There are ambiguities in the title: Other Discourses. What are these discourses and who speaks them? Discourses of others, of those who are not the same? Discourses by the same about those who are other, and about otherness itself, about an absolute Other, which would also be the other of discourse itself? And then, almost immediately upon these questions, as if folded within them, come other questions. Can we hear the discourses of others, if they really are other? Can we have discourses about others which do not reduce them to the limits of our own discourses? Can there be any discourse about otherness itself, about an absolute Other, if it is indeed the other of discourse, beyond discourse?

Even if it were possible to pursue all these questions in a single essay, this is not that essay. Here I pursue only some of the questions in the direction of the philosophical authorship of Emmanuel Levinas.

More than half of this book is taken up with the complete text of Pope John Paul II’s encyclical letter on ‘certain fundamental questions of the Church’s moral teaching’, Veritatis Splendor, dated 6 August 1993. The rest reprints the set of eleven comments published in The Tablet, together with a brief introduction by the editor, John Wilkins.

According to John Wilkins, ‘people feel that something is wrong’—‘there is a widespread moral unease’—but ‘the task of establishing a pluralist society which yet acknowledges shared values as the condition of that pluralism is proving beyond the capacities at present being brought to it’ (page ix, my italics). In the judgment of many worried people (not only Catholics), that would seem an unduly optimistic statement. It suggests that, while the task is beyond our intellectual powers ‘at present’, we may be better off in days to come. But what if the ‘shared values’ which would be the condition of the moral pluralism of Western culture are already as substantial as they ever could be—and are diminishing all the time? What if a pluralist society is, by definition, irreconcilably divided over deep moral issues? Where there are ex hypothesi radically conflicting conceptions of the good life which are never going to converge, let alone be unified, what content would there be to ‘shared values’ beyond temporary alliances, occasional trade-offs, and the kind of tolerance that has marked Western societies since people wearied of the religious wars?

The Strozzis were a large, rich and powerful family in the Florence of the 1420s. Like many aristocratic merchant families of the time, they planned a chapel where only they would have the right to be buried. Such privatised funerary and memorial arrangements were not unusual, though in combining theirs with a functioning sacristy in the monastic church of Santa Trinita, the Strozzis started a trend which was to be important in the evolution of Renaissance architecture. Because it was stripped of furnishings and pictures in the seventeenth century, the chapel-sacristy at Santa Trinita now looks bare, but in the early fifteenth century it was full of colour and religious imagery.

The head of the family, Palla Strozzi, took a leading part in the planning of the memorial chapel. He negotiated with the monks, engaged an architect, masons and stone carvers and had his deceased father entombed in a wall of the as yet uncompleted building. In a real sense it was Palla’s project His choice of artists to paint pictures for it reveals his taste. He commissioned Gentile da Fabriano, the most famous artist in Italy, to paint the Adoration of the Magi, and Lorenzo Monaco, the leading practitioner in Florence of the International Gothic style, to produce a Deposition of Christ from the Cross. Gentile’s work is now in the Uffizi, but Lorenzo died in 1425 leaving the Deposition unfinished. Twenty years later Fra Angelico completed it, and today it hangs in the Museum of San Marco, Florence.

The Editor has responded to my criticism of what has often seemed to me the almost automatically pro-Palestinian “line” followed by this and other journals when treating of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, by agreeing to publish this article in which I set out to redress the balance by supplying some of the crucial facts of Israeli and Jewish history which are ignored by partisan accounts. To omit more recent examples of this kind of bias, the reviewer of Lucas Grollenberg’s book Palestine Comes First in “New Blackfriars” of May 1980, after giving a tendentious resume of the “true facts” of the history of the conflict which glossed over a number of salient facts, ended with the revealing assertion that since Grollenberg’s facts are “right”, any other account is “wrong” and therefore should not be published — an attitude which should speak for itself. Fair-minded people — as one assumes the great majority of the readers of New Blackfriars strive to be — will wish to weigh all relevant facts. This account aims not to deny legitimate Palestinian claims but to supply some facts which are the context of those claims and to invite readers to enter into the minds of the other side in the historical conflict, the Israelis and the wider Jewish community. It will already be clear, I hope, that for me “fair-minded” does not necessarily equal fashionable liberal bien-pensant.

