In a letter to Fr Bede Jarrett, dated 17 July 1925, Basil Blackwell refers to the financial instability of Blackfriars, this journal, which he had published since 1922: ‘The policy of safety, no doubt, is to cease publication at the end of this volume’ — volume VI.

On his father’s death, in 1924, Basil Blackwell, then aged thirty five, took over the bookshop in Oxford. At this distance, it looks as if he decided to focus on building up the bookshop, rather than the publishing house he had founded in 1921. Not until the 1950s did his become a significant name in academic publishing, with such books as Elizabeth Anscombe’s Intention, a classic as it turned out, never out of print. By then, Blackwell’s was the leading academic bookshop in the United Kingdom.

According to the letter asking Bernard Delany to resume the editorship, Fr Bede says that Basil Blackwell had come to regard Blackfriars as ‘little more than respectable’, whereas he expected it to be ‘fresh, daring and sane’ when he took on the job of publishing it.

Revamped with effect from October 1964 as New Blackfriars, this journal first appeared in April 1920. We claimed then not to be ‘new’ but only The Catholic Review, ‘revived and renamed’: a quarterly that ran for several years but had to give up during the War. In 1919 Fr Bede Jarrett (1881-1934), then Prior Provincial, bought it for £40, on behalf of the English Dominican Province.

Bernard Delany (1890-1959) was appointed Editor of the projected journal. He had just come from two years as an army chaplain (1917-19). As he recalled, Fr Bede wanted a review which ‘was not to be learned or theological, nor of a specifically ecclesiastical character’ (see Bernard Delany, ‘The Beginnings of “Blackfriars”’, Blackfriars 34 (1953): 308-319).

The first issues were planned over lunches at Jack Straw’s Castle on Hampstead Heath. Besides Delany and Jarrett himself the editorial board consisted of Joseph Clayton and Stanley Morison, along with two other Dominicans, Fr Vincent McNabb and Fr Luke Walker.

Stanley Morison (1889-1967) was to become the most distinguished British scholar of typography. At this stage, barely thirty years of age, he was working for small presses in London. He became adviser to Cambridge University Press in 1925, designed Gollancz’s famous ‘yellow jackets’, completely restyled The Times, and created the Times New Roman type-family which remains widely in use.

Our previous conference had been held in Leeds on 9-12 September 2001 and during the course of the last morning but one, word came through of the spectacular assault on tens of thousands of civilians in New York. Some had watched it live on television after breakfast. By midday we had learnt that the twin towers of the World Trade Centre had collapsed with many people inside. Outrageous and brilliantly executed as it was, we quickly realised that it was one more example of an assault on innocents in a political cause to add to Srebrenica, Tel Aviv, Jenin, now Bali and so many others. Whatever the political injustices, real or perceived, they could not justify such an assault on ordinary people. Here evil was at work.

Suggestions for the next conference inevitably included: forgiveness, reconciliation, Christian-Muslim relations, but in the end the committee decided to pull several themes together under the topic Dealing with Evil. The purpose was to have a moment of theological reflection on an ever-present theme without getting caught up excessively in the crises of the moment.

The conference opened with the paper by John Hemer on how God dealt with evil through Jesus on the cross. Here, we were told, is God’s rejection of an apocalyptic overcoming of evil in some dramatic resolution. The God incarnate in Jesus Christ is no deus ex machina who stops the forces of destruction in their tracks. Jesus confronts evil by suffering it and refusing to perpetuate it. Karen Kilby examines the tradition of ‘theodicy’ where philosophers of religion try to answer the question of why an omnipotent and loving God allows evil to flourish in our world.

On the acknowledgements page of Theology and Social Theory John Milbank thanks, rather abruptly, ‘Rowan Williams, who taught me theology’. No other teacher is recognised. The formal teaching was at Westcott House, Cambridge, in the mid-70s; but there is evidence enough that the current Archbishop of Canterbury has been an abiding influence on the whole of John Milbank’s theological career. In the crowded Metro of Milbank’s footnotes, it is rare to see a face more than once; but Williams appears five times in The Word Made Strange, speaking variously of Barth, Arius, Lossky and Gregory of Nyssa. And often, Milbank’s ideas seem closely related to those of his teacher. The concept of poesis in Milbank’s ‘A Critique of the Theology of Right’ (1989) - ‘the ceaseless re-narrating and ‘explaining’ of human history’, a self-exceeding act — is clearly the twin of Williams’ ‘generative revelation’ — ‘events or transactions in our language that break existing frames of reference and initiate new possibilities of life’ — in his essay ‘Trinity and Revelation’ (1986). But this example serves not just as a demonstration of Williams’ influence on Milbank; it also shows how Milbank overtakes his teacher, tackling on a grand scale ideas that are in Williams rather tentative. For Milbank, the idea that somehow Christian experience generates its own momentum of truth contributes to the overthrow of Kantian transcendentalism; for Williams, the same sort of idea provides ‘a way of thinking’ about the Spirit’s work in the church. Milbank’s theological ambition seems much greater than Williams’.

