Joseph S. O'Leary homepage

Bibliography with Links

NEW BOOK:

 

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09KDYM542

Ellen Carol Jones: 'Joysis Crisis compellingly documents how Joyce’s revolution of the word—the “impossible philosophy” of a creativity that is negative and yet also “porous to transcendence”—“wrestles with reality itself,” resulting in truth-telling about the divine and the human. In judicious, enlightening readings spanning Dubliners to Finnegans Wake, Joseph S. O’Leary argues that Joyce’s texts stage a crisis that is both binding and freeing: “an event in writing and language, but also a religious event, a sexual event, and a collective crisis of his city and nation, or of European civilization.” Joyce seeks through his art to grasp the ungraspable world, “a micro and a macrocosm ineluctably constructed upon the incertitude of the void,” to reveal the real, even if that real is “unmasterable by historical vision or philosophical reason, or even language itself.” His art is a labor of transformation and a labor of redemption, sounding the depths of existence, revealing the spectrum of suffering humanity, transmuting that suffering through agonistic yet redemptive writing, and translating historical material into something rich and strange: a visionary aesthetic labor that is “a parable of the eschatological transformation that religions yearn for.”'

 

BOOKS
1. Questioning Back: The Overcoming of Metaphysics in Christian Tradition. Minneapolis: Winston-Seabury. Repr. Wipf & Stock, 2016. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/04/questioning_bac_1.html https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/04/questioning_bac.html
Extract: ‘Overcoming the Nicene Creed.’ Cross Currents 34 (1984):405-13.

2. La Vérité chrétienne à l’âge du pluralisme religieux. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, ‘Cogitatio Fidei,’ 1994.

3. Religious Pluralism and Christian Truth. Edinburgh University Press, 1996. Repr. Wipf & Stock, 2016. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/06/religious_plura.html https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/02/4_derrida_on_tr.html https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/07/7-the-empty-chr.html

4. L’Art du jugement en théologie. Paris: Éditions du Cerf (‘Cogitatio Fidei’), 2011.

5. Christianisme et philosophie chez Origène. Paris: Éditions du Cerf (‘Philosophie & Théologie’), 2011. Reviews: https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2016/10/review-of-christianisme-et-philosophie-chez-orig%C3%A8ne-by-f-x-risch.html https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2016/09/bernard-pouderon-review-of-christianisme-et-philosophie-chez-orig%C3%A8ne.html

6. Philosophie occidentale et concepts bouddhistes. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France (‘Chaire Gilson’), 2011.

7. Conventional and Ultimate Truth: A Key for Fundamental Theology. University of Notre Dame Press, 2015. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2015/07/ian-leask-launch-of-conventional-and-ultimate-truth-at-mater-dei-institute-june-26-2015.html https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2019/12/reply-to-cyril-oregan.html

8. Buddhist Nonduality, Paschal Paradox: A Christian Commentary on the Teaching of Vimalakirti (Vimalakirti-nirdesa). Leuven: Peeters, 2018.

9. Reality Itself: Philosophical Challenges of Indian Mahayana. Brussels and Nagoya: Chisokudo, 2019. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/en/publications/cp/evi/reality-itself

EDITED BOOKS AND TRANSLATIONS
1. Heidegger et la question de Dieu. Paris: Éditions Bernard Grasset (‘Figures’), 1980. Ed. Richard Kearney and J. S. O’Leary. 2nd ed. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France (Quadrige Grands Textes), 2009.
2. Nishida Kitarō, Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness. Trans. Y. Takeuchi, V. H. Viglielmo, and J. S. O’Leary. State University of New York Press, 1987.
3. Heinrich Dumoulin, Zen Buddhism in the 20th Century. Translated and adapted by J. S. O’Leary. New York, Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1992.
4. Heinrich Dumoulin, Understanding Buddhism: Key Themes. Translated and adapred by J. S. O’Leary. New York, Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1994.
5. Buddhist Spirituality I (World Spirituality: An Encyclopedic History of the Religious Quest 8). Ed. Y. Takeuchi, J. Van Bragt, J. W. Heisig, J. S. O’Leary, and P. L. Swanson. New York: Crossroad, 1993 (London: SCM; New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass).
6. Buddhist Spirituality II (World Spirituality 9). Ed. Y. Takeuchi, J. W. Heisig, J. S. O’Leary, and P. L. Swanson. New York: Crossroad, 1999 (London: SCM).

CHAPTERS IN BOOKS
1. ‘The Irish and Jansenism in the Seventeenth Century.’ The Irish-French Connection 1577-1977, ed. Liam Swords. Paris: The Irish College, 1978, 21-43. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/07/the_irish_and_j.html
2. ‘Topologie de l’être et topographie de la révélation.’ Heidegger et la question de Dieu, 194-237.
3. ‘Limits to the Understanding of John in Christian Theology.’ Studia Biblica 1978, II: Studies in the Gospels, ed. Elizabeth A. Livingstone, Sheffield (JSNT suppl. 2), 227-241. 4. ‘En lisant le De utilitate credendi de saint Augustin.’ La Croyance, ed Jean Greisch. Paris: Beauchesne (‘Philosophie’), 1982, 29-49.
5. ‘Father Bovary.’ The Way Back: George Moore’s ‘The Untilled Field’ and ‘The Lake,’ ed. Robert Welch. Dublin: Wolfhound; Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 105-18. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/07/father_bovary.html
6. ‘Religion, Ireland: in Mutation.’ Across the Frontiers: Ireland in the 1990s, ed. Richard Kearney. Dublin: Wolfhound, 1988, 231-41. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/12/religion_irelan.html
7. ‘Exiles.’ Samayoeru hitotachi (Program note), Tokyo, 1989, i-iv. Trans. K. Kondo, 14-16, reprinted in his trans. of play (Tokyo: Sairyusha, 1991),’ 191-7. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/07/fragmented-sexuality-in-joyces-exiles-1989.html
8. ‘The Spiritual Upshot of Ulysses.’ An Introduction to Celtic Christianity, ed. James Mackey. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991. Second edition, 1995, 305-34. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/07/the-spiritual-upshot-of-ulysses-1989.html
9. ‘Impeded Witness: Newman Against Luther on Justification.’ John Henry Newman: Reason, Rhetoric and Romanticism, ed. David Nicholls and Fergus Kerr. Bristol Press; University of Southern Illinois Press, 1991, 153-93. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/07/impeded_witness.html
10. 'L’herméneutique théologique et ses effets philosophiques.’ Paul Ricoeur: Les métamorphoses de la raison herméneutique, ed. J. Greisch and R. Kearney. Paris: Cerf, 1992, 97-103.
11. ‘Towards the Post-Postmodern Retrieval of Irish Religious Tradition.’ Essays on Class and Culture in Ireland, ed. S. Mac Grianna and P.E.S. Ua Conchurhair. University of Ulster, 1992, 89-102. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/03/toward_the_post.html
12. ‘Theological Resonances of Der Satz vom Grund.’ Critical Assessments: Martin Heidegger, ed. Christopher Macann. New York: Routledge, 1992, I, 213-56. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/07/theological-res.html
13. ‘Origène face à l’altérité juive.’ Comprendre et interpréter: Le paradigme herméneutique, ed. J. Greisch. Paris: Beauchesne (‘Philosophie’), 1993, 51-82. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/07/origne_face_lal_1.html
14. ‘Plotinus in “Mont Blanc” and Adonais.’ Centre and Circumference, ed. K. Kamijima et al. Tokyo: Kirihara, 1993, 466-81.
15. ‘Origen’s Metaphysical Interpretation of the Johannine Logos.’ The Philosophy of Logos, ed. K. Boudouris. Athens: International Society for Greek Philosophy and Culture, 1993, II, 140-55. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/01/origens_metaphy.html
16 ‘Heidegger and Indian Philosophy.’ Beyond Orientalism: The Work of Wilhelm Halbfass and its Impact on Indian and Cross-Cultural Studies, ed. Eli Franco and Karin Preisendanz. Amsterdam and Atlanta GA: Rodopi (Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 59), 1997, 171-203. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/10/heidegger_and_i.html
17 ‘Religions as Conventions.’ The Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology, ed. Graham Ward. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001, 413-24. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/03/religions_as_co.html
18. ‘Toward a Buddhist Interpretation of Christian Truth.’ Many Mansions? Multiple Religious Belonging and Christian Identity, ed. Catherine Cornille. Maryknoll: Orbis, 2002, 29-43. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/10/towards_a_buddh.html
19. ‘Atonement.’ ‘Grace.’ ‘Judaism.’ ‘Logos.’ The Westminster Handbook to Origen, ed. John McGuckin. Louisville, London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003, 66-8, 113-17, 135-8, 142-5. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/12/origen_on_grace.html  https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/02/origen_on_judai.html  https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/12/origen_on_logos.html
20. ‘Ultimacy and Conventionality in Religious Experience.’ Religious Experience and the End of Metaphysics, ed. Jeffrey Bloechl. Indiana University Press, 2003, 174-99. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/09/ultimacy_and_co.html
21. ‘La Mutation des croyances.’ Le souci du passage: Mélanges offerts à Jean Greisch, ed. Philippe Capelle, et al. Paris: Cerf, 2004, 170-9.
22. ‘Time and Emptiness.’ Zeit: Anfang und Ende; Time: Beginning and End, ed. Walter Schweidler. Sankt Augustin: Academia, 2004, 217-35. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/04/time-and-emptiness.html
23. ‘La percée mystique en philosophie: Plotin, Augustin.’ Expérience philosophique et expérience mystique, ed. P. Capelle. Paris: Cerf, 2005, 133-45.  https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/03/les-extases-plotiniennes-de-saint-augustin.html
24. ‘The Gift: A Trojan Horse in the Citadel of Phenomenology?’ Givenness and God: Questions of Jean-Luc Marion, ed. Ian Leask and Eoin Cassidy. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005, 135-66. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/10/the_gift_a_troj.html
25. ‘God in the Dark.’ In: Ei, doitsu, furansu, kokubungaku ni okeru shinwa, seisho no juyo to henka (Reception and Transformation of Myth and Bible in English, German, French and Japanese Literature). Faculty of Letters, Sophia University, 2005, 1-12. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/08/god_in_the_dark_1.html
26. ‘Questions to and from a Tradition in Disarray.’ After God:Richard Kearney and the Religious Turn in Continental Philosophy, ed. John Manoussakis. New York: Fordham UP, 2006, 185-207.
27. ‘Moral Qualms and Mystic Claims.’ Song Divine: Christian Commentaries on the Bhagavad Gita, ed. Catherine Cornille. Leuven University Press, 2006, 49-67.
28. ‘Augustinienne (Doctrine).’ Notionnaires 2: Idées. Paris: Encyclopaedia Universalis, 2006, 80-1. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/12/doctrine_august.html
29. ‘From Impermanence to Emptiness: Madhyamaka and Momentariness.’ Expanding and Merging Horizons: Contributions to South Asian and Cross-Cultural Studies in Commemoration of Wilhelm Halbfass, ed. Karin Preisendanz. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2007, 525-49. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/04/from-impermanence-to-emptiness.html
30. ‘Divine Simplicity and the Plurality of Attributes (CE II 359-386; 445-560).’ Gregory of Nyssa: Contra Eunomium II: An English Version with Supporting Studies, ed. Lenka Karfíková et al. Leiden: Brill, 2007, 307-37.
31. ‘Forgiveness.’ Ecumenics from the Rim: Explorations in Honour of John D’Arcy May, ed. John O’Grady and Peter Scherle. Berlin: LIT, 2007, 119-25.
32. ‘The Theological Status of Philosophy in Origen.’ Philosophie et théologie: Festschrift Emilio Brito, ed. Éric Gaziaux.Leuven UP, 2007, 3-18.
33. ‘Paste.’ The Literary Encyclopedia. 9 June 2008.
34. Respect for Life and the Problem of Scriptural Violence.’ Beauty, Truth & Love: Essays in Honour of Enda McDonagh, ed. Eugene Duffy and Patrick Hannon. Dublin: Columba, 2009, 93-120. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/01/3_respect_for_l.html
35, ‘Merleau-Ponty and Modernist Sacrificial Poetics: A Response to Richard Kearney.’ Merleau-Ponty at the Limits of Art, Religion, and Perception, ed. Kascha Semonovich and Neal DeRoo. New York: Continuum, 2010, 167-84.
36. ‘Skillful Means as a Hermeneutic Concept.’ Interreligious Hermeneutics, ed. Catherine Cornille and Christopher Conway. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2010, 163-83.
37. ‘Rahner and Metaphysics.’ Karl Rahner: Theologian for the Twenty-first Century, ed. Padraic Conway and Fainche Ryan. Bern: Peter Lang, 2010, 23-38.
38. ‘Knowing the Heart Sutra by Heart.’ Traversing the Heart, ed. Richard Kearney and Eileen Rizo-Patron. Leiden: Brill, 2010), 367-80.
39. ‘Gregory’s Metaphysical Investments.’ Gregory of Nyssa: The Minor Treatises on Trinitarian Theology and Apollinarism, ed. Völker Henning Drecoll and Margitta Berghaus. Leiden: Brill, 2011, 351-67.
40. ‘Western Hospitality to Eastern Thought.’ Hosting the Stranger: Between Religions, ed. Richard Kearney and James Taylor. New York: Continuum, 2011, 23-33.
41. ‘Aspiring Minds: Renaissance Humanism in Marlowe, Milton and Goethe.’ In: Y. Nagamachi et al, ed. Ningen no sonkei wo toinaosu.(Re-examining Respect for Humanity).Tokyo: Sophia University Press, 2011, 1-19.
42. ‘The Simplicity of the Ultimate, East and West.’ Aquinas, Education and the East, ed. Thomas Brian Mooney and Mark Nowacki. Dordrecht: Springer, 2013. 133-45.
43. ‘Incarnational Ontology and Paschal Transsformation: Acts 2,36 in Contra Eunomium III.’ Gregory of Nyssa Contra Eunomum III: An English Version with Commentary and Supporting Studies, ed., Johan Leemans and Matthieu Cassin. Leiden: Brill, 2014, 613-24.
44. ‘Bedingungen der Möglichkeit einer Begegnung zwischen abendländischer und buddhistischer Philosophie.’ Christentum und Philosophie: Einheit im Übergang, ed. Jean-Luc Marion and Walter Schweidler. Munich: Alber, 2014, 454-68.
45. ’Se libérer des vues en bouddhisme.’ Religion et liberté, ed. Philippe Capelle-Dumont and Yannick Courtel. Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 2014, 59-70.
46. ‘The Future of Collegiality.’ Vatican II in Ireland, Fifty Years On: Essays in Honour of Padraic Conway, ed. Dermot A. Lane. Oxford, Bern: Peter Lang, 2015, 305-27.
47. ‘Stanislas Breton, lecteur de Nagarjuna.’ Philosophie et mystique chez Stanilas Breton, ed. Jean Greisch, Jérôme de Gramont, and Marie-Odile Métral. Paris: Cerf, 2015, 145-57.
48. ‘Nicht-Dualität im Vimalakīrtinirdeśa.’ Buddhismus und Komparative Theologie, ed. Klaus von Stosch, Hermann- Josef Röllicke, and Daniel Rumel. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2015, 105-34.
49. ‘Truth and Violence.’ In: Walter Schweidler, ed. Transcending Boundaries: Practical Philosophy from Intercultural Perspectives. Sankt Augustin: Academia, 2016, 237-49.
50. ‘Les incidences radicales du tournant herméneutique sur la théologie,’ Jean Greisch: Les trois âges de la raison, ed. Stefano Bancalari, Jérôme de Gramont, and Jean Leclercq. Paris: Hermann, 2016, 301-17.
51. ‘The Self and the One in Plotinus.’ Self or No-Self?, ed. Ingolf U. Dalferth. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017, 9-36.
52. ‘Buddhist Anatheism.’ Richard Kearney’s Anatheistic Wager: Philosophy, Theology, Poetics, ed. Chris Doude van Troostwijk and Matthew Clemente. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 168-77.
53. ‘Pioneers of Buddhist-Christian Dialogue Before Vatican II.’ Building a Culture of Compassion: Essays Celebrating 25 years of the Vesakh Message to Buddhists, ed. Indunil J. Kodithuwakku. Vatican: Urbaniana University Press, 2020, 27-41.
54. ‘Socrates and Plato in the fathers.’ The Routledge Handbook of Early Christian Philosophy, ed. Mark Edwards. Abington and New York: Routledge, 2021, 191-205.
55. ‘The Church and Hunger Strikes: For Critical Commemoration of a Dangerous Past.’ In: Dermot Keogh, ed. forthcoming. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2021/02/the-church-and-hunger-strikes-for-critical-commemoration-of-a-dangerous-past.html

JOURNAL ARTICLES

RECHERCHES DE SCIENCE RELIGIEUSE
‘Dieu-Esprit et Dieu-Substance chez saint Augustin.’ 69 (1981):357-90.
‘Le destin du Logos johannique dans la pensée d’Origène.’ 83 (1995):283-92.

IRISH THEOLOGICAL QUARTERLY
‘The Hermeneutics of Dogmatism.’ Review article on Lonergan, The Way to Nicea. 47 (1980):98-118.
‘Has the Nicene Creed Become Inaccessible?’ 48 (1981):240-55.
Reviews: I. Trethowen, The Absolute and the Atonement. 39 (1972):205-6; N. Lash, Theology on Dover Beach. 47 (1980):155-7; A. Stuttgen, Ende des Humanismus, Anfang der Religion? 47:244; E. Brito, Hegel et la tâche actuelle de la Christologie. 48 (1981):144-6; A.T. and R.P.C. Hanson, Reasonable Belief. 48:280-2; V. Twomey, Apostolikos Thronos. 51 (1985):245-6; J. Mackey, The Christian Experience of God as Trinity. 51:321-2; F. Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstein. 53 (1987):241; J. Segundo, The Humanist Christology of Paul. 53:242.

ORIGENIANA
1. ‘How to Read Origen.’ 4 (1987):358-60. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/02/how_to_read_ori.html
2. ‘The Recuperation of Judaism.’ 6 (1995):373-9. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/02/the_recuperatio.html
3. ‘The Invisible Mission of the Son in Origen and Augustine.’ 7 (1999):605-22. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/02/the_invisible_m.html https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/02/the_invisible_m_1.html
4. ‘Logos and Koinonia in Philo's De Confusione Linguarum.’ 8 (2003): 245-73. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/02/logos_and_koinn.html
5. ‘Knowledge of God: How Prayer Overcomes Platonism (Contra Celsum VI-VII).’ 9 (2009):447-68.
6. ‘Biblical and Metaphysical in the Texture of Origen’s Writing (CIo II.175-192).’ 10 (2011):671-86.

STUDIA PATRISTICA
‘Insights and Oversights in Origen’s Reading of Romans 4:1-8.’ 41 (2006):225-9.
‘Platonic Dissolution of History in Origen’s Commentary on John X 5-34.’ 46 (2010):241-6.

THE AUSTRALIAN EJOURNAL OF THEOLOGY.
1. ‘Dogma and Religious Pluralism.’ 4 (February 2005).
2. ‘Language in Luther’s Reformation Breakthrough 8 (October 2006). Also in K. Riesenhuber, ed. The Understanding of Language from the Later Middle Ages to the Renaissance, Sophia University research bulletin, 2005, 117-50. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/06/language_in_lut.html
3. ‘Paul, Origen and Melanchthon on Justification.’ 11 (July 2008). Expanded from: ‘Melanchthon’s Critique of Origen.’ Reception of the Fathers 1350-1550), ed. M. Kobayashi, 82-107. Sophia University, research bulletin, 2003. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/07/melanchthon-aga.html

SCRIPTURE IN CHURCH
‘Luke’s Selfish Soliloquists.’ 47 (2017):110-21.
'Reading 1 John Contemplatively.' 51 (2021:

ARCHIVIO DI FILOSOFIA
1. ‘Grace Before Being.’ 64 (1996):121-34. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/08/grace_before_be.html
2. ‘Demystifying the Incarnation.’ 67 (1999):417-31. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/06/demystifying_th_1.html
3. ‘Enjoying One Another in God: In Defence of Augustine's Eudaemonism.’ 69 (2001):561-76. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/12/enjoying_one_an.html
4. ‘“Where all the ladders start”: Apophasis as Awareness.’ 70 (2002):375-405. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/06/where_all_the_l.html
5. ‘Gift and Debt in the Economy of Salvation.’ 72 (2004):579-89. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/08/gift_qnd_debt_i.html
6. ‘The Eucharist as a Work of Art.’ 76 (2008):169-76. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24488404?seq=1
7. ‘Logical Impossibility in Mādhyamika Argumentation.’ 78 (2010):93-103. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24488352?seq=1
8. ‘Self-determination in James Joyce.’ 80 (2012):249-60. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24488535?seq=1
9. ‘Demystifying the Trinity.’ 82 (2014):129-42. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24488858?seq=1
10. ’Luke’s Selfish Soliloquists.’ 84 (2016):225-32. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2021/02/lukes-selfish-soliloquists.html
11. ‘L’Auto-présence de la conscience en bouddhisme et en phénoménologie.’ 86 (2018):157-67. http://www.libraweb.net/articoli.php?chiave=201808502&rivista=85

JOURNAL FOR CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
‘A Seminal Event.’ 2 (2020):176-90.
'Philosophical Depth in Visconti’s Death in Venice.' forthcoming

PHILOSOPHY TODAY
‘Phenomenology and Theology: Respecting the Boundaries.’ 62 (2018):99-118.

HERMATHENA
‘Rethinking the Incarnation.’ Review article on Kuschel, Geboren vor aller Zeit?. 152 (1992):59-69. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23040985?refreqid=excelsior%3A51d5d0ba0abdf1f2c8143840f998add1&seq=1
Reviews: R. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity 149 (1990):143-7 https://www.jstor.org/stable/i23040913
G. Bruns, Heidegger’s Estrangements. 150 (1991):56-60. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/06/heideggers_estr.html

SEMINAR (University College, Cork)
‘The Riddle of the Self.’ 4 (1980):51-8.
‘Can We Return to Reason?’ 5 (1981):32-9.

STUDIES IN WORLD CHRISTIANITY
‘Conventions and Ultimacy in Japanese Religion: A Challenge to Christian Theology.’ 6 (2000):38-58. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/08/conventions_and.html
Reviews: J. Bracken, The Divine Matrix. 2 (1996):113-17 https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/swc.1996.2.1.113; J. Maher and G. Macdonald, Diversity in Japanese Culture and Language. 2 (1996):117-18 https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/pdfplus/10.3366/swc.1996.2.1.117; M. Abe, Buddhism and Interfaith Dialogue. 2 (1996):229-31 https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/swc.1996.2.2.229 https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/swc.1996.2.2.231 ; P.F. Kornicki and I.J. McMullen, Religion in Japan. 2 (1996):231-3; R.A. Hinde, Why Gods Persist.5 (1999):267-9 https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/swc.1999.5.2.267; B. Hebblethwaite, Ethics and Religion. 6 (2000):108-11.

THE EASTERN BUDDHIST
‘The Significance of John Keenan’s Mahāyāna Theology.’ 30.1 (1997):114-32. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/03/the_significanc.html
‘The Hermeneutics of Critical Buddhism.’ 31.2 (1998):278-94.
‘Nonduality in the Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa: A Theological Reflection.’ 46.1 (2015):63-78.

BUDDHIST-CHRISTIAN STUDIES
‘Emptiness and Dogma.’ 22 (2002):163-79. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/3551/summary.
Interview: ‘Religious Pluralism and Christian Truth.’ 19 (1999):239-41.
Reviews: Aitken/Steindl-Rast, The Ground We Share; K. Amill, Contemplation et dialogue. 20 (2000):315-8 https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/12/two_books_on_bu.html https://muse.jhu.edu/article/3486/summary https://www.jstor.org/stable/i260251.
D. Wright, Philosophical Meditations on Zen Buddhism. 21 (2001):147-51. http://www.thezensite.com/ZenBookReviews/OLeary_review_Philosophical_Meditations.htm https://muse.jhu.edu/article/3517/summary.

INTER-RELIGIO
‘Partners for Dialogue.’ 8 (1985):62-99. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/3348
Reviews: P. Knitter, No Other Name? 7 (1985):44-7 https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/3346 .
E. Sharpe, Karl Ludvig Reichelt. 9 (1986):35-8 https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/3352.
J. B. Cobb and C. Ives, The Emptying God. 20 (1991):71-7 https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/3383.

THE JAPAN MISSION JOURNAL
1. ‘Literature and Inculturation.’ The Japan Missionary Bulletin 45 (1991):323-35.
2. ‘The Murmur of the Gods.’ The Japan Mission Journal 51 (1997):219-29.
3. ‘The Theological Significance of Jean-Luc Marion’s Thought.’ 53 (1999):300-9. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/01/the_theological.html
4. ‘Finding Kingdom Values in the City.’ 54 (2000):19-27.
5. ‘Emptiness and Dogma.’ 55 (2001):227-45.
6. ‘Buddhism and Forgiveness.’ 56 (2002):37-49; 97-109. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/02/buddhist_and_fo.html
7. ‘Japanese Buddhism: The Dialogue with Our Sister Religion.’ 56 (2002):165-72. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/07/japanese_buddhi.html
8. ‘Editorial.’ 56 (2002), 218.
9. ‘Stanislas Breton on the Essence of Christianity.’ 57 (2003):184-92.
10. ‘An American Tragedy.’ 57 (2003):232-41. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/03/three_years_lat.html
11. ‘Buddhist Serenity in a Time of Rage. 58 (2004):54-66. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/08/buddhist_sereni.html
12. Review L. Viévard, Vacuité et compassion dans le bouddhisme madhyamaka. 58 (2004): 136-44. Also published as ‘Emptiness and Compassion.’ Studia Asiatica (Bucharest) 10 (2009):287-96. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/09/emptiness_and_c.html
13. ‘The Stress of Time.’ 58 (2004):147-56. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/06/the_stress_of_t.html
14. ‘Editorial.’ 58 (2004):218.
15. ‘Towards an Incarnational Ethics.’ 59 (2005):77-86.
16. ‘Vatican Instruction, Church Reception.’ 59 (2005):263-9. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/12/vatican_instruc.html
17. ‘Love Conquers All: An Encyclical and its Intertexts.’ 60 (2006):49-65. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/02/love_conquers_a.html
18. ‘A Note on Nitobe.’ 61 (2007):16-29. In Japanese: ‘Nitobe bunken no shingakuteki kento.’ Kirisutokyo o meguru kindainihon no shoso. Tokyo: Oriens Institute, 2008, 80-100. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/01/a_note_on_nitob.html
19. Review: W. Johnston, Mystical Journey. 61 (2007):69-70.
20. Review: Benedikt XVI, Jesus von Nazareth. 61 (2007):140-4.
21. ‘Governance and Freedom in Church and State.’ 62 (2008):58-72.
22. ‘The Eucharist: A Work of Art.’ 62 (2008):93-7.
23. ‘Paul’s Missionary Motivation.’ 63 (2009):54-62.
24. Review: J. P. Keenan, Grounding our Faith in a Pluralistic World. 63:67-70.
25. ’Dostoevsky’s Quest for Resurrection.’ 63:132-44.
26. ‘Skillful Means and Conventional Truth in Interreligious Dialogue.’ 63:191-207.
27. ‘Rahner and Religions.’64 (2010):60-5.
28. ‘The Attraction of Ancient Indian Thought for Philosophers and Theologians Today.’ 64:119-28.
29. ‘In Newman’s Wake: Ernesto Buonaiuti and the Development of Doctrine.’ 64:254-77.
30. Review: J. P. Keenan, I Am/No Self. 66 (2012):72.
31. ‘Luther and Erasmus Revisited.’ 66:134-44.
32. ‘Vatican II: The Unfinished Council.’ 66:263-82.
33. ‘Overcoming Views in the Vimalakīrti Sūtra.’ 67 (2013):34-40.
34. ‘Facing the Modern World with Pope Francis.’ 67:135-41.
35. ‘Editorial.’ 67:218.
36. ‘A Vexed Question: Catholic Theology Facing Same-Sex Marriage.’ 68 (2014):58-72. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2018/08/a-vexed-question-catholic-theology-facing-same-sex-marriag.html
37. ‘Editorial.’ 69 (2015):2.
38. ‘The Theological Impact of Literary Modernism.’ 69:66-72.
39. ‘Editorial.’ 69:74.
40. ‘Editorial.’ 69:146.
41. ‘Robert Magliola on Buddhist-Christian Dialogue.’ 69:186-9.
42. ‘Editorial.’ 70 (2016):2.
43. ‘Book Review: Jesuits Engage with Buddhism.’ 70 (2016):71-2.
44. ‘Conventional Truth as a Platform for Buddhist-Christian Understanding.’ 70:270-81.
45. ‘Editorial.’ 71 (2017):2.
46.. ‘Excursus: Luther in Bach.’ 71:78-80.
47. ‘Kenosis.’ 71:133-9.
48. ‘Reply,’ 71:144.
49. ‘Editorial.’ 71:146.
50. ‘Luke’s Selfish Soliloquists.’ 71:157-66.
51. ‘Editorial.’ 72 (2018):2.
53. ‘Impeded Dialogue: The Case of Jacques Dupuis.’ 72::49-61.
54. ‘Editorial.’ 72 :146.
55. Book Review: Schmidt-Leukel, Religious Pluralism & Interreligious Theology. 72:276-82.
56. ‘Editorial.’ 73 (2019):2.
57. ‘The Universal Core of Shinto.’ 73:102-4.
58. ’Editorial.’ 73:146.
59. Book Review: R. Schulzer, Inoue Enryō. 73:275-9.
60: Book Review: M. Pesce, Il cristianesimo, Gesù e la modernità. 73:280-2.
61. ‘Editorial.’ 74 (2020):2.
62. Book Review: G. Rappo, Rhétoriques de l’hérésie. 74:71-2.
63. ‘Editorial.’ 74:146.
64. ‘Reading 1 John Contemplatively.’ 75 (2021):47-54.
65. Book Review: O’Loughlin Kennedy, The Curia is the Pope. 75:61-7.

FUKUIN SENKYO
‘Amerika no higeki.’ 58.3 (March 2004):2-16.
‘Eiga “Chinmoku — Silence” ni okeru fukuinteki kakushin.’ 71.7 (July 2017):11-17.

DHARMA WORLD
‘Buddhism and Forgiveness.’ 31 (Nov./Dec. 2004):14-19.
‘Scripture and Prayer.’ 36 (Oct.-Dec., 2009):4-7.
‘Many Religions, One Reality.’ 43 (Jan.-Mar. 2018), 7-10.

THE FURROW
1. ‘Prayer and Life.’ 21 (1970):608-17.
2. ‘Homilies for July.’ 22 (1971):363-7.
3. ‘The Marian Consciousness.’ 23 (1972):660-5.
4.‘John Paul II on Love and Responsibility.’ 29 (1978): 740-7.
5. ‘The French Bishops on Abortion.’ 30 (1979):353-60. Repr. An Irish Reader in Moral Theology, III, ed. Enda McDonagh and Vincent MacNamara. Dublin: Columba, 2013), 141-7.
6. ‘Christianity in Contemporary Ireland.’ 35 (1984):633-8.
7. ‘Some Buddhist Challenges.’ 36 (1985):35-40.
8. ‘Integrity.’ 36:467-74.
9. ‘Cults and the Occult.’ 36:717-8.
10. ‘Thoughts after Ballinspittle.’ 37 (1986):285-9.
11. ‘Sexual Orientation.’ 38 (1987):680-5.
12. ‘Homosexuality: Pursuing the Dialogue.’ 39 (1988):601-2.
13. ’The Future of Christianity.’ 40 (1989):361-6.
14. ‘Modernist Fiction and Christian Faith.’ 41 (1990):401-9.
15. ‘Featured Review: Art and Our Future.’ 53 (2002):310-13.
16. ‘Featured Review: Liberal Christian Voices.’ 57 (2006):496-505.
17. ‘Featured Review: In Dogged Loyalty.’ 57:577-8.
18. ‘Preaching Paul.’ 59 (2008):606-14.
19. ‘A Dialogue with Dostoevsky.’ 60 (2009):140-5.
20. ‘A Son’s Death.’ 64 (2013):220-7.
21. ‘New Pope, New Hope.’ 64:259-64. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2014/01/new-pope-new-hope.html

THE FOLD (Cork)
‘The Church and the Young Generation.’ 18 (1970):14-16.
‘Celebrating Penance.’ 24 (1977):11-15.
‘Theology and the Laity.’ 28.7 (1980): 36-9.
‘Parents, Youth and Religion.’ 29.2, (1981) 13-17.

CÉIDE
‘Mother Church and her Gay/Lesbian Children.’ 2.1 (Sept.-Oct. 1998). https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/06/mother_church_a.html
‘A mother’s perspective.’ 2.3 (Jan.-Feb. 1999):27.
‘Are Religions All the Same?’ 2.6 (July-Aug. 1999):4-5.THEOLOG (Student publication, Maynooth College)

THEOLOG (student publication, Maynooth College)
‘The Death of God and Time.’ Spring 1971, 4-5.
‘Searching the Scriptures.’ Spring 1972, 8-11.
‘Servants of Freedom.’ Spring 1973, 21-4.
‘Philosophy and Faith : The Augustinian Perspective.’ 1976, 13-18

THE IRISH TIMES
‘Maynooth Notes.’ 1969-70.
Interview with Andy Pollak. 9.4.1991.
Letters to the Editor. 9.1.80; 11.2.81; 19.2.81; 4.5.81; 13.5.81; 10.6.81;26.11.81; 22.4.82; 10.4.84; 5.9.84; 8.3.85; 3.7.85; 23.9.86; 2.5.87; 22.9.87; 30.8.88; 17.3.90; 29.8.90; 6.11.90; c. 18.3.91; c. 13.11.91; 12.91; 7.3.92; 17.4.92; c. 13.7.92; 23.10.92; 12.92-1.93; 18.1.93; c. 7.4.93; 16.4.93; 24.8.93: 10.1.98; 10.7.98; 21.7.98; 26.10.98: 18.1.99; 11.3.99; 2.6.99; 27.2.2001; 14.4.01; 30.4.01; 4.5.01; 5.5.01; 22.5.01; 15.1.02; 23.12.02; 14.3.03; 8.1.05; 1.3.05; 6.5.05; 28.10.05; 1.12.05; 23.9.06; 29.9.06l 14.1.08; 1.2.08; 13.5.08; 18.6.08; 7.8.08; 13.8.08; 21.8.08; 3.9.08; 20.11.08; 24.2.09; 1.4.09; 17.5.10; 24.7.10; 26.11.10; 4.6.11; 15.7.11; 23.7.11; 14.4.12; 5.7.12; 29.10.12; 27.2.13; 3.4.13; 9.8.13; 11.1.14; 15.5.14; 2.10.14; 20.10.14; 29.7.15

IDENTITY (Dublin)
‘Reflections on the Gay Movement in Ireland.’ 2 (1982):26.
‘Learning from the Nightmare.’ 3 (1982):30.
‘American Notes.’ 5 (1983):8.

OUT (Dublin)
‘The Flesh and the Spirit.’ 1 (Dec. 1984-Jan. 1985):26. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/06/the_flesh_and_t.html
‘Spotlight on Dr. McNamara.' 1985, 14-16.
‘Aids and Gay Liberation.’ 7 (Dec. 1985-Jan. 1986):28-9.
[Response to Homosexualitatis problema]. 12 (May 1987):24-6.

THE CRANE BAG

‘Joyce and the Myth of the Fall.’ 2 (1978):18-21. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/06/joyce_and_the_m.html
‘The Riddle of Sacrifice.’ 3.1 (1979):85-7. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/06/the_riddle_of_s.html
‘Latin America’s Theological Challenge.’ 6.1 (1982):31-4. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/07/latin_americas_.html

BOUNDARY 2
‘Theology on the Brink of Modernism.’ 13:2-3, Winter-Spring 1986, 145-156
‘Steve Bannon’s Ghostly Triumph.’ (5 September 2017). https://www.boundary2.org/2017/09/joseph-s-oleary-steve-bannons-ghostly-triumph

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
Letters.’Henry James’s Models’ 9.7.1999. ‘Mahler and Aschenbach’ 19.11.2002. ‘Bullshit’ 19.01.2007. ‘Death in Venice’ 12.12.2008. ‘Heidegger’ 27.10.2010.

JOURNAL OF ROMANTICISM
‘Shelley and Plotinus.’ 1 (2016):29-50.
‘Coleridge and Plotinus.’ 3 (2018):19-36.

JOURNAL OF IRISH STUDIES (IASIL JAPAN; FORMERLY THE HARP).
1. ‘Notes on the Soul-Motif in Joyce’s Portrait.’ The Harp 8 (1993):61-9.
2. ‘The Musical Structure of “The Dead.”’ The Harp 11 (1996):29-40. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/04/the_musical_str.html
3. ‘George Moore between Zola and Gide: The Case of “John Norton.”’ The Harp 12 (1997):90-102. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/03/george_moore_be.html
4. ’The Redemptive Emergence of Form in Joyce.’ The Harp 15 (2000):112-18. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/06/the_redemptive_.html
5. ‘Nietzsche and Shelley in “Blood and the Moon.”’ Journal of Irish Studies 16 (2001):138-47. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/03/nietzsche_and_s.html
6. ‘Beckett’s Intertextual Power.’ 18 (2003):87-101. Partial Japanese translation in Samuel Beckett’s Vision and Movement, ed. K. Kondo. Tokyo: Michitani 2005, 108-31 https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/08/becketts_intert.html
7. Review: G. Moore, Parnell and His Island et al. 20 (2005):103-5. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/04/moore_parnell_a.html
8. ‘The palm of beauty: Yeats, Rilke, Joyce.’ 21 (2006):36-48.
9. ‘God in the Dark: Theological Ghosts in Beckett’s Company 20 (2005):34-44. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/08/god_in_the_dark_1.html
10. ‘Beckett and Radio.’ 23 (2008):3-11.
11. ‘Dionysos in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.’ 24 (2009):66-74.
12. ‘Sex and Gender in “Albert Nobbs.”’ 26 (2011):88-96.
13. ‘Robert Welch’s Farewell.’ 28 (2013):7-16. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2014/01/robert-welchs-farewell.html
14, ‘Sexual Dawn at Clongowes: The Latency Period in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Chapter 1.’ 30 (2015): 77-85.
15, ‘The Troubled Heart: Yeats’s persona in “Meditations in Time of Civil War.”’ 31 (2016):54-65.
16, Review: R. Foster, Vivid Faces. 31 (2016):80-2.
17. ‘The Eighteenth Century in Ulysses.’ 32 (2017):53-63.
18. Review: S. Brivic, Revolutionary Damnation. 32 (2017):73-4.
19. ‘From elegiac transience to tragic impermanence: Yeats’s “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen.’’ 33 (2018):112-22.
2o. Review: G. Dawe, Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets. 33 (2018):420-2.
21. ‘Comic Entrances, Tragic Exits: Wilde and Socrates..’ 34 (2019):76-89. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog /2020/03/comic-entrances-tragic-exits-wilde-and-socrates.html
22. 'Religious Joyce.' 35 (2021:

THE TRANSACTIONS OF THE ASIATIC SOCIETY OF JAPAN
‘Jun’ichiro Tanizaki meets Thomas Hardy.’ 14 (1999):101-22. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/06/junichiro_taniz.html
‘Crisis of Assimilation.’ 14:171-4.
‘Lurid Misbehaviour,’ review of Paul McCarthy trans. of Atsushi. Ser. 5, 5: (2014):309-11.

ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE (Sophia University)
1. ‘Theology and the Modern Novel.’ 26 (1989):69-104.
2. ‘Beckett’s Company: The Self in Throes.’ 28 (1991):83-124.
3. ‘The Birth of the Soul in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.’ 29 (1992):11-50.
4. ‘The Magnanimity of Yeats: Reading “A Dialogue of Self and Soul.”’30 (1993):57-89.
5. ‘Newman on Education and Original Sin.’ 31 (1994):11-45. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/03/newman_on_educa.html
6. ‘Joyce between Jacques Lacan and Hélène Cixous: Interpreting “The Sisters.”’33 (1996):35-51.
7. ‘Enclosed Spaces in “The Dead.”’ 34 (1997):33-52. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/06/enclosed_spaces.html
8. ‘“Grace” and the Origins of Ulysses.’ 35 (1998):23-45. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/09/grace_and_the_o.html
9-11. ‘Anathemata for Henry James.’ 37 (1999):63-99; 38 2000:59-118; 39 (2001): 37-84. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/07/love_in_the_tim.html https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/07/the_turn_of_the.html https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/07/jamesian_subtex.html https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/07/roderick_hudson.html https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/06/fetichism_in_th.html https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/07/authorial_consc.html https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/06/goethe_in_the_g_1.html
12. ‘The Heightened Vision of Exile: Dublin in Ulysses.’ 39 (2002):3-24.
13. ‘Introduction to George Moore (1852-1933).’ 40 (2003):33-43. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/09/introduction_to.html
14. ‘Mary Lavin’s Images of the Clergy.’ 41 (2004):17-48. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/06/the_irish_clerg.html
15. ‘Father and Son in Ulysses.’ 42 (2005):49-77. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/02/father_and_son_.html
16. ‘Intertextuality in Beckett’s "The Lost Ones."’ 43 (2006):59-76.
17. ‘“The Beast in the Jungle” and its Progeny.’ 44 (2007):53-97.
18. ‘The Afterlife of Renaissance Humanism: Marlowe, Milton, Goethe.’ 45 (2008):15-55.
19. ‘Walter Pater’s Construction of the Renaissance.’ 46 (2009):15-42.
20. ‘Newman’s Literary Empiricism.’ 47 (2010):65-98.
21. ‘Symbolic Power in Shelley’s “To a Sky-Lark.” 49 (2912):1-18. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2021/02/symbolic-power-in-shelleys-to-a-sky-lark.html
22. ‘Seduction in Henry James’s “Paste.” 50 (2013):1-46. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2017/11/seduction-in-henry-jamess-paste-part-i-1.html
23. Joyce’s Radical Wagnerism.’ 51 (2014):1-21. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2016/03/joyces-radical-wagnerism-3.html

SOPHIA ENGLISH STUDIES
‘Tampering with Milton.’ 33 (2008):45-61
‘A Mystical Utterance in Context: “Tintern Abbey.”’ 38 (2013):19-58. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2013/12/a-mystical-utterance-in-context-%CA%BBtintern-abbey%CA%BC-.html

ZENITH (Student publication, Maynooth College)
 ‘A Sermon on Hope.’ 1 (1971):11-14.
‘Intellectual Capitulation.' 3 (1974):16-19.
'Proust's Quest.' 4 (1975):1-8.
'Henry James.' 6 (1976):6-14.

OTHERS

1. ‘Looping the Loop with Tom Murphy: Anticlericalism as Double Bind.’ Studies 81 (1992):41-8.
2. ‘Modern Historical Consciousness in Roman Catholic Thought.’ Zen Buddhism Today 13 (1996):83-108. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/07/modern_historic.html
3. ‘The Whole Play of the World’ (interview). Graph (NS) 2 (1996):64-83.
4. ‘Dogmat a spotkanu religii.’ Miesiecznik Znak 495 (1996):33-44.
5. ‘Tanizaki’s “Shunkin” and Hardy’s “Barbara.”’ Surugadai University Studies 17 (1998):26-40.
6. ‘Pushkin in “The Aspern Papers.”’ Henry James E-Journal, 1.March.2000. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2018/11/pushkin-in-the-aspern-papers.html
7. ‘Forgiveness in Mahāyāna Buddhism and a Christian Reflection.’ Dialogue (NS) 29 (2002):94-110 (The Ecumenical Institute, Kandy).
8. ‘Questioning the Essence of Christianity.’ Philosophy & Theology 16 (2004):203-16.
9. ‘T. S. Eliot and the Gītā’s Spirituality of Action.’ Journal of Vaishnava Studies 16/1 (2007):143-60.
10. ‘Entrevista: O cristianismo foi moldado pelo contexto ocidental.’ Revista IHU (2007): 248.
11. ‘Knowing the Heart Sutra by Heart.’ Religion and the Arts 12 (2008):356-70.
12. ‘Japanese Studies of Philo, Clement and Origen.’ Adamantius 14 (2008):395-402.
13. ‘La théologie catholique face au mariage homosexuel.’ Cités 44 (2011):27-43.
14. ‘The Ghosts of T. S. Eliot.’ Renaissance Bulletin (The Renaissance Institute, Tokyo.) 38 (2012):27-45. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2014/11/the-ghosts-of-t-s-eliot.html
15. ‘Everyday Life and Ultimate Reality: Dialectical Reversals in Hegel, Heidegger and Buddhism.’ Contemporary Buddhism. 15 (2014):465-78.
16. ‘Bisexual Dynamics in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Chapter One.’ James Joyce Journal (Seoul) 21.2 (2015): 137-54.
17. ‘Nonduality in the Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa.’ Hōrin 18 (2015):297-319.
18. ‘Eruaikunisu ni oite Sonzai dou natte shimau no ka?’ (‘Qu’advient-il à l’être dans l’Ereignis?’), trans. Odagiri Kentaro. Ritsumeikan Daikaku Jinbunkagaku Kenkyujo Kiyo 107 (2016):157-76.
19. ‘Research Report.’ Bulletin of the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture 40 (2016):104-6.
20. ‘Numinous Presences in Two Buddhist Sūtras: Toward a Comparative Phenomenology.’ Exchange 46 (2017):245-59.
21. ‘Self-emptying in Martin Scorsese’s Silence.’ Doctrine & Life 67.6 (2017):15-23.
22. ‘Author’s Response.’ [Symposium on Buddhist Nonduality, Paschal Paradox] Horizons 44 (2017):442-7.

BOOK REVIEWS

JOURNAL OF THEOLOGICAL STUDIES
1. L. Ayres, Augustine and the Trinity. 62 (2011):755-9.
2. É. Vetö, Du Christ à la Trinité. 63 (2012):793-6.
3. C. Geffré, Le Christianisme comme religion de l’Évangile. 64 (2013):330-3.
4. E. Durand, L’offre universelle du salut en Christ. 64 (2013):333-5.
5. C. Markschies, Hellenisierung des Christentums. 64 (2013):696-9.
6. E. Falque, Passer le Rubicon. 64 (2013):841-5.
7. E. Bermon/G. O’Daly, ed. Le De Trinitate de saint Augustin. 66 (2015):449-52.
8. J. Rivera, The Contemplative Self after Michel Henry. 67 (2016):883-5.
9. A.-C. Jacobsen, ed., Origeniana Undecima. 68 (2017):775-8.
10. M. B. Simmons, Universal Salvation in Late Antiquity: Porphyry of Tyre and the Pagan–Christian Debate. 69 (2018):333-6.
11. A. Fürst, Origenes. 69 (2018):818-21. https://academic.oup.com/jts/article/69/2/818/5078590?guestAccessKey=aad5ff4f-8308-4c96-9e4d-1b5c315c480b
12. J. Zachhuber, Luther’s Christological Legacy. 70 (2019):456-60. https://academic.oup.com/jts/article-abstract/70/1/456/5289526
13. V. Limone, Origene e la filosofia greca. 70 (2019):851-4. https://academic.oup.com/jts/article/70/2/851/5510124?guestAccessKey=8e9ffbc0-4fe4-44b1-94e5-25fefbf9e989
14. R. Williams, Christ the Heart of Creation. 70 (2019):928-32. https://academic.oup.com/jts/article/70/2/928/5513310?guestAccessKey=5a7e99bc-2b23-46f2-ad3d-e7eb823769f1
15. L. Ayres, The Oxford Handbook of Catholic Theology. 71 (2020):426-32. https://academic.oup.com/jts/article/71/1/426/5740019?guestAccessKey=5c98652e-28c9-4f5e-a3e8-ef9e71ac94d9
16. D. Pazzini, Gesù il Cristo in Origene. 71 (2020):356-8.
17. B. Bitton-Ashkelony, et al, ed., Origeniana Duodecima. 72 (2021):
18. J. Zachhuber, The Rise of Christian Theology and the End of Ancient Metaphysics. 72 (2021):

THEOLOGISCHE LITERATURZEITUNG
A. Altieri, Voir infiniment. 143 (2018):805-8.
R. Elberfeld. Philosophieren in einer globalisierten Welt. 143 (2018):940-2.

REVIEWS IN RELIGION & THEOLOGY
1. T. Cattoi, Divine Contingency. 17 (2010):577-9.
2. K. Ettenhuber, Donne’s Augustine, 20 (2013):568-71.
3. ‘Five Books on Sacrifice.’ 21 (2014):289-96.
4. B. Asbill, The Freedom of God for Us, 23 (2016):252-4.
5. G. Bayliss, The Vision of Didymus the Blind, 24 (2017):31-3
6. P. Schmidt-Leukel and A. Hehring, ed. Interreligious Comparisons in Religious Studies and Theology. 24:365-7.
7. E. Shulman, Rethinking the Buddha. 24:370-2.
8. ‘Peter Sloterdijk as an Ally of Theology.’ 25 (2018):5-11.
9. D. Karłowicz, Socrates and Other Saints. 25:90-2.
10. A. Mong, Dialogue Derailed. 25:533-6.
11. P. Allen and B. Neil, ed. Oxford Handbook to Maximus the Confessor. 25:614-17.
12. K. Maitra, Philosophy of the Bhagavad-gita. 26 (2019):286-8.
13. G. Muscolino, Teurgia. 26:303-5.
14. ‘Justification Vindicated’ (M. Horton, Justification) 26:556-61.
15. J. Westerhoff, Golden Age of Buddhist Philosophy. 26:727-9.
16. ‘Toward a Theological Reading of Saint John Henry Newman.’ 27 (2020):163-7.
17. V. A. Lektorsky/M.Bykova. Philosophical Thought in Russia. 27:374-6.
18. J. L. Morrow, Alfred Loisy and Modern Biblical Studies. 27:386-8.

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES (FORMERLY PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES )
1. H. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative. Philosophical Studies 23 (1974):323-4.
2. R. Kearney, The Wake of Imagination. 32 (1988-90):330-3.
3. N. Denyer, Language, Thought and Falsehood in Ancient Greek Philosophy: W. Jordan, Ancient Concepts of Philosophy. 33 (1992):238-46. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/04/two_books_on_gr.html
4. G. Gutting, Michel Foucault’s Anatomy of Science. 33 (1992):362-4.
5. F. Dallmayr, Life-World, Modernity, and Critique. IJPS 2 (1994):350-2.
6. D. Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History. 3 (1995):388.
7. T. Rockmore, Heidegger and French Philosophy. 3 (1995):390.
8. J. Derrida, Aporias. 4 (1996):177-83. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/06/derridas_aporia.html
9. F. Gonzales, Plato and Heidegger. 20 (2012):308-13. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2021/02/review-of-francisco-j-gonzalez-plato-and-heidegger-a-question-of-dialogue-pennsylvania-state-univers.html

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS
‘God’s New Faces’: On Richard Kearney and Jens Zimmermann’s ‘Reimagining the Sacred.’ 15 May 2017. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/gods-new-faces/
‘Restoring the Divine to the Care of the Earth’: On James W. Heisig’s ‘Of Gods and Minds.’ 12 October 2019. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/restoring-the-divine-to-the-care-of-the-earth-on-james-w-heisigs-of-gods-and-minds/

MONUMENTA NIPPONICA
1. K. Nishitani, The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism; T. Unno, ed. The Religious Philosophy of Nishitani Keiji, 46 (1991):569-72.
2. B. Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights. 48 (1993):521-6. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/12/chan_insights_a.html
3. D. Bauer, Die Transmoderne; I. Hijiya-Kirschnereit, Überwindung der Moderne? 52 (1997):276-9.
4. T. Ogawa, M. Lazarin, G. Rappe. Interkulturelle Philosophie und Phänomenologie in Japan. 55 (2000):147-9
5. S. Odin, Artistic Detachment. 57 (2002):117-19.
6. H. P. Liederbach, Martin Heidegger im Denken Watsuji Tetsuros. 58 (2003):146-8.
7. D. N. Slaymaker, The Body in Postwar Japanese Fiction. 60 (2005):281-3. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/11/the_body_in_pos.html
8. R. Hutchinson/M. Williams, ed. Representing the Other in Modern Japanese Literature. 62 (2007):131-4. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/07/the-other-in-mo.html
9. S. Heine, Did Dogen Go to China?; R. Payne et al. Discourse and Ideology in Medieval Japanese Buddhism. 62 (2007):389-92.
10. S. Heidegger, Buddhismus, Geschlechterverhältnis und Diskriminierung. 63 (2008):178-81. http://jodoshinshubuddhism.wordpress.com/2008/07/07/shinshu-life-links-070708 https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/07/women-in-shin-b.html
11. S. Yamada, Shots in the Dark. 66 (2011):159-61.
13. Y. Miyamoto, Beyond the Mushroom Cloud. 68 (2013):147-50.
14. Nanyan Guo, Refining Nature in Modern Japanese Literature. 70 (2015):173-5.

JAPANESE JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES
1. R. Magliola, Derrida on the Mend. 12 (1985):362-6. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2322
2. D. Lopez and S. Rockefeller, ed. The Christ and the Bodhisattva. 14 (1987):335-7. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2366
3. P. Griffiths, On Being Mindless.15 (1988):81-3. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2374
4. G. Parkes, ed. Heidegger and Asian Thought. 15(1988):311-13. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2391
5. G. Parkes, ed. Nietzsche and Asian Thought. 19 (1992):90-4. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2478
6. J. P. Keenan, The Meaning of Christ. 19 (1992):94-100. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2479
7. J. Sanford et al. Flowing Traces. 20 (1993):73-7. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30234132?refreqid=excelsior%3Adffbdf12b58266217757436cfa674781&seq=1
8. D. Kalupahana, A History of Buddhist Philosophy.20 (1993):78-83. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30234133?refreqid=excelsior%3A0f106bb7bd112e9722cd426cbb51debf&seq=1
9. J. Cabezon, Buddhism, Sexuality, and Gender. 20 (1993):86-9. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30234135?refreqid=excelsior%3A41dba989ff2b88bec62fe62788e48cb5&seq=1
10. S. Heine, Dōgen and the Kōan Tradition. 21 (1994):113-15. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2535
11. Ng Yu-Kwan, T’ien-t’ai Buddhism and Early Mādhyamika.22 (1995):224-7. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2570
12. S. Laycock, Mind as Mirror and the Mirroring of Mind. 22 (1995):227-9. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2571
13. Fu and Heine, Japan in Traditional and Postmodern Perspectives. 23 (1996):189-92. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2593
14. P. Griffiths, On Being Buddha. 23 (1996):196-200. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2595
15. P. Mommaers and J. Van Bragt, Mysticism Buddhist and Christian. 23 (1996):200-4. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2596
16. E. Ohnuki-Tierney, Rice as Self. 23 (1996):213-14. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2601
17. B. Faure, Visions of Power. 24 (1997):194-7. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2623 https://search.proquest.com/openview/7f84bdfc2f81852c9f11dde0a70e1945/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=1818335
18. B. Bocking, A Popular Dictionary of Shinto and Nagarjuna in China. 24 (1997):210-1. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2627
19. M. Teeuwen, Motoori Norinaga’s The Two Shrines of Ise. 24 (1997):214-5. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2629
20. H. Keel, Understanding Shinran. 24 (1997):219-22. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2634
21. P. Harvey, The Selfless Mind; M. Deegalle and F. J. Hoffman, Pali Buddhism; J. Pickering, The Authority of Experience; P. 22. Williams, Altruism and Reality. 26 (1999):208-15. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2680
23. A. van des Kooij and K. van den Toorn, Canonization & Decanonization. 26 (1999):216-20. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2681
24. B. Bodart-Bailey, Kaempfer’s Japan. 27 (2000):137-9. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2709
25. D. Bargen, A Woman’s Weapon. 27 (2000):139-43. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2710
26. B. Frank, Dieux et Bouddhas au Japon and Amour, colère, couleur. 28 (2001):157-60. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2735
27. R. Carter, The Nothingness Beyond God. 29 (2002):165-8. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2772
28. J. Heisig, Philosophers of Nothingness. 29 (2002):168-75. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2773
29. J. Greisch, Le Buisson ardent et les lumières de la raison. 29 (2002):175-80. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2774
30. G. Reeves, A Buddhist Kaleidoscope. 30 (2003):175-7. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2804
31. Y. Wang, Buddhism and Deconstruction. 31 (2004):201-6. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2834 https://www.jstor.org/stable/30233746?refreqid=excelsior%3Ac5f87d3eca79001010cacb383d287cb5
32. F. Girard et al. Repenser l’ordre, repenser l’héritage. 31 (2004):213-16. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2837 https://www.jstor.org/stable/30233749?refreqid=excelsior%3A9b7ba28d868b5441fb8bf49df3833c2f
33. D. Lopez, ed. Critical Concepts for the Study of Buddhism. 33 (2006):182-6. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2893
34. H. Kim, Dōgen on Meditation and Thinking. 35 (2008):376-80. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2967
35. J. D. May, Converging Ways? 35 (2008):400-2. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2974
36. J.-N. Robert, La Centurie du Lotus. 36 (2009):381-4. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2994
37. D. Hirota, Asura’s Harp. 37 (2010):167-70. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/3011
38. K. Lee, The Prince and the Monk. 37 (2010):170-2. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/3012
39. U. App, The Birth of Orientalism. 38 (2011):213-6. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/3041
40. F. Lachaud, Le vieil homme qui vendait du thé. 38 (2011):226-8. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/3046
41. J. Shields, Critical Buddhism. 38 (2011):399-401. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/4112
42. R. Magliola, Facing Up to Real Doctrinal Difference 42 (2015):395-8. http://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/4463

