This paper explores St. Paul of the Cross's passion-centred spirituality as a context for avoiding the distortions of such spirituality and promoting proper praxis. These distortions are not the legacy of Paul of the Cross himself, but the fact that his contemplation of the passion was primarily performative and mystical, along with the lack of a systematic theology on the passion-death-and resurrection, there remains a context wherein distortions of passion-centred approaches can occur. The paper then presents some aspects of Bernard Lonergan's thought on lex crucis and also from his Trinitarian work in order to provide a theological framework (orthotheoria). This framework can help prevent the distortions of such a passion-centred spirituality and guide orthopraxis of passion-centred spiritualities. In the final section we explore some insights from Buddhism that are consonant with both Paul of the Cross's spirituality and Lonergan's law of the cross as fruits of the Spirit and seeds of the Word.

I remember a secular priest, in the course of a retreat at Oxford a good many years ago, politely chiding us Dominicans for not making more of St Catherine of Siena. The rebuke was, and is, worth attending to. St Catherine is always rated among the greatest figures in Dominican history, and there are those who would place her among the greatest women of all time. Yet it is now eighty years since the first, and last, really solid work on her life and teaching by an English Dominican—a nun, as it happened—appeared: the massive biography by Augusta Theodosia Drane, a very good work for its time and one unduly neglected. Since then there have been four books in English worth mentioning here: the two ‘Lives’ by Edmund Gardner and Alice Curtayne, the translation of the Dialogue by Algar Thorold, and vida Scudder's version of a selection of the Letters.

This paper purports to deal with a non-existent subject in holding that there was no Dominican hagiography before the canonization of St. Dominic nor for some time afterwards.

Dominic Guzman died and his obsequies were presided over by his friend and patron Cardinal Ugolino on 6th August 1221. The same Ugolino, having ascended the papal throne as Gregory IX, issued a bull on 3rd July 1234 ordering annual celebration of the feast of St Dominic and likening the Order of Preachers he founded to those of St Benedict and Citeaux as an historic achievement for the faith. The first life of St. Dominic written by a Dominican (or by anyone) is the Legenda S. Dominici of Peter of Ferrand composed between 1235 and 1239 for liturgical use in the new office of St. Dominic which was established throughout the Order in the latter year.

It is at first sight astonishing that no earlier Dominican life exists and that none was produced specifically for submission in the canonization proceedings as had become standard practise at this time: these facts this paper seeks to explain. To do so will involve answering two questions: 1. What was the procedure which had become established for the canonization of saints by 1234 and what factors affected its operation in the case of St. Dominic? 2. What material had in fact been produced from Dominican sources about Dominic up until his canonization and why did this not include a life of the saint?

According to Alvin Plantings, ‘we who are Christians and propose to be philosophers must not rest content with being philosophers who happen, incidentally, to be Christians; we must strive to be Christian philosophers.’ He gives advice on the character such striving should have. I think his advice is bad advice, bad for philosophy and bad for Christianity. Here I shall concentrate, in the main, on the philosophical aspects of this bad advice. The aspects I have in mind are of two kinds: first, Plantinga’s appeal to considerations external to philosophy which distort the spirit of philosophical enquiry; second, Plantinga’s conception of philosophical enquiry itself.

Plantinga claims, ‘Christianity, these days, and in our part of the world, is on the move ... There is also powerful evidence for this contention in philosophy’ (p. 253). How is this supposed to be established? By comparison, it seems, with the state of philosophy in the fifties vis á vis Christianity: ‘the public temper of main-line establishment philosophy in the English speaking world was deeply non-Christian. Few establishment philosophers were Christian: even fewer were willing to admit in public that they were, and still fewer thought of their being Christian as making a real difference to their practice as philosophers’ (p. 253). These three characterisations of the fifties are very different from each other.

The first sign that Christianity in philosophy was not on the move in the fifties is supposed to be the fact that few Christians were in the philosophical establishment.

