The documents that represent Catholic Social Teaching are primarily papal and clerical. Following the approach of Herbert McCabe that CST is not a body of doctrine but is a response to concrete social circumstances, this paper notes the absence of serious engagement with the Bible in CST and particularly the teaching of Jesus. Using two parables as paradigms, we can see that Jesus was using the social and economic circumstances of his day to provoke debate and an imaginative response that might lead his listeners towards the kingdom of God. In developing the current state of CST, the Church must draw on the practical wisdom of already existing Church groups and must collaborate with groups outside the Church.

Theorists with strongly communal understandings of the common good frequently criticize the modern liberal state for failing to provide for the common good and for interfering with local communities. These critics, however, are less clear about what role, if any, the state should play in modern life. In order to trace a middle ground between liberal attempts to justify the state and too hasty communitarian condemnations of it, I develop a two-tiered theory of political justification. All political justification is to be seen in relationship to the common good of a community. While only local communities have a common good and a direct claim to political authority, the state can still have an indirect and derivative authority. After examining how this theory applies to thinkers such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel, and Charles Taylor, I propose an appropriate model for the relationship between local communities and the state.

There has been a resurgence of interest in a particular kind of contemporary music in recent years. This has been a surprise to many, especially the composers involved, because we live at the end of a century that has seen a retreat by the composing community from the larger music loving public. If one looks back to the early days of the century we see figures like Schonberg, establishing private societies for the performance of Contemporary music. A perception is beginning to emerge within the composing community that the priorities of composeIs have in some way separated from the priorities of the larger music-loving public. At the very time when a museum culture was beginning to be the main priority of classical music listeners, composers were going into a very exploratory mode. In the century of the holocaust and the loss of meaning generally, composers have gone into a kind of laboratory phase when the very nature of music was the stuff of their investigations. Composers like Boulez, Stockhausen, Berio and the young Turks of the post-war generation took music into a very abstract phase indeed by making explorations into the purely abstract nature of music but with an ideological and idealistic desire to turn their backs on the past. They wanted to start afresh from year zero, as it were, to write a music that was untainted by tradition, a music that would not have any resonance of a failed bourgeois culture.

Muriel Spark’s concept of faith is an essential feature of her work.lt supplies perspective and balance. Without an appreciation of it, her novels may only be valued for their wit, their irony, their unpredictability. These are indeed attractive aspects of her writing. However, they do not function merely to tease, surprise and entertain. They exist to illustrate a life which is essentially fragmented.

In a world where nothing can be fully grasped, there are dangers; the most threatening is a misplaced confidence in a single selfish viewpoint. Such an error constitutes an essential sin in Christian terms: it is philautia, love of self. St Augustine described sin as a turning away from God towards the self. Sin in Christian terms is negative: it is the opposite of all that comes from God. And so we find certain characters in Spark’s work mistakenly asserting themselves as the source of power and their own viewpoint as a criterion of truth. On the other hand we find characters who have a profound need to acknowledge a truth beyond themselves and who strive to come to terms with the essential inadequacy of a human perspective. These characters have a determination to identify what is true and honest in their existence; they have a sense of irony and sometimes a great sense of joy. All these characters describe themselves as Catholics. Although they are not portrayed as dependent on church ritual or practice, the dimension of faith is of the utmost importance to them.

Caroline in The Comforters is most explicitly bound up in her faith. She is a convert and finds herself patronized by cradle Catholics such as Mrs Hogg. She is irritated by this for she has a sense of her faith which lies beyond the smug platitudes of this woman. Although Caroline goes into retreat, she does not encounter her faith by turning her back on her life. On the contrary, the challenges, the irritations and the mysteries which nurture her faith are in her experience.

A contemporary of Dante’s, opening the Divine Comedy for the first time, would probably have expected to find St. Francis among le beate genti, or at least to hear his praises sung by them, and that independently of any particular interest in the Franciscan Order, such was the esteem in which ‘il santo d‘Assisi’ was held. St. Dominic, on the other hand, an incomparably less popular figure, is unlikely even to have crossed the mind of such a reader except, perhaps, in connection with the well-known confraternity he founded. For the average Catholic of those times, Dominic had already become what he has remained, one of those holy ‘founders’ about whom one knows or cares little, well-nigh obscured as they are by the universally accepted and venerated institutes which they founded. Even the Dominicans themselves seem, on the whole, not to have fully appreciated the extraordinary character of the man to whom they owed so much. Apart from the biographical sketch in the Libellus of Jordan of Saxony (d. 1237), Dominic’s immediate successor in the government of the Order—a sketch which was historical rather than hagiographical, written that is to describe ‘the origin of the Order of Preachers’—and from the depositions by the witnesses at the two Processes, at Bologna and Toulouse, prior to his canonization in 1234, biographical material concerning Dominic is sparse, or, rather, scattered piecemeal among conventional legendary accretions.