At perhaps no time in recent memory has the temptation to hopelessness been so great or the relative powerlessness of most of the world’s humanity so obvious. As I sit to write this essay, safely complicit in the “protection” afforded by the world’s richest and most powerful nation and yet strangely imprisoned by it, we appear to be careening ineluctably toward war—or escalating an ongoing war largely invisible to the public eye—against a country half of whose population is under the age of fifteen. Vast opposition in the United Nations is greeted with incredulity and incomprehension by President Bush on our half-willing behalf, and massive protests worldwide are countered simultaneously with piety about the blessings of free expression and an indifference which shows that such liberty is countenanced, such displays encouraged even, because sovereign power and a bland pluralism of purely private opinion have drained these expressions of any weight. This impotence is what we have learned to call freedom. In Washington, war protesters dutifully apply for permits to register their dissatisfaction. Could there be a clearer example of modern democracy’s ingenious capacity to domesticate dissent simply by permitting and embracing it?

It is particularly appropriate, as we are plunged helplessly and headlong into war, that we are also invited by the Ash Wednesday liturgy and the season which it announces to contemplate this powerlessness, to offer sacrifices of repentance worthy of it, by dwelling on the fact and meaning—or perhaps the meaninglessness— of our deaths. “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

In Dependent Rational Animals Alasdair MacIntyre advances the case for a realist account of the moral life over against the unsituated Enlightenment account of the good. The normative foundation of his proposal is narratives of the dependent rather than autonomous character of human existence from birth through childhood to old age and death, and analogies between human biological and emotional dependence, and child development, and the rich moral lives, and nurturing behaviours of dolphins and some other animals. This approach represents a significant revision of MacIntyre’s earlier espousal of a principally Aristotelian - and hence heroic - account of the virtues. His setting of dependence as an ordering contingency of rationality brings him much closer to Christian narratives of the good life. The problem however with attempts to read off moral narratives from anthropological accounts of human embodied and social life, or from ethological narratives of other animals, is that they involve the attempt to found Christian theology and ethics on other than Christian foundations, and they therefore lack a true ontological foundation. In what follows I will suggest that narratives of the morality of embodiment, whether human or nonhuman, do find a legitimate place in Christian theological ethics but that this place is subject to the ordering narrative of the scriptures, and in particular the narratives of Christ crucified and risen. The narratives of the Incarnation, Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ teach Christians to interpret dependence, embodiment, illness and even death, as aspects of biological existence which find correlates in the vulnerability of God.

Christian theologians’ ruminations on the relationship between the commands to love God and neighbour in the New Testament traverse a broad spectrum. Some posit a unity or even the identity of loving God and the neighbour. Others insist on a clear distinction or disjunction between loving God and loving the neighbour, sometimes pointing to the variance of the scriptural formulations: we are to love God “with all our heart, soul, mind and strength,” whereas we are enjoined to love our neighbour “as ourselves” (cf. Mt 22: 34-40; Mk 12: 28-34; Lk 10:25-29).1 In the Summa Theologiae, Thomas Aquinas deals with this issue under the rubric of charity (caritas) and the respective merits of the active and contemplative life (Il.n. 25-27; II.II. 179-182, 185.2, 188). In the following essay, I will analyze Aquinas’ thought on the relationship between the love of God and neighbour by examining these parts of the Summa. These articles will be the focus of my analysis as they represent the heart of Aquinas’ writing on this issue. However, I will occasionally refer to other parts of the Summa, which either reinforce, clarify or perhaps obfuscate his position.2 I will argue that Aquinas clearly emphasizes both the love of God and neighbour as constitutive elements of the moral life. However, his conception of the relationship between the two remains nebulous in various places. This essay will attempt to elucidate as far as possible the nature of the relationship between the love of God and neighbour according to Aquinas. As we shall see, his thought provides fertile ground for scholarly debate and various interpretations of the precise nature of the relationship between the love of God and neighbour. This essay will offer one possible interpretation.3

I first met Gareth thirty years ago, almost to the day. I was a guest at Quarr Abbey. I was considering on which path the Lord was leading me; he was already a monk of Quarr. It was his duty that week to serve at the guests’ table in the refectory. One day, a Friday I think, he brought in a collection of dishes that included a very unappetizing looking fish, a kind of bloater or something, and a dish of white, lumpy sauce that looked suspiciously like rice pudding. The guests eyed each other nervously while Gareth looked at us encouragingly. All of us had heard of the horrors of the monastic cuisine, so we embarked on this voyage of gastronomic discovery obediently, if not with enthusiasm. I poured the white sauce on the bloater and stoically munched my way through it. The white sauce was, of course, rice pudding. Gareth had mixed the dishes up and brought them all at the same time! The first time I was treated to his wonderful smile was when he realized his mistake and saw the rueful expression of the guests. I shall not see that smile again this side of eternity, and how it pains me.

I have always thought that this first encounter said something about both of us. It showed Gareth’s flair, sense of adventure, experimentation and imagination; all qualities that he was to show to great effect in later years. It showed my docility and sense of obedience, all qualities that have been so absent from my own life ever since, as my brethren will confirm.

Northrop Frye’s views, both on the Bible and on other works of literature, are strongly influenced by the writings of William Blake. When the University of Toronto Press published a collection of Frye’s writings on religion, it was thus very fitting that William Blake’s picture of God answering Job out of the whirlwind should be used as a frontispiece to the book. In the spirit of Blake, Frye treats the Bible as a sovereign means for the expansion of human consciousness and imagination, and I believe that this is one very useful way of looking at it. But the question between Frye and most traditional Christians is, whether it also contains, however implicitly, a message about what is so, what philosophers might call propositional content. Frye seems to hold that such propositional content as there is in traditional Christianity may be abandoned, indeed is much better abandoned.

It appears to me that Frye is a thinker of genius rather than mere talent. Quite apart from the brilliance of his work on other parts or aspects of literature, few other writers, if any, have thrown as much light as he on the way in which the Bible ‘works’ on the human mind, as an imaginative structure of narrative and imagery. But however much Christians may stand to learn from Frye’s understanding of the Bible, his views are by no means compatible with any form of orthodox Christianity. What are the outstanding differences, and what are the reasons for them?

While the resonances between classical Christian negative theology and the discourse of deconstruction have been explored for the last twenty years, there has been scant attention paid to the resonances between negative theology and the philosophical writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein. To be sure, theologians have shown much interest in Wittgenstein, but that interest often links Wittgenstein’s conception of forms of life to religious practice. Such writings have sought to view Wittgenstein in terms of philosophy of religion. In this essay, I am not concerned with Wittgenstein’s philosophy of religion, but am interested in the connections between his writings on language and the view of language held in negative theology, specifically in the writings of the Pseudo-Denys. In the same way that Mark C.Taylor, John D.Caputo et al. see similar strategies at work in negative theology and in Jacques Derrida (specifically, the connection between apophasis and differance), I see similar strategies at work in Wittgenstein and Denys. I will argue that there are important points of intersection between the two, especially on the issues of the limits of reference in language, the necessity of communal understandings for meaning, and the view of the self within a community of shared practices and shared language.

One word of explanation before I continue. In making Denys and Wittgenstein interlocutors, I am not saying they were interested in the same things. Denys was concerned about liturgy and how liturgy does or dries not praise God properly, and Wittgenstein was interested in how language works and how proper use of language frees us from philosophical problems.

Both Karl Barth and John Paul II have written extensively on marriage and procreation. Coming from different traditions, they have of course different things to say. The aim of this paper is to show that the differences between them highlight theologically important questions relating to the symbolism of marriage, the value of procreation and the parental mission. Both theologians share the view that as Christians we must see the world and human relationships in the light of the Gospel News, and so from an eschatological perspective. Both of them, therefore, hold that under the New Covenant in Christ the relationship between mankind and God and also between man and woman in marriage take on a new meaning. But, nevertheless, they differ on the importance of procreation and also on the question of the God-given parental mission. The exploration of these differences will bring to the fore the question of what moral obligations are entailed by the concept of the child as a gift, a concept espoused by both theologians. It will also bring to the fore the question of the basis of the fourth commandment.

The paper starts with a comparison between the two theologians’ views on marriage and procreation. Here it is shown why Barth considers procreation relativised under the New Covenant in Christ and so why he attaches less importance to procreation than John Paul II does. In the second part of the paper the two theologians’ views on the main role and mission of parents are discussed and it is shown why John Paul II puts the emphasis on the evangelising role of parents as Christian educators, whereas Barth stresses the symbolical role of parents as representatives of God.

Thomas states in the Prologue to the Summa theologiae that he intends to teach beginners (incipientes). This description of the Summa’s intended audience might lead us to ask what qualities identify beginners (incipientes) as beginners. Alternatively stated, we might ask what deficiencies these beginners must overcome in order to become proficient.

The Prologue itself suggests one answer to these questions. Beginning students, or as Thomas describes them in the Prologue, “novices in this doctrine” (hujus doctrinae novitios) are impeded in their efforts to learn sacred doctrine by a multiplication of useless questions, articles, and arguments. In addition, things which are necessary to a sound grasp of sacred doctrine are presented according to the order required for the exposition of a text rather than according to the order of learning. Finally, frequent repetition of material bores and confuses the student.

In his reading of the Prologue, Marie-Dominique Chenu suggested that Thomas would have understood beginners as those who lack a sufficient grasp of the intelligible principle that pervades sacred doctrine. Chenu argued that with the influx in the West of the Aristotelian corpus in the 13th century, theologians were forced to ask anew the question, “Is sacred doctrine a science?” It was in part to show that sacred doctrine is truly a science that Thomas sought to construct his Summa theologiae according to an intelligible order. This effort to show the scientific nature of sacred doctrine was no mere academic exercise, though. Effective learning required that the material taught be presented in such a way that the student might grasp the unifying principle of the material itself.