For reasons of academic fashion and ecclesial politics, Rahner is often dismissed as a liberal. Though elements of his thought on the church/world relationship do not date well, and others have been so thoroughly absorbed into the mainstream as to lose their interest, there is a dimension of his thought which remains important and which in fact undercuts typical divisions between liberals and their opponents.

This paper explores the meal scenes in Mark's gospel and examines the theme of Divine Hospitality in the Old Testament. In doing so, a connection is made between the table fellowship of Jesus and the Kingdom of God. The article concludes by reflecting upon ecclesiological practices of the Eucharist in light of the inclusivity of table fellowship. The argument is that by attending to the meal scenes in the gospel of Mark, an understanding of the Kingdom of God manifests and should shape the way the Church practices hospitality.

This article is a study of how Augustine's ethics of belief shaped his arguments against unbelief and its legacy in using coercion to settle disputes. After considering the arguments for belief presented by Augustine, the article studies how these were shaped by his understanding of the problem of evil and how the Fall influenced free will. What is noted to be of benefit in Augustine is that he offers arguments in favor of belief, and is convinced that he has shown unbelief to be based on unsound reasoning. By way of contrast, a number of theologians (such as Tertullian, John Calvin, and those under the heading of Reformed Epistemology) are considered who do not believe that arguments are necessary to support belief or reject unbelief. These are contrasted with Augustine and it is argued that they have significant shortcomings in this respect. However, the article concludes that Augustine could have gone farther in supporting the claim that it is clear that God exists, and his own shortcomings have been used to justify coercion in religious belief. If common ground is to be achieved this problem must be corrected and an adequate foundation for clarity must be established.

In Love Alone is Credible (1963), Hans Urs von Balthasar discusses love in a way that “seeks to be faithful to the theological tradition of the great saints.” Conspicuously missing from the set of “great saints” whom Balthasar praises is Thomas Aquinas. Does Balthasar imply a negative judgment about Thomas's thought on love? If so, what is the judgment? On what grounds is it made? How might Thomas answer? To address these questions, I construct a dialogue between the two, privileging Love Alone and the Questions on charity from the Summa Theologiae. The dialogue begins with a survey of ground common to Balthasar and Thomas. A second step shows how three salient aspects of Thomas's treatment of charity appear from Balthasar's perspective. A third section deepens the critique, showing that for Balthasar, both divine and human love must be conceived as utterly gratuitous in ways that Thomas downplays or denies. A fourth section asks how the account of love given by Balthasar appears from Thomas's viewpoint. A final section asks what to make of these partly overlapping, partly clashing perspectives, and suggests why both are necessary.

Several times since I left the Communist Party nearly four years ago to become a Catholic, young priests have told me that they proposed engaging in argument or debate with members of the Communist Party. In every case they have been convinced that they had not only been given all the answers to the Marxists when they were in the seminary but, in addition, that those arguments were so devastating, so unanswerable, that any audience, any Communist even (if he were honest), would at once be obliged to accept them and to admit the intellectual defeat of Marxism. But it is not as easy as that, as a brief discussion of the lines they proposed to follow and an indication on my part of the answers which the Communists were likely to produce has usually soon demonstrated.

It is absolutely right that the young priest should be sent out with a knowledge of Marxism—for it is now, apart from anything else, the basis of all education from the elementary school to the university in nearly a quarter of the world today—and it is obviously necessary that he should be given entirely convincing answers at the time, or the consequence might well be that our seminaries would begin to produce members of the Communist Party instead of Catholic priests. But, when visiting seminaries, or talking to their younger products, I have sometimes felt that this outlining of the Marxist case followed by instruction in the pat answers to it is all a little too easy. First you put up a simplified, truncated version of Marxism and then provide the unanswerable answer. The result is a foregone conclusion. It is rather in the same category as those very popular but, I always feel, rather phoney ‘two pulpit’ performances where one priest puts up Marxism as an Aunt Sally and the other proceeds to knock it down.

