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

In this thought-provoking book, distinguished legal scholar Joseph Vining traces the complex roots of brutal twentieth-century human experimentation and extermination to worldviews that dehumanize both perpetrators and victims in distinctive ways, stripping them of their individuality as well as their intrinsic dignity and value. Vining finds a disturbing parallel between these worldviews and what he calls “total theory.” Total theories are “beautiful and helpful explanations through attention to system and process” that aggressively claim to account for the universe and everything in it. Vining maintains that some of the most gifted intellectuals and scientists of our time profess these theories without necessarily considering the implications of such totalizing worldviews. Using the example of the song sparrow and the child, Vining opens our eyes to the ramifications of total theory. He challenges readers to question casual acceptance of the total theories that are widely and quietly taught in contemporary biology, physics, and mathematics—theories that Vining maintains cannot be and are not actually believed by the people espousing them. This book is an invitation to recall our individuality and to take seriously the connection between thought and action, theory and practice. He asks readers to think deeply about what actual belief is and how what we believe in science has crucial consequences for the future of humanity and the natural world. To assist readers in understanding total theory, Vining draws upon the legal sensibilities commonly shared by scientist and nonscientist alike. He extends his consideration to include the dignity not only of humans, but also of animals. In elegant, highly readable prose, The Song Sparrow and the Child offers a reconciliation of spirit and mind, serious science and a serious sense of purpose and meaning.

Read more less

Contributors to Virtues and Practices in the Christian Tradition use Alasdair MacIntyre’s work as a methodological guide for doing ethics in the Christian tradition. These essays are grouped in three sections: descriptions of MacIntyre’s approach to ethics as developed in After Virtue, reflections on the moral issues that come to the fore when viewing the Christian tradition from a MacIntyrean perspective, and selected essays on family, homosexuality, abortion, pacifism, feminism, business ethics, medical ethics, and economic justice.

Read more less

In Icons of Hope: The “Last Things” in Catholic Imagination, John Thiel, one of the most influential Catholic theologians today, argues that modern theologians have been unduly reticent in their writing about “last things”: death, judgment, heaven, and hell. Beholden to a historical-critical standard of interpretation, they often have been reluctant to engage in eschatological reflection that takes the doctrine of the “last things” seriously as real events that Christians are obliged to imagine meaningfully and to describe with some measure of faithful coherence. Modern theology’s religious pluralism leaves room for a speculative style of interpretation that issues in icons of hope—theological portraits of resurrected life that can inform and inspire the life of faith. Icons of Hope presents an interpretation of heavenly life, the Last Judgment, and the communion of the saints that is shaped by a view of the activity of the blessed dead consistent with Christian belief in the resurrection of the body, namely, the view that the blessed dead in heaven continue to be eschatologically engaged in the redemptive task of forgiveness. Thiel offers a revision of the traditional Catholic imaginary regarding judgment and life after death that highlights the virtuous actions of all the saints in their heavenly response to the vision of God. These constructive efforts are fostered by Thiel’s conclusions on the disappearance of the concept of purgatory in large segments of contemporary Catholic belief, a disappearance attributable to the emergence of a noncompetitive spirituality in postconciliar Catholicism, which has eclipsed the kinds of religious sensibilities that made belief in purgatory a practice in earlier centuries. This noncompetitive spirituality—one that recovers traditional Pauline sensibilities on the gratuitousness of grace—encourages an eschatological imaginary of mutual, ongoing forgiveness in the communion of the saints in this life and in the life to come.

