I offer a brief outline of The Beauty of the Infinite, pointing up its similarities with and differences from John Milbank's Theology and Social Theory (1990), and the violence of its rhetoric. I then take issue with Hart's reading of Nicholas Lash on the death and resurrection of Christ. I argue that not only is Lash closer to Hart than Hart allows, but that Lash recognizes the necessarily unfinished nature of Christian story telling. Hart is led by his rhetoric of out‐narration to affirm an unsustainable completeness that elides the terrors of suffering and death, the very fault for which Hart chides Lash. Having noted Hart's misdirection I conclude with an appreciation of his aesthetics.

Just over a hundred years ago, the case of Governor Eyre split English society into fiercely opposing factions: one led by Carlyle and Ruskin included Dickens and Tennyson; in the other J. S. Mill was supported by Darwin and Huxley.

The slave-based prosperity of Jamaica in the eighteenth-century had given place by the early 1860s to an economic decline, the white sugar-planters easily outdistanced by foreign competitors, the negroes now mostly working their own land, but discontented and seeking more. Droughts, disease and the American Civil War had brought the latter’s discontent to a head. The national Assembly was unrepresentative, venal and inefficient. In this delicate situation the task of ruling as Governor was one which called for very exceptional qualities. To this assignment Edward John Eyre was appointed in 1862; Eyre had been an emigrant and explorer in Australia, where he had done much to protect the aborigines. He had been seven years Lieutenant-Governor of New Zealand, six years Lieutenant- Governor of St Vincent, and then Governor of the Leeward Islands. Able and humane, Eyre was obstinate and tactless, and he soon became unpopular in Jamaica.

On 9th October, 1865, a rebellion broke out at Morant Bay, led by a negro demagogue called Bogle. His men killed the German custos and about twenty others, mostly Volunteers, wounding thirty-odd as well. In the next few days sporadic outbreaks took place in neighbouring parishes. Eyre promptly declared martial law in the troubled district, and sent troops there. They found the rebels dispersed or hidden, and there was no organized resistance.

Right intention is but one of the requirements that must be met for a war to be just, according to the Just War tradition. To treat it in isolation, as a basis for analysing the motives of the multi-national coalition which confronted Iraq in the Gulf war, requires isolating and dissecting certain elements of a complex whole, which may distort more than it reveals. That said, the exercise does provide a way of exploring one aspect of the war which was, and remains, the subject of speculation in the Middle East, if not elsewhere.

Both before and during the Gulf war there was much discussion, some of it covered in the Western media, on the war aims of the coalition. Speculation focused on the possibility that the members of the coalition had certain objectives in addition to those publicly professed by the various governments concerned. Any evaluation of the intentions of the coalition members must thus take into account not only what they said their aims were, but also the objectives implied by the strategy they adopted and the terms on which they were prepared to end hostilities. Actions, presumably, reveal as much as words.

Here the emphasis will be on defining the war aims of the coalition, both implicit and explicit, short and long term, so that they may be examined in the light of the requirement, of the Just War tradition, that the intentions of the combatants be just. As a reference point, some assumptions about the meaning of ‘right intention’ will be offered at the outset.

On 24th August the Pope solemnly opened the general assembly of all the Bishops of Latin America in the Cathedral of Bogota, Columbia. This was the second general episcopal conference to be held on the soil of South America, and the first meeting of a local Church on a continental scale since Vatican II. This assembly had been carefully prepared for over a year by bishops, theologians and experts from the whole of South America, in accordance with an express mandate from the Episcopal Commission of Latin America, created in the wake of the fast general assembly of the Bishops of Latin America held in 1955. The text which we publish below (thanks to the kind permission of the editor of ‘Informations Catholiques Internationales’) is the first half of the first part of the entire document, which consists of three parts in all: this description of the situation in the continent, a theological reflexion, and pastoral directions.

The general theme of the Medellin assembly was ‘the Church in the present transformation of Latin America in the light of the Council’. The conclusions of the assembly have since been published, but this comprehensive diagnosis of the facts remains striking from many points of view: the catching of a historic moment of awakening on the part of a whole continent, the detail and social awareness, the sense that ‘the difficult progress towards development and integration [in Latin America] could become an important catalyst in the process of unification to which the whole human race is converging today’, and the vivid realization that ‘the upheaval we are experiencing demands new attitudes of us so that we can carry through an urgent, global and profound reform of structures’ (from the Introduction to the Statement)—all these are remarkable in an ecclesiastical document.

‘The description could appear to be pessimistic, since we do not dwell on the positive factors, which do of course exist. But it is, nevertheless, a reflexion of the reality of Latin America, which is tragic, and which demands a swift and effective response.’

A sharp-witted analyst of the church’s contemporary situation once said: No previous council spoke so extensively and so profoundly about the Church as the Second Vatican Council. After no other council was there such great confusion over the question of what the church is and which form it should take. Church is, as Luther said, a blind, vague word. Indeed it is not easy to say what we mean when we speak of Church.

For one thousand five hundred years the church has lived out its existence and often enough suffered to sustain it in adversity. But not until the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries did the church begin expressis verbis to reflect on its nature. This reflection originally took place against a background of conflicts: conflicts between the papacy and the up-and-coming nation states, conflicts centred around John Wyclif and Jan Hus and above all against the background of debate and argument in the Reformation era. Yet, although the quarrels of the Reformation were not only concerned with individual ecclesiological questions, but much more with the general understanding of what Church is, the sixteenth century did not get as far as reflecting on what the Church’s teaching on the term ‘church’ should be. Not until the nineteenth century, in the wake of Romanticism, did the understanding of the church as such become the subject of consideration. It was Friedrich Schleiermacher who determined the direction of the Protestant Church. On the Catholic side the thoughts of Johann Adam Mohler, the theologian from Tubingen, led the way.

Maria is 21 years old. She lives in a poor barrio in the suburbs of Lima and studies economics in one of Lima’s universities. She also works as a catechist in her local parish. “I think that in the past two years there have been great advances,” she told me, “the people now are very much more conscious than before”. She sees her work as a catechist as a preparation for what she calls “political militancy”. As an example of this she told me of a march which the catechists had been involved in a month before when 2,000 people went to the Ministry of Housing banging empty cups demanding a decent water supply for their area. “Us young people accept marxism, communism, without any problem”, she added.

Senora Isabel lives in a nearby parish and at 79 has seen some more of life than Maria. When she first arrived in the area 19 years ago she used to make a meagre income by selling holy pictures of St Martin de Porres. Through the ‘hermendad’ or sodality of which she was a member she began to go along to meetings organised by a local priest. From there she progressed to be a member of the Movement of Christian Workers and for the past number of years has gone along to the annual summer schools in theology organised by the Catholic University. As her understanding of her faith changed so too did she begin to get involved in the struggles of the people.

The general credibility of theology was once widely held by theologians to depend on a successful natural theology. Today things are different. There are certainly some contemporary advocates of natural theology—and a few of these are even theologians; but it is presently fashionable to reject natural theology in the name of theology itself. But are there cogent, theological reasons for dismissing natural theology? I shall suggest that the best known modern defences of an affirmative reply are unacceptable.

According to the natural theologian, ‘God exists’ is a respectable philosophical assertion which can be rationally sustained without recourse to the prior acceptance either of God’s existence or of any special revelation. Typically, he insists that ‘God exists’ is rational, provable, justifiable or demonstrable. Bearing these points in mind, what is the nature of the theological opposition to natural theology?

We can begin to answer this question by noting the view that the nature of theism renders irrelevant the notion of arguing or reasoning or making inferences about God. Some observe that this is the position of the Bible. Biblical writers, it is argued, “did not think of God as an inferred entity, but as an experienced reality”. Others explain that proofs must result in abstraction, “a pale shadow of the living God who is the putative object of biblical faith”. In this connection we might note some remarks of Alasdair MacIntyre. In Metaphysical Beliefs MacIntyre points to the enormous importance of faith where religious belief is concerned. He thus argues that natural theology, considered in its familiar guise as the presentation of supposedly demonstrative argument, is out of place in religion.

