Let us never believe that the way in which the people in power tell us to look at the world is the only way we can look, because if we do that, then that’s a kind of appalling selfcensorship. (Salman Rushdie).

In Britain we believe in live and let live ... Moslems, Hindus, Buddhists and Rastafarians are all welcome to our tolerant society. But there is only one law for all of us ... Those who say their deep religious convictions prevent them from obeying the law of this land should quit Britain immediately and go and live in a country where the conflict does not exist. (Sunday Sport, 19 February, 1989 — editorial on Rushdie).

So the battle over The Satanic Verses is a clash of faiths, in a way. Or, more precisely, it’s a clash of languages. (Salman Rushdie, The Observer, 22 January, 1989).

Britain’s prized tolerant and pluralist society began to exhibit the power of its master code from the beginning of 1989, following the highly publicised second attempt at book burning by Bradford Muslims in January, 1989. (The first protest in Bolton, in December 1988, failed to get any media coverage—so it was repeated after advice that the national media be duly invited!). Text burning was encoded and enmeshed into two curiously related histories: that of Nazism and that of the history of religious bigotry and intolerance. Hence, from a major national quality paper: ‘following the example of the Inquisition and Hitler’s National Socialists, a large crowd of Muslims burnt some copies of the book’ (The Independent, 16 January, 1989).

When I was considering what subject to treat in the Aquinas Lecture, which you had so kindly invited me to deliver, in the state of near-despair one reaches on such occasions I went to an Oxford bookshop where a selection of volumes may be bought for sixpence each and bought one at random in the hope that I might derive some guidance from it. The True History of Joshua Davidson (1872) was an at-one-time popular work of fiction by a socialist republican, Eliza Lynn Linton, though it was published anonymously. It is a story of Jesus returning to earth in mid-nineteenth-century England and of how he acted in the situation then confronting him. At the end of the book the authoress says that ‘if sociology is a scientific truth, then Jesus of Nazareth preached and practised not only in vain, but against unchangeable Law’. This gave me an idea for my address for, though she was speaking of the doctrines of Political Economy current at that time and as she understood them, it appeared to me that it might be of interest to you were I to discuss the attitude of sociologists, and social anthropologists in particular, towards religious faith and practice. It has been for the most part bleakly hostile.

It is scarcely possible to discuss social science in this country without some reference to its French background. We may regard it, if only for convenience, as beginning with Montesquieu in his great book L'Esprit des Lois (1748). In it he set out to discover the laws of social life, the necessary conditions of its existence in its various forms, but he did not, in my opinion, think of these laws in a deterministic or mechanical sense.

What is it that makes us “modern”? When we think of ourselves as “modern people” —and thus distinguished from medieval or ancient or primitive peoples what are we in fact saying about ourselves? I wish to explore the suggestion of Max Weber that an important element in our being denizens of modernity is the “disenchantment” of our world. Further, I wish to explore some of the connections between Weber’s notion of disenchantment and his understanding of mysticism as a response to this disenchantment, in order to argue that the relegation of religion to “the mystical” is not so much a response to disenchantment as it is the condition for the very possibility of disenchantment. In Weber’s sociology, mysticism becomes the irrational “other” of the rational, bureaucratic use of coercive force that we, in our disenchanted world, call “politics.” In his work we can see clearly a process whereby the categories of the mystical and the political mutually create each other in such a way that mysticism—a private and irrational religious experience—becomes the only viable future for religion, and politics—the rational administration of territory through violence—becomes statecraft. In this respect, Weber seems a paradigmatic modern interpreter of religion and politics, one whose interpretive categories continue to shape our discourse. Finally, I will argue that the power of Weber’s story of disenchantment can be seen in current political and liberation theologies, even when they explicitly seek to reunite the “mystical” and the “political.”

Might I begin with the personal remark that in the course of preparing this lecture for Blackfriars in Oxford, I was quite unable to prevent thoughts of Herbert McCabe’s absence here today from occupying my mind. You must forgive me if, though he is absent physically, you are able to identify his presence intellectually within the few thoughts I offer you today; for the inclination to give some expression to the conjunction of influences which some thirty years of debate with Herbert have visited upon me personally became, in the circumstances, irresistible. Back in the early nineteen-eighties Nicholas Lash and I published in quick succession monographs on the subject of Marxism and its relation to Christian theology. We agreed on much of a theological nature, disagreed sharply on how to read Marx, so Herbert, then in his second stint as editor of New Blackfriars, invited us each to review the work of the other, Nicholas first, me to follow. With characteristically wicked wit, Herbert entitled my reply to Nicholas’ review ‘Turner Responds to Lash’. Well, today I mark my indebtedness to Herbert by means of a lecture which I am happy to concede is, in a manner, a response to Herbert’s ‘lash’, and in some spirit of emulation, could I achieve it, of that fierce clarity and energy of thought which so characterised what Eamon Duffy called ‘his mighty soul’.

