460 Theology Today possessed of nuclear weapons. Against those who await a foreordained assize, O'Leary quotes Franz Kafka's remark that the Day of Judgment is "in reality . . . a summary court in perpetual session" and calls for a renewed appreciation of the comic dimensions of the Apocalypse-that is, those aspects stressing the open-endedness of the future and the power of human agency to effect change. The author is surely correct in warning of the dangers of fatalistic millennialism, but it is unclear that people can live with complete open-endedness or with a "summary court in perpetual session." The notion of an End to time answers a fundamental human longing, and it would be truly sad if Christian theologians allowed themselves to be scared off from responding to that need by the pathetic misuses of eschatology by the Hal Lindseys and televangelists. In assessing how a meaningful word of ultimate hope is to be addressed to the current age, serious Christian thinkers will find O'Leary's provocative and often brilliant book "must" reading.
The Capuchin friar, Valerian Magni, was one of the most influential churchmen of the first half of the seventeenth century. A confidant of Pope Urban VIII, an advisor to the emperor Ferdinand II and an intimate of the Polish king Władysław IV, Magni worked tirelessly as a religious mediator for nearly fifty years. This article investigates his ecumenical activity in two major arenas, Bohemia and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In the Czech kingdom Magni collaborated with young Archbishop Harrach to counter the Jesuits' harsher policies of reCatholicisation while in Poland he endeavoured to reunite both Protestant and Orthodox communities with the Catholic Church.
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