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

Catholic Greg Bourke's profoundly moving memoir about growing up gay and overcoming discrimination in the battle for same-sex marriage in the US. In this compelling and deeply affecting memoir, Greg Bourke recounts growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, and living as a gay Catholic. The book describes Bourke’s early struggles for acceptance as an out gay man living in the South during the 1980s and ’90s, his unplanned transformation into an outspoken gay rights activist after being dismissed as a troop leader from the Boy Scouts of America in 2012, and his historic role as one of the named plaintiffs in the landmark United States Supreme Court decision Obergefell vs. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in 2015. After being ousted by the Boy Scouts of America (BSA), former Scoutmaster Bourke became a leader in the movement to amend antigay BSA membership policies. The Archdiocese of Louisville, because of its vigorous opposition to marriage equality, blocked Bourke’s return to leadership despite his impeccable long-term record as a distinguished boy scout leader. But while making their home in Louisville, Bourke and his husband, Michael De Leon, have been active members at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church for more than three decades, and their family includes two adopted children who attended Lourdes school and were brought up in the faith. Over many years and challenges, this couple has managed to navigate the choppy waters of being openly gay while integrating into the fabric of their parish life community. Bourke is unapologetically Catholic, and his faith provides the framework for this inspiring story of how the Bourke De Leon family struggled to overcome antigay discrimination by both the BSA and the Catholic Church and fought to legalize same-sex marriage across the country. Gay, Catholic, and American is an illuminating account that anyone, no matter their ideological orientation, can read for insight. It will appeal to those interested in civil rights, Catholic social justice, and LGBTQ inclusion.

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This book unveils the history and impact of an unprecedented anarchist awakening in early twentieth-century America. Mother Earth, an anarchist monthly published by Emma Goldman, played a key role in sparking and spreading the movement around the world. One of the most important figures in revolutionary politics in the early twentieth century, Emma Goldman (1869–1940) was essential to the rise of political anarchism in the United States and Europe. But as Rachel Hui-Chi Hsu makes clear in this book, the work of Goldman and her colleagues at the flagship magazine Mother Earth (1906–1917) resonated globally, even into the present day. As a Russian Jewish immigrant to the United States in the late nineteenth century, Goldman developed a keen voice and ideology based on labor strife and turbulent politics of the era. She ultimately was deported to Russia due to agitating against World War I. Hsu takes a comprehensive look at Goldman’s impact and legacy, tracing her work against capitalism, advocacy for feminism, and support of homosexuality and atheism. Hsu argues that Mother Earth stirred an unprecedented anarchist awakening, inspiring an antiauthoritarian spirit across social, ethnic, and cultural divides and transforming U.S. radicalism. The magazine’s broad readership—immigrant workers, native-born cultural elite, and professionals in various lines of work—was forced to reflect on society and their lives. Mother Earth spread the gospel of anarchism while opening it to diversified interpretations and practices. This anarchist awakening was more effective on personal and intellectual levels than on the collective, socioeconomic level. Hsu explores the fascinating history of Mother Earth, headquartered in New York City, and captures a clearer picture of the magazine’s influence by examining the dynamic teamwork that occurred beyond Goldman. The active support of foreign revolutionaries fostered a borderless radical network that resisted all state and corporate powers. Emma Goldman, “Mother Earth,” and the Anarchist Awakening will attract readers interested in early twentieth-century history, transnational radicalism, and cosmopolitan print culture, as well as those interested in anarchism, anti-militarism, labor activism, feminism, and Emma Goldman.

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This book serves as an introduction to the ongoing political debate about the relationship of capitalism and democracy. In recent years, the ideological battles between advocates of free markets and minimal government, on the one hand, and adherents of greater democratic equality and some form of the welfare state, on the other hand, have returned in full force. Anyone who wants to make sense of contemporary American politics and policy battles needs to have some understanding of the divergent beliefs and goals that animate this debate. In Capitalism and Democracy, Thomas A. Spragens, Jr., examines the opposing sides of the free market versus welfare state debate through the lenses of political economy, moral philosophy, and political theory. He asks: Do unchecked markets maximize prosperity, or do they at times produce wasteful and damaging outcomes? Are market distributions morally appropriate, or does fairness require some form of redistribution? Would a society of free markets and minimal government be the best kind of society possible, or would it have serious problems? After leading the reader through a series of thought experiments designed to compare and clarify the thought processes and beliefs held by supporters of each side, Spragens explains why there are no definitive answers to these questions. He concludes, however, that some answers are better than others, and he explains why his own judgement is that a vigorous free marketplace provides great benefits to a democratic society, both economically and politically, but that it also requires regulation and supplementation by collective action for a society to maximize prosperity, to mitigate some of the unfairness of the human condition, and to be faithful to important democratic purposes and ideals. This engaging and accessible book will interest students and scholars of political economy, democratic theory, and theories of social justice. It will also appeal to general readers who are seeking greater clarity and understanding of contemporary debates about government's role in the economy.

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“Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn delineates his idyllic time in rural Vermont, where he had the freedom to work, spend time with his family, and wage a war of ideas against the Soviet Union and other detractors from afar. At his quiet retreat . . . the Nobel laureate found . . . ‘a happiness in free and uninterrupted work.’” —Kirkus Reviews This compelling account concludes Nobel Prize–winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s literary memoirs of his years in the West after his forced exile from the USSR following the publication of The Gulag Archipelago. The book reflects both the pain of separation from his Russian homeland and the chasm of miscomprehension between him and Western opinion makers. In Between Two Millstones, Solzhenitsyn likens his position to that of a grain that becomes lodged between two massive stones, each grinding away—the Soviet Communist power with its propaganda machine on the one hand and the Western establishment with its mainstream media on the other. Book 2 picks up the story of Solzhenitsyn’s remarkable life after the raucous publicity over his 1978 Harvard Address has died down. The author parries attacks from the Soviet state (and its many fellow-travelers in the Western press) as well as from recent émigrés who, according to Solzhenitsyn, defame Russian culture, history, and religion. He shares his unvarnished view of several infamous episodes, such as a sabotaged meeting with Ronald Reagan, aborted Senate hearings regarding Radio Liberty, and Gorbachev’s protracted refusal to allow The Gulag Archipelago to be published back home. There is also a captivating chapter detailing his trips to Japan, Taiwan, and Great Britain, including meetings with Margaret Thatcher and Prince Charles and Princess Diana. Meanwhile, the central themes of Book 1 course through this volume, too—the immense artistic quandary of fashioning The Red Wheel, staunch Western hostility to the historical and future Russia (and how much can, or should, the author do about it), and the challenges of raising his three sons in the language and spirit of Russia while cut off from the homeland in a remote corner of rural New England. The book concludes in 1994, as Solzhenitsyn bids farewell to the West in a valedictory series of speeches and meetings with world leaders, including John Paul II, and prepares at last to return home with his beloved wife Natalia, full of misgivings about what use he can be in the first chaotic years of post-Communist Russia, but never wavering in his conviction that, in the long run, his books would speak, influence, and convince. This vibrant, faithful, and long-awaited first English translation of Between Two Millstones, Book 2, will fascinate Solzhenitsyn's many admirers, as well as those interested in twentieth-century history, Russian history, and literature in general.

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The Spanish conquest has long been a source of polemic, ever since the early sixteenth century when Spanish jurists began theorizing the legal merits behind native dispossession in the Americas. But in The Business of Conquest: Empire, Love, and Law in the Atlantic World, Nicole D. Legnani demonstrates how the financing and partnerships behind early expeditions betray their own praxis of imperial power as a business, even as the laws of the Indies were being written. She interrogates how and why apologists of Spanish Christian empire, such as José de Acosta, found themselves justifying the Spanish conquest as little more than a joint venture between crown and church that relied on violent actors in pursuit of material profits but that nonetheless served to propagate Christianity in overseas territories. Focusing on cultural and economic factors at play, and examining not only the chroniclers of the era but also laws, contracts, theological treatises, histories, and chivalric fiction, Legnani traces the relationship between capital investment, monarchical power, and imperial scalability in the Conquest. In particular, she shows how the Christian virtue of caritas (love and charity of neighbor, and thus God) became confused with cupiditas (greed and lust), because love came to be understood as a form of wealth in the partnership between the crown and the church. In this partnership, the work of the conquistador became, ultimately, that of a traveling business agent for the Spanish empire whose excess from one venture capitalized the next. This business was thus the business of conquest and featured entrepreneurial violence as its norm—not exception. The Business of Conquest offers an original examination of this period, including the perspectives of both the creators of the colonial world (monarchs, venture capitalists, conquerors, and officials), of religious figures (such as Las Casas), and finally of indigenous points of view to show how a venture capital model can be used to analyze the partnership between crown and church. It will appeal to students and scholars of the early modern period, Latin American colonial studies, capitalism, history, and indigenous studies.

