If it is true that, as Tertullian said, 'one Christian is no Christian', then by the same token we should be able to say, 'one bishop is no bishop', and so 'one local church alone is no church '. A bishop is not an individual who 'represents' the local church as if he is empowered to speak for its local identity like a politician for his constituency. The bishop is above all the person who sustains and nourishes within the local church an awareness of its dependency on the apostolic mission, on the gift from beyond its boundaries, of the Church established by the Risen Lord – and he does this, of course, primarily and irreducibly as the celebrant of the 'Catholic oblation'. Hence, again from the earliest days, the clustering of local churches and their bishops around metropolitan sees which represented the channels through which the Gospel came to be shared; and hence the insistence (an insistence that might almost be called fierce in many instances) that bishops received ordination from their neighbours in the metropolia under the leadership of the local primate – and hence too the seriousness of communicating episcopal election by letter to the region and the severity of the sanction of removing a bishop's name from the formal intercession list.

Primacy needs to be seen as a sign of the continuing reality of active tradition—that is, the sharing of the gift—as the foundation of each local church. So it should be exercised in the service of the further sharing of the gift; this is why it is problematic if a local church so interprets the gift it has received that it cannot fully share it beyond its own cultural home territory... reminding the local assembly and its chief pastor that it must not lose its recognisability or receivability to other communities – across the globe and throughout history.

Archbishop Rowan Williams Rome, Constantinople, and Canterbury: Mother Churches?

Praise be to the High Priest of our faith Jesus Christ, the Devout and Holy Sacrifice, Who performed purification of our sins by His own Person and cleansed the world by His sacrifice, the Good One to Whom is due glory, honor and dominion with His Father and with his Holy Spirit at this time of the celebration of this Eucharist and all feasts and seasons and at all times and forever.

O Lord God Almighty, Who accepts the sacrifice of praise from those who call upon You whole-heartedly, accept from our hands, Your sinful servants, this sweet incense and bring us near to Your holy altar. Strengthen us that we may raise to You spiritual offerings and sacrifices on account of our sins and the transgressions of Your people. Make us worthy that we become to You an acceptable sacrifice, and may Your Good Spirit rest upon us and upon these offerings that are set here and upon all Your faithful people in Christ Jesus our Lord with Whom befit You praise, honor and dominion with Your Holy Spirit, now, always and forever.

From God may we receive remission of debts and forgiveness of sins in both worlds forever and ever. Amen.

Syriac Anaphoras - Supplications

Today we celebrate Saint Irenaeus

‘So also by the obedience of one man, righteousness having been reintroduced, shall cause life to fructify in those persons who in times past were dead…so did he who is the Word, recapitulating Adam in himself, rightly receive a birth, enabling him to gather up Adam (into himself) from Mary.’ (3.21.10)

‘Luke points out that the pedigree which traces the generation of our Lord back to Adam contains seventy-two generations connecting the end with the beginning, and implying that it is he who has summed up in himself all nations dispersed from Adam downwards.’ (3.22.3)

For if He be not the God of the dead but of the living, yet was called the God of the Fathers who are sleeping, they do indubitably live to God, and have not passed out of existence, since they are children of the resurrection. But the fathers are his children for (Ps 45.17) ‘Instead of thy fathers, thy children have been made to thee’.. For Abraham according to his faith followed the command of the Word of God and with a ready mind delivered up as a sacrifice to God his only begotten and beloved son, in order that God might also be pleased to offer up for all his seed his own beloved and only-begotten Son as a sacrifice for our redemption. (4.5.4) Against the Heresies

It is a good idea to know your saints

What is economics about? It describes from one angle what people do all day. Jesus (of all people) once noted that since the days of Noah and Lot and until the end of the world, humans have been doing and will be doing four kinds of things. He gave these examples: "planting and building," "buying and selling," "marrying and being given in marriage," and "eating and drinking" : in other words, we produce, exchange, distribute and use (or consume) our human and nonhuman goods. That's the usual order in action. But in planning, first we choose For Whom we intend to provide, which we will express by the distribution of our goods; next What goods to provide as means for those persons; and finally How to provide these means, through production and (usually) exchange. So we might say that economics is essentially a theory of providence: it describes how we provide for ourselves and the other persons we love, using scarce means that have alternate uses. Scholastic economics began in the mid-13th century when Thomas Aquinas first integrated these four elements, all drawn from Aristotle and Augustine, to describe personal, domestic and political economy. The scholastic economic system is comprehensive, logically complete, mathematical, and empirically verifiable.

Classical economics (1776-1871) began when Adam Smith tried to chop the four scholastic elements to two: dropping Augustine's theory of utility (which describes consumption) and replacing Augustine's theory of personal distribution and Aristotle's theory of social distribution with the mere assumption that everyone is motivated by self-love. This is how classical economics began with only two elements, production and exchange.

Today's neoclassical economics (1871-c.2000) began when three economists dissatisfied with the failure of classical predictions independently but almost simultaneously reinvented the theory of utility, starting its reintegration with the theories of production and exchange.

I predict that in coming decades Neoscholastic or "AAA" economics (Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas) will revolutionize economics once again by replacing its lost cornerstone - the theory of personal and social distribution.

John D Mueller The Development of Economics There are two longer versions of the same argument in The Economist as Preacher, The Preacher as Economist (2008) and (2003).

A contributing factor to post-abortion trauma is silence from the Church. The common reluctance to preach on the matter because there are some women in the Church who have had abortions and it will hurt them is misguided and harmful. There is a crying need to acknowledge the grief of abortion - silence pushes this grief underground and prevents forgiveness and reconciliation.

Since, sadly, the rate of abortion among Catholic women is about the same as the rate in the general population, there is no question that there will be many women in our parishes who have had abortions. They need the grace of the sacrament of penance, the understanding of the Church and the clear and unambiguous commitment of their priests to preaching compassionately against this evil - and indeed the reaffirmation of the virtue of chastity for their own children.

Tim Finigan

A mother and daughter, both of whom had had abortions, and became pro-life. They went to the parish priest with a pro-life poster asking him to display it in their church. He politely took the poster and folded it, saying to them: "You know, I can't put this up. Don't you know there might be women in my congregation who have had abortions?" Our silence denies these women the right/opportunity to grieve for their child. Silence means that their child's existence is denied.

There are prayer vigils regularly outside the abortion mill at Bedford Square.

John Boyle

The Society for the Study of Christian Ethics 2008 2008 Annual Conference is 5th-7th September at Westcott House, Cambridge. The conference theme is The Sermon on the Mount

Rt Hon John Battle - MP, Leeds, Former Faith Advisor to the Prime Minister

Richard Bauckham - Professor Emeritus of New Testament, University of St Andrews

Carolyn Muessig - Senior Lecturer in Medieval Theology, University of Bristol

Oliver O'Donovan - Professor of Christian Ethics and Practical Theology, Edinburgh University

Susan Parsons - President, Society Study of Christian Ethics, Editor, Studies in Christian Ethics

Glen Stassen - Lewis B. Smedes Professor of Christian Ethics, Fuller Theological Seminary

Last weekend, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a wonderfully concise and eloquent statement on embryonic stem cell research. When printed out, it comes to barely more than six double-spaced typewritten pages, but within that relatively small compass may be found all of the elements essential to a well-formed Catholic conscience on this important question. Even more remarkably, the statement marshals its argument in a manner that can be grasped by a person of ordinary intelligence.

Given the complexity of the subject and the continual stream of disinformation propagated by the mainstream media on the question, this is no small accomplishment. The bishops deserve a hearty round of applause for piercing to the heart of the matter in such a thoughtful and accessible fashion. The pity is that it hasn’t been done before, but now that the statement is out, every effort should be made to ensure wide dissemination throughout the nation’s parishes. A rough estimation suggests that its fifteen paragraphs would fit nicely onto a single two-sided page for insertion into weekly bulletins. But there’s no reason why the effort to educate the laity should end there. Homilists should be encouraged to expound upon its themes from the pulpit.

Michael Uhlmann The bishops get it right

A member of President Sarkozy's Cabinet once told me that France - as the "eldest daughter of the Church" - could never lose the faith. I suggested to her that she visit Ephesus. The Holy Mother spent her last days there and was assumed from there into Heaven. Ephesus was one of the ancient churches mentioned in the Gospels. Go there now. It is an archeological dig. There is a village a few miles away and in it there is no Christian church. But there are mosques. The faith does not grow on stones but only in human hearts. And so the Southern Baptists had it right in Vienna a few weeks ago and so did Weiler before them. Europe is tired. Europe may be spent. Europe is almost certainly dying. The spread of radical social policies and their death-dealing pathologies, the epoch-ending birth rates, the death of marriage; all these are symptoms of a deeper malaise of the spirit. Europe can only be saved by "more Europeans proclaiming the lordship of Jesus Christ." To reiterate: This is the language of America and of American Evangelicals and it is the language that has kept America percolating as the most religious country in the west. Catholics owe a great debt to Evangelicals for this kind of language. It may not be our language, but it is language that has protected this country from going the way of Europe.

Austin Ruse Saving Europe

Karl Barth Church Dogmatics III.4 3.

1. When marriage is seen in the light of the divine command it is surely evident that the decision for the way of marriage is for some, as the choice of the unmarried state is for others, the matter of the supremely particular divine vocation. (p.183)

2. When marriage is seen in the light of divine command and it is plain to men and women united in marriage that here too and especially that they are called to be obedient to God then the fulfilment of this life-partnership becomes for them a task (p. 187)

3. When marriage is seen in the light of the divine command, it is apparent that it is full life- partnership. It is this fact which differentiates marriage from other relations between human beings and between man and woman. (189)

4. When marriage is seen in the light of the divine command, it is clear that it is an exclusive life-partnership. With or without a family it builds and shapes a home where many may go in and out… The man who thinks it is possible or permissible to love many women simultaneously or alternately has not yet begun to love. (195)

5. When marriage is seen in the light of the divine command, it is clear that it is a lasting life-partnership. It is the full and exclusive union of a man and a woman for the whole of the time which is still before them and which is given to them in common. To enter upon marriage is the of renounce the possibility of leaving it. (p.203)

6. When marriage is seen in the light of the divine command, this is decisive for the question of its genesis. It is now made manifest that to be concluded and lived out in freedom, marriage requires from both participants free and mutual love. And we further maintain that it is not their love for each other but God’s calling and gift which is the true basis of marriage. (213)

Holland — with its disproportionately high Muslim population — is the canary in the mine. Its once open society is closing, and Europe is closing slowly behind it. It looks, from Holland, like the twilight of liberalism — not the "liberalism" that is actually libertarianism, but the liberalism that is freedom. Not least freedom of expression.

The governments of Europe have been tricked into believing that criticism of a belief is the same thing as criticism of a race. And so it is becoming increasingly difficult and dangerous to criticise a growing and powerful ideology within our midst.

Douglas Murray We Should Fear Holland's silence

Again, we commemorate those who have gone before, fallen asleep in holiness, and are at rest among the saints; those who have kept the one apostolic faith without blemish and entrusted it to us. We proclaim the three sacred and holy Ecumenical Synods of Nicaea, of Constantinople and of Ephesus. We also remember our glorious and God-fearing fathers, prelates and doctors present at the Synods. Bishop James, the first bishop of Jerusalem, the apostles and martyrs and the saints: Ignatius, Clement, Dionysius, Athanasius, Julius, Basilius, Gregorius, Dioscoros, Timothy, Philoxenus, Antemus, Ivanius. Particularly, St. Cyril that exalted and firm tower who declared and made manifest the incarnation of the Word God, our Lord Jesus Christ Who took flesh. We also remember our Patriarch St. Severius, the crown of the Syrians, that rational mouth, pillar and teacher of all the Holy Church of God; and our saintly and holy father St. Jacob Burd`ono the supporter of the orthodox faith and St. Ephrem, St. Jacob, St. Isaac, St. Balai, St. Barsaumo, head of the anchorites, St. Simon the Stylite and the chosen St. Abhai. Let us, also, remember all those before them, with them and after them, who kept the one, true and uncorrupted faith and delivered it to us. May their prayers be a stronghold to us. Let us beseech the Lord.

Kyrie eleison

Anaphora of St. John Chrysostom

Know your saints. Today, June 22, is Saint Alban's day. Saint Alban was the first British martyr. He is in good company and there is room for more.

His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI is a pastor. He preaches and teaches around the Church year, his homily at every feast telling us something about Christ and something about us. Through his Easter and Corpus Christi homilies in particular he teaches us how to relate the passion, crucifixion, resurrection, the eucharist and body of Christ.

His very impressive little book on Jesus of Nazareth takes us through the ministry up to the transfiguration. We come to it in the knowledge that there is second book dealing with the passion and resurrection to follow. But a work of Christian teaching theology would not put incarnation and ministry in one book, which would then look very like a work of biblical studies, and the resurrection in another, and the Church and eucharist in a third. That would attempt to divide the indivisible, Jesus in one book, Christ in a second, and so divide Christ from his people, take away his anointing, until ‘Christ’ becomes the corpse over which the dogs of biblical studies have fought these many years. So it is a joy to find that the passion, resurrection and worship and eucharist are everywhere in this volume.

Pope Benedict on Jesus and Sacrifice

Let us dwell on only two points. The first is the journey towards "the maturity of Christ", as the Italian text says, simplifying it slightly. More precisely, in accordance with the Greek text, we should speak of the "measure of the fullness of Christ" that we are called to attain if we are to be true adults in the faith. We must not remain children in faith, in the condition of minors. And what does it mean to be children in faith? St Paul answers: it means being "tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine" (Eph 4: 14). This description is very timely!

How many winds of doctrine have we known in recent decades, how many ideological currents, how many ways of thinking. The small boat of the thought of many Christians has often been tossed about by these waves - flung from one extreme to another: from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism and so forth. Every day new sects spring up, and what St Paul says about human deception and the trickery that strives to entice people into error (cf. Eph 4: 14) comes true.

Today, having a clear faith based on the Creed of the Church is often labeled as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, that is, letting oneself be "tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine", seems the only attitude that can cope with modern times. We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one's own ego and desires.

We, however, have a different goal: the Son of God, the true man. He is the measure of true humanism. An "adult" faith is not a faith that follows the trends of fashion and the latest novelty; a mature adult faith is deeply rooted in friendship with Christ. It is this friendship that opens us up to all that is good and gives us a criterion by which to distinguish the true from the false, and deceit from truth.

