Oasis

Oasis Journal (from Cardinal Scola's Oasis Foundation) is a real find. It's a great read and it's also a great-looking journal. This is one that looks good on the shelf (and off the shelf too).

The current issue deals with some important issues which I'll return to in another post, but you can also read at least some of the Education issue here.

The Way of Beauty

Another magazine which has some very interesting articles is Faith. The May and June edition, for example, has this fascinating article by James MacMillan in which he draw attention to the resources available here.

There's also an article by Dudley Plunkett on The Via Pulchritudinis: Beauty and the New Evangelisation which draws attention to this document from the Pontifical Council for Culture on The Via Pulchritudinis: Privileged Pathway for Evangelisation and Dialogue. There are lots of interesting passages but these two seemed of particular interest (though the translation isn't great for the first one):

To travel the way of beauty implies educating the youth for beauty, helping them develop a critical spirit to discern the various offerings of media culture, and aid them shape their senses and their character to grow and lead into true maturity. Is not "kitsch culture" only a typical outcry of those living in fear of responding to the call to undergo a profound transformation?

and,

It is a matter of presenting with a language that speaks and is pleasing to our contemporaries and using the most apt means the precious witness given by the Mother of God, the martyrs and the saints who have followed Christ in a particularly "attractive" manner. Much is being done in catechetical programmes to let the extraordinary lives of the saints be discovered. It is clear today that, for young people, saints are fascinating—think of Francis of Assisi and José of Anchieta, Juan Diego and Theresa of the Child Jesus, Rose of Lima and Bakhita, Kisito and Maria Goretti, Father Kolbe and Mother Theresa and the theatrical works, films, comic strips, recitals, concerts and muscials that re-create their stories. Their example calls each Christian to be a pilgrim on the pathway of beauty, truth, good, in journeying to the Celestial Jerusalem where we will contemplate the beauty of God in a relation full of love, face-to-face. "There, we will rest and we will see; we will see and we will love, we will love and we will praise. Such will be the end, without end."[40]

An appropriate education helps the faithful grow in the life of prayer of adoration and worship, and fuller participation in the truth to a liturgy lived in the fullness of beauty which immerses the faithful in the mystery of faith. At the same time as re-educating the faithful to marvel at the thinkgs that God works in our lives, it is also necessary to give back to the liturgy its true "splendour", all its dignity and authentic beauty, by rediscovering the authentic sense of Christian mystery, and forming the faithful so that they can enter into the meaning and beauty of the celebrated mystery and live it authentically.

Liturgy is not what man does, but is a divine work. The faithful need to be helped to perceive that the act of worship is not the fruit of activity, a product, a merit, a gain, but is the expression of a mystery, of something that cannot be entirely understood but that needs to be received rather than conceptualised. It is an act entirely free from considerations of efficiency. The attitude of the believer in the liturgy is marked by its capacity to receive, a condition of the progress of the spiritual life. This attitude is no longer spontaneous in a culture where rationalism seeks to direct everything, even our most intimate sentiments.

No less important is the promotion of sacred art to accompany aptly the celebration of the mysteries of the faith, to give beauty back to ecclesiastical buildings and liturgical objects. In this way they will be welcoming, and above all able to convey the authentic meaning of Christian liturgy and encourage full participation of the faithful in the divine mysteries, following the wish often expressed during the Synod of Bishops on the Eucharist.

Certainly the churches must be aesthetically beautiful and well decorated, the liturgies accompanied by beautiful chants and good music, the celebrations dignified and preaching well prepared, but it is not this in itself which is the via pulchritudinis or that which changes us. These are just conditions that facilitate the action of the grace of God. Therefore the faithful need to be educated to pay attention not merely to the aesthetic dimension of the liturgy, however beautiful it may be, but also to understand that the Litrugy is a divine act that is not determined by an ambiance, a climate or even by rubrics, for it is the mystery of faith celebrated in Church.

Two interesting articles

There have been two interesting articles recently about faith in fiction. The first one, by Paul Elie in The New York Times, raises lots of questions and draws attention to a few books that are certainly worth reading.

The second, which is also fascinating, is a response by Gregory Wolfe in The Wall Street Journal.