Read more less

The Trail of Martyrdom examines the stages by which religious dissidents were persecuted by Tudor monarchs across the sixteenth century, and the means by which these dissidents counteracted authorities. While Henry VIII, Edward, Mary, and Elizabeth differed in religious orientation, their desire to enforce a uniformity of belief compelled them, in various degrees, to seek out and expunge heterodoxy or perceived treason in their midst. Individuals of contrary belief were targeted, apprehended, imprisoned, interrogated, and sometimes executed. During each stage of persecution, many dissidents were able to elude capture, counter-interrogate their inquisitors, use time in prison to write letters and prepare for death, and exploit their own executions to forge a final drama of suffering and redemption before a large, public audience. Enforcement was always dependent upon cooperation from the public and local officials, which made successful persecution uncertain at best. Sarah Covington explores the details of this system of enforcement, and the means by which it was subverted. Her explorations also address larger questions concerning obedience and disobedience, tolerance and intolerance, and the dynamics of martyrdom. This fascinating study of the power of dissidence will be welcomed by anyone interested in early modern British history and religious controversy.

Read more less

With the equality and liberty of the Declaration of Independence as his fighting words, Thomas Jefferson created American democracy. For the two hundred years since then, he has been studied and debated worldwide, but never more intensely than in recent years. His extensive and influential understanding of democracy’s foundation in reason and nature continue to make him one of the most examined American founders. Thomas Jefferson and the Politics of Nature is a collection of the very best current scholarship devoted to Thomas Jefferson as politician, writer, philosopher, Christian, and economist. Lead essayist Michael Zuckert presents his comprehensive interpretation of Jefferson’s political thought, which Zuckert considers the best theoretical approach to democracy. While Zuckert moderates Jefferson’s natural rights philosophy with a Kantian perspective, Jean Yarbrough responds with the argument that Jefferson incorporates the authors of the Scottish Enlightenment and principles from the Republican tradition to achieve the same moderating effect. Garrett Ward Sheldon looks at the broader cultural influences shaping Jefferson’s thought and traces his republicanism to his support of Christian ethics and Aristotle. R. Booth Fowler examines why Jefferson, the leading liberal theorist of the nineteenth century, became the hero of the very different liberalism of the twentieth. Robert Dawidoff considers Jefferson as writer and literary figure instead of political thinker and actor, while Joyce Appleby renews an appreciation of Jefferson's statecraft by a famous reexamination of his commercial agrarian policy. Finally, James Ceaser traces Jefferson’s belief in racial inferiority to a speculative new natural science prominent among contemporary European thinkers and argues that Jefferson committed a significant error in reducing politics to such conjectural “facts.” This compact text is ideal for professors wishing to offer a one-volume collection of current Jeffersonian scholarship to undergraduate students. Professors and students alike will find that the essays contain prompt, focused, substantive discussions on the key issues facing Jeffersonian scholars. This handy collection will be an invaluable classroom tool for those studying not only Jefferson but also history, political philosophy, and science, as well as the history of ideas.

Read more less

Starting with the premise that the history of a medieval subject cannot be properly written "without recourse to the materials it produced," Lesley Smith's Masters of the Sacred Page provides an illuminating study of theology in the Middle Ages. She focuses on the dramatic transformations of the discipline in the twelfth century and uses a collection of contemporary manuscripts as a guide to its changes and developments. Smith points out that the medieval masters of theology had a much wider view of their subject than the modern academic tendency for neatness and division can easily admit, and she places their discipline squarely within the rapidly evolving intellectual and educational context of the twelfth-century university. Her approach avoids two of the most common weaknesses of modern historical studies of medieval theology. In the first place, those histories have a tendency to be distorted by a reliance on easily available printed editions of medieval texts, the bulk of which are summae and other logical, systematic treatments. This preponderance, however, often reflects the concerns and interests of nineteenth- and twentieth-century editors more than it does the medieval masters. Biblical commentaries, sermons, and manuals for pastoral use have only recently begun to be edited and printed in numbers reflecting their importance and widespread use in the Middle Ages; Smith includes such material in her study. In the second place, traditional histories have a tendency to remove the study of theology from the actual environment of the medieval university and therefore fail to account for the complex relations between theology, the arts, and the burgeoning disciplines of medicine and law. By refusing to follow this trend, Smith has greatly improved our awareness of the situation of medieval theology. Using the manuscript books themselves as witnesses, Smith shows how theology competed with other disciplines for students (as well as teachers), how it attempted to define itself, and how it cooperated with other disciplines to foster new development in book technology—and new traditions in the social and intellectual culture of the medieval university.

