Mathematics teaching in Scotland today

2003 ◽  
Vol 87 (509) ◽  
pp. 250-266
Author(s):  
Chris Pritchard

Home to just over five million souls, Scotland is the most sparsely populated part of Britain. The people are overwhelmingly white (some 98.7%) and English speaking. Levels of deprivation vary considerably across the country as a whole. Some 20% of the school population was entitled to free school meals in 1995, though the figure was twice as high in the City of Glasgow, where life expectancy is 10 years below that of affluent parts of the south of England. In July 1997 proposals were presented for the creation of a Scottish parliament. Whilst the Westminster parliament would ‘remain sovereign’, many powers would be devolved to Edinburgh, including those relating to virtually every aspect of education. So today, the Scottish Executive Education Department (or SEED) administers Scottish Executive policy for pre-school and school education in co-operation with local authorities that are responsible for providing school education in their areas. No less than 96% of youngsters are educated in state schools. Schools associated with religious groups including the Roman Catholic Church were incorporated into the state system in the 1920s. The annual cost of running the whole education system is a little under £5 billion or some 9% of Scottish GDP [1, p. 17].

1979 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 335-340
Author(s):  
C.M. Stafford Poole

Of all the communities and religious orders in the Roman Catholic church that are involved in missionary activity, the Congregation of the Mission, while one of the more extensive, is undoubtedly the least known. Founded in 1625 by Saint Vincent de Paul (1581-1660), its original purpose was the giving of parish missions in the de-Christianized rural areas of France. The rural missions remained a special concern of Saint Vincent's community and it was in this sense that the term “mission” was originally used. Prior to the French Revolution the term missionary was used almost exclusively of members of Saint Vincent's group. In the mid-eighteenth century they also came to be known as Lazarists, a name derived from their motherhouse, the famous Saint-Lazare. Though this name has been used in other countries, the Congregation of the Mission has come to be known by different names in different localities: for instance, Vincentians in the English-speaking world, Padres Paúles in the Spanish-speaking world, and Saint Vincent's Fathers in Nigeria.Reacting against the excessive esprit de corps of numerous religious groups of his time, Vincent de Paul decreed that the work of his missionaries should be without fanfare or publicity. He even forbade some of them from writing histories of the community lest this should lead to corporate pride. It was an unfortunate precedent. This tendency, plus a general lack of historical consciousness, has caused the work of the Congregation of the Mission to be unpublicized and unknown, even by the members themselves.


2013 ◽  
Vol 54 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 405-424
Author(s):  
Alina Nowicka -Jeżowa

Summary The article tries to outline the position of Piotr Skarga in the Jesuit debates about the legacy of humanist Renaissance. The author argues that Skarga was fully committed to the adaptation of humanist and even medieval ideas into the revitalized post-Tridentine Catholicism. Skarga’s aim was to reformulate the humanist worldview, its idea of man, system of values and political views so that they would fit the doctrine of the Roman Catholic church. In effect, though, it meant supplanting the pluralist and open humanist culture by a construct as solidly Catholic as possible. He sifted through, verified, and re-interpreted the humanist material: as a result the humanist myth of the City of the Sun was eclipsed by reminders of the transience of all earthly goods and pursuits; elements of the Greek and Roman tradition were reconnected with the authoritative Biblical account of world history; and man was reinscribed into the theocentric perspective. Skarga brought back the dogmas of the original sin and sanctifying grace, reiterated the importance of asceticism and self-discipline, redefined the ideas of human dignity and freedom, and, in consequence, came up with a clear-cut, integrist view of the meaning and goal of the good life as well as the proper mission of the citizen and the nation. The polemical edge of Piotr Skarga’s cultural project was aimed both at Protestantism and the Erasmian tendency within the Catholic church. While strongly coloured by the Ignatian spirituality with its insistence on rigorous discipline, a sense of responsibility for the lives of other people and the culture of the community, and a commitment to the heroic ideal of a miles Christi, taking headon the challenges of the flesh, the world, Satan, and the enemies of the patria and the Church, it also went a long way to adapt the Jesuit model to Poland’s socio-cultural conditions and the mentality of its inhabitants.


