Douglas Knight

In order to mark this Second Reading of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill in the House of Commons on Monday 12th May we will be holding a prayer vigil together with other groups.

PLEASE COME to our prayer vigil outside Parliament, invite members of your church, Christian groups, family and friends. We will gather at 2pm on 12th May in Old Palace Yard, opposite St Stephen’s Entrance to the House of Lords, Westminster.

At Second Reading, MPs vote on the ‘principle’ of the whole Bill. This is usually a formality and then the Bill goes through to its Committee Stages, Report and Third Reading where MPs can vote on specific amendments.

With faith and humility we must come together to pray for a great miracle. Monday, 12th May is the day after Pentecost and exactly 2 years since the miraculous defeat at Second Reading of the Joffe Bill which would have legalised euthanasia in this country. We would like Christians everywhere to come in their hundreds and stand outside Parliament and pray for this miracle; pray that MPs will vote against the principle of the Bill.

Christian Concern for our Nation

Though he is little known in the West, Coptic priest Zakaria Botros — named Islam’s “Public Enemy #1” by the Arabic newspaper, al-Insan al-Jadid — has been making waves in the Islamic world. Along with fellow missionaries — mostly Muslim converts — he appears frequently on the Arabic channel al-Hayat (i.e., “Life TV”). There, he addresses controversial topics of theological significance — free from the censorship imposed by Islamic authorities or self-imposed through fear of the zealous mobs who fulminated against the infamous cartoons of Mohammed. Botros’s excurses on little-known but embarrassing aspects of Islamic law and tradition have become a thorn in the side of Islamic leaders throughout the Middle East.

Botros is an unusual figure onscreen: robed, with a huge cross around his neck, he sits with both the Koran and the Bible in easy reach. Egypt’s Copts — members of one of the oldest Christian communities in the Middle East — have in many respects come to personify the demeaning Islamic institution of “dhimmitude” (which demands submissiveness from non-Muslims, in accordance with Koran 9:29). But the fiery Botros does not submit, and minces no words. He has famously made of Islam “ten demands” whose radical nature he uses to highlight Islam’s own radical demands on non-Muslims.

Typically, Botros’s presentation of the Islamic material is sufficiently detailed that the controversial topic is shown to be an airtight aspect of Islam. Yet, however convincing his proofs, Botros does not flatly conclude that, say, universal jihad or female inferiority are basic tenets of Islam. He treats the question as still open — and humbly invites the ulema, the revered articulators of sharia law, to respond and show the error in his methodology. He does demand, however, that their response be based on “al-dalil we al-burhan,” — “evidence and proof,” one of his frequent refrains — not shout-downs or sophistry.

More often than not, the response from the ulema is deafening silence — which has only made Botros and Life TV more enticing to Muslim viewers.

Raymond Ibrahim on Father Zakaria Botros

The priest was gradually changed in the popular imagination from the celebrant of the Sacred Mysteries of salvation into the coordinator of the liturgical ministries of others. And this false understanding of the ministerial priesthood produced the ever-expanding role of the “priest presider,” whose primary task was to make the congregation feel welcome and constantly engage them with eye contact and the embrace of his warm personality. Once these falsehoods were accepted, then the service of the priest in the liturgy became grotesquely misshapen, and instead of a humble steward of the mysteries whose only task was to draw back the veil between God and man and then hide himself in the folds, the priest became a ring-master or entertainer whose task was thought of as making the congregation feel good about itself.

Father Jay Scott Newman

Philip Hamburger Separation of Church and State

In a powerful challenge to conventional wisdom, Philip Hamburger argues that the separation of church and state has no historical foundation in the First Amendment. The detailed evidence assembled here shows that eighteenth-century Americans almost never invoked this principle. Although Thomas Jefferson and others retrospectively claimed that the First Amendment separated church and state, separation became part of American constitutional law only much later.

Hamburger shows that separation became a constitutional freedom largely through fear and prejudice. Jefferson supported separation out of hostility to the Federalist clergy of New England. Nativist Protestants (ranging from nineteenth-century Know Nothings to twentieth-century members of the K.K.K.) adopted the principle of separation to restrict the role of Catholics in public life. Gradually, these Protestants were joined by theologically liberal, anti-Christian secularists, who hoped that separation would limit Christianity and all other distinct religions. Eventually, a wide range of men and women called for separation. Almost all of these Americans feared ecclesiastical authority, particularly that of the Catholic Church, and, in response to their fears, they increasingly perceived religious liberty to require a separation of church from state. American religious liberty was thus redefined and even transformed. In the process, the First Amendment was often used as an instrument of intolerance and discrimination.

Der Gottesbeweis: Warum wir, wenn es Gott nicht gibt, überhaupt nichts denken können

Solange Vergangenes erinnert wird, ist es nicht schwer, die Frage nach seiner Seinsart zu beantworten. Es hat seine Wirklichkeit eben im Erinnertwerden. Aber die Erinnerung hört irgendwann auf, und irgendwann wird es keine Menschen mehr auf der Erde geben. Schließlich wird die Erde selbst verschwinden. Da zur Vergangenheit immer eine Gegenwart gehört, deren Vergangenheit sie ist, müßten wir also sagen: mit der bewußten Gegenwart - und Gegenwart ist immer nur als bewußte - verschwindet auch die Vergangenheit, und das Futurum exactum verliert seinen Sinn. Aber genau dies können wir nicht denken. Der Satz: “In ferner Zukunft wird es nicht mehr wahr sein, daß wir heute abend hier zusammen waren” ist Unsinn. Er läßt sich nicht denken. Wenn wir einmal nicht mehr hier gewesen sein werden, dann sind wir tatsächlich auch jetzt nicht wirklich hier, wie es der Buddhismus denn auch konsequenterweise behauptet. Wenn gegenwärtige Wirklichkeit einmal nicht mehr gewesen sein wird, dann ist sie gar nicht wirklich. Wer das Futurum exactum beseitigt, beseitigt das Präsens.

Aber noch einmal: Von welcher Art ist diese Wirklichkeit des Vergangenen, das ewige Wahrsein jeder Wahrheit? Die einzige Antwort kann lauten: Wir müssen ein Bewußtsein denken, in dem alles, was geschieht, aufgehoben ist, ein absolutes Bewußtsein. Kein Wort wird einmal ungesprochen sein, kein Schmerz unerlitten, keine Freude unerlebt. Geschehenes kann verziehen, es kann nicht ungeschehen gemacht werden. Wenn es Wirklichkeit gibt, dann ist das Futurum exactum unausweichlich, und mit ihm das Postulat des wirklichen Gottes.

And that, my friends, is an eschatological ontology.

Der letzte Gottesbeweis

If however reason, concerned about its supposed purity, fails to hear the great message that comes from the Christian faith and the understanding it brings, it will dry up like a tree with roots cut off from the water that gives it life. It will lose the courage needed to find the truth and thus become small rather than great.

Applied to our European culture this means that if it wants to constitute itself on the basis of its arguments and whatever appears to it to be convincing, with concerns about its own secular nature, it will cut itself off from its life-sustaining roots, and in doing so will not become more reasonable and pure but will instead become undone and fragmented.

Pope XVI Benedict Speech to La Sapienza - the University of Rome

All the stars will be out in Nottingham for

The Pope and ‘Jesus of Nazareth‘ conference 19-20 June

Archbishop Javier Martínez (Granada): ‘Christ of history, Jesus of Faith’
Questions and Discussion (chaired by Prof. John Milbank)
Prof. Walter Moberly (Durham): ‘The Use of the Old Testament in Jesus of Nazareth’
Prof. Markus Bockmuehl (Oxford): ‘Lessons learned from Reading Scripture with Pope Benedict’
Dr Roland Deines (Nottingham): ‘Can the “Real” Jesus be Identified with the Historical Jesus?’
Prof. Henri-Jérôme Gagey (Paris): ‘Between Theology and History: A Question of Epistemology’
Olivier-Thomas Venard OP (Jerusalem): ‘Does the Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels reallysay nothing different from the Prologue of John?’
Dr Simon Oliver (Lampeter): ‘Jesus and Eucharistic Exchange: Reflections on Cudworth and Ratzinger’
Dr Angus Paddison (Nottingham), ‘Following Jesus with Pope Benedict’
Dr Richard H. Bell (Nottingham): ‘On the Transfiguration’
Dr Douglas Knight (London): ‘Benedict on the Whole Christ’
Dr Jane Heath (Aberdeen): ‘Burckhardt’s Greeks and Ratzinger’s Jesus’
Dr James Crossley (Sheffield): ‘Historical Criticism and the Construction of Judaism in Ratzinger’s Jesus of Nazareth’
Luke Tallon (St. Andrews), ‘The Evangelical Dialogic of Joseph Ratzinger’s Own, Personal Jesusbild’
Martin Bauspieß (Tübingen), ‘Event and Testimony’
William Daniel (Nottingham), ‘Whose Jesus? Which Christology?’
Prof. Geza Vermes FBA (Oxford): ‘A Historian’s Perspective on the Pope’s Jesus’
Prof. Mona Siddiqui (Glasgow): ‘Seeing the Face of the Lord – Hope or Heresy?’
Fr Fergus Kerr OP (Edinburgh): ‘Reckoning with the Originality of Jesus: Where Did Christology Come from?’

Clap your hands, all you peoples; shout to God with loud songs of joy. For the Lord, the Most High, is awesome, a great king over all the earth. He subdued peoples under us, and nations under our feet. He chose our heritage for us, the pride of Jacob whom he loves. God has gone up with a shout, the Lord with the sound of a trumpet. Sing praises to God, sing praises; sing praises to our King, sing praises. For God is the king of all the earth; sing praises with a psalm. God is king over the nations; God sits on his holy throne. The princes of the peoples gather as the people of the God of Abraham. For the shields of the earth belong to God; he is highly exalted. Psalm 47

The ascension in Luke and Acts summarises and rounds off the resurrection appearances of Jesus. They tell us that the resurrection is the truth of the incarnation. But the ascension is the thumbprint view of the whole narrative of God with man, and therefore the whole plot of the bible. Man is called and destined for communion with God, and in that communion, fellowship with all other creatures of God. Man in Christ now sits at the right hand of the Father and with us will fill all creation .

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon began talks yesterday in Berne (Switzerland) with key development agencies on how to tackle the crisis provoked by soaring food and fuel prices and put an estimated 100 million of the world’s poorest people on the brink of starvation. The prices of staple foods like rice, grain, oil and sugar are all at least 50 per cent higher than they were this time last year.

Asia News UN’s emergency plan against world food crisis

What is extraordinary about the current situation is that it echoes in so many respects an earlier world food crisis: that of 1973-74

Paul Rogers at Open Democracy The world’s food insecurity

By its nature, pornography encourages an expression of human sexuality which is not only deformed but also severely limited and patently false. The use of pornography by young people prevents an understanding of human sexuality integrated with the self-expression and intimacy that is the full expression of the human person. Instead of growing to an appreciation of the sacredness of the person, young people caught in the web of pornography begin to relate to others and themselves as objects.

Self-mastery is an essential element to emotional security. Without the self-mastery that comes from controlling and, when necessary, struggling with one’s destructive behaviors, including pornography, maturing young persons find themselves in the fearful condition of being unable to control either the world or themselves. A young person who has abandoned the hope of self-control is also unable to control what he does to others.

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This ability “to see” spiritually has implications for the moral life: it enables us to see according to God, to accept others as ‘neighbors’; it lets us perceive the human body - ours and our neighbor’s - as a temple of the Holy Spirit, a manifestation of divine beauty (Catechism of the Catholic Church 2519) .

