When a summer visitor goes to Saint-Malo, he sees the obvious; the ancient town peering over her encircling walls, the narrow streets and tall old houses, the great church with its single soaring steeple and the arrogant castle of the Duchess Anne: very interesting if he cares for such things and likes to inquire into their history, very picturesque if he prefers to take them only at their scenic value. And in most cases he is probably content so to regard them, or to read of them in the common or garden guide-book. But for those who care to look a little deeper, Saint-Malo has other and more intimate tales to tell—tales that are sometimes based on history and sometimes have grown out of tradition, and oftenest of all belong to both. And these tales have left shadows behind them—shadows that like ghosts still linger about her shores as in her houses, and if unseen are at least unforgotten to-day. Assuredly, on both sides of her, seaward and river-ward, there are places that have every right to be remembered.

On the Sillon, the roadway that links Saint-Malo to the mainland, there stands opposite the casino, a cross of granite. I was not able to discover its precise date, but it is said to be very old; it is known locally as the ‘Stone-Cross’ and a story is told of its origin for which there seems to be little reliable authority. Be that as it may, it serves now to mark a spot on the beach above which it stands that is a place of very notable memories; there is nothing else now left to record them—and yet these memories are actual history, and not only tradition.

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.

The fate of the Encyclical Letter “In the Utmost Anxiety,” addressed to the German hierarchy, is in itself sufficient to show the state of affairs in the Third Reich. It was not allowed to be published either in any secular newspaper or in any purely religious paper. The printers who dared to print the Encyclical for the bishops’ official publication were closed down by the police for the time being and the official papers confiscated. All that was publicly known of the Encyclical was a short notice of a severe protest to the Vatican in respect of it. Following this, the letter was rejected by the Nazi leaders, notably by Adolf Hitler himself who on May 1st made some biting references to critics of the Nazis and allusions to the Pope's Encyclical. In reference to the Churches he said: “So long as they attend to their own affairs the State will not intervene. But if they go against us with sermons and encyclicals and encroach on the business of the State, we shall call them to order and we shall force them back into their proper work of caring for the religious needs of the people.”

The very attempt to suppress the Encyclical proves how right the Holy Father was to condemn therein the eluding and violation of the “Reichskonkordat,” for the later, established in 1933, distinctly maintained the right of free publication of pastoral letters and encyclicals.

Peru has a Left-wing daily paper called El Diario de Marka. On the day after Pope John Paul issued his encyclical Laborem Exercens the paper carried a cartoon covering most of its front page which summed up its view of the significance of the encyclical for the Peruvian situation. It showed a determined looking Pope John Paul carrying a banner which read: “Free Trade Unions, Right to Strike, Co-Ownership of the Means of Production and Just Remuneration, Social Justice”. He was bearing down on a rather smug President Belaunde who stood with a banner behind his back saying “Anti-Strike Decree” and thinking “Terrorist”.

The fact that such a cartoon would even appear in a Left-wing paper, let alone cover most of its front page, indicates the importance of the popular church for the Peruvian Left. This was further underlined by the amount of space and the sympathetic coverage the paper gave the encyclical in marked contrast to that given by the bourgeois press. Nor is this simply a recognition of the large number of Christians who are trade union and political militants. Perhaps more important is the new image this has given the church and the consequent expectation that a papal statement on social justice would be a broadly Left-wing document.

Occasions such as this serve to show just how significant is the popular church, both politically and ecclesiologically. Not only is it new to find large sectors of the church being the natural allies of political progressives but it is even more novel to find that this alliance has caused secular progressives to re-evaluate the meaning of Christianity itself and to come to expect that even some of its more conservative leaders must themselves be progressive if they choose to criticise society from a Christian standpoint.

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.

The Constitution on the Liturgy, Sacrosanctum concilium (1963), envisaged an extensive episcopal liturgical governance role. With the local episcopal conference, the bishop was to regulate the use of language in the liturgy and prepare and translate liturgical prayers into ‘living languages’ and oversee the implementation of liturgical change. These were key conciliar expressions of episcopal governance, which represented a deeper theology of the episcopacy. In subsequent years, the Council's reform agenda was challenged and resisted by the Roman Curia and others. The Curia aimed at protecting its pre-Vatican II position of governance and was not inclined to receive the Council's collegial and synodal ecclesiology. The most recent development, Magnum principium (2017), may be viewed as an opportunity yet to be grasped.

A sharp-witted analyst of the church’s contemporary situation once said: No previous council spoke so extensively and so profoundly about the Church as the Second Vatican Council. After no other council was there such great confusion over the question of what the church is and which form it should take. Church is, as Luther said, a blind, vague word. Indeed it is not easy to say what we mean when we speak of Church.

For one thousand five hundred years the church has lived out its existence and often enough suffered to sustain it in adversity. But not until the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries did the church begin expressis verbis to reflect on its nature. This reflection originally took place against a background of conflicts: conflicts between the papacy and the up-and-coming nation states, conflicts centred around John Wyclif and Jan Hus and above all against the background of debate and argument in the Reformation era. Yet, although the quarrels of the Reformation were not only concerned with individual ecclesiological questions, but much more with the general understanding of what Church is, the sixteenth century did not get as far as reflecting on what the Church’s teaching on the term ‘church’ should be. Not until the nineteenth century, in the wake of Romanticism, did the understanding of the church as such become the subject of consideration. It was Friedrich Schleiermacher who determined the direction of the Protestant Church. On the Catholic side the thoughts of Johann Adam Mohler, the theologian from Tubingen, led the way.

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.

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.

I remember, as a small boy, telling my parents that before 1 was bom, I had been in heaven and had chosen them to be my parents. My father laughed heartily at this. In retrospect, it is clear that Platonism was not strong in my family, but it was inevitable that when later I came to do a doctorate I did it on pre-existence language in Christology because Christ had been there too and we had discussed my parentage, at some length, I remember. I have no idea where my childish fantasy came from: it may be a common idea among religious children to think that they were somewhere before they are here and that they are going somewhere after they have been here.