Basic Christian Research Articles

Conscience & Conversion in Newman. A Developmental Study of Self in John Henry Newman (review)

Conscience & Conversion in Newman. A Developmental Study of Self in John Henry Newman. By Walter E. Conn. [Marquette Studies in Theology, No. 71.] (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press. 2010. Pp. 158. $17.00 paperback. ISBN 978-0-874-62777-0.) Walter Conn's concise, interdisciplinary case study of Blessed Cardinal John Henry Newman's psychological self-development and conversions mines not only English churchman's relevant major works but also his private letters, diaries, and journals, which, to paraphrase Newman, reveal true character of a man. Conn succeeds in his hope that some readers will find it a useful review of Newman's life (p. 9), since it offers a specialized perspective, with well-chosen source references, surveying well-traveled ground. Tracking Newman's various conversions chronologically, each of four chapters opens with a discussion of events and Newman literature of period, followed by Conn's use of psychological development theories from Erickson, Piaget, Kohlberg, Fowler, and Kegan to support his analyses of Newman's various conversions, although to those unfamiliar with this literature, brevity of psychological analysis can be challenging reading at times. However, a helpful chart on final page of appendix compares stages of each developmental theorist with four stages drawn from Conn's prior research. Readers may profit by reading very helpful appendix first, which provides a succinct overview of Conn's previous research on conversion. Conn's thesis for interpreting Newman's experiences is grounded in dynamic relationship of conscience, the radical drive of personal subject for self-transcendence (p. 132), and conversion, an 'about-face' which moves one into a world (p. 22). These occur within subject's fundamental dynamism for self-transcendence. Conn identifies Newman's multiconversions as they unfolded chronologically in three stages. First was a basic Christian moral conversion with evangelical overtones at age fifteen, accompanied by important affective, cognitive, and religious dimensions (p. 8).This led to a structural cognitive conversion (p. 8) during his twenties, with changes in both what and how religious knowledge was acquired. Finally, Conn suggests a new interpretation of Newman's ecclesial conversion as a negative deconversion from Anglicanism and a positive conversion to Rome at age forty-four, best understood as a moral (religious) decision responding to a judgment of personal conscience . …

Friends in Warm Places

Friends in Warm Places Michael J. Jarvis (bio) Larry Gragg . The Quaker Community on Barbados: Challenging the Culture of the Planter Class. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009. x + 192 pp. Map, bibliography, and index. $39.95. In the second half of the seventeenth century, Barbados was the richest, most populous, and economically most productive colony in the Anglo-Atlantic world. Its planters were the first to embrace a slave plantation system, providing a model that English settlers copied elsewhere in the Caribbean and North America. Successful Barbadian planters displayed their wealth to all through their clothes, lavish entertainments, and fine mansions. The island was among the closest to England and Africa in terms of maritime distances: it was the first port of call for many western-bound English vessels, as well as for the rising tide of English slavers operating on the West African coast. Virginia and Massachusetts are the darlings of many colonial historians, but Barbados was the single most dynamic, trend-setting colony in the half-century before 1700. Considering the vanity, rampant materialism, and brutal slave-based labor regime that characterized seventeenth-century Barbados, one would not expect George Fox's radical Quaker faith to flourish there. And yet Barbados was home to the largest Quaker population in the Americas prior to Pennsylvania's founding. Larry Gragg has followed up his recent general history of early Barbados with a slim but meticulously researched investigation of Barbadian Quakers that is both a community study of island Friends and a recovery of their transatlantic and intercolonial networks and connections. As he charts the rise and decline of Quakers in Barbados from the 1650s through the early eighteenth century, Gragg profiles who became "convinced" and how Quakers dealt with slavery, the ultimate source of the island's prosperity. He argues that Barbadian Quakers formed a counterculture that aggressively challenged the island's dominant planter class, directly and through their example of leading lives of peace, simplicity, and equality within a rigidly hierarchical society.1 Gragg starts with an appraisal of the turbulent times in England from which George Fox and his Society of Friends emerged. Fox grew up in a comfortable "middling" Midlands household and wanted for little until, at [End Page 595] the age of nineteen, he experienced a crisis of faith. Over the next four years, he wandered spiritually through an England wracked with religious and civil discord. Even as Calvinist, Arminian, and Episcopal clergymen debated theology, attacked one another, and sought adherents, a large segment of the English populace remained unchurched and ignorant of basic Christian doctrine. Fox floundered within "this confusing milieu of conflicting beliefs and apathy" until he experienced "a mystic union with the divine" and discovered a guiding inner light (p. 14). Further revelations led him to embrace the egalitarian worldview that shaped the central tenets of Quaker belief: rejection of vanity and hierarchy, a commitment to peace, belief in direct divine revelation, and social and gender equality. Rejecting predestination, Fox promised widespread salvation to a nation in spiritual disarray. Established clergymen condemned Fox's "blasphemy," but his message was highly appealing and spread quickly during the 1650s, especially among the families of yeomen and craftsmen in rural northern counties. Despite civil and clerical authorities' vigorous efforts to suppress Fox and his followers, the ranks of England's Quakers swelled to an estimated 50,000 by 1660—and Quaker missionaries and pamphlets were fanning out to Ireland, Continental Europe, and the colonies to spread Fox's radical message even farther afield. The first Quaker itinerants arrived in Barbados in the mid-1650s and found a colony in the midst of dynamic change. As sugar supplanted tobacco and great planters bought out their poor and middling neighbors, settlement patterns established during the island's first decades were radically altered. English political, ecclesiastical, and legal institutions transplanted in Barbados survived the sugar revolution intact, but the island's society and landscape became markedly different from that of England. The growing number of enslaved Africans working under a coercive and oppressive labor regime stoked racism and white fears of violent revolt. As the gulf in wealth between great planters, middling landowners, and the many English and...