Though both authors make valuable points, they also both focus on Anglophone (and mainly American) literature. That's fine up to a point but, I would argue, the picture looks very different if you widen the lens: Torgny Lindgren, Kyung Sook-Shin, Roger Bichelberger, Fan Wen, Uwem Akpan, Martin Mosebach ...

And that's just a few of the Catholics.

This Week's Catholic Herald

This week's Catholic Herald is definitely worth getting hold of. There is a fascinating interview with Walter Hooper, C.S. Lewis's personal assistant in the last months of the writer's life, and a good article on Jack Kerouac's rather tortured Catholicism.

However, that's not all. There's a great article by Edward Norman on why he has converted to Catholicism and an interesting series of articles on the documents of Vatican II.

Articles now available online

The Catholic Herald archive is now available free and online which means that all sorts of interesting articles and reviews are available without a subscription. It also means that three of my articles are now easier to access.

Click here for my review of Amy Hungerford's Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion Since 1960.

Click here for my article on the Chinese Prime Minister who became a Catholic Monk and Priest.

Click here for my article on adoption. (Not strictly relevant, I realise, but there you go).

The Distortion of Language

There is an extremely interesting article by Neil Scolding, Professor of Clinical Neurosciences at Bristol University, in the current (April 2012) edition of Standpoint.

I won't do Professor Scolding the disservice of summarising his article, which deals with abortion and "after-birth abortion" (or "infanticide"), but my eye was caught by his comments about "The distortion of language" and, in particular, the use of terms such as "non-persons" and "after-birth abortion".

It is very easy to shy away from the discussion of this sort of language in the classroom (unless we are studying 1984) but there is no intrinsic reason why we should do so. Language change is a perfectly valid topic for discussion and the horrifying manipulation of the language by advocates of infanticide should shock us into action.

Professor Scolding's articles are always worth reading - click here or here for articles about adult stem cell research - or you can hear him talking about the Day for Life here. For a more personal discussion of his life, work and faith click here.

The Guardian Style Guide

The Guardian Style Guide is very useful but, as The Guardian would be the first to admit, it's not perfect. It has some very useful advice for budding journalists and, indeed, for all writers and is well worth using in the classroom but it also has one or two blindspots.

However, I did wonder what it had to say about the Catholic Church and this is what I found:

Catholic church

but if you mean Roman Catholic, say so

Which didn't seem very helpful. So I looked up Roman Catholic and this is what I found:  

Roman Catholic

The archbishop of Birmingham, Cardiff, Glasgow, Liverpool, St Andrew's, Southwark and Westminster: it is not normally necessary to say Roman Catholic (as there is no Anglican equivalent). 

The Roman Catholic bishop of Aberdeen, Argyll, Lancaster, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Shrewsbury (for all of which there are Anglican bishops). 

Unless obviously Roman Catholic from the context, say the Roman Catholic bishop of Brentwood, Clifton, Dunkeld, Galloway, Hexham and Newcastle, Leeds, Menevia, Middlesbrough, Motherwell, Northampton, Nottingham, Paisley and Salford. 

In a UK setting use Roman Catholic in describing Roman Catholic organisations and individuals and wherever an Anglican could argue ambiguity (eg "the Catholic church"). But Catholic is enough in most overseas contexts, eg Ireland, France, Italy, Latin America

But I suppose we should be grateful for small mercies. In 1928 neither "Catholic" nor "Roman Catholic" made it into the guide at all.

Evelyn Waugh and the Mass; OUP and the Catholic Tradition

There have been some interesting reviews in the last two editions of The Catholic Herald. In the December edition, Joseph Pearce wrote a review article on the updated edition of A Bitter Trial, Evelyn Waugh's responses to the liturgical innovations of his last years. As I wrote last year, Waugh now seems remarkably prescient and this book sets out his views admirably.


And then, in the Christmas edition, Aidan Nichols favourably reviewed a new anthology of English Catholic writing, published by Oxford University Press and edited by John Morrill, John Saward and Michael Tomko: Firmly I Believe and Truly. 

This looks like a great book and my only reservation is the start date: 1483. I understand the practical constraints - the anthology runs to over 700 pages as it is - but, nonetheless, many centuries of Catholic England and many great Catholic writers go unexplored in this, as in so many other, anthologies. But I mustn't be churlish: this looks as though it's a must-have anthology.

Image Journal: Poems for the Season

Image Journal is an interesting publication with an interesting blog. If you're looking for some festive poems they have some good recommendations here.