Spirits burdened by the wars or conflicts between peoples and nations have been uplifted in recent months, especially in the Near East. A new peace process between Israel and its neighbours, including direct negotiations with Palestinian leaders, requires consummate statesmanship and also an adjustment in the hearts of all, moving from fear and hatred to hope and generosity. The Fundamental Agreement between the Holy See and Israel (December 30, 1993) has implications for Catholics and Jews everywhere. Within this context, the Latin-rite Patriarch of Jerusalem has promulgated a lengthy pastoral letter in November 1993. An English version is published in Origins 23 (January 20, 1994) pp. 541-555. In the context of an interfaith conference held in Jerusalem from February 1-4, 1994 the Patriarch gave an address entitled “Religious Leadership in the Holy Land.” This text will be studied at the end of the essay.

In the pastoral letter Patriarch Michel Sabbah celebrates explicitly the new hope for “peace and reconciliation between our two peoples, Jewish and Palestinian, and with all the Arab world” (#1). The sad events of prolonged conflict “must not consume the past and present.. . “ but now the struggle will be to maintain and build peace with justice (#1). This letter about the Bible intends to encourage reading and understanding of God’s Word, “in order to make it the object of meditation and prayer” (#2).

The poignancy of praying in the Eucharistic liturgy the psalms and readings about Israel and its neighbours has been particularly graphic for Christian communities in the Near East over recent decades.

The saint we are honouring today would have found the theme of this lecture all too familiar. St Thomas Aquinas was personally involved in the lively, indeed fierce, medieval debates that surrounded the first appearance of the Franciscan and Dominican friars in the life of the Church. Then, as before and since, religious did not always fit in immediately or obviously into the established patterns of diocese and parish. At the time of St Thomas some argued that all the attributes of the antichrist and his ministers were to be found in the new Mendicant Orders. In Cambridge there survives a medieval manuscript with an illumination showing Archbishop FitzRalph, its author and a critic of the friars, faced by Mendicant friars mingled with devils. At about the time St Thomas was writing his first polemical work, soldiers had to be sent to protect the Paris Dominicans at Saint-Jacques from riots and demonstrations. Troops had to patrol his inaugural lecture, and on Palm Sunday 1259, as he preached, St Thomas was heckled by someone trying to get a hearing for the seculars’ case. No wonder that he went into the matter of when and by what means religious can defend themselves.

St Thomas’s own experience as a Dominican friar was gained in different dioceses, indeed in different countries. He dealt repeatedly with the position of religious in the Church, especially in three polemical works, in Quodlibetal disputations and in the Summa Theologiae, going well beyond the controversy over the organisation of university teaching in Paris. To guide our own exploration, we might do well to start with how St Thomas approached the task. Some problems have a way of recurring. In particular, he had to fight against two errors, the kind of mistakes still made today.

This article looks at a fundamental area of social and political concern in Britain today, that is to say the Welfare State. It sets out initially to elicit some of the different arguments about this ‘institution’, contrasting what is necessarily now, after several years of one political party holding power, to be seen as ‘the Government’s view’, with alternative opinions. It then seeks to analyse these contrasting views in terms of a dialectic between individual and state responsibility, which can be analysed in theological terms. It argues that this dialectic, which in the past has appeared to be threatened by a denial of individual responsibility, is nowadays threatened by a denial of state responsibility. It does not, therefore, seek to go into detail about the various aspects of the Welfare State, analysing what they have achieved or where their inadequacies lie. Rather it concentrates more generally upon the theoretical basis of the system, from the point of view of both its supporters and its detractors.

It is worthwhile initially to consider the term ‘Welfare State’ itself. It appears according to most polls to be very popular, but what is it? It is noteworthy that people refer most commonly to a welfare ‘state’ rather than ‘system’, as if they were thinking less in terms of a particular set of institutions than in terms of a particular idea of society as a whole, namely that it be organised for the welfare or benefit of its citizens.

Recently several works that study Thomas Aquinas’s ethics have been published. Why is it, too, that a return to Thomas’s ethics yields insights into his writings that have escaped us for decades, even centuries? Why is he a perennial font of reflection that prompts new writers to find fresh insights at the end of the second millennium?

The answer rests, I believe, in the fact that he captures an understanding of the moral life that is enormously helpful in forming a vision of the type of people we ought to become. In an age that wants to respect the individual conscience while maintaining a sense of the objectively right and wrong, Thomas provides a framework in which we can achieve both. In order to demonstrate how Thomas accomplishes this, I advance along the way ten key points that Thomas makes that serve as sign posts to our conclusions.

1. Rather than retreat from public life. Thomas believes that good religious life, like good theology, can be at home in the life of the city. At the age of six, Thomas’s parents sent him to the famous Benedictine Abbey, Monte Casino, where they (reasonably) hoped that he would become abbot. At fifteen, he leaves the order and, after five years of studies in Naples, enters the relatively new order of SL Dominic. As urban areas emerge for the first time in human history, the fifteen year old Thomas makes his first adult decision to leave an order that requires a vow of permanence and enters a new order already known for their work of preaching in the cities and teaching in the medieval universities.

As the ecological crisis, fuelled by widespread reality avoidance, deepens, so, fitfully and hesitantly, does the religious response. “Curiously, scientific analysis points toward the need for a quasireligious transformation of contemporary culture. Whether such a transformation can be achieved in time is problematic, to say the least”, writes Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich. Recent Christian reflection has concentrated on the human presence, the place and responsibility, within creation, of people under God. Fruitful discussion continues about metaphors and models for human dominion, such as stewardship, sacral kingship, co-worker, and co-operative letting be.

Other distinctively Christian questions are also being asked — and convincing answers demanded — that go right to the heart of the Christian religion, questions about Christ and the whole scientifically unfolding reality of life through geological history. We now realize that the cosmos is more immense than our ancestors in the faith imagined; and that our own species, redeemed in Christ and the conscious edge of evolution, is both more fragile and more vulnerable and, simultaneously, more damaging a presence within global and local ecosystems than we like to acknowledge. We are aware that there have been mass extinction events taking out whole ecosystems; in particular we are aware of the dinosaurs. Extinction events take their toll, especially through climate change and habitat loss, over millenia, even millions of years. We may be in such an extinction event in this our time, particularly in the decimation of flora and fauna including numerous insect species in the rainforests of the humid tropics.

My concern is with the phenomenon of self-definition, and particularly with the self-definition of one group over against another group. I shall consider two test-cases, one ancient and the other modem, the selfdefinition of Ancient Israel in relation to the Canaanites as evidenced in the Hebrew Bible, and the self-definition of Christians in relation to Jews in the Christian experience of reading the Hebrew Bible as Old Testament.’

Self and Other in Ancient Israel

I begin with the distinction between Israel and Canaan as presented in the Bible. This case illustrates how complex can be the mixture of reality and fantasy in the self-definition of a nation. Some words from the book of Deuteronomy:

Israel presented herself as being distinctive, a people set apart. This emphasis marks the biblical story from Genesis 12 onwards; in the call of Abram, Israel is effectively called to be a people, T will make of you a great nation’ (Gen. 12.2). The story of Jacob and Esau is all about Israelite identity over against others. Jacob represents Israel; through his craftiness, he triumphs over Esau, who represents the enemy Edom (See especially Genesis 27).

Iris Murdoch is a philosopher and a novelist. Her novels are not philosophy in narrative form: we would not expect her philosophical writings to be categorical formulations of her narrative line.

Why should Murdoch, an Irish agnostic, be of interest to the clergy or those with theological preoccupations? Well, perhaps because much modern theology and spiritual writing employs, consciously or otherwise, a neo-Cartesian mentalist individualist epistemology. Or perhaps because we must be attuned to hearing people’s stories, or perhaps because when we understand people’s mental furniture better, many of our tasks will be clarified.

Is there some more important reason? Yes. Because our way of praying, lamenting, celebrating, and perhaps what ever counts as prayer, will be affected by the kind of narrative we feel at home in.

It may seem odd to speak of us ‘feeling at home’ in a novel, but if we easily see ourselves as the hero of Lucky Jim or This Sporting Life, feeling more at home in that role, than in a piece of more chaotic, fabulist metafiction like, say, The Philosopher’s Pupil it should tell us something about the philosophical anthropology we are employing. Put it this way: there are philosophical reasons for the hero of many modem novels being a rather alienated character, engaged in a more or less fruitless attempt to be ens causa sui, but these are not good reasons.

A clue to what Murdoch is getting at may be found in her comment on the existentialist view of evil as found in Sartre’s La Naus?e ‘Sartre as Cartesian solipsist seems especially ... to exhibit a lack of any lively sense of the mystery and variousness of individuals’.