The purpose of this work is to explicate Thomas Aquinas' teaching regarding the nature of satisfaction, punishment, and the relation between the two in the Passion of Christ. This task is undertaken as a response to recent treatments of Aquinas' soteriology that misinterpret his understanding of the penal nature of Christ's work of satisfaction. I argue that Aquinas' explication of Christ's ‘satisfactory punishment’ on the cross does not reduce the salvific significance of the Passion to the mere endurance of a penalty in order to fulfill an arbitrary legal requirement, nor does it reflect a notion of God as wrathful and delighting in human suffering. Rather, the punishment that constitutes the Passion is a complex reality that is willed by God and chosen by Christ as a fitting means of attaining the end of his saving mission, namely, the healing and elevation of sinners.

The task facing a feminist theologian when asked to reflect on the legacy of St Augustine and sin is indeed daunting. For when confronting contemporary understanding of sin and guilt, it is frequently assumed that the legacy of guilt and the whole burden of responsibility for sin which women have borne in Christianity is somehow to be laid at Augustine’s door. So the problem underlying this paper is basically a historical one: how much responsibility for pessimistic views of human nature can be traced to what Augustine actually wrote and taught? Secondly, to reflect critically on Augustinian notions of sin will inevitably obscure the positive dimensions of his thought—in particular, his views on community, sacrament and Christology. For this I apologize in advance. But no one will thank me for tracing the legacy of Augustine’s teaching on sin through the anguishings of Luther and the rigorous extremism of Baius and Jansenius to the Papal encyclicals of this century. Instead, I begin by sketching sin-consciousness today. I then look briefly at Augustine’s doctrines in the context of 4th-century Christianity. Thirdly, I focus on certain threads, presumed to be the Augustinian legacy, and in the last section I look at attempts to represent ‘the sin of the world’ suggesting an alternative based on feminist psychological research.

Top Gun: Maverick is a film about the American Empire: its ethos and hopes, its illusions and contradictions. This essay considers the propaganda content of the movie, and reflects on what it reveals and conceals about the wider political and social context of America's imperial project. The film provides insights on the shifting expectations, and troubles facing the American Empire in 2022. In reflecting upon the sequel and comparing it with the original, it is possible to notice changes and new prerogatives in the self-perception of the United States, as well as an overall imperial fatigue and tension. In particular, this essay evaluates the use of missionary language and metaphors in the film, and considers that empires have a chronic incapacity, or maybe impossibility, in abdicating their power. Top Gun: Maverick shows that an empire, any empire, would simply cease to be such if it would not believe in its own myth of perennial youth. Ultimately, this essay considers the burden of the American Empire: its damnation is its immortality, its illusion of eternity.

This paper argues that being there, actually existing, is a notion that cannot be explicated by formal logicians, cannot be defined in terms of conscious perception, and cannot be satisfactorily explained using the theories of mathematics or natural science. So, must we turn to theology to make up for the deficiencies of the methods so far canvassed? The paper concludes by considering the Thomistic identification of God with existence itself, but argues that it would be a mistake to suppose that the mystery of actual existence is thereby dispelled.

This article reviews the church and culture relationship developed in Gaudium et Spes and Lumen Gentium and proposes a Catholic account of modernity as a way in which the contemporary mission of the church in today's culture can be creatively and faithfully carried forward. After an initial outlining of the definitions of church and culture proposed by the Vatican documents, I then go on to position my proposal of a Catholic modernity in relation to some important current accounts of the church and culture relationship that tend towards a rejection of secular culture. I argue that Protestant accounts of modernity have dominated in philosophical and sociological theories and draw on my previous work on Max Weber to illustrate the significance of this for developing a Catholic account of modernity. I conclude by sketching some of the important issues which would need to be addressed in formulating a systematic account of a Catholic modernity.

Aquinas's articulation of the eight ‘integral parts’ of prudence can serve as a manageable, practical focus for ongoing human development. Although Aquinas holds that there is an infused Prudence, this does not render acquired prudence redundant, because (1) God moves things in ways that befit their natures, and it is our nature to have dominion over our actions; (2) human beings have free will, characteristically exercised in electio, choice of means; (3) grace perfects nature; (4) some scholars have defended the complementarity of the acquired and infused virtues, and there is widespread agreement that the psychological structures needed by acquired virtue persist in the life of graced virtue.

The ‘integral parts’ of a Cardinal Virtue must concur for its perfect acts. Aquinas examines them in detail, and offers methods of building ‘memory’ through human effort; he leaves to our diligence the discernment of how to build other parts of prudence. He explains how the parts are deployed in the acts of deliberation, judgment and command.

Aquinas's consideration of the vices opposed to prudence and its parts enables him to warn us about what impedes prudence, and to help us distinguish false from legitimate concerns for bodily goods, superfluous from proportionate solicitude, etc.

It is not my intention to attempt a systematic examination of what Catholic historians have had to say about the Reformation in England. Such an examination, beginning, perhaps, with the work of Dr Nicholas Sander and Fr Edward Rishton in the sixteenth century - De Origine ac Progressu Schismatis Anglicani - and working through to Fr Philip Hughes’ three volumes on The Reformation in England would indeed bring the enquirer into contact with a large number of fascinating personalities and would incidentally, provide him with a number of examples of prejudice and propaganda, as well as with models of painstaking and disinterested scholarship. Nor am I concerned only, or even mainly, with Catholics who have written historical works, but with all Catholics who have in one way or another to deal with history and with historical problems, particularly with historical problems which still arouse religious prejudices and which may be the occasion of religious propaganda.

Whether they like it or not, Catholics have to concern themselves with history. They belong to a church which claims to have been founded by an historical person at a particular point of time in history. They claim that there is continuity between the Church founded by Christ and the Church today. They claim that the line of supreme pontiffs is not eventually lost in the twilight of fable but can be traced back to St Peter. The Catholic explaining or defending the claims of his Church must continually have recourse to history, not only because his Church makes particular historical claims but because in a great many of the attacks made on that church, the arguments employed are arguments from history.

St. Thomas Aquinas is primarily a theologian. He writes of Sacred Scripture not only as a theologian, but because he is a theologian. As a master of theology his essential textbook was the Bible. From earlier theologians St. Thomas received an understanding of theology, which he shared with his contemporaries and which he in turn was to deepen and strengthen: Sacred Scripture provides the auctoritas of theology. It gives rise to theology, enables and governs it. M-D Chenu has emphasized and demonstrated St. Thomas’ fundamental reliance on the Bible as the foundation of his theological work.

St. Thomas says that ‘the truth of faith is contained in Sacred Scripture.’ He understood that a cursory reading of the text would not reveal this truth very clearly, because it is in Scripture, but ‘diffusely, in diverse ways and sometimes darkly.’ Thomas provides an insight into his own approach to exegesis when he continues: ‘the result is that to draw out the truth of faith from Scripture requires a prolonged study and practice.’ Here we see Thomas the theologian approaching the sacred books in order to draw out carefully from them what faith teaches through them.

St. Thomas served the Church as a ‘Master of the Sacred Scriptures’ (Magister in Sacra Pagina) and, therefore, as J. Mahoney states, the systematic works of Aquinas do not constitute his truly magisterial activity. Mahoney notes the valuable work of H. Denifle who, in his discussion of the text-books of the medieval professors of theology, shows the Bible to be the basic text-book and indicates that ‘the theologian of that day knew no book so well as the Bible.’

Jean‐Luc Marion's work has received plenty of critical attention in recent years. This paper returns to the core of Marion's project in a rather different way from many of the previous critiques by focussing on two troubling aspects of his work. Firstly, the way in which Marion conceives the relationship between phenomenology and theology is explored in the hope that Marion's missteps might illuminate the ongoing problem of the relationship between philosophy and theology; secondly, the major methodological move which Marion makes, that of linking givenness to phenomenological reduction, is critically examined. This latter critique is the main purpose of the paper, since it is apparent that the role which reduction plays in Marion's phenomenology, when seen under the rubric of a philosophical practice, also indicates one possible route towards the clarification of the first problem, that of the relationship between philosophy and theology.

This is intended to be a practical comparison between two approaches. Accordingly it would be as well to start with a few truisms that are shared between them. In the first place, people only discover themselves and the world through their relationships with other people and this relationship is primary. Perspectives on the world follow and are fashioned by these relationships. In view ©f this, theology may be said to be reflection on human experience specifically understood as directed towards God. Thus Schillebeeckx (1969:214) describes man, from a theological point of view, as ‘a free being who must define himself in and towards the world in dialogue with God’. This may be contrasted with the definition of one sort of sociology, ‘critical sociology’, described by Hansen (1976:3) as ‘an invitation to become an involved, critical explorer of human and societal possibilities’.

Unless the theologian is to consider for the most part his own experience (the source of much individualistic agonizing of an existentialist sort commonly characterized as bourgeois sociology) he must perforce draw on some systematic body of reflection on the human condition. Traditionally, this has been provided by philosophy, but in more recent times the social sciences have rather cornered the interaction business.