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)

This month as well readers may wish to be on the outlook for the fall 2010 edition of the Newman Studies Journal 7/2, which promises to contain an article by Adam Stewart, whom some of you will remember from his presentation to us in July on Pentecostalism and his comments on John L. Allen, The Future Church: How Ten Trends are Revolutionizing the Catholic Church (Doubleday, 2009). Adam’s article is entitled “John Henry Newman and Andrew Martin Fairbairn: Philosophical Scepticism and the Efficacy of Reason in The Contemporary Review Exchange.” This essay examines the contrasting conceptualizations of reason in the thought of John Henry Newman and the Congregationalist theologian, Andrew Martin Fairbairn in their articles published in The Contemporary Review in 1885. This piece articulates both Fairbairn’s charge of philosophical skepticism against Newman as well as Newman’s defense of his position, and concomitantly details Fairbairn’s and Newman’s competing notions of the efficacy of reason to provide reliable knowledge of God. The positions developed by Fairbairn and Newman remain two of the most important perspectives on the role that reason plays in the acquisition of knowledge about God in nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first century Christian theology.
Peter Erb

I suppose that the English Dominican, Timothy Radcliffe, Master of the Order of Preachers 1992-2001, is a “liberal.” After all, as someone once pointed out to me, intending the remark to be negative: “Radcliffe’s most recent Why go to Church? The Drama of the Eucharist (Continuum, 2008) was designated by the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury’s as the 2009 Lenten reading book.” But open his What is the Point of Being a Christian? (Continuum, 2005) and the significance of labelling someone as liberal or conservative, if such labelling has any significance at all, quickly disappears. A highly readable volume, the book is accessible to senior high and university students as well as the reading public at large. It is packed with anecdotes and concrete examples for support, its eleven chapters treat such topics of the good news of the faith: hope, freedom, spontaneity, courage, the body, community and truth. In his chapter on “Root Shock” he outlines the so-called division among Catholics between the Concilium and the Communio groups, (his terms “Kingdom” and “Communio” Christians).
A useful comparison and contrast on this “divide” is that of Tracey Rowland, Dean of the John Paul II Institute in Melbourne Australia, in her Ratzinger’s Faith: The theology of Pope Benedict XVI (Oxford, 2008), chapter 1, a book that is must reading for anyone seeking a clear outline of Benedict’s central concerns, unmuddied by infomercialised news bites or the “stories” of self-proclaimed “unbiased” investigative reporters. Following her treatment of contemporary theological circles (“circles” for her, not “divisions”), Rowland continues with a treatment of Gaudium et spes – usually most closely linked with Radcliffe’s “Kingdom,” not Ratzinger’s “Communio” group which is usually characterized as seeing Lumen gentium as the central Vatican II text. . As in her stimulating Culture and the Thomist Tradition: After Vatican II (Routledge, 2003), Rowland focuses on the christological centre of Gaudium et spes, continuing her reflections with chapters on “Revelation, Scripture, and Tradition,” “Beyond Moralism: God is Love,” “The Structure of the Communion,” “Modernity and the Politics of the West,” and “Liturgy since Vatican II.”
Peter Erb

At the beginning of the “new school year” Paul Griffiths, Intellectual Appetite: A theological Grammar (Catholic University of America Press, 2009) will well repay even a quick review. As with his earlier work, it is crisply written and accessible to all. There are no footnotes, but a thoughtful reader will immediately grasp the wealth of learning that stands behind the piece. In the first chapter, Griffiths explains his intentions, and university students in particular will find his reflections on the traditional distinction between studiousness and curiosity well worth consideration as they face the forced-deeding frenzy that will mark most of courses they are required to “take.” Christian students struggling with the complex issues relating faith and reason will have even more to consider with this volume and may well wish to turn also to an earlier much shorter book by Griffiths on The Vice of Curiosity: An Essay on Intellectual Appetite (Winnipeg: Canadian Mennonite University, 2006).
Griffiths’ book and the beginning of the academic year necessitates serious students to consider once again the question posed by the great Dominican scholar, Antonin Gilbert Sertillanges, “Do you want to do intellectual work?” in his classic The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods, first published in 1920, revised in 1934, and still, thankfully, in print. Sertillanges’ question, although not always consciously asked, often lurks ominously in the back of many students’ minds. For those who allow it to come\to the fore, his volume offers a good many defensive practices to face the digital realities and mass of information delivery systems many of us need to face. And if the Sertilanges’ question proves stimulating, a number of equally important questions on the topic can be found in The Passionate Intellect: Incarnational Humanism and the Future of University Education (Baker Academic, 2006), co-authored by Norman Klassen (an active member of our Communio Circle and Chair of the English Department at St. Jerome’s University, Waterloo, ON) and Jens Zimmermann. These questions are available at http://www.marshillaudio.org/catalog/Study_Booklet.pdf and will make useful conversation points for university chaplaincies.
Peter Erb