I want to discuss in this essay the possible interrelations between socialism, Christianity and community.

For one strange moment in the summer of 1994, it seemed as if the people of this country had become a community, united, like so many communities, perhaps all communities, around a death. The death of a Scottish Christian socialist, John Smith. But they became a community it seemed, perhaps again like every community, around a mourning for lost community, lost solidarity, lost hope of a religiously-tinged socialist ideal (which many more sympathise with than believe in).

And we are still just about within the echo of this moment, which determines that the new public visibility of Christian Socialism, concentrated around the Elisha figure of Tony Blair, has an elegiac, melancholy feel to it. There is nothing here for anyone to triumph in; least of all Christian Socialists. For if a surprising number of still remaining socialists are Christians, or indeed Jews, Muslims or Buddhists, then this may be precisely because socialism, like religion, now assumes a merely spectral reality in the modern secularised world. It has ceased to appear either plausible or rational, and has instead been consigned to the realm of faith. Yet, as with Christianity in the west, we remain haunted by its excellence, because nothing has emerged to replace it; we sense that just as the story of a compassionate God who became man was the ‘final religion’, so also, the hope of a universal fraternity based on sharing was ‘the final politics’. With its demise, we are delivered over to something somehow more secular than politics—to a future of infinite utilitarian calculation by individuals, states and transnational companies, of the possible gains and losses, the greater and the lesser risks.

How ought evil to be dealt with in Christian theology? In what follows I will approach this question by reflecting on what is arguably a different intellectual tradition—the production of theodicies—and on the relationship between theology and this other tradition. What I shall try to show is that Christian theology ought neither to construct theodicies, nor ignore the kinds of problem theodicies try to address. It ought instead to acknowledge itself to be faced with questions it cannot answer, and to be committed to affirming things it cannot make sense of.

Thomas’s trinitarian theology has a rather bad name in modern literature. He is associated with an artificial separation between the discussion of the one God and the exploration of trinitarian revelation. This, it is said, privileges the most abstract level of talk about God, and inevitably suggests that what reason can know of God as one is prior to what revelation shows us of God’s threefold life and action. And indeed, when we turn to the details of the discussion, abstraction is what seems to dominate. A brief visit to the relevant sections of the Prima Pars will leave a migrainous blur of processions, relations, notions, essential names, appropriations and much more; a certain impatience with the whole register in which he considers the question sets in well before any of the detail is examined.

What I want to do in this lecture is not to provide a full exposition of this daunting treatise, but to select certain aspects of them that have, I think, been misunderstood or neglected, so as to point tentatively towards a recovery of some of Thomas’s perceptions, both for anthropology and for trinitarian thought. And my fundamental concern is to challenge the accusation of abstractness levelled against him. The late Catherine Mowry LaCugna, in her intriguing and influential essay, God for Us.

The initial reaction of nearly all theologians and religious people to the very idea that it is possible to talk about ‘the theological dimensions’ of the existence of robots would—today—be dismissive, and, more often than not, scornful. ‘It makes no sense,’ most theologians would say. Before beginning to argue that one day, on the contrary, it will make a lot of sense, something much more general must be said about robots, or, more specifically, about Artificial Intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence, or AI as it is usually abbreviated, is the study of computer models of intelligent behaviour. Some scientists are interested in using AI to understand human behaviour, others in designing intelligent mechanisms. As a discipline in its own right, it has existed since about 1950, with the pioneering work of John McArthy. It has two separate strands in its historical origin. Psychologists after the dark ages of behaviourism, which banished all talk of mental models as unscientific, started to study cognition (commonly called thought), which formed the subject of cognitive psychology. In devising models of mental processes they naturally turned to computers for an appropriate language of description; thus were born information processing models of human cognition. In order to formulate precise and testable theories of mental processes computer models were found to be indispensible. Models have been developed for memory, understanding natural language, vision, learning and, more recently, emotion.

Computer science has probably had a longer historical interest in AI, although one could argue that cogwheel and pneumatic models were an early attempt by psychologists to understand the mechanics of the mind.

The Church today is engaged in a great crisis of self-examination. It is looking at its claims, its traditional role, its theology. It is revising its rituals. This reforming effort is intended to bring Christian worship fully into the twentieth century. But, alas, the zeal for coming up to date proceeds without recourse to one of the most relevant critical techniques which this century has produced, I mean sociological comparison. Hence some naivété in the religious reformer about his own role. He seems not to suspect how much his views are the product of his secular environment. Nor does he consider whether the faithful are free to follow his proposals, though they also must be constrained by their own social environment. More important, he does not seem to foresee any difficulty in abolishing some forms of worship and retaining others. Whereas, if the sociological dimension has as much power as I think it has, King Canute had more chance of saying which pebbles should remain dry.

Christian hope of resurrection requires that the one raised be the same person who died. Philosophers and theologians alike seek to understand the coherence of bodily resurrection and what accounts for numerical identity between the earthly and risen person. I address this question from the perspective of disability. Is a person with a disability raised in the age to come with that disability? Many theologians argue that disability is essential to one's identity such that it could not be eliminated in the resurrection. What anthropology undergirds these claims is not often explicated. I argue that Thomistic hylemorphic anthropology provides the best context to understand the human person such that disability is not essential to identity. In the resurrection, we shall become truly ourselves. The marks of disability may remain, but Thomistic anthropology expresses the coherence of bodily resurrection in which one may hope for healing which eliminates the disability but not numerical identity.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of charity in the moral life by focusing on the nature of charity and its requirements. What does it mean to say that someone has charity? Through an examination of the virtue of charity: subject, object and order, I will establish the necessary way in which charity functions as love of neighbor, including the love of God through love of neighbor. Focusing then on love of neighbor, I will examine what, for Aquinas, is constitutive of living charity through mercy, beneficence and almsgiving. Throughout, I will argue that one cannot have charity without living charity through love of neighbor.

He who claims to have read all the works of Augustine, says Isidore of Seville, is a liar. Yet of all the works of the Augustinian corpus, few have received as much attention as the Confessions. One is tempted, thus, to paraphrase Isidore and say, He who claims to say something new about the Confessions is a liar. I have no desire to be called a liar, I have not read all the works of Augustine, nor do I claim to have absolutely new insights into Augustine’s great work. I do, however, wish to offer some provisional thoughts on a topic little discussed: Memory and Imagination in Augustine’s Confessions.

Augustine’s theoretical treatment of memory, which has of course received extended treatment, occurs in book X of the Confessions. We cannot engage the vexing debate regarding the relationship between the first nine and final four books of the Confessions here. Suffice it to say that in writing the 13 books of the Confessions Augustine saw them as an integrated whole. It is not surprising, then, that after nine books of confessional remembrance of his life’s events and their meanings Augustine should turn to reflect on the faculty of memory itself.

When one takes account of the scale and range of Aquinas’s achievements it becomes clear why he deserves to be described as the greatest of the mediaeval philosopher-theologians, for he was the first thinker of the high mediaeval period to work out in detail the new synthesis between Catholicism and philosophy. It is sometimes supposed that this just meant ‘Christianizing’ Aristotle. Even were that the limit of his achievement it would have been considerable, but in fact he went further. For while he opposed unquestioning appeals to authority, he believed in the idea of cumulative philosophical and religious wisdom and sought to integrate Neoplatonist, Augustinian and Anselmian ideas, as well as Aristotelian ones, with scripture, patristic teaching and evolving Catholic doctrine.

The variety of ways of construing how humanity is in the image of God suggests a profound interrelation of tradition and context in theological reflection on the imago dei. For example, Colin Gunton has recently argued that the dominant ways of interpreting the imago dei at the present time are stewardship and the duality of male and female. It is not hard to see how contemporary discussions on the relations between humanity and non-human nature, and between men and women, inform such a selection. The recent work of Peter Hodgson furnishes us with a second example: being in the image of God, he argues, comprises three spheres: self-relatedness, other or world-relatedness and wholeness. Again, it is not hard to discern how such a construal is informed by the identification of three dilemmas which are, Hodgson considers, constitutive of our contemporary (Western) context: liberation from unjust social relationships; relations between Christianity and other religions; relations between humanity and non-human nature. In the presentation of the imago dei, we may safely say, tradition and context are deeply interrelated.

In what follows, I shall develop one aspect of recent Christian tradition—that sociality is the mark of the imago dei—in order to explore how humanity might be in the image of God in a technological society. Thus in the last two sections of this paper, I ‘expand’ Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s reading of humanity as social by including the themes of spatiality and temporality. It is as social, spatial and temporal, I shall argue, that humanity is to be understood as imaging God.

This article aims to demonstrate that Thomas Aquinas's metaphysics of being, in which evil is considered a privation or lack of perfection introduced only by the creature against God's intention, is a remarkable starting point for solving the main problems involved in the modern and contemporary debate on the problem of evil. It also seeks to prove that Aquinas's position is neither reducible to an ‘optimistic theodicy’ –such as Leibniz's theodicy– nor to a ‘free will defence’.

St. Thomas Aquinas argues that all of the passions, including hatred, anger, sorrow and despair, are morally neutral. That is, Thomas Aquinas argues that the manner in which a person responds to a particular passion determines the morality of the passion, and not the passion itself. Hatred, for example, can lead one to a good end, as when one comes to hate his sin. Likewise, Aquinas notes that even the passion of despair is not necessarily evil, since when felt rightly it can move one to some good end. Aquinas, however, fails to recognize that according to his own account despair so stupefies the soul that it cannot lead to any good end. Unlike hope or love, or any of the other passions, despair paralyzes the soul and thus must always be avoided.

While the First Vatican Council (1869–70) decreed that for Catholics it is a dogma of faith that we can have certain knowledge of God by the natural light of reason it was only in the Anti-Modernist Oath (1910) that this knowledge was defined as rationally demonstrable by cosmological arguments.

The subject matter of Social Anthropology, human societies, with special reference to primitive societies, has been a field of philosophic speculation from the earliest times. It has only very recently become a field of scientific inquiry; so recently that Sir Edward Tylor is sometimes spoken of as ‘the father of anthropology’. Tylor defined the scope of his inquiry in his classical work, Primitive Culture (1871) as culture or civilization taken in its widest ethnographic sense, a definition which excludes what the rest of Europe calls anthropology and what in England is sometimes called physical anthropology: the study of racial characteristics, genetics, and so forth. But it covers what is generally called today in England social anthropology, or the sociology of primitive peoples. Tylor was himself the first occupant of a university post in the subject, from 1883 at Oxford.

Social anthropology is therefore still a very young discipline, hardly yet accepted as one of themselves by the august natural sciences. It has, however, taken the first step towards qualifying as a science by becoming inductive. The earlier social anthropologists were what are sometimes called ‘arm-chair’ anthropologists. When they wrote about primitive peoples they relied for the material from which they constructed their theories not on their own observations but on the reports of missionaries, administrative officers, and travellers. Sir James Frazer’s monumental The Golden Bough is one of the best examples of this kind of work—polished, erudite, comprehensive, and occasionally profound. Such writings suffered, in the eyes of men of science, from a serious defect.

Hazlitt has had a fair amount of modern critical attention, but not enough of it has been concerned with rescuing him from the drab category of ‘minor Regency prose’ and establishing him where he belongs, as one of the most extraordinarily intelligent writers of his period. Perhaps the difficulty has been in part one of genre. One dominant definition of the English essay form, as a belletristic set- piece concerned to charm, composed of the casual meanderings of a liberal, off-beat, impressionist mind, fits a little of Hazlitt’s work accurately enough; but there seem good reasons why critics who feel comfortably at home with Lamb, Stevenson and Belloc might feel less at ease with Hazlitt’s writings as a whole. His liberalism is allied with a trenchancy which has been attacked as intemperate and bellicose; and this is perhaps one reason why a book like Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays, to my mind an inferior product containing hardly a single disturbing judgment, has assumed predominance over works with a sharper edge—Political Essays, Table Talk, The Plain Speaker.

Hazlitt’s trenchancy springs from his radicalism; and it is worth calling the abrasive force of that radicalism to mind, with its controlled combination of moral indictment and caustic irony. There are his comments on the Quarterly Review, for instance: