When people think about Newman, they usually think, first of all, about his ideas, doctrinal development, the relationship between faith and reason, the place of the laity in the Church, and much else besides. But however brilliant those ideas may have been, Newman was never simply a thinker, a man trapped in his brain. The key question for him was always how to make the ideas become real. He had no interest in moving minds without touching hearts. Newly ordained as an Anglican deacon, then as a tutor at Oriel, as a leader and preacher during the early years of the Oxford Movement, as a parish priest in Birmingham, as an educator, and as a champion of the via media, of moderation in dispute, his instinct was invariably pastoral.

Last December a conference of the War Resister’s International was held at Gandhigram in South India, which I was invited to attend. I was only able to go on the last day, but I felt that the meeting was significant both for its timing and for its setting and for the conclusions to which it came. I was glad to find that there were two or three other Catholics present, including a priest sent by his bishop from Belgium. Catholics are not generally supposed to be favourable towards pacifism, but it is obvious that the threat of nuclear war calls for a radical change in our attitude to war, and it seems inevitable that there will be an increasing number who will feel obliged to take up a pacifist position in regard at least to nuclear war. The timing of this meeting was significant because the W.R.I. is an international organization without any religious basis, yet clearly it was felt that the birth of Christ was something which is relevant to the issue which faces all men to-day, and I must say that I was impressed by the spiritual attitude which was shown by the majority of the delegates. The setting also was significant because clearly it was felt that the country of Mahatma Gandhi was the country in the world which could best be expected to offer some guidance on the supreme problem which faces our generation.

In the false Spring of our times, everything is painted green: it is the appointed liturgical colour for our post-historical sabbath. It’s to everyone’s taste, the guarantee of minimum respectability. There’s a Green party, but that doesn’t get very far, because it appears to appropriate for a particular cause the symbol that belongs to all. The colour has a utopian hint, or rather that of a puritan arcadia, but at the same time it soothes the passages of capitalist economic exchange. More than that: the guarantee of a ‘good’, ‘healthy’ relation to nature, as to one’s own body, increases surplus value. Capitalism has already incorporated, in the interests of profit, the new religiosity of our times, which takes the form of transcending one’s humanity in order to celebrate nature or animality as the ‘other’ with which one nonetheless seeks to become united.

I don’t want to be misunderstood. The planetary structures which support life have been dangerously interfered with; much natural beauty, along with the delicate and long-developed harmonies of people’s everyday environments has been ruined or destroyed. Technology is employed indiscriminately and for the mere sake of size and complexity. However, ‘Green consciousness’ is not the complete answer to all this: in too many ways it may collude with precisely what it purports to oppose.

This is intended to be a practical comparison between two approaches. Accordingly it would be as well to start with a few truisms that are shared between them. In the first place, people only discover themselves and the world through their relationships with other people and this relationship is primary. Perspectives on the world follow and are fashioned by these relationships. In view ©f this, theology may be said to be reflection on human experience specifically understood as directed towards God. Thus Schillebeeckx (1969:214) describes man, from a theological point of view, as ‘a free being who must define himself in and towards the world in dialogue with God’. This may be contrasted with the definition of one sort of sociology, ‘critical sociology’, described by Hansen (1976:3) as ‘an invitation to become an involved, critical explorer of human and societal possibilities’.

Unless the theologian is to consider for the most part his own experience (the source of much individualistic agonizing of an existentialist sort commonly characterized as bourgeois sociology) he must perforce draw on some systematic body of reflection on the human condition. Traditionally, this has been provided by philosophy, but in more recent times the social sciences have rather cornered the interaction business.

To a former student like myself, to whom Kenelm’s conversation about the Italian Ottocento was as stimulating over the years as his teaching on the subject had been sure and authoritative in undergraduate and postgraduate days, it was always something of a shock to remember how relatively little he had published in this area of Italian literature. Two major essays, both of which started life as lectures, two invaluable translations, a scattering of lesser articles and reviews—these, combined with his presence as teacher and talker, were enough to ensure his status as an indispensable point of reference in any discussion of the early nineteenth century in Italy.

The two lecture-essays—on the idea of truth in Manzoni and Leopardi (1967) and in commemoration of Manzoni on the centenary of his death (1973)—are not so much the report of specific pieces of research as syntheses, dense and sometimes tense, of what Kenelm judged to be the most important things he had to say about the subject. And the subject mattered to him a lot. Manzoni was important because, as he put it in the centenary lecture, he was ‘that uncommon thing, a considerable Christian artist’—adding in pen to his own copy the word ‘very’ before ‘considerable’—and Leopardi was in some sense his antithesis. What Kenelm had in mind when he thought about Christian art is discussed elsewhere in this issue.

According to classical Christian doctrine, the human body is not a container for the soul but its “form”. In defending a form of this view, I suggest that the resurrected body of Christ represents the truth of human flesh. In the light of the resurrected and glorified body of Christ, who still bears his wounds, death can be understood as the loss of something irreplaceable and therefore mourned as a horrific deprivation of life; that is, because eternal life consists in the vision of God by our whole selves, and not just a separated soul, a proper Christian anthropology that began in some sense with the glorified body of Christ as the “truth of the physical” might suggest a very different biomedical practice than that with which we are familiar, which often proceeds from a methodological materialism underwritten by a dualistic metaphysics.

What the late Stephen J Gould baptized ultra-Darwinism is anti-evolutionary. In so being, it leads to the undermining of science, rationality, and, lastly, to ethical nihilism, wherein any notion of humanism is impossible, and this for one simple reason – there is now no such thing as a human. In addition, we argue that ultra-Darwinism is a progeny of crass philosophical dualism, and this leads it to despise matter and the material world, even though, paradoxically, it espouses materialism. We conclude that the theory of evolution invalidates ultra-Darwinism.

The little alpine city of Trent is not a very important place today, nor was it in the sixteenth century, apart from its position on a fairly busy line of communication connecting Italy with Germany over the Brenner Pass; and it may well be asked how it came to be the site of an important General Council of the Church. The answer lies in the circumstance that still brings Trent and the Trentino into the news today, their mixed racial character. In the sixteenth century Trent, with an Italian majority and a German minority, was ruled by its Prince-Bishop, usually a prelate of mixed German and Italian connections. It was the capital of a Prince-Bishopric (one of so many in Germany) that formed a constituent principality of the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation, the boundary of which curious organization with the free and sovereign Italian State of Venice lay not far to the south on the road to Verona.

Ian McEwan is arguably the best living British novelist. His most successful novel, Atonement, was recently made into an internationally successful film. And indeed, through analysis of his novels, it is clear that Ian McEwan believes literature—precisely as fictive—might very well bear the task of atonement for postmodernity. His novels, though, are patently hopeless, (even as they are truly well-written). Because McEwan doesn't accept or see the causes of sin as such—formally understood as rebellion against the Creator—his diagnostic aesthetic of our postmodern malaise is incomplete and ineffectual. The literary or fictive atonement that he would achieve through his novels does not satisfy. This article aims to lay bare the philosophico-literary characteristics of Ian McEwan's later novels. The ultimate goal of this critical reading, though—tending toward an “evangelical lection”—is to transfigure McEwan's imaginative and creative virtuosity for otherwise disappointed Christian readers, precisely by envisioning his novels in the dark light of their redemptive deficit. Thus, the literary or fictive atonement that Ian McEwan's atheism cannot achieve might be saved apropos the Judeo-Christian revelation of divine atonement.

Newman was formed in the Church of England and all his major theological concerns were developed in an Anglican context. The rebuttal of utilitarian scepticism in the University Sermons; the ecclesial context of Christian faith and life in The Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church; the strong sense of mystery in Newman's epistemology and apologetic; the sacramental character of Christian truth are all significantly part of the Anglican inheritance that he took to the Roman Catholic Church. Furthermore Newman's early formation was ‘pre-Victorian’– he was engaged when writing his Essay on Scriptural Miracles with earlier debates with the Deists, as well as sharing in the rediscovery of the imagination that characterised Coleridge and the Romantic Movement. This paper explores these and other issues to show an important part of Newman's enduring Anglican inheritance.

This article, working within a sociological framework, discusses the issues and challenges arising at the church-culture interface, which are of central importance for ecclesial credibility, many of which came up in the 2012 Synod of Bishops on the New Evangelization. It suggests that, while there are evident problems with postmodern culture, the key problem lies within the Church itself, in the disconnect between contemporary modes of cultural production and the dominant mode of transmission of the Christian faith. The remedy would be a presentation of the gospel and an ecclesial witness that is deeply respectful of individuals searching for authentic ways of living and that invites and enables them to find in a renewed church the path to true freedom.