Revising Basic Christian Ethics: Rethinking Paul Ramsey’s Early Contributions to Moral Theology

Despite petitions from friends and critics through much of his career, Paul Ramsey adamantly refused to revise his first book, Basic Christian Ethics. Yet, several pieces of Ramsey’s private correspondence indicate specific changes to Basic Christian Ethics that he felt were necessary. These include a desire to distance his use of agape from associations with Anders Nygren’s Agape and Eros, an added emphasis on the importance of the doctrine of creation for his understanding of agape, covenant, and natural law, and a shift from eschatology to Christology as the foundational doctrine for political ethics. Drawing upon personal letters and other disparate comments throughout Ramsey’s published work, this paper explores the impact such proposed revisions might have on contemporary interest (or lack thereof) in Basic Christian Ethics. In so doing it also highlights Ramsey’s ability to rethink central theological concepts in his work and draw his readers’ attention to fundamental questions in the field of moral theology.

Despicere mundum et terrena: A Spiritual and Liturgical Motif in theMissale Romanum

This article traces the Latin tradition of the use of the verb despicere in phrases such as despicere mundum et terrena from the fathers of the Church (especially Ambrose, Augustine, and Gregory the Great) through the Roman missals published up to 1962. Despicere mundum designates a basic Christian disposition or attitude of mind and heart whereby this world with all its pleasures and glories is accounted as of nothing in comparison with God and the things of heaven. Such a disposition makes martyrdom possible, but also must characterise the attitude of every Christian believer. Therefore despicere appeared in more and more Mass orations between the sixteenth and the mid twentieth century. This study's final sections discuss the purging of the verb despicere from the Roman missals promulgated after the Second Vatican Council. The author suggests that the stated reasons for almost entirely eliminating the verb are not convincing, and that the term should be revisited in the interest of the spiritual formation of the faithful through participation in the Mass.

Book Review: "Beyond Boundaries: Hindu-Christian Relationship and Basic Christian Communities"

Book Review: "Beyond Boundaries: Hindu-Christian Relationship and Basic Christian Communities"

The Face of the “Pagan”: Portraits of Religious Deviance on the Medieval Periphery

The Face of the “Pagan”: Portraits of Religious Deviance on the Medieval Periphery

How Christian Norms Can Have an Impact on Bioethics in a Pluralist and Democratic Europe: A Scandinavian Perspective

This article assesses the similarity and difference between the Western European style of doing bioethics and the Scandinavian one. First, it reviews the introductory article by the editor, C. Delkeskamp-Hayes in the first issue of Christian Bioethics (2008), devoted to the possibility of a specifically Christian bioethics in Europe. Second, it analyses bioethics debates in Scandinavian today. In light of Delkeskamp-Hayes' article, the main similarity is that both regions are facing secularization as a threat to basic Christian values, for example, to the Christian view of the sanctity and dignity of the human life. But the Scandinavian tends to reduce Christian bioethics to Luther's concept of the worldly kingdom, supposed to foster a dialogue between Christians and non-Christians on controversial ethical issues. Despite the positive value of the dialogue, this strategy renders Christian ethics powerless. Third, from an evangelical theological standpoint, it proposes some strategies for enhancing the influence of Christian commitments on bioethical laws and policies.

Eschatology and Statecraft in Paul Ramsey

This essay traces the historical development of the relationship between eschatology and statecraft in the thought of Paul Ramsey. At the outset of his career, as exemplified in Basic Christian Ethics, Ramsey outlined a position in which the Christian doctrine of eschatology could be construed as a source of positive theological warrants for engagement in politics. By the end of his career Ramsey's political realism had trumped this earlier theological position on eschatology such that eschatology was seen as a permanent limiting factor that restrained what he saw as Enlightenment stained utopian Christian political schemes.

Linguistic politeness in Anglo-Saxon England? A study of Old English address terms

This paper investigates Anglo-Saxon address terms against the background of politeness and face work. Using the Dictionary of Old English Corpus, it examines the most prominent Old English terms of nominal address associated with polite or courteous behaviour, their distribution, the typical communicative settings in which they are used and their basic pragmatic meaning. The results suggest that, at least in this field, politeness as face work may not have played a major role in Anglo-Saxon England. Rather, the use of the address terms may reflect accommodation to the overriding importance of mutual obligation and kin loyalty on the one hand, and obedience to the basic Christian ideals of humilitas and caritas on the other.

Empowering religious institutions through the basic Christian farming systems approach as development catalysts in rural communities

Two approaches to development, the Farming systems approach and the Basic Christian Community approach are examined in terms of success rates. Both approaches record a partial success due to one – sided emphasis on development. The farming systems approach which enjoys financial support from funding agencies emphasizes only material accumulation whereas the Basic Christian Community approach, which has an ethic and vision, lacks support from these agencies. In order to redress the situation and reap the full benefit of development, a merger approach, the Basic Christian Farming System approach, is suggested. This approach advocates greater empowerment of the rural religious institutions through support from funding agencies, thereby equipping these institutions for their social roles as mediating institutions and development catalysts. Keywords: farming systems, basic Christian community, mediating institution, basic Christian farming systems, religious institution Global Journal of Social Sciences Vol. 4(1&2) 2005: 17-20

Latin Sermon Collections from Later Medieval England: Orthodox Preaching in the Age of Wyclif. By Siegfried Wenzel. Pp. 740. (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 53.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. isbn 0 521 84182 8. £95.

This important book by a well-known scholar of medieval literature will be of great value to all serious students interested in sermons, literature, and church history. It consists of four main sections. Firstly the author discusses the authors where known, the style, and main contents of the sermon collections he has found, including at the end a much briefer account of some that lie outside his chosen dates of c.1350–1450. Then there is a discussion of the occasions for preaching, first outlining the canonical obligations of the clergy and giving evidence for much more frequent preaching than one might suppose. There follow chapters on preaching by bishops, monks, friars, and at university, with a chapter on other occasions for sermons (e.g. parliament). Part III, ‘Orthodox Preaching’, concludes that what we have reflects the theology of the schools as applied practically to the needs both of the clergy and parishioners. These sermons are not, for the most part, deep theological discussions. Two chapters here consider what the preachers had to say about the pastoral office and of course particularly about preaching itself, which was of great concern to many of them, and then the preaching of the basic Christian life and duties, the pastoralia. A chapter discusses the very wide variety of styles and methods, even though preachers used many of the same conventions and exempla. A chapter then discusses the impact of Lollardy, concluding that it is often impossible to distinguish an orthodox zeal for reform from a Wyclifite one, but that the emphasis on straightforward belief in the eucharistic presence, insistence on the need to confess to one's parish priest, and the defence of images and pilgrimage probably reflect matters which Lollardy had caused to be contested, even if the preacher never mentions heretics. The final section is an inventory of all the sermons, numbering them, giving the occasion, theme, biblical source, incipit and explicit, and the name of the preacher, with printed editions and other copies, if any.

Could the Extended Aquinas/Calvin Model Defeat Basic Christian Belief ?

Could the Extended Aquinas/Calvin Model Defeat Basic Christian Belief ?

PsychoBible

PsychoBible

Fécondité et limites de la réception du platonisme en Angleterre au XVIIe siècle: le cas des platoniciens de Cambridge

Even if in seventeenth-century England empiricism was the main current of thought, Platonism also played a significant part. In the thirties, elaborating at least partly upon the Florentine revival of the quattrocento, Thomas Jackson challenged the Aristotelian views still prevailing at Oxford. Outside academic circles, Lord Herbert of Cherbury was also a vocal critic of scholasticism and somehow prepared the way for the acceptance of the Cartesian doctrine by English thinkers. However, Platonism mostly flourished at Cambridge among a group of men who, after discarding the Calvinist principles on which they had been nurtured, developed a rational theology relying heavily on Platonist or Plotinian ideas. By the mid-century, Benjamin Whichcote bore the brunt of the Calvinist assault, as his former tutor, Antony Tuckney, reproached him for deviating from the orthodox path. The philosophers of the group were Ralph Cudworth and Henry More who endeavoured to find in Platonism an adequate answer to Hobbesian determinism and materialism. Capitalizing upon the Platonist and neo- Platonist texts, which they were thoroughly familiar with, they developed a kind of metaphysics, epistemology and ethics which, in their view, harmoniously combined the best of the Platonic tradition with basic Christian tenets.

So What Is a Franciscan?: Constituting the Franciscan Subject

35 Franciscan Studies 63 (2005) SO WHAT IS A FRANCISCAN? CONSTITUTING THE FRANCISCAN SUBJECT “Et odio habeamus corpus nostrum cum suis vitiis et peccatis, quia carnaliter vivendo vult nobis auferre amorem Domini nostri Iesu Christi et vitam aeternam et se ipsum cum omnibus perdere in infernum .” This line comes from Chapter XXII in the Early Rule.1 As some historians propose, Francis is addressing his brothers in 1219 before setting out for the Orient. You might ask why I read you the line in Latin. I read it to you in Latin because I do not think you want to hear it in English. It is not a line popular with teachers of Franciscan spirituality . It makes students of Franciscan spirituality uneasy. So by forced readings we have been taught, if indirectly, to pass rapidly here when perusing the early writings. In editorial work, when collating manuscripts , an editor will come across disagreement among the manuscripts . (That is why he is collating them.) A major disagreement sharpens the editor’s senses, for behind it lies a story. By figuring out the story, the editor ends up understanding better the different scribes as well as the text, advancing the critical worth of the eventual edition. We have something similar here. Why are we wary of the sentence I quoted in Latin? Why do we want to elide something Francis said? Where lies our problem? The fact that we have a problem with these words of Francis already makes them interesting, more interesting still if we ascribe them, as I do, a central role in early Franciscan life. So: now that you have been forewarned, here is the line in English: “And let us hate our body with its vices and sins, for by living carnally it 1 I use the collection of Franciscan sources edited by L. Garcia Aragon, Summa Franciscana vel Sancti Francisci et Sanctae Clarae Assisiensium Opuscula, Biographiae et Documenta. Murcia, 1993. Hereafter Summa Franciscana. Here: Summa Franciscana, 68. – I thank Michael Blastic (The Franciscan Institute) for his critical reading of the text, which helped me remove a few of its weaknesses. DAVID FLOOD 36 wants to take from us the love of our Lord Jesus Christ and eternal life and cast itself with everyone into hell.” We come across this rule of life regularly in the early Franciscan writings. It belongs to any summary of that life. It receives a very forceful expression in the Message of Recall and Encouragement.2 “We must not be wise and prudent according to the flesh. Rather, we must be simple, humble, and pure. And let us revile our bodies and look on them with contempt, for by our own fault we are all cheap and smelly, fetid and wormy, as the Lord says through the prophet: I am a worm and no man, the scorn of men, an outcast of the people. We should never aspire to be over others. Rather, we should be servants, subject to every human creature for God.” Francis addressed that text to a wide audience of men and women, an audience he and his companions had acquired by their life and words. Consequently Francis offers it as a basic Christian rule. Anyone who wishes to engage life at Jesus’ side has to despise his or her body (habere corpus despectum). At the end of The Salutation of the Virtues the brothers glory in this sense of themselves . We are examining an instruction central to Franciscan life. We can fix the first time the early Franciscans reached the conclusion that they had to hate their bodies. The context in which they reached that conclusion and then formulated it helps us determine what they meant and why they considered the determination important . We first encounter the ruling in Chapter Seventeen of the Early Rule.3 This portion of the Early Rule followed on the experience of the brothers as they “went about the world,” in the words of Chapter Fourteen. Francis and his companions worked, as Chapter Seven in the Early Rule prescribed. Work as they understood it gave them a sure and independent place among the people of their day. Able to take care of themselves, sensitive...