Teen Magazines

Teen magazines are really not my thing but, as these things go, t! magazine is much better than most. As well as all the usual articles about fashion, make-up and Tom Daley, there is also an article in the current edition about World Youth Day and another about Mary's Meals. Perhaps as important is what is not there. The editors are keen to leave parenting to parents.

The magazine also runs journalism courses for students. These run at various points during the year and have to be paid for but they sound as if they could be interesting.

Catholicising the Curriculum - Part 2

The second part of my article on Catholicising the English Curriculum is now available online. The first part is available from the link posted here. I hope some of the ideas might prove interesting.

You can download the whole magazine here.

Bringing Catholic Culture Back Into the English Curriculum

I have just had an article published in Faith Magazine on 'Bringing Catholic Culture Back into the English Curriculum'. This is the fullest statement of my ideas to have appeared in print so far and I hope it helps provoke a debate. Any thoughts gratefully received.

When Historical Memory Fails

There is a slightly bizarre quotation from Stephen Layton in today's Telegraph: "when it comes to choral singing," he claims, "we are the best in the world, with a tradition stretching back to the Reformation". Is he really claiming that there was no decent choral singing in England before the Reformation? 


It seems hard to believe but we see much the same with literature. As far as many schools and exam boards are concerned we have a great tradition stretching back to the Reformation. But before that English Literature wasn't worth bothering with. And anyway it's too difficult to read. And we weren't taught it ourselves at university.


Fortunately, there are some good resources out there to help us cope with this failure of historical memory.

American Literature and Religion

Here's my review of Amy Hungerford's Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion since 1960 (Princeton University Press, 2010), which appeared in last week's Catholic Herald:

It is often assumed, in this country at least, that the age of great Christian literature is over. What we have instead, the argument goes, are books which either ignore religion completely, mock it mercilessly, or treat it as an irrational threat.

It is also assumed that the situation is quite different in the US where affirmations of religious belief are all but obligatory for politicians and where highly respected authors such as John Updike have espoused religious belief.

However, as Amy Hungerford demonstrates in Postmodern Belief, religious assumptions are also often underarticulated in contemporary American literature and in secular academic discourse.

What Hungerford, who is professor of English at Yale University, attempts to do in her fascinating book is to bring these basic assumptions out into the open in order to examine just how literature and religion have intersected over the last 50 years.

Her book is not, as the rather misleading title suggests, a study of postmodernism. Indeed, part of her purpose in writing is to move beyond postmodern interpretations of religion and literature. Nor is it a comprehensive survey. Hungerford is quite open about the fact that she omits as much as she includes.

Nonetheless, Hungerford still deals with an impressive range of writers, from Salinger and Ginsberg to Cormac McCarthy and Toni Morrison and what she has to say about them is incisive and often original.

As the list of authors above suggests, she writes mainly about novelists who have emerged from within the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Indeed, the absence of any discussion of Islam is one the book's most surprising features, not least because of 9/11's continuing reverberations in American literature.

Of most interest to readers of The Catholic Herald will probably be her chapter on what she calls, after Don DeLillo, "The Latin Mass of Language" in which she argues convincingly that "DeLillo ultimately transfers a version of mysticism from the Catholic context into the literary one, and that he does so through the model of the Latin mass."

With a good many qualifications, Hungerford argues that DeLillo is a "religious writer" by paying particular attention to what is often regarded as his masterpiece, Underworld.

Clearly DeLillo is not a religious writer in any traditional sense of the term but, in Hungerford's view, the way his use of language becomes infused with religious meaning derives, at least in part, from his Catholic upbringing.

Indeed, Catholics may be heartened to discover that "one of the surprising findings of this book ... is the importance of the Roman Catholic religious imagination in the literature of the period, even - or rather, especially, outside the body of 'Catholic novels' by believers such as Flannery O'Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, Walker Percy, or Graham Greene."

Hungerford seeks to overturn common assumptions about post-Protestant secularity by drawing attention not only to the Catholic backgrounds of J.D. Salinger, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison and others but also to the presence of many Catholic writers and critics in the New Critical movement and in the Creative Writing Programs which derived their modus operandi from it. 

However, there are limits to the satisfaction Catholics might feel about these reinterpretations. In the very first sentence of the book, for example, Hungerford declares that "this book is about belief and meaninglessness, and what it might mean to believe in meaninglessness."