The recent publication of his Collected Essays has renewed interest in Orwell’s position as a writer, and especially in his attitude to the artist’s commitments in the world. The writer’s problem, in a time of conflict, according to Orwell, was that ‘one half of him, which in a sense is the whole of him, can act as resolutely, even as violently if need be, as anyone else. But his writings, in so far as they have any value, will always be the product of the saner self that stands aside, records the things that are done and admits their necessity, but refuses to be deceived as to their true nature’. For Raymond Williams (e.g. in The Observer, May 21 1961) this separation, while understandable, is not necessary: ‘it is part of the dissociation between the individual and society which is our deepest crisis’. Elsewhere he points out that any defence of liberty by an exile, as Orwell chose to be, standing apart from society, is bound to be ambiguous because ‘while the rights in question may be called individual, the condition of their guarantee is inevitably social... to belong to a community is to be part of a whole, and, necessarily, to accept, while helping to define its disciplines’. While I agree with this view, I want to argue in this article that the source of Orwell’s dilemma, and indeed of the dissociation in general, has an important but hitherto undiscussed, philosophical aspect—to put it crudely, Cartesian dualism—which manifests itself in Orwell’s treatment of two related problems: the problem of language and the problem of orthodoxy.

Though many writers have studied the Cluniac achievement from the ecclesiastical, the economic and even the political point of view, none of the standard books on the history of spirituality seems concerned to trace the growth of Cluniac spirituality. Indeed, it seems taken for granted on all sides that Cluny has no spirituality worth mentioning. An elaborate ceremonial, a devotion to the splendours of the Liturgy, accompanied by an easy asceticism, this is the impression that most people have received of it: an impression based solely on a few isolated facts culled from the third century of Cluny’s existence. It may be useful, therefore, to outline a few of the principal ideas that dominated Cluny’s spirituality during the course of its history from its foundation to the time of Peter the Venerable.

When Berno left the Abbey of Baume in A.D. 910 to accept part of the estate of the Duke of Aquitaine for his foundation at Cluny, monastic life was at a low ebb. For sixty years the Normans had ravaged a country already torn by internecine war. Towns and villages had been depopulated, monasteries had been sacked and destroyed, and the few refugees who had settled in ruinous buildings to restore a semblance of monastic life were undistinguished both for religion and discipline. Berno little realised the magnitude of his undertaking, for his own ambitions were surprisingly modest. He simply aimed at establishing the pure Benedictine tradition, and envisaged nothing more exalted than the literal fulfilment of the Rule.

Whatever may have been the case at other epochs of the history of the Church, it is clear that today treatments of confined topics of theology which can afford to take for granted theology and Christianity as a whole are no longer possible. This is true in a special way of the topic which concerns us here, the theology of the priesthood and the ministry, since we have to examine an essential element in the structure or form of Christianity itself, and since we are making this examination not as detached observers but as people who are considering the fundamental sense of our own lives.

Consequently it seems suitable to make explicit two presuppositions of what is to be said later. Firstly, Christianity is real. That is to say, it is real not only with the kind of reality which will allow it to be included among other realities in accordance with a scale of reality already set up apart from Christianity itself. Christianity is real in the sense that its reality modifies the scale of reality itself. Whether we say that Christianity is a new reality in a world considered as being without it (say, as being prior to it, or posterior to it, hostile or neutral to it), or whether we say that Christianity has always been and still is ‘anonymously’ present in the world (as, say, prefigured in a total history of humanity within the eternal design of God), we must, in terms of Christianity itself, claim that Christianity is at the very least a dimension of reality which needs explicitly to be taken into account if the ontological scale which we use to assess it and indeed anything else is to function as a true criterion of the real.

In his ecumenical Marian theology, Fr. George H. Tavard has a fine chapter entitled “Mary in Anglicanism,” in which he traces the development of Marian teaching from Thomas Cranmer to the present. Tavard’s essay is not intended to be comprehensive and so. while he maintains that it would be “an exaggeration to speak of a Marian movement in contemporary Anglicanism,” nonetheless significant contributions have been made in recent times, for example, by Canon Donald Allchin and Professor John Macquanie. Had the nonagenarian Anglican priest-theologian Norman Pittenger’s Our Lady, The Mother of Jesus in Christian Faith and Devotion been published before 1996, no doubt Fr. Tavard would have included some mention of it as yet another contemporary Anglican contribution.

The promulgation of the Bull In agro dominico in March 1329, which condemned twenty-eight propositions taken from the work of Meister Eckhart, is an event which has attracted the attention of many scholars in recent years. This interest is the result not only of the ‘rehabilitation’ of Eckhart by the theological fraternity (the greater part of which is now convinced of his fundamental orthodoxy) but also of the extraordinary character of the condemnation itself. In the present article I do not intend to repeat the work of Bernard McGinn, Edmund Colledge and others, who have shown the extent to which Eckhart was misunderstood by the commission which examined his work, but rather to enquire why it was that such misgivings were ultimately translated into a formal condemnation of Eckhart’s work by the Holy See itself.

In agro dominico stands out from other such condemnatory Bulls in a number of ways. Firstly, it was the first and only occasion when the full machinery of the Inquisition was used against a member of the Dominican Order, and it was similarly the first and only time in which a theologian of the first rank was charged with the inquisitio haereticae pravitatis: the most serious accusation which the Inquisition had at its disposal and the one which carried the heaviest penalties. Despite its extraordinary character, however, Eckhart’s trial remained fundamentally within the bounds of legality, as Winfried Trusen’s recent study has shown. Trusen also reveals, however, the malevolence of his detractors and their determination to inflict maximum damage upon Eckhart within the strict letter of the law.

Pope John Paul II, in Fides et ratio#108, states that there is a deep harmony between the vocation of true philosophy and the Blessed Virgin Mary. This intriguing claim, so different from the usual link of Mary with faith, is developed in this article. Drawing analogical implications from selected events in Mary's life, two questions will be asked: How do philosophers “philosophize in Mary?;” and how could this way of philosophizing help us today to renew the vocation to be a philosopher? The following authors are considered: Thomas Aquinas, Edith Stein, Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, Bernard Lonergan, Josef Ratzinger, Mary Daly, Robert Sokolowski, Norris Clarke, Søren Kierkegaard, Karol Wojtyla, John Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Judy Chicago, and John Henry Newman.

Any understanding of this statesman’s contribution to a new African ideology of reality and humanity in their political, economic and social doctrines has to be combined with an examination of the background from which he emerged.

Nyerere has been fortunate in inheriting problems which have not been as serious or restrictive of new policies as those experienced by the new presidents of Uganda and Kenya, even though there was the shared inheritance of colonialism, underdeveloped economies overwhelmingly agricultural and the shadows of a British style of administration too expensive for newly independent African states to maintain.

Tanzania’s historical background is remarkably free of the problems which continue to bedevil the politics of its neighbours. Tribal differences are minimal and mostly within the Bantu group so that the state has no inherited splits in its structure. There is the national language of kiSwahili, dating from before the colonial period and structured into the administration first by the Germans and then by the British; it is a real medium of communication centred on the towns and as such has associations with politics and progress which have increased its utility.

The capital at Dar-es-salaam on the coast is not dominated by one tribal group and the state had no semi-independent federated kingdoms to cope with; the progressive Haya and Chagga are too small in numbers and too far from the capital to be in any position to dominate national policies. The numerically superior Sukuma and Nyamwezi had neither the economy nor natural leaders to achieve the Kikuyu and Ganda ascendencies in their respective countries.