When a Western European landed his plane among African natives who gazed unbelievingly at this enormous bird, he proudly remarked, “In one day I have covered a distance which used to take me thirty”. Thereupon the wise black chieftain came forward and aSked, “Sir, what do you do with the other twenty-nine?”

Here we have the twofold possibility of man’s fundamental decision: on the one hand technological rationality, and on the other the question of the meaning of human action.

The question also of the relationship between human hopes and expectations by self-liberation, and the God-given salvation: the question of God as connected with the context of mankind’s striving for liberation. The question of God-talk is intrinsically connected with the question of human integrity and wholeness in such a way that this question of identity cannot be solved in purely theoretical terms: it includes the question of a particular life-style — contemplative and political as well. Talk about God stands under the quest of our way of life; it is governed by the question of our real concerns in life.

This document was composed by the Dominican friars who have been imprisoned in Sao Paolo since 1969. It is the outcome of their joint reflections and those of other Christian prisoners with them. It falls into three parts: a meditation on the role of the Church in the world (extensively summarized here), an account of conditions in Brazil, and a consequent justification of the revolutionary position they have adopted.

The Church is the universal sacrament of salvation, continuing in time the presence, mission and work of Christ in the world. Jesus Christ came to make salvation a reality, and his whole life, including his death and resurrection, was a witness of love. The mission of the Church is to continue this living witness of love, and the Church is essentially missionary, sent to the world to witness to Jesus Christ among men.

The Church cannot exist on the fringe of the world; it is in the world and has to be constantly present to the world, since it is there that its mission lies, as light to the world, salt of the earth, the leaven in the dough. This is why the Council produced a Constitution on the Church in the World of Today.

For most Catholics, a prayer meeting is a new and perhaps disturbing experience. However, in recent years an increasing number of Catholics have been meeting to pray together, in silence or in spoken prayer as they feel led by the Spirit; so it may be useful, for both enthusiasts and critics, to consider in general terms the advantages, objectives and principles of prayer meetings, and to face frankly the dangers and possible errors to which they are liable.

The basic principle of group prayer is the teaching of our Lord, that ‘where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in their midst’ (Matt. 18, 20), and that ‘if two of you agree about anything on earth in prayer, it shall be granted’ (18, 19). For we are together the Body of Christ, and as such ‘members of one another’ (Eph. 4, 25). As Christians, we belong together; it is therefore natural and proper that we should exercise our most specifically Christian privilege of prayer together. This is what much of the recent liturgical renewal has been about.

Group prayer obviously falls into two kinds: formal, liturgical prayer, and spontaneous, free prayer. Originally, of course, these two were not separate. Even the Eucharistic Prayer, the Canon of the Mass, was originally extemporized by the celebrant. And it is clear that in the worship of the early Church the whole assembly would take part in various ways (except perhaps the women—and there St Paul may have been dealing with the particular situation!). Whether we shall ever return to this, or even whether it would be a good thing to return to this, I do not know. In any case, our situation is different, and we do have to distinguish between set prayer and spontaneous prayer.

“Fido is wagging his tail in heaven to-night”. According to Evelyn Waugh, this was the greeting sent out from Forest Lawn to the owners on the anniversaries of their pets buried in the cemetrey. No one, of course, asked if the owners would also deserve a place in heaven if they had killed their dogs by overfeeding or whether the latter would have the joy of interrupting the heavenly choirs by their barking. But the false assumption behind this attitude was perhaps less the hope of reunion with animal friends than the idea of a heaven where we shall all congregate cosily with our pets and former neighbours. If some of us do not relish the prospect of an eternal menagerie, can we nevertheless in all charity welcome the company of human beings who never hurt us but often threaten to bore us to death?

Even from traditional theology we get the impression that we shall not be troubled with bores, but equally that our joy in the beatific vision will be solitary and even then frustrated by the delay in the restoration of the body or by a reunion with the soul to which it will be no more than a glorified appendage. We look for the restoration of the whole personality, redeemed in Christ and therefore in Christ’s company and in the company of those we have loved on earth. The lonely person in particular asks if the affection of his or her pet, expressed in an outstretched paw, in a purring response, is not somehow transfigured also and not forever extinguished.

