There are two fairly commonplace facts about games which seem relevant to a discussion of Alice in Wonderland. First, games are rule-governed, and so orderly; but playing a game involves a creative application of the rules, as Wittgenstein reminds us in Philosophical Investigations, and thus allows for freedom: rules are fixed, but moves are to some extent unpredictable. Seen in this way, a game might appear as a paradigmatic fusion of order and liberty—one, perhaps, of some relevance to society. Second, games involve a means/ends rationality, but aren’t in themselves functional: they are played as ends in themselves and in that sense transcend considerations of sheer utility. From this viewpoint, games raise interesting questions about the relations between rational and ‘irrational’ for msof activity, and indeed this issue is touched on at the very beginning of Alice: the White Rabbit appears just as Alice is wondering ‘whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies’, pondering the relations between utilitarian effort and creative play. This, too, has a wider social application which the book brings out.

Alice in Wonderland abounds in games; indeed, most of the central scenes—the Caucus Race, the tea-party, the croquet match, the lobster quadrille, even the trial—are games of a more or less direct kind. But, of course, these games are, by normal standards, very peculiar. The croquet game, for instance, is completely chaotic, since the players ignore the rules and the equipment won’t stay in place. Alice has to hit a rolled-up hedgehog through the arch of a doubled-up soldier with a flamingo, but the hedgehog keeps unfurling, the flamingo won’t keep still and the soldiers continually get up and stroll away at the crucial moment.

We live in a time in which the boundary fences between the various disciplines are being dismantled—at least as far as the social sciences and humanities are concerned. Take, for example, the work of Michel Foucault. Is it philosophy, history, sociology or political science? Again, where would one place the deconstructionism of Jacques Derrida? Under the guise of literary theory it has profoundly changed the enterprise of literary criticism, and some think it is finally bringing to an end the hegemony of historical criticism in the theory and practice of biblical interpretation. With a nod towards Thomas Kuhn we could say that across the social sciences and humanities there is a search for new paradigms.

Students of that questionable discipline, called variously science of religion, history of religions, religiology, religious studies, comparative religion, or simply religion, are well used to a cloud of uncertainty obscuring the legitimacy, function and defining method of their academic project. About the only point of agreement is that the science of religion is not theology—and even that distinction is understood in different ways. Other questions abound. Is there a single science of religion, with a defining method, distinguishing it from such related sciences as anthropology and sociology? Or, is it a collective name for a group of sciences and disciplines with no single methodology? Is there a strictly empirical science of religion or is the study of religion essentially a hermeneutic discipline, demanding a methodology appropriate to one of the Geisteswissenschaften? One could continue along these lines, multiplying questions. Enough has been said to indicate what all its practitioners know, the uncertain status of the academic study of religion. By the ‘academic study’ of religion I mean that study when disengaged from the controlling authority and presuppositions of any particular religious tradition or organization.

The mystical language of the 14th century Dominican, Meister Eckhart, can certainly be characterised as daring in its creativity. Indeed, Eckhart uses language like few others in his talk of the divine, employing bold paradoxes and unusual metaphors. But as Bernard McGinn has written, “while Eckhart’s creative handling of language is one of the major attractions of his style, it often does not make the task of understanding him any easier.” Part of the problem in failing to understand Eckhart’s words involves a failure to understand the context of his theological vision and his efforts to bring his listeners to a new appreciation of the divine. This has been especially true in the contemporary philosophy of religion. Philosophical analyses have failed to attend to the conditions in which the mystic’s words have their meaning and instead have generally been attempts to “penetrate” the phenomena. What is required instead is what the 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein has advised, namely, a grammatical investigation. When Eckhart writes, “The eye in which I see God is the same eye in which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye and one sight and one knowing and one loving”, it must be recognized that the meaning of such a statement can only be understood in seeing how Eckhart’s words are being used, for it is only in this context that these words have their significance. Rather than impose a philosophical explanation, therefore, it is important to note the grammar of Eckhart’s discourse and thus a description is offered.

The notion of ‘the feminine Other’ is a vexed one for feminists. In the opening pages of The Second Sex Simone de Beauvoir asks, ‘Are there women, really? Most assuredly the theory of the eternal feminine still has its adherents who will whisper in your ear: “Even in Russia women still are women”.’ For de Beauvoir the verbal symmetry of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine is merely a matter of linguistic form. In the real world of work and love—in life in general—man is the norm and woman is man’s ‘other’, thus her famous remark, ‘He is the Subject... she is the Other’, the ‘not man’ defined by men.

Levinas may be a ‘recent read’ for many of us but already, writing in 1949, de Beauvoir quotes him; ‘Otherness’, says Levinas, ‘reaches its full flowering in the feminine, a term of the same rank as consciousness but of opposite meaning.’ T suppose’ de Beauvoir comments, ‘that Levinas does not forget that woman, too, is aware of her own consciousness. . . . But it is striking that he deliberately takes a man’s point of view. When he writes that “woman is mystery”, he implies that she is mystery for man. Thus his description, which is intended to be objective, is in fact an assertion of masculine privilege.’3 And one which, we can note with de Beauvoir, can stand in a long line of philosophical evocation of ‘the female’ and ‘the feminine’ from the pre-Socratics to Nietzsche and beyond.

In the existentialist rubric of The Second Sex de Beauvoir sees the problem as this—a woman, like anyone else, is an autonomous freedom, yet she discovers herself in a world where men force her to assume herself as the ‘Other’. Woman, philosophically speaking, lacks her own subjectivity.

St Thomas is one of those people who, like Queen Victoria, have become a myth : I use the word in a Jungian sense and by no means in depreciation. She became one during her lifetime, and on that count made an earlier start; still he was already five centuries ahead, and his image has been more variously encrusted with the tastes of different periods and regions, so much so as almost to have grown into several myths.

To discover what the real person was like, the prosopon of Patristic theology, you cannot do better than go by the biographical documents edited by Father Kenelm Foster, which record the witness of those who were as near to him as we are to the characters of the 1914 war. Yet it is with the prosopon in its earlier histrionic and later juridical sense, the personage standing for a cause, the legal person and sometimes, it must be confessed, the legal fiction, that the historian of philosophy and theology is occupied, for such is the public figure that engages the gears and sets into motion the vehicles that carry the ideas of groups.

Islam contains a greater plurality of theology than is often realised. Here two “alternative voices” are chosen as examples of how cultural accretions can be questioned to what is taken to be the original, pure voice of Islam. Amina Wadud has led a mixed congregation in prayer in New York and has demonstrated, not without opposition, that women can be imams. There follows a discussion of the historical debate about women as imams and reactions to Wadud's actions. The second voice is Hasan Askari, an Indian Muslim who has written widely on inter-faith dialogue. He maintains that to reduce differences between Judaism, Christianity and Islam, differences should be interpreted symbolically rather than literally. He questions all claims to finality in any religion and he believes that historical Islam has yet to be transformed to “universal Islam”. Religious differences can only be finally transcended at a level of mystical experience.

The reception of Greek learning in mediaeval Islam, Judaism, and Christianity was the occasion for a profound analysis of many theological doctrines. In particular, Neoplatonism and Aristotelian philosophy led to renewed thinking about what it means for God to be the Creator of all that is. In the Latin West, Thomas Aquinas benefited from the works of Avicenna, Averroes, and Maimonides as he fashioned his understanding of creation, understood both philosophically and theologically. The recognition that creation is not a change and as a metaphysical dependence in the order of being does not challenge claims in the natural sciences (e.g., that something cannot come from absolutely nothing) are crucial features of the mediaeval heritage on the relationship between creation and the natural sciences. Indeed, Thomas Aquinas argued that an eternal, created universe was intelligible.

At the present time women are becoming more and more integrated into the public and professional spheres; they are taking posts of responsibility not only within the home, but outside of it, where they are being accepted not just as feminists but as members of the community with particular skills and aptitudes, which are not, moreover, merely ‘womanly’ skills and aptitudes. In many professional situations it is now no longer sensible to ask whether the applicant for a post is a man or a woman; the only criteria applied are those of professional competence. This change within the secular society is not reflected within Church communities. Women are systematically discriminated against; the most crude and powerful symbol of this is their exclusion from the sanctuary. Now, it is argued that ‘tradition’ supports this discrimination and any attack on it is an attack on the living and holy tradition of the Church, and moreover that woman’s place is sharply and strictly defined in scripture. We shall not be able to examine both of these objections, but must content ourselves with a partial examination of the second. Partial because we shall only look at the four Gospels and not at the Old Testament or the other writings of the New Testament. Also much of the work that has been done on this question is based on a study of the role of the Mother of God, but very little has been attempted in the study of the roles of other women mentioned in the Gospel narratives. Therefore, we shall concentrate on this area, hoping to discuss the unique and all-important place of the Mother of God later. Finally we should make clear that in spite of the content, this article is not a statement of a merely ‘feminist’ point of view. Issues will be raised that go far beyond the single problem of the status of women; rather this problem should be seen as one of many which present a moral challenge to the Church and which are all interrelated. Sexual discrimination is only one form of discrimination which may afflict a ‘Christian’ community.

The paper describes the settings for an official dialogue between religious communities, including the Catholic Church, and the institutions of the European Union. It goes on to describe some important and necessary contributions that a Christian vision can make to the European project. Finally it considers how far certain styles (rather than content) of Catholic discourse can impede the reception of this vision, and so render effective dialogue more difficult.

In 19821 drove with friends from the city of Puebla to Mexico City by the rather hazardous route between the volcanoes Ixtaccihuatl and Popocatepetl. That is the route which Cortés and his followers travelled in 1519. From the top, they caught Europe’s first glimpse of the Aztec capital, glistening below. Bernal Diaz, in his eyewitness chronicle, describes their amazement at its size and beauty. Now you cannot see the city, but only the pulsating orange-brown glow of its pollution. What was more interesting to me was that in order to find the right track to the pass, we had stopped in a village to ask the way, and had been guided by indians speaking the Spanish of Cervantes, rich in forms and courtesies quite unused in modem Spanish.

In 1990 I spent a weekend in Sucre, the historical capital of Bolivia, a beautiful university city in the Andes. I was attending a national charismatic conference, which had borrowed a military academy during the summer holiday. In the evening there was a big Mass in the Cathedral, presided over by the newly appointed Bishop, a Spaniard. The next morning the Feast of the Epiphany, I stumbled out of bed to celebrate Mass at six with the (enclosed) Carmelite sisters in their 17th century Carmel. To my amazement, the church was full, mostly of indians , in multi-coloured costume; the sisters in their choir made sprightly song with the help of a number of Spanish and Andean instruments, and every time they did so, a small indian girl, quite unprompted, danced with delight in front of the image of Our Lady.

Pius XII condemned atheism's “most ignoble corruptions” in his 1956 encyclical Haurietis Aquas, along with its “lethal tenets” in 1958's Meminisse Iuvat. Only six years later, however, in 1964, Vatican II's Lumen Gentium affirmed the possibility of salvation for “those who, without any fault of theirs, have not yet arrived at an explicit knowledge of God” (article 16). Furthermore, the following year's Gaudium et Spes 19–21, drafted by Paul VI's newly-founded Secretariat for Non-believers, offers, among much else, a sympathetic overview of contemporary atheisms, and invites their contemporary adherents to “a dialogue that is sincere and prudent”. These paragraphs, according to Ratzinger, “may be counted among the most important pronouncements of Vatican II”.

Evidently, comparing Pius XII's “lethal tenets” to Vatican II's salvific optimism, profound developments are manifest in the Catholic engagement with atheism. Primarily responsible for this are, I argue, two episodes in French Catholic history in the decades preceding Vatican II: a) the unprecedented dialogue of Catholic intellectuals with modern atheism, following the French Communist Party's main tendue (“outstretched hand”) during the period of the Popular Front (1934–38); and b) the ‘priest-worker’ experiment, initiated by Henri Godin and Yvan Daniel's 1943 publication of La France – Pays de Mission?

One of St. Paul’s contributions to our understanding of the powers of evil is to sum them up in the phrase ‘principalities and powers’. For him they represent the sum-total of evil powers that threaten men both heavenly and earthly. The author of Ephesians takes over the concept in his emphasis of Christ’s exaltation and victory over evil. For him Christ’s victory and redemption is cosmic in scope, yet peculiarly practical in that its effects are to be worked out in the Church and in the lives of believers.

In 1:21 the ascended Christ is described as sitting at the right hand of the Father above, ‘all rule and authority and power and dominion’. This list represents the cosmic totality; everything that in any way is in a position of power and influence in the universe. The all-inclusive nature of the phrase is underlined by the addition of, ‘and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in that which is to come’. There is no attempt made to set the powers in any order of preference, or to define any of their individual characteristics. ‘The Writer is concerned not to give us information about the denizens of the unseen world but to help our imagination to picture the exalted glory of Christ.’ Are the powers referred to good or bad? The need for them to be put in subjection under his feet points at least to the inclusion of subversive heavenly powers. By his exaltation Christ is not only supreme over the whole universe, but also head of the Church.

This article considers how the young Thomas Aquinas treats the question of universal salvation by examining his reading of 1 Timothy 2.4, God wills that all humans should be saved, in two of his early works, the Scriptum on the Sentences of Peter Lombard and the sixth Disputed Question on Truth, both dated to the period 1252–1257. Drawing on John Damascene's distinction between God's antecedent and consequent will, Thomas here teaches that whereas God wills antecedently in a unimodal way that all humans should be saved, He wills consequently in a bimodal way based on foreknown merits. Though foreknown merits are not a cause of predestination itself, they are a cause of glory, one of predestination's temporal effects. On Thomas's account, then, reading 1 Tim 2.4 as a straightforward statement of what God has done eternally—namely, predestine or save every individual human—would undermine the freedom of the human will that is necessary in order to attain to beatitude.

Pope Benedict XVI often uses the concept of the dignity of the human person in his discourse. This article firstly attempts to present a synthesis of Benedict XVI's understanding of human dignity. The result is a multidimensional understanding of human dignity based on the belief that the human person is created in the image of God. Human dignity is constituted by the given-ness of human existence, the capacities inherent in being human—freedom, reason, love and community—and the telos of human existence, namely, spiritual union with God and the practical realisation of a peaceful and mutually edifying human coexistence. Based on this understanding of human dignity, Benedict XVI develops a normative morality. The second part of this article asks whether interpretations of this normative morality that would claim that some of these norms are absolute moral norms are in fact correct. Particular attention is paid to the apparent equation or reduction of human dignity to the dignity of life. The conclusion is, though it is possible to read Benedict XVI's normative morality as advocating absolute moral norms, such an interpretation would be usually incorrect in light of Benedict XVI's more comprehensive understanding of human dignity.