Promoting ecological awareness and sustainability of God's creation is now considered as a primary task of the CST. However, from its beginning with Rerum Novarum, CST emphasizes the promotion of social justice and equity, and highlights the dangers of economic inequalities between richer and poorer nations and the need for distributive justice. To that effect, human development was its central theme, which is favored by the dominion mandate and is known nowadays as the Anthropocene. Important documents like Gaudium et Spes and Populorum Progressio are illustrative for this anthropocentric stance, while less attention is given to the wellbeing of nonhuman creatures and natural ecosystems. Nevertheless, from Octogesima Adveniens onwards, the CST starts to look into environmental issues. Pope Francis' Laudato Si' in 2015 introduces a significant shift by referring to nonhuman creatures as ‘our fellow creatures’, thereby extending ‘intrinsic value’ to all nonhuman creatures. In his integral ecology, he promotes a sustainable and integral development that favors the wellbeing of both human and natural environments. In this article, we assess Laudato Si's view on sustainability and integral development in confrontation with the wider framework of the Planetary Boundaries's concept of sustainable development.

Theology is both a human endeavor and something of Divine origin, insofar as it is a human attempt to make sense of certain Divinely revealed propositions. How does one reconcile these two elements? One attempt to do so was on the part of the Anglican theologian Rowan Williams. In sections I and II of chapter 1 of his work ‘On Christian Theology’, Williams speaks of the nature of authentic theological discourse, that is, theological discourse that has integrity. In his work on theological integrity, Williams explores how human intentions or hidden agendas can potentially warp our attempt to make sense of the truths contained within Divine Revelation. He then goes on to speak of how to avoid such pitfalls. In this article, I will respond to the epistemological implications of William's thoughts on this topic. I will use various ideas from Catholic theology, including the development of doctrines and the notion that faith has both a subjective and objective element, to explore both the strengths and weaknesses of Williams's thought.

The phrase ‘a spiritual space’ is used by Certeau at the end of his brief analysis of hagiographic material in ‘A Variant: Hagio-Graphical Edification’. The essay is one of three explorations in the production of certain topographies of the other found in The Writing of History. The spiritual space is another of Certeau’s non-places. Hagiography announces that a “non-place is here a discourse of places.” That is how he concludes the essay. What I wish to demonstrate in this essay is the way spiritual topoi govern Certeau’s understanding of the production of space both in its heterological and non-heterological forms. These spiritual spaces are profoundly theological in character and liturgical in economy. The direction of my argument, therefore, emphasizes, again, the importance of reading Certeau’s project theologically.

‘Spiritual spaces’ are not at the centre of Certeau’s work; they make that work possible. Other forms of space are focused upon and it is by mapping out these spaces that alternative places are opened up. I wish to examine three kinds of space explored, in fact, produced, in Certeau’s work. They correspond to three different epochs of time and three kinds of utopia [which, following the work of Louis Marin on Thomas More needs to be understood as both outopia (no-place) and Utopia (a good place)]. In outlining these three spaces, Certeau’s concerns with ethnography, speaking and texts at the dawn of modernity come more clearly into focus.

The Rational Utopia

The first space I will term, after Certeau, the ‘rational utopia’. It is the space produced by the closed system, what Certeau will describe as “a bubble of panoptic and classifying power, a module of imprisonment that makes possible production of an order.”

In The Grain of Wheat, Hans Urs von Balthasar quotes St. Basil on the intent contemplation of God's works. In Letters to Malcolm, C. S. Lewis speaks of making “every pleasure into a channel of adoration”, by praising “these pure and spontaneous pleasures” as “‘patches of Godlight’ in the woods of our experience.” According to Iris Murdoch, such attentiveness requires a degree of “selflessness” that resembles aesthetic contemplation and— it may be inferred — prayerful reflection. Using these passages and others by Kathleen Norris and Simone Weil, this essay offers related perspectives on the process and the effects of attentiveness, in poetry and prayer. Poets practise, and thereby teach an attentiveness that is analogous to that achieved in certain forms of prayer. Prayer, like poetry, gives thanks for the mysteries — even as it seeks to understand and respond to the injustices and sufferings — of life. Denise Levertov illustrates in her poetry an awareness of how such attentiveness can be productive, in her late religious poems especially.

Nobody who cares about the future of religious life should fail to study the recent essay on the subject by Jerome Murphy O’Connor, an Irish Dominican who teaches at the Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem— an entire issue of Supplement to Doctrine and Life is given over to it (No. 45, May-June, 1973). What he has to say is so illuminating that it is worth repeating the main idea here, adding some comments and observations to back up his argument.

1—The raison d’etre of religious life

The question of priorities is crucial. What service do religious have to offer the Church and society? As they proceed to retrenchment and reform, the dilemma that confronts religious today is as follows: are they to decide what work they should be doing (teaching, nursing, preaching, whatever) and then allow the style of their life to be determined by that, or are they to make the form and quality of their community life the priority? Fr Murphy O’Connor is categorical : ‘What is important is that religious recognize that the primary service they render to the Church and to the world is the witness of their life together as a community’. Though religious increasingly do regard their service to the Church and to society as teachers, nurses, preachers, etc., as the primary determinant and seek to define the nature of religious life in terms then of work, this job- oriented approach in fact distorts religious life and leads to the disintegration of religious orders and communities.

For how can religious define and justify their existence as religious primarily in terms of the jobs they undertake ? Does a woman have to become a nun in order to teach or to nurse ?

The central tenet of the distributist thesis is a wide-spread diffusion of private ownership, and perhaps our first task should be to show that property privately owned accords with the precepts of natural law. Possession of material things is a right of man, because, being created with reason and will, he is to that extent master of the material world, and the natural destiny of the latter is to serve his needs. But possession does not necessarily imply private ownership. There are, for example, communal forms of ownership. The right of individuals to possess private property is not therefore an absolute precept of natural law. But both reason and experience prove that communal ownership, as a general mode of human possession, is unsatisfactory. Aristotle calls it an occasion of strife, and it is almost inconceivable that, with human beings as they are, such a system generally applied could fail to cause constant quarrelling, interfere grievously with primary production, and weaken the bonds that unite the family.

Private ownership, provided it be equitably distributed and does not claim excessive powers, has none of these defects. Moreover the whole trend of the Church’s teaching, especially in the famous encyclicals of Leo XIII and Pius XI, as well as in several allocutions of the present Pope, has been in its favour.

But from the starting point of wide-spread private property Distributism enters a field that comprises politics, economy, and human relationships. In this era of finance-industrialism it is revolutionary in its aims. It is in open and unique opposition to the prevalent trends of modern life.

In the early 1930s the artist Stanley Spencer committed himself to working on the never-achieved Church-House project. It was intended to reflect his understanding of God and religion as love, and, furthermore, of the sacred being fully integrated in secular times and places. The first painting he finished for the project was Villagers and Saints (1933), now in the collection of the University of Hull. This paper uses Villagers and Saints as a way into a reading of Spencer's work, drawing on insights from Charles Taylor's A Secular Age to explore how Spencer sacramentalises the material world. The first part of the paper contextualises Villagers and Saints, and the second part identifies its vision with what appears to have been a conversion experience, discussed by Spencer in his public writing.

Matthew’s gospel contains passages difficult for Jewish Christian relations for the final text, as we have it, seems to contain passages hostile to Jews which irritate Jewish Christian dialogue. History, however, may show these so called ‘anti Semitic’ passages of this gospel in a new, and quite different light.

The key text which today causes perhaps the greatest agony for those involved in Jewish Christian dialogue is the verse in the passion narrative of Matthew’s gospel: Mt. 27: 25 ‘His blood be upon us and upon our children’. For these commentators, the idiom ‘his blood be upon’ means ‘the responsibility of the death of Jesus is on our heads’. The action of Pilate washing his hands, seems to be drawing a contrast between Pilate and the people: Pilate seems to be declaring his innocence of the death of Jesus and says ‘My hands are clean of this man’s blood . . .’ By contrast the people seem to be accepting responsibility for the death of Jesus. Pilate is not guilty, but the ‘people’ are guilty. By this saying, they also incriminate their heirs in this guilt Some try to get round these ‘anti-semitisms’ (Matt. 23: 32-36, 7: 21-23, 8:11-12, 23: 33-46, 27: 25) by saying that ‘anti-semitic montages’ are only a secondary element introduced to the text added at a later, Greek, stage of the development of the gospels.

There is, of course, at present a fairly strong lobby, even among some Christians, who want to find ‘antisemitisms’ within the new Testament, for reasons which are sometimes distant from the academic interests of biblical criticism. It is necessary I think to examine these texts anew, both in the interest of the historical evidence available and in the interests of integrity within Jewish Christian relations.

Eighty Catholic priests who live and work among the working classes in Chile met in April in Santiago to study the most effective way priests and lay people could help in building socialism in Chile. What follows is a summary made up from answers given to questions asked at a Press Conference on 16th April, to some questions asked later of some of the priests taking part, and from statements made in some of the papers read.

It has been compiled by the Uruguayan journalist MARUJA ECHEGOYEN.

Background

During the final Session of the study group, eight priests held a Press Conference at which they read out a prepared statement and answered questions from journalists representing both Chilean and overseas papers. Among these priests were Fr Gonzalo Arroyo, chaplain of the Catholic University of Santiago, and Fr Alfonso Pujadas, Director-General of the Workers’ Movement at the same University. The journalists mostly represented left-wing organs. Not long before, the Christian Democrat daily La Prensa had published, tendentiously and without prior authorization, with misleading headings, a private document circulated in November last year among a group of priests, wrongly making it out to be the starting-point for this meeting of Socialist priests. Gonzalo Arroyo attacked this action at the Press Conference, and it is indeed one more example of the growing inability of the more right-wing sector of Christian Democracy in Chile to listen and discuss rationally.

My aim is to make some observations on the recent Instruction from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (summarised in The Tablet of 30 June, pp. 838—841) in an attempt to clarify certain issues and assist the debate which has been initiated, of which this journal has revealed ample evidence. These are observations bom of the awareness that the language of this document finds interesting echoes within my own tradition and consciousness as a Reformed theologian.

The very notion of a vocation of theology is an interesting reflection of the sense that theology is a church-related activity. As terminology employed to specify a certain view of ecclesiastical polity it is in fact reminiscent of Calvin’s Institutes and so—naturally—this view of theology and the theologian has been one of the main features of 20th Century Protestant theology, with its rediscovery of Classical Reform. Part of that lovely sense of theology as a church-related and indeed church-based activity has been the realisation that theology is of necessity an ecumenical task. When this is ignored its practice is less than its profession and its efficacy is at once frustrated. Hence my title; for it is neither as an onlooker judging somebody else’s concerns nor as an outsider with no interest or involvement in the issue that I would make these comments. Rather, this is the deliberate attempt to bring what assistance one part of the Church can offer to another—and this on the basis of the unity of our common faith and the singleness of theological purpose.

It is eight years since Miss Sayers brought out her ‘Penguin’ version of the Inferno, to the surprise of some readers of her other thrillers. Yet it need not have surprised anyone that she was interested in Dante and perfectly capable of writing competent footnotes to the Comedy. The long Introduction to her Hell was, however, a remarkable manifesto in praise of Dante and in justification of her own rendering of his verse—at once a declaration of love and a statement of method. But the most remarkable thing was the translation itself, a real tour deforce—five thousand lines rhyming in an intricate pattern, the terza rima, which I should have thought an extraordinarily difficult one to handle in English, though Miss Sayers herself speaks of the task with noticeable sans gêne. It had been attempted before, notably by Binyon for the whole Comedy and by Professor Bickcrsteth for the Paradiso; both commendable efforts, especially the latter. Then came Miss Sayers’s attempt; and then, a little later, the quiet voice of Mr Eliot was heard, off-stage, to observe that it would be better not to try to reproduce in English, with its less copious and ‘in a way more emphatic’ rhyming words, the ‘light effect’ of the more easily rhyming Italian. Mr Eliot did not refer, in the lecture from which I quote, tc Miss Sayers; he was talking, with characteristic modesty, about his own Dantean pastiche in Little Gidding; but his judgment is relevant, of course, to any rhyming English version of Dante. Meanwhile Miss Sayers, undeterred and unwearied, forged ahead with hers. Hes Purgatory appeared in 1955; and though for the moment, I believe, she has turned aside to deal with the trifling matter of the Chanson and Roland, no power on earth, we may be sure, will prevent her from crowning her labours, in due course, with a Paradise.

The value of theology as a discipline has been challenged in recent years by a number of high-profile scientists, most prominently perhaps Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins. It has been questioned whether theology can bring anything to the table, particularly when compared with the clearly evident successes of modern science. This paper will take this challenge seriously and explore what value theology may have in the context of a scientific age, where the successes of the sciences have clearly reshaped how we think about the world. It will argue that theology offers a space and a language for discourse on the ineffable and intangible aspects of human experience, and can address the implicit philosophical and theological connotations of the scientific worldview.

This essay falls into two parts. In the first I offer a panorama of my book, In Defence of War (Oxford University Press, 2013), highlighting its main features. These comprise: its rhetorical position; its opposition to the “the virus of wishful thinking”, pacifism, legal positivism, and liberal individualism; and its promotion of the early Christian tradition of just war reasoning and of three kinds of realism – moral-ontological, Augustinian-anthropological, and practical. Then in the second part, I consider four controversial issues that the book raises: love, proportionality, Britain's entry into the First World War, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Over a century before the principles of the “new evangelization” were proclaimed in 1965 in Gaudium et spes (The Pastoral Constitution on the Church and the Modem World) Catherine McAuley (1781-1841), vigorously promoted its two key principles: (1) the dignity of the human person and (2) the virtue of solidarity with the suffering poor, sick, and ignorant. From her First Conferences alter founding the Religious Sisters of Mercy in 1831 in Dublin, Ireland, Mother Catherine consistently taught her Sisters to put these principles into practice in their apostolic work in education and health care.

Drawing upon Venerable Catherine McAuley’s original writings and biographies of her life and works, this article will demonstrate how she helped prepare the way for consecrated persons in the new evangelization of the Church in the modem world. The themes are divided as follows: Part I—The Dignity of the Human Person, Part II—Solidarity with the Poor, Sick, and Ignorant, and Part III—Urgent Problems for the Church in the Modem World.