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger to the College of Cardinals 2005

This essay represents what might be called a radical friendly amendment to the revisionists by exploring a hitherto unexamined logical leap in the famous story line. To be fancy about it for a moment, what secularization theory assumes is that religious belief comes ontologically first for people and that it goes on to determine or shape other things they do — including such elemental personal decisions as whether they marry and have children or not. Implied here is a striking, albeit widely assumed, view of how one social phenenomenon powers another: that religious believers are more likely to produce families because religious belief somehow comes first.

And therein lies a real defect with the conventional story line about how and why religion collapsed in Western Europe. For what has not been explained, but rather assumed throughout that chain of argument, is why the causal relationship between belief and practice should always run that way instead of the other, at least some of the time. It is as if recent intellectual history had lined up all the right puzzle pieces — modernity, belief and disbelief, technology, shrinking and absent families — only to press them together in a way that looks whole from a distance but leaves something critical out. This essay is a preliminary attempt to supply that missing piece. It moves the human family from the periphery to the center of this debate over secularization.

In brief, it is not only possible but highly plausible that many Western European Christians did not just stop having children and families because they became secular. At least some of the time, the record suggests, they also became secular because they stopped having children and families. If this way of augmenting the conventional explanation for the collapse of faith in Europe is correct, then certain things, including some radical things, follow from it.

Mary Eberstadt How the West really lost God

And this is the sevenhundred post on this blog. Fecund in more than one sense then.

Not only do we have an entirely novel definition of marriage that excludes procreation from its purview. That would be dramatic enough, since it shifts the focus of our most basic social institute from inter-generational concerns to those of present personal gratification, and in doing so eliminates many of the responsibilities that belong to marriage. But we also have the novel idea that the state has the power to re-invent marriage by adopting and enforcing this definition. By claiming such a power the Canadian state has drawn marriage and the family into a captive orbit. It has reversed the gravitational field between the family and the state, putting itself at odds with the founding principles of Canada and with the notion of free men and free women. It has effectively made every man, woman and child a chattel of the state, by turning their most fundamental human connections into mere legal constructs at the state’s disposal. It has transformed those connections from divine gifts into gifts of the state.

Douglas Farrow Nation of Bastards: Essays on the End of Marriage. Yup, this is the Douglas Farrow of Ascension and Ecclesia.

Read lots more Farrow at the wonderful Institute for for the Study of Marriage, Law and Culture

To You, O Lord, both heaven, which is the throne of Your Majesty, and the earth, which is the footstool under Your feet, sing praise. The earth glorifies Your Holy Name in this church that chants the sound of glory to You from the mouth of her children; by the succession of the prophets, the company of the apostles, the sufferings of the martyrs, the orders of the confessors, the theology of the doctors, the orderly standing of the ascetics, the endurance of the abstinents, the hosts of the just, the assemblies of the righteous and the faithful of all ages. In that heavenly Church which is set on high, where Your first-born are inscribed in Your holy books, You are praised by sons of the angels, the joyful voices of the archangels, the melodies of the cherubim, the zeal of the primacies, the splendor of the principalities, the brilliance of the thrones, the honor of the lords, the fiery glow of the legions, the companies of the victorious, the assemblies of the perfect, the feasts and the rejoicing of the saints and the hallowing of the seraphim, who, with their six wings and the serenity of their voices, praise and cry out, saying:

Holy, holy, holy

Anaphora of St. Cyril

For a host of historical and theological reasons Anglicans have routinely overplayed an understanding of visibility which associates it too strictly with ordered externality, and underplayed what that stout ecumenist Karl Barth called the ‘very special visibility’ of the Church. By that, Barth did not intend to deny that the Church of Jesus Christ has concrete, historical form; he simply sought to affirm that the Church has visible form by virtue of the presence and action of Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit; and he wanted to deny that any contingent historical ordering could guarantee or ensure the essence of the Church, since to say that would be to pass the Church from the hands of its Lord to the hands of its human members. Visibility is thus a spiritual event, describable only by talk of the presence and action of God, and not convertible without residue into forms. Again, this is not a denial of externality, but an attempt to spell out how the Church’s externality is a function of present divine action, of which the externality of the Church is a witness. Hence the principle: ‘The visible attests the invisible’ – ‘invisible’ meaning ‘spiritually visible’, perceptible by faith in the work of God. Perhaps the most crucial bit of dogmatic work which Anglicans need to undertake here is to spell out full, visible unity in such a way that the necessary concrete forms of unity (apostolic confession, common sacraments and ministry, and episcope) can credibly be shown to attest the invisible rather than replace the invisible with contingent structures or order.

