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.

Suppose a fairy godmother were to appear and offer you three wishes — not, as in the folk tales, for yourself, but for the future of the world or even just for the future of the country. My guess is that the instant answers from almost everyone would start with No. No more hunger; no more wars;no terrorism-, no nuclear weapons; no more unemployment. But suppose the fairy godmother were to reply, rather acidly, that she was in the business of granting positive wishes, not negative ones, and that you must say what /ou actually wanted to happen, how easy would it be to formulate what you wanted in the few brief moments before, in exasperation, she vanished into the blue?

There would be two kinds of difficulty in stating three wishes. The first kind would be the technical problem of finding positive answers to what is wrong: for example, unemployment is obviously appalling and should be replaced by full employment, but even if a wave of the wand would achieve this, what exactly would “full employment” be? Would it be a situation recognisably better than the present one, with far more people having jobs but with a considerable number still unwillingly out of work, or doing unpleasant and badly-paid jobs, or having to work through every weekend in order to make enough to keep the family going? A world in which nuclear weapons had, by magic, been made impossible to produce, would still be a world manufacturing cluster bombs, napalm, bacteriological weapons and expanding bullets. But the challenge of the fairy godmother would touch a deeper problem than these.

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?

Arthur Peacocke, a biochemist turned theologian, accepted Christ's personal resurrection but not his bodily resurrection from the grave. He argued from Paul's silence about the discovery of the empty tomb, from Christ's sharing fully in our human condition, and from the irreversible processes of nature. John Polkinghorne, a physicist turned theologian, has maintained that Paul's view of resurrection implies an empty tomb, that Christ's resurrection from the grave has revealed the transformed destiny of matter, and that, for good reasons, God can suspend and change the laws of nature. In Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's vision of an evolving world, Christ's resurrection from the grave released a new force of love and revealed the spiritual destiny of matter. With Polkinghorne he shared a hope for the transformation of the universe, a process initiated by the glorious raising of Jesus’ crucified body.

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.

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.

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.

In a society such as our own (I am thinking particularly of Western European society) that sees little need for postulating the existence of God and no longer lives by specifically religious rules and rituals, it would seem that human intention and action could be quite adequately explicated in the language of ethics rather than theology : the opposite of good, consequently, is not evil, it is bad, that is to say, bad in the sense of being wrong morally, of willing and acting in ways that are in opposition to an accepted moral standard. The fact that it may be difficult to establish widely accepted moral standards does not invalidate the principle. When the word evil is used—and, of course, it is used—its semantic content is vague, or, if clear, then reductive, by which I mean that, more often than not, it acts merely as a kind of intensifier—so that, when one wants to express extreme outrage at an action of gross immorality, the word one reaches for is the word evil; but there would be no qualitative difference between a wrong action or intention and an evil action or intention. Given the nature of the relationship between art and its cultural context it would not be unreasonable to expect the literature of our own era to reflect this situation and, indeed, it would be surprising if it did not. We should expect the representation of evil in modem literature to take on an extremely etiolated and reductive form. But does it?

The medieval, contemplative tradition for the most part ended with the great 16th century Spanish mystics. The modern period of the 17th and 18th centuries was an age of reason that sought to eliminate mystery. Modern theology kept in step with the rational nature of the period and the contemplative tradition was lost to the modern age. Thomas Merton reintroduced a contemplative theology to the 20th century, but contemplative practices are much more popular today than they were in the mid-twentieth century when Merton was writing. This paper examines what it is about our present 21st century and the end of modernity that is so conducive to the popularity of contemplative prayer, and so conducive to bringing us to a deeper and richer understanding of the Gospel.

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.

English theology is notoriously ‘lop-sided’. In the historical disciplines, it has an excellent record of intelligent and discriminating scholarship. But, when attention shifts from what was once said and done in the name of Christianity to what might be said or done today, matters are either handed over to the philosopher (whose admirable and indispensable preoccupation with formal and linguistic considerations is no guarantee of competence to perform this task) or else are tackled at a level which, according to the standards operative in cognate ‘secular’ disciplines—from aesthetics and literary criticism to social and political theory—is so strikingly amateurish as to render it hardly surprising that theology plays little part in the conversation of the culture. In this naughty world, Professor Sykes has performed an excellent deed. The Identity of Christianity is a learned, vigorous and original reconstruction of some perennial problems: problems which found particular focus, in the nineteenth century, in discussion of the ‘essence’ of Christianity.

Sykes has shifted the theme from ‘essence’ to ‘identity’ partly to counter the widespread but unwarranted suspicion that an ‘enquiry into what makes Christianity Christianity’ (p.3) is likely to be reductionist in character, and partly because his discovery of the importance of Newman’s work for the ‘elucidation of what was at stake’ helped him to see how mistaken was the equally widespread view that the issues under consideration are of central moment only to Protestant Christians.

It is hard to imagine a professor at the Ecole Normale Superieure, reading, with mounting excitement, the latest work by one of the present episcopal bench of the Church of England. One should of course be less surprised to discover that a book by one of their 18th century forebears has been a stimulus on the recent French philosophical scene. The work in question is The Divine Legation of Moses; written by William Warburton, Bishop of Gloucester and literary controversialist in 1738. It was first set upon by Frenchmen in 1744, when the section of the work dealing with the origin of language was removed from its original theological context and translated by Leonard des Malpeines as the Essai sur les Hieroglyphes des Egyptiens. Warburton’s subsequent influence on thought concerning language has been compared to that of Saussure in our own day, it is felt at many places in the Encyclopédie, and in the writings of Condillac and Rousseau. With the revival of interest in the problematic of the origin of language in the climate of Post-Structuralism, Malpeines edition was republished in Paris in 1977, smothered with critical commentary by Patrick Tort and Jacques Derrida. For the latter Warburton has proved a significant influence.

In what follows I am going to give a brief outline of Warburton’s thoughts concerning the origin of language in the original context of his concern with biblical exegesis. Then I shall describe what is made of his reflections by the Post-Structuralists. Finally I will call in not one but three Samaritans, intellectually alien for Warburton in his own century, whose insights may yet rescue him from his 20th century predicament.

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.

Bertrand Russell, by any reckoning, must count as a figure of central importance in British intellectual history. Many of his books continue to be reprinted, in cheap paperback editions, up to sixty years since he first brought them out. He is standard fare for first- year philosophy students and some of his essays are classical points of reference in current debates in the analytical tradition. In 1915 he was brought to Pulborough by Lady Ottoline Morrell to meet D H Lawrence. By that time Russell (1872 - 1970) was aged forty- three and had already achieved his most original and influential contributions to philosophy. Lawrence (1885 - 1930) was thirty, with Sons and Lovers published (Duckworth, 1913), and The Rainbow about to be so. Their common interest lay in opposition to the War — in which, to place the other main characters in this essay, F R Leavis (then aged twenty) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (aged twenty-six) were both volunteers, Leavis as a stretcher-bearer in Flanders, Wittgenstein as an officer in the Austrian army.