What reason is there for belonging to the Catholic Church, or to any other church, for that matter? An answer that some people would give is: there may be plenty of good reasons, but there is no rationale. A good reason for belonging to the Catholic Church would be that you had always been a Catholic and that you felt at home in it; another would be that you were living in a Catholic country, and no other Christian church amounted to more than a sect there. These, of course, are personal reasons, applying to some people and not to others; as such, they contrast with any purported rationale. A rationale, if there was one, for belonging to a particular church would be a proposition holding good generally and not relating to certain individuals more than to others, that, in virtue of its truth, constituted a reason, perhaps a compelling reason, for belonging to that church rather than any other. Is it plausible to hold that there is no rationale, in this sense, for belonging to the Catholic Church, or, conversely, for not belonging to it?

We know that men and women have died rather than renounce, or rather than adhere to, the Catholic Church: if there is no rationale in the matter, they were pitiably deluded. There is no sense to be made of the history of Christianity unless we regard one proposition as held in common by Catholics and Orthodox, and rejected by Protestants.

In the wake of the (almost) universal rejection of neo-Thomism after the Second Vatican Council it was normal to view St. Thomas's theology within the prism of certain stereotypes. A particularly favoured generalisation said that in Thomas's theology Aristotle had trumped the Bible turning theology away from its principle source and power. In recent years however there has been a renewal in what this paper argues is a more holistic reading of St. Thomas focussing especially on his sapiential understanding of theology. Names synonymous with this renewal are Torrell, Emery, Pinckaers, Cessario, and Levering. It is the purpose of this paper to highlight the source of this more sapiential reading of St. Thomas by discussing four key dimensions of his understanding of theology: 1) what Thomas means by wisdom 2) the contemplative nature of theology 3) the unitive nature of theology 4) the importance of prayer and holiness for theology.

I would like to begin by reminding you of an episode in the history of modern philosophy in this country which is not altogether without significance, and that is the revolt against the Hegelian absolutism which one associates with such writers as Bosanquet and Edward Caird by a very powerful collection of thinkers at once philosophical and theological, of whom perhaps the best known in philosophical circles is the late Professor A. E. Taylor and in theological circles that profound and passionate writer Peter Taylor Forsyth. I mention Taylor and Forsyth together. I knew Taylor: I did not know Forsyth personally, but to judge from the latter’s biography there was very little temperamental kinship between the two men. But both Taylor and Forsyth had this in common, that they welcomed Kant’s intense moralism. I well remember Taylor saying to me: ‘You know, MacKinnon, Kant is a very great moralist indeed. The Hegelian criticism of him is largely irrelevant. Hegel was a man without a conscience and could never understand anyone who took the moral struggle as seriously as Kant did’. Forsyth, too, in his writings found in Kant’s intense moralism—his insistence on the inescapable demand of the moral law—a rock firm to withstand the moral frivolousness that he supposed to be ultimately implicit in the Hegelian attitude; and certainly if any of you have read Bosanquet’s book, Some Suggestions in Ethics (a book well worth reading) you will agree, I think, that Bosanquet does leave little foothold for an ultimate moral seriousness—for the kind of almost existential engagement that seems involved in moral choice.

A synodal church makes assumptions about our basic ecclesial experience which takes place when we assemble liturgically, especially when we act eucharistically. The basic assumption is that we are a genuine human community knowing and relating to one another as brothers and sisters in baptism. Only real communities can authentically image the church's nature. This is a ‘bottom – up’ activity. If we wish this, then we must rediscover our liturgy and celebrate it in a new way as flowing out from a community and helping it to discover its own nature. This, in turn, makes demands on our understanding of ministry and its structures. While many Catholics endorse synodality, their willingness to change the shape of the presbyterate is uncertain.

Raimond Gaita's moral philosophy is distinguished by, among other things, its attention to the role of embodied, enacted witness in disclosing certain moral values, and its understanding of the emotions as forms of thought. In this paper, I consider how Gaita's insights on these matters may be applied to certain questions in the philosophy of religion, paying particular attention to the nature of religious experience and ‘the problem of evil’. I suggest that Gaita's discussion of how we come to recognise moral values or ‘meanings’ can be extended to the question of how we might recognise religious meanings. On this view, religious experience may take the form of an appreciation of the meaning borne by a material context (rather than, for example, some supra-sensory encounter with a supernatural agent), and our sense of the goodness or otherwise of the world may be answerable to the authoritative example of particular lives.

Victor White’s life and work are a fine demonstration of the combination of the Dominican commitment to truth and to contemplation and the handing on of the fruits of contemplation. They are also a demonstration of the very considerable cost which commitment can entail, especially when operating for twenty years on .the frontiers of theology and Jungian psychology. That Jung and White had the highest regard for one another’s work and that they disagreed strongly on the nature of evil, especially concerning Jung’s Answer to Job, is well known. The publication of the greater part of Jung’s side of their correspondence makes available to those who were not personally involved the real extent of their disagreement over a number of years and the estrangement between them which resulted. More than once White wondered what exactly it was they were arguing about, since at different times they each seemed to agree to some particular item of the argument. Their inability to synchronise such agreements between them is not to be explained by personal factors, though this plays an important part in any discussion involving psychoanalysis. The breaking point was the Catholic philosophical view of evil as a privation of good and parasitic upon it (privatio boni) and not as autonomous element opposed to it, and I shall return to this later.

Examination of the relationship between them casts light on the difficulties of making this philosophical position experientially convincing and indicates that the disagreement focussed upon this point drew upon wider areas of contention between theology and psychology.