John Webster The goals of ecumenism - full visible unity? in Paths to Unity (large PDF) in Synod papers

This is a piece for a volume on eschatology edited by John Manoussakis and Neal Deroo to be published by Ashgate in 2009

The Orthodox theologian John Zizioulas is most often associated with the Christian doctrine of the person. The concept of the person holds together the two issues of communion and freedom. Zizioulas argues that if there is one person there must be many persons: the concept is intrinsically plural, relational and yet safeguards our particularity. By making a distinction between person and individual, Zizioulas contrasts the human who is related and integrated, and the human who is disengaged and isolated from all others. According to Christian doctrine, Christ is the person in whom we may all be persons. Christ comes to individuals without relation to anyone else, and brings them into communion so that they become persons, related to all others, indeed related to everything that is not themselves. This catholic being who is simultaneously one and many is coming into being in history, and at the eschaton will turn out to be truth of all humanity. In Christ, time and history move towards this reconciliation in which all creatures discover their proper unity and difference; this coming together of all things makes itself known in history in the Church and in the event of the eucharist. For Christian theology, the concept of the person relates to time and purpose and so to eschatology. His confidence in the theology of the Greek Fathers enables Zizioulas to lay out the logic of the Christian doctrine of the person with the utmost clarity, and it is this that makes his account of personhood distinctive and rewarding. More...

Ashgate say that they have sold the rights to The Theology of John Zizioulas to a Greek publisher. If Ashgate can sell a Greek to the Greeks I am sure they will find a big market for this American phenomenology. (No, I don't know either). Selling a little British theology to the Brits, though - who is up to that?

Anastasia de Waal argues that while Labour thinks it is being liberal, its position on the family is actually highly conservative. Its policy is currently determined not by its own priorities, but by Conservative policy and past notions of the repressive ‘traditional’ family. Labour therefore considers family structure to be solely Conservative moralising territory and marriage irrelevant to 21st century policymaking. Instead, the government has focused on celebrating so-called ‘diversity’. But Labour’s nominally inclusive stance is actually blurring the lines between the poor family and what Labour imagines to be the ‘modern’ family:

‘What are construed [by Labour] as positive manifestations of diversity are in fact very often negative manifestations of deprivation and limiting circumstances. This is not to deny that new opportunities to end unhappy relationships and a greater freedom of choice in family life have positively affected families right across the socio-economic spectrum. However, non-marriage and parental separation in the UK today disproportionately represent the problematic, as opposed to the progressive, elements of family diversity.’

Labour’s misjudged resistance to acknowledging the importance of family structure is undermining its equalising agenda, perpetuating inequality between both the classes and the sexes.

Lower marriage rates and greater numbers of cohabitating parents are strongly connected to what Anastasia de Waal terms ‘structural poverty’, that is, unemployment-related poverty incurring further poverty through parental separation. The relationship between unemployment and parental separation is hugely significant because child poverty in Britain is concentrated in single-parent households.

Labour’s treatment of fathers as ‘optional extras’ is exacerbating difficulties for women and children. Whilst the aim has been to be non-judgemental to mothers and children in separated families, in reality the effect has been to legitimise irresponsible fathers.

Civitas Marriage in modern Britain: out of reach, not out of fashion

God could have granted no greater gift to human beings than to cause his Word, through whom he created all things, to be their head, and to fit them to him as his members. He was thus to be both Son of God and Son of Man, one God with the Father, one human with us. The consequence is that when we speak to God in prayer we do not separate the Son from God, and when the body of the Son prays it does not separate its head from itself. The one sole saviour of his body is our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who prays for us, prays in us, and is prayed to by us. He prays for us as our priest, he prays in us as our head, and is prayed to by us as our God. Accordingly we must recognise our voices in him, and his accents in ourselves.

Augustine Exposition of the Psalms - Psalm 85.1

Kirby Laing Institute for Christian Ethics Annual Book Colloquium

3-4 September 2008 Tyndale House, Cambridge

A one-day colloquium on Brian Brock’s Singing the Ethos of God: On the Place of Christian Ethics in Scripture

Bernd Wannenwetsch Gordon Wenham Hans Reinders Brian Brock

It was Brian who showed me Augustine's theology of the Whole Christ

The question is how we understand the purity of the Church for which we are bound to strive in prayer, in self-criticism and self-examination, first, before we venture onto critique of actions and structures. I understand the purity of the Church to be a prophetic notion, first of all concerned with the purity of the Church’s speech. It has to do with the Church’s willingness to be a vehicle of the speech of God to all men and women. And the issue of obedience in the realm of pure speech comes down to our willingness to muffle, to compromise, to evade what God may be saying to us because it’s too uncomfortable for ourselves, too uncomfortable for our society, or to speak it would threaten our cause or whatever.

The notion of prophetic purity is explored, it seems to me, in the Scriptures in very classic ways through the great narratives of the prophets that associated with the figures Elisha and Elijah, 1 Kings and 2 Kings, in which the task of the prophet is not in any sense to withdraw. These prophets are deeply interwoven with their society both in its economic day by day aspects and also in political aspects. They have ongoing relations with the kings of Israel, and indeed other kings, the kings of Judah, the kings of Aram, the kings of Syria.