Her central argument is that, as belief has been emptied of doctrinal content, not just former Catholics like DeLillo but American authors in general have invested language itself with religious meaning. Although she does write, extremely interestingly, about Marilynne Robinson, for example, Hungerford is not primarily interested in the work of believers.

She is a highly sympathetic critic but she is ultimately more concerned, as she explains in a personal conclusion, with the question of how we can "be post-religious and still have literature worth venerating". 

Much of the literature she discusses, therefore, is post-Christian and most of the authors she writes about have only the most tangential of links to the Catholic church, being, for the most part, either indifferent or lapsed.

However, it is arguable that by writing about practising Catholic authors only in passing, Hungerford leaves some fundamental questions about the relationship of literature and religion in America unaddressed, let alone unanswered.

By beginning her analysis in 1960, on the eve of the Second Vatican Council, she also effectively concedes the case for a hermeneutic of discontinuity and so perhaps fails to give full credit to the ongoing influence of orthodox believers such as Flannery O'Connor and orthodox beliefs in the post-conciliar literary world.

Nevertheless, it is easy to indulge in wishful thinking. Clearly Vatican II, or at least contemporary interpretations of Vatican II, was a cataclysmic event not only in the Church but also in literary America and authors like DeLillo were deeply affected by it.

What Hungerford doesn't touch upon, and what, to be fair, may only become clear over the course of the next decade or more, is what difference the re-evaluation of Vatican II associated most strongly with Joseph Ratzinger both before and after he became pope will transform American (and other) attitudes to literature and the arts.

Much as I enjoyed Postmodern Belief, the book which deals with those questions is one I am really looking forward to reading.

A few ideas

I am currently working on a more detailed article about Catholic English teaching but here are my ideas in miniature, in an article for 'Networking - Catholic Education Today', Volume 11, Issue 3, February 2010.

Creating a Catholic English Curriculum

In an important booklet published by the Centre for Research and Development in Catholic Education (CRDCE), four authors, including the editor of this magazine, asked whether there “can be a Catholic School curriculum?”[i] Given that their answer was “yes” (though they were more guarded and nuanced than my one-word summary suggests), what I want to do in this article is begin to map out what the basis of a Catholic English curriculum might be.

Neither I nor any of the authors of the CRDCE booklet wish to create an English Catholic ghetto, nor would we be able to even if we wanted to. The constraints of the National Curriculum and the requirements of public examinations ensure that we cannot approach the teaching of English in schools from a narrowly confessional perspective.

However, practical considerations apart, there are several other reasons why a Catholic English curriculum must necessarily focus on more than just Catholic literature. First and foremost, as John Henry Newman recognised 150 years ago, “English Literature will ever have been Protestant.”[ii] Whether we like it or not, the fact is that most English literature is not Catholic and never has been.

For three hundred years or more, Britain was solidly Protestant and its literature reflects this basic fact. Nonetheless, as G.K. Chesterton once wrote in a typically forthright riposte to Newman’s essay, “The name of Chaucer is alone enough to show that English literature was English a long time before it was Protestant.”[iii]

Indeed, it is arguable that one of the great weaknesses of the English curriculum in schools today is its almost total neglect of any pre-Shakespearean literature. A starting point for the revival of an English Catholic curriculum, therefore, might be the recognition that English Literature began some thousand years before 1564. I am not suggesting that our students should study Old English (though it’s not as daft an idea as it might at first sound) but I am suggesting that there is a place in the curriculum for some of the classics of our pre-Protestant past.

We should not dismiss the work of Catholic authors simply because they wrote along time ago. Pope Benedict was not talking about English literature when he described the hermeneutic of continuity but his insights can clearly be applied in the English classroom.

Some may baulk at the idea of teaching such apparently inaccessible texts but I would argue that Old English and Middle English literature is no more inaccessible than Shakespeare, especially when it is taught in translation and in conjunction with more recent works. Kevin Crossley-Holland, J.R.R. Tolkien and Seamus Heaney, in their very different ways, have all shown how the world of Anglo-Saxon literature can be revived in a form that is fully comprehensible to modern readers.

Such literature does not need to be taught in isolation. The Middle English ‘Pearl’, for example, could be taught in conjunction with Tolkien’s ‘Leaf by Niggle’ while, for the more daring, ‘Piers Plowman’ could be taught alongside Derek Walcott’s ‘The Schooner Flight’.