JAPAN CHRISTIAN REVIEW
1. J. M. Kitagawa, The Christian Tradition: Beyond its European Captivity. 59 (1993):135-8. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/3518
2. T. Dean, Religious Pluralism and Truth. 61 (1995):109-112. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/4145
3. J. Heisig and J. Maraldo, Rude Awakenings. 62 (1996):128-32. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/4145
4. R. Drummond, A Broader Vision. 62 (1996):132-4.
5. D. Tracy, Naming the Present. 63 (1997):115-16. https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/4156

H-BUDDHISM. H-NET REVIEWS
1. H. Kazimow, J. and L. Keenan, Beside Still Waters. August, 2003. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/reviews/15972/oleary-kasimow-and-keenan-and-keenan-beside-still-waters-jews
2. Y. Wang, ed. Deconstruction and the Ethical in Asian Thought. 2008. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/reviews/16034/oleary-wang-deconstruction-and-ethical-asian-religion-and-philosophy
3. Paul B. Watt, Demythologizing Pure Land Buddhism. 2016. https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=46909
4. Richard Bowring, In Search of the Way. H-Buddhism, H-Net Reviews, Dec. 2017. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/reviews/1058614/oleary-bowring-search-way-thought-and-religion-early-modern-japan

THE JAPAN TIMES
Book Reviews: 1. B. A. Wallace, Meditations of a Buddhist Skeptic. 8 April 2012.
2. J. Watts, ed. This Precious Life. 29 July 2012.
3. H. Wakabayashi, The Seven Scrolls Tengu. 26 August 2012.
4. T. D. Leighton, Zen Questions. 13 January 2013.
5. P. Haskel, Sword of Zen. 24 March 2013. http://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2013/03/24/books/zen-master-indulges-japanese-sword-myth/
6. R. Welch, Kicking the Black Mamba. 7 April 2013. http://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2013/04/07/books/processing-the-bitter-to-a-durable-beautiful-form
7. D. Massarella, Japanese Travellers in Sixteenth-Century Europe. 12 May 2013.
8. Endo Shusaku, Kiku’s Prayer. 23 June 2013. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2013/06/30/books/book-reviews/preaching-endos-theme-of-a-maternal-divinity/#.Wg568BOCx0s https://www.degruyter.com/view/product/464699
Letters to the Editor. May 1985; 4.4.93; 22.5.05; 18.2.07; 2.6.13: 9.6.13

OTHERS
D. Holmes, More Roman than Rome. New Blackfriars 59 (1978):531-32. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43246953?refreqid=excelsior%3Aad56d41e709d182e3cbc4f2502d6291c
L. Arnhart, Aristotle on Political Reasoning. Review of Politics 45 (1983):468-70. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1407191?seq=1
J. Caputo, Heidegger and Aquinas. The Thomist 49 (1985):477-81.
R. Williams, Sergii Bulgakov. Religiologiques 25 (2001):360-4. https://www.religiologiques.uqam.ca/no25/recensions/Leary.html
J. P. Williams, Denying Divinity. Philosophy East and West 55 (2005):370-3. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/philosophy_east_and_west/v055/55.2oleary.pdf
Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth. National Catholic Reporter (21 September 2007):29.
E. Däumer and S. Bagchee, The International Reception of T. S. Eliot. Sophia 57 (2009):126-31.
G. Peters, Reforming the Monastery. Sixteenth Century Journal 45 (2014):843-4. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24246053?refreqid=excelsior%3A472ab3f3b009ac0ed93520bf71ecf55f
W. L. Todd, The Ethics of Śaṅkara and Śāntideva. Journal of Buddhist Ethics 23 (2016):161-4 http://blogs.dickinson.edu/buddhistethics/files/2016/11/Todd_OLeary_16_2.pdf
C. Simpson, Merleau-Ponty and Theology. Journal of Religion 97 (2017):145-6.

LECTURES
‘Alltäglichkeit und Letztgültigkeit. Dialektische Umkehrungen bei Hegel und Heidegger und im Buddhismus. ‘ Humboldt University, Berlin, 30 January 2012. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2012/02/allt%C3%A4glichkeit-und-letztg%C3%BCltigkeit-dialektische-umkehrungen-bei-hegel-und-heidegger-und-im-buddhismu.html
‘Überwindung der Metaphysik bei Erasmus und Luther.’ Charité Hospital, Berlin, 7 May 2012. https://www.academia.edu/23028028/Disputation_Luther_und_Erasmus
‘Negative Dialektik bei Nāgārjuna und Hegel.’ University of Leipzig, Dept. of Indology, 28 June 2012. https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2012/06/negative-dialektik-bei-n%C4%81g%C4%81rjuna-und-hegel.html

DOCTORAL DISSERTATION
Methods and Structures in the De Trinitate of St. Augustine. Pontifical University of Maynooth, 1976.

 

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09KDYM542

Ellen Carol Jones: 'Joysis Crisis compellingly documents how Joyce’s revolution of the word—the “impossible philosophy” of a creativity that is negative and yet also “porous to transcendence”—“wrestles with reality itself,” resulting in truth-telling about the divine and the human. In judicious, enlightening readings spanning Dubliners to Finnegans Wake, Joseph S. O’Leary argues that Joyce’s texts stage a crisis that is both binding and freeing: “an event in writing and language, but also a religious event, a sexual event, and a collective crisis of his city and nation, or of European civilization.” Joyce seeks through his art to grasp the ungraspable world, “a micro and a macrocosm ineluctably constructed upon the incertitude of the void,” to reveal the real, even if that real is “unmasterable by historical vision or philosophical reason, or even language itself.” His art is a labor of transformation and a labor of redemption, sounding the depths of existence, revealing the spectrum of suffering humanity, transmuting that suffering through agonistic yet redemptive writing, and translating historical material into something rich and strange: a visionary aesthetic labor that is “a parable of the eschatological transformation that religions yearn for.”'

Music in The Sacred Fount

https://eut.units.it/it/catalogo/the-sound-of-james-the-aural-dimension-in-henry-jamess-work-papers-from-the-8th-international-confer/1244

 

 

https://eut.units.it/it/catalogo/the-sound-of-james-the-aural-dimension-in-henry-jamess-work-papers-from-the-8th-international-confer/1244

Meditations for Advent/Christmas 2021

Nov. 28

Learning from Israel

In Advent we step back to the landscape of the Hebrew Bible, to recover our bearings and to understand afresh what it means to have a Messiah. The Hebrew Bible maps a great space of hope, and to embrace that space we need to declutter our lives of all the inessential things that fill them up and suffocate us. Not only the moral trash, or time-wasting pastimes and curiosity, but even the good things that demand and disperse our energies and prevent us from practising singleness of purpose.

In Advent we rediscover the importance of the First Covenant, which directs us unerringly to the Living God of Israel, and which trains us in the fundamental attitudes of faith and hope. It is often because we slight that first covenant that our grasp of the covenant sealed in the blood of Christ becomes narrow or abstract or unreal. As we prepare to celebrate his coming we must wait for him where he actually appeared, in Israel’s great space of hope. The prophets were passionate for righteousness, and angry at the triumph of rich and powerful people who were rich and powerful. The triumph of evil was enabled by the spinelessness, indifference, or lack of empathy of the multitude, and the prophets constantly sought to sensitize our conscience. The scandal of triumphant evil, impotent good, and divine silence in face of the resultant catastrophes remains the greatest obstacle to faith today as it was in ancient Israel. The modern critique of religion from Voltaire to Dawkins adds little to this basic scandal, to which the last century and the present one have added new chapters of horrors. But was God silent? His voice resounds in the desert and in the hearts of those who make space to hear it. Stepping back to Israel we commit to playing our daily part in the eternal battle of good and evil, confident that God is on our side.

The hope of Israel found a galvanizing focal point in the figure of the Messiah, the son of David, sometimes imaged as a Son of Man coming with the clouds of heaven to establish justice on earth. To understand the meaning of Christ it is good to meditate on these biblical conceptions of the Messiah. Theologians today puzzle over the question, ‘Why do we need a Saviour, and from what?’ Such a question would have puzzled the prophets, for they registered the full depth of human woe, and clung to God as their sole refuge. All the various promises by which God replied to their longing for salvation, notably the promise of a Messiah, deserve to be gratefully recalled in the Advent season, so that we can refresh our understanding of what is at stake in the mission of Jesus of Nazareth, prophetic teacher and healer, but more than that, the very embodiment of promised salvation: ‘For all the promises of God are “Yes” in him’ (2 Cor 1:20).

This is why the church takes us back to the founding Israelite experience for the first month of every liturgical year, encouraging us to renew our contact with the path of life that the First Covenant offers. Wholesome and invigorating in itself, this Jewish path is essential for an understanding of our Jewish Saviour, who fulfils it but in no way supersedes it. We used to say, with St Bernard, ‘per Mariam ad Iesum, through Mary to Jesus,’ but we should also say ‘per Israelem ad Iesum, through Israel to Jesus.’ She stands at the threshold of the Gospel, as the embodiment of Israel’s hope, along with the Baptist. They are our models of a wise emptying and clearing of the space of hope, in humility and simplicity of life, so that Christ can enter in.

 

 

Dec. 5

The author of the book of Baruch is a rather obscure figure, who got into the Bible by the skin of his teeth. The name is that of Jeremiah’s secretary, but he may be writing centuries later than Jeremiah. The book is deutero-canonical, being absent from the Hebrew Bible and consequently from Protestant Bibles, and it found its way even into the Catholic Bible, the Vulgate, very belatedly, only in the ninth century, St Jerome having excluded it from his translation in the fifth.

Baruch’s theme is unprepossessing too: a meditation on the worst period in Jewish history, the long exile in Babylon. In language less heartfelt and dramatic than that of Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the book of Lamentations, Baruch sighs morosely over Israel as a hopeless case. He recycles the ancient monitions about the waywardness of Israel and the displeasure of God, about the need to relearn the paths of Wisdom and Torah, about the urgency of returning to the Lord with tenfold zeal. But does he feel that no one is really listening, that the the message is dying on his own lips?

One imagines him as a familiar figure on the preaching circuits, always to be relied on to recite eloquently the old lore, and to reassure the audience, even in what were then modern times, with a sense of their ancient identity as Israel, the people scolded by God. But even when old Baruch evoked the two most glorious moments of redemption in Israel’s past, namely the exodus from Egypt and the return from the Babylonian captivity, he may have done so with a sinking feeling that all this had been heard before and was making no real impact.

But poetry takes over at the end, in the passage the Church serves up for our delectation today: ‘Take off the garment of your sorrow and affliction, O Jerusalem, and put on forever the beauty of the glory from God’ (5:1). Human mediocrity is intractable and irreformable, indifference and mockery are impregnable, but God remains God: ‘Arise, O Jerusalem, stand upon the height; look toward the east, and see your children gathered from west and east at the word of the Holy One, rejoicing that God has remembered them’ (5:5).

This happy ending is a surprise of the Spirit, stirring people to the depth of their souls. The divine ‘medicine of mercy’ bears no relation to the unworthiness of its recipients. They can continue to look at themselves in morose defeatism, convinced that nothing will ever change, and that their lives and institutions have settled into a condition of paralysis. Or they can hear the shout of joy that breaks out on Zion and tells that the Lord is nigh (Isaiah 40).

Every year Advent springs on us from nowhere, bringing just such a messsge. We thought the game was played out and that promises of redemption were mere dreams. But we missed the resources of the divine player, who can overturn the most settled and sullen indifference and teach us to dance anew to the old music, which is ever new.

 

Dec 12

What an unexpected command: ‘and again I say, Rejoice!’

Usually we come crawling before the Lord in need and guilt, but He says to us, ‘Stand up, and rejoice!’ We singled out the seven Penitential Psalms as particularly important, but there are many more psalms that enable us to shout and sing in praise of God and his beautiful creation. Praise, not lamentation, is the basic tone.

Our morose and worried faces prompted Nietzsche’s mockery: these people do not look redeemed. ‘Redemption was for Nietzsche not a deliverance from sin, but a total affirmation of life, with all its pain, suffering and absurdity’ (Eva Cybulska). Rilke, who inherited Nietzsche’s girlfriend Lou Andreas-Salome, also took this up in a famous poem just a century ago, in December 1921:

Oh speak, poet, what do you do?
–I praise.
But the monstrosities and the murderous days,
how do you endure them, how do you take them?
–I praise.
But the anonymous, the nameless grays,
how, poet, do you still invoke them?
–I praise.
What right have you, in all displays,
in very mask, to be genuine?
–I praise.
And that the stillness and the turbulent sprays
know you like star and storm?
: –because I praise.

Oh sage, Dichter, was du tust ?
– Ich rühme.
Aber das Tödliche und Ungestüme,
wie hältst du’s aus, wie nimmst
du’s hin ?
– Ich rühme.
Aber das Namenlose, Anonyme,
wie rufst du’s, Dichter, dennoch an ?
– Ich rühme.
Woher dein Recht, in jeglichem
Kostüme, in jeder Maske wahr zu sein ?
– Ich rühme.
Und daß das Stille und das Ungestüme
wie Stern und Sturm dich kennen ?
: – weil ich rühme.

Not only Christmas, but Advent too, is an invitation to joy. Let not our Christian language of joy decay into drab formulas while our language of sin and guilt swells and festers. If we end the day with an act of contrition, let us at least begin it with praise. If Nietzscheans can find praise welling up in their souls, even though they thought God was dead, how much more should we, who know the living God of Israel, find joy to be the natural reaction to the miracle of each morning. Just use the words, and they will free up the springs of spontaneous praise:

O come, let us sing to the Lord; let us heartily rejoice in the rock of our salvation.

Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving and be glad in him with psalms.

For the Lord is a great God and a great king above all gods.

In his hand are the depths of the earth and the heights of the mountains are his also.

The sea is his, for he made it, and his hands have moulded the dry land.

Come, let us worship and bow down and kneel before the Lord our Maker.

For he is our God; we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand.

Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit; as it was in the beginning is now and shall be for ever. Amen. (Ps 95:1-7 = the ‘Venite’ of Anglican Matins)

 

Dec. 19

The most beautiful part of the New Testament is Luke’s Infancy Narrative, which is like an enclosed garden, populated only by beautiful people. Luke, after his opening statement of purpose, which is considered the most perfect Greek sentence in the New Testament, dips his pen in the style of the Septuagint to paint a model Jewish world, describing the Baptist’s parents as ‘both righteous before God, walking in all the commandments and regulations of the Lord, blameless’ (Lk 1:6). The old couple are depicted with much humour. Then after the sublime scene of the Annunciation, Mary sets off eagerly to share her good news with Elizabeth (1:39) and their meeting is a moment of utter joy, yielding those words of Elizabeth that we recite every day: “Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb” (1:42). Not without humour is the image of John the Baptist bouncing joyfully in her womb (44); reverence would have held Luke back from giving a similar account of Jesus.

This scene of the Visitation inspired Sts Francis de Sales and Jeanne de Chantal to found a religious order, the Visitandines, who were supposed to visit the poor on charitable errands, but became an enclosed contemplative order. They would perpetuate this short biblical scene, letting it shape their whole existence. Let us enter into that scene this morning, thinking of Mary, her haste to be with her kinswoman and to help her, staying with her till the birth; thinking of Elizabeth, her deep gratitude to God for granting her a son, like Sarah of old; her prophetic insight, like that of Simeon and Anna further on, she being filled with the Holy Spirit; her sense of family bonds, as wife, mother, cousin to Mary, aunt to Jesus; her noble heritage as a daughter of Aaron (1:5); her patient endurance and resignation in the long years of sterility; here forthrightness of character and speech, shown again when she insists against family tradition that her son’s name will be John (as the angel prescribed, 1:13). John is Hebrew Yohanan, meaning ‘graced by God.’ Grace pervades the scene of the Visitation and all the scenes of the Infancy Narrative, grace abounding blissfully, unalloyed, unshadowed, as nowhere else in Scripture.

Think also of the contemplative peace and calm that emanates from this story, the deep and quiet love of God that eventually bursts forth in the canticles of Mary and Zechariah. Queen Elizabeth was worthy of her patron saint when she said recently to the bishops of the church of which she is Supreme Governor: “The list of tasks facing that first General Synod may sound familiar to many of you – Christian education, Christian unity, the better distribution of the ordained ministry. … But one stands out supreme: ‘To bring the people of this country to the knowledge and the love of God.’”

Harmony of charitable action and serene contemplation is set forth in exemplary form in these Jewish women so masterfully painted by St Luke (said to have been a painter, with a portrait of Mary that circulated in later times). They are the first in a long string of women who grace his Gospel and set it off from the others. All contemplatives tell us that to enjoy the knowledge and love of God we must awaken the feminine depths of our soul, something rather countercultural, but Christmas is the time for it.

On 2 July 1660, Bossuet preached on the Visitation before another English queen, Henrietta Maria (Henrette-Marie, 1609-1669), daughter of Henri IV, widow of Charles I and mother of the Restoration monarchs Charles II and James II. She had a troubled life, father assassinated, husband decapitated, and her militant Catholic faith putting her at odds with Britons. Bossuet speaks of ‘a hidden God, whose virtue acts in hearts in a secret and impenetrable way. I see four persons united in the mystery we honour: Jesus and the divine Mary, St. John and his mother St. Elizabeth; this is the whole subject of our Gospel. But what I find most remarkable is that, except for the Son of God, all these sacred persons visibly exercise some particular action. Elizabeth, enlightened from above, recognizes the dignity of the Blessed Virgin, and humbles herself deeply before her: Undè hoc mihi? John feels the presence of his divine Master even in his mother’s womb, and testifies with incredible transports: Exultavit infans. However, the happy Mary, admiring in herself such great effects of the divine omnipotence, exalts with all her heart the holy name of God and publishes his munificence. Thus all these persons act, and it is only Jesus who seems immobile: hidden in the womb of the Blessed Virgin, he makes no movement that makes his presence perceptible; and he who is the soul of the whole mystery, appears without action in the whole mystery.’
[DeepL translation of: ‘un Dieu caché, dont la vertu agit dans les cœurs d’une manière secrète et impénétrable. Je vois quatre personnes unies dans le mystère que nous honorons: Jésus et la divine Marie, saint Jean et sa mère sainte Elisabeth; c’est ce qui fait tout le sujet de notre évangile. Mais ce que j’y trouve de plus remarquable, c’est qu’à la réserve du Fils de Dieu toutes ces personnes sacrées y exercent visiblement quelque action particulière. Elisabeth éclairée d’en haut reconnait la dignité de la sainte Vierge, et s’humilie profondément devant elle : Undè hoc mihi? Jean sent la présence de son divin Maître jusque dans le sein de sa mère, et témoigne des transports incroyables: Exultavit infans. Cependant l’heureuse Marie admirant en elle-même de si grands effets de la toute-puissance divine, exalte de tout son cœur le saint nom de Dieu et publie sa munificence. Ainsi toutes ces personnes agissent, et il n’y a que Jésus qui semble immobile : caché dans les entrailles de la sainte Vierge, il ne fait aucun mouvement qui rende sa présence sensible; et lui qui est l’âme de tout le mystère, paraît sans action dans tout le mystère.]

 

Dec. 25

Is it a good idea to begin a book with its climax? And could anything be more climactic than the Johannine Prologue, with its majestic statement summing up the entire meaning of Jesus and of salvation: ‘The Word became flesh and dwelt among us’ (Jn 1:14). Well, the Johannine eagle will ferry us over many heights and depths, as we traverse this infinite and inexhaustible Gospel (which grows with its readers to the degree that they can tune in to its mystical element), and will bring us in the end to a still greater climax. Not the passion and resurrection narrative, but a little phrase in the last discourse: ‘Love one another’ (Jn 15:12, 17; cf. 1 Jn 3:11; 4:7). This new commandment is the practical counterpart of the theological vision of the Prologue.

 

Christmas is a time to use the heart and to put forth the energies of love, through giving to those in need, or simply by thinking of thoughtful gestures that can allay or end coldness and alienation in family relationships. Everything in this feast invites us to love and enables us to love.

 

Recall what a golden, glowing day it was for us as children, and how eagerly it was expected. If we invite Christ to lodge in our hearts, as once among the animals at Bethlehem, we can have the golden glow of Christmas all the year round. There were saints who lived like that, ablaze with love even in their darkest hours: Francis of Assisi, Francis de Sales, Thérèse de Lisieux. They were a blessing to all they met, not by their words or acts, however impressive, but simply by who they were. Among the Apostles, it is of St John that this most holds true. Different epithets name the relationship of the apostles and disciples to Jesus: penitent, faithful, trusted, blessed, and to John is given the singular and heart-melting title ‘beloved.’

 

Where Peter and Paul stand on faith, John’s relation to Jesus is concentrated in the stance of steady, intense, ever-renewed love, which enabled him to see into the unfathomable identity of the Word Incarnate deeper than anyone else. ‘No one has seen God at any time. The only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known’ (Jn 1:18). Jesus asks his disciples to model their relation of faith, love, and obedience to him on his own relationship to the Father who sent him. John achieves this to perfection, lying in the bosom of Jesus as the eternal Word lies always in the bosom of the Father.

 

It is not only in Jn 1:18 that we learn this, for that last verse of the Prologue echoes the first: ‘the Word was with God.’ The ‘with’ here is the very relational preposition ‘pros,’ suggesting the the Word was ‘toward’ God. Indeed Origen of Alexandria says the Word is divine because of this primordial leaning on God, participation in God. The divine Word is not an impersonal emanation as in Neoplatonism but proceeds in a loving generation as the eternal Son. This is the unimaginable background of the countless references in the Gospel to Jesus’s intimate relation to the Father.

No need to scale a ladder to heaven and peer into the mystery of the Trinity up there. The mystery has come down to earth and dwells among us. Christmas is the feast in which heaven kisses earth, and the birth in time of a human child resonates with the eternal birth of the divine Word. Faith appreciates this, and may even defend the truth of the Incarnation with much theological huffing and puffing. But love understands this, in its joy over a newborn child, in its wide-reaching compassion for those for whom the light of Bethlehem shines, in its readiness, eventually, to lay down its life as Jesus did, in the supreme expression of love. To abide in love is to abide in God (1 Jn 4:16). So when we love one another the barriers between heaven and earth fall, we become children of God (cf. Jn 1:12), claiming our divine birthright, and we rejoice in this together.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09KDYM542

Ellen Carol Jones: 'Joysis Crisis compellingly documents how Joyce’s revolution of the word—the “impossible philosophy” of a creativity that is negative and yet also “porous to transcendence”—“wrestles with reality itself,” resulting in truth-telling about the divine and the human. In judicious, enlightening readings spanning Dubliners to Finnegans Wake, Joseph S. O’Leary argues that Joyce’s texts stage a crisis that is both binding and freeing: “an event in writing and language, but also a religious event, a sexual event, and a collective crisis of his city and nation, or of European civilization.” Joyce seeks through his art to grasp the ungraspable world, “a micro and a macrocosm ineluctably constructed upon the incertitude of the void,” to reveal the real, even if that real is “unmasterable by historical vision or philosophical reason, or even language itself.” His art is a labor of transformation and a labor of redemption, sounding the depths of existence, revealing the spectrum of suffering humanity, transmuting that suffering through agonistic yet redemptive writing, and translating historical material into something rich and strange: a visionary aesthetic labor that is “a parable of the eschatological transformation that religions yearn for.”'

The Church and Hunger Strikes: For Critical Commemoration of a Dangerous Past

Terence MacSwiney (1879-1920) is no doubt the most iconic and “exemplary” of all hunger strikers, and back in the 1950s and 60s he was certainly an icon for us in the North Monastery, where both he and his murdered predecessor as Mayor of Cork, Tomás Mac Curtain (1884-1920), had been pupils. What has most dimmed his glorious legend for me is the subseequent history of Republican hunger strikes, culminating in the “sacrifice” of ten men in their twenties in 1981.

But more generally, that recent history has raised deep questions about the ethos of what is now somewhat misleadingly called “the Irish Revolution,” and especially about its religious components. The glowing commemorations of 1966 still held to the unbroken founding myth fashioned by Pearse, and its “terrible beauty,” at a time when painful memories of the 1922-23 Civil War were fading. In 2016 peaceful commemoration was again possible, since the “Troubles” had been so satisfactorily wrapped up, to international acclaim, in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. The GFA seems to have replaced the founding myth as the new consensus horizon of commemoration, which has changed its key from triumphalism to somcething like therapy. President Michael D. Higgins organized a seminar, “Macnamh,” in Áras an Uachtaráin on 4 December 2020, which presented commemoration as a talk of “comprehensive ethical public memory” in which “inclusivity takes centre stage” and which reaches reaching out in critical sympathy to all participants and victims of past conflicts as a dialogal and reflective practice to enhance Irish community today. The thirty years of civil strife and terrorism in the Six Counties, an unsightly gash in the texture of modern European history, are now almost as if they had never been (despite the fact that about sixty “peace walls” still stand in Belfast as a warning that much dangerous hostility remains). In addition to bending over individual cases of injury and grief, the new perspective subsumes the Troubles and preceding Irish conflicts into a broader history of empires and rebellions, a calming Aufhebung that is some way to T. S. Eliot’s Heraclitean view of the English Civil War: “United in the strife that divided them” (“Little Gidding”). When scholars and others from both sides of the historical divides discuss the shared past together, each side’s cherished story in enhanced by reception into an ecumenical vision, and universalized by connection with similar stories from other times and places.

How Ideologies Die

Looking back at 1920 from 2020 offers an education on how ideologies die, or at least change beyond recognition. Our history textbooks as children in the 1950s gave their penultimate pages to 1916 and the last page to modern Ireland: each picture celebrated wondrous success—the Shannon Electrification Scheme for instance—but the last picture of all was a blank map of Ireland, with the Union Jack planted in its north-east corner. The sacred cause of a United Ireland, thoroughly internalized, shone in our juvenile minds as we marched around piping ballads about Roddy McCorley (d. 1800) and Kevin Barry (1902-20). Well, now the Holy Grail may descend, thanks to Brexit and for dismal financial reasons, and perhaps in the form of a mere federation, if a Dublin parliament still feels unable to handle the tensions of the North. So do ideologies end, “not with a bang but with a whimper.” Or perhaps the cross-border exchanges that have been intensified since 1998 (and that resume the approach of Seán Lemass after the hiatus of the Troubles) will create sufficient mutual amity to make transition to a united Ireland a more serene and joyful event than could have been foreseen. In any case, the idea of fighting and dying for Ireland, which brought a tear to so many Irish eyes, and to even more American ones, is now so linked to the PIRA campaign of terror that this ricochets on the historical record all the way back. Bloody sacrifice that makes “a stone of the heart” (Yeats, “Easter, 1916”) has been desanctified and now we revisit scenes of past violence only to pity and deplore.

Before proceeding, let me dwell on the 1981 hunger strikes, which loom as a black cloud between us and Terence MacSwiney. They explicitly took as their motto MacSwiney’s words in his inaugural speech as Lord Mayor: “It is not those who can inflict the most. But those who can endure most who will conquer.” For MacSwiney this was a clear-eyed strategy, matured in previous imprisonments and through observation of other hunger strikers, and confirmed by the mass hunger strike of IRA prisoners that had ended with an amnesty on 14 April 1920. Moreover, he knew fully the mythic power of the role he was assuming, one well expressed by the budding Banbridge-born classicist E. R. Dodds (1893-1979) in a letter to the Manchester Guardian on 26 August: “Let him die and before the month is up he will be a legend, a symbol, a ghost haunting the secret thoughts of every Irishman. In Ireland a legend has the power of many bayonets; and ghosts live longer than men.”

As soon as MacSwiney was arrested he declared with preternatural decision that he would use the weapon of “hunger strike.” It is a strange weapon, belonging to the repertory of psychological warfare or a “war of nerves.” It provokes the authorities to violent reaction, as in the use of force feeding, which had already secured moral victories for the Suffragettes, the first hunger strikers in the British Empire. The hunger strike uses moral and emotional blackmail, showing up the authorities as lacking in empathy or even forcing them to fake displays of empathy, and pressuring the populace to total support of the self-martyred. Of course it must be accompanied by a skilful PR operation. Taoiseach Éamon de Valera (1882-1975) did not display much empathy to republican hunger strikers in the 1940s, but cut off the oxygen of publicity by censoring reports. The hunger strike of up to 8,000 republicans in ten prisons from 14 October to 23 November 1923 had likewise met little empathy from the new Government whose leaders knew all about the technique. The hunger strike is a rather friable tactic, since it can easily lose its force, as authorities become more adept at defusing it (as in the “cat and mouse” Temporary Discharges Act used against the Suffragettes, releasing hunger strikers when they grew weak and rearresting them when they recovered strength) or more brazen in facing it down, as Mrs Thatcher did, or even mocking it. It is easily demystified, becoming just another problem of prison discipline.

But MacSwiney’s famous utterance was not just the declaration of a strategy. It is suffused with religious associations. MacSwiney had a thirst for martyrdom reminiscent of some early Christians. He felt deep regret that he had not joined the Easter Rising, and remarked “Ah Cathal, the pain of Easter Week is properly dead at last.” Pearse’s “blood sacrifice” (as a somewhat muddled retrospective propaganda styled it) was the founding event of the Irish struggle for independence, but it was enacted quickly; he was executed on 3 May 1916, a few days after the insurrection of 24-29 April. MacSwiney’s was a prolonged agony of 74 days, and drew the whole world into meditation on this Passion of an Irish martyr. Pearse proceeded with no clerical support, but MacSwiney could claim he had the Church on his side. The Church at that time was strong, and universally respected, and its support was marked by reflective sobriety. Hagiography predominates massively in the literature on MacSwiney, his numinoous image eclipsing the history of his thought and his development, as well as questions about his militarism and the baleful later influence of his legendary self-martyrdom: one wonders if anyone thought of promoting his cause for Canonization; after all the last Austrian emperor, Charles I (1887-1922), was beatified by John Paul II in 2004 despite his approval of using poison gas in World War I.

The effort of the 1981 Maze Prison hunger strikers to win church support was less successful. There had been some clerical sympathy with the earlier Long Kesh “dirty protest,” from Frs Raymond Murray and Denis Faul, Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich, and even the pacifist Daniel Berrigan, SJ, who led a delegation of 55 Americans to Long Kesh in June 1980, hoisting the protest to international recognition. Berrigan read Long Kesh in light of his own American prison experience, and his group may have been gulled by plausible IRA propaganda. The systematically organized spectacle of ten young men dying—the largest number ever reached in an Irish hunger strike—was too extreme to win the same degree of sympathy. Lots of priests attended the hunger strikers’ funerals, with IRA military salutes; but that did not necessarily indicate approval of the ends or means of the hunger strike. Their theology of blood sacrifice was no longer fresh and vigorous but had become a weird and archaic cult, which did not strike deep chords in the breasts of Irish citizens south of the Border, where the age of naive devotion was ending. For every group who clamoured for support of the hunger strikers an equal and opposite group arose to protest indignantly against any display of support. Meanwhile the bulk of the population reacted with irritation or indifference. Hunger strikers might be elected to Westminster or the Dáil, and streets might be named after the first of the ten victims in Paris and Teheran (and his name is the only one most people recall today), but these were very spotty gains. Thatcher’s victory was no doubt Pyrrhic, in that the hunger strike sparked a resurgence of violence. Yet had she granted the prisoners political status they and their tactics might now be canonized in Irish and English school textbooks as legitimate and exemplary, which despite the efforts of Sinn Féin they thankfully have not been.

Richard Kearney acutely noted the desperation behind the IRA’s attempt to supplement the ballot and the bullet with religious fanaticism. “The republican hunger-strikers sought to escape their actual paralysis by realigning their plight with a mythico-religious tradition of renewal-through-sacrifice…. It was something which operated largely as a pre-reflective password of the tribe, frequently escaping critical analysis… a mythic logic which claimed that defeat is victory, failure is triumph, past is present… a highly structured and strategic method of combining contraries which secular reason keeps rigidly apart.” This line of inquiry has not been sufficiently followed up, but instead a thin representation of the mythico-religious aspect (as in the case of Pearse) has been ritually invoked either to celebrate or to demonize.

Seamus Heaney remarked about Conor Cruise O’Brien: “I think the obstinate voice of rationalist humanism is important. If we lose that we lose everything, don’t we? I believe that Conor Cruise O’Brien did an utterly necessary job in rebuking all easy thought about the Protestant Community in the North.” The deep nationalism and Irish archetypes that Seamus Deane accused O’Brien of failing to take into account have much less purchase on the Irish people forty years on, and their power was waning even then, pari passu with that of Irish Catholicism. The 1979 visit of John Paul II was called at the time, and often since, “the last hurrah” of Irish Catholicism. The Pope addressed the gunmen: “On my knees I beg you to turn away from the paths of violence…. Further violence in Ireland will only drag down to ruin the land you claim to love and the values you claim to cherish.” This went unheeded or was bandied about as a pollitical football. But the IRA itself was a waning force, personified by “that devious, cowardly, death-dealing little generalissimo Seamus Twomey.” Its mishmash of brutal terrorism, a decaying sacrificial cultism, and a veneer of progressive policy was an ’ ory brew that citizens of what IRA propaganda branded “the Quisling state” (viz. the Republic of Ireland) found increasingly nauseous. Martin McGuinness’s deluded bid for the Irish Presidency in 2011 can have left few illusions as to where the Irish people eventually stood. Thirty years of bloodshed and terror had achieved precisely nothing, or less than nothing, except perhaps to confirm Yeats’s diagnoses: “We had fed the heart on fantasies,/ The heart’s grown brutal from the fare“ (“Meditations in Time of Civil War”); “Great hatred, little room,/ Maimed us at the start” (“Remorse for Intemperate Speech”).

 

Mayor and Bishop

The churchman most associated with MacSwiney’s hunger strike was his bishop, Daniel Cohalan (1858-1952), who visited him in August 1920, as well as the hunger strikers in Cork, where Mick Fitzgerald died on October 17 and Joe Murphy on October 25, the same day as MacSwiney. MacSwiney’s funeral ceremonies were attended by several archbishops and bishops in Southwark and Cork (a Dublin ceremony was thwarted by the government shipping his body directly to Cork, but Archbishop Willliam Walsh presided over a Requiem Mass instead). Three years earlier, Thomas Ashe (1885-1917), killed by force feeding in Mountjoy Prison, had been given a funeral in the Pro-Cathedral, in the presence of Archbishop Walsh, an event that no doubt gave aid and comfort to future hunger strikers. (Ashe’s well-known poem shows how the Catholic devotional revoluion and the Celtic literary revival both fuelled sacrificial piety: “Let me carry your Cross for Ireland, Lord! For the cause of Roisin Dubh.”) MacSwiney’s funeral was an internationally resonant demonstration of the Church’s support for a self-sacrificing son. “Mourners in Boston, Chicago, Melbourne, Newcastle upon Tyne, and Manchester held symbolic, mock funerals with empty caskets.” Requiem masses were held for MacSwiney before large congretations in Buenos Aires (“attended by many of the most distinguished personalities in the country, politicians, military officers, diplomats, high civil servants, clergy and many deputies and senators”) and in a dozen other towns in Argentina. One might say that MacSwiney’s hunger strike to the death, unlike any before or since, became an ecclesial event. That must have blown the scruples of churlish moral theologians out of the water. But after the lessons of the century since then some critical distance may be permitted. The Church of that time was not in all respects a model of enlightenment: consider the ferocious anti-Modernist crackdown that had been raging since 1907, and the uncritical embrace of the extravagances of Fatima (1917). As to the world at large, the Great War, despite its stunning literary yield, is now regarded as a mistake and utterly futile. It formed the backdrop to the 1916 Insurrection, which some would now see as a mistake within a mistake. The prelates who held back from celebrating MacSwiney’s heroism may emerge as the wiser ones from today’s vantage. They include Cardinal Francis Bourne of Westminster and Benedict XV (Pope from 3 September 1914 to 22 January 1922), who according to the British representative Count de Salis, “was convinced that MacSwiney must have taken food to survive for so long” and “expressed surprise at the excessive ostentation of the funeral. ‘There was a certain element of farce with it all” (Stuart Mews). Msgr Hagan deplored that Benedict, “immersed in ‘his one hobby, that of extending and consolidating diplomatic relations,’” saw the Irish struggle as “nothing more than a needless disturbance of the harmonious relations which otherwise could exist undisturbed between the Holy See and the Empire” (Patrick Murray).

The Irish Bishops referred in October 1920 to “hunger strikers, who think nothing of their lives if they can do anything for Ireland in the sad plight to which the rule of the stranger has reduced her” (Padraig Corkery). Cohalan wrote to The Times on 28 August: “To add a personal touch, let me add I have visited the Lord Mayor of Cork in prison.To put it mildly, I was scrupulously careful against saying anything that would confirm him in his resolution to continue the hunger strike.” To the Cork Examiner on 11 November he wrote: “If the Hunger Strike in Cork Gaol is not called off these self-sacrificing men will pass away one after another without impressing the world any more than it has been impressed already. The continuance of the Hunger Strike will only lead to a waste of human life.” The aura of self-sacrifice covered a multitude of sins, and led bishops to a moral liberalism and a spirit of dialogue that they were never to show on such matters as divorce, abortion, and sexual behaviour. Bishop Colahan “reasoned that the three deaths [Fitzgerald, Murphy, and MacSwiney] had secured for the Irish cause both a moral victory and international attention, and that any further deaths would be a futile waste of life.” “It is clear that, during the War of Independence, Bishop Cohalan viewed the hunger strike not as an act of suicide but as a legitimate act of defence against an aggressor. Such an action could be justified once it was not futile. In the case of MacSwiney the benefits were, in his understanding, immediate and weighty. The later hunger strikes of this period [during the War of Independence] met with his disapproval, not because he judged them to be wrong per se but because, in his understanding, they lacked proportionate reason.”

When the IRA ambushed a mobile Auxiliary patrol at Dillon’s Cross in Cork on 11 December 1920, killing a British officer, the Auxiliaries’ retaliation for this, and for the killing of seventeen Auxiliaries in the Kilmichael ambush of 28 November (a gaisce mór for Tom Barry), included murdering two IRA men in their beds and burning down the centre of the city, perhaps the most ruinous event in its history. The next morning Bishop Cohalan issued a decree stating that anyone taking part in an ambush was guilty of murder and would be excommunicated. Then on the Fourth Sunday of Advent he issued a “Pastoral Letter in the Aftermath of the Burning of Cork.” While arguing that the existing mode of Government had “no sanction in the moral law,” and was the “rule of might over right,” he added: “Though resistance to unlawful oppression may be lawful theoretically and in the abstract, it may be wrong in practice.” He counseled his flock to “bear this period of persecution patiently” and “above all avoid the terrible crime of taking human life.” This was in line with what the entire hierarchy had said in October, and was an effort to halt a cycle of tit for tat murders. A Sinn Féin member of Cork City Corporation Councillor Ó Cuill attacked the bishop: “He stands now only where his people [the clergy] always stood—in the wrong.” Kevin O’Higgins (1892-1927) wrote in March 1921: “Justice is vindicated on earth by the patient and dignified sufferings of people like them [his father, then imprisoned] rather than the mean-spirited effusions of the Bishop of Cork and many of his colleagues.” He also claimed: “Probably not since the persecutions of the early Christians has human nature risen to finer heights in endurance for an ideal than in Ireland today.” But “it was that very mindset which O’Higgins was to denounce a year later.”

There was “a fundamental shift between 1921 and 1923 in [Cohalan’s] moral analysis of violent resistance and the hunger strikes that formed part of it.” When Cohalan refused Christian burial to hunger striker Denis Barry who died on 20 November 1923, Terence MacSwiney’s sister Mary commented in the Cork Examiner that the bishop’s new view of hunger strikes as suicide, never permissible, “if true today, must have been equally true three years ago, when he officiated with all the honour that the Church can pay to a faithful son, at the obsequies of another hunger striker.” She herself had been on hunger strike since her arrest on November 4 and her “heroic struggle” was acclaimed by Archbishop Mannix in Melbourne, resulting in her release on 20 November, a damaging loss of face for the Free State government. The “Republican Women of Cork” denounced to the Pope Cohalan’s politicization of Confirmation addresses. The turbulent Fr Michael O’Flanagan said he’d prefer to “go to Heaven with Denis Barry than to hell at the head of a procession of high ecclesiastics.” But hunger-strike heroics had lost their lustre and the Civil War gave them a context less prepossessing than the “glorious years” of fighting British rule. Yet Cohalan “could have employed the theological framework he had previously used, which accepted hunger strikes as moral in certain circumstances…. The hunger strike could now be described as an act of tyranny against the legitimate government of Ireland rather than as an act of defence against an unjust aggressor” (Padraig Corkery).

An alternative view is offered by James Healy, SJ: “When faced with a bad hunger-strike the easiest condemnatory language to use for an ensuing death is that appropriate for suicide since ‘everyone’ knows that suicide is wrong.” Or it may be that the Bishop Cohalan did not regard the 1923 hunger strike, which collapsed embarrassingly, as worthy of serious political analysis and thought it more logical to treat its handful of fatalities as rather foolish cases of suicide. (The Civil War had ended in May, so this rumpus had less weighty political significance.) “Privately, Cohalan was much less assured of the moral rectitude of his treatment of Barry”; he wrote to Bishop Foley of Kildare and Leighlin that he had dealt with the matter “in foro externo in relation to the public life of the Church,” but “if Barry got the last Sacraments, and as the strike is ended, I might reconsider the question” (Patrick Murray). The apparent inconsistencies in epicopal response indicate that despite their high conception of their authority and its scope the bishops were swayed by changing circumstance, as witness also the difference between Cardinal Michael Logue’s (1840-1924) judgement on Michael Collins (1890-1922) and his Squad in 1920: “No object would excuse them, no hearts, unless hardened and steeled against pity, would tolerate their cruelty,” and his acclaim of the dead Collins in 1922 as “a young patriot brave and wise.” Logue’s “settled contempt for Republicans and their activities,” contributed to the failure of the Vatican legate Salvatore Luzio’s visit to Ireland from 19 March to 5 May 1923. The Vatican was jostled by both sides, seeking its legitimation of the new government or its recognition of the right to rise in arms against it.

George Sweeney, indulging the regrettable tendency of many writers to regard all moral discussions as politically motivated, claims that before 1922 that bishops did not condemn militant republicanism for fear of alienating their flock, but now they had become “more confident and condemnatory.” “In return for the Church’s support, [William T.] Cosgrave’s [1880-1965] government agreed to abide by the decisions of the Catholic Church in matters of morality and not to interfere with the hierarchy’s control of education,” and this in Sweeney’s view influenced Cohalan’s changed stance. But surely this underestimates the great difference between a fight for Ireland’s independence and a fight against Ireland’s new government? Since Cohalan’s interventions are all in the pastoral mode, with little systematic exposition of his principles, he may not have seen the need to explain his change of framework, or may not even have been fully conscious of it; the bishops as a body had swung firmly against the Republicans and behind the Government, as shown by their pastoral letter of 10 October 1922: “All who in contravention of this teaching, participate in such crimes are guilty of grievous sins and may not be absolved in Confession nor admitted to the Holy Communion if they persist in such evil courses.” Their strong support for the government made them reluctant to speak out against the 81 official executions, amounting to state terror, that included 11 teenagers and 45 men in their twenties, from 17 November 1922 to 3 May 1923. “Although the executions were opposed in private by various bishops,” it remains the case that “to the end of the conflict there is no record of a specific Episcopal condemnation of any of the Free State misdemeanours during the civil war” (Bill Kissane). An appeal to the Vatican against the Bishops’ Pastoral “failed to reverse the Catholic Church’s attitude to the republicans who remained blamed for all the destructiveness of the civil war” (Kissane).

Archdeacon Thomas Duggan (1890-1961), my Parish Priest in Ballyphehane from 1957 to 1961, who died in Lima as a member of the Cork Mission to Peru at the end of 1961, turns out to have been a significant agent in the events of the so-called Irish Revolution, as Fr Carthach McCarthy relates. “My generation at Maynooth embraced the ideals of Easter Week 1916, with a hundred percent fervour,” Duggan recalled, but he was not a passive observer of this: “An ardent Republican, Thomas had many close associates within the hierarchy of Sinn Fein and was well known to promote their ideals at Maynooth.” In 1919, after serving as a chaplain in World War I, “on his return to the Cork Diocese, he was appointed as Secretary to Bishop Cohalan. The relationship began well, but soon deterioriated due to what the Bishop perceived as Thomas’ ardent republicanism. As a senior cleric in a position where he had to navigate a delicate path due to the impact of the War of Independence, the Bishop felt that he could not rely on Thomas’ unwavering support and dispensed with his services.” The 1920 hunger strike at Cork Jail was an opportunity for action: Duggan became Assistant Chaplain at the Jail and “when Mick Fitzgerald died on 19 October 1920 after 67 days on hunger strike, Thomas was at his bedside. As further men died, Thomas became unconvinced over the efficacy of this tactic and was instrumental in efforts to have the hunger strike stopped.” Nor was his sympathy confined to the spiritual: “A plan was hatched to blow the walls of the prison to free many of the prisoners. By his own admission, Thomas became involved in smuggling weapons and guncotton into the prison to facilitate the escape attempt.” But in the Civil War Duggan was a peacemaker: “As a confidant of both Tom Barry and Michael Collins, Thomas played an important role in trying to mediate between the warring factions in the Irish Civil War, taking a neutral position between the Pro and Anti-Treaty forces.”

[ ‘The enigma that was Archdeacon Tom Duggan OBE MC, Chaplain to the Forces,’ WW1ResearchIreland.com, 12 March 2020; see Carthach MacCarthy, Archdeacon Tom Duggan: In Peace and in War (Dublin: Blackwater, 1994). Tom Barry (1897-1980) is another local hero who might abide our question. In the War of Independence, as he recounts in his long-selling Guerilla Days in Ireland (Dublin: Irish Press, 1949; republished by Anvil Books 1993 and Mercier Press 2013) his unit shot dead sixteen civilians accused of informing in the first six months of 1921, nine of whom were Protestants. However, he assures us, “the majority of the West Cork Protestants lived at peace throughout the entire struggle and were not interfered with by the IRA.” His unit also carried out reprisal killings of captured British soldiers in response to the execution of IRA Volunteers, a situation immortalized in Frank O’Connor’s chilling story of 1931, “Guests of the Nation.” “Barry would assert in later life that he opposed both the 1930s bombing campaign in England and IRA contacts with Nazi Germany. In fact, in January 1937 he had taken a trip to Germany seeking German support, which was assured to him subject to the condition that the IRA limit its actions to British military installations once war was declared. Financing was to be arranged through the Clann na Gael in the USA. The Army Convention in April 1938 adopted Seán Russell's S-Plan instead. Barry resigned as chief of staff as a result, but remained in contact with German agents at least to February 1939” (Wikipedia).

Moral Theology Between Justice and Suicide

Moral theology, though pursued with integrity by the participants in its debates, was inevitably exploited by political agents both in 1917-23 and in 1981. Catholic priests urged prisoners in Mountjoy to end their hunger strike, using the arguments against suicide. Todd Andrews (1901-1985) recalled: “I had a visit from the prison chaplain… he warned me that I was wilfully endangering my life which was an immoral act totally forbidden by the Commandments.… The chaplain was doing the dirty work required by his British employers” (C. S. Andrews). Some moral theologians stretched the principle of double effect to cover hunger strikes, Like the maiden who leaps from a tower to avoid a fate worse than death, a hunger striker is not directly willing his own death but some other end. This proportionalist reasoning seems to have seduced Bishop Cohalan in his earlier phase. But the moral prohibition of suicide proves a rather durable objection, for we meet it again in a letter from Cardinal Basil Hume to Bishop Edward Daly of Derry in 1981: “a hunger strike to death is a form of violence to one’s self and violence leads to violence.” After Bobby Sands’ death the Irish Bishops stated that “there is some dispute about whether or not political hunger striking is suicide, or more precisely, about the circumstances in which it is suicide.” In both periods the suicide theme became a rabbit-hole or a quagmire. Theologian Maria Power remarks that in 1981 the Church “needed to create a balance between its teaching and prophetic functions. When it came to the hunger strikes, the church didn’t achieve the balance necessary. It became side-tracked by points of moral theology regarding the issue of suicide, and in doing so allowed these to obscure the real issue of justice.” But did justice obviously require that perpetrators of terrorist acts be given political status? And again, the “real issue” may lie in the fanatical theology of the hunger strikers, which the focus on suicide has the slight merit of partially deflating. But it is true that Irish bishops generally have made too much of moral theology and canon law, at the expense of theological imagination.

The debate on the moral issue a century back includes some sparring between Canon John Waters, chaplain at Mountjoy Prison (he accompanied Kevin Barry to the scaffold), and Maynooth professor Patrick Cleary (1886-1970), who as an early member of the Columban Missionaries was to become Bishop of Nancheng in China. Cleary warns the Canon “that no man should be allowed to fling about the epithets ‘suicide’ and ‘criminal’ without proving to the hilt that he is justified in doing so.” A hunger strike may be not only licit but obligatory: “if a big national issue is at stake, which would be very materially benefited by a strong protest against injustice, and which, on the other hand, would be seriously compromised by even an apparent admission of guilt, it would seem that in these circumstances disobedience might be not only a right but even an obligation.” So sacred is the obligation that the principle of double effect easily takes care of the incidental damage inflicted on himself by the prisoner: “It may be that incidentally the same act may result in the death of the striker: the principle is conserved not by the death but by the refusal to acknowledge the prison chains.” Brendan O Cathaoir says that Cleary “defended Terence MacSwiney theologically during his 74 day hunger strike. Dr Cleary supported the hunger strike as a protest against British policy, but not to death.” But in the essay quoted he does defend the strike unto death, and rejects Canon Waters’ moral distinction between the “limited, non-fatal strike” and the fatal one and his claim that “whilst the danger which results from temporary abstinence is indirect that which results from continued abstinence becomes direct.” A Jesuit theologian, Patrick J. Gannon, wrote: “No hungerstriker aims at death.... His object is to bring the pressure of public opinion to bear upon an unjust aggressor.... There is nothing here of the mentality of suicide.”

Canon Waters saw the Mountjoy hunger strikers as emboldened by theologians’ assurances of the legitimacy of their action. Harried bishops, such as John Vaughan, auxiliary bishop of Salford, yearned for a clear determination from the Vatican, a Roma locuta est moment, but it was not forthcoming, and the morality of the hunger strike remains murky to this day. Perhaps there are transgressive and subversive actions that cannot be mapped unambiguously by the moralist, and that it is of their essence to remain disturbingly unmapped. One thinks of Kierkegaard’s “teleological suspension of the ethical” or even of Luther’s words to Melanchthon: pecca fortiter, sed crede fortius (sin strongly, but believe more strongly). Such is the fringe region into which hunger strikes take us, and it is one that can never be clarified or normalized in the light of common day. Gannon took a bold step in this direction: “Sincere good faith redeems from guilt an act that may perhaps harmonise but ill with the divine law. That the Irish hunger-strikers are in this disposition is too evident to need elaboration.”

In other religious traditions too, self-immolation may inspire awe, but it is not canonized as a normal ethical action. The spate of self-immolations by Tibetan monks since 1998 was denounced by lamas and also by western Buddhists, but not by the Dalai Lama, whose followers at Dharmasala, [who] insist that ‘what qualifies the violence of the suicidal act is its motivation. If you commit suicide because of your personal lot, that can be considered violence; but if you commit suicide in the name of the freedom of six million people, then it is not violence.’At the Rinzai Zen monastery, Zenryûji, I saw a monument to the wartime self-sacrifice of the Kamikaze pilots, also admired by Donald Trump; but who would dare raise the principles of their action into a universal moral imperative? How free and voluntary was this sacrifice? The young men, even if sustained by fanaticism and esprit de corps, were pawns in a military strategy (the same may be true of the 1981 Long Kesh strikers). The monks who burnt themselves in Vietnam had American imitators: Alice Herz, aged 82, in Detroit on 16 March 1965; Norman Morrison, a Quaker, outside the Pentagon on 2 November; Roger Allen La Port outside the UN building in New York on 10 November; Florence Beaumont in Los Angeles on 15 October 1967. On 19 January 1969, the Czech student Jan Palach immolated himself in protest at Soviet repression, and on 13 January 1998 Alfredo Ormando inflicted fatal burns on himself in St Peter’s Square in protest against church homophobia. The Vatican comment can be summed up in the words, “Quid ad nos?” (Mt 27:4). Did these expensive gestures, now forgotten, make a deep impression on anyone? Self-immolation easily misfires and is dismissed as futile. If its aim is not well thought out or if its audience is misjudged it can become a grisly farce, as with the seppuku of novelist Mishima Yukio (1925-1970). Today hunger striking seems to have become a routine form of protest, carried out with the deftness of Mahatma Gandhi, whose numerous hunger strikes were mostly relatively short fasts. Consider Olan Horne, Massachusetts, who vowed to “stop eating until the Vatican acknowledges it received pleas for help from local families riven by clergy sexual abuse.” He fast lasted less than nearly a week, and received no Vatican notice. “This wasn't about me killing myself,” he said. “I had the ability to not eat for a week.” Or consider Fr Gary Graf, Chicago, who, with the blessing of Archbishop Blaise Cupich, embarked on a hunger strike on behalf of Dreamers (undocumented immigrants brought to the US as children). “Yes, it’s dramatic,” he explained; “It’s a way in which we pray for our political leaders and invite them to do their jobs.” A strong man, Graf could sustain his six week fast, but without the threat of dying the hunger strike becomes almost an athletic feat. Refashioned as an approved symbolic gesture, a spiritual exercise, it scarcely troubles impervious state authorities. One recalls that the Church reduced the ancient Irish custom of fasting against a debtor to “a ritual hunger strike that began at sundown and ended at sunrise.” The hunger-strike unto death is also a cultic sacrificial ritual, which 1. “makes a virtue of necessity,” as a weapon of the powerless; 2. “it can demonstrate legitimacy,” establishing “the importance and truth of a cause”; 3. “it flatters the followers of a cause by linking them with the heroic”; 4. “the cult caters for the needs of machismo and masochism,” giving Catholic asceticism and glorification of suffering an unorthodox twist. On this last point psychoanalysis finds an ample field of application, from Alfred Adler on “the masculine protest” to Freud and Theodor Reik on the dynamics of masochism. That no deep study on these lines exists suggests that the whole area is surrounded by a taboo, as if it were an untouchable sacral action.

[For a critique of the Provisional IRA as the chief agent of the Troubles, whose campaign of terror aborted the progressive movements of hte 1960s, see Liam Kennedy, Who Was Responsible for the Troubles}? The Northern Ireland Conflict (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020). Such books are no doubt still seen as traiterous by bien-pensant IRA sympathizers even though Islamist atrocities have robbed terrorism of much of its charm.]

Conclusion

In the vitriolic arguments kindled by Irish Republican violence, the Irish Catholic Church is often denounced from both sides, either as playing footsie with the gunmen, or as siding with the authorities in an opportunistic way. From this little survey, it seems to me that the Church has been divided and undecided at many junctures in the history, and that there has been no settled policy either for or against the Republican “cause.” Church leaders can always be relied on to denounce unjust violence and to uphold the sacredness of human life. In the Troubles they failed to produce a coherent and nuanced vision of the situation, but oscillated between abstract denunciations of violence and empathy not only with its victims but with its perpetrators. It did not emerge from the period with its moral authority enhanced, and its role in the Good Friday Agreement does not seem to have been a key one. In the 1920s similar division and oscillation may be observed. In both periods this allowed perpetrators of violence to dismiss church authorities or to hear them selectively. This is a sad and disappointing conclusion, but after all the entire chronicle of Irish political violence, much as we have tried to glorify it in song and story (and film), is a sad and disappointing one. That is why the Irish Republic has been gradually reinforcing alternative foundations for its identity, with a focus on literary and musical culture, European connections, soft power, and a broader and more disinterested view of the entire Irish past. Whatever renewal the Church can expect will be contingent on its creative engagement with this emergent post-ideological Ireland.

 

[Forthcoming with documentation in a volume edited by Dermot Keogh on international reactions to the events in Ireland a century ago.]