That useful and interesting publication, African Arts, regularly sends out a questionnaire to its readers asking them for details of financial details, range of interests, and criticisms of editorial policy. The picture of the average reader which emerges, a prosperous art collector, or prospering would-be collector, seems to reflect the advertisements rather than the articles. Were New Blackfriars to launch such a questionnaire, one would be little surprised to find that the average reader is an under-wealthy book addict who through the articles enjoys her/his fantasies of endless and fascinating reading in well-stocked and up-to-date libraries. For such people a worthwhile, or, at least interesting, questionnaire could be constructed to test their control of semantic variations by seeing how they defined various “in” words. One problem, of course, is that “in” words must shift in meaning if they are to stay “in” indefinitely. One “in” word is “hegemony” which received from Gramsci a neat specification as the situation in which a group dominates society by means other than force, fraud, or consent. Unfortunately, the word has also become a resource for translating Chinese foreign policy statements in which “hegemony” refers to the domination of the super-powers over their allies. I want in this article to use “hegemony” in discussing Spanish colonial, and Ladino post-colonial domination of the Maya Indians of Yucatan Chiapas, and Guatemala, and the way in which Maya resistance developed new forms of authority, based on the “assumption” of some of the symbols used by their conquerors.

In September of this year the Dominicans are holding their General Chapter in Rome at the same time as the Jesuits are holding their General Congregation. The occasion marks the opportunity for renewed dialogue and friendliness between these two great orders. As someone who has drawn from both spiritual traditions with great profit, I offer this article on Jesuit spirituality for those of a Dominican background, in the hope of contributing to mutual understanding and respect.

The last twenty years have seen a major upsurge in Ignatian spirituality and in the practice of the Spiritual Exercises - the form of retreat devised by St Ignatius and now given by Jesuits and many others all over the world. Inspired by the movement towards le ressourcement (or getting back to the sources) and by the Conciliar drive to rediscover the true spirit of each religious order, Jesuits began to research the early history of the Exercises.

They found that the lgnatian retreat had departed drastically from Ignatius’ original intention and practice in many ways, centring round one absolutely crucial respect: whereas the Exercises had come in modern history to be preached to groups of people, the true Exercises of Ignatius can only be given individually. There was consequently a movement from the ‘preached’ retreat to the ‘directed’ retreat, stressing the point that although a greater or lesser proportion of preaching may be suitable in some other kinds of retreat, the Spiritual Exercises as such can only be made in the process of private prayer under the individual guidance of a retreat-giver.

Warburton’s theological opponent. Robert Lowth, later Bishop of London, published (in Latin) in 1758 his seminal Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews. It is evidence of the staggering lack of interest of English theology today in historical enquiry that there exists no study of this work, described by Meinecke as one of the prime sources for later historicism, and by E. S. Shaffer as vital for the development of biblical criticism. After its reprinting a few years later at Gottingen it exercised a great influence in Germany, but it is interesting to note that while Herder praised Lowth for attempting to isolate the cultural peculiarities of the Hebrews, he thought that his enquiry was too technical, failing to penetrate the spirit of an age. It is Lowth’s strictly formal attempt to position Hebrew poetry vis-a-vis the categories of classical rhetoric and poetics rather than a romantic trust in empathy or pure subjectivity which leads him to a new depth of cultural analysis. The Lectures thus represent a moment in the history of ideas that was quickly forgotten.

For another reason also, it is hard to categorize Lowth. His formal, aesthetic treatment of the Old Testament opened up the possibility of accounting for it (without recourse to the wilder absurdities of deist slander) in purely human terms. However Hans W. Frei is, I think, wrong to conclude that because Lowth is not concerned to expound the truth of the scriptures, nor to establish their factual veracity, the work is theologically neutral.

Reviewing J. L. Mackie’s The Miracle of Theism (Oxford, 1982), Galen Strawson says that ‘philosophical resistance to the theologians’ argument has dropped to a low ebb in recent years’ because ‘most philosophers think the topic is simply not worth discussing any more’ (The Sunday Times, 16 January 1983). This is fair comment, though its truth entails no conclusion to the credit of ‘most philosophers’. But Mackie, at any rate did think theology worth discussing. Hence The Miracle of Theism (written shortly before Mackie’s death in 1981), which is a sustained discussion of arguments for and against God’s existence. The book is a rich one deserving of serious study. Here I am concerned only with a small part of it: its critique of the design argument offered by Richard Swinburne in The Existence of God (Oxford, 1979). Swinburne thinks well of an argument which belongs to the family of arguments commonly lumped together under the (dubious) title ‘the argument from design’. Mackie thinks otherwise of the argument. Here I wish to defend Swinburne, though I shall also be disagreeing with him at one point.

Swinburne offers what he calls a ‘teleological argument from the temporal order of the world’. That there is temporal order in the universe is, says, Swinburne, very evident. This is explained as follows: