Communio Circle of the Diocese of Hamilton

At a meeting of the International Summer School in Venice, held this September Cardinal Angelo Scola, Patriarch of Venice and well-known to Communio readers, addressed the meeting on the topic “The “New Rights” in the European and American Public Space: Rethinking Rights in a Plural Society,” a topic of particular interest to Canadians, immersed as we are in a rhetoric of multi-cultural concerns.
The Summer School at the Studium Generale Marcianum Venezia is a project of ASSET – Alta Scuola Società Economia Teologia, described by the Cardinal as planned to “foster contemporary interpretative frameworks for the study of today’s socio-cultural reality, viewed in terms of the rise of the `plural society’ ”:… Economic globalisation, the civilisation of the internet, migration on an epochal scale, the spread of an education and schooling that are international in character.”
“Theology,” Cardinal Scola continues, “too is of course not exempt from this commitment. The new cultural and social phenomena challenge it to the core; and it has the choice either of interacting with the other disciplines, or submitting to the consequences of too much self-referentiality. Theological pratice is called on for help in the guidance of study and formation by reflecting on the experience of the faith of the Christian community, the place out of which authentic and critical encounter with cultures is born.”
Cardinal Scola then treats the new importance of legal studies and offers brief and stimulating analyses of the resulting implications – the new rights and the conception of man, the sustainability of rights, the challenge of legal modernity: in particular the case of Islam – and challenging his readers in conclusion to face the present “paradox: a hitherto unprecedented circulation and expansion of rights in tandem with a degree of vagueness about their content.” “Here is the point of entry,” he concludes “for the contribution” of all those considering the matter “– the specific role of the theological dimension and of the social doctrine of the Church. The point at issue is not about putting “new wine into other wineskins”, but about making clearer the true face of these rights. This operation brings into question the whole horizon of the human and theological sciences. Looked at from one side, any catalogue of rights has formidable economic and social implications, but in truth it is itself the product of a certain view of man which is always I-in-relation. To recover the true face of rights it is indispensable to engage with their anthropological and social dimensions: an objective on which the various sciences and disciplines converge, each with its own specificity but in a perspective which increasingly requires a transdisciplinary dimension.”
Readers wishing to study the full document can find it here, and with it several other of his September address of like interest: “Protecting nature or saving creation? Ecological conflicts and religious passions” (with striking cues from Mahler and Dostoevsky), a series of his irenic pieces on Christian-Muslim relations in Europe, and for those who prefer orality to text a long YouTube (!) video of his August presentation  “Desiring God. Church and postmodernity.”
PCE

Beauty for Truth’s Sake: On the Re-enchantment of Education, Stratford Caldecott, Brazos Press, 2009.
As a Secondary Religious Education and Philosophy teacher I have given some thought and study to the question of Catholic Education. Sometimes in my more leisurely moments, I think of writing a short book in the Catholic Philosophy of Education. So imagine my delight when I took up and read Stratford Caldecott’s recent book, Beauty for Truth’s Sake. I discovered that someone had already, at least in part, written the little book that I had in mind.
Caldecott has written a much needed introduction to a Catholic approach to the philosophy of education. This gem of a book is a creative retrieval of the traditional Liberal Arts approach to the cultivation of the human person. This is accomplished by interweaving attention to the Transcendentals of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful into the educational enterprise. In particular, Caldecott maps out the centrality and importance of the neglected transcendental of Beauty for any re-enchantment of education in our times.
Ever aware of the contemporary divide between the sciences and mathematics, on the one hand, and the arts, on the other, Caldecott spends the last half of the book attempting a qualitative rather than a quantitative reading of the teaching of mathematics and science. This emphasis, he thinks, will go a long way to counter the instrumental, post-Cartesian, reduction of the wide-ranging educational project in the modern world.
Finally, the whole of Liberal Arts teaching, the transcendentals, and the qualitative retrieval of mathematics and science is all bent towards the liturgical completion of education. The person and community to be formed and educated, and education itself, turn out to be forms of participation in the vast intelligibility of the Letting-Be of creation that emerges freely from the interior life of the Trinity.
Caldecott’s Beauty for Truth’s Sake is an extraordinary achievement that will both delight the hungry reader, and because of its brevity (a short 144 pages), may actually be read by a few other people in the educational community.
Blaine Barclay

For those of you caught up by our Newman Day seminar on September 18 and/or the beatification ceremonies of September 19 and  asking what Newman introductions and biographies are available, here are some rambling notes;
The best books on Newman come for the most part in two forms – very large or very short.
If you are drawn to “short” books you’ll certainly want to check the various sections in The Cambridge Companion to John Henry Newman, Edited by Ian Ker and Terrence Merrigan (Cambridge,2009), but even before you do so, I would suggest initially turning to two earlier studies, many still easily available.  The first is by the Anglican historian Owen Chadwick and is simply entitled Newman (Oxford, 1983 – a mere 75 pages) and the second by C. S. Dessain, Dessains book goes under several titles, Newman’s Spiritual Themes, as well as The Spirituality of John Henry Newman and was first published in 1977.  It is a succinct well-written piece of ony 146 pages, a very short work when one considers that Dessain’s major accomplishment was to begin and see through the  larger part of Newman’s Letters and Diaries, now complete in 31 volumes – London, 1961-2008. Then too there is the remarkable brief pamphlet John Henry Newman (London, 1963; only 36 pp. if you are really pressed for time) by the British-Canadian “man of letters,” J. M. Cameron, and if Cameron’s style attracts, you might want to go on to read his article, “The liberal Newman” in his collection Nuclear Catholics (Grand Rapids, 1989) and what may be the best reflection on the modern university inspired by Newman, simply titled On the Idea of a University (Toronto, 1978 – but 88pp in length)
If you are interested in a medium-length book, perhaps the best recommendation is Louis Bouyer’s Newman’s Vision of Faith: A Theology for Times of general Apostasy (San Francisco, 1986) Rushed readers (an oxymoron?) will wish to know that Bouyer’s work fills 210 pages and if they find that too large, they will certainly wish to flee the 500-page Newman and his Age in the immaculate prose of Sheridan Gilley (London, 1990) and the 800 pages of John Henry Newman: A Biography by the modern dean of Newman studies. Ian T. Ker (Oxford, 1988).
PCE

Please excuse the pathetic pun in my subject heading. I simply want to bring your attention to a booklet I am presently reading about this upcoming beatus. This tract on Newman is a pamphlet put out by the U.K. Catholic Truth Society (CTS), London. CTS is the heir to the Oxford Movement’s Tracts as it prints and publishes Catholic literature in a succinct and affordable format. If you are looking for a source that will provide a thoroughly complete backgrounder to this marvelous man then this is the book to read. In this edition of its miniature eighty-page Biographies series John Henry Newman: Apostle to the Doubtful by Meriol Trevor and Léonie Caldecott CTS presents, by far, a most accurate compact backgrounder to his life and thinking. This little booklet will be a gem for those too busy to read ‘everything’ in preparation for the SJU seminar on September 18.
Seán O’Seasnáin SDL (Stray Dog of the Lord)