Inside the Palazzo Pubblico, the dignified Town Hall of Siena, is Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s cycle of frescoes of the Allegories and the Effects of Good and Bad Government painted between 1337 and 1339. The frescoes were commissioned by the Council of the Nine, a régime which retained power in Siena until 1355, after having preserved its peace and prosperity for some sixty years. A wise old man symbolizes the Common Good while a patchwork of neat fields, tame boar and busy hoers suggests order and prosperity. Bad Government is a desolate place, razed to the ground by a diabolical tyrant, the Sienese wolf at his feet. Lorenzetti’s civic masterpiece, Siena’s icon of the Common Good, documents the Catholic social tradition which recent papal teachings reaffirm in their critique of both Marxism and laissez-faire capitalism. Lorenzetti’s frescoes are not only decorative and celebratory, but they are also didactic; for this was the primary object of all medieval painting. The frescoes, a distillation of Augustinian and Thomist thought, are designed for the eyes of Siena’s ruling 61ite, for few, outside of that charmed group, ever penetrated to the innermost rooms of the Palazzo Pubblico. It is clearly the Nine who are addressed by the words which appear above the head of Justice in the fresco: “Love Justice, you who rule the earth.” The frescoes state the obligations of the governor to the governed, rather than the obligations of the governed to the governing.

Liberation theologians, from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and even from North America and Europe, are actively engaged in responding to massive human rights violations in countries where revolution has either been a success or a tragic failure. The inspiration for this commitment is the Church's ‘Option for the poor’, originating in the historic Conferences of the Latin American Bishops at Medellin and Pueblo. But twenty years on, in a changed global context, there is a need for Liberation Theology to develop more than a praxis-oriented focus: there needs to be a further development of that epistemic shift on which Liberation Theology was originally constructed, as well as a new sensitivity as to how knowledge itself is attained. This new sensibility must extend to those who have withstood and suffered the violation of human rights, and include reflection on who has the right to know, and the de-humanisation process on both individual and communal levels. I will briefly explain what I mean by this epistemic shift before exploring the whole notion of ‘dangerous memory* and its bearers.

I consider this to be a theo-political task: theology has always been concerned perhaps over possessively with the location of truth and its formulations. But since the work of Michel Foucault, philosopher and social historian, and his call for the ‘insurrection of the subjugated knowledges’, it is no longer possible to ignore the power factor in theological expressions. The call to listen to oppressed peoples as the ‘bearers of theological truth’ must be woven into the struggle against the dominant ideology.

Robert Liddell is an unjustly neglected Catholic novelist. Perhaps now that Peter Owen has reprinted three of his novels and promises to reprint them all, his bookes may at last find the audience they deserve. Lovers of Barbara Pym will remember him as Jock in A Very Private Eye; they met at Oxford and remained life-long friends. She greatly admired his novels. So did Ivy Compton-Burnett, Elizabeth Taylor, Francis King, and Walter Allen. But the list of his literary friends and admirers is endless: John Bayley, Fr. D’Arcy, Peter Levi, Iris Murdoch, Olivia Manning, Honor Tracy. All of this suggests that he must be worth reading, and he is.

His best and most characteristic works are Unreal City (1952) and The Rivers of Babylon (1959) which follow Charles Harbord from 1944 to 1953 in his teaching posts in Alexandria and Cairo. They are novels of a real and quiet distinction, in the tradition that comes down from Jane Austen. Witty, often comic, highly literate and allusive, they examine with studied understatement the great themes of exile, sin, and faith.

On the most obvious level, they provide a highly entertaining account of what it was like to teach during and after the war in such foreign places as Alexandria and Cairo. Both novels are narrated in the third person, almost entirely from Charles’s point of view, and through his eyes we get a vivid picture of both great cities without, however, any scene painting.

Opera is currently enjoying a great deal of public interest. In its popular understanding, as the most lavish, the most spectacular, the most luxuriant of art forms, it might not seem an obvious form for religious exploration, or the working out of spiritual problems. That, one might think, is rather the preserve of more private and introspective art forms: to be left to writers, poets, and workers in the plastic arts. Yet, in the operatic works produced by British composers in the last fifty or so years, many do take this apparently private subject-matter into this most public of artistic domains. This article is an attempt to draw together some of the more notable examples of this tendency, to compare them in their diversity, and to draw attention to this phenomenon among the non-opera-going public. (In all that follows, dates after opera titles refer to the year of their first production.)

Bishop Richard Harries has recently remarked, ‘All works of art, whatever their content, have a spiritual dimension’, in that they can be a source of comfort and solace. He goes on to distinguish ‘a distinctive tradition of ostensibly spiritual art’, which ‘seeks to indicate through symbols the eternal reality behind, beyond and within this world’. In this article, the term ‘spirituality’ is used quite loosely, usually to refer to the use by composers and their librettists of material from sources acknowledged to be of spiritual significance. I have also drawn attention to composers’ uses of myths and legends, since these may be said to have a spiritual content in Harries’ sense, insofar as they consciously direct their hearers to levels of understanding beyond the simple level of the story being told.

The Confessions of Saint Augustine’ have been esteemed throughout the centuries for the literary elegance with which their author integrates self-disclosure, compunction, and analysis of the human and redeemed condition. For all the claims made for this classic, however, rarely has it been noted that prime among Augustine’s intentions in writing was to convey a definitive point of view regarding the orthopraxy of the Church. This article maintains that central to the Confessions is an unequivocal instruction regarding the reading and interpretation of texts. Written between 397 and 401, only a few years following Augustine’s succession in 395 to the see of Hippo, the Confessions are a study of the place of texts in the community. Furthermore, they are an explicit defence of the bishop’s primacy in the governance of a community’s texts.

No matter what his topic at any given moment, Augustine’s attention throughout the Confessions scarcely deviates from the issues of speech, language, poetics, and, ultimately, scripture. Augustine plumbs their meaning throughout, returning repeatedly to how all these function for ill or good within community. Cognizant of the extent to which language and texts can abet fallen human nature and lead towards its worst proclivities, Augustine admonishes readers ever to beware of the potential of texts to deceive, endanger, and enslave. To note only this, however, would be to remain ignorant of the author’s far more important conviction. If some words can entrap, cannot different words liberate? The scriptural Word of the psalms, which Augustine quotes so profligately that his own voice

It is at least twenty years too late to prevent most Catholic institutions of higher education in Europe and North America from establishing departments of religious studies. It is not, of course, too late to disestablish them or, short of that rather impractical possibility, reform them along lines extending from a quite different set of principles. I believe a particularly good reason for doing no less than the latter is that the present enterprise is a contradiction to genuine Catholic education; simply one more manifestation of the stale secularism which now permeates Catholic schools. And the proof of this claim, as I intend to argue, lies in the fact that it is impossible within the regnant discourse of religious studies to reclaim what St Thomas meant by “acts commanded by religion.” The very notion of religion operating within that enterprise precludes it. The “religion” of religious studies is both too extensive in its initial presumptions but, more importantly, much too narrow in its final application to encompass what St. Thomas spoke of when he wrote on religion.

Perhaps the best route, then, to what St Thomas meant by religion, and in particular by acts commanded by religion, is getting straight about what he was not speaking of. To this end we can look to the most recent Encyclopedia of Religion, published under the editorial leadership of Mircea Eliade. The contribution on “religion” by Winston L. King provides just the sort of definition that reflects, not only the current wisdom in the field of religious studies, but a perfect antithesis to the teaching of St. Thomas.

‘Law’ says Plato in his dialogue The Statesman, ‘can never embrace in one prescription what is best and most right for everyone. The dissimilarities between men and between their actions and the fact that human affairs are pretty well always changing make it impossible for any skill whatever to lay down anything simple in connection with anything that will hold for all cases and at all times.’ Aristotle agrees. ‘It is the mark of an educated mind to aim at just so much precision of detail as the nature of the subject matter admits.’ In mathematics we expect exactitude; but in matters of conduct and what is advantageous, ‘nothing is fixed any more than in medicine’, and ‘the agents themselves must decide each case as it comes, just as must doctors and steersmen.’ The best thinkers of ancient Greece thought it obvious that we cannot achieve what is best for ourselves, cannot achieve the good for human beings, by following general rules.

Today it is sometimes said that there are certain general moral rules that bind without exception, rules that it is always wrong to break, whatever the circumstances. Is there a conflict between this and the ancient view?

The developing teaching of the Catholic Church on economic justice in recent years has increasingly emphasized the rights of people to active participation in the economy. Although the exact term is not to be found in official documents, some observers find in the Church’s teachings not only the advocacy of increased participation but also a case for some form of “economic democracy”. This paper examines the Church’s teaching on participation in the economic realm and the possibilities of developing a more democratically controlled economy. Specifically it examines the feasibility of and prospects for implementation of economic democracy, with eastern Europe as a special focus of attention.

Over the last one hundred years the hierarchy of the Catholic Church has produced a variety of official documents which reflect upon a range of social, economic and political issues. Collectively these documents have come to be known as the tradition of Catholic Social Thought. Increasingly there has been an emphasis in these documents on both the rights and obligations of all people to active participation in the various realms of human life. These rights and obligations are conceptualized around a three-faceted concept of justice which encompasses procedure, distribution and participation. Procedural justice refers to what is commonly called the “rule of law”. Concerns which fall under procedural justice include the establishment of laws for regulating fair competition in the economic, political and sociocultural realms, as well as laws which guarantee fair and equal protection of civil rights and fair and equal procedure in the courts.