Dr Jack Goody has over a period of twenty years done extensive fieldwork in northern Ghana, mainly among the LoDagaa (more commonly known as the Dagarti) and the Gonja. In both areas, he has exercised very satisfactorily the normal skills of the anthropologist dutifully recording the size of farming groups, and the ways inheritances are divided. However, farms are cultivated, and inheritances shared by human beings, who use language and live in time; and Goody’s awareness of this has made him responsible for three books which related the history and literature (both written and oral) of northern Ghana to a wider world. In Technology, Tradition and the State in Africa Dr Goody argued that Ghanian history is significantly influenced not only by the means of production, but also by the means of destruction, the horse, associated with Islam and the savannas, and guns, associated with Christendom and the forests. In a contribution to Literacy in Traditional Societies Dr Goody showed in the West African context, but with obviously much wider relevance, that the break-through to literacy may lead not towards secularization, but rather to mythifying and mystifying to a much greater degree than before. In The Myth of the Bagre Goody has not only increased the available corpus of African oral literature by giving us the original texts and annotated translations of the two long Bagre poems, but has also indicated its place in the religion and world-view of the LoDagaa and its relevance to contemporary discussions of myth.

The LoDagaa are not, strictly speaking, a ‘tribe’ in the colonialist sense of an obviously distinctive group, sharply distinguished from their neighbouring tribes. As happens in a number of areas in Africa, this particular area of northern Ghana is marked by a lack of coincidence between cultural and linguistic boundaries, and by the gradual way cultural differences appear with gradually increasing distance. Even the term has been selected for use to cover a given area by Dr Goody, albeit with some justification in local usage.

I have written this paper on the basis of the hunch that there is something very misleading about the relationship, as Marx sometimes describes it, between the scientific analysis of society and morality. I have the hunch, also, that many of Marx’s followers have been misled in the way one would expect them to be, given his false clues. I should say, however, that this suspicion of confusion concerns more what Marx and his followers call by the name ‘morality’ than what they offer as a method and a substance for the analysis of society. This misleading confusion is that Marx and subsequent Marxists more or less explicitly define their stance as scientists by way of contrast with the status the moralist or moral theorist is, on their view, supposed to have. I shall not discuss in any detail the various ways in which this false contrast has been made out. Rather I shall mention some guiding lines of thought which lead to it.

The hypothesis which I will offer as an alternative to this contrast is simply that it would best serve both clarity and the history of moral thought if we were to agree on the following proposition: Marxism, as the science of society is, if a true science, nothing but morality and morality nothing but Marxism. Hence, the judgments about how to act which may be based on the results of that science, if true, are moral judgments. If, however, the science has produced more than trivially false results it is nothing but vice to act, or want to act on the judgments about acting which are entailed by them. The question, therefore, whether Marxism is or is not identical with morality is, to my mind, an empirical question, to be settled one way or the other by reference to the very same facts which show it to offer either crucially true or else false statements about contemporary society.

This article takes as its point of departure Roderick Strange’s interesting article ‘Faith and Theology in the University’ but it is not really intended as another contribution to the somewhat closed debate on the place of Theology in the University. That is a fairly specialized question which theologians tend to worry about when their public relations have grown particularly remote, but has little reference to anyone outside their context, and may reasonably be left to them to resolve.

The problems implied in it, though, are not confined to the University context for several reasons; first, the privilege of having sufficient time to give thought to the health of one’s own religion is not the prerogative solely of dons and undergraduates; secondly, a lot of people read books which have been conceived and realized in the context of the University but are not themselves in a position to take account of what that genetic context has had to do with the making of the book; and, thirdly, the tensions between faith and reason do not confine themselves to professional theologians, but are part and parcel of every man’s consciousness.

Roderick Strange’s solution to the question, ‘Should the academic theologian permit his own faith to be involved in his professional activity?’ seems to me to be based on treacherous ground in the form of Dr Ian Ramsey’s rather unsatisfactory contribution to the problems of religious language. This latter debate has not yet made any real progress I think, and will continue to be unsatisfactory so long as it remains an eclectic science taking only piecemeal ideas, now from linguistics, now from literary criticism, with the result that it does justice to neither and leaves its own problems unresolved.

The contemporary world is characterized by rapid and intense activity. Yet, sometimes as an understandable reaction to the feverishness of haste, at other times for the very success of activity, there are worldwide manifestations of a drive towards greater interiority.

Asia today is an interesting example of the activity-interiority tension. Even apart from the too facile generalizations of comparative sociology, Asia remains the place where of set purpose interiority is passionately sought, even at the expense of activity. Yet Asia today is one of the most exciting fields of the action-conquest of reality. Asian action is therefore distinguished by its inherent reference to concomitant reflective interiority.

It is against this background that the Church has to work out its corporate renewal and reform. And in summary form the theme of the present article is that a continuing interaction of liturgy and a system of interiority-seeking, such as the Ignatian Exercises, provides the ideal framework for the renewal of the Church in Asia, as indeed anywhere else.

The liturgy is the most potent means of spiritual renewal for both individual Christians and for communities. This is so all over the world, but is particularly true in Asia, where the external sign and symbol have always had an important pageant value in themselves, even apart from the reality they indicate.

But in order to lead to effective and drastic renewal and reform the liturgy must proceed from the deepest inner realization and acceptance of all that it implies. It is here that the Ignatian Exercises can play a powerful role in the action-reflection dialectic by leading to a greater interior preparedness for meaningful liturgy. And fortunately the Exercises seem to be gaining ground on Asian soil.

Cardinal Heenan’s pastoral letter on the importance of retaining Catholic schools even at an increased financial burden to the Catholic community has provoked these reflections on religious education.

The bible or major talking point in religious education today is the Schools’ Council Working Paper 36 put out by the Project on Religious Education in Secondary Schools based on the University of Lancaster. Many teachers, including Catholic teachers, have been working on this project. The fundamental premiss of much of the thinking of this group, and of such pioneer groups such as the SHAP working party on world religions, is that an adequate understanding of religion can only be achieved in the context of learning not only about the child’s own religion (if he has one) but also about other major world faiths. The rationale for this stance varies from one apologist to another: we live in ‘one’ world; we are part of a multireligious society—these are commonplaces. A more valid reason is, perhaps, that we have now reached a stage of self-consciousness in the West such that, even those souls who are naturally religious, let alone the majority who are not, are no longer content with understanding religion only from the inside: they seek also to understand it from the outside, from the stance of the anthropologist, the sociologist, the psychologist, and the philosopher. Another important movement in a related field is that which seeks to understand how schools can best perform the task of the moral education of children.

These new approaches to religious and moral education have made their impact on Catholic education as much as anywhere else. Cardinal Heenan assumes, somewhat naively, that the purpose of Catholic colleges is to produce teachers capable of teaching the Catholic religion to Catholic children in the context of a Catholic school. There are different ways of understanding this proposition as can be seen by recent disputes in the field of catechetics.

Of course, a serious question deserves a serious answer, but is importance necessarily associated with solemnity, especially if the problem is unlikely to be solved in the immediate future? Might it not be possible or even desirable in such a situation to relax, if only for the moment, and treat the problem neither indifferently nor lugubriously, but with a certain degree of panache or even irresponsibility—for our own sakes, if nobody else’s? Such thoughts were prompted by reading through one particular controversy among English-speaking Catholics during the eighteenth century. At the time, many Catholics were dissatisfied with the attitudes and laws of the Church, not least on the issue of celibacy. Furthermore, these critics, no doubt largely influenced by the temper of the time, regarded themselves as liberal and enlightened in their own religious approach. How then were they to regard the clerical ‘vert’?

In 1784, Charles Henry Wharton, one of the first American Jesuits, published A Letter to the Roman Catholics of the City of Worcester where he had previously served as chaplain, giving his reasons for joining the Anglican Church. This pamphlet, first published in Philadelphia and reprinted in London about three months later, was particularly successful because it was, to use the publisher’s phrase, written in ‘a spirit of moderation and liberality’. Wharton was answered by, among others, John Carroll, the first American Bishop, and William Pilling in A Caveat addressed to the Catholics of Worcester (London, 1785). Pilling in turn was answered by a former Benedictine, John Hawkins, in An Appeal to Scripture, Reason, & Tradition which supported Wharton’s Letter, while Joseph Berington replied in his Reflections addressed to The Rev. John Hawkins (Birmingham, 1785).