This article analyses three of Taylor's principal theoretical moves: his basic account of secularity and related rejection of secularist ‘subtraction stories’; his comprehension of historico-empirical realities in the light of a sort of philosophy of history; and his presentation of the transcendental quality of the experience of ‘fullness’. Motivated to contest Taylor's framing of the ‘unbeliever’ as spirituality deprived and intellectually complacent, the coherence, content and rhetorical overkill of his argumentation in each of these areas is questioned.

Mr Aldous Huxley has recently published yet another book. It is not a very good book; nor is it a very attractive book; but it is, alas, in its way an important book. Its importance consists in this: that anyone who may feel an inclination to enjoy, here and now, what Christians call the Beatific Vision or the experience which the Zen Buddhists call satori, has merely to buy himself three-pennyworth of mescalin at the nearest chemist’s, and behold, the ineffable vision is his. Whether or not the drug is available in this country in commercial quantities, I am afraid I have been too idle to find out. However, there it is for any who may care to make the experiment—heaven in a capsule.

It may be surprising to learn that Mr Huxley, who has for so long written in a tone of such great authority on mysticism and the mystical experience, confesses that before he achieved ‘liberation’ though mescalin, he had not actually had a mystical experience of any kind himself. ‘For’, says he, ‘until this morning I had known contemplation only in its humble, its more ordinary forms—as discursive thinking; as a rapt absorption in poetry or painting or music; as a patient waiting upon those inspirations, without which even the prosiest writer cannot hope to accomplish anything; as occasional glimpses in nature, of Wordsworth’s “something far more deeply interfused”; as systematic silence, leading, sometimes, to hints of an obscure knowledge.’

There are two fairly commonplace facts about games which seem relevant to a discussion of Alice in Wonderland. First, games are rule-governed, and so orderly; but playing a game involves a creative application of the rules, as Wittgenstein reminds us in Philosophical Investigations, and thus allows for freedom: rules are fixed, but moves are to some extent unpredictable. Seen in this way, a game might appear as a paradigmatic fusion of order and liberty—one, perhaps, of some relevance to society. Second, games involve a means/ends rationality, but aren’t in themselves functional: they are played as ends in themselves and in that sense transcend considerations of sheer utility. From this viewpoint, games raise interesting questions about the relations between rational and ‘irrational’ for msof activity, and indeed this issue is touched on at the very beginning of Alice: the White Rabbit appears just as Alice is wondering ‘whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies’, pondering the relations between utilitarian effort and creative play. This, too, has a wider social application which the book brings out.

Alice in Wonderland abounds in games; indeed, most of the central scenes—the Caucus Race, the tea-party, the croquet match, the lobster quadrille, even the trial—are games of a more or less direct kind. But, of course, these games are, by normal standards, very peculiar. The croquet game, for instance, is completely chaotic, since the players ignore the rules and the equipment won’t stay in place. Alice has to hit a rolled-up hedgehog through the arch of a doubled-up soldier with a flamingo, but the hedgehog keeps unfurling, the flamingo won’t keep still and the soldiers continually get up and stroll away at the crucial moment.

In this article, a number of findings of a series of focussed interviews with fifteen Roman Catholic clergy associated with four English parishes will be discussed in the light of a recent survey of clergy from three denominations. It will be shown that in a number of important respects the findings of this mail questionnaire survey were not supported by the evidence derived from taped interviews in the present research.

All the priests interviewed were or had been recently associated with one of the four parishes selected for the study of change in the Roman Catholic community in England. The parishes had been selected to reflect as far as possible with the resources available, both regional and social class variations. Two parishes were in the London area. One was a middle class commuter parish covering an area of some fifteen square miles, about 20 miles outside the city and with a Catholic density of around 8% of the population. The second was an inner-city parish occupying under one square mile in area with a large proportion of both Irish and New Commonwealth immigrants. In this parish Catholics comprised some 18% of the population. The remaining two parishes, both covering under one square mile in. area were in Preston where Catholics comprised between one quarter and one third of the population. Relatively few Catholics in Preston admitted to having any Irish ancestry. One parish was an inner-city, traditional working class parish in a state of population decline and aging associated with massive but arrested urban redevelopment programmes and the second, on the outskirts of Preston consisted mainly of new housing estates occupied by upwardly mobile people in professional, managerial and technical occupations.