Our sight, more than just a physical ability, also serves as an important means for understanding faith, heaven and salvation. Indeed, its proper end and fulfillment is the vision of God Himself. Man’s final purpose is caught up with his ability to see. With this profound truth in mind, we can better appreciate the grave threat pornography presents to the human soul, to the family and to society.

Bishop Paul Loverde of Arlington Bought with a price

I like Pastoral Letters. Here is Bishop Philip Tartaglia’s Communications Sunday Pastoral Letter

The Pope warns that the mass media can be used for ideological purposes, and “can tend to legitimise or impose distorted models of personal, family or social life”. As Scottish Catholics, we know only too well how true this is, and we are keenly aware of how rarely our own media represents us as people of faith in a fair or balanced manner.

Today, mass communications can fairly be charged with losing the ethical underpinning that once existed. It is a sad reality that those involved in the production and dissemination of much of our media content do not themselves share the religious or moral perspectives of their audience. There has occurred a fundamental disconnection between the provider and the consumer. While the last national census showed that over two thirds of Scots described themselves as Christians, few of those who work in radio, television and the press share this identity.

So the Scots have one faith, while their Media has another quite different faith. Ah well, as long as we know, I suppose. I wasn’t aware that ‘Communications Sunday’ was a feast of the Church, but why not? Let’s have a day for everything, only let the Scots Catholics lead so we English Anglicans can trail along behind. I’ll go back to the Scottish Catholic Media Office

Lewis Ayres has been appointed to the newly established Bede Chair of Catholic Theology at Durham.

Ayres, an English lay Catholic theologian, currently teaching at Emory is a world-regarded, leading expert in patristic theology (particularly Christology and Trinity) with a strong constructive/contemporary dimension to his work, with a very well developed understanding of what it means to live between academy and church, and with a strong vision and passion for the further development of Catholic theology and the Centre for Catholic Studies within the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University.

Hope springs eternal.

Still, it is always nice to see an Englishman come home, which makes me wonder why we don’t invite Paul Griffiths to do to same. His title for the ‘Catholic Theology and the Public Academy’ conference? ‘Why Theology Should Find the Public Academy Inhospitable’. Ah, there’s one that knows.

A propos Spaemann’s line about becoming what you see, did you read Jason Byassee ?

As theologian Sarah Coakley has so brilliantly said, ancient Christian reflection on desire shows that Freud is exactly wrong: Talk about God is not repressed talk about sexuality; talk about sex is, in fact, repressed talk about God. To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, porn users are not to be rebuked for desiring too much but for desiring too little.

and

Christians have resources with which to aid this recovery of genuine eros, though they’re a bit dusty at present. I think here that Orthodox iconography, when done right, is beautiful beyond words. It had better be: Worship bears the Church up to heaven into the presence of God. Liturgy is a drawing out of our true selves, our best selves, in union with God in reflection of God’s union with us in Christ through the Theotokos.

If you don’t have a First Things subscription, listen to Jason Eskew

This is the paper I read to the Cheyneygates ‘Work-in-Progress’ seminar at Westminster on 24th April 2008.

When the congregation of my Church is gathered in worship we say that Christ is with us, although, without faith, no evidence of him imposes itself on us. The degree to which we find one another unattractive and not very Christ-like comes from this dark and incomprehensible way in which Christ presents himself, crucifying our expectations as he comes. In each of these unlovely people at the altar rail Christ says, ‘Do you see me, do you love me’?

All human beings give themselves away – we cannot help ourselves. If we do not give ourselves to Christ and to all his body, we give ourselves away in some other way, and to some other power. Either we love and adore God and give ourselves to him, which is to say give ourselves back to him, or we direct all that love and adoration to other objects, thereby making idols of them. I just cannot hold my adoration in. I too readily give myself to the darlings and delights of the media, but so grudgingly give myself to the people of the church. All our whole consumer culture is a vast displacement activity for this true love.

To denigrate the Church is to fail to recognise Christ. When I declare that the Church is too full of old people, demand that it demonstrate its relevance, and search for a fresh emergent and more real Church consisting of separate congregations for young people, I reveal my disdain for the body of Christ. I need you to help me overcome this desire to distance myself from this body. When I decide that the Christians around me are too exclusivist, traditionalist and fundamentalist, or otherwise just too muddleheaded, you have to tell me that they have had fewer educational opportunities than I have, and that if they are the weak, we who are the strong have to wait for them. For if we go ahead ‘without waiting for anyone else’, we fail to ‘recognise the body of the Lord’, and so eat and drink division on the Church and judgment on ourselves. You have to name my disparagement of the rules and habits of the Church for the antinominianism and Gnosticism it is. We have to fast and abstain together at the appropriate point in the calendar and learn all the practices of self-control that make each of us more than just our own bodies. Until we keep the fast, and wait for each other, the joy of the feast will elude us.

The Whole Christ and the Eucharist

Brazos Press has a wonderful manifesto

The onset of the twenty-first century finds the Western world in the midst of transition at a seismic level: from Christendom to post-Christendom, from industrialism to post-industrialism, from modernity to postmodernity, from colonial hegemony to multicultural pluralism, and so forth. It is at the same time a period of the rediscovery and reaffirmation of classical, creedal and confessional Christianity. Some find the current ferment chaotic and threatening. While recognizing the gravity of the ongoing “culture wars,” Brazos Press responds constructively in a setting of monumental flux and transition.

Brazos Press seeks as authors scholars and thinkers capitalizing on and promoting the rediscovery and reaffirmation of classical Christianity. Our books encourage Christians to speak as Christians in and to the public square and to extend the vital roots of the ancient Christian tradition into the twenty-first century.

* * *

By unapologetic theology, we mean a theology that is distinctly, particularly, and unashamedly Christian and considers no other narrative or tradition more basic to its identity than the Christian narrative and tradition.

So wonderful, that I am tempted to plagiarise it. I will certainly send them a manuscript.

You were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.

We stand at a threshold - either we can continue to allow this plague (pornography) to spread with fewer and fewer checks, or we can take concrete steps to uproot it in our lives, our families, our neighborhoods and our culture.

We are a people called to share in the pure and noble vision of God and His creation. We are also a people whose future glory has been bought with the precious sacrifice of our Lord Jesus Christ. We must never forget the high cost of this purchase.

A free people can combat the tremendous moral, social and spiritual danger of pornography with great courage. My fervent prayer is that Catholics, other Christians, and all people of good will understand this threat, confront it, facilitate true healing, and ever more fully live out our God-given use of human sight.

Bishop Paul Loverde of Arlington Bought at a Price and other homilies and pastoral letters

By the way, can I have a bishop who writes homilies and pastoral letters, and can I have a priest who reads them out to us? Can I have a church that does does not leave its members in pastoral free-fall? Just thought I’d ask.

I have been reading Mary Ann Glendon at First Things, to which I will be renewing my subscription.

Although awareness of this impending demographic storm is beginning to sink in, policymakers in Europe and the United States tend to frame it only as a “welfare crisis.” The falling birth rates that are fueling the welfare crisis, however, are symptomatic of a deeper crisis in beliefs and attitudes—a crisis involving changes in the meanings and values that people attribute to aging and mortality, sex and procreation, marriage, gender, parenthood, relations among the generations, and life itself.

Principled Immigration

With widespread acceptance of the notion that behavior in the highly personal areas of sex and marriage is of no concern to anyone other than the “consenting adults” involved, it has been easy to overlook what should have been obvious from the beginning: individual actions in the aggregate exert a profound influence on what kind of society we are bringing into being. Eventually, when large numbers of individuals act primarily with regard to self-fulfillment, the entire culture is transformed. The evidence is now overwhelming that affluent Western nations have been engaged in a massive social experiment—an experiment that brought new opportunities and liberties to adults but has put children and other dependents at considerable risk.

Discovering Our Dependence (2004)

So, where to begin? “What, in heaven’s name,” muses the Stranger, “should be the first law our legislator will establish?” Without waiting to hear what Kleinias and Megillos have to say, he answers his own question: “Surely the first subject he will turn to in his regulations will be the very first step that leads to the birth of children in the state: the union of two people in the partnership of marriage.” Kleinias readily agrees that marriage must be regulated first because it is crucial to the nurture and education of future citizens.

But not everything that pertains to the seedbeds of character and competence needs to be regulated. Unwritten customs, according to the Stranger, “are the bonds of the entire social framework.” When soundly established and habitually observed, they “shield and protect” the written law. “But if they go wrong,” says the Athenian from bitter experience, “well, you know what happens when carpenter’s props buckle in a house: They bring the whole building crashing down.

Plato as Statesman

and there’s more

How central to the Christian understanding of the meaning of marriage is the sexual difference between men and women? It is this question that Christopher Roberts addresses in his Creation and Covenant: The Significance of Sexual Difference in the Moral Theology of Marriage, and no one paying attention to the arguments about the blessing of same-sex unions in the Christian churches will want to ignore it. Roberts says he aims to raise the level of the theological conversation now dominated by questions of the justice of treating heterosexuals and homosexuals equally. Have most Christian thinkers thought sexual difference to be morally and theologically important? If so, does the contemporary discussion take account of their insights and arguments?

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Roberts writes with a shrewd eye for our contemporary predicament. “We cannot imagine existing in our culture without the haven of an erotic partnership,” he writes, “because our capacity to belong together in more chaste ways is so limited.” Here, he faults our failure to make possible “a social life of lay celibacy.” He notes that it is not only advocates for same-sex unions who want to redefine marriage. “Reclaiming the theological tradition about sexual difference would entail not only a chastening word to the revisionist theologians but also a thoroughgoing revolution for almost all Christians.” Would we not, for instance, have to put some daylight between the public social life of Christians and contemporary youth culture as celebrated by the media? With this book, Roberts has tried to raise the standard of theological argument about same-sex unions, and in this he succeeds admirably.

Guy Mansini reviewing Christopher Roberts’ Creation and Covenant: The Significance of Sexual Difference in the Moral Theology of Marriage

Because politics, in the vision of the Church, deals with the good of people, individually and collectively, the primary subject of the political system is the human person. As a result, there are matters and issues that arise which the Church considers fundamentally
related to the dignity of the human person.

These matters are life, the family, education, religious belief, justice and protection for those most in need in society. The Church’s approach to such issues is based above all in the very nature of the human person as created in the image and likeness of God.
Consequently, you can certainly understand why the Church takes such an interest in these questions. It does so, not in an attempt to impose its views or doctrines on society, and even less on any legislative body, but rather it does so in a spirit of service to the common good and the nature of the human person, realities which transcend institutions, but which must rely on the good intentions of institutions to be protected and safeguarded. In that context it is even foreseen that at times the Church can offer its own expertise on these universal questions in collaboration with public authorities while always respecting the distinct competencies that each has.

Obviously, I am very much aware of the challenges facing you as lawmakers, in a pluralistic society, which has so many voices and different points of view about a whole range of issues. Yet, a convergence can be found in keeping in mind those principles whose goal you have as legislators in a spirit of service to your country: to promote the common good and to respect the nature and dignity of the human person.

Address of Apostolic Nuncio His Excellency Archbishop Faustino Sainz Muñoz to the Scottish Parliament

That is how to do it. Always praise politicians for being public servants, talk up this vocation and thank them for taking on such an onerous responsibility.

Civitas - The Institute for the Study of Civil Society is doing a valuable public service. It produces fact-sheets for teachers

Do Fathers matter?
Does Marriage matter?

Yes, it has come to this. More urgently than teachers, it is politicians who need those fact sheets. And we need to familiarise ourselves with some of these linked organisations