Since Vatican II great progress has been made towards an ecumenical understanding and appreciation of our Blessed Lady, even as there has been a certain development in Catholic understanding. This essay looks briefly at Reformation mariologies, those of Luther, Calvin and Zwingli before moving on to consider three Scots: John Knox, Edwin Muir and John Macquarrie. Arguably, John Macquarrie has shown one of the most careful retrievals of Marian theology, not least in his Principles of Christian Theology and Mary for All Christians. His final mariological sounding took him back to his Celtic roots, and is summarized here. John Macquarrie died in 2007, and this essay is dedicated to his memory.

I have long been puzzled by the Gospel prediction that at the resurrection I shall become like an angel in heaven. What does it mean, and did Jesus really say it? What follows is an attempt to settle the matter. I shall be arguing that the passage in its original form envisaged a non-corporeal existence (contrary to the view of some recent writers), but that it does not go back to Jesus.

After routing the Pharisees and Herodians and turning on the scribes, Mark’s Jesus in 12:18-27 slaps down the Sadducees. The Sadducees, who disbelieve in the doctrine of a resurrection, argue that Moses would never have prescribed levirate marriage (Deut 25:5-10) if he had believed in an afterlife, because of the confusion it would cause in extreme cases, such as that of a woman who married seven brothers in succession.1 Jesus defends the doctrine with the hard saying, ‘They are as angels in heaven’ (12:25), and goes on to argue for the doctrine of the resurrection on the strength of what to the present-day reader is very tendentious exegesis of an Old Testament passage: the fact that God calls himself ‘the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob’ in Exodus proves that the dead rise.

My prime purpose here is, as I have said, to examine the meaning of the words ‘They are as angels in heaven’ and to see whether it is likely that they go back to Jesus. It will be necessary, however, to look at the passage as a whole. The words attributed to Jesus in Mk 12:24-27 are:

In a pace-setting paper recently published in New Blackfriars, Fergus Kerr argues that Cartesian assumptions and presuppositions have entered so deeply into the thinking of the West that even those who profess to follow other traditions of thought can often be found to be working within the Cartesian paradigm. Here I hope to develop just one of the many lines of inquiry to which Father Kerr has pointed, arguing that there is a convergence between Cartesian anthropology on the one hand and the productive relations of capitalism on the other. Beyond this, I shall try to suggest that this convergence can tentatively be documented so as to form a real part of the “history of ideas” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, rather than left as no more than an abstract, analytical congruence or aptness of fit.

The theoretical argument is straightforward and can be concisely stated. Thomist anthropology and psychology propose a unitary conception of man and of the relationship between soul and body. Kerr pertinently reminds us (p. 255) of Aquinas’s commentary on I Corinthians 15, and quotes his memorable reference to the soul as pars corporis humani. This unity is found in all living things, in vegetables, for example, and in “brutes”; the rational soul in man, moreover, is no exception to this unitary principle. A corollary of this is that, as Kenny puts it, “a human being is not something that has a body; it is a body, a living body of a particular kind”.

Thirty years ago the very idea of including the Rhineland mystics in a series of articles on the role of the Dominicans in the promotion of peace and social justice would have been seen as intolerably bizarre. At that time it was still widely taken for granted that mysticism and dedication to the promotion of social justice were irreconcilable: that they belonged to profoundly different ways of understanding the world and understanding the teaching of Jesus Christ. There were, of course, some remarkable people who seemed to be able to keep a foot in both the camps, but lesser mortals who attempted this were in danger of not being taken seriously by the occupants of either.

In spite of the massive changes which have taken place since then in politics, the culture and the Church, even today the presence of the Dominican Rhineland mystics in this series demands some explanation. By ‘the Dominican Rhineland mystics’ we mean, first and foremost, three friars of the Dominican Province of Teutonia: the brilliant but controversial Meister Eckhart (c.1260-c.1328) and two of his disciples, Johannes Tauler (c.1300-1361) and Henry Suso (1295-1366). At first sight the only things which these men seem to share in common with, for instance, the French Dominican worker-priests of the 1950s or the Brazilian Dominican liberation theologians of the 1970s are membership of the same religious order and considerable strength of character.

