unbaptised

In this it recalls Agamben's other bare lives of impotentiality, whether the Muselmann, whose incapacity to speak witnesses to the indestructibility of the human, (48) or the unbaptised children who, in Thomistic theology, reside in limbo and thus (like the 'saved night' of an irredeemable creation) outside the economy of anthropo-theo-logical machinery.

The most interesting to me were Tennyson's more vehement repudiation of eternal punishment-"St Augustin's descriptions of unbaptised infants crawling in everlasting torture revolts any mind of the present day.

It must be clearly acknowledged that the Church does not have sure knowledge about the salvation of unbaptised infants who die.

(14) Which can cause difficulties where the defendant ship is either unbaptised (see Fletcher Steel v Unnamed Double Ended Gravel Dredge, Unreported, AD22, High Court, Dunedin, 27 July 1988) or has changed its name frequently (see Tomita v The Unnamed Vessel formerly known as 'Amami Taiki Go' and also known as 'Intrepid' (2000) 16 PRNZ 459).

The dearth of priests in rural areas has consequences in the increasing numbers of unbaptised children and young couples cohabiting outside marriage.

Limbo was where the souls of unbaptised infants were kept in a sort of "Catholics-only creche", until last year when it was airbrushed by Catholic teachings because, well, who could believe it?

The blessed and the damned; sinful women and unbaptised children in Irish folklore.

As an unbaptised child raised in a family that went to church only for weddings and funerals, I didn't encounter the problem of religious belief until I reached Yale College in the 1950s, where I was informed by the liberal arts faculty that it wasn't pressing because God was dead.

The disappearance of the limbus infantium was one important reason for a growing English popular belief that heaven was the destination of the souls of unbaptised infants.

One mum, Mary Salmon, now 85, of Renvyle, Co Galway, still sheds tears as she recalls how she lost four babies - two of them unbaptised. They are buried in a field near her house.

In some parts of Romania Varcolac was believed to be a ghost; in others he was a werewolf which had risen from the body of an unbaptised child.

But what counts is that her husband - or at least his family - DO have strong convictions and if they sincerely believe the child will burn in hell if it remains unbaptised, that isn't "sick", but a genuine belief.

Likewise Alice's urgent baptism was normal, as was Elena's subsequent churching, in an era when it was believed that a child unbaptised, and thus uncleansed of original sin, was condemned to eternal damnation.