God, Evil, and Innocent Suffering: A Theological Reflection by John E. Thiel

476 BOOK REVIEWS Soskice's essay, "Fides et ratio: The Postmodern Pope" (292-96), provides a brief and jaunty summary of the encyclical's main goals, with special interest in its analysis of our cultural malaise, mixed in equal parts of nihilism and despair, and in its recommendation to return philosophy to its large-scale interests in fundamental and final questions. A task for the future, one I have yet to see taken up with the energy it deserves in the now extensive literature on the encyclical, and certainly absent from this volume, is discussion of why none of the encyclical's exemplars of philosophy done well are taken from what is sometimes (misleadingly) called the Anglo-American analytical tradition. There is a tendency among Catholic philosophers to think that the only Egyptians who need to be despoiled are the phenomenological (Husserl, Scheler, Heidegger, and after) and hermeutical (Levinas, Ricoeur) ones; and that those best equipped to do the despoiling will always be Thomists of one stripe or another. The pope's own philosophical work shows that a rich harvest can be reaped in this way. But I suspect that there is more to be said about what the ratio evident in the work of philosophers (some Catholic and some very much not) such as Elizabeth Anscombe, Peter Geach, Michael Dummett, Philippa Foot, Alvin Plantinga, and Peter van lnwagen might have to offer to the tasks limned by Fides et ratio. It may be that the editors of this volume, being as I think English, are in a good position to take up that task in future volumes in this series. This is, then, a mixed bag, as are all such collections. Some of the individual contributions provide deep and useful insight into the encyclical and the issues it propounds. Yet the volume's truly distinctive {if somewhat puzzling) contrib~tion is the new translation it provides. University ofIllinois at Chicago Chicago, Illinois PAUL}. GRIFFITHS God, Evil, and Innocent Suffering: A Theological Reflection. By JOHN E. THIEL. New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 2002. Pp. 192. $24.95 (paper). ISBN 0-8245-1928-0. The modern project known as "theodicy" has been with us a long time-at least since Leibniz's book ofthat title published in 1710. The theological appeal of this project is undeniable. No religious person wants to believe that his or her God is a monster who sends planes crashing into buildings or wills a child's death by cancer. On the other hand, theodicy's critics-and they have been many-have wondered if the price to be paid is too great. Is not the God of theodicy a rationalized deity, constructed according to human needs and purposes? Don't pious attempts to make sense of evil tend toward rendering it BOOK REVIEWS 477 tolerable? It is understandable if some prefer to endure the mystery of evil in faith, rather than offering blasphemous explanations for its existence. John Thiel's God, Evil, and Innocent Suffering is one long, determined effort to resist the temptations of theodicy. Thiel seeks to offer a theological account of evil and suffering that "move[s] within the language of scripture and tradition," its rationality governed by "the most basic Christian claims of faith" (3). At the same time, Thiel is not entirely happy with the ways in which the classical tradition has approached these issues. His book seeks to chart an alternative course within the tradition that can better address the mystery of evil. The key term of his inquiry is found in the book's title: innocent suffering. Thiel argues that for much of the tradition, there is really no such thing as innocent suffering. Augustine believed that most human suffering could be accounted for on the basis of the Fall. This theological answer reflects a deep religious urge to see God as just and loving. If innocent suffering exists, then God is indeed a monster; so if God has the character we attribute to him, then suffering cannot be innocent. As Thiel rightly says, "the denial of innocent suffering lets the Christian God be the Christian God" (12). But this orthodox explanation does not sit well with our experience...