After all, Frank Tobin has said that Eckhart’s sermons ‘center so exclusively on what is within and are so utterly devoid of any comments that might be used as references to time and place that they might just as well have been delivered on the moon as in turbulent fourteenth-century Strasburg or Cologne.’

That there are social, political and economic problems in India is a fact that needs no proof. The task of the believer in this situation can be spoken of in line with the general understanding of revelation which encourages the Christian to act like Christ, who gave himself unto death; to act like the apostles who spent themselves for their brethren, because our fellow men are members of Christ and in order that the peace willed by Christ may reign in this world. Yet such a description of the task of the Christian leaves his role as regards the structures of human society relatively undefined.

In India today, there is the effort to analyse the structures themselves and establish Christian positions in dealing with them, so as to re-construct a social order in which sin as a structuring element is less present.

The present article seeks to present the general lines of the approach followed by Indian theologians and then try to offer, for the information and comment of Western theologians, certain approaches by which the theology of liberation as formulated for and in India could have an impact in regard to other approaches to the theology of liberation.

Even the most systematic considerations in the matter of the theology of liberation are formulated as “hypotheses”. The present article seeks to present some of the present approaches to the theology of liberation in India. Admittedly, it is a difficult task to synthesize the perspectives of the analyses of Indian society already made and the “projects” suggested due to the “particularity” of the viewpoint of each author. But it is necessary to make some attempt in order to set our comments in perspective.

Catholics are so accustomed to be shocked or disillusioned by popular books on social science, that they may well be tempted to give these new Pelicans a wide berth. This would be a mistake, for both are well-written, pleasantly informative, and contain much encouragement for those who do not despair of welding Catholic principles info the British way of life. In Peter Archer’s symposium one will find a keen recognition of the importance of stable family life, a warm acceptance of the need for voluntary effort to supplement state action and a thoroughly wholesome attitude to officials. They should be supported and assisted in the performance of their duties, one gathers, but firmly protected by a wide-awake proletariat from any temptation to dictatorship.

Social Welfare and the Citizen makes no pretext of giving a complete picture of the modem Welfare State. Those topics have been selected for discussion which prove to be ‘the most constant source of practical difficulty to the citizen’. Several of the essays are entirely factual, those for example which deal with Income Tax, National Insurance, Landlord and Tenant, Public Health, Property and Town Planning, Law and the Motorist. No comment is required except a word of praise for their clarity and accuracy. But most of the contributors have made some effort to show the historic background of the service they are describing and to indicate in what ways it needs reform. In an excellent chapter on National Assistance Mr R. E. Prentice reminds us that the old Poor Law of 1601 established a ‘public responsibility for the relief of distress’, impeccable in principle, but discharged over the centuries ‘with a strange mixture of charity and harshness’. A curious feature of the relief of the destitute in this country has been the movement away from local to centralized administration in the interests of humanity. The old Boards of Guardians based on the parishes were notoriously the best-hated institutions

Henri de Lubac's Corpus Mysticum, published during and immediately after the conditions of wartime France, had a profound influence on the theology and actual practice of not only Catholic, but also much Protestant liturgy in the course of the unfolding liturgical movement. The interpretative keys of the text were established primarily by Michel de Certeau and Hans Urs von Balthasar, and have emphasised a historical shift from understanding in the connections between a threefold hermeneutic of Christ's ‘mystical body’. The ‘mystical body’ is variously understood as the Eucharist itself, the extant body of the Church, and the actual body of Christ. The conventional reading of this text is to claim that de Lubac traces a shift, occurring in the High Middle Ages that points away from the body of the Church to an objectification of the eucharistic species, resulting in the highly individualistic piety that manifested itself in the Catholicism of the nineteenth century. This paper challenges that hermeneutic key as an oversimplification of a much more subtle reading suggested by de Lubac himself and intrinsic to the text of Corpus Mysticum, and suggests that de Lubac understood the real shift to be the triumph of a certain kind of rationalism, exemplified by Berengar's thought, emerging to assert itself as the basis and ground of theological thinking, eclipsing the grounding character of the liturgy as the source of meaning in theology. It examines de Lubac's late claim that Corpus Mysticum was ‘a naïve text’ and asks what kinds of naïvety are indicated in this statement.