Social work might be described as the natural human response of one human being to another who asks for help, and case-work is a (very inadequate) name for the attempt to give the individual person in trouble the individual remedy he requires. A ‘case-worker’ is the substitute for the ‘good neighbour’ of a simpler society. In a small community the good neighbour steps in during a crisis with advice and help, able to provide an objective point of view, and ready to step out again when no longer needed, without disturbing the fundamental independence of the person concerned. In a community where everyone knows each other and social ties are firmly knit, this works very well; it was not till the growth of industry and the development of large towns where rich and poor were segregated into different areas that the system broke down.

The social workers of the nineteenth century found themselves complete strangers in experience and outlook to the people they were trying to help. To be the good neighbours they desired to be—intimate, wise, accepted friends— they had to evolve a technique based on principles which would enable them to help without patronage or sentimentality. They called this technique ‘case-work’. It came into being in 1869 with the Charity Organisation Society (now the Family Welfare Association) from which all other family case-work societies have developed.

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.

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.

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.

When a summer visitor goes to Saint-Malo, he sees the obvious; the ancient town peering over her encircling walls, the narrow streets and tall old houses, the great church with its single soaring steeple and the arrogant castle of the Duchess Anne: very interesting if he cares for such things and likes to inquire into their history, very picturesque if he prefers to take them only at their scenic value. And in most cases he is probably content so to regard them, or to read of them in the common or garden guide-book. But for those who care to look a little deeper, Saint-Malo has other and more intimate tales to tell—tales that are sometimes based on history and sometimes have grown out of tradition, and oftenest of all belong to both. And these tales have left shadows behind them—shadows that like ghosts still linger about her shores as in her houses, and if unseen are at least unforgotten to-day. Assuredly, on both sides of her, seaward and river-ward, there are places that have every right to be remembered.

On the Sillon, the roadway that links Saint-Malo to the mainland, there stands opposite the casino, a cross of granite. I was not able to discover its precise date, but it is said to be very old; it is known locally as the ‘Stone-Cross’ and a story is told of its origin for which there seems to be little reliable authority. Be that as it may, it serves now to mark a spot on the beach above which it stands that is a place of very notable memories; there is nothing else now left to record them—and yet these memories are actual history, and not only tradition.

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.’

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.

It is normal today to defend the right of one state to make war against another by comparing a war against aggression with a private individual’s exercise of his right of self-defence. If I have a right to live, it seems that I must have a right to protect my life against violent and unjust attack; it is probable that in order effectively to protect myself I may have to use violence, even such as to cause the death of the aggressor in a case of extreme necessity. If an individual can do this, then clearly an organized group can do the same, and this implies the use of an army by a state. Such an army would be used as an individual uses his fists or his sword or his gun in a lawless land; it would be used to protect the life of the country in an internationally lawless world.

Such is the commonsense approach to the justification of war today; and such, if we make allowances for the lack of theological refinement, is the current Catholic view of the just war. It depends for its cogency on an extension of the rights of the individual to the rights of the state.

It may cause some surprise, therefore, to those who regard Saint Augustine as the main source of the just war tradition to find that not only is such a line of reasoning absent from his writings, but that it is in fact directly contrary to his teaching.

In his treatise on Freewill, he states clearly that an individual has no moral right to kill an assailant in defence of life, liberty or honour. A law permitting such killing may well be objectively reasonable, since it permits the lesser of two evils; it is a lesser evil for a robber to be killed than for a good man to be killed.

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.

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.

‘If good people feel disgust at a nation which—simply with a view to extending its dominion—spontaneously provokes a war with neighbouring States which are at peace with it and have done them no harm—then I can only say that I applaud their praiseworthy feelings.’—De Civitate Dei, IV, xiv.

Remarkably little seems to have been written on this subject. Yet Augustine is quite justly described as the Father of the Philosophy of History,’ and even if he had not treated of the subject almost ‘ex professo ‘—as we hope to show—no remarks of his on the part war has played in the history of the world could fail to be of interest. So far the only discussion on his attitude to the problems are a Paper by Fr. Vincent Scully, C.R.L., in the Clergy Review for Feb., 1932, and also Ypres de la Brière, La Conception de la Paix et de la Guerre chez S. Augustin, Revue de la Philosophic, 1916. See too R. Regout, S.J., La doctrine de la guerre juste de S. Augustin ii nos jours d'apres les théologiens et les canonistes catholiques, 1935, though the author is more concerned with Franciscus de Victoria who has, he thinks, broken with scholastic teaching on the requisites for a just war.

The above passage—so peculiarly apropos to the events of to-day—shows us what the Bishop of Hippo’s reactions to the present crisis would have been. Yet to gentle, peace- loving Augustine, ever absorbed in the needs spiritual as well as temporal of his flock, war was-—as indeed it must be to every thinking man—-something unspeakably horrible.

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.