“Aesthetics” is mainly devoted to the description of an assumed aesthetic experience. My intention is to try to show that this modern account, defining a large part of Aesthetics as a discipline, does not allow a correct description of our aesthetic life. Criticism of this modern and contemporary conception will be followed by the defence of a completely different thesis according to which we are made to apprehend in natural things and works of art those properties by which they signify, and in particular their aesthetic properties. Apprehension and appreciation of works of art presuppose the ability to respond to the aesthetic properties of things and works of art. We need to exercise virtues, intellectual and moral ones, to answer appropriately to aesthetic properties of works of art and natural things. Good in general, and good in our aesthetic life and in art, can be understood according to what Aquinas calls “the gradation to be found in things”. I will try to show that it is a reason to think that a successful aesthetic life is a form of desire for God as the source of all perfection.

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.

If you look in a popular atlas for the world of Las Casas—in other words, Central and South America and the West Indies—you will find it tucked away at the end. An afterthought, you might say. Our atlases very much help to shape our mental geography.

In fact the world of Las Casas covers one-sixth of the earth’s total land surface and now contains over 500 million people, the vast majority of them Catholics (they account for almost half the world’s Catholic population). However, still nearly half of the people in that world are illiterate, and nearly half of them are landless peasants; there is, in other words, still a huge gap between the rich and the poor. Las Casas would be broken-hearted to know that today at least some of the ugly consequences of the colonisation which began five centuries ago are still there for every discerning foreign tourist to see. But who was Las Casas?

Men like Dominic and Francis in varying ways powerfully articulated timeless questions in the lights of their times, and we call them men of vision. We must not claim too much for them, for they were in and out of their times. At the same time, we must keep them alive in our collective memory in a living historical conversation rooted in discernment and interpretation. They took hold of the past, immersed themselves in a living experience of their present, decoded from all that some of the timeless questions of humanity, and humbly suggested a possible and perhaps better future by word and action.

A significant demographic event or the advent of a natural disaster sees a surge in demand for a particular good or service. Conventional liberal market economics dictates that vendors should increase their prices to restore equilibrium to the market. Such an increase in price would provide an incentive for vendors to increase output or redirect their resources to those areas where there is a peak in demand. In the case of ride-share operators such as Uber, this is reflected in their surge pricing models to encourage drivers to service those areas where demand has spiked. Is such an increase in price justified according to the ethical principles of St. Thomas Aquinas' economic philosophy?

A navigator in charge of the steering of aship, in addition to the compass and other aids, has to keep a constant look-out for rocks, some of which are visible, others submerged. The locality of these submerged rocks is as a rule well known and is marked on the chart, but from time to time we read that a ship has struck on some uncharted rock or reef and has gone down, or at least has suffered some damage.

There is something analogous to this in the life of a human being. He has a course to steer, a goal to reach; he has rocks to encounter and keep clear of. As long as these are visible—as long as he is conscious, that is to say, of these rocks—it is an easier matter; but from time to time he strikes something which, so to speak, is not on his chart and yet profoundly influences his life. Disturbance of an emotional character may ensue, the root of which lies in the uncharted rocks of the sub-conscious mind.

This is merely a simile introduced by way of illustration to show the fundamental thought which runs through this treatise on the psychology of emotion.

The part which emotion—or, as older writers would say, passion—plays in human life is so obvious that the fact is barely worth mentioning. Without emotion life would resemble the existence of an oyster, fixed on its bed, immovable, impervious to any stimulation other than that which procures for it its daily diet of animalculae. It is in the quality of the emotional life that we find those oscillations of the personality which are familiar to us all.

What must I believe to be a Catholic? Catholicism is a highly variegated phenomenon, with an extraordinary diversity of beliefs, practices and traditions. Is this Tradition an inheritance to be cherished, or a stifling burden?

This question becomes especially acute when the Church tries to discover its identity in a new culture or society, as when Paul brought Christianity to the world of the Greek city, or, in our own day, when we ask what it might mean to be a Catholic in monetarist Britain. One way to answer this question would be to scrutinise the Tradition, to see if one can discern an essence that must be preserved, while leaving one some freedom to be creative. Clifford Longley recently described a liberal conservative theologian, such as Karl Rahner, as one who ‘sits under obedience to Tradition, and applies his intellectual ingenuity to the negotiation of as much freedom as can be justified within those limits.’ Many Catholics can identify with that picture. But I would suggest that if one looks at the genesis of the New Testament one can discover a different paradigm of the relationship between tradition and creativity, fidelity and freedom.

There were several moments between the time of Jesus and the canonisation of the New Testament when the Church was faced sharply with the question: What must we believe? What in the inherited tradition must be preserved? This was so with the Pauline mission to the Gentiles, with the gradual separation of Christianity and Judaism towards the end of the first century, and with the emergence of the Great Church in the second to fourth centuries.

When God created all things in His Wisdom, we are introduced to His work in three stages because we cannot understand all the works of God at once. So God instructs us about these elemental things which happened before men existed on this world, and He tells us that in the beginning of His creation He created the good things, the basic things, the things which could, as it were, contain all the other things that He wanted to make. On the first day He created the Light, and on the second day He created the Heaven, and on the third day He created the Earth and the Sea and all the things which grow on the earth. All these things are the good things. God said so and it is so.

Then there was the second stage in God’s creation. God could have left these things to grow; the seeds of life were in the earth. They were given on the third day and all seems to be complete; but it was not enough for God. More than the seeds of life were needed for them to prosper. It was not good enough that they should be just good. Things need more than the seeds of life if they are to live; they need the blessing of God, if they are to be fruitful. The work of the second three days was the work of blessing what was already good. On the first day God created light, but on the fourth day He made the stars which shine in the light.

Early in December 1986, I was siting in Charlottesville, Virginia, minding my own business (which is to say that I was on sabbatical leave) when a letter arrived from John Coventry, asking me to address this year’s conference of the Association on the topic of ‘ministry of the word’.

I agreed, and almost at once began to regret having done so. The topic seemed so vast, so comprehensive, so obviously central to every aspect of Christian speech and action, that I did not know where to begin. So I turned to the dictionaries, and got a bit of a shock. The Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique has only one entry under ‘ministry’, and that is ‘ministre des sacrements’. Ah well, that was back in 1929, in the dark ages before Vatican II. Things would be better in the bright new postconciliar world, a world which had witnessed the proclamation of a dogmatic constitution entitled ‘Dei Verbum’. Well, perhaps, but not much better. Sacramentum Mundi (1969) has no entries under ‘ministry’, and the New Catholic Encyclopaedia, published in 1967, has one, which reads ‘ministry, Protestant’.

Perhaps we should not make too much of this. It is, after all, perfectly possible that, gathered under other heads and quite compatible descriptions, our Catholic self-understanding has still been permeated by a sense of all our discipleship, all our prayer and compassion, all our disciplined distinctiveness, being set at the service of the word, the diaconia tou logou. Possible, but I somehow doubt it, because it was not simply the ministry of the word which had largely ceased to figure in our Catholic vocabulary.

‘I have some longstanding debts: to Donald MacKinnon, who introduced me to philosophy at Aberdeen between 1950 and 1952; to Cornelius Ernst, who got me to read Wittgenstein, together with Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, at Hawkesyard in 1957-60; and to Adolf Darlap, who helped me to understand Heidegger (much easier than understanding Wittgenstein), in Munich between 1964 and 1965’.

Serendipitously, a few days before being invited to contribute to these celebrations some remarks on that ‘longstanding debt’ to Donald MacKinnon, while sorting out some papers I came across three yellowing pages of typescript. On the top of the final page was written, in that inimitably energetic and near-illegible hand: ‘Done for Theology in July 1977, but rejected by the editors as unsuitable on the inflexible recommendation of Dr James Mark (reviews editor). DMM’. (This was by by no means the only occasion on which Donald had noted the inflexibility of one to whom he usually referred as ‘the brother of the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police’.) The spurned offering was a review of Christopher Stead’s Divine Substance, which had been published earlier that year.