What sort of right is the right to life? Does it make sense to speak of a right to die, or to be allowed to die, or to be helped to die, or to die with dignity? Are life and death straightforward alternatives? Are they possible objects of desire or aversion? Can they be given as gifts? If life is a gift, have recipients of it a duty to be grateful? Answers to these questions are obtained by philosophical analysis, chiefly of the concepts of life and death.

Something like natural law is required if Christians are to say that Jesus Christ is as relevant to human beings of every age and in every place that we have ever existed as a race. There must be something stable about the human condition which means that we are all alike in need of a Saviour. That something is the fact that we are created to love God and to love our neighbour. This much is revealed to all humankind. For the Apostle Paul and Thomas Aquinas the natural law was not given as an alternative method of salvation but rather to explain the justice of God's judgment and the utter gratuity of divine grace. Similarly, natural theology is not an assertion that faith in Christ is optional but rather that all human beings are culpable if they do not recognise that there is a god who created them and rewards those who seek God. Natural theology is the minimum content of faith where Christ has not been proclaimed; it is no substitute for explicit faith in Christ when He has been revealed.

From a comparison of the much-discussed and supposedly epoch-making Neo-Modernist ‘Jubilee church’ in Rome and a new study of John Ninian Comper's church architecture, the article enquires into theologically informed principles of church design and in their light considers some crucial elements in the symbolics of ecclesial space, notably altar, screen, communion rails and tabernacle.

In Jeff McMahan's The Ethics of Killing, an example involving a congenitally retarded child and a dog of similar cognitive ability is used to attempt to show that arguments about the potential to manifest traits are morally irrelevant to the abortion debate. McMahan argues that our intuition to enhance the child rather than the dog may be irrational. I explain that the only way to maintain common-sense ethics and strongly held intuitions about function and dysfunction is to accept a theory of design and to think, not in terms of “species” but, in terms of kinds of things that are designed to function in specific ways, where the failure of an individual of the kind to manifest characteristic functions is indicative of a privation rather than evidence that the individual is not – or not yet – a member of that kind and thus not as morally significant as members of the kind.

In this paper I seek to address the question of the interpretation and translation of the Proslogion and to understand why the text of this major work is repeatedly mistranslated. Having identified the various strands in the interpretative tradition and taken as my paradigm case an analysis of a passage from Proslogion, 4, I suggest that the reason for the errors to be found in the various attempts at translating this passage is to be found in the fact that the translators are influenced by the interpretative tradition and translate in accordance with it, even when this leads to ‘obvious’ mistranslation. I ask whether there can be a definitive interpretation and translation of the Proslogion, and answer this question in the negative, primarily because important elements of Anselm's thought are not available to us. Nevertheless, I suggest that it is possible to avoid errors of interpretation and translation by remaining within the constraints of the text. Finally, I attempt to lay some ground rules for those readers who are interested in an accurate reading of the Proslogion.

I discuss the recent tendency to extend the concept of sacramentality by applying it to the world or to aspects of it like beauty, e.g. by David Brown in his God and the Enchantment of Place. I look at the Church's traditional teaching on sacraments, in terms of signs, words, and effectiveness, making use of J.L.Austin's work on Performative Utterances, and explore how these three features might apply to the extended concept of a sacrament. I argue that we can perceive signs-by-likeness of God in the world, especially in beauty, and that we can often discern the effectiveness of such signs. We lack, however, anything here corresponding to the words of the sacraments of the Church. I conclude, therefore, that the parallel between sacraments in an extended sense and the sacraments of the Church is only partial; nevertheless the extended usage is justifiable, provided that we realize its limitations.

It is popular nowadays to claim not only that narrative is the most effective way to communicate religious knowledge but also that narrative provides the framework within which religious lifestyles and practices are meaningful. However, many today lack familiarity with the narratives of traditional religions. In other words, they suffer from ‘religious illiteracy’. This article considers the problem of how religion can become meaningful to such people. The view that religion can be divested of its outdated cultural accoutrements and presented in a form that resonates with postmodern secular culture is considered and found to be problematic. If acquiring a religion is like acquiring a culture, or a language, it seems unlikely that a deeper appreciation of a religious tradition will be facilitated by divesting it of its traditional cultural expressions. Moreover, the view that religious lifestyles should be emphasised rather than religious belief seems to be more a symptom of the problem of ‘religious illiteracy’ than a solution to it. The article concludes that both of these responses fail to provide a solution to the problem and that an alternative strategy is urgently required.

In his published Gifford Lectures, Professor Michael Dummett asks ‘what would it be for there to be a universe devoid of sentient beings? What would be the difference between God's creating a material universe, in the whole of which there never was any creature able to experience it [‘a unidead’, in Moonan's shorthand], and His creating nothing at all? … What difference would its existing make?’ He answers: ‘there would surely be no difference…’ and ‘unless there are sentient and rational observers, it would not be possible for either observation or inference to occur’. (Thought and Reality, 97.)

Some theists might find this a disconcerting restriction on divine power; and if in addition realist, might put it down to a refusal of realism for the range of language in question. In this article, however, I presuppose a coherent realism for the range, and argue that Dummett's contentions can hold for realisms too, and ought not to disconcert serious theists. What is crucial is not (just) whether you are prepared to understand your assertions in an ‘anti-realist’ rather than a realist manner, but whether or not you are prepared to use ‘God’ to stand for something not finite in any way, if there is any, and for nothing else in extra-mental reality. Dummett's Giffords are metaphysically serious: where it would matter if there were no God.