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Concepts of predestination and reprobation were central issues in the Protestant Reformation, especially within Calvinist churches, and thus have often been studied primarily in the historical context of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In Versions of Election: From Langland and Aquinas to Calvin and Milton, David Aers takes a longer view of these key issues in Christian theology. With meticulous attention to the texts of medieval and early modern theologians, poets, and popular writers, this book argues that we can understand the full complexity of the history of various teachings on the doctrine of election only through a detailed diachronic study that takes account of multiple periods and disciplines. Throughout this wide-ranging study, Aers examines how various versions of predestination and reprobation emerge and re-emerge in Christian tradition from the Middle Ages through the seventeenth century. Starting with incisive readings of medieval works by figures such as William Langland, Thomas Aquinas, and Robert Holcot, and continuing on to a nuanced consideration of texts by Protestant thinkers and writers, including John Calvin, Arthur Dent, William Twisse, and John Milton (among others), Aers traces the twisting and unpredictable history of prominent versions of predestination and reprobation across the divide of the Reformation and through a wide variety of genres. In so doing, Aers offers not only a detailed study of election but also important insights into how Christian tradition is made, unmade, and remade. Versions of Election is an original, cross-disciplinary study that touches upon the fields of literature, theology, ethics, and politics, and makes important contributions to the study of both medieval and early modern intellectual and literary history. It will appeal to academics in these fields, as well as clergy and other educated readers from a wide variety of denominations.

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Concepts of predestination and reprobation were central issues in the Protestant Reformation, especially within Calvinist churches, and thus have often been studied primarily in the historical context of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In Versions of Election: From Langland and Aquinas to Calvin and Milton, David Aers takes a longer view of these key issues in Christian theology. With meticulous attention to the texts of medieval and early modern theologians, poets, and popular writers, this book argues that we can understand the full complexity of the history of various teachings on the doctrine of election only through a detailed diachronic study that takes account of multiple periods and disciplines. Throughout this wide-ranging study, Aers examines how various versions of predestination and reprobation emerge and re-emerge in Christian tradition from the Middle Ages through the seventeenth century. Starting with incisive readings of medieval works by figures such as William Langland, Thomas Aquinas, and Robert Holcot, and continuing on to a nuanced consideration of texts by Protestant thinkers and writers, including John Calvin, Arthur Dent, William Twisse, and John Milton (among others), Aers traces the twisting and unpredictable history of prominent versions of predestination and reprobation across the divide of the Reformation and through a wide variety of genres. In so doing, Aers offers not only a detailed study of election but also important insights into how Christian tradition is made, unmade, and remade. Versions of Election is an original, cross-disciplinary study that touches upon the fields of literature, theology, ethics, and politics, and makes important contributions to the study of both medieval and early modern intellectual and literary history. It will appeal to academics in these fields, as well as clergy and other educated readers from a wide variety of denominations.

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In Fifteenth-Century Lives, Karen A. Winstead identifies and explores a major shift in the writing of Middle English saints’ lives. As she demonstrates, starting in the 1410s and ’20s, hagiography became more character-oriented, more morally complex, more deeply embedded in history, and more politically and socially engaged. Further, it became more self-consciously literary and began to feature women more prominently—and not only traditional virgin martyrs but also matrons and contemporary holy women. Winstead shows that this literature placed a premium on scholarship and teaching. Hagiography celebrated educators and scholars to a greater extent than ever before and became a vehicle for educating readers about Christian dogma. Focusing both on authors well known, such as John Lydgate and Margery Kempe, and on others less known, such as Osbern Bokenham and John Capgrave, Winstead argues that the values promoted by fifteenth-century hagiography helped to shape the reformist impulses that eventually produced the Reformation. Moreover, these values continued to influence post-Reformation hagiography, both Protestant and Catholic, well into the seventeenth century. In exploring these trends in fifteenth-century hagiography, identifying the factors that contributed to their emergence, and tracing their influence in later periods, Fifteenth-Century Lives marks an important contribution to revisionary scholarship on fifteenth-century literature. It will appeal to students and scholars of late medieval English literature and late medieval religion.

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The crisis of multiculturalism in the West and the failure of the Arab uprisings in the Middle East have pushed the question of how to live peacefully within a diverse society to the forefront of global discussion. Against this backdrop, Indonesia has taken on a particular importance: with a population of 265 million people (87.7 percent of whom are Muslim), Indonesia is both the largest Muslim-majority country in the world and the third-largest democracy. In light of its return to electoral democracy from the authoritarianism of the former New Order regime, some analysts have argued that Indonesia offers clear proof of the compatibility of Islam and democracy. Skeptics argue, however, that the growing religious intolerance that has marred the country’s political transition discredits any claim of the country to democratic exemplarity. Based on a twenty-month project carried out in several regions of Indonesia, Indonesian Pluralities: Islam, Citizenship, and Democracy shows that, in assessing the quality and dynamics of democracy and citizenship in Indonesia today, we must examine not only elections and official politics, but also the less formal, yet more pervasive, processes of social recognition at work in this deeply plural society. The contributors demonstrate that, in fact, citizen ethics are not static discourses but living traditions that co-evolve in relation to broader patterns of politics, gender, religious resurgence, and ethnicity in society. Indonesian Pluralities offers important insights on the state of Indonesian politics and society more than twenty years after its return to democracy. It will appeal to political scholars, public analysts, and those interested in Islam, Southeast Asia, citizenship, and peace and conflict studies around the world. Contributors: Robert W. Hefner, Erica M. Larson, Kelli Swazey, Mohammad Iqbal Ahnaf, Marthen Tahun, Alimatul Qibtiyah, and Zainal Abidin Bagir

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In his latest book, Horizons of Difference: Engaging with Others, Fred Dallmayr argues that the dialogue between religious and secular commitments, between faith and reason, is particularly important in our time because both faith and reason can give rise to dangerous and destructive types of extremism, fanaticism, or idolatry. In this interdisciplinary and cross-cultural synthesis of philosophy, religious thought, and political theory, Dallmayr neither accepts the “clash of cultures” dichotomy nor denies the reality of cultural tensions. Instead, operating from the standpoint of philosophical hermeneutics, he embraces cultural difference as a necessary condition and opportunity for mutual cross-cultural dialogue and learning. In part 1, “Relationality and Difference,” Dallmayr explores the emergence of diverse loyalties and attachments in different social and cultural contexts. The assumption is not that different commitments are necessarily synchronized or “naturally” compatible but rather that they are held together precisely by their difference and potential antagonism. Part 2, “Engagement through Dialogue and Interaction,” dwells on the major means of mediating between the alternatives of radical separation and radical sameness: dialogue and hermeneutical interpretation of understanding. In this respect, the emphasis shifts to leading philosophers of dialogue such as Hans-Georg Gadamer, Bernhard Waldenfels, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In a world where the absolutizing of the ego encourages selfish egotism that can lead to aggressive warmongering, Horizons of Difference shows how the categories of “difference” and “relationality” can be used to build a genuine and peaceful democracy based on dialogue and interaction instead of radical autonomy and elitism.

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In Fifteenth-Century Lives, Karen A. Winstead identifies and explores a major shift in the writing of Middle English saints’ lives. As she demonstrates, starting in the 1410s and ’20s, hagiography became more character-oriented, more morally complex, more deeply embedded in history, and more politically and socially engaged. Further, it became more self-consciously literary and began to feature women more prominently—and not only traditional virgin martyrs but also matrons and contemporary holy women. Winstead shows that this literature placed a premium on scholarship and teaching. Hagiography celebrated educators and scholars to a greater extent than ever before and became a vehicle for educating readers about Christian dogma. Focusing both on authors well known, such as John Lydgate and Margery Kempe, and on others less known, such as Osbern Bokenham and John Capgrave, Winstead argues that the values promoted by fifteenth-century hagiography helped to shape the reformist impulses that eventually produced the Reformation. Moreover, these values continued to influence post-Reformation hagiography, both Protestant and Catholic, well into the seventeenth century. In exploring these trends in fifteenth-century hagiography, identifying the factors that contributed to their emergence, and tracing their influence in later periods, Fifteenth-Century Lives marks an important contribution to revisionary scholarship on fifteenth-century literature. It will appeal to students and scholars of late medieval English literature and late medieval religion.

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The Roman Catholic Church, with its global reach, centralized organization, and more than 1.4 billion members, could be one of the world’s most significant forces in global peacemaking, and yet its robust tradition of social teaching on peace is not widely known. In Peacebuilding and Catholic Social Teaching, Theodora Hawksley aims to make that tradition better known and understood, and to encourage its continued development in light of the lived experience of Catholics engaged in peacebuilding and conflict transformation worldwide. The first part of this book analyzes the development of Catholic social teaching on peace from the time of the early Church fathers to the present, drawing attention to points of tension and areas in need of development. The second part engages in constructive theological work, exploring how the existing tradition might develop in order to support the efforts of Catholic peacebuilders and respond to the distinctive challenges of contemporary conflict. Peacebuilding and Catholic Social Teaching is one of the first scholarly monographs dedicated exclusively to theology, ethics, and peacebuilding. It will appeal to students and academics who specialize in Catholic social teaching and peacebuilding, to practitioners of Catholic peacebuilding, and to anyone with an interest in religion and peacebuilding more generally.

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An Yves R. Simon Reader is the first collection of texts from the entirety of the philosopher’s work. French Catholic (and then American) political philosopher Yves R. Simon was a student of Jacques Maritain and one of the most important figures in the revival of Thomism. His work, however, is still little known in English, and there is as yet no English biography of him. In An Yves R. Simon Reader: The Philosopher’s Calling, Michael D. Torre provides an erudite and helpful introduction to Simon’s life and thought. The volume contains selected key texts from all of Simon’s twenty books, half of which were published posthumously, dividing them into three sections. The first fundamentally defends the Aristotelian and Thomistic account of human knowing. The second begins with his groundbreaking discussion of human freedom and ends with his account of practical wisdom. The third then expands this account to cover the chief concerns of his social and political philosophy. The selections are long enough to be substantive and contain sustained and complete arguments. Each selection has its own foreword by an eminent commentator, familiar with Simon’s work, who lays out the necessary context for the reader. An Yves R. Simon Reader includes sections from several of Simon’s last and most important essays: on sensitive knowledge and on the analogous nature of “act.” It includes a number of excerpts from his justly famous account and defense of democratic government. The hallmarks of his work—his careful conceptual analysis, his genius for finding undervalued examples, and his talent for creating expressions that revivified an outworn idea—are on display throughout. Indeed, as one of the book’s contributors says, Simon touched nothing that he did not adorn. The result is a highly readable introduction to the thought of a key and underappreciated modern philosopher. Contributors: Michael D. Torre, Jude P. Dougherty, Raymond Dennehy, John C. Cahalan, Steven A. Long, Ralph Nelson, John P. Hittinger, Ralph McInerny, David B. Burrell, CSC, Laurence Berns, Catherine Green, W. David Solomon, V. Bradley Lewis, Joseph W. Koterski, SJ, James V. Schall, SJ, George Anastaplo, Walter J. Nicgorski, John A. Gueguen, Jr., Thomas R. Rourke, Jeanne Heffernan Schindler, and Robert Royal.

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A rediscovered classic of military history back in print for the seventy-fifth anniversary of the end of World War II When William B. Dreux parachuted into France in 1944, the OSS infantry officer had cinematic visions of blood-and-guts heroics, of leading the French Maquis resistance forces in daring missions to blow up key bridges and delay the German advance. This isn’t the glamorized screen-ready account he expected; this is the real story. Dreux’s three-man OSS team landed behind enemy lines in France, in uniform, far from the targeted bridges. No Bridges Blown is a story of mistakes, failures, and survival, a story of volunteers and countrymen working together in the French countryside. The only book written by one of the Jedburghs about his wartime experiences, Dreux brings the history of World War II to life with stories of real people amidst a small section of the fighting in France. These people had reckless courage, little training, and faced impossible odds. This story will resonate with veterans and everyday citizens alike and it brings to life the realities of war on the ground in Nazi-occupied France.

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Nationalism has played a uniquely powerful role in Argentine history, in large part due to the rise and enduring strength of two variants of anti-liberal nationalist thought: one left-wing and identifying with the “people” and the other right-wing and identifying with Argentina’s Catholic heritage. Although embracing very different political programs, the leaders of these two forms of nationalism shared the belief that the country’s nineteenth-century liberal elites had betrayed the country by seeking to impose an alien ideology at odds with the supposedly true nature of the Argentine people. The result, in their view, was an ongoing conflict between the “false Argentina” of the liberals and the “authentic”nation of true Argentines. Yet, despite their commonalities, scholarship has yet to pay significant attention to the interconnections between these two variants of Argentine nationalism. Jeane DeLaney rectifies this oversight with Identity and Nationalism in Modern Argentina. In this book, DeLaney explores the origins and development of Argentina’s two forms of nationalism by linking nationalist thought to ongoing debates over Argentine identity. Part I considers the period before 1930, examining the emergence and spread of new essentialist ideas of national identity during the age of mass immigration. Part II analyzes the rise of nationalist movements after 1930 by focusing on individuals who self-identified as nationalists. DeLaney connects the rise of Argentina’s anti-liberal nationalist movements to the shock of early twentieth-century immigration. She examines how pressures posed by the newcomers led to the weakening of the traditional ideal of Argentina as a civic community and the rise of new ethno-cultural understandings of national identity. Identity and Nationalism in Modern Argentina demonstrates that national identities are neither unitary nor immutable and that the ways in which citizens imagine their nation have crucial implications for how they perceive immigrants and whether they believe domestic minorities to be full-fledged members of the national community. Given the recent surge of anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe and the United States, this study will be of interest to scholars of nationalism, political science, Latin American political thought, and the contemporary history of Argentina.

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In Montaigne: Life without Law, originally published in French in 2014 and now translated for the first time into English by Paul Seaton, Pierre Manent provides a careful reading of Montaigne's three-volume work Essays. Although Montaigne's writings resist easy analysis, Manent finds in them a subtle unity, and demonstrates the philosophical depth of Montaigne's reflections and the distinctive, even radical, character of his central ideas. To show Montaigne's unique contribution to modern philosophy, Manent compares his work to other modern thinkers, including Machiavelli, Hobbes, Pascal, and Rousseau. What does human life look like without the imposing presence of the state? asks Manent. In raising this question about Montaigne's Essays, Manent poses a question of great relevance to our contemporary situation. He argues that Montaigne's philosophical reflections focused on what he famously called la condition humaine, the human condition. Manent tracks M

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Robert J. Sierakowski's Sandinistas: A Moral History offers a bold new perspective on the liberation movement that brought the Sandinista National Liberation Front to power in Nicaragua in 1979, overthrowing the longest-running dictatorship in Latin America. Unique sources, from trial transcripts to archival collections and oral histories, offer a new vantage point beyond geopolitics and ideologies to understand the central role that was played by everyday Nicaraguans. Focusing on the country’s rural north, Sierakowski explores how a diverse coalition of labor unionists, student activists, housewives, and peasants inspired by Catholic liberation theology came to successfully challenge the legitimacy of the Somoza dictatorship and its entrenched networks of power. Mobilizing communities against the ubiquitous cantinas, gambling halls, and brothels, grassroots organizers exposed the regime’s complicity in promoting social ills, disorder, and quotidian violence while helping to construct radical new visions of moral uplift and social renewal. Sierakowski similarly recasts our understanding of the Nicaraguan National Guard, grounding his study of the Somozas’ army in the social and cultural world of the ordinary soldiers who enlisted and fought in defense of the dictatorship. As the military responded to growing opposition with heightened state terror and human rights violations, repression culminated in widespread civilian massacres, stories that are unearthed for the first time in this work. These atrocities further exposed the regime’s moral breakdown in the eyes of the public, pushing thousands of previously unaligned Nicaraguans into the ranks of the guerrilla insurgency by the late 1970s. Sierakowski’s innovative reinterpretation of the Sandinista Revolution will be of interest to students, scholars, and activists concerned with Latin American social movements, the Cold War, and human rights.

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Value and Vulnerability brings together scholars of many religions—including Catholicism, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Protestantism, Islam, and Humanism—to identify and examine conceptions and interpretations of dignity within different religious and philosophical perspectives and their applications to contemporary issues of conflict, such as gendered, religious, and racial violence, immigration, ecology, and religious peacemaking. Value and Vulnerability also includes response chapters that clarify and refine these interpretations from interfaith perspectives. Through this volume, Matthew R. Petrusek and Jonathan Rothchild offer recommendations for advancing the conversation about dignity within and among traditions and for addressing urgent global issues and threats to dignity. Together, Petrusek, Rothchild, and the contributors create a comparative framework constituted by seven questions: What sources justify dignity’s existence, nature, and purpose? What is the relationship between the divine and human dignity? What is the relationship between dignity and the human body? Is dignity vulnerable or invulnerable to moral harm? Is dignity inherent or attained? Is dignity universal and equal? Is dignity practical? Through its systematic, comparative, interdisciplinary, and practical dimensions, Value and Vulnerability fills in the gaps in contemporary theological, philosophical, and ethical discourses on dignity. Contributors: Matthew R. Petrusek, Jonathan Rothchild, Darlene Fozard Weaver, Kristin Scheible, Karen B. Enriquez, Elliot N. Dorff, Daniel Nevins, Christopher Key Chapple, David P. Gushee, Aristotle Papanikolaou, Zeki Saritoprak, William Schweiker, Hille Haker, Nicholas Denysenko, Terrence L. Johnson, William O’Neill, Victor Carmona, Dawn Nothwehr, OSF, and Ellen Ott Marshall.

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Vatican II opened new pathways to engagement with societies shaped by modernity. Its project could be read as an attempt to interpret the stance of the church in relation to the whole project of modernity. The fundamental presumption of this collection of essays is that it is timely, indeed imperative, to keep alive the question of the church's self-understanding in its journey alongside "the complex, often rebellious, always restless mind of the modern world." Cornelius J. Casey and Fáinche Ryan have assembled some of the most prominent commentators on ecclesiastical and social-political engagements from the fields of theology, political philosophy, social theory, and cultural criticism. The contributors present differing perspectives on the role of the church. Some argue that pluralism is here to stay. Others point out that the liberal pluralism of contemporary society is aggressively powered by global corporate consumerism. This book, with its variety of voices, explores these issues largely from within the Catholic tradition. The role of the church in a pluralist society is a narrative that is being written by many people at many different levels of the church. Contributors: J. Bryan Hehir, Terry Eagleton, Patrick J. Deneen, Hans Joas, William T. Cavanaugh, Massimo Faggioli, Fáinche Ryan, Patrick Riordan, and Cornelius J. Casey

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The wildly unrestrained poems in Splinters Are Children of Wood, Leia Penina Wilson's second collection and winner of the Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry, pose an increasingly desperate question about what it means to be a girl, the ways girls are shaped by the world, as well as the role myth plays in this coming of age quest. Wilson, an afakasi Samoan poet, divides the book into three sections, linking the poems in each section by titles. In this way the poems act as a continuous song, an ode, or a lament revivifying a narrative that refuses to adopt a storyline. Samoan myths and Western stories punctuate this volume in a search to reconcile identity and education. The lyrical declaration is at once an admiration of love and self-loathing. She kills herself. Resurrects herself. Kills herself again. She is also killed by the world. Resurrected. Killed again. These poems map displacement, discontent, and an increasing suspicion of the world itself, or the ways people learn the world. Drawing on the work of Bhanu Kapil, Anne Waldman, Alice Notley, and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Wilson's poems reveal familiarity and strangeness, invocation and accusation. Both ritual and ruination, the poems return again and again to desire, myth, the sacred, and body

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The Reverend John Augustine Zahm, CSC, (1851--1921) was a Holy Cross priest, an author, a South American explorer, and a science professor and vice president at the University of Notre Dame, the latter at the age of twenty-five. Through his scientific writings, Zahm argued that Roman Catholicism was fully compatible with an evolutionary view of biological systems. Ultimately Zahm’s ideas were not accepted in his lifetime and he was prohibited from discussing evolution and Catholicism, although he remained an active priest for more than two decades after his censure. In Faith and Science at Notre Dame: John Zahm, Evolution, and the Catholic Church, John Slattery charts the rise and fall of Zahm, examining his ascension to international fame in bridging evolution and Catholicism and shedding new light on his ultimate downfall via censure by the Congregation of the Index of Prohibited Books. Slattery presents previously unknown archival letters and reports that allow Zahm’s censure to be fully understood in the light of broader scientific, theological, and philosophical movements within the Catholic Church and around the world. Faith and Science at Notre Dame weaves together a vast array of threads to tell a compelling new story of the late nineteenth century. The result is a complex and thrilling tale of Neo-Scholasticism, Notre Dame, empirical science, and the simple faith of an Indiana priest. The book, which includes a new translation of the 1864 Syllabus of Errors, will appeal to those interested in Notre Dame and Catholic history, scholars of science and religion, and general readers seeking to understand the relationship between faith and science.

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American society is often described as one that celebrates self-reliance and personal responsibility. However, abolitionists, progressive reformers, civil rights activists, and numerous others often held their fellow citizens responsible for shared problems such as economic exploitation and white supremacy. Moreover, they viewed recognizing and responding to shared problems as essential to achieving democratic ideals. In Democratic Responsibility, Nora Hanagan examines American thinkers and activists who offered an alternative to individualistic conceptions of responsibility and puts them in dialogue with contemporary philosophers who write about shared responsibility. Drawing on the political theory and practice of Henry David Thoreau, Jane Addams, Martin Luther King Jr., and Audre Lorde, Hanagan develops a distinctly democratic approach to shared responsibility. Cooperative democracy is especially relevant in an age of globalization and hyperconnectivity, where societies are continually threatened with harms—such as climate change, global sweatshop labor, and structural racism—that result from the combined interactions of multiple individuals and institutions, and which therefore cannot be resolved without collective action. Democratic Responsibility offers insight into how political actors might confront seemingly intractable problems, and challenges conventional understandings of what commitment to democratic ideals entails. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of political science, especially those who look to the history of political thought for resources that might promote social justice in the present.

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From Revolution to Power in Brazil: How Radical Leftists Embraced Capitalism and Struggled with Leadership examines terrorism from a new angle. Kenneth Serbin portrays a generation of Brazilian resistance fighters and militants struggling to rebuild their lives after suffering torture and military defeat by the harsh dictatorship that took control with the support of the United States in 1964, exiting in 1985. Based on two decades of research and more than three hundred hours of interviews with former members of the revolutionary organization National Liberating Action, Serbin’s is the first book to bring the story of Brazil’s long night of dictatorship into the present. It explores Brazil’s status as an emerging global capitalist giant and its unique contributions and challenges in the social arena. The book concludes with the rise of ex-militants to positions of power in a capitalist democracy—and how they confronted both old and new challenges posed by Brazilian society. Ultimately, Serbin explores the profound human questions of how to oppose dictatorship, revive politics in the wake of brutal repression, nurture democracy as a value, and command a capitalist system. This book will be of keen interest to business people, journalists, policy analysts, and readers with a general interest in Latin America and international affairs.

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In this unprecedented introduction to Byzantine monasticism, based on the Conway Lectures she delivered at the University of Notre Dame in 2014, Alice-Mary Talbot surveys the various forms of monastic life in the Byzantine Empire between the ninth and fifteenth centuries. It includes chapters on male monastic communities (mostly cenobitic, but some idiorrhythmic in late Byzantium), nuns and nunneries, hermits and holy mountains, and a final chapter on alternative forms of monasticism, including recluses, stylites, wandering monks, holy fools, nuns disguised as monks, and unaffiliated monks and nuns. This original monograph does not attempt to be a history of Byzantine monasticism but rather emphasizes the multiplicity of ways in which Byzantine men and women could devote their lives to service to God, with an emphasis on the tension between the two basic modes of monastic life, cenobitic and eremitic. It stresses the individual character of each Byzantine monastic community in contrast to the monastic orders of the Western medieval world, and yet at the same time demonstrates that there were more connections between certain groups of monasteries than previously realized. The most original sections include an in-depth analysis of the challenges facing hermits in the wilderness, and special attention to enclosed monks (recluses) and urban monks and nuns who lived independently outside of monastic complexes. Throughout, Talbot highlights some of the distinctions between the monastic life of men and women, and makes comparisons of Byzantine monasticism with its Western medieval counterpart.

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Shortly after the Civil War ended, David Power Conyngham, an Irish Catholic journalist and war veteran, began compiling the stories of Catholic chaplains and nuns who served during the war. His manuscript, Soldiers of the Cross, is the fullest record written during the nineteenth century of the Catholic Church's involvement in the war, as it documents the service of fourteen chaplains and six female religious communities, representing both North and South. Many of Coyngham's chapters contain new insights into the clergy during the war that are unavailable elsewhere, either during his time or ours, making the work invaluable to Catholic and Civil War historians. The introduction contains over a dozen letters written between 1868 and 1870 from high-ranking Confederate and Union officials, such as Confederate General Robert E. Lee, Union Surgeon General William Hammond, and Union General George B. McClellan, who praise the church's services during the war. Chapters on Fathers William Corby and Peter P. Cooney, as well as the Sisters of the Holy Cross, cover subjects relatively well known to Catholic scholars, yet other chapters are based on personal letters and other important primary sources that have not been published prior to this book. Unpublished due to Conyngham's untimely death, Soldiers of the Cross remained hidden away in an archive for more than a century. Now annotated and edited so as to be readable and useful to scholars and modern readers, this long-awaited publication of Soldiers of the Cross is a fitting presentation of Conyngham's last great work.

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There have been many studies analyzing the philosophy of Blaise Pascal, but this book is the first full-length study of the philosophies of his sisters, Jacqueline Pascal and Gilberte Pascal Périer, and his niece, Marguerite Périer. While these women have long been presented as the disciples, secretaries, correspondents, and nurses of their brother and uncle, each woman developed a distinctive philosophy that is more than auxiliary to the thought of Blaise Pascal. The unique philosophical voice of each Pascal woman is studied in The Other Pascals. As the headmistress of the Port-Royal convent school, Jacqueline Pascal made important contributions to the philosophy of education. Gilberte Pascal Périer wrote the first philosophical biographies of Blaise and Jacqueline. Marguerite Périer defended freedom of conscience against coercion by political and religious superiors. Each of these women authors speaks in a gendered voice, emphasizing the right of women to develop a philosophical and theological culture and to resist commands to blind obedience by paternal, political, or ecclesiastical authorities. The Other Pascals will be of keen interest to readers interested in early modern philosophy, history, literature, and religion. The book will also appeal to those with an interest in women’s studies and French studies.

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In his fascinating new book, based on the Conway Lectures he delivered at Notre Dame in 2016, William Courtenay examines aspects of the religious life of one medieval institution, the University of Paris, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In place of the traditional account of teaching programs and curriculum, however, the focus here is on religious observances and the important role that prayers for the dead played in the daily life of masters and students. Courtenay examines the university as a consortium of sub-units in which the academic and religious life of its members took place, and in which prayers for the dead were a major element. Throughout the book, Courtenay highlights reverence for the dead, which preserved their memory and was believed to reduce the time in purgatory for deceased colleagues and for founders of and donors to colleges. The book also explores the advantages for poor scholars of belonging to a confraternal institution that provided benefits to all members regardless of social background, the areas in which women contributed to the university community, including the founding of colleges, and the growth of Marian piety, seeking her blessing as patron of scholarship and as protector of scholars. Courtenay looks at attempts to offset the inequality between the status of masters and students, rich and poor, and college founders and fellows, in observances concerned with death as well as rewards and punishments in the afterlife. Rituals for the Dead is the first book-length study of religious life and remembrances for the dead at the medieval University of Paris. Scholars of medieval history will be an eager audience for this title.

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The belief that the Virgin Mary was bodily assumed to be crowned as heaven’s Queen has been celebrated in the liturgy and literature of England since the fifth century. The upheaval of the Reformation brought radical changes in the beliefs surrounding the assumption and coronation, both of which were eliminated from state-approved liturgy. Queen of Heaven examines canonical as well as obscure images of the Blessed Mother that present fresh evidence of the incompleteness of the English Reformation. Through an analysis of works by writers such as Edmund Spenser, Henry Constable, Sir John Harington, and the writers of the early modern rosary books, which were contraband during the Reformation, Grindlay finds that these images did not simply disappear during this time as lost “Catholic” symbols, but instead became sources of resistance and controversy, reflecting the anxieties triggered by the religious changes of the era. Grindlay’s study of the Queen of Heaven affords an insight into England’s religious pluralism, revealing a porousness between medieval and early modern perspectives toward the Virgin and dispelling the notion that Catholic and Protestant attitudes on the subject were completely different. Grindlay reveals the extent to which the potent and treasured image of the Queen of Heaven was impossible to extinguish and remained of widespread cultural significance. Queen of Heaven will appeal to an academic audience, but its fresh, uncomplicated style will also engage intelligent, well-informed readers who have an interest in the Virgin Mary and in English Reformation history.

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The Portrait of Beatrice examines both Dante's and D. G. Rossetti's intellectual experiences in the light of a common concern about visuality. Both render, in different times and contexts, something that resists clear representation, be it the divine beauty of the angel-women or the depiction of the painter's own interiority in a secularized age. By analyzing Dante's Vita Nova alongside Rossetti's Hand and Soul and St. Agnes of Intercession, which inaugurates the Victorian genre of 'imaginary portrait' tales, this book examines how Dante and Rossetti explore the tension between word and image by creating 'imaginary portraits.' The imaginary portrait—Dante's sketched angel appearing in the Vita Nova or the paintings evoked in Rossetti's narratives—is not (only) a non-existent artwork: it is an artwork whose existence lies elsewhere, in the words alluding to its inexpressible quality. At the same time, thinking of Beatrice as an 'imaginary Lady' enables us to move beyond the debate about her actual existence. Rather, it allows us to focus on her reality as a miracle made into flesh, which language seeks incessantly to grasp. Thus, the intergenerational dialogue between Dante and Rossetti—and between thirteenth and nineteenth centuries, literature and painting, Italy and England—takes place between different media, oscillating between representation and denial, mimesis and difference, concealment and performance. From medieval Florence to Victorian London, Beatrice's 'imaginary portrait' touches upon the intertwinement of desire, poetry, and art-making in Western culture.

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The belief that the Virgin Mary was bodily assumed to be crowned as heaven’s Queen has been celebrated in the liturgy and literature of England since the fifth century. The upheaval of the Reformation brought radical changes in the beliefs surrounding the assumption and coronation, both of which were eliminated from state-approved liturgy. Queen of Heaven examines canonical as well as obscure images of the Blessed Mother that present fresh evidence of the incompleteness of the English Reformation. Through an analysis of works by writers such as Edmund Spenser, Henry Constable, Sir John Harington, and the writers of the early modern rosary books, which were contraband during the Reformation, Grindlay finds that these images did not simply disappear during this time as lost “Catholic” symbols, but instead became sources of resistance and controversy, reflecting the anxieties triggered by the religious changes of the era. Grindlay’s study of the Queen of Heaven affords an insight into England’s religious pluralism, revealing a porousness between medieval and early modern perspectives toward the Virgin and dispelling the notion that Catholic and Protestant attitudes on the subject were completely different. Grindlay reveals the extent to which the potent and treasured image of the Queen of Heaven was impossible to extinguish and remained of widespread cultural significance. Queen of Heaven will appeal to an academic audience, but its fresh, uncomplicated style will also engage intelligent, well-informed readers who have an interest in the Virgin Mary and in English Reformation history.

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Are we moving inevitably into an irreversible era of postnationalism and globalism? In Political Philosophy and the Republican Future, Gregory Bruce Smith asks, if participation in self-government is not central to citizens’ vision of the political good, is despotism inevitable? Smith's study evolves around reconciling the early republican tradition in Greece and Rome as set out by authors such as Aristotle and Cicero, and a more recent tradition shaped by thinkers such as Machiavelli, Locke, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Madison, and Rousseau. Gregory Smith adds a further layer of complexity by analyzing how the republican and the larger philosophical tradition have been called into question by the critiques of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and their various followers. For Smith, the republican future rests on the future of the tradition of political philosophy. In this book he explores the nature of political philosophy and the assumptions under which that tradition can be an ongoing tradition rather than one that is finished. He concludes that political philosophy must recover its phenomenological roots and attempt to transcend the self-legislating constructivism of modern philosophy. Forgetting our past traditions, he asserts, will only lead to despotism, the true enemy of all permutations of republicanism. Cicero's thought is presented as a classic example of the phenomenological approach to political philosophy. A return to the architectonic understanding of political philosophy exemplified by Cicero is, Smith argues, the key to the republican future.

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This book argues that classical natural law jurisprudence provides a superior answer to the questions “What is law?” and “How should law be made?” rather than those provided by legal positivism and “new” natural law theories. What is law? How should law be made? Using St. Thomas Aquinas’s analogy of God as an architect, Brian McCall argues that classical natural law jurisprudence provides an answer to these questions far superior to those provided by legal positivism or the “new” natural law theories. The Architecture of Law explores the metaphor of law as an architectural building project, with eternal law as the foundation, natural law as the frame, divine law as the guidance provided by the architect, and human law as the provider of the defining details and ornamentation. Classical jurisprudence is presented as a synthesis of the work of the greatest minds of antiquity and the medieval period, including Cicero, Aristotle, Gratian, Augustine, and Aquinas; the significant texts of each receive detailed exposition in these pages. Along with McCall’s development of the architectural image, he raises a question that becomes a running theme throughout the book: To what extent does one need to know God to accept and understand natural law jurisprudence, given its foundational premise that all authority comes from God? The separation of the study of law from knowledge of theology and morality, McCall argues, only results in the impoverishment of our understanding of law. He concludes that they must be reunited in order for jurisprudence to flourish. This book will appeal to academics, students in law, philosophy, and theology, and to all those interested in legal or political philosophy.

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Beyond High Courts: The Justice Complex in Latin America is a much-needed volume that will make a significant contribution to the growing fields of comparative law and politics and Latin American legal institutions. The book moves these research agendas beyond the study of high courts by offering theoretically and conceptually rich empirical analyses of a set of critical supranational, national, and subnational justice sector institutions that are generally neglected in the literature. The chapters examine the region’s large federal systems (Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico), courts in Chile and Venezuela, and the main supranational tribunal in the region, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Aimed at students of comparative legal institutions while simultaneously offering lessons for practitioners charged with designing such institutions, the volume advances our understanding of the design of justice institutions, how their form and function change over time, what causes those changes, and what consequences they have. The volume also pays close attention to how justice institutions function as a system, exploring institutional interactions across branches and among levels of government (subnational, national, supranational) and analyzing how they help to shape, and are shaped by, politics and law. Incorporating the institutions examined in the volume into the literature on comparative legal institutions deepens our understanding of justice systems and how their component institutions can both bolster and compromise democracy and the rule of law.Contributors: Matthew C. Ingram, Diana Kapiszewski, Azul A. Aguiar-Aguilar, Ernani Carvalho, Natália Leitão, Catalina Smulovitz, John Seth Alexander, Robert Nyenhuis, Sídia Maria Porto Lima, José Mário Wanderley Gomes Neto, Danilo Pacheco Fernandes, Louis Dantas de Andrade, Mary L. Volcansek, and Martin Shapiro.

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The phrase "creation ex nihilo" refers to the primarily Christian notion of God’s creation of everything from nothing. Creation ex nihilo: Origins, Development, Contemporary Challenges presents the findings of a joint research project at Oxford University and the University of Notre Dame in 2014–2015. The doctrine of creation ex nihilo has met with criticism and revisionary theories in recent years from the worlds of science, theology, and philosophy. This volume concentrates on several key areas: the relationship of the doctrine to its purported biblical sources, how the doctrine emerged in the first several centuries of the Common Era, why the doctrine came under heavy criticism in the modern era, how some theologians have responded to the objections, and the relationship of the doctrine to claims of modern science—for example, the fundamental law of physics that matter cannot be created from nothing. Although the Bible never expressly states that God made everything from nothing, various texts are taken to imply that the universe came into existence by divine command and was not assembled from preexisting matter or energy. The contributors to this volume approach this topic from a range of perspectives, from exposition to defense of the doctrine itself. This is a unique and fascinating work whose aim is to present the reader with a compelling set of arguments for why the doctrine should remain central to the grammar of contemporary Christian theology. As such, the book will appeal to theologians as well as those interested in the relationship between theology and science. Contributors: Gary A. Anderson, Markus Bockmuehl, Janet Soskice, Richard J. Clifford, S.J., Sean M. McDonough, Gregory E. Sterling, Khaled Anatolios, John C. Cavadini, Joseph Wawrykow, Tzvi Novick, Daniel Davies, Cyril O’Regan, Ruth Jackson, David Bentley Hart, Adam D. Hincks, S.J., Andrew Pinsent, and Andrew Davison.

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Black Domers tells the compelling story of racial integration at the University of Notre Dame in the post–World War II era. In a series of seventy-five essays, beginning with the first African-American to graduate from Notre Dame in 1947 to a member of the class of 2017 who also served as student body president, we can trace the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of the African-American experience at Notre Dame through seven decades. Don Wycliff and David Krashna’s book is a revised edition of a 2014 publication. With a few exceptions, the stories of these graduates are told in their own words, in the form of essays on their experiences at Notre Dame. The range of these experiences is broad; joys and opportunities, but also hardships and obstacles, are recounted. Notable among several themes emerging from these essays is the importance of leadership from the top in successfully bringing African-Americans into the student body and enabling them to become fully accepted, fully contributing members of the Notre Dame community. The late Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, president of the university from 1952 to 1987, played an indispensable role in this regard and also wrote the foreword to the book. This book will be an invaluable resource for Notre Dame graduates, especially those belonging to African-American and other minority groups, specialists in race and diversity in higher education, civil rights historians, and specialists in race relations.

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Mathematical Disquisitions: The Booklet of Theses Immortalized by Galileo offers a new English translation of the 1614 Disquisitiones Mathematicae, which Johann Georg Locher wrote under the guidance of the German Jesuit astronomer Christoph Scheiner. The booklet, an anti-Copernican astronomical work, is of interest in large part because Galileo Galilei, who came into conflict with Scheiner over the discovery of sunspots, devoted numerous pages within his famous 1632 Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems—Ptolemaic and Copernican to ridiculing Disquisitiones. The brief text (the original was approximately one hundred pages) is heavily illustrated with dozens of original figures, making it an accessible example of "geocentric astronomy in the wake of the telescope."

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Margherita Colonna (1255–1280) was born into one of the great baronial families that dominated Rome politically and culturally in the thirteenth century. After the death of her father and mother, Margherita was raised by her brothers, including Cardinal Giacomo Colonna. The two extant contemporary accounts of her short life offer a daring model of mystical lay piety forged in imitation of St. Francis but worked out in the vibrant world of medieval Rome. In Visions of Sainthood in Medieval Rome, Larry F. Field, Lezlie S. Knox, and Sean L. Field present the first English translations of Margherita Colonna’s two “lives” and a dossier of associated texts, along with thoroughly researched contextualization and scholarly examination. The first of the two lives was written by a layman, the Roman Senator Giovanni Colonna, one of Margherita Colonna's brothers. The second was written by a woman named Stefania, who had been a close follower of Margherita Colonna and assumed leadership of her Franciscan community after Margherita's death. These intriguing texts open up new perspectives on numerous historical questions. How did authorial gender and status influence hagiographic perspective? How fluid was the nature of female Franciscan identity during the era in which the papacy was creating the Order of St. Clare? What were the experiences and influences of female visionaries? And what was the process of saint-making at the heart of an aristocratic Roman family? These texts add rich new texture to our overall picture of medieval visionary culture and will interest students and scholars of medieval and renaissance history, literature, religion, and women's studies.

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Margherita Colonna (1255–1280) was born into one of the great baronial families that dominated Rome politically and culturally in the thirteenth century. After the death of her father and mother, Margherita was raised by her brothers, including Cardinal Giacomo Colonna. The two extant contemporary accounts of her short life offer a daring model of mystical lay piety forged in imitation of St. Francis but worked out in the vibrant world of medieval Rome. In Visions of Sainthood in Medieval Rome, Larry F. Field, Lezlie S. Knox, and Sean L. Field present the first English translations of Margherita Colonna’s two “lives” and a dossier of associated texts, along with thoroughly researched contextualization and scholarly examination. The first of the two lives was written by a layman, the Roman Senator Giovanni Colonna, one of Margherita Colonna's brothers. The second was written by a woman named Stefania, who had been a close follower of Margherita Colonna and assumed leadership of her Franciscan community after Margherita's death. These intriguing texts open up new perspectives on numerous historical questions. How did authorial gender and status influence hagiographic perspective? How fluid was the nature of female Franciscan identity during the era in which the papacy was creating the Order of St. Clare? What were the experiences and influences of female visionaries? And what was the process of saint-making at the heart of an aristocratic Roman family? These texts add rich new texture to our overall picture of medieval visionary culture and will interest students and scholars of medieval and renaissance history, literature, religion, and women's studies.

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This collection of essays by leading international philosophers considers central themes in the ethics of Danish philosopher Knud Ejler Løgstrup (1905–1981). Løgstrup was a Lutheran theologian much influenced by phenomenology and by strong currents in Danish culture, to which he himself made important contributions. The essays in What Is Ethically Demanded? K. E. Løgstrup's Philosophy of Moral Life are divided into four sections. The first section deals predominantly with Løgstrup's relation to Kant and, through Kant, the system of morality in general. The second section focuses on how Løgstrup stands in connection with Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Levinas. The third section considers issues in the development of Løgstrup's ethics and how it relates to other aspects of his thought. The final section covers certain central themes in Løgstrup's position, particularly his claims about trust and the unfulfillability of the ethical demand. The volume includes a previously untranslated early essay by Løgstrup, "The Anthropology of Kant’s Ethics," which defines some of his basic ethical ideas in opposition to Kant’s. The book will appeal to philosophers and theologians with an interest in ethics and the history of philosophy. Contributors: K. E. Løgstrup, Svend Andersen, David Bugge, Svein Aage Christoffersen, Stephen Darwall, Peter Dews, Paul Faulkner, Hans Fink, Arne Grøn, Alasdair MacIntyre, Wayne Martin, Kees van Kooten Niekerk, George Pattison, Robert Stern, and Patrick Stokes.

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Icons and the Liturgy, East and West: History, Theology, and Culture is a collection of nine essays developed from papers presented at the 2013 Huffington Ecumenical Institute’s symposium “Icons and Images,” the first of a three-part series on the history and future of liturgical arts in Catholic and Orthodox churches. Catholic and Orthodox scholars and practitioners gathered at Loyola Marymount University to present papers discussing the history, theology, ecclesiology, and hermeneutics of iconology, sacred art, and sacred space in the Orthodox and Catholic traditions. Nicholas Denysenko’s book offers two significant contributions to the field of Eastern and Western Christian traditions: a critical assessment of the status of liturgical arts in postmodern Catholicism and Orthodoxy and an analysis of the continuity with tradition in creatively engaging the creation of sacred art and icons. The reader will travel to Rome, Byzantium, Armenia, Chile, and to other parts of the world, to see how Christians of yesterday and today have experienced divine encounters through icons. Theologians and students of theology and religious studies, art historians, scholars of Eastern Christian Studies, and Catholic liturgists will find much to appreciate in these pages. Contributors: Nicholas Denysenko, Robert Taft, S.J., Thomas M. Lucas, S.J., Bissera V. Pentcheva, Kristin Noreen, Christina Maranci, Dorian Llywelyn, S.J., Michael Courey, and Andriy Chirovsky.

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The historiography of English Catholicism has grown enormously in the last generation, led by scholars such as Peter Lake, Michael Questier, Stefania Tutino, and others. In Suspicious Moderate, Anne Ashley Davenport makes a significant contribution to that literature by presenting a long overdue intellectual biography of the influential English Catholic theologian Francis à Sancta Clara (1598–1680). Born into a Protestant family in Coventry at the end of the sixteenth century, Sancta Clara joined the Franciscan order in 1617. He played key roles in reviving the English Franciscan province and in the efforts that were sponsored by Charles I to reunite the Church of England with Rome. In his voluminous Latin writings, he defended moderate Anglican doctrines, championed the separation of church and state, and called for state protection of freedom of conscience. Suspicious Moderate offers the first detailed analysis of Sancta Clara's works. In addition to his notorious Deus, natura, gratia (1634), Sancta Clara wrote a comprehensive defense of episcopacy (1640), a monumental treatise on ecumenical councils (1649), and a treatise on natural philosophy and miracles (1662). By carefully examining the context of Sancta Clara's ideas, Davenport argues that he aimed at educating English Roman Catholics into a depoliticized and capacious Catholicism suited to personal moral reasoning in a pluralistic world. In the course of her research, Davenport also discovered that "Philip Scot," the author of the earliest English discussions of Hobbes (a treatise published in 1650), was none other than Sancta Clara. Davenport demonstrates how Sancta Clara joined the effort to fight Hobbes's Erastianism by carefully reflecting on Hobbes's pioneering ideas and by attempting to find common ground with him, no matter how slight.

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William C. Hackett’s English translation of Jean Wahl’s Existence humaine et transcendence (1944) brings back to life an all-but-forgotten book that provocatively explores the philosophical concept of transcendence. Based on what Emmanuel Levinas called “Wahl’s famous lecture” from 1937, Existence humaine et transcendence captured a watershed moment of European philosophy. Included in the book are Wahl's remarkable original lecture and the debate that ensued, with significant contributions by Gabriel Marcel and Nicolai Berdyaev, as well as letters submitted on the occasion by Heidegger, Levinas, Jaspers, and other famous figures from that era. Concerned above all with the ineradicable felt value of human experience by which any philosophical thesis is measured, Wahl makes a daring clarification of the concept of transcendence and explores its repercussions through a masterly appeal to many (often surprising) places within the entire history of Western thought. Apart from its intrinsic philosophical significance as a discussion of the concepts of being, the absolute, and transcendence, Wahl's work is valuable insofar as it became a focal point for a great many other European intellectuals. Hackett has provided an annotated introduction to orient readers to this influential work of twentieth-century French philosophy and to one of its key figures.

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The Celtic Unconscious offers a vital new interpretation of modernist literature through an examination of James Joyce’s employment of Scottish literature and philosophy, as well as a commentary on his portrayal of shared Irish and Scottish histories and cultures. Barlow also offers an innovative look at the strong influences that Joyce’s predecessors had on his work, including James Macpherson, James Hogg, David Hume, Robert Burns, and Robert Louis Stevenson. The book draws upon all of Joyce’s major texts but focuses mainly on Finnegans Wake in making three main, interrelated arguments: that Joyce applies what he sees as a specifically “Celtic” viewpoint to create the atmosphere of instability and skepticism of Finnegans Wake; that this reasoning is divided into contrasting elements, which reflect the deep religious and national divide of post-1922 Ireland, but which have their basis in Scottish literature; and finally, that despite the illustration of the contrasts and divisions of Scottish and Irish history, Scottish literature and philosophy are commissioned by Joyce as part of a program of artistic “decolonization” which is enacted in Finnegans Wake. The Celtic Unconscious is the first book-length study of the role of Scottish literature in Joyce’s work and is a vital contribution to the fields of Irish and Scottish studies. This book will appeal to scholars and students of Joyce, and to students interested in Irish studies, Scottish studies, and English literature.

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Since the late 1970s, theologians have been attempting to integrate mimetic theory into different fields of theology, yet a distrust of mimetic theory persists in some theological camps. In René Girard, Unlikely Apologist: Mimetic Theory and Fundamental Theology, Grant Kaplan brings mimetic theory into conversation with theology both to elucidate the relevance of mimetic theory for the discipline of fundamental theology and to understand the work of René Girard within a theological framework. Rather than focus on Christology or atonement theory as the locus of interaction between Girard and theology, Kaplan centers his discussion on the apologetic quality of mimetic theory and the impact of mimetic theory on fundamental theology, the subdiscipline that grew to replace apologetics. His book explores the relation between Girard and fundamental theology in several keys. In one, it understands mimetic theory as a heuristic device that allows theological narratives and positions to become more intelligible and, by so doing, makes theology more persuasive. In another key, Kaplan shows how mimetic theory, when placed in dialogue with particular theologians, can advance theological discussion in areas where mimetic theory has seldom been invoked. On this level the book performs a dialogue with theology that both revisits earlier theological efforts and also demonstrates how mimetic theory brings valuable dimensions to questions of fundamental theology.

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For over half a century, Robert Schmuhl interviewed and wrote about Reverend Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C., who served as the president of the University of Notre Dame from 1952 until 1987. Beginning as an undergraduate student during the 1960s, when he covered Hesburgh and Notre Dame for the Associated Press, to 2014 when he conducted his last visit with the frail ninety-seven-year-old priest, Schmuhl maintained a unique relationship with Father Hesburgh. Over time, Hesburgh’s meetings with Schmuhl evolved into a friendship, which is documented in this personal and warmhearted portrait of the man who was for decades considered the most influential priest in America. Fifty Years with Father Hesburgh: On and Off the Record contains excerpts and commentary from various interviews Schmuhl conducted with Father Hesburgh about his service as Notre Dame’s president, including the most difficult years of his presidency during the 1960s, when Notre Dame and other college campuses were in turmoil because of student protests against the Vietnam War and other issues. Knowing and working with four popes and nine U.S. presidents, Father Hesburgh was a moral force in virtually all major social issues of his day, including civil rights, peaceful uses of atomic energy, third-world development, and immigration reform. Schmuhl records Hesburgh’s candid reflections on the U.S. presidents with whom he worked and his assessment of the years after he left the university’s presidency and maintained an active life of service in retirement. Schmuhl expresses his devotion and respect in the chapters about Hesburgh’s twilight decades. He describes how Hesburgh dealt with macular degeneration and blindness in his later years, enlisting students to read the New York Times and other publications to him. During the 1990s and the first years of the twenty-first century, Father Ted was, as he liked to say, “everybody’s grandfather.” His open-door policy extended beyond students to faculty, staff, alumni, and campus visitors, and continued right up until the end of his life. Throughout the book, Schmuhl captures the essence, spirit, and humanity of a great leader.

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For nearly four decades, E. P. Sanders has been the foremost scholar in shaping and refocusing scholarly debates in three different but related disciplines in New Testament studies: Second Temple Judaism, Jesus and the Gospels, and Pauline studies. This collection of essays by an impressive array of colleagues and former students presents original scholarship that extends—or departs from—the research of Sanders himself. Both apologists and dissenters find their place in this volume, as the authors actively debate Sanders’s innovative positions on central issues in all three disciplines. The introductory group of essays includes a substantive intellectual autobiography by E. P. Sanders himself. The next three parts examine in turn the three areas in which Sanders made his important contributions. The essays in part 2 engage Sanders's notion of “common Judaism.” Those in part 3 deal with issues that Sanders raised respecting the historical Jesus and the Gospels. And the essays in part 4 debate, among other issues, Sanders’s contention that participation in Christ, rather than justification by faith, is the central theme of Paul’s soteriology. The volume concludes with a bibliography of Sanders's works. The introductory group of essays includes a substantive intellectual autobiography by E. P. Sanders himself. The next three parts examine in turn the three areas in which Sanders made his important contributions. The essays in part 2 engage Sanders's notion of “common Judaism.” Those in part 3 deal with issues that Sanders raised respecting the common Judaism. And the essays in part 4 debate, among other issues, Sanders’s contention that common Judaism. Contributors: Fabian E. Udoh, D. Moody Smith, E. P. Sanders, Jouette M. Bassler, Shaye J.D. Cohen, Albert I. Baumgarten, Cynthia M. Baker, Israel J. Yuval, Martin Goodman, Eric M. Meyers, Jürgen Zangenberg, Seán Freyne, Peter Richardson, Adele Reinhartz, Paula Fredriksen, Stephen Hultgren, John P. Meier, Craig C. Hill, Heikki Räisänen, Richard B. Hays, Stanley K. Stowers, John M. G. Barclay.

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Thornton Wilder, the only author to have won the Pulitzer Prize for both drama and fiction, frequently portrays characters struggling with religious and theological issues. His work has been examined by critics in connection with American Puritanism, existentialism, and Vedantic literature, but little attention has been paid to the works of Thornton’s brother Amos, an ordained minister, poet, biblical scholar, literary critic, and professor at Harvard. Thornton Wilder and Amos Wilder: Writing Religion in Twentieth-Century America is the first book to explore the relationship between Thornton’s work and his brother Amos’s scholarship. Previous critics of Thornton’s works have claimed that they describe timeless human values. Christopher Wheatley, on the contrary, argues that Wilder is primarily interested in the historical context of ideas, the ways in which they are a product of their time. He demonstrates how this parallels elements in Amos’s biblical scholarship. For the most part scholars have also treated Wilder’s works as if his ideas were static throughout his career. Wheatley contends that Wilder's early works of fiction and drama examine religion in times of historical crisis, whereas his later works demonstrate a deep concern about the intellectual, social, economic, and spiritual currents of contemporary America, as well as the influences of existentialism and postwar skepticism on his evolving religious ideas. Drawing on extensive archival research in the papers of both brothers, Thornton Wilder and Amos Wilder: Writing Religion in Twentieth-Century America is essential reading for anyone interested in the Wilders, religion and literature, or American literature and drama.

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English-speaking philosophers are generally attuned to the German and French philosophical traditions but not to the Spanish. Why, for example, does someone with the vivid appeal of Bartolomé de Las Casas remain almost completely unknown in North America? The purpose of this anthology is to introduce the Spanish philosophical tradition to English-speaking readers. Other Voices: Readings in Spanish Philosophy represents high points of nearly two millennia of Spanish philosophy, from first-century thinkers in Roman Hispania to those of the twentieth century. John R. Welch has selected, and in several cases translated excerpts from the works of thirteen philosophers: Seneca, Quintilian, Isidore of Seville, Ibn Rushd (Averroës), Moses Maimonides, Ramón Llull, Juan Luis Vives, Francisco de Vitoria, Bartolomé de Las Casas, Francisco Suárez, Benito Jerónimo Feijóo, Miguel de Unamuno, and José Ortega y Gasset. Welch provides for the reader a brief introduction to each historical period or philosophical movement represented and a biographical introduction to each philosopher. Of special interest are the selection from Feijóo's "A Defense of Women" (an attack on misogyny), which has not been translated into English since the eighteenth century; the arguments on the justification of war by Vitoria and Las Casas (in the context of the Spanish conquest); and Unamuno's celebration of the concrete over the abstract, desire over reason.

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