Cartesian pictures of the human self and act-centred understandings of ethics dominate modern thought. Throughout his work, Herbert McCabe challenges these, and as such remains an important resource for philosophical and theological ethics. This paper lays out McCabe’s philosophical anthropology, showing how he draws on Wittgenstein to revive a Thomist account of the human person. It then shows how this anthropology feeds into a philosophical ethics, focused on human flourishing and the possibility of life being meaningful. This, in turn, underwrites a theological ethics, according to which the human person flourishes ultimately through graced participation in the divine life. The paper concludes with a discussion of McCabe’s account of faith as participation in the divine self-knowledge.

Over the eight hundred years of the English Dominican province, few of its members have matched the rigour and depth of thought of Herbert McCabe. This paper presents a brief overview of McCabe's thought, focusing first on his understanding of God and then on his conception of human beings. Like Thomas before him, McCabe thought it vital to think clearly and correctly about both God and humanity, an effort which in the case of God involves recognising the many ways in which we cannot think of God.

Recently a change to the Italian text of the Pater Noster has been proposed. Motivation for this change centers on worries about the suggestion that God leads us into temptation. This paper argues that these worries issue from a confused picture of the relationship between God and creaturely freedom. More fundamentally, however, the suggestion that these kind of worries ought to precipitate revision of liturgical texts fails to take seriously the nature of the liturgy as prayer, rather than simply a means of communicating information. Drawing on Wittgenstein, the sui generis nature of prayer is laid out before the paper concludes with some comments on the distinctive values of both scholarship and prayer.

Smoking contributes to health inequalities for people with severe mental illness (SMI). Although smoking cessation interventions are effective in the short term, there are few long-term trial-based estimates of abstinence. The SCIMITAR trials programme includes the largest trial to date of a smoking cessation intervention for people with SMI, but this was underpowered to detect anticipated long-term quit rates. By pooling pilot and full-trial data we found that quit rates were maintained at 12 months (OR = 1.67, 95% CI 1.02–2.73, P = 0.04). Policymakers can now be confident that bespoke smoking cessation interventions produce successful short- and long-term quitting.

Centred on figures like Herbert McCabe, David Burrell, and Brian Davies the loose tradition known as grammatical thomism is undervalued within analytic philosophy of religion. This is particularly unfortunate, since a grammatical thomist approach offers the prospect of both a reorientation towards a more apophatic conception of God, consonant with the theology and practice of many religious traditions, and of moving beyond certain debates in the philosophy of religion. In this article, a grammatical thomist approach to the word ‘God’ is laid out: the conditions for introducing the word constrain its grammar, such that it cannot be understood as designating anything within our world. Accordingly inferential moves which we might otherwise find tempting are blocked. The result is an apophatic theology grounded in linguistic considerations. Objections against linguistic approaches to philosophy and theology, owing to Williamson and Murphy respectively, are considered and counter-arguments presented. The potential for therapeutic approaches to both the problem of evil and questions around theology and politics is then flagged.

Herbert McCabe was, by widespread acclaim, one of the greatest Catholic thinkers in the English speaking world during the final quarter of the last century. He was also deeply committed to radical left‐wing politics. What is the relationship between these two facts? I lay out what I take to be the key themes in McCabe's politics before arguing that, in contrast to significant strands in present day political theology, he had a keen sense of the respective roles of faith and reason in guiding political action. This allowed him to commit himself to a politics which was more radical than much of what has followed him, whilst having a clear sense of how Christian faith ought to be allowed to condition political engagement. The article concludes by drawing out lessons from McCabe for thinking about faith and politics. Not least of these is that we ought to avoid the lure, often articulated in terms of the ‘unifying’ role of the Church, to eschew conflict.

This paper is a contribution to the Latitudinal Gradient Project. It describes macro and epifaunal assemblages and habitats at three shallow water locations at the southern end of the western Ross Sea coast, and investigates relationships between faunal composition and environmental characteristics. Many variables (e.g. substrate type, sediment composition, depth, latitude, longitude) contributed to explaining the differences in community composition between locations, with latitude (a likely surrogate for broader scale factors, e.g. ice cover) one of the most important. The percentage explained by environmental characteristics was strongly scale dependent, decreasing with increasing scale of observation. As much as 66% and 75% of the variability in macrofaunal and epifaunal assemblages, respectively, was explained at the smallest scale (i.e. between transects within a location), compared to 9–18% and 11–32%, respectively, at the scale of the entire study. This relationship was also true for species richness and total abundance. This suggests that while small-scale habitat variability will not confound our ability to detect latitudinal gradients in future studies, adequately quantifying the environmental factors important in structuring these communities at larger (latitudinal) spatial scales will be important. Finally, large differences in habitat structure did not translate into large differences in the diversity of fauna, illustrating the difficulty of predicting faunal composition in the Ross Sea based on seafloor topography alone.

Data from two new cruises is used to assess whether latitude plays any role in influencing broad-scale spatial patterns in echinoderm assemblage composition along the Victoria Land coast and the Balleny Islands as a contribution to the Latitudinal Gradient Project. Our results indicate that a latitudinal gradient is influencing assemblage structure in subtle and non-linear ways. The Balleny Islands system is different from the Victoria Land coast, probably because of a different biogeographic origin and current oceanographic conditions. Along the Victoria Land coast, latitude related differences arise when taking into account benthic biodiversity at different spatial scales. Alpha diversity increases from north to south, but beta diversity shows the opposite trend, although not linearly, suggesting the different importance of the iceberg disturbance along the northern Victoria Land coast.