A pauper dead-house: the expansion of the Cambridge anatomical teaching school under the late-Victorian poor law, 1870-1914.

In May 1901 an article appeared in the Yarmouth Advertiser and Gazette entitled ‘Alleged Traffic in Pauper Corpses—How the Medical Schools are Supplied—The Shadow of a Scandal’. It recounted that, although a pauper named Frank Hyde aged fifty had died in Yarmouth workhouse on 11 April 1901, his body was missing from the local cemetery. The case caused a public outcry because the workhouse death register stated that Hyde had been “buried by friends” in the parish five days after he had died. An editorial alleged that “the body was sent to Cambridge for dissection” instead and that the workhouse Master's clerk profited 15 shillings from the cadaver's sale. Following continued bad publicity, the visiting committee of Yarmouth Union investigated the allegations. They discovered that between 1880 and 1901 “26 bodies” had been sold for dissection and dismemberment under the terms of the Anatomy Act (1832) to the Cambridge anatomical teaching school situated at Downing College. The Master's clerk staged a false funeral each time a pauper died in his care. He arranged it so that “coffins were buried containing sand or sawdust or other ingredients but the body of the person whose name appeared on the outside [emphasis in original]” of each coffin never reached the grave. This was Hyde's fate too. Like many paupers who died in the care of Poor Law authorities in the nineteenth century, Hyde's friends and relatives lacked resources to fund his funeral expenses. Consequently, he underwent the ignominy of a pauper burial, but not in Yarmouth. His body was conveyed on the Great Eastern railway in a “death-box” to Cambridge anatomical teaching school. Following preservation, which took around four months, the cadaver was dissected and dismembered. It was interred eleven months after death in St Benedict's parish graveyard within Mill Road cemetery, Cambridge, on 8 March 1902. A basic Christian service was conducted by John Lane of the anatomy school before burial in a pauper grave containing a total of six bodies. The plot was unmarked and Frank Hyde disappeared from Poor Law records—the end product of pauperism.

Globalization and Catholic Higher Education: A Dialogue for Harnessing the Impact of Globalization

The position and the role of Catholic higher education in the ongoing globalization of higher education are discussed. The author, the Secretary-General of the International Federation of Catholic Universities (FIUC/IFCU), presents a number of arguments in favour of the participation of Catholic universities in the processes of globalization while, at the same time, remaining true to their basic Christian values. The axis of this participation should be one of striving to humanize the phenomenon by serving as the voice of those who have no voice.

Returning From Exile: Exploring John Dominic Crossan's Concept of the Passion-Resurrection Narratives as Prophecy Historicised1

AbstractThe modern and post-modern worldviews are inimical to the worldview of theistic religions and the fundamental assumptions and credal articulations of the Christian faith. John Shelbey Spong has characterised the situation of Christians who take seriously the (post)modern worldview as well as their commitment to Jesus of Nazareth and the biblical tradition as 'living in exile.' In this article I explore to what extent the insights of New Testament historical scholarship, specifically John Dominic Crossan's concept of the passion-resurrection narratives as prophecy-historicised, as well as his historical construct of Jesus as the founder of the Kingdom Movement, could enable a reformulation of basic Christian concepts so that commitments to Christianity and (post)modernism can be held in a creative and meaningful tension. It is suggested that Christians in exile can return and contribute to the Christian community and tradition, and to the transformation of the (post)modern world, if the Church recognizes that different interpretations of Jesus can exist creatively side by side within the tradition. On the basis of Crossan's research-findings it is argued that that is exactly what happened at the birth of Christianity. It remains a possibility today.

Paul Christian - A Jewish Dominican Preaching for the Jews

The so-called Barcelona disputation of 1263 was one of the earliest Jewish-Christian disputations in medieval Europe. The disputants were Paul Christian, a Jewish convert to Christianity and member of the Dominican order, and the well known Jewish sage Ramban (Rabbi Moses ben Nahman of Gerona). In the disputation Paul Christian used an innovative method: he attempted to prove the truth of basic Christian dogma, for instance that the Messiah had already come, by using classical Jewish texts, especially the Talmud. Paul Christian used the same method in his sermons which the Jews in the area were forced to listen to. When one analyses the arguments he employs, it becomes obvious how he alludes to both Jewish and Christian traditions in order to convince his listeners.