Anglicanism's relationship with its Reformation heritage represents a tension. It looks to the Reformation as the movement from which an English Church, independent of papal authority, was inaugurated. At the same time, it refuses to be labelled as a “church of the Reformation”, pointing to its continuity with a much longer history of Christian practice in Britain. The growth of the Anglican Communion and current controversies over church order, the interpretation of scripture and the exercise of authority make Anglican identity difficult to define. Identity would once have been sought in liturgy, but the view that liturgy completely enshrines Anglican doctrine has been convincingly put to rest by scholarship since the 1970s. This paper argues that the liturgical legacy of the Reformation (especially use of the vernacular, concern for the orderly reading and interpretation of scripture, and attention given to the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist) offers categories that can help to form possible approaches to the current crisis of Anglican identity.

The work of scientists has in the last half-century brought humanity face to face with two major menaces to its survival and created a situation without precedent in human history. This twofold threat has been posed by the development of nuclear fission for civilian or military purposes and the more recent development of biotechnology or genetic engineering. We live, all of us, all of Creation, in the ominous shadow of nuclear technology. We live also in what is potentially a no less chilling shadow—the darkening shadow of biotechnology, an industry which, according to the Times of India, is ‘the fastest growing industry in the world today’.

It is more than a decade since the distinguished Austro-American biochemist Erwin Chargaff commented that these two immense and fateful scientific discoveries, ‘the splitting of the atom (and) the recognition of the chemistry of heredity and its subsequent manipulation’, both involved the mistreatment of a nucleus—that of the atom and that of the cell. He added—and it was a comment whose prophetic vision was largely ignored at the time—‘In both cases do I have the feeling that science has transgressed a barrier that should have remained inviolate.’

I must begin by saying how much I appreciate the honour of being asked to address a group of scientists on this subject; and my only hope is that what I have to say will not prove entirely irrelevant to the concerns of those who practise experimental science in one form or another, though I suspect that the kind of relevance which I shall suggest is rather a peculiar one.

While the experimental sciences—what is usually meant by ‘science’—have become highly diversified today, so much so that divisions of the sciences such as ‘physics’, ‘chemistry’, ‘botany’ and so on, are so general as to be pretty well unusable, one feature in particular distinguishes theology from all of them and indeed from any other intellectual pursuit whatsoever: the fact that theology itself belongs to the supernatural order. By ‘theology’ I shall always mean ‘sacred theology’ and not ‘natural theology’, which is properly a special way of practising metaphysics. To say that theology in this sense belongs to the supernatural order is not merely to say that its object, what it studies, is something supernatural, the Revealed. It is also to say that it is itself, in its intrinsic movement and apprehension of truth, something supernatural. It is not merely the application of procedures already practised in other fields to a special field, a special set of data, though it certainly is that too, as we shall see: but its very intellectual activity shares the specific character of the special field which it investigates.

Four years ago the contributors to Robert Nugent’s A Challenge to Love discussed the position of gay and lesbian Catholics in the Church in the aftermath of the 1975 Vatican declaration on sexual ethics. Now Sister Jeannine Gramick, co-founder with Father Nugent of New Ways Ministry, has co-edited with Pat Furey (a pseudonym used ‘for professional reasons’) The Vatican and Homosexuality. This is a collection of reactions to the Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons which the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued in October 19863. Of the nineteen participants in the earlier symposium, only Gramick and Nugent re-appear among the twenty-five leading Catholic educators, journalists, activists and officials who write in it.

Gramick cites The Tablet as having called the document ‘violently hostile’, and The Month as having noted a failure to address ‘the reality of homosexuals in their living of Christian discipleship’ (p. 93). In the United States, the editors say, reactions were ‘as might have been expected, swift and strong’. One prominent Catholic and former Trappist monk writing in the Washington Post dismissed the letter as ‘homophobic rantings’. A more dispassionate and scholarly response came from the Archbishop of San Francisco, John R. Quinn: his article ‘Toward an understanding of the letter’, first published in America, is reprinted here.

The story of the gallant attempt of the later Middle Ages to win Asia for the Church is so often passed over with the scantiest reference, even by Catholic historians, that it is almost unknown. It covered more than a century; a century whose short opening years of high hopes were followed by long dreary ones of disappointment, persecution and martyrdom, to end in the destruction of all achievement and the expulsion of the missionaries.

The first great missionary movement, which converted the northern barbarians, was the work of the Benedictines, while the glories of the sixteenth century in the East belong to the Society of Jesus. The great missionaries of the later Middle Ages were the Franciscans and Dominicans. Both Orders bore the brunt of the battle equally throughout Asia, but Cathay and Central Asia was particularly the sphere of the Minorites, while India, Persia and the Caspian Steppes was that of the Preachers.

John Zizioulas is not only a prolific writer but arguably one of the most original and influential Orthodox scholars of our present time. His originality can be most clearly observed in his development of a personal and relational ontology. Central to this approach is his assertion that the Father as cause should be understood as the one God rather than the divine ousia. Zizioulas subsequently asserts that the divine ousia should be understood in terms of divine communion. While this approach might be original, it is not without its difficulties, not least the possible implication that there are two different Gods. It is our contention that this problem arises out of a failure by Zizioulas to adequately distinguish between two distinct types of divine unity particularly located in the writings of the Cappadocian Fathers. The first is located solely in the ousia and ensures the ontological oneness of God, the second may be observed in the relational role of the Father as a point of reference for the Son and the Spirit. Finally, although these two forms of unity are identified by the Cappadocians we will suggest that the second is more adequately located with the Spirit by Augustine.