The question of whether Peter was indeed the first bishop of Rome has recently gained popular prominence in the United States due to the best seller by historian and papal critic Garry Wills who vigorously dismisses the entire idea as myth. Although simplistically and sensationally presented, Wills’ thesis relies on the view of many, albeit more subtle, critical scholars that Peter could not have been a bishop at Rome because there were no bishops in Rome until the middle of the second century A.D. Several years ago, David Albert Jones O.P., challenged in this journal this common view of episcopacy in the first century. One scholar, Francis Sullivan S.J., recently responded specifically to Jones’ challenge by reaffirming the apparent majority view. This article will briefly refer to Sullivan’s critique of Jones, and will present in a new light the New Testament evidence showing that Jones’ questioning of the reigning critical view is indeed well-founded and long overdue.

The heart of Jones’ challenge is highlighting the flawed assumptions underlying the reasoning used to deny a first century episcopate: 1) the ideological tendency to view apostolic ministry as “free, loose, inspired and lay” while seeing “the emergence of clerical forms as a fall from primitive innocence” (Jones, p. 142); and 2) the denial of the existence of a first century episcopate based on the alleged silence of early documents. In essence, Jones rightly detects a pervasive bias in the critical literature against developed church structure as somehow contaminating the springtime of apostolic Christianity.

The mystical language of the 14th century Dominican, Meister Eckhart, can certainly be characterised as daring in its creativity. Indeed, Eckhart uses language like few others in his talk of the divine, employing bold paradoxes and unusual metaphors. But as Bernard McGinn has written, “while Eckhart’s creative handling of language is one of the major attractions of his style, it often does not make the task of understanding him any easier.” Part of the problem in failing to understand Eckhart’s words involves a failure to understand the context of his theological vision and his efforts to bring his listeners to a new appreciation of the divine. This has been especially true in the contemporary philosophy of religion. Philosophical analyses have failed to attend to the conditions in which the mystic’s words have their meaning and instead have generally been attempts to “penetrate” the phenomena. What is required instead is what the 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein has advised, namely, a grammatical investigation. When Eckhart writes, “The eye in which I see God is the same eye in which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye and one sight and one knowing and one loving”, it must be recognized that the meaning of such a statement can only be understood in seeing how Eckhart’s words are being used, for it is only in this context that these words have their significance. Rather than impose a philosophical explanation, therefore, it is important to note the grammar of Eckhart’s discourse and thus a description is offered.

We live in a time in which the boundary fences between the various disciplines are being dismantled—at least as far as the social sciences and humanities are concerned. Take, for example, the work of Michel Foucault. Is it philosophy, history, sociology or political science? Again, where would one place the deconstructionism of Jacques Derrida? Under the guise of literary theory it has profoundly changed the enterprise of literary criticism, and some think it is finally bringing to an end the hegemony of historical criticism in the theory and practice of biblical interpretation. With a nod towards Thomas Kuhn we could say that across the social sciences and humanities there is a search for new paradigms.

Students of that questionable discipline, called variously science of religion, history of religions, religiology, religious studies, comparative religion, or simply religion, are well used to a cloud of uncertainty obscuring the legitimacy, function and defining method of their academic project. About the only point of agreement is that the science of religion is not theology—and even that distinction is understood in different ways. Other questions abound. Is there a single science of religion, with a defining method, distinguishing it from such related sciences as anthropology and sociology? Or, is it a collective name for a group of sciences and disciplines with no single methodology? Is there a strictly empirical science of religion or is the study of religion essentially a hermeneutic discipline, demanding a methodology appropriate to one of the Geisteswissenschaften? One could continue along these lines, multiplying questions. Enough has been said to indicate what all its practitioners know, the uncertain status of the academic study of religion. By the ‘academic study’ of religion I mean that study when disengaged from the controlling authority and presuppositions of any particular religious tradition or organization.

This article examines the place of wonder in Newman's account of university education. It pays particular attention to Newman's ‘Rise and Progress of Universities’ (1872) rather than to his better known The Idea of a University (1873). The article first introduces some ideas about wonders and wondering, as found in medieval thought and in Newman's writings, before proceeding to the wonder that was Newman's attempt to establish a university in Dublin, and that is his history (historia) of the university: a story (fabula) that is every bit as marvellous as any medieval tale. Newman's educational romance involves the islands of Britannia and Hibernia, and the cities of Athens, Rome and Dublin. The article also considers the place of personal encounter and the written word in Newman's idea and practice of education, before finally offering some brief reflections on the diversity of modern society and university education. The article closes by suggesting the necessity of wonder for the gaining of knowledge.

