Search results for ""university of notre dame press""

The Genius to Improve an Invention derives its title from John Dryden’s phrase for the British tendency to take up literary masterpieces from the past and “perfect” them. Distinguished literary scholar Piero Boitani adopts Dryden’s notion as a framework for exploring ways in which classical and medieval texts, scenes, and themes have been rewritten by modern authors.Boitani focuses on a concept of literary transition that takes into account both T.S. Eliot’s idea of “tradition and individual talent” and Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence.” In five elegant essays he examines a wide range of authors and texts, including Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Voltaire, Goethe, Sartre, Dante, and Keats. Appearing for the first time in an English translation, The Genius to Improve an Invention will appeal to anyone interested in the Western literary tradition.

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The Genius to Improve an Invention derives its title from John Dryden’s phrase for the British tendency to take up literary masterpieces from the past and “perfect” them. Distinguished literary scholar Piero Boitani adopts Dryden’s notion as a framework for exploring ways in which classical and medieval texts, scenes, and themes have been rewritten by modern authors.Boitani focuses on a concept of literary transition that takes into account both T.S. Eliot’s idea of “tradition and individual talent” and Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence.” In five elegant essays he examines a wide range of authors and texts, including Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Voltaire, Goethe, Sartre, Dante, and Keats. Appearing for the first time in an English translation, The Genius to Improve an Invention will appeal to anyone interested in the Western literary tradition.

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Since the nineteenth century, many philosophical and theological commentators have sought to trace lines of continuity between the Trinitarian thought of Augustine of Hippo (354–430) and G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831). Many contemporary Christian theologians have also criticized Augustine's Trinitarian theology generally and his doctrine of the Holy Spirit more specifically through this historical lens. At the same time, Hegelian Trinitarian conceptual dynamics have come to exert a strong influence over contemporary Trinitarian theology. In Life in the Spirit, Douglas Finn seeks to redress several imbalances with respect to Augustine, imbalances that have one of their hermeneutic causes in a Hegelian-influenced theological tradition. Finn argues that common readings of Augustine focus too much on his De Trinitate, books 8–15, betraying a modern—and to some extent Hegelian—prejudice against considering sermons and biblical commentaries serious theological work. This broadening of Augustinian texts allows Finn to critique readings of Augustine that, on the one hand, narrow his Trinitarian theology to the so-called psychological analogy and thus chart him on a path to Descartes and Hegel, or, on the other hand, suggest he sacrifices a theology of the Trinitarian persons on the altar of divine substance. Augustine's Trinitarian theology on Finn's reading is one fully engaged with God's work in history. With this renewed understanding of Augustine's Trinitarianism, Finn allows Augustine to interrogate Hegel with his concerns rather than only the other way around. In this ambitious study, Finn shows that Hegel's rendition of Christianity systematically obviates whole swaths of Christian prayer and practice. He does this nonpolemically, carefully, and with meticulous attention to the texts of both great thinkers.

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In A Philosophy of the Unsayable, William Franke argues that the encounter with what exceeds speech has become the crucial philosophical issue of our time. He proposes an original philosophy pivoting on analysis of the limits of language. The book also offers readings of literary texts as poetically performing the philosophical principles it expounds. Franke engages with philosophical theologies and philosophies of religion in the debate over negative theology and shows how apophaticism infiltrates the thinking even of those who attempt to deny or delimit it. In six cohesive essays, Franke explores fundamental aspects of unsayability. In the first and third essays, his philosophical argument is carried through with acute attention to modes of unsayability that are revealed best by literary works, particularly by negativities of poetic language in the oeuvres of Paul Celan and Edmond Jabès. Franke engages in critical discussion of apophatic currents of philosophy both ancient and modern, focusing on Hegel and French post-Hegelianism in his second essay and on Neoplatonism in his fourth essay. He treats Neoplatonic apophatics especially as found in Damascius and as illuminated by postmodern thought, particularly Jean-Luc Nancy’s deconstruction of Christianity. In the last two essays, Franke treats the tension between two contemporary approaches to philosophy of religion—Radical Orthodoxy and radically secular or Death-of-God theologies. A Philosophy of the Unsayable will interest scholars and students of philosophy, literature, religion, and the humanities. This book develops Franke's explicit theory of unsayability, which is informed by his long-standing engagement with major representatives of apophatic thought in the Western tradition.

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Human Knowing is a clearly written, brief introduction that guides the reader through an exploration of sense perception, ordinary knowing, scientific knowing, and philosophic knowing. This journey culminates in a justification of philosophy as a genuine form of knowing and thus a natural prelude to metaphysics. Though Felt manages to avoid technical language, the development of his argument is a genuine exercise in philosophic thinking. The outcome is a contemporary expression of a position similar to that of Thomas Aquinas, significantly enriched by insights from Bergson, Whitehead, and phenomenology. This book is accessible, smart, and refreshing. Any interested general reader or student will profit from reading it.

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In his examination of the bishopric of Orvieto from 1100 to 1250, David Foote reveals how three defining developments of the High Middle Ages—the feudal revolution, ecclesiastical reform, and state building—played out in a typical medieval Italian commune. He challenges scholarship that overemphasizes the secular nature of Italian city-states by showing the extent to which developments in ecclesiastical institutions provided a model for the formation of civic institutions and defined a commune’s political and religious culture. Following the collapse of Carolingian authority in the tenth century, Italy experienced a period of political chaos. Rural lords, unrestrained by central authority, fought to dominate the countryside. Bishoprics, by virtue of their temporal and spiritual authority over dioceses, emerged in the midst of this disorder as the most effective institutions for rebuilding political authority at the local level. The Orvietan bishopric formed the center of an urban coalition attempting to conquer and pacify their contado, or surrounding countryside. Orvieto’s bishopric assisted the early city-state in administering its territory by developing innovative methods of written administration and record keeping. As the center of a wide range of religious interests, the bishopric was often caught between competing political and religious actors who leveraged their interests through ecclesiastical institutions and resources. This interaction had a profound effect on the city’s political and religious culture. As Orvietans struggled to define the norms that would govern their society, they had to adapt their quest for political power and autonomy to their religious values. David Foote’s deeply researched new book illuminates the process of state building in its early stages and the formation of political and religious culture in Europe during the High Middle Ages.

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From Martyrdom to Power provides a comprehensive examination of the origins, development, and rising electoral prominence of Mexico’s Partido Acción Nacional (PAN). Yemile Mizrahi, widely recognized as a leading authority on this topic, has based this book on extensive research and original field work over the past ten years. Her personal interviews with government officials and party leaders and her surveys of public opinion in three Mexican states enrich this unique study. Mizrahi’s theoretical and empirical analysis of the electoral success of PAN is situated within a larger assessment of political parties and the changes they undergo. Her discussion of how and why political parties adjust to changes in the political landscape is particularly relevant to scholars of Latin America. Mizrahi contends that PAN party leaders have not acted quickly or decisively enough in making internal changes that will allow them to make a smooth transition from a survivalist minority party to Mexico’s ruling party. In contrast to the past, when the PAN’s main problems were associated with its inefficacy in the electoral arena, today the party confronts problems associated with its electoral success. Mizrahi argues that PAN’s relatively unchanged party structure presents serious obstacles to electoral expansion. Mizrahi’s account is analytically powerful and offers clear policy and political suggestions for her subject itself. This definitive work will be welcomed by political scientists, policy makers, and scholars of Latin America.

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Although a number of books have addressed recent changes in Ireland that are related to immigration, both during and after the Celtic Tiger economic boom and bust, they are often limited by a focus on a single aspect of immigration or on either the Republic of Ireland or Northern Ireland. Race and Immigration in the New Ireland, in contrast, offers a variety of expert perspectives and a comprehensive approach to the social, political, linguistic, cultural, religious, and economic transformations in Ireland that are related to immigration. It includes a wide range of critical voices and approaches to reflect the broad impact of immigration on multiple aspects of Irish society and culture. The contributors address immigration and Irish sports, education systems, language debates, migrant women’s issues, human rights policies, and culture both in the Republic and in the North of Ireland. Further, authors offer a framework for considering this new Ireland in relation to earlier colonial contexts, reading intersections between new racism and old sectarianism.

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From Martyrdom to Power provides a comprehensive examination of the origins, development, and rising electoral prominence of Mexico’s Partido Acción Nacional (PAN). Yemile Mizrahi, widely recognized as a leading authority on this topic, has based this book on extensive research and original field work over the past ten years. Her personal interviews with government officials and party leaders and her surveys of public opinion in three Mexican states enrich this unique study. Mizrahi’s theoretical and empirical analysis of the electoral success of PAN is situated within a larger assessment of political parties and the changes they undergo. Her discussion of how and why political parties adjust to changes in the political landscape is particularly relevant to scholars of Latin America. Mizrahi contends that PAN party leaders have not acted quickly or decisively enough in making internal changes that will allow them to make a smooth transition from a survivalist minority party to Mexico’s ruling party. In contrast to the past, when the PAN’s main problems were associated with its inefficacy in the electoral arena, today the party confronts problems associated with its electoral success. Mizrahi argues that PAN’s relatively unchanged party structure presents serious obstacles to electoral expansion. Mizrahi’s account is analytically powerful and offers clear policy and political suggestions for her subject itself. This definitive work will be welcomed by political scientists, policy makers, and scholars of Latin America.

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In The Sword and the Pen: Women, Politics, and Poetry in Sixteenth-Century Siena, Konrad Eisenbichler analyzes the work of Sienese women poets, in particular, Aurelia Petrucci, Laudomia Forteguerri, and Virginia Salvi, during the first half of the sixteenth century up to the fall of Siena in 1555. Eisenbichler sets forth a complex and original interpretation of the experiences of these three educated noblewomen and their contributions to contemporary culture in Siena by looking at the emergence of a new lyric tradition and the sonnets they exchanged among themselves and with their male contemporaries. Through the analysis of their poems and various book dedications to them, Eisenbichler reveals the intersection of poetry, politics, and sexuality, as well as the gendered dialogue that characterized Siena's literary environment during the late Renaissance. Eisenbichler also examines other little-known women poets and their relationship to the cultural environment of Siena, underlining the exceptional role of the city of Siena as the most important center of women's writing in the first half of the sixteenth century in Italy, and probably in all of Europe. This innovative contribution to the field of late Renaissance and early modern Italian and women's studies rescues from near oblivion a group of literate women who were celebrated by contemporary scholars but who have been largely ignored today, both because of a dearth of biographical information about them and because of a narrow evaluation of their poetry. Eisenbichler's analysis and reproduction of many of their poems in Italian and modern English translation are an invaluable contribution not only to Italian cultural studies but also to women's studies.

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A six-day series of interviews between Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Elie Wiesel and French journalist Michaël de Saint Cheron, Evil and Exile probes some of the most crucial and pressing issues facing humankind today. Having survived the unspeakable evil of the Holocaust, Wiesel remained silent for ten years before dedicating his life to the memory of this tragedy, witnessing tirelessly to remind an often indifferent world of its potential for self-destruction. Wiesel offers wise counsel in this volume concerning evil and suffering, life and death, chance and circumstance. Moreover, the dialogue evokes candid and often surprising responses by Wiesel on the Palestinian problem, Judeo-Christian relations, recent changes in the Soviet Union as well as insights into writers such as Kafka, Malraux, Mauriac, and Unamuno.

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Among the issues that continue to divide the Catholic Church from the Orthodox Church—the two largest Christian bodies in the world, together comprising well over a billion faithful—the question of the papacy is widely acknowledged to be the most significant stumbling block to their unification. For nearly forty years, commentators, theologians, and hierarchs, from popes and patriarchs to ordinary believers of both churches, have acknowledged the problems posed by the papacy. In Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity, Adam A. J. DeVille offers the first comprehensive examination of the papacy from an Orthodox perspective that also seeks to find a way beyond this impasse, toward full Orthodox-Catholic unity. He first surveys the major postwar Orthodox and Catholic theological perspectives on the Roman papacy and on patriarchates, enumerating Orthodox problems with the papacy and reviewing how Orthodox patriarchates function and are structured. In response to Pope John Paul II’s 1995 request for a dialogue on Christian unity, set forth in the encyclical letter Ut Unum Sint, DeVille proposes a new model for the exercise of papal primacy. DeVille suggests the establishment of a permanent ecumenical synod consisting of all the patriarchal heads of Churches under a papal presidency, and discusses how the pope qua pope would function in a reunited Church of both East and West, in full communion. His analysis, involving the most detailed plan for Orthodox-Catholic unity yet offered by an Orthodox theologian, could not be more timely.

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Jacque Vaught Brogan's new collection of poems, Damage, examines a variety of cultural, natural, and personal damages in a lyrical voice ironically marked by intense beauty. This disjunction is precisely what makes the volume so disturbing and yet so tantalizing. The first section, Windows, examines the public sphere of failures and violence, including the simple cyclical decay of nature itself. The next section, Blue Waters, shifts the focus from the public to the personal, in poems frought with betrayal and desire, disillusionment and erotic bondings. In the last section, Notes from the Body, Brogan braids these two spheres into a strikingly original and risky series of poems which fearlessly addresses the modern emotional terrain or what might be called the genuinely body politic.

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Margaret Stieg Dalton offers a comprehensive study of the German Catholic cultural movement that lasted from the late nineteenth century until 1933. Rapidly advancing industrialization, higher literacy rates, rising real income, and increased leisure time created a demand for intellectually accessible entertainment. Technological developments not only gave rise to new forms of entertainment, but also to the means by which they were marketed and disseminated. At the same time, the effects of modernism were being felt in all areas of high culture. Dalton’s book examines the encounter of clergy and lay Catholics with both high culture and popular culture in Germany. German Catholic culture was more than the product of an individual who happened to be Catholic; it was intellectual and artistic activity with a specifically Catholic stamp, a unique blend that offered distinctive variants of art, literature, and music. In response to the predominant Protestant, nationalistic culture, German Catholics attempted to create an alternative cultural universe that would insulate them from a world that seemed to threaten their faith. Dalton’s book provides detailed insight into the manner in which Catholics and other Germans tried to determine to what extent the new world could be accepted while still holding on to traditional values. Catholicism, Popular Culture, and the Arts in Germany, 1880-1933 will be welcomed by anyone interested in European intellectual and cultural history.

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Defining Global Justice offers the first comprehensive overview of the history of the United States role in the International Labor Organization (ILO). In this thought-provoking book, Edward Lorenz addresses the challenge laid down by the President of the American Political Science Association in 2000, who urged scholars to discover "how well-structured institutions could enable the world to have ‘a new birth of freedom’." Lorenz’s study describes one model of a well-structured institution. His history of the U.S. interaction with the ILO shows how some popular organizations, from organized labor through women’s, academic, legal, and religious institutions have been able to utilize the ILO structure to counter what the APSA president called "self-serving elites and . . . their worst impulses." These organizations succeeded repeatedly in introducing popular visions of social justice into global economic planning and the world economy. Lorenz demonstrates the key role played by the social gospel movement, academic elites, women leaders, lawyers, and organized labor in the quest for global justice through labor standards. By underscoring the role of women in this process, he highlights the importance of gender relations in the development of labor standards policy. Lorenz also shows how transformations in the economic and social reproduction of knowledge gradually displaced academics from the cutting edge of research on labor issues. Throughout this fascinating study, Lorenz reminds his readers that the development of decent labor standards has come in large part from the efforts of religious groups and a host of other nongovernmental, voluntary civic organizations that have insisted labor is a human activity, not a commodity. Defining Global Justice reveals why the United States, despite showing exceptional restraint in domestic social policy making, played a leading role in the pursuit of just international labor standards. Lorenz's lucid volume covers a century's worth of efforts, charting the development of a body of international law and an institutional structure as important to the global economy of the twenty-first century as the battle against slavery was in the nineteenth century.

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Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988) originated much of twentieth- and twenty-first-century theology's renewed interest in aesthetics. Von Balthasar's theology is both poetic and philosophical, and while this combination is often recognized, it calls for an explanation. In Theo-Poetics: Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Risk of Art and Being, Anne M. Carpenter explores von Balthasar's use of poetry and poetic language, and she offers a detailed analysis of his philosophical presuppositions. Carpenter argues that von Balthasar uses poets and poetic language to make theological arguments because this poetic way of speaking expresses metaphysical truth without reducing one to the other. Carpenter begins with von Balthasar's very early interests in music, literature, and philosophy, in particular his work, Apocalypse of the German Soul. She explores Glory of the Lord and the trilogy, moving through his despair over the possibility of reconciling art and theology. She uncovers the major characteristics of von Balthasar's metaphysical thinking, discussing his interactions with Thomas Aquinas, Karl Barth, and Martin Heidegger to firmly link Christology, metaphysics, and the expressiveness of language. The book concludes by marshaling its themes into a focused evaluation of von Balthasar's "redeemed" theo-poetic as it comes to expression in the poetry of G. M. Hopkins. Carpenter resituates and reevaluates Hopkins's poetry in a new context, placing him in the school of Aquinas rather than Scotus, and shows us how metaphysics is necessary for a vigorous understanding of language.

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Rhina P. Espaillat, judge of the 2014 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, describes Furious Dusk, David Campos’s winning collection, as "a work whose five parts trace a son’s efforts—only partially successful—to fulfill his father’s expectations and—perhaps even more difficult—understand those expectations enough to forgive them.” The poet's reflections are catalyzed by learning of his father’s impending death, which, in turn, forces him to examine his father’s expectations against his own evolving concept of what it means to be a man. The poems' speaker sifts through his past to find the speckles of memory that highlight the pressures to fit the mold of masculinity forged both by the Mexican culture of his father and the American culture he inhabits. The problematic norms of both rip the speaker in two directions as he recounts his father’s severe parenting, as he explores the inability to father a child, as he witnesses human suffering, as he overeats and confronts the effects on his body, and, finally, as he realizes what it means to transcend these expectations. The speaker’s epiphany frees him to reject masculine stereotypes and allows him to see himself simply as a human being. That realization, in turn, enables the speaker to see his father not only as “father,” “husband,” and “man,” but as a citizen of Earth. Through Campos’s bold imagery and accessible language and themes, he memorably adds to the continuing conversation of the effects of cultural expectations on the children of immigrant parents.

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In Catholic Progressives in England after Vatican II, Jay P. Corrin traces the evolution of Catholic social and theological thought from the end of World War II through the 1960s that culminated in Vatican Council II. He focuses on the emergence of reformist thinking as represented by the Council and the corresponding responses triggered by the Church's failure to expand the promises, or expectations, of reform to the satisfaction of Catholics on the political left, especially in Great Britain. The resistance of the Roman Curia, the clerical hierarchy, and many conservative lay men and women to reform was challenged in 1960s England by a cohort of young Catholic intellectuals for whom the Council had not gone far enough to achieve what they believed was the central message of the social gospels, namely, the creation of a community of humanistic socialism. This effort was spearheaded by members of the English Catholic New Left, who launched a path-breaking journal of ideas called Slant. What made Slant revolutionary was its success in developing a coherent philosophy of revolution based on a synthesis of the “New Theology” fueling Vatican II and the New Left’s Marxist critique of capitalism. Although the English Catholic New Left failed to meet their revolutionary objectives, their bold and imaginative efforts inspired many younger Catholics who had despaired of connecting their faith to contemporary social, political, and economic issues. Corrin’s analysis of the periodical and of such notable contributors as Terry Eagleton and Herbert McCabe explains the importance of Slant and its associated group within the context of twentieth-century English Catholic liberal thought and action.

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Messiahs and Machiavellians is an innovative exploration of "modern evil"in works of early- and late-modern theatre, raising issues about ethics, politics, religion, and aesthetics that speak to our present condition. Paul Corey examines how theatre—which expressed a key political dynamic both in the Renaissance and the twentieth century—lays open the impulses that instigated modernity and, ultimately, unparalleled levels of violence and destruction. Starting with Albert Camus' Caligula and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, then turning to Machiavelli's Mandragola and Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, Corey traces the emergence of two dominant, intertwining features of modern evil: an unrestrained pursuit of power and the utopian desire for perfection. Corey's imaginative and convincing readings of these plays, based on detailed textual analysis, move beyond the accounts usually offered by literary critics. Drawing on political, theological, and philosophical sources—a combination as fertile as it is unusual—Corey's methodology allows him to make keen and subtle arguments about the eschatological nature of modern politics.

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Jerrold Casway’s fascinating biography of legendary baseball player Ed Delahanty (1867–1903) offers a compelling examination of the first “King of Swatsville’s” life and career, including the enigma surrounding his tragic and untimely death. Through Delahanty’s story, Casway traces the evolving character of major league baseball and its effect on the lives and ambitions of its athletes. Delahanty’s career spanned the last decades of the nineteenth century during a time when the sons of post-famine Irish refugees dominated the sport and changed the playing style of America’s national pastime. In this “Emerald Age” of baseball, Irish-American players comprised 30–50 percent of all players, managers, and team captains. Baseball for Delahanty and other young Irishmen was a ticket out of poverty and into a life of fame and fortune. The allure and promise of celebrity and wealth, however, were disastrous for Delahanty. He found himself enmeshed in desperate contract dealings and a gambling addiction that drove him to alcohol abuse. The owner of the fourth highest lifetime batting average, Delahanty mysteriously disappeared and was found at the bottom of Niagara’s Horseshoe Falls. This rich biography, which relies on previously unavailable family papers and court transcripts, as well as the colorful sports reporting of the period, will appeal to anyone interested in baseball, sports, or Irish history.

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Although most Latin American countries are considered middle-income nations, their child health and well-being statistics overall compare poorly with those of the United States. This volume, representing the fifth part of Project Latin America 2000 from the Helen Kellogg Institute, brings together contributors from the U.S., Latin America, and organizations such as UNICEF to consider the physical, educational, social, legal, and economic status and progress of children throughout Latin America, focusing especially on health and rights issues. In chapters concerning health, experts in biology and medicine address such topics as trends in malnutrition and undernutrition, iron deficiency, inadequate sanitation, and contaminated water. Other articles on children's rights by contributors from the social sciences and public policy consider a wide range of issues, including youth violence and homicide, child labor and education, adolescents and the penal system, and future prospects for children's rights. All of the articles contribute to a more complete understanding of the situation of children in contemporary Latin American development, creating a storehouse of information that will be useful to both scholars and policymakers. These contributors show that as long as children in Latin America remain victimized by poverty, malnutrition, injustice, and violations of human rights, the many challenges of development must be addressed in ways that will protect children as well as support growing economies. They bring into focus the interdependence of all aspects of change, which must be acknowledged if children are to be both rightful beneficiaries and effective participants in the continuing development of Latin America.

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Robert L. Benson (1925–1996), professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles, was one of the most learned and original medievalists of his generation. At his untimely death he left behind a considerable body of unpublished writings, many of which he had revised and refined and in some cases presented in lectures and at conferences over many years. The best and most significant of these previously unpublished writings are collected in this volume. The essays in Law, Rulership, and Rhetoric span Benson’s entire career from 1955 to 1994. They comprise a rich collection covering a vast range of topics in political, intellectual, legal, and ecclesiastical history, rhetoric, and historiography. Art historians will find the three essays on medieval images of rulership and medieval art valuable, and literary scholars will be interested in the essays on, among others, Boncompagno da Signa. The volume concludes with several occasional, historiographical essays, including a spirited defense of Ernst Kantorowicz against Norman Cantor and an entertaining talk on “the medievalist as literary hero.” The volume begins with a brief biographical sketch and appreciation of Benson by Horst Fuhrmann.

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In The Rise and Fall of Theological Enlightenment, Jeffrey D. Burson analyzes the history of the French Enlightenment and its relationship to the French Revolution by casting it as a diverse constellation of Theological Enlightenment discourses, compromised between about 1730 and 1762 by high-stakes cultural and political controversies involving the royal court, the government, and the Catholic Church. Burson places the Abbé Jean-Martin de Prades at the center of the storm. In 1749, Prades was working on his doctorate in theology at the University of Paris. An ambitious young theologian, Prades, like his teachers at the Sorbonne and like many lay and clerical apologists in mid-eighteenth-century France, had been deeply inspired by the spirit of the Enlightenment. Burson reinterprets the Jesuit Enlightenment and its influence on French society, arguing that Jesuits had pioneered ways of synthesizing Locke, Malebranche, and Newton in light of the expansion of the public sphere. Hoping to defend Catholic theology against the Radical Enlightenment by adapting these Jesuit Enlightenment discourses with natural history and Enlightenment theological debates, Prades inadvertently sparked a public scandal that galvanized members of the royal court and the Parlement of Paris, Jansenists, Jesuits, and philosophes, alike—all of whom refashioned the person and work of Prades to suit their own ends. Ultimately, the controversy polarized the cultural politics of pre-Revolutionary France into two camps, that of a self-consciously secular Enlightenment and that of a staunchly opposed Counter-Enlightenment. Prades's history provides Burson with a lens through which to reevaluate the intersections of theology and Enlightenment philosophy, of French politics and the French Catholic church, and of conservatives, moderates, and radicals on all sides in order to provide us with a newly-capacious Enlightenment historiography.

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Although Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland together dominate fourteenth-century English literature, their respective masterpieces, The Canterbury Tales and Piers Plowman, could not be more different. While Langland’s poem was immediately popular and influential, it was Chaucer who stood at the head of a literary tradition within a generation of his death. John Bowers asks why and how Chaucer, not Langland, was granted this position. His study reveals the political, social, and religious factors that contributed to the formation of a literary canon in fourteenth-century England. Through extensive manuscript evidence, Bowers tracks the reputations of the two writers into the fifteenth century, when studies of fourteenth-century literature became more clearly configured in terms of a double, antagonistic dynamic. Langland remained the largely invisible presence against which the official Chaucerian tradition was constructed. Never really separate, the two literary traditions constantly interacted, with the reputation of Chaucer the court poet eclipsing that of Langland the dissenter and critic. By examining the historical and social contexts within which these traditions arose, Bowers helps us to understand how some texts and writers become canonical and how others become marginalized.

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American-born Cardinal Aloisius Muench (1889-1962) was a key figure in German and German-American Catholic responses to the Holocaust, Jews, and Judaism between 1946 and 1959. He was arguably the most powerful American Catholic figure and an influential Vatican representative in occupied Germany and in West Germany after the war. In this carefully researched book, which draws on Muench’s collected papers, Suzanne Brown-Fleming offers the first assessment of Muench’s legacy and provides a rare glimpse into his commentary on Nazism, the Holocaust, and surviving Jews. She argues that Muench legitimized the Catholic Church’s failure during this period to confront the nature of its own complicity in Nazism’s anti-Jewish ideology. The archival evidence demonstrates that Muench viewed Jews as harmful in a number of very specific ways. He regarded German Jews who had immigrated to the United States as "aliens," he believed Jews to be "in control" of American policy-making in Germany, he feared Jews as "avengers" who wished to harm "victimized" Germans, and he believed Jews to be excessively involved in leftist activities. Muench’s standing and influence in the United States, Germany, and the Vatican hierarchies gave sanction to the idea that German Catholics needed no examination of conscience in regard to the Church's actions (or inactions) during the 1940s and 1950s. This fascinating story of Muench’s role in German Catholic consideration—and ultimate rejection—of guilt and responsibility for Nazism in general and the persecution of European Jews in particular will be an important addition to scholarship on the Holocaust and to church history.

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The new emphasis on spirituality in the workplace has been widely discussed in recent years and reported in major publications such as the Wall Street Journal and Fortune. Spirituality seems to be a basic human good essential for human flourishing. The contributors to this volume are all proponents of spirituality in the workplace, yet all raise important questions about this movement and what it means. What are the moral questions that should guide leaders? Is spirituality being treated as simply an instrumental good, valued for its usefulness in enhancing productivity and well-being? What are the responsibilities of business leaders? Of business schools and their faculty? Of churches? The essayists in this collection reflect on these and other pertinent questions. The common thread linking these authors is that all have distinguished themselves in their respective fields or professions and all wish to advance spirituality in business. Contributors to Business, Religion, and Spirituality provide a sober, but positive, prognosis for this new growth in spirituality while offering direction for the future.

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These three poem sequences read like novellas, with each poem/tale set in a real time and place, and each documented with original photographs from scrapbooks and archives.

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The topic of the election of Israel is one of the most controversial and difficult subjects in the entire Bible. Modern readers wonder why God would favor one specific people and why Israel in particular was chosen. One of the most important and theologically incisive voices on this topic has been that of Jon D. Levenson. His careful, wide-ranging scholarship on the Hebrew Bible and its theological reuse in later Judaic and Christian sources has influenced a generation of Jewish and Christian thinkers. This focused volume seeks to bring to a wide audience the ongoing rich theological dialogue on the election of Israel. Writing from a variety of disciplines and perspectives, the authors—Jews, Catholics, and Protestants—contribute thought-provoking essays spanning fields including the Hebrew Bible, apocryphal and pseudepigraphic literature, New Testament, rabbinics, the history of Christian exegesis, and modern theology. The resulting book not only engages the lifelong work of Jon D. Levenson but also sheds new light on a topic of great import to Judaism and Christianity and to the ongoing dialogue between these faith traditions.

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This collection of essays focuses on sacrifice in the context of Jewish and Christian scripture and is inspired by the thought and writings of René Girard. The contributors engage in a dialogue with Girard in their search for answers to key questions about the relation between religion and violence. The book is divided into two parts. The first opens with a conversation in which René Girard and Sandor Goodhart explore the relation between imitation and violence throughout human history, especially in religious culture. It is followed by essays on the subject of sacrifice contributed by some of the most distinguished scholars in the field, including Bruce Chilton, Robert Daly, Louis Feldman, Michael Fishbane, Erich Gruen, and Alan Segal. The second part contains essays on specific scriptural texts (Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22 and the book of Job in the Jewish tradition, the Gospel and Epistles in the Christian tradition). The authors explore new ways of applying Girardian analysis to episodes of sacrifice and scapegoating, demonstrating that fertile ground remains to further our understanding of violence in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. Contributors: Sandor Goodhart, Ann W. Astell, René Girard, Thomas Ryba, Michael Fishbane, Bruce Chilton, Robert Daly, S.J., Alan F. Segal, Louis H. Feldman, Erich S. Gruen, Stuart D. Robertson, Matthew Pattillo, Stephen Stern, Chris Allen Carter, William Morrow, William Martin Aiken, Gérard Rossé, Christopher S. Morrissey, Poong-In Lee, Anthony Bartlett

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Robert Archambeau examines the influence of the poet and critic Yvor Winters on his final generation of graduate students at Stanford in the early 1960s: Robert Hass, Robert Pinsky, James McMichael, John Matthias, and John Peck. Archambeau divides the poets into two groups, laureates and heretics. Hass and Pinsky, each of whom served multiple terms as United Sates Poet Laureate, achieved both popular recognition and institutional renown. In contrast, the poetic accomplishments of Matthias, McMichael, and Peck (and to some extent Winters himself), the "heretics," have not resulted in wide readership or institutional canonization. Archambeau begins with the context of the modernist poetics Winters first espoused and then rejected. The story that follows--of how his five most prominent students accepted, rejected, or transformed Winters's poetics, and how these poets went on to greater or lesser degrees of success in the field of late twentieth-century letters—illuminates the cultural politics of poetry in our own day. The author provides close readings of poems by this diverse group of poets, places their careers and works in the context of their times, and traces the relationship between American literary history and American canons of literary taste from the 1930s to the present day. Laureates and Heretics is an important contribution to American literary history and American poetry.

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This intellectual history and textual analysis of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s famous and obscure theme of the verbum interius, or “inner word,” serves as an indispensable guide to and reference for hermeneutic theory. John Arthos here gives a full exposition and interpretation of the medieval doctrine of the inner word, long one of the most challenging ideas in Gadamer’s Truth and Method. The scholastic idea of a word that is thought but not yet spoken served Augustine as an analogy for the procession of the Trinity, served Aquinas as the medium between divine ideas and human expression, and serves Gadamer as an expression of the embodied nature of human language. Arthos offers a history of the idea of the inner word in ancient and medieval thought, its place in German philosophy, and its significance for probing the deepest implications of hermeneutic understanding. Arthos also provides a close reading of Gadamer’s exegesis of the source texts of the doctrine of the inner word. He cross-references Gadamer’s analyses with the original texts and draws out their Heideggerian and Hegelian overtones. Through this close reading, Arthos deepens our understanding of the radical nature of Gadamer’s thought, which not only calls upon the authority of tradition but also develops some of the profoundest insights of classical and Judaeo-Christian teaching about language.

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Authoritarian Legacies and Democracy in Latin America and Southern Europe brings together well-known comparative political scientists to define and explore the effects of authoritarian rule in post-authoritarian regimes in Southern Europe, the Southern Cone, and Brazil. Contributors to this volume use the research of historians, social psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists to formulate their conceptualizations of legacies. Their analysis is also sensitive to the experiences of those who live with the consequences of authoritarian regimes. Each chapter offers a multi-case comparison either from within Latin America or between Latin America and Southern Europe. Among the challenges for democracies in Latin America and Southern Europe are weakened political parties, politicized militaries, compromised judiciaries, corrupt police forces, and widespread citizen distrust. Utilizing a historical-sociological methodology that incorporates both the formal-legal and cultural dimensions of legacies, these essayists offer a fruitful examination of the political structures and institutions bequeathed by authoritarian regimes. They look at such core institutions as political parties, executives, legislatures, constitutions, and interest groups as well as symbolic-discursive dimensions related to individual and collective memories, citizenship, public perception, and trust. They also suggest policy directions to eradicate authoritarian legacies from democratic institutions and praxis. Authoritarian Legacies and Democracy in Latin America and Southern Europe encourages comparativists to consider more systematically the many manifestations of authoritarian legacies as challenges to democracy. This volume will appeal to all students and scholars interested in comparative politics, Latin America, Southern Europe, and democratization.

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The Origins of Argentina’s Revolution of the Right traces the ideological roots and political impact of Argentine right-wing nationalism as it developed in the 1930s and 1940s. In this spirited book, Alberto Spektorowski focuses on the attempt by a new brand of nonconformist intellectuals to shift the concept of Argentine nationalism from its liberal incarnation to an integralist-populist one and, simultaneously, to change Argentina’s path of development from liberalism to a “third road” of economic autarky. Spektorowski maintains that the “third road” developed in 1930s Argentina through the juxtaposition of two apparently opposing types of anti-liberal ideological currents: a right-wing authoritarian current reliant upon counterrevolutionary European sources, and an anti-imperialist, populist current. He shows that both of these wings rejected liberal institutions, bourgeois society, cosmopolitanism, and old-type conservatism, and became profoundly anti-imperialist. Both defended a “pro-Axis” neutrality during World War II, and both set the ideological stage for Argentina’s sociopolitical shift of the 1940s. Spektorowski concludes that both of these currents produced a single nationalist ideology that became the intellectual framework in which the “repertoire” of political values of the 1943 military regime and Peronism was subsequently elaborated.

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Water and the Word focuses on a genre of literature written for the education of the Carolingian clergy: Carolingian baptismal instructions. This literature has never been brought together and studied collectively in the context of the books in which it circulated. As a corpus, read in comparison to one another, the baptismal tracts tell how baptism was celebrated and interpreted across Carolingian Europe. At the same time, in their manuscript context, they are an important new source of information regarding the nature and the success of the Carolingian Reform to educate the clergy. This comprehensive study has three major objectives. One is to describe the codices in which the baptismal instructions are found, in order to show what other kinds of material the baptismal tracts were associated with and to show where, how, and by whom these codices were intended to be used. Another is to bring together the baptismal texts and study them systematically. Finally, a third objective is to interpret the Carolingian Reform in light of the baptismal instructions and the manuscripts in which they were copied. Volume I of this two-volume set is devoted to analysis and interpretation of the material in volume II. It is divided into three parts. The first part is concerned with the manuscript context of the baptismal instructions. In the second, the baptismal expositions themselves are analyzed. Part 3 of volume I offers some conclusions about the Carolingian Reform. Volume II contains the Latin text of sixty-six manuscripts, as well as descriptions, introductions, and a topical survey of the contents of these manuscripts. In its broadest context this study is about the Christianization of Europe—not the superficial conversion of conquered peoples, but the slow replacement of one mindset with another that came about through the education of the people under the care of pastors.

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The wide range of readings in Working: Its Meaning and Its Limits proposes different ways of thinking about something most of us do every day—work. As part of the Ethics of Everyday Life series, these readings are an invitation to reflection and conversation. They focus not on rules for the workplace or on dilemmas in business ethics but on one of the most fundamental aspects of human existence in every time and place. Gilbert C. Meilaender presents varied readings that explore many of the ways in which human beings have thought about the place of work in life—its meanings, its limits, and its relation to other obligations, to the life cycle, to play, and to rest. The readings in this volume range in time from the world of ancient Israel and the classical world of Greece and Rome to contemporary American society. They range in complexity from “The Little Red Hen” to philosophers such as Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre, and in genre from poetry by Kipling and George Herbert to essays by Dorothy Sayers and Roger Angell; from novels by Tolstoy and Twain to treatises by Marx, Aristotle, and Karl Barth—all placed in the context of an extended discussion of the meaning of work in human life by Meilaender’s introduction. Working: Its Meaning and Its Limits enables any reader interested in understanding the moral and spiritual significance of work in our lives to enter into a conversation not only about what we do but who we are.

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In his Treatise on the Virtues, Aquinas discusses the character and function of habit; the essence, subject, cause, and meaning of virtue; and the separate intellectual, moral, cardinal, and theological virtues. His work constitutes one of the most thorough and incisive accounts of virtue in the history of Christian philosophy. John Oesterle's accurate and elegant translation makes this enduring work readily accessible to the modern reader.

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This volume brings together essays by an internationally distinguished and diverse group of scholars. Contributors thoughtfully explore the ethical, public policy, and scientific implications of embryonic and adult stem cell research. Part one of the book offers a variety of scientific and public policy perspectives, including essays on stem cell plasticity and using umbilical cord blood as an alternative source of pluripotent stem cells. Part two vigorously examines the ethics of stem cell research and considers issues of social justice, morality, and public policy. Scientific alternatives, a natural law perspective regarding federal funding, and a discussion of the possible moral complicity of Catholic researchers are among the distinctive contributions made to the stem cell research debate by this collection. The objective and balanced discussions contained in this volume serve as an accessible introduction to the bioethical questions, issues, and problems surrounding stem cell research.

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The Soul as Virgin Wife presents the first book-length study to give a detailed account of the theological and mystical teachings written by women themselves, especially by those known as beguines, which have been especially neglected. Hollywood explicates the difference between the erotic and imagistic mysticism, arguing that Mechthild, Porete, and Eckhart challenge the sexual ideologies prevalent in their culture and claim a union without distinction between the soul and the divine. The beguines' emphasis in the later Middle Ages on spiritual poverty has long been recognized as an important influence on subsequent German and Flemish mystical writers, in particular the great German Dominican preacher and apophatic theologian Meister Eckhart. In The Soul as Virgin Wife, Amy Hollywood presents the first book-length study to give a detailed textual account of these debts. Through an analysis of Magdeburg's The Flowing Light of the Godhead, Marguerite Porete's Mirror of Simple Souls, and the Latin commentaries and vernacular sermons of Eckhart, Hollywood uncovers the intricate web of influence and divergence between the beguinal spiritualities and Eckhart.

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Drawn from 15 years of work, this text presents a selection of the verse of Henry Weinfield.

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Scholarly and popular interest in Dorothy Day has grown steadily during the past decade. Widely acclaimed as a pioneer of American social Catholicism, as well as for co-founding the Catholic Worker and the movement by the same name, Day's religious vision and lifework have played a dramatic role in modern American Catholic history, profoundly influencing consciences. In this perceptive new study, Brigid O'Shea Merriman, O.S.F., examines the development of Day's spirituality, astutely relating it to twentieth-century intellectual and cultural history. After her conversion to Catholicism in 1927, Dorothy Day met the French peasant-philosopher Peter Maurin in 1932 and together they founded the Catholic Worker newspaper and movement. In this work Day discovered a vocation that would combine her journalistic skills with her long-standing desire for sweeping social change and love of the poor. Merriman demonstrates that Day's leadership of this radical Catholic movement served as the locus for the development and fruition of her spirituality. A work of intellectual or spiritual history rather than biography, Searching for Christ explores Day's spiritual roots in literature, especially the Scriptures, along with her sensibility and her aesthetic vision, all of which have received too little attention up to now. The impact of Christian personalism, monasticism, and the retreat movement on Day's spirituality are also examined, including new material on Day's association with Thomas Merton and a critical analysis of the Lacouture retreat movement. Friendship remained a necessary component of Day's spirituality, and Merriman's final chapter discusses Day's devotion to and enduring friendship withthe saints, as well as her warm relationships with a number of her contemporaries.

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In the Proslogion, St. Anselm presents a philosophical argument for the existence of God. Anselm's proof, known since the time of Kant as the ontological argument for the existence of God, has played an important role in the history of philosophy and has been incorporated in various forms into the systems of Descartes, Leibniz, Hegel, and others. Included in this edition of the Proslogion are Gaunilo's "A Reply on Behalf of the Fool" and St. Anselm's "The Author's Reply to Gaunilo." All three works are in the original Latin with English translation on facing pages. Professor Charlesworth's introduction provides a helpful discussion of the context of the Proslogion in the theological tradition and in Anselm's own thought and writing.

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Book Three, Part 1 of the Summa Contra Gentiles series is the first part of a treatise on the hierarchy of creation, the divine providence over all things, and man’s relation to God. The Summa Contra Gentiles is not merely the only complete summary of Christian doctrine that St. Thomas has written, but also a creative and even revolutionary work of Christian apologetics composed at the precise moment when Christian thought needed to be intellectually creative in order to master and assimilate the intelligence and wisdom of the Greeks and the Arabs. In the Summa Aquinas works to save and purify the thought of the Greeks and the Arabs in the higher light of Christian Revelation, confident that all that had been rational in the ancient philosophers and their followers would become more rational within Christianity. Book 1 of the Summa deals with God; Book 2, Creation; and Book 4, Salvation.

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Book Four of the Summa Contra Gentiles examines what God has revealed through scripture, specifically the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the end of the world. The Summa Contra Gentiles is not merely the only complete summary of Christian doctrine that St. Thomas has written, but also a creative and even revolutionary work of Christian apologetics composed at the precise moment when Christian thought needed to be intellectually creative in order to master and assimilate the intelligence and wisdom of the Greeks and the Arabs. In the Summa Aquinas works to save and purify the thought of the Greeks and the Arabs in the higher light of Christian Revelation, confident that all that had been rational in the ancient philosophers and their followers would become more rational within Christianity. Book 1 of the Summa deals with God; Book 2, Creation; and Book 3, Providence.

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Like all writers of really good spiritual theology, John Dunne never betrays his subject matter with the kind of pious posturing or psycho-babble gimmickry that too often passes for spiritual writing. Dunne's theological sensitivity is alert to nuance without becoming trapped into mere jargon. His care for the heart of authentic spirituality, like Henri Nouwen’s, is steady and believable. Dunne chooses the classical religious metaphor of the ‘journey’ and invites his readers to join him in a journey into solitude and back again into the human circle. He insists that we accept as guides in this journey the great spiritual masters of the Eastern and Western traditions. Thus in reading Reasons of the Heart, we find ourselves in the presence of some of the best insights of John’s Gospel, Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Buber, the Buddha, and Jesus. Dunne skillfully invites the reader to ‘pass over’ to a religious and theological vision of God and of our common humanity in our journey to authentic spirituality. Like Whitehead, Dunne believes that religion, above all, has to do with what an individual does with his/her solitariness. More than Whitehead, Dunne is concerned not only to have the individual enter solitariness, but also finally to leave it behind and rejoin the human community.

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In 1977, a Chicago-based Nazi group announced its plans to demonstrate in Skokie, Illinois, the home of hundreds of Holocaust survivors. The shocked survivor community rose in protest and the issue went to court, with the ACLU defending the Nazis’ right to free speech. The court ruled in the Nazis’ favor. According to the “content neutrality doctrine” governing First Amendment jurisprudence, the Nazis’ insults and villifications were “neutral”--not the issue, as far as the law was concerned. But to Downs, they are at issue. In Nazis in Skokie he challenges the doctrine of “content neutrality” and presents an argument for the minimal abridgment of free speech when that speech in intentionally harmful. Draawing on his interviews with participants in the conflict, Downs combines detailed social history with informed legal interpretation in a provocative examination of an abiding tension between individual freedom and community integrity, and between procedural and substantive justice.

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It is generally agreed that those types of philosophy that are loosely called "Platonic" and "Neoplatonic" played a crucial role in the history of European culture during the centuries between antiquity and the Middle Ages. However, until now no scholar has attempted to describe the evolution of these forms of thought in a single comprehensive academic study. Middle Platonism and Neoplatonism is the first full-scale study to bridge the gap between ancient and medieval thought. Stephen Gersh’s two-volume survey of Platonic influences upon the Middle Ages focuses on questions that are basic to scholars of medieval philosophy, history, and literature: What was the influence of Plato’s philosophy during the Middle Ages? Is it correct to consider earlier medieval philosophy as Platonic? How do Platonism and Neoplatonism differ? What do Platonic and Neoplatonic modes of thought have to do with Plato? Most medieval philosophers developed their doctrines without access to the greatest intellectual works of the Greeks. Instead, they elaborated their philosophies in relation to the Latin philosophical literature that spanned the classical period to the end of antiquity. Thus, Gersh develops his study by examining the important channels of transmission that existed for medieval philosophers. Following an introduction that outlines particular methodological perspectives relative to the discussion, the history is divided into three main sections. In total, the study surveys an impressive range of authors never previously considered in a single work, with many of the translations previously available only as Greek and Latin texts: I.1 Middle Platonism: The Platonists and the Stoics (Cicero, Seneca); I.2 Middle Platonism: The Platonists and the Doxographers (Gellius, Apuleius, the Hermetic "Asclepius," Ambrose, Censorinus, Augustine); II Neoplatonism (Calcidius, Macrobius, Martianus Capella, Boethius, Marius Victorinus, Firmicus Maternus, Favonius Eulogius, Servius, Fulgentius, Priscianus Lydus, Priscianrs Grammaticus) The concluding chapter illustrates the Platonic influence upon certain medieval authors up to the early twelfth century, and it establishes guidelines for further study. Middle Platonism and Neoplatonism contains an extensive bibliography and a complete index of Latin texts.

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"Newton on Matter and Activity shows persuasively that while the Principia remains within the first two stages of inquiry (mathematical and physical) into nature, Newton spent the next forty years of his life making a philosophical analysis of matter, force, and transmission of force. Close attention is paid to methodological issues, especially Newton's move beyond inductivism and toward a reproductive theoretical schema of interpretation required to treat of attraction, hardness, and impenetrability." —Cross Currents

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Labors from the Heart, a collection of personal narratives, comes from the inspiring day-to-day work of people who attempt to prove the Catholic university true to its mission. Some of the essays are written specifically about the individual Christian ministries—residence hall ministry, liturgical coordination, marriage preparation and enrichment, and adult Christian formation. Others are about faculty and administrative activities which find a distinctive home in a Catholic university—a law school's legal aid clinic for the poor and marginalized, an alumni association's continuing education program with a special focus on social justice and professional ethics, an innovative program for training a corps of young teachers for underserved Catholic schools. Some are narratives by people who have a professional or personal stake in the vitality of Catholic higher education—an alumna who provides a retrospective of the meaning of her education, a writer who "commits acts of public relations" on behalf of the University. Faculty, staff, administrators, and alumni provide personal perspectives on how the Catholic character of a university such as Notre Dame is realized in their own occupations, ministries, and vocations.

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