But they exercise the sovereignty of God’s word and will not be compromised, and the nature of prophetic compromise itself is explored in one or two of these stories, for example, the incredibly beautiful story about the prophet who confronted Jeroboam and having carried off his mighty confrontation with wonderful aplomb is then seduced by the urgent desire for fellowship with other prophets into betraying his mission.

Now the question, are we betraying our mission? – how may we avoid betraying our mission – is surely the starting point, and there’s one answer that can be given that seems to me to be essentially a false turn. And that is that we betray our mission because something in our circumstances isn’t right. Something needs adjusting in the set of presuppositions from which we come to it, the social setting from which we come to it and that if we can doctor that, then we can turn from being cowardly, compromised and ineffective, into being effective, brave and spirited. And it seems to me that that is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of purity.

The nature of purity is not having no connections, ties, obligations. It doesn’t consist in not having relationships with the world and the Church. It consists in that purity of heart which is to will one thing. Everyone who has dealt with the way the Church interacts with government in this country has at some stage come away grinding their teeth over what look like cowardly, evasive, altogether unsatisfactory postures that the Church is inclined to strike. And it’s very easy in England if we don’t lift our eyes from the local scene, simply to attribute all these to the set of relationships we have with government and law. But as soon as one lives and works in the Church in other countries, one finds one is facing a universal problem. This is a matter of moral and spiritual obedience, not of structure.

Oliver O'Donovan to the Evangelical Alliance Faith and Nation enquiry 2003

The Bible gives one consequential answer to these two queries: the human being is created in the image of God, and God himself is love. It is therefore the vocation to love that makes the human person an authentic image of God: man and woman come to resemble God to the extent that they become loving people.

This fundamental connection between God and the person gives rise to another: the indissoluble connection between spirit and body: in fact, the human being is a soul that finds expression in a body and a body that is enlivened by an immortal spirit.

The body, therefore, both male and female, also has, as it were, a theological character: it is not merely a body; and what is biological in the human being is not merely biological but is the expression and the fulfilment of our humanity.

Likewise, human sexuality is not juxtaposed to our being as person but part of it. Only when sexuality is integrated within the person does it successfully acquire meaning.

Thus, these two links, between the human being with God and in the human being, of the body with the spirit, give rise to a third: the connection between the person and the institution.

Indeed, the totality of the person includes the dimension of time, and the person's "yes" is a step beyond the present moment: in its wholeness, the "yes" means "always", it creates the space for faithfulness. Only in this space can faith develop, which provides a future and enables children, the fruit of love, to believe in human beings and in their future in difficult times.

The freedom of the "yes", therefore, reveals itself to be freedom capable of assuming what is definitive: the greatest expression of freedom is not the search for pleasure without ever coming to a real decision; this apparent, permanent openness seems to be the realization of freedom, but it is not true. The true expression of freedom is the capacity to choose a definitive gift in which freedom, in being given, is fully rediscovered.

In practice, the personal and reciprocal "yes" of the man and the woman makes room for the future, for the authentic humanity of each of them. At the same time, it is an assent to the gift of a new life.

Therefore, this personal "yes" must also be a publicly responsible "yes", with which the spouses take on the public responsibility of fidelity, also guaranteeing the future of the community. None of us, in fact, belongs exclusively to himself or herself: one and all are therefore called to take on in their inmost depths their own public responsibility.

Marriage as an institution is thus not an undue interference of society or of authority. The external imposition of form on the most private reality of life is instead an intrinsic requirement of the covenant of conjugal love and of the depths of the human person.

His Holiness Benedict XVI to the Ecclesial Convention of Rome 2005

The desacralization of man, who no longer knows himself made in the image and likeness of God, advances in tandem with inflated reverence for culture. But we were warned. Half a century ago, Romano Guardini reflected on modernityâ??s faith in culture, which â??took its stance opposite God and His Revelationâ?? and recognized no measure beyond itself. Louis Bouyer, writing in 1982, looked on the dilation of culture and recognized it as a symptom of deep degeneration, the herald of a â??monstrous civilizationâ?? emptied of meaning. He referred to museums as little more than â??cultural refrigeratorsâ?? where â??apparent life is actually preserved in a state of death.â?? More recently, Louis Dupré expanded on Guardiniâ??s theme: â??Culture itself has become the real religion of our time, absorbing traditional religion as a subordinate part of itself.â??

When UNESCO declared Vatican City a World Heritage Site in 1984, it blessed St. Peterâ??s Basilica as â??the fruit of the combined genius of Bramante, Raphael, Michelangelo, Bernini, and Maderna.â?? The witness of Peter did not apply. If it is true, as the historian David Lowenthal asserts, that society restores and preserves what it has ceased to resent, then the Williamsburging of Christianity is no compliment. Worse, it flatters Christians into believing that the blame for a de-Christianized West lies outside themselves. The Museum of Biblical Art is premised on the assumption that our predicament results from a failure of education; continuing ed, buttressed by museum stature, is the cure. Père Bouyer was not so readily seduced. He understood the Westâ??s descent into post-Christian culture in terms of the adage corruptio optima pessima: â??It is not ignorance of Christianity among those who were never evangelized, nor its negation by those who were never able to accept it, but rather by the betrayal of Christianity by those who received the Gospel and were brought up as Christians.â?? It is not necessary to document the corruption of the best in our own decade and close to home. It is enough to stay mindful that every genuflection by the Church to secular idolsâ??under the pretext of promoting the gospelâ??ends as Vigo Demant foresaw: a proclamation of secularism â??in a Christian idiom.â?? The Paraclete does not need our museums.

Maureen Mullarkey Faith behind Glass

Our current Government is in danger of sacrificing Liberty in favour of an abused form of equality – not a meaningful equality that enables the excluded to be brought into society, but rather an equality based on dictat and bureaucracy, which overreaches into the realm of personal conscience.

Human rights without the safeguarding of a God-reference tends to set up rights which trump others’ rights when the mood music changes.

John Sentamu Archbishop of York to the Institute of Jewish Policy Research

The rapid fragmentation of society, the emergence of isolated communities with only tenuous links to their wider context, and the impact of home-grown terrorism have all led even hard-bitten, pragmatist politicians to ask questions about â??Britishnessâ??: what is at the core of British identity; how can it be reclaimed, passed on and owned by more and more people?

The answers to these questions cannot be only in terms of the â??thinâ?? values, such as respect, tolerance and good behaviour, which are usually served up by those scratching around for something to say. In fact, the answer can only be given after rigorous investigation into the history of nationhood and of the institutions, laws, customs and values which have arisen to sustain and to enhance it. In this connection, as with the rest of Europe, it cannot be gainsaid that the very idea of a unified people under God living in a â??golden chainâ?? of social harmony has everything to do with the arrival and flourishing of Christianity in these parts. It is impossible to imagine how else a rabble of mutually hostile tribes, fiefdoms and kingdoms could have become a nation conscious of its identity and able to make an impact on the world.

Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali of Rochester Breaking Faith with Britain

On May 15 the California Supreme Court â??overturned the gay marriage ban,â?? according to news media reports. What the court really did was command a radical redefinition of marriage, the most basic institution of any society. It brought same-sex â??marriageâ?? to the largest state in the union and front and center into the presidential campaign.

The arrogance of this judicial fiat cannot be overstated.

The 4-3 decision directly overrules the will of the people of California expressed in a 2000 referendum, when 61.4 percent voted that â??[o]nly a marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.â?? The justices seem to have forgotten that they are merely interpreters of the law. Instead they styled themselves as Platoâ??s philosopher kings stooping to undo the will of those they deem less enlightened than they are.

As Heritage Foundation scholars Jennifer Marshall, Daniel Patrick Moloney, and Matthew Spalding wrote, the decision â??is long on public policy preferences, and extremely short on law.â??

According to E.J. Dionne writing in the Washington Post, Carol Corrigan, one of the dissenting justices, is a supporter of same-sex marriage. Nonetheless, she sees such judicial overreach as the breaking of the courtsâ?? â??covenantâ?? with the people of California. According to Dionne, Corrigan:

â?¦argued that in a democracy, â??the people should be given a fair chance to set the pace of change without judicial interference.â?? She added: â??If there is to be a new understanding of the meaning of marriage in California, it should develop among the people of our state and find its expression at the ballot box.â??

God bless her!

Alan Wisdom & Jim Tonkowich California Same-Sex â??Marriageâ??: The Arrogance of the Judges, and the Silence of the Churches

and see James D. Berkley High Priests of Secularity

International Society for MacIntyrean Philosophy - Revolutionary Aristotelianism, Thomism, Virtue Theory, Social Theory, and Politics Theory, Practice, and Tradition: Human Rationality in Pursuit of the Good Life July 30 through August 3, 2008 St. Meinrad, Indiana, USA

You know Alasdair MacIntyre is a Brit? We'll have him back when you have finished with him.

With the restructuring of government departments, higher education is now under the control of the Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills (â??DIUSâ??). We no longer have a Department for Education in this country. The idea of a university as â??a place of teaching universal knowledgeâ?? â?? Cardinal Newmanâ??s phrase â?? has, it seems, no relevance in Brownâ??s Britain. Higher education must now justify itself in terms of the â??innovation and skills agendaâ??. Crudely put, academic research must pay its way by generating real returns in the wider economy. The Research Councilsâ?? big new idea, driven by DIUS, is â??knowledge transferâ??. This is defined as â??improving exploitation of the research base to meet national economic and public service objectivesâ?? to be achieved by means of â??people and knowledge flowâ?? together with â??commercialisation, including Intellectual Property exploitation and entrepreneurial activitiesâ??.

Jonathan Bate The Wrong Idea of a University

Far from just a cult of silence about the true nature of radicalism, there’s now a culture of institutionalized denial. West Midlands police with no less a body than the Crown Prosecution Service have had to apologise to Hardcash Productions, the makers of the Dispatches film ‘Undercover Mosque’, for libeling them with accusations of ‘fakery’ and inciting religious hatred. Their exposure of hate preachers at Green Lane Mosque and other Birmingham Islamic centres, rather than being praised as a service to the community, was reported to the broadcast watchdog Ofcom by the police.

* * *

When someone does something bad in the name of religion, they are usually deemed mad or criminal. How do you criminalise a worldview? You can’t. You just pretend it doesn’t exist. You lie to yourself about what is there in front of your face. Finally, if you can’t stand the message you shoot the messenger. The police and more worryingly still the CPS haven’t a clue about how to tackle cultural crime on this scale. It goes to the heart of our own most sacred cow – a secularism that says all religions are equal – and equally irrelevant.

What we are witnessing is the national sickness of the soul. It is a sickness that leads first to moral and actual blindness – and then to social collapse. A house divided against itself cannot stand.

The bloodthirsty rhetoric of the radicals reveals an ugly – and very real - determination to force their religion on the country by fair means or foul, and it is good citizenship for the sake of all our faiths - not racist or islamophobic or an incitement to religious hatred – to recognize it.

Jenny Taylor Undercover mosque: How did police get it so wrong?

We can only wonder at, and try to recapture for ourselves, the insight shown by the early Christians and by Christians down to the beginning of the second millennium, who placed the Christ of the ascension in the dome of their churches. When the faithful gathered to manifest and become the body of Christ, they saw their Lord both as present and as coming. He is the head and draws his body toward the Father while giving it life through his Spirit. The iconography of the churches of both East and West during that period was as it were an extension of the mystery, of the ascension throughout the entire visible church. Christ, the Lord of all" (Pantocrator), is "the cornerstone which the builders had rejected"; (5) when he is raised up on the cross, he is in fact being raised to the Father's side and, in his life-giving humanity, becomes with the Father the wellspring of the river of life. (6)

The ascension of the Lord was thus really the new space for the liturgy of the last times, and the iconography of the church built of stone was its transparent symbol. (8) In his ascension, then, Christ did not at all disappear; on the contrary, he began to appear and to come. For this reason, the hymns we use in our churches sing of him as "the Sun of justice" that rises in the East. He who is the splendor of the Father and who once descended into the depths of our darkness is now exalted and fills all things with his light.

Our last times are located between that first ascension and the ascension that will carry him to the zenith of his glorious parousia. The Lord has not gone away to rest from his redemptive toil; his "work" (Jn 5:17) continues, but now at the Father's side, and because he is there he is now much closer to us, "very near to us," (9) in the work that is the liturgy of the last times. "He leads captives," namely, us, to the new world of his resurrection, and bestows his "gifts," his Spirit, on human beings (see Eph 4:7-10). His ascension is a progressive movement, "from beginning to beginning." (10)

Jesus is, of course, at his Father's side. If, however, we reduce this "ascent" to a particular moment in our mortal history, we simply forget that beginning with the hour of his cross and resurrection Jesus and the human race are henceforth one. He became a son of man in order that we might become children of God. The ascension is progressive "until we all ... form the perfect Man fully mature with the fullness of Christ himself" (Eph 4:13). The movement of the ascension will be complete only when all the members of his body have been drawn to the Father and brought to life by his Spirit. Is that not the meaning of the answer the angels gave to the disciples: "Why are you Galileans standing here looking into the sky? This Jesus who has been taken up from you into heaven will come back in the same way as you have seen him go to heaven" (Acts 1:11). The ascension does not show us in advance the setting of the final parousia; it is rather the activation of the paschal energy of Christ who "fills all things" (Eph 4: 1 0). It is the ever-new "moment" of his coming.

Jean Corbon The Wellspring of Worship

A conference on the theology of John Owen Westminster College Cambridge, UK 19–22 August 2008

Willem van Asselt Utrecht University, Holland

Stephen R Holmes St Mary’s College, University of St Andrews, UK

Michael S Horton Westminster Seminary, California, USA

George Hunsinger Princeton Theological Seminary, New Jersey, USA

Kelly M Kapic Covenant College, Georgia, USA

Suzanne MacDonald Calvin College, Grand Rapids, USA

Sebastian Rehnman Johannelunds Theological Seminary, Sweden

Alan Spence United Reformed Church, London, UK

Carl R Trueman Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, USA

Further details at John Owen Today and a booking forms from johnowentoday@aol.com