Month: April 2008

Posted on

Nottingham on Benedict on Jesus

The Pope and Jesus of Nazareth

19th and 20th June 2008 Nottingham

The publication of the book Jesus of Nazareth on 16 April 2007 was an unprecedented event: never before had a reigning Pope published personal reflections on Jesus.

The book engages not just with New Testament scholarship but also with fundamental methodological questions related to historical criticism. Moreover, it resonates with wider questions of scriptural reading, Christology, ecclesiology and relations with Judaism and Islam. This conference is the first extended theological discussion in the UK on Joseph Ratzinger’s book.

John Milbank
Markus Bockmuehl
Geza Vermes
Archbishop Martínez
Fergus Kerr OP
Walter Moberly
Olivier-Thomas Venard OP
Mona Siddiqui

This may really be the first time any work of Pope Benedict is examined by academics in Britain. There is plenty on Benedict’s Jesus of Nazareth and other books over at the B16 fanclub and Ignatius Insight.

Posted on

Maranatha – Crisis and Glory

The Church in this land is now in a totally new situation. After years of enjoying a comparatively privileged position, we are now clearly facing attack, ridicule and even persecution. We are in a counter-culture situation and our position is increasingly similar to the Early Church.

Viewed from the position of the world, the Church is not a single body giving a clear message, but rather a large number of disparate congregations who each have their own interpretation and presentation of the Gospel message and who appear to be in competition with each other. There is a very real danger of the churches ceasing to engage with our culture. At the two extremes, we either withdraw and disconnect from it, or run the risk of being consumed by it. God calls us to invade and transform our culture, not to collaborate with it, capitulate to it, retreat from it.

This engagement is inevitably confrontational. There is clearly much doubt about the central truths of the Gospel in the churches. There is also evidence of some Christians substituting an ethical or a programme of social action for the Gospel.

Maranatha – Crisis and Glory (PDF)

I know a bishop not far from here who talks about ‘the coming storm’ and a ‘tidal wave’. He means secularism, but he doesn’t spell out what he means by that, and I am not sure that he knows how to. Sometimes he seems to regret this and to want to do something about it, sometimes not. Our caution and elipticism is becoming a problem. We have to stop worrying about sounding unsophisticated and apocalyptic. We have to bring the people of Maranatha into Church and ask them to teach us how not to be sophisticated or ironic, and we have to learn how to spell this ‘new situation’ out.

Costly discipleship involves using our heads, consistently, and over the long term. No probs there. But that also means getting to know my own tradtion and speaking consistently from it, without attempting to preserve any ironic distance. It also means learning the old practices and practising them, in public. I am going to start reading my bible (big, black, leather) on the Central Line. I am going to kneel in church, dunk my fingers in the holy water when I enter a Catholic church. I am going to learn to cross myself (every nerve screams No!). I am going to learn a half dozen psalms off by heart. I am going to familiarise myself with the readings for each next Sunday. When you see me, test me.

Posted on

Catholic theology in the UK?

Catholic Theology and the Public Academy

A colloquium in dual celebration of the establishment of the Durham Centre for Catholic Studies and the Bede Chair of Catholic Theology 8th-10th May, 2008 Durham University

Tina Beattie
Gavin D’Costa
Eamon Duffy
David Ford
Paul Griffiths
Karen Kilby
Michael Kirwan, S.J.
Paul Lakeland
Nicholas Lash
Gerard Loughlin
Andrew Louth
John Milbank
Francesca Murphy
Paul D Murray

I would certainly like to hear Gavin D’Costa, Eamon Duffy, and Paul Griffiths. The first Bede Professor of Catholic Theology will be appointed just before this conference, and the appointment will make it clear whether this is the long-awaited new start or not. There have been a lot of international applicants, apparently, so my breath is bated. But why aren’t Stratford Caldecott or Aidan Nichols among the speakers? Why doesn’t Ex Corde Ecclesia (JP II’s Apostolic Constitution on Catholic universities) appear anywhere on the Centre’s website? Why is a Protestant giving the opening address on ‘The Case for Catholic Theology in a Twenty-first Century University’? How much Protestant permission has to be sought?

From a Catholic point of view the contemporary secular university is not at fault because it is not Catholic. It is at fault insofar as it is not a university…

Alasdair MacIntyre (Commonweal October 20, 2006 / Volume CXXXIII, Number 18)

Posted on

Truth and goodness

The heart of the problem lies with the prominence given to what are seen to be the supreme values of today, liberty and equality. These are not the supreme values. Truth and goodness are the supreme values. Liberty is seen as the absence of restraint, rather than the freedom to do what is right, with equality being transformed into a justification of the sameness of social institutions. That is why I went to war with the Labour Governments in Westminster and Holyrood last year, due to what is called political correctness, as they made liberty and equality the supreme moral values for the agenda that they wanted to introduce.

In effect, what they were doing was introducing a new kind of morality, a kind of morality that was bou nd to result in moral mayhem, as it was not based on truth and goodness. That is what happened. We now have a kind of state sponsored morality that is at war with our Christian tradition. Mark me well when I tell you why this is so. It is because liberty and equality have replaced truth and goodness. This is the heart of the problem. When liberty and equality are made the supreme values, not truth and goodness, then we have an agenda that is no longer answerable to what is true and what is good. This is by far the most important thing that I am going to say tonight. So write it down. I will repeat if for all of you. When liberty and equality are made the supreme values, not truth and goodness, we have an agenda that is no longer answerable to what is true and good.

* * *

I remind you that the greatest obstacle to halting the advance of the secularist culture has been our failure to recognise the ambition of the protagonists of that agenda. In seven years there has been a massive transformation in our understanding of family life. The plan for that transformation taking place at the time were not widely known and were so ambitious that, even for those in the know, they were not taken seriously.

Bishop Joseph Devine (Motherwell, Scotland) Saying No to Secularism – Gonzaga Lecture, Glasgow

So write it down. I will repeat it for all of you


This is how a bishop speaks

Thanks to the Hermeneutic of Continuity

Posted on

Saint Paul

Saint Paul’s Journeys into Philosophy:An International Conference

Vancouver School of Theology at the University of British Columbia Vancouver June 4-6, 2008

Join us for a conference which explores the critical appropriations of Saint Paul by recent and contemporary Continental philosophers, including Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Benjamin, Jacob Taubes, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Zizek, and others. An
international group of philosophers, theologians, biblical scholars and literary theorists will present papers on a wide range of themes arising from this recent philosophical appropriation of Saint Paul. Plenary speakers include Stephen Fowl, Paul Griffiths, Travis Kroeker and J. Louis Martyn. There will also be presentations by Creston Davis, Neil Elliott, Paul Gooch, Douglas Harink, Chris Huebner, Mark Reasoner, Jeffrey Robbins, Gordon Zerbe, Jens Zimmerman and others.

Paul Griffiths and Lou Martyn are certainly worth going to hear.

Posted on

Candour

Candour is of the greatest importance for the public realm itself. Candour is a simple public duty, often unperformed, or performed badly, out of simple reluctance to take responsibility for the truth on which the community depends. Behind many a story of tyranny lies collusion between oppressor and oppressed, a community that prefers to accept a shrunken public realm rather than pay the price of discerning and articulating complex truths in public.

Oliver O’Donovan The Ways of Judgment