Why do Christians celebrate the Paschal Mystery again and again? “We did it last year,” one might say, “Why do it again?” One reason, of course, is the need to deepen our understanding and appreciation of what is in fact the heart of the Christian religion; and from this point of view the Mystery unfolds in two distinct phases. The first phase is linked with the catechumenate (RCIA). The entire Christian community is invited to journey through Lent toward Easter in company with the candidates for Baptism, who are in the last stage of their preparation for sacramental initiation into the Body of Christ. Here the obvious intention is to promote in the community at large a progressively deeper spiritual plunge into the Mystery of Christ’s Death and Rising. The second phase of the Mystery encompasses the fifty days following Easter, and culminates with Pentecost Sunday. During this period there is a cycle of readings from the Johannine gospel, which taken as a whole constitutes a second catechesis. Here the Catechist is the Risen Christ himself. The teaching unfolds in three stages. It begins with the dialogue between Jesus and Nicodemus on New Birth (Jn 3); then there is his discourse on the Bread of Life (Jn 6); and finally the words he spoke in the Upper Room, which reveal the Gift of the Spirit (Jn 14-17). Taken together these readings are a profound instruction on the Church’s two-fold endowment of Sacrament and Spirit.

This article maps a selection of Pope Francis’ social teaching, which supports respect for diversity. It undertakes this task with the aid of a green theo‐ecoethical lens. That hermeneutical lens is first introduced to the reader via an explanation of its constituent parts. It is then employed to help situate respect for diversity as a Christian ethical principle. With those foundations in place subsequent sections employ the lens to colligate Francis’ teachings which, dialogically, both inform and come into focus through a green theo‐ecoethical perspective concerned with respect for diversity. Here, three sections unfold the Pope’s treatment of themes relevant to respect for diversity in a green theo‐ecoethical light. Specifically, these sections focus on contributions emerging from (1) Francis’ public ministry in general, (2) his first substantive piece of Catholic Social Teaching, Evangelii Gaudium, and (3) perhaps the most anticipated papal encyclical of all time, Laudato Si’. The article's conclusion helps situate the contextual cogency of insights emerging from this multi‐dimensional mapping for what Francis names as our common home, a planet which encompasses an Earth community in a dire need of increased levels of socio‐ecological flourishing.

I remember, as a small boy, telling my parents that before 1 was bom, I had been in heaven and had chosen them to be my parents. My father laughed heartily at this. In retrospect, it is clear that Platonism was not strong in my family, but it was inevitable that when later I came to do a doctorate I did it on pre-existence language in Christology because Christ had been there too and we had discussed my parentage, at some length, I remember. I have no idea where my childish fantasy came from: it may be a common idea among religious children to think that they were somewhere before they are here and that they are going somewhere after they have been here.

Père Daniélou has expressed in a recent book his opinion that the theology of the Holy Ghost, hitherto so little developed in the Church, will receive definitive form only when it has been formulated in the thought of India: that this indeed is the providential vocation of Indian thought, just as that of Greek thought has been to express the theology of the Incarnation.

This is certainly looking somewhat far ahead, but it will appear extravagant only to those who are wedded to a narrowly Western point of view. Such a point of view becomes ever less tenable in view of the rapid decline of Western civilisation in our day, and there is no respectable authority for persisting in it.

Human systems of thought, no less than the political systems described by Plato, have each their germs of decay which will eventually work themselves out unless neutralised by the influence of another system. While making due allowance for the influence of divine providence in the Christian thought of the West, we must not forget that grace worked by adapting and combining diverse natural elements, and has in fact so worked in producing the Catholic synthesis that we know, built up as it is with stones from Jerusalem, Athens, Antioch, Alexandria, Rome and many other places.

A thousand years of schism were bound to make our synthesis somewhat lopsided in a Westerly direction. The Latin scholastic element has been allowed to grow somewhat disproportionately and has not been slow in manifesting its peculiar danger: a too rigid conceptualism, tending towards rationalism and legalism.

The trouble with post-modern theology is that it tends to be pre-Barthian. Indeed, two main strands of English theology that have attempted to write from a postmodern perspective—the ‘Sea of Faith’ school surrounding Don Cupitt, and the ‘Radical Orthodoxy’ school surrounding John Milbank, Graham Ward and Catherine Pickstock— share very little else but their postmodernism and different kinds of pre-Barthianism. I suspect the arguments of this article could be applied equally to the American ‘post-liberal’ school surrounding George Lindbeck, but space forbids treatment of too many variants.

Modernism then represents faith in three things:

1. 1 Deductivism: the idea that all meaningful language forms a single deductive system, wherein the truth value of any proposition can be calculated;

2. 1 Foundationalism: the idea that this system can be securely based on universally accepted premises

3. 1 Correspondence theory: the idea that statements exist to express truth, which consists in the correspondence between what they assert and what is the case.

Modernism hopes one day to get at a text that is consistent with itself, demonstrable to all reasonable people, and adequate to the world. Of course, there is a lot out there in the world that is currently ‘outside the text’, but one day we will expand the text to fit the world exactly, like a glove.

It was Wittgenstein who said that in order to ‘combat’ a point of view, one first has to establish whether that point of view is within or without one’s own framework. That is to say, one has to establish whether the ‘combat’ is to be a dispute within a framework or between frameworks. For Wittgenstein, that was of the utmost importance if one was to avoid falling into confusion. This is because whereas disputes within a framework proceed by means of reasoned arguments which are held fast and validated by that common surrounding framework, disputes between frameworks do not proceed within a common milieu, and so the common validity of reasoned arguments subsides. Thus, a dispute between frameworks has to proceed by means of quite different methods, that is, methods of persuasion and charm.

This insight has a particular significance when one considers some of the developments that have been taking place in theology in recent years. For the last three centuries or so, theological discourse was conducted within a framework that was, at once, both ‘theological’ and ‘scientific.’ As Amos Funkenstein has argued, it was a framework ‘in which theological concerns were expressed in terms of secular knowledge, and scientific concerns were expressed in theological terms. Theology and other sciences became almost one.’ Virtually all theological disputes in those centuries were located within that framework, and consequently, they were conducted by means of reasoned arguments.

The cruelties committed in the war in former Yugoslavia profoundly shock us. Villages are completely destroyed, children, women and men, even their cattle, are killed. Women are raped and forced to give birth to the children of their rapists. The perpetrators are ordinary citizens, pleasant people, good neighbours. We do not have to look for violence that far away. Bombs go off in the city of London, children are killed in Warrington, and in revenge innocent young men are massacred in Belfast. Violence exists outside war situations as well. Domestic violence is probably the most common form of violence: incest, beating, or simply bullying. It is often hidden; in spite of everything, loyalty to parents and other members of the family overrules the urge to confide in someone, to complain and to accuse in public. Though violent novels and films may be very popular, articles and books on violence are generally not. The Bible is full of violent events, but there is relatively little literature on violence in Scripture.

Why do we accept violence relatively easily as a part of life? Why do peaceful people resort to violence in certain situations? It seems to me that violence is closely linked with justice. Violence is used to redress wrongs or to prevent injuries. The source of much violence is the thirst for justice. People always try to justify their use of violence by appealing to their right to restore injustices done to them in the past or in the present.

Consciences are neither born nor made, they develop. Development in living beings is the outcome of interaction between the individual and the environment; specifically, in the case of moral development, between the individual person and the culture. The child is born with the potential ability to distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in terms other than those of immediate personal satisfaction to which the infant is limited, but the growing child can make assessments only in terms of the values which he is taught. He has. as part of his human make-up, the tendency to pursue the perceived good and to shun the perceived bad. What he actually perceives as good and bad depends largely on what the society into which he is born teaches him so to perceive. This is not to say that the individual's capacity for moral judgment is wholly dependent on the influence of external agents; the ultimate structure of conscience is unique because no two environments are entirely alike and no two individuals are entirely alike.

Though it has been said that moral development is the result of interaction between the individual and the culture one must be yet more precise. The child receives his values not from ‘the culture’ or from ‘society’ in a large and undefined sense but from a fairly circumscribed group of persons: parents and siblings, other adults in the family circle, school teachers and companions. This means that values are never transmitted to the child in a ‘pure’ state, they are always, in some way. modified by the person who mediates them.

Then don’t let him engage a decorative artist of the second, third or any subsequent rank to apply fiddling little bits of art to a structure which will probably at least have the humble merit of plainness. Again and again as one turns these pages one is struck by the pity of it ‣ messy ceramic plaques, vacuous mural reliefs, busy semi-abstract stained glass windows of overblown cosmological significance, facile streamlined statues of sacred personages appliqué to fine blank walls with about as much relevance as if one were to stick a Valentine card on a Mondriaan abstract … if only they’d refrained! So unless you can afford the prices payable to the Chagalls, Rouaults or Légers of this world, let the architecture do the talking: it has a far better chance of avoiding the arbitrary, the personal, and therefore the distracting.