A thematic approach is also possible. An interesting scheme of work about the afterlife could easily be constructed around Claudio’s speech from ‘Measure for Measure’[iv], the last chapter of Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in Ten and a Half Chapters, Miroslav Holub’s ‘Death in the Evening’[v], Nina Cassian’s ‘Ghost’[vi], passages from the Book of Revelation, as well as some of the Old and Middle English classics.

Part of the problem, of course, is teaching the teachers. How many, I wonder, have studied Middle English or Old English literature at university, even in translation? If the Reformation is the starting point for the teachers then what hope do the children have?

Newman’s assertion is not the final word then, especially as we are now more aware than he perhaps was of the ideological judgments and prejudices that went into the forming of the English literary canon. We have rightly recovered the female and non-English voice in English literature, but we have been slower to re-evaluate the place of Catholic literature in the English canon.

This is not to say that no work has been done in this field. Literary scholars such as Alison Shell, for example, have started to demonstrate the fundamental strength of post-Reformation Catholic literature in much the same way that Eamon Duffy and others have enabled us to see the fundamental strength of the pre-Reformation Church in England.[vii]

Some teachers may feel uneasy about this rewriting of literary history but the point is that we filter what we teach already. The most blatant anti-Catholic diatribes are already expunged from the curriculum, if not from the history of literature. Nobody teaches Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chesse or Thomas Dekker’s The Whore of Babylon any more.

Indeed, one could go further and argue that Donne, Herbert and, above all, Shakespeare are taught, at least in part, because their religion is, or appears to be, a thoroughly modern, reasonable one. Their poetry conjures up what C.S. Lewis once called “a sweet, Protestant world”[viii], a world apparently free from religious intolerance and bigotry.

By contrast, authors like Thomas More and Robert Southwell – St Thomas More and St Robert Southwell – don’t get a look in because, through no fault of their own, they remind us of precisely such an era. Our English curricula are weaker without them.

Far from imposing our views on our students, we are failing in our duty if we do not teach them to cast a critical eye over the English literary canon. If we teach Shakespeare and the Metaphysical poets then surely we should also teach More and Southwell? If we teach Milton and Wordsworth then surely we should look at the work of Dryden and Pope too? If we are going to teach Hardy, George Eliot and the Brontës, surely we should find some place, at least in passing, for Newman?

Newman’s wise words in The Idea of a University remind us that we cannot simply replace the Protestant past with a Catholic one. However, the truth is that we are much more likely to go along with the marginalisation of our Catholic authors than we are to overturn the English curriculum altogether.

Fortunately, the Catholic English teacher’s task becomes much easier when we reach the 20^th century. The children’s fiction of Rumer Godden and Frank Cottrell Boyce, the poetry of Michael Symmons Roberts and Les Murray, the short stories of Flannery O’Connor and G.K. Chesterton are all readily accessible. We have Catholic literature in abundance and do not need to restrict ourselves to the novels of Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene.

Nor, indeed, do we need to restrict ourselves to literature written in England. One simple way of reviving the Catholic English curriculum is to draw upon Catholic literature from around the world. There may not be much teaching of the Nobel Prize-winning Catholics, Sigrid Undset, François Mauriac and Heinrich Böll, in our schools but there is no reason why they should be ignored entirely.

However, there are plenty of other writers to choose from. Uwem Akpan, a Nigerian Jesuit, for example, has swept all before him with his debut collection of short stories, Say You’re One of Them.[ix] With the recent endorsement of Oprah Winfrey, his star is sure to rise still further.

Another quite different Catholic author is Willi Chen, a Trinidadian of Chinese descent, who is a baker, painter and church designer, as well as an author. Chen may not have the same range as Akpan but his short stories could certainly find a place in any school curriculum. The Christmas stories in Chutney Power and Other Stories[x], for instance, offer a wonderful Caribbean alternative to yet more versions of A Christmas Carol.

We don’t need to restrict ourselves to English-language authors, though their works are more readily available. Asian Catholics have suffered from severe publishing neglect but the works of the Indonesian priest, novelist, architect and political activist, Yusuf Bilyarta Mangunwijaya, and the Japanese novelist, Ayako Sono, are well worth seeking out.