Read more less

“All of us teach,” begins Mark Schwehn’s anthology of readings on teaching and learning. Teaching is woven into the fabric of our everyday lives. It includes training children, forming habits and characters, witnessing to a way of life, nurturing reflection and imagination, and imparting goals as well as facts and skills. Teachers are parents, grandparents, spouses, friends, neighbors, pastors, siblings, and co-workers, as well as professional educators. Most people know good teaching when they encounter it, Schwehn argues, and few would identify it with a list of techniques. Although good teaching often seems closer to an art than a skill, teaching is not an occult practice, but a public activity that can be improved by practice and questioning and demonstrated by good examples. Through Schwehn’s choice of examples and deft introductions, Everyone a Teacher is an argument for a rich account of good teaching. It invites reflection yet avoids the abstractions of psychology and educational theory. From Socrates teaching a Greek slave boy geometry to Mark Twain’s river-boat pilot on the Mississippi, from a real classroom of kindergarten children in Chicago to the parents who tenderly raise their child in Agee’s A Death in the Family, the readings remind us of the historical and human importance of teaching and of the qualities of good teaching. These readings are intended to help us all think about the meaning of teaching and learning, for the sake of improving our teaching in everyday life.

Read more less

This collection of essays originated in conferences held at the Gregorian University in Rome and at the University of Notre Dame to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. These essays, by leading scholars, assess the continuing relevance of Darwin's work from the perspectives of biological science, history, philosophy, and theology. The contributors focus on three primary areas: developments in evolutionary biology that open up new ground for interdisciplinary dialogue; reflections on human evolution, with a particular focus on evolution and ethics; and new reflections on theology and evolution, particularly from a Roman Catholic perspective, drawing both on traditional perspectives and on new currents in Catholic theology. Contributors: Phillip R. Sloan, Gerald McKenny, Kathleen Eggleson, Scott F. Gilbert, Stuart A. Newman, Alessandro Minelli, David J. Depew, Gennaro Auletta, Ivan Colagè, Paolo D'Ambrosio, Bernard Wood, Robert J. Richards, Paul E. Griffiths, John S. Wilkins, John O'Callaghan, William E. Carroll, Józef Życiński, Celia Deane-Drummond, Peter J. Bowler, and Jean Gayon.

Read more less

Costume historians and literary critics have sharpened understandings of dress as it constructs bodies and identities, but none has considered how representations of clothing in medieval literature respond to clerical discourses that sought to regulate contemporary aristocratic fashion. In Sartorial Strategies: Outfitting Aristocrats and Fashioning Conduct in Late Medieval Literature, Nicole D. Smith establishes that writers of romances redirect the negative depictions of the courtly body found in clerical chronicles and penitential writings into positive images that convey virtue. Smith structures her book around two key moments in fashion history: the transformation of expensive attire by lacing, knotting, and belting in the twelfth century and by form-fitting tailoring in the fourteenth. She selects two literary texts in French from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—Marie de France’s Guigemar and Heldris of Cornuälle’s Roman de Silence—and two in English from the fourteenth century—Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Chaucer’s The Parson’s Tale—for analysis in light of these changes in fashion. While religious and political documents decried the immorality inherent in sumptuous clothing and attempted to restrain the behavior of individuals wearing stylish garments, the literature selected by Smith reimagines fashion-savvy aristocrats as models of morally sound behavior in a pedagogical program advanced not by preachers but by poets. Smith argues that each poet responds directly to the accusations of religious narratives that luxurious garments hinder the soul. Smith also offers original readings of lesser-known penitential guides, such as the Clensyng of Mannes Sowle and the Memoriale Credencium, thus illustrating an extensive conversation between romance and penitential guides.

Read more less

After the dethronement and subsequent murder of Richard II, the usurping Lancastrian dynasty faced an exceptional challenge. Interrupting a long period of Plantagenet rule, Henry IV and Henry V needed