The election of Giacomo Della Chiesa as Pope Benedict XV coincided with the outbreak of the First World War. His pacifism led to vigorous attempts to halt the war, which failed because of the Vatican's isolation and poor diplomatic prestige. The most notable attempt was Benedict Peace Note of 1917 that set out seven proposals for negotiating peace. Despite Benedict's failure to alter the course of the war, his diplomatic efforts were matched by humanitarian action on behalf of prisoners of war and famished children. Benedict's legacy has been greater diplomatic resources for the Vatican and an energetic search for peace.

A prolonged (yet telescoped) rendition of the chequered history of relations between Christianity and Islam, as each religious community operated out of different political contexts, illustrates diverse modes of interaction, from disputation to mutual illumination via a shared Hellenic philosophical tradition. A theological probe takes us to the heart of Christian teaching—the triune God—only to unveil remarkable affinities with Islamic developments regarding divine unity. The key to our entire exploration—intellectual humility—functions specially well here: recognizing the comparable logics of revelation, as well as acknowledging the power of these revelations to transform human beings into holy men and women, should motivate us to attempt to reconcile apparent contradictions between Abrahamic faiths in a manner similar to the way philosophical theologians of these traditions proceeded in the Middle Ages to reconcile their respective revelations with reason. A tactic axial to this analysis compares Qur'an with Jesus, rather than Qur'an and Bible, to show the fruitfulness of this more coherent approach. Support from both traditions for a pervasive attitude of intellectual humility shows how to open ways forward.

One of Catherine of Siena's principal teachings is self‐knowledge, i.e., knowledge of oneself and knowledge of God. Catherine adapted the Christian spiritual tradition on the subject and presented it anew using a number of ingenious images such as a well, a cell within a cell, a peaceful sea, a mirror. So important was self‐knowledge in her life and teaching that she came to regard it as virtually prayer itself.

I have chosen a strange subject to celebrate the centenary of Thomas Aquinas here, at Oxford. Is it not paradoxical, if not a little provocative, to speak of ‘St Thomas and the Spirit of Ecumenism’? For several reasons great caution is to be recommended.

First of all, there can only be ecumenism if one accepts the other as other, that he also has insights, that he has something to give. Now St Thomas lived in an epoch of a Christianity very sure of itself, and even, one can say, of a latin Catholicism loyal to the Pope as its head, absolutely assured of its legitimacy and its truth. England was certainly no exception. In these circumstances, what could possibly have been an ecumenical dialogue? Heretics were to be ‘exterminated’: that does not mean killed, but driven far away, chased from the land; though the process of ‘exclusion’ could culminate in physical destruction. One thinks of the cathars of Montségur. Listen to this account of an indicative incident. It happened at Cluny, at the beginning of the reign of St Louis, who recounted the episode to Joinville: ‘There was a great conference of clerics and Jews at the monastery of Cluny. There was a knight there . . . , who stood up and leaning on his crutch, asked that the greatest cleric and the greatest master of the Jews he brought to him. And so they were. . . . “Master”, said the knight, “I ask you if you believe that the Virgin Mary, who carried God in her womb and in her arms, gave birth while remaining a virgin and that she is the mother of God”. And the Jew replied that he did not believe a word of it. . . . “Truly”, said the knight, “You will pay for it”. And then he lifted up his crutch and struck the Jew near the ear and knocked him to the ground. And the Jews fled, carrying away their master, badly wounded, and thus ended the conference’.

One of the problems confronting the doctrine of the Incarnation concerns Jesus’ apparent limitation in knowledge. This paper assesses various constructive proposals by modern theologians and philosophers, focusing on three of the most widely discussed solutions, namely Ontological Kenoticism, Two Consciousnesses Model, and Divine Subconscious Model. I argue that despite recent work done on the first two, the difficulties of avoiding the implication that the Logos ceased to be divine (for the first) and the implication of Nestorianism (for the second) remain. I conclude that the most promising solution is to defend Functional Kenoticism and develop the Divine Subconscious Model.

Medical and/or social gender transition need not involve denial of one's biological sex, but raises other taxing ethical issues. These range from sexual ethics issues narrowly understood to consideration of the claims of any spouse or children and indeed, of gender-discordant younger people who may follow one's example. As with intersex conditions, not all crossdressing or use of cross-sex hormones is excluded absolutely. Detransition, for example, could be rightly deferred for various reasons. However, as illustrated by the analogy of an infertile woman wanting to present as the pregnant mother of a child she plans to adopt, there is a significant social value in accurate bodily and other outward communication of one's actual/predominant sex (and occupancy of key allied roles).

Thomas Aquinas has a philosophy of education. In this article I try to indicate what it amounts to by focusing not only on his theoretical discussions of teaching and learning but also on what can be gleaned about his approach to teaching by looking at his own teaching practice as displayed in some of his writings. In addition, I look at two of Aquinas's sermons that shed light on what he thinks about teaching and learning.

Desire is examined here with a view to informing a theological response to capitalism. The notion of mimetic desire offered by René Girard is used as a starting point, Girard's ideas being brought into critical engagement with, first, other intersubjective accounts, namely those offered by Alexandre Kojève and by psychoanalysis in its Freudian and Lacanian variants; and then the account of desire as productive becoming offered by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in which the link to capitalism is explicit. It is suggested that both mimetic desire and its productive counterpart can be understood as asserting the priority of desire itself over both subject and object. The possibilities for framing a coherent theological account of desire which is both mimetic and productive are then assessed with reference to Bernard of Clairvaux, Aquinas and Augustine, noting that accepting a metaphysics of participation makes plausible a productive desire which is nonetheless coded as a mimesis of the divine precedent. Such a conclusion brings into relief the inevitable difficulty of reconciling Christian and capitalist economies of desire.

Even in war-time men cannot think only of what they are doing here and now. Their desire goes beyond the immediate job; and when their outer world falls to bits they turn to God, if they believe in Him and seek Him, or to the Future that is always going to be so much better than the past, or to their own souls. Belief that the human soul is somehow, vaguely, ‘divine’ is intensified by the horrors that surround it and to which it seems a stranger even while it directs them. The sense of the strangeness of man’s soul in this world, of its unconformity to the outer madness, causes wonder; and wonder has traditionally found expression, in England, in the individual voice of poets. Yet as a citizen and in public the poet is expected not merely to draw poetry from the situation, but to relate it back to the situation. He must be practical, he must provide propaganda or, in the -widest sense of the word, amusement. If Shakespeare is ever played nowadays, he is expected, officially at least, either to help people to forget the War completely or to make them remember it all the more intensely. Teach us to forget ourselves for a night. Teach us to remember ourselves to-night so that to-morrow we may fight like Englishmen.

It is said that Plato’s discussions of love and friendship in the Lysis and Symposium, unlike those of Aristotle, allow little place for love or affection towards individuals. Scholars have arrived at this conclusion by several routes. It is thought that Aristotle more genuinely appreciates the specificity of human affections and friendships: friends for the Stagirite are considered ‘the greatest of external goods’; those who have regulated their passions to such a degree that they are unmoved by particular instances of beauty ‘are simply not human’.

Aristotle’s emphasis upon friendship itself as ‘the beautiful thing’ has been central to the recent burgeoning scholarly interest in the topic of friendship. Studies have appeared in many disciplinary areas and from many perspectives: historical, philosophical and sociological.

Alongside these, a number of theological reflections upon this theme have been produced, addressing friendship in its late antique context, or else examining mediaeval understandings of charity and its link with protocols of personal affiliation and friendship. More recently still, Jacques Derrida has produced his ambivalently- received Politiques de l’amitié? in which his deconstructive impulse applies itself variously from Plato and Aristotle all the way to Montaigne and the controversial political theorist Carl Schmitt. There has also been an increasing engagement with classical negotiations of the theme of friendship.

No description quite captures the fragmentation through which our culture is passing. Post modem, new age, deconstruction, immanentism, emotivism, all are usefully employed — none quite turns the key. In general we may say not that there are no narratives, but that the received narrative, the foundational cosmology, the consensus about ultimate reality upon which our societies formerly concurred have receded. Moreover, at least in affluent cultures, the mourning about dwindling consensus is past. Rather than writhe in anxiety before religious fragmentation, people simply accept as the one “luminously self evident reality” that they are alone in the universe making their own meaning. Confusion exists as to what theology is, and what real theologians are. Walter Kasper writes, “It is unfortunately not a redundancy to say that, especially today, a theological theology is the need of the hour.”

Do It Yourself Culture

Perhaps our present phase can be fairly described as a spiritual do it yourself culture in which God, faith, morality and the future are for each and every person what each decides they are. Appreciation of expertise, theological training, the religious wisdom of the centuries, is suspended. Religion, says Cambridge’s Don Cupitt, is “wholly of the world, wholly human, wholly our own responsibility”. Eclecticism, picking and choosing from traditional religions and from new constructs, is increasingly common. The “spiritual” remains important. But the wholly transcendent is questioned. Far from being without spiritual narratives, ours is an age in which there are almost as many stories as there are tellers.

Ritual is pre-eminently a form of communication. Let us turn therefore to a modern sociologist who conducts research among ourselves into different patterns of communication. Professor Basil Bernstein says that

He distinguishes two different types of linguistic codes. One, he calls the elaborated code, in which, as he says, the speaker selects from a wide range of syntactic alternatives, and these are flexibly organized; this speech requires complex planning. In the other, which he calls the restricted code, the speaker draws a much narrower range of syntactic alternatives, and these alternatives are more rigidly organized. The elaborated code is adapted to enable a speaker to make his own intentions explicit. It is adapted to the elucidation of general principles.

The whole question of the moral aspect of psychotherapy is, it seems to me, a vast and intricate one, and one which has as yet been given little serious and thoroughgoing consideration. This is due in part to the fact that contemporary psychotherapeutic theory and practice is in so variegated, amorphous and contradictory a state that few generalisations about it are possible, let alone any critical examination of it as a whole in the light of any body of ethical principles. It is possible, indeed, to take the written works of a given writer on psychological theory and methods and to subject them to ethical scrutiny, and a certain amount of work of varying merit has been done in this direction; work which is itself, perhaps, by no means impervious to serious criticism. But even such work as this, within its own inevitable limitations, is not always very practically helpful. The theoretical expositions of psychologists and the accounts which they give of their methods are not infrequently both better and worse than their actual practice; and in any case do not afford very adequate material for judgment and discussion on the part of those who themselves lack either active or passive psychotherapeutic experience.

But the practical urgency of the problem is too acute to allow us to wait indefinitely for some decisive and all-inclusive ethico-psychotherapeutical synthesis. The problem is brought home to most of us in its most challenging and concrete form when the question arises of committing ourselves or others to psychological treatment. Do we not, in doing so, risk the undermining of our moral principles, perhaps of our religion and our faith? Rumours have reached us, perhaps, of alleged psychotherapists who, after long and costly weeks of treatment, prescribe some such homely old palliatives as a dose of fornication, divorce, cutting loose from hearth and home, or some other form of uncleanness, injustice or impiety.

The total number of Catholic sociologists in Great Britain could fit comfortably at the back of the Clapham omnibus. Among the many exotic ideological species of sociologists, the feminists, the cat fanciers, and the vegetarians, it is reasonable to assume a believing Catholic could be found somewhere. Those found seem to occupy a peculiar ideological limbo, their religious and sociological gaze doomed to be misunderstood by Church and discipline alike. This tiny band of sociological hopers forms a dispersed breed, invisible in their own Church, and for some, best kept so; within their discipline, they seem as a holy huddle on a tiny rock discernable in a sea of analytical uncertainty, odd, but interesting. Doubtless every occupation carries a burden, a witness to a calling out of improbable circumstances.

Although some sociologists wear their ideological beliefs heavily in public, most carry their burdens privately. Few biographies of sociologists have been written, and even fewer about those who are also Catholic. Sociologists are a reticent breed, and theologically they are unlikely to be able to say much about why they believe in Catholicism. Doubtless coming back to Catholicism was a surprise for some: maybe reading Althusser by candlelight, or an account of the ceremonies of the Dinka in bed, or spotting the moral similarities between the plight of Goffman’s actor and Job in a pub, drove some unsteadily further along the road to Damascus. To be a Catholic and a sociologist is to occupy a place not necessarily of one’s own choosing.