Three years before René Girard published La violence et le sacré, a Jesuit doctoral candidate at the University of Fribourg began a short essay entitled “Unterwegs zu einer toleranten Kirche” in April 1969 with this claim: “Hexenjadgen gab es auf die eine oder andere Weise zu allen Zeiten”. After having asserted that it is a universal feature of human existence to elevate customs, laws, thought patterns, and other interests to absolute norms, he argued, “Im Namen dieser Normen stießen sie dann (...) einzelne oder Minderheiten aus ihrer Gemeinschaft aus und trieben sie in die Vereinsamung und oft sogar in den physischen Tod” (In... (shrink)

In a recent article ‘The Problem of Natural Theology’, Professor N. H. G. Robinson has considered the requirements of a ‘genuinely empirical natural theology’. For the first section of it, a very clear sorting-out of recent debates on the ontological argument, I have nothing but admiration. It ends with the question: ‘Granted that if we think of God we must think of him as necessarily existing, why must we think of God at all?’, followed by the comment: ‘We seem thrown, (...) without any prospect of rest, between apriorism and [Barthian] empiricism’. Robinson is rightly dissatisfied with that situation, and in his second section he raises the question whether there cannot be an approach to God which the debates on the ontological arguments have overlooked and which may be properly called an ‘empirical’ one, free from Barthian presuppositions. He finds what seems to be such an approach in Professor E. L. Mascall's Existence and Analogy but concludes that it is in fact after all a form of ‘rationalism’. In the third section he criticises Professor T. F. Torrance's defence of Barth's position in a way which seems to me most satisfactory, and in the fourth he makes his own positive proposals. With these I am in substantial agreement. It is only his account of Mascall's position, in particular at the end of his second section, which seems to call for critical comment. (shrink)

Muitas expectativas povoam nosso coração de discípulos e missionários, às vésperas da Conferência de Aparecida. Uma delas diz respeito ao diálogo inter-confessional nas suas duas vertentes: ecumênica (com as Con) ssões cristãs) e inter-religiosa (com as demais religiões). Alguns, convictos do valor desta importante diretriz do Concílio Vaticano II, indagam se o diálogo estará devidamente presente nos debates da V Conferência.

The author claims to adopt a strictly empirical method, but he also claims that human experience is metaphysical. Christian thinkers, he holds, too often hesitate to admit that we have knowledge not just of God's effects, but of God himself in his effects. That God is indescribable is as it should be. There is too much talk about God -- whereas a knowledge of him can be assured only by bringing the mind to bear upon the transcendent elements in our (...) experience, the meeting place of God and man. From this point of view, the moral evidence for God (or rather of God) proves to be fundamental. This volume contains an outline of the traditional Christian metaphysics, overlaid by scholasticism and renewed for our time by (especially) Maurice Blondel, in which many theological emphases now current can be reconciled. What we need is not less metaphysics but more and better metaphysics. And the dividing line between metaphysics and mysticism, as Gabriel Marcel has said, is not easy to draw. Also this work contains detailed critiques of a good many recent writers. [Book jacket]. (shrink)