Author(s):  
Hiermonk Ioann ( Bulyko) ◽  

The Second Vatican Council was a unique event in the history of the Roman Catholic Church. Initiated by Pope John XXIII, it was intended to make the Roman Catholic Church more open to the contemporary society and bring it closer to the people. The principal aim of the council was the so called aggiornamento (updating). The phenomenon of updating the ecclesiastical life consisted in the following: on the one hand, modernization of the life of the Church and closer relations with the secular world; on the other hand, preserving all the traditions upon which the ecclesiastical life was founded. Hence in the Council’s documents we find another, French word ressourcement meaning ‘return to the origins’ based on the Holy Scripture and the works of the Church Fathers. The aggiornamento phenomenon emerged during the Second Vatican Council due to the movement within the Catholic Church called nouvelle theologie (French for “new theology”). Its representatives advanced the ideas that became fundamental in the Council’s decisions. The nouvelle theologie was often associated with modernism as some of the ideas of its representatives seemed to be very similar to those of modernism. However, what made the greatest difference between the two movements was their attitude towards the tradition. For the nouvelle theologie it was very important to revive Christianity in its initial version, hence their striving for returning to the sources, for the oecumenical movement, for better relations with non-Catholics and for liturgical renewal. All these ideas can be traced in the documents of the Second Vatican Council, and all this is characterized by the word aggiornamento.


1952 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-44

With the assistance of ten students and six priests over a period of 12 months, the head of the department of sociology at Loyola University of the South conducted a field study of the social actions of parishioners and clergy in a single Roman Catholic Church unit in the city of New Orleans. The methodology and conceptual framework of the analysis of action within the context of the social institution, viewed structurally and functionally, have been magnificently adhered to. Religious actions, conceived as such by the actors and by others who interpret their behavior, are the substance of this study in parochial sociology. Data were collected by patient observation of the many aspects of the detailed religious patterns of action in which Roman Catholics engage. These are, among others, the typical and atypical behavior associated with church attendance, the sacraments, retreats, missions, recruitment for the priesthood, special devotions and feast-days, and the observances relating to baptism, matrimony and death.


Author(s):  
Ralph Keen

Luther’s position on the duties of rulers to preserve social order and on the obligation of subjects to obey them for the sake of civil tranquility is scripturally grounded, principally in Romans 13:1–7, and presupposes an anthropology in which humans are so sinful as to need worldly government. The foundations of Luther’s thought about politics can be located in two sources: his doctrine of the Two Kingdoms and his understanding of the Pauline precept in Romans 13 to obey worldly authorities. Woven into each of these positions is a theological anthropology that holds that fallen humanity is too sinful to survive without divine aid. In the political realm, this aid takes the form of civil government; as a correlate, the authority of the church for Luther is limited to spiritual matters only and has no influence in the governance of the people. Luther’s defense of the social order and civil government set him in sharp opposition to the leaders of the Peasants’ War and led him to support the Protestant princes in their opposition to the Holy Roman Empire (founded on the spurious authority of the Roman Catholic Church in political affairs) after the 1530 Diet of Augsburg. In his defense of obedience to worldly powers and his grounds for justified resistance to impious rule, Luther left a seemingly ambiguous legacy that manifested itself after his death in a division over advocates of obedience to a conciliatory ruler (who wished to reintroduce elements of Roman worship) and purists who insisted that such obedience was a violation of Luther’s intention.


Author(s):  
Ormond Rush

For 400 years after the Council of Trent, a juridical model of the church dominated Roman Catholicism. Shifts towards a broader ecclesiology began to emerge in the nineteenth century. Despite the attempts to repress any deviations from the official theology after the crisis of Roman Catholic Modernism in the early twentieth century, various renewal movements, known as ressourcement, in the decades between the world wars brought forth a period of rich ecclesiological research, with emphasis given to notions such as the Mystical Body, the People of God, the church as mystery, as sacrament, and as communio. The Second Vatican Council incorporated many of these developments into its vision for renewal and reform of the Roman Catholic Church. Over half a century after Vatican II, a new phase in its reception is emerging with the pontificate of Pope Francis.