Drawing extensively upon anthropological and historical studies of primal and “canonical” religions (RR, 2, 232, 278, 318, 343), the philosophical theologian Keith Ward attempts in his recent book Religion and Revelation,’ to develop a comparative doctrine of revelations in order to situate Christian revelation within the plethora of revelations that are an undeniable aspect of human religiousness in its virtually infinite forms (RR, 57, 37, 23, 215-16). Yet because Ward believes that in Jesus Christ God has disclosed the true form of human redemption (RR, 280), he evaluates other revelations in light of this belief. Consequently, his theology of religions, despite its drawing upon the data of historical and comparative study of religions, is incapable of accommodating other revelations on their own terms. For example, Ward tries to read Sankara as a theist, and, thus, as an ally. In this essay, I will argue that this appeal to Sankara is misdirected since Sankara's position involves an ontological nondualism that ultimately annuls theism. I will also argue that such a misreading is an inevitable consequence of Ward’s exceptionalist theology of revelations, but is unconvincing to philosophical theologians of religions who cannot agree with Ward that the central claims of orthodox Christianity are “simply true” (RR, 279). Ward’s fideism forecloses arbitrarily upon the limits of revelation and encourages an exceptionalist parochialism This is harmless perhaps within the walls of liberal seats of theological learning, but it can foster fundamentalisms in other settings. Finally, I will argue that Ward’s fideism belies the apparently comparative character of his undertaking.

In an admirable artide on the Spanish situation by the Dominican Father H. Munoz these words occur: ‘What Spain needed was an intelligent organizer who could coordinate all the disjointed elements into a united front against the destructive forces of irreligion and anarchy.’ On reading this it is impossible not to reflect that this is an echo of what many English Catholics have been saying about their own country for a long time.

The present position of Catholics in England is not so very far removed from that of Catholics in Spain just before the revolution. Indifference and lack of organization sold the pass and allowed the forces of an anti-religious Socialism to seize power. And not till the Catholics of Spain found their diurches pillaged, convents burned, schools secularized, religious orders expelled and a sheaf of anti-Catholic laws on the statute book did they wake up to the realities of the situation and organize themselves into a force which now promises to be the salvation of Spain.

In England, a generation of ever-increasing indifference in matters of faith and morals has enabled the anti-God propaganda of Moscow to make tremendous progress. The traditional Conservative and Protestant party, product of the Reformation, exists in a fog. In matters of faith and morals they simply do not know where they stand, having neither standards nor guidance. And from not knowing to not caring is but a short step.

Liberalism no longer counts. The more extreme Liberals have gone over to Labour. A few have thrown in their lot with the Conservatives. The rest plough a lonely furrow in the wilderness.

This paper examines Origen's views of “Adam” and considers whether aspects of Origen's views might prove helpful in contemporary debates about Adam and original sin. The question “who was Adam” presents difficult issues for Christian theology. In response to these concerns, many contemporary theologians suggest that “Eastern” traditions, which are less connected to the “Western”/Augustinian view of original sin, can more easily manage these tensions. These gestures towards “Eastern” thought are helpful in the sense that they do highlight the “mythic” dimensions of the Biblical creation narratives and the irreducibly social construction of human identity. They tend, however, towards broad generalizations that often do not account for the more nuanced and complex philosophical matrix that informed many of the Eastern Church Fathers as they thought about creation, humanity, and the Fall. In this regard, Origen is an interesting figure to study because of the historic anathemas against his supposedly aberrant neo‐Platonic views about the pre‐existence of souls. Origen did indeed draw heavily on Platonism, but his views about Adam and the Fall were far more subtle than is often supposed. Elements of Origen's views could be useful to a contemporary Christian theology of Adam and original sin.

Peru has a Left-wing daily paper called El Diario de Marka. On the day after Pope John Paul issued his encyclical Laborem Exercens the paper carried a cartoon covering most of its front page which summed up its view of the significance of the encyclical for the Peruvian situation. It showed a determined looking Pope John Paul carrying a banner which read: “Free Trade Unions, Right to Strike, Co-Ownership of the Means of Production and Just Remuneration, Social Justice”. He was bearing down on a rather smug President Belaunde who stood with a banner behind his back saying “Anti-Strike Decree” and thinking “Terrorist”.

The fact that such a cartoon would even appear in a Left-wing paper, let alone cover most of its front page, indicates the importance of the popular church for the Peruvian Left. This was further underlined by the amount of space and the sympathetic coverage the paper gave the encyclical in marked contrast to that given by the bourgeois press. Nor is this simply a recognition of the large number of Christians who are trade union and political militants. Perhaps more important is the new image this has given the church and the consequent expectation that a papal statement on social justice would be a broadly Left-wing document.

Occasions such as this serve to show just how significant is the popular church, both politically and ecclesiologically. Not only is it new to find large sectors of the church being the natural allies of political progressives but it is even more novel to find that this alliance has caused secular progressives to re-evaluate the meaning of Christianity itself and to come to expect that even some of its more conservative leaders must themselves be progressive if they choose to criticise society from a Christian standpoint.