Japan also offers some fine non-fiction. In The Bells of Nagasaki, for example, the radiologist, Takashi Nagai, describes the moments immediately before and the days after the dropping of the atom bomb on Japan’s most Catholic city.[xi] There is plenty of Catholic literature out there if we want to teach it.

However, we cannot allow ourselves the comfortable illusion that all is well elsewhere. As Newman wrote in that same essay, “other literatures have disadvantages of their own … One literature may be better than another, but bad will be the best, when weighed in the balance of truth and morality.”[xii] Catholic literature from the rest of the world can complement literature written within the narrow confines of our country but it can never entirely replace it.

I have been writing so far as though English and English Literature were synonymous. However, it is quite clear that there is much more to the English teacher’s job than the teaching of literature. Whether there can be a specifically Catholic approach to English language teaching is much less self-evident.

Our starting point needs to be an awareness that language, and the teaching of language, is never a neutral activity. Nowhere has this been more apparent than in recent debates about the translation of the liturgy into English. Language is contentious, which is why part of the English teacher’s job is to make students aware of its persuasive and propagandist power.

It is easy to discuss jargon in class, to have a lesson on euphemisms, to expose military obfuscation, but perhaps we should also not be afraid to venture into the realm of ethical debate. “Assisted dying”, “dignity”, “terminations”, “emergency contraception”: all these, and very many more, are highly loaded terms which are too often taken at face value. As Catholics in an overwhelmingly secular culture, we need to protect our students from insidious misuse of the language.

There is more to the English language, though, than the power to deceive. I once attended a Welsh evensong at which Rowan Williams preached (in English). He spoke about the Tower of Babel and endangered languages, arguing that the glory of the God is so great that no single language can do justice to Him.

He was speaking about so-called minority languages but his argument holds true even if we limit ourselves to English. The full resources of the English language are not enough to describe the wonder of God and his creation but, if we help our students widen their vocabulary and broaden the range of their expressive powers, we can at least make a start.

There is, then, a great deal more to the Catholic English curriculum, I would argue, than “some critical enjoyment of Christian and catholic poetry and novels”.[xiii] Indeed, there is more to it than the study of Catholic literature and the development of a Catholic approach to English language teaching. Ultimately what is required is the development of a Catholic imagination.

It is entirely possible, for example, to study Chaucer with a 20^th century mindset. The Chaucerian narrator so easily becomes a proto-Protestant, a Lutheran looking for a church door on which to pin his theses, rather than a devout pilgrim who was able to poke fun at abuses in the Church because he took the place of the Church in life for granted. It is easy to read Hopkins’ poetry for the music and to ignore the theology. It is easy to buckle under the secular, liberal consensus.

However, if we take our Catholic English heritage seriously, if we allow Catholicism to creep out from the RS classrooms, if we develop a Catholic approach to the language itself, we can help our students develop a Catholic imagination that will serve them well for the rest of their lives.

If we cherish our faith, we cannot but allow it to enter into every aspect of our lives and that includes our schools and our curricula. It will take more than a short article to tease out exactly what that might mean in practice but I offer these brief thoughts, if nothing else, as a means by which to continue the debate.

---

[i] Can There be a Catholic School Curriculum: Renewing the Debate (Centre for Research and Development in Catholic Education: 2007).

[ii] John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University (Longmans, Green and Co: 1947), 272 [First published, 1852].

[iii] G.K. Chesterton, The Thing (Sheed & Ward: 1929), 236.

[iv] III.i.

[v] Mirsolav Holub, Selected Poems (Penguin, 1967).

[vi] Nina Cassian, Life Sentences: Selected Poems (W. W. Norton & Company, 1997).

[vii] Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy, and the English Literary Imagination: 1558–1660 (Cambridge University Press: 1999); Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altar: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580 (Yale University Press, 1994).

[viii] C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength (Pan Books, 1983), 20.

[ix] Uwem Akpan, Say You’re One of Them (Abacus, 2008).

[x] Willi Chen, Chutney Power and other stories (Macmillan, 2006).

[xi] Takashi Nagai, The Bells of Hiroshima (Kodansha Europe, 2007).

[xii] John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University (Longmans, Green and Co: 1947), 273-274.

[xiii] Can There be a Catholic School Curriculum: Renewing the Debate (Centre for Research and Development in Catholic Education: 2007), 35.