The long-term ecclesiological trajectory of Pope Francis is towards a synodal Church. He has chosen this topic for the next World Synod of Bishops in 2022. Though a key theme of his pontificate, synodality is a contested notion. In 2018 the International Theological Commission (ITC) published its reflections on synodality in the life and mission of the Church. This article traces the understanding of synodality in the ITC document, offers an appraisal, and looks at some of the challenges facing Francis’ synodal project.

Many years ago, when I was unsettled about the Anglican position, I read Salmon’s Infallibility with great care. It had been recommended to me as ‘a devastatingly unanswerable criticism of the validity of the Roman claims’.

Though I did not realise it then, this book was a determining factor in my decision to become a Catholic. I had read at the same time Wilfrid Ward’s Life of Cardinal Newman and Newman’s own Essay on Development, the classical exposition in English of the doctrine of tradition. I saw at once that the infallibility which Salmon was attacking was not the infallibility which the Catholic Church claims and which had been defined with greater precision by the Vatican Council. I realised, too, that when Salmon wrote of tradition he meant something different from the tradition so clearly analysed and cogently expounded by Newman.

I knew that according to Catholic theology reason can go so far as to show the consonance of revealed truth with knowledge acquired by reason, and even to infer that what is revealed is true and should be believed. The assent of faith however is supernatural and cannot be produced by such knowledge, but is wholly dependent on the word of God in revelation. It was plain that Salmon had no clear conception of this distinction and was in constant confusion about the respective functions of faith and reason.

This article considers how the young Thomas Aquinas treats the question of universal salvation by examining his reading of 1 Timothy 2.4, God wills that all humans should be saved, in two of his early works, the Scriptum on the Sentences of Peter Lombard and the sixth Disputed Question on Truth, both dated to the period 1252–1257. Drawing on John Damascene's distinction between God's antecedent and consequent will, Thomas here teaches that whereas God wills antecedently in a unimodal way that all humans should be saved, He wills consequently in a bimodal way based on foreknown merits. Though foreknown merits are not a cause of predestination itself, they are a cause of glory, one of predestination's temporal effects. On Thomas's account, then, reading 1 Tim 2.4 as a straightforward statement of what God has done eternally—namely, predestine or save every individual human—would undermine the freedom of the human will that is necessary in order to attain to beatitude.

The gospel-text chosen for today’s feast (John 17, 9—19) gives us the interpretative key we need in order to understand what it was that motivated the life of St Thomas at the deepest level. It discloses the point of departure from which that life began to take on shape and form. ‘Consecrate them in the truth,’ says our Lord on the evening before his death. By this prayer of his, he transformed the Old Testament liturgy of reconciliation into that ‘liturgy’ of the New Testament which consists in the Lord’s own living and dying.

‘Consecrate them in the truth’. The word ‘consecrate’ is founded on the term sacer, ‘sacred’, and ‘the Sacred’ is the characteristic being of God, the untouchableness of his majesty. ‘Consecrate’ signifies: make man, this poor and finite creature, able to enter into contact with God in his immense glory. How can man dare to approach God, with impure hands lay hold on the Untouchable One, the Pure One, the Infinite? The world religions have created ritual systems in order to qualify man for dealing with the sacred so as to resolve the tragic enigma whereby man needs contact with God in order to live, and yet is incapable of bearing that light inaccessible.

The notion of ‘the feminine Other’ is a vexed one for feminists. In the opening pages of The Second Sex Simone de Beauvoir asks, ‘Are there women, really? Most assuredly the theory of the eternal feminine still has its adherents who will whisper in your ear: “Even in Russia women still are women”.’ For de Beauvoir the verbal symmetry of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine is merely a matter of linguistic form. In the real world of work and love—in life in general—man is the norm and woman is man’s ‘other’, thus her famous remark, ‘He is the Subject... she is the Other’, the ‘not man’ defined by men.

Levinas may be a ‘recent read’ for many of us but already, writing in 1949, de Beauvoir quotes him; ‘Otherness’, says Levinas, ‘reaches its full flowering in the feminine, a term of the same rank as consciousness but of opposite meaning.’ T suppose’ de Beauvoir comments, ‘that Levinas does not forget that woman, too, is aware of her own consciousness. . . . But it is striking that he deliberately takes a man’s point of view. When he writes that “woman is mystery”, he implies that she is mystery for man. Thus his description, which is intended to be objective, is in fact an assertion of masculine privilege.’3 And one which, we can note with de Beauvoir, can stand in a long line of philosophical evocation of ‘the female’ and ‘the feminine’ from the pre-Socratics to Nietzsche and beyond.

In the existentialist rubric of The Second Sex de Beauvoir sees the problem as this—a woman, like anyone else, is an autonomous freedom, yet she discovers herself in a world where men force her to assume herself as the ‘Other’. Woman, philosophically speaking, lacks her own subjectivity.