Romano Guardini's theory of oppositions (Gegensatzlehre), which helped him forge a unity within multifaceted realities such as Church and liturgy, also inspired him to achieve a unity between the secular and sacred aspects of the Christian life, as the Second Vatican Council was later to do, particularly in Gaudium et Spes. While Gaudium et Spes 36 concentrated on a Christian view of the autonomy of created realities, Guardini diagnosed the gulf between faith and life in a neglect of the interplay of creation and redemption: ‘to save redemption by the Son, [man] has been forced to abandon creation by the Father’. In a way which was prophetic of later criticisms of Gaudium et Spes and also of fruitful applications and developments of its doctrine, Guardini called for a reflection on the light which the work of redemption sheds on the created world and on man's life within it, that the believer may stand with his faith amid the concrete, actual world, and rediscover that world in his faith.

It has often been remarked that in the 1920s and 1930s some British Catholics sympathized with Fascism; but the collocation of ‘Catholic’ and ‘Fascism’ is alarming, the more so when it is realized that the Catholics in question were the writers, the intellectuals: civilized, educated, sophisticated and otherwise likable and mostly well- intentioned people, who expressed varying measures of attraction to what we now know to be the politics of megalomania, elitism, frustration, prejudice, deceit and brutality. How could cultured Catholics be even partially attracted to Fascism: what did they see to admire in it, and what were the conditions which permitted and provoked them to find good in it?

The present subject of ‘Catholic pro-Fascism’ is a minefield, with some of the mines laid by rightist Catholics, who, believing it to be damaging to the Catholic Church, do not wish the subject to be discussed by other than apologeticists. One such mine is to say that the word ‘Fascist’ cannot be used, either because it is a mere term of abuse, or because its meaning is so variable as to be worthless, or because it is generally confused with Nazism; so to speak the words ‘Catholic’ and ‘Fascist’ in the same breath is to risk unjustifiably tainting the memory of good people. But the memory of such people can be clarified only by considering exactly what they were saying, and why.

For several decades the official teaching office of the Roman Catholic Church has consistently invoked the notion of religious experience as a category for interrelgious dialogue. Moreover, the Church has appealed to the so-called dialogue of religious experience as a means of encouraging its members to constructively engage with persons who are committed to ‘other’ religious traditions. This essay seeks to develop a systematic understanding of religious experience as well as the dialogue associated with it. Subsequent to summarizing the recent magisterial teaching on the dialogue of religious experience, the essay continues by probing the meaning of religious experience as such, particularly with the assistance of the theological insights of Bernard Lonergan and Louis Roy. The essay concludes by acknowledging some of the limitations that persist in connection with the dialogue of religious experience, namely, those that inevitably arise when considering the particularity of the incarnation and the necessity of the Church for salvation.

Lindbeck's difficulties with Lonergan's account of religion stem from his radical methodological option in which he draws on Wittgenstein. I revisit ‘the dialectic of methods,’ by examining children's mistakes. I use Lonergan's distinction between ordinary and originary meaningfulness to argue that in Wittgenstein's account of rule‐following such mistakes highlight the publicity of norms in ordinary meaningfulness, but I show how alternatives can be cited in which originary meaningfulness is not obscured. I explain the core of Lonergan's foundational methodology and show how for Lonergan the desire to understand is an exigence which, as retorsion indicates, is difficult to deny. I conclude that in his account of religion Lonergan has an answer to a question posed by Wittgenstein on the purpose of thinking.

While ‘the meaning of life’ has grown in prominence as a topic of philosophical inquiry, few Thomists have addressed it. Joshua Hochschild has recently offered a plausible explanation, arguing that ‘the meaning of life’ is a late modern ‘invention’, at home in a conceptual framework both philosophically problematic and incompatible with the principles of St. Thomas’ thought. He, therefore, counsels Catholic intellectuals to avoid the question of life’s meaning. I argue in contrast that St. Thomas offers the kind of metaphysical perspective that originally made ‘the meaning of life’ intelligible. First, I show that closer attention to the context in which the phrase emerges (that of German Romanticism) can clarify why much of the modern discourse on ‘the meaning of life’ succumbs to Hochschild’s critique. I then show that, even in the writings of its earliest modern proponents, we find compelling reasons to hold that ‘the meaning of life’ was always more at home within a Christian conceptual framework. Finally, I argue that St. Thomas’ account of providence and divine art in particular explain the purposefulness and significance of the world, such that Thomists who appeal to these notions are well positioned to address the question of life’s meaning in contemporary philosophical debates.