular’ disciplines—from aesthetics and literary criticism to social and political theory—is so strikingly amateurish as to render it hardly surprising that theology plays little part in the conversation of the culture. In this naughty world, Professor Sykes has performed an excellent deed. The Identity of Christianity is a learned, vigorous and original reconstruction of some perennial problems: problems which found particular focus, in the nineteenth century, in discussion of the ‘essence’ of Christianity.

Sykes has shifted the theme from ‘essence’ to ‘identity’ partly to counter the widespread but unwarranted suspicion that an ‘enquiry into what makes Christianity Christianity’ (p.3) is likely to be reductionist in character, and partly because his discovery of the importance of Newman’s work for the ‘elucidation of what was at stake’ helped him to see how mistaken was the equally widespread view that the issues under consideration are of central moment only to Protestant Christians.

It has often been remarked that in the 1920s and 1930s some British Catholics sympathized with Fascism; but the collocation of ‘Catholic’ and ‘Fascism’ is alarming, the more so when it is realized that the Catholics in question were the writers, the intellectuals: civilized, educated, sophisticated and otherwise likable and mostly well- intentioned people, who expressed varying measures of attraction to what we now know to be the politics of megalomania, elitism, frustration, prejudice, deceit and brutality. How could cultured Catholics be even partially attracted to Fascism: what did they see to admire in it, and what were the conditions which permitted and provoked them to find good in it?

The present subject of ‘Catholic pro-Fascism’ is a minefield, with some of the mines laid by rightist Catholics, who, believing it to be damaging to the Catholic Church, do not wish the subject to be discussed by other than apologeticists. One such mine is to say that the word ‘Fascist’ cannot be used, either because it is a mere term of abuse, or because its meaning is so variable as to be worthless, or because it is generally confused with Nazism; so to speak the words ‘Catholic’ and ‘Fascist’ in the same breath is to risk unjustifiably tainting the memory of good people. But the memory of such people can be clarified only by considering exactly what they were saying, and why.

In an admirable artide on the Spanish situation by the Dominican Father H. Munoz these words occur: ‘What Spain needed was an intelligent organizer who could coordinate all the disjointed elements into a united front against the destructive forces of irreligion and anarchy.’ On reading this it is impossible not to reflect that this is an echo of what many English Catholics have been saying about their own country for a long time.

The present position of Catholics in England is not so very far removed from that of Catholics in Spain just before the revolution. Indifference and lack of organization sold the pass and allowed the forces of an anti-religious Socialism to seize power. And not till the Catholics of Spain found their diurches pillaged, convents burned, schools secularized, religious orders expelled and a sheaf of anti-Catholic laws on the statute book did they wake up to the realities of the situation and organize themselves into a force which now promises to be the salvation of Spain.

In England, a generation of ever-increasing indifference in matters of faith and morals has enabled the anti-God propaganda of Moscow to make tremendous progress. The traditional Conservative and Protestant party, product of the Reformation, exists in a fog. In matters of faith and morals they simply do not know where they stand, having neither standards nor guidance. And from not knowing to not caring is but a short step.

Liberalism no longer counts. The more extreme Liberals have gone over to Labour. A few have thrown in their lot with the Conservatives. The rest plough a lonely furrow in the wilderness.

Lindbeck's difficulties with Lonergan's account of religion stem from his radical methodological option in which he draws on Wittgenstein. I revisit ‘the dialectic of methods,’ by examining children's mistakes. I use Lonergan's distinction between ordinary and originary meaningfulness to argue that in Wittgenstein's account of rule‐following such mistakes highlight the publicity of norms in ordinary meaningfulness, but I show how alternatives can be cited in which originary meaningfulness is not obscured. I explain the core of Lonergan's foundational methodology and show how for Lonergan the desire to understand is an exigence which, as retorsion indicates, is difficult to deny. I conclude that in his account of religion Lonergan has an answer to a question posed by Wittgenstein on the purpose of thinking.

This paper examines Origen's views of “Adam” and considers whether aspects of Origen's views might prove helpful in contemporary debates about Adam and original sin. The question “who was Adam” presents difficult issues for Christian theology. In response to these concerns, many contemporary theologians suggest that “Eastern” traditions, which are less connected to the “Western”/Augustinian view of original sin, can more easily manage these tensions. These gestures towards “Eastern” thought are helpful in the sense that they do highlight the “mythic” dimensions of the Biblical creation narratives and the irreducibly social construction of human identity. They tend, however, towards broad generalizations that often do not account for the more nuanced and complex philosophical matrix that informed many of the Eastern Church Fathers as they thought about creation, humanity, and the Fall. In this regard, Origen is an interesting figure to study because of the historic anathemas against his supposedly aberrant neo‐Platonic views about the pre‐existence of souls. Origen did indeed draw heavily on Platonism, but his views about Adam and the Fall were far more subtle than is often supposed. Elements of Origen's views could be useful to a contemporary Christian theology of Adam and original sin.

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.