Author(s):  
Paul Vermeer ◽  
Peer Scheepers

AbstractBackground: Today the Dutch religious landscape is characterized by two opposite trends. On the one hand, there is a massive and dominant trend of religious disaffiliation which mostly affects the Roman Catholic Church and the mainline Protestant churches, while on the other hand the Netherlands also witnesses the emergence of several independent, evangelical congregations of near megachurch size. Purpose: Against the background of these opposite trends, this paper focuses on the second trend and tries to explain why some people join an evangelical congregation. Methods: For this purpose, quantitative data gathered among the audiences of six thriving evangelical congregations are analyzed in view of the following research questions: (1) What was the previous religious affiliation of the people who switched or converted to one of the six participating evangelical congregations? and (2) Which factors induced the switch or conversion to these congregations? Results: Results of bivariate and multivariate analyses show that these congregations attract both mainline and orthodox Protestant switchers as well as a significant number of secular converts, whose decision to join these evangelical congregations is induced by early socialization experiences, their intrinsic religious orientation and the switching of their partner. Closer scrutiny into the background of the apparent secular converts reveals, however, that several of these converts are probably re-affiliates. Although these secular converts indicated to be a religious none in their early teens, their conversion to evangelicalism is in part still induced by certain, early religious socialization experiences. Conclusions and Implications: This insight puts the alleged success of these evangelical congregations in more perspective. It shows that their success is more a matter of circulating, religious believers and not so much a matter of successfully reaching out to the unchurched. In all likelihood, then, thriving evangelical congregations will remain an exception in secular societies like the Netherlands and evangelical church growth in no way marks a break with the ongoing trend of religious disaffiliation.


2019 ◽  
pp. 135-158
Author(s):  
Дионисий Шлёнов

Известнейший аскет и мистик конца XIII в., стоящий у истоков расцвета исихазма в XIV в., прп. Никифор Итал был автором не только трактата «О хранении сердца», вошедшего в «Добротолюбие», но и диспута о вере, который никогда не переводился на русский язык. Диспут состоялся в городе Птолемаида/Акра в конце 1276 г. с Фомой, латинским патриархом Иерусалима, папским легатом в Святой Земле и известным персонажем в иерархии Римско-католической церкви. В настоящей публикации предлагается русский перевод памятника, важного не только для истории полемики между латинянами и греками, но и как сочинение, в котором в зачаточном виде присутствуют черты учения о сущности и энергиях Бога, впоследствии развиваемого свт. Григорием Паламой. «Диспут» носит яркий автобиографический характер и, помимо богословия, проливает свет на жизнь прп. Никифора Исихаста, которую можно реконструировать по отдельным внешним свидетельствам. В целом данный памятник важен, в том числе, и для формирования учения о неизменности предания семи Вселенских Соборов, которое впоследствии применялось в антилатинской полемике. The most famous ascetic and mystic of the end of the 13th century, who stood at the origins of hesychasm in the 14th century, was the author of not only the treatise «On the Keeping of the Heart», which was included in the «Philocalia», but also the author of a debate on faith, which was never translated into Russian. The dispute took place in the city of Ptolemais Acre at the end of 1276 with Thomas, the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, papal legate in the Holy Land and a famous figure in the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. This publication offers a Russian translation of the monument, which is important not only for the history of polemics between the Latins and the Greeks, but also as an essay in which the features of the doctrine of the essence and energies of God, later developed by St. Gregory Palamas, are presented in their earliest stage. «The Dispute» has a vivid autobiographical character and, in addition to theology, sheds light on the life of St. Nicephorus the Hesychast, which can be reconstructed on the basis of some external evidence. In general, this work is important for the understanding of the formation of the doctrine of the immutability of the tradition of the seven Ecumenical Councils, which was later used in the anti-Latin polemics.


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