Theology and Ethics
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Being saved and being wrong (Alison, 1999)

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Are you saved? The only real answer to the question is not to answer, not to pre-empt the richness of the final judgement, when the astounding diversity of the wedding banquet of the Lamb will be seen, and we may even be surprised at detecting something of our hand in some of the minor decorations. It is rather to allow oneself to be sucked into that strange, dislocated story which starts with the realisation of being wrong, and patiently makes use of the stories, signs, examples, to nourish a creative imagination. It is this story, the story of how we became active participants in the subversion of the monotonous story of this world, that was opened up by Jesus’ death and Resurrection. This story is what we called the Church, and it is why salvation is intrinsically linked to the Church with its texts and sacraments. It is a dizzy story, to whose coat-tails we cling with a certain lightness of heart, because we have so little idea of what it might mean creatively to forge a story that has no end.

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Girard’s breakthrough (Alison, 1996)

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A series of coincidences in early 1985 led me to René Girard’s Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World. As I staggered through its third part I found myself being read like an open book, feeling like the woman at the well of Samaria, as she returned to her compatriots to say: “Come and meet someone who has told me everything I ever did”. Eleven years on, I am still struggling to put into words the fecundity of what continues to be a completely unexpected and extraordinary access to Christ that is absolutely concentric with, and illuminating of, the central tenets of the Catholic faith.

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Excerpt from Knowing Jesus, regarding “justification by faith” (Alison, 1993)

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There is one further dimension to the presence of the crucified and risen Jesus I would like to bring out, and that is a dimension which cannot be separated from the dimension with which we have just been dealing. At the same time as the crucified and risen Lord is the foundation of the new Israel, so it is his crucified and risen presence that is the basis of the holiness of this new people. What is traditionally called ‘justification by faith,’ is inseparable from the universality of the new community, or society, that the victim founds. There is no grace, no faith, that is not by that very fact immediately related to the new reconciled community. The new Israel is not tacked on to the making of humans holy, as an additional extra. Making us holy is identical with making us part of the new Israel of God.

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Sacrifice, Law & The Catholic Faith: Is Secularity Really the Enemy? (Alison, 2006)

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It is and always has been a proper part of the Catholic Faith, and the life of the Church, that it tends to generate a relatively benign secularity; that far from the “secular” being our “enemy”, it is in fact our “baby”. And a fragile baby, one whose birth and development is well worth protecting. Nowadays our contemporaries are inclined to use the word “religious” as though it were synonymous with the word “sacred”, and the word “secular” as though it were synonymous with “common”, “normal” or “profane”. Nevertheless, to regard those definitions as fixed is, I’m afraid, the result of a mixture of historical ignorance, cultural tone-deafness and the fact that thinking in dichotomies is a great deal easier than anything more subtle.

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On Helping the Faithful Negotiate Confusion: Homosexuality and the Church – Two Views (Alison 2007)

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I think this has come about because church authority has become aware that the advent of “matters gay” in recent years may not primarily centre on sexual ethics at all. Rather it concerns an emerging anthropological truth about a regular, normal and non-pathological variant within the human condition. In other words, it is not so much that the Church’s teaching about sexual ethics is being challenged by insufficiently heroic people, but the field of application of that teaching is being redefined by emerging reality. And of course it is proper to the Catholic faith, where Creation and Salvation are never to be completely separated, that it takes very seriously “what is” as informing “what should be” rather than trying to force “what is” to fit into an understanding of “what should be” derived from other sources.

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Halo Effect (Is.60:1-6; Ps. 72:1-7, 10-14; Eph. 3:1-12; Matt. 2:1-12) (Alison, 2007)

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We are used to the imagery of God communicating by God’s word, and so we think of our responses to God as aural: we listen. And obedience (from obaudiens) can be translated as “intense hearing.” Yet how much of the religion of ancient Israel was a priestly religion of presence! We forget that one of the central images of God’s communication in the scriptures is that of the shining face. From the priestly blessing of Numbers 6 to the continuous references in the psalms, it is expected that worshipers will see the radiance of God’s face, and that in its light they too will shine.

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Stretched Hearts (Is.:1-10; Ps. 146:5-10; Lk. 1:47-55; James 5:7-10; Matt. 11:2-11) (Alison, 2007)

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With each Sunday of Advent, it is as though the Spirit brings us deeper into the Presence by bringing us closer to having our feet on the ground, closer to the present, and closer to our own hearts. The divine Heart Surgeon is reconfiguring our desires so that we can inhabit both the Presence and the present. How else can we be made alive? This means learning how to long, how to hope and how to be vulnerable to failure. There is no coming without traveling this route. If we cannot be taken to the end of ourselves, stretched beyond our capacity to imagine a salvation, and have our longing forged against the hard anvil of apparent impossibility, then we are still wanting something that is a continuation of our selves, and not the Other who is coming in.

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Prodded to Life (Is. 11:1-10; Ps. 72:1-7, 18-19; Rom. 15:4-13; Matt. 3:1-12) (Alison, 2007)

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How is the Presence working on us? Once again the liturgy gives us three different prods into life. As the sound of portentous thunder begins to diminish, we are being trained to perceive a shape to the One who comes, a shape that is different from the one that our fantasies and our fears have constructed for us.

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Punctured (Alison, 2007)

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One of the things I love about the liturgical life of the church is the way that the Holy Spirit, quietly and gently, works on us. Through the texts and prayers set out each year in the lectionary the Spirit draws us ever more fully into the Presence. If we read the texts in a literalistic manner, it can sound as though week by week it is God who is undergoing change toward us. In fact, however, in the liturgy of the Presence it is we who are worked on through the scriptures and the prayers, we who get to be reconfigured and brought into the life of the changeless One.
At Advent, it begins again: the cycle by which God breaks through the clutter of our lives to announce to us that the Presence is very near, irrupting into our midst, hauling us out of our myths, our half-truths and the ways we have settled for what is religious rather than what is holy, alive and real. So lest we be tempted to think that Advent is merely a religious warm-up for Christmas, let us see if we can allow ourselves to be brought near the cold-water spigot whose splashes can chasten us into reality.

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Risk and Fulfillment (Is. 63:7-9; Ps. 148; Heb.2:10-18; Matt. 2:13-23) (Alison, 2007)

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All of the Spirit’s labor–the pruning of our imagination, the background work on our expectations–comes to fruition on Christmas Day, when we are brought into the Presence. The virgin who for nine months has been weaving the veil of the temple out of the material of her own body sits in stupefied and exhausted silence. Following the line of her gaze toward the manger, we too “veiled in flesh, the Godhead see.” The angels sing the first Gloria, for where there is Presence, there too is praise: the two are inseparable. We too allow our ears, our voices and then our hearts to proclaim the Creator’s new mode of Presence among us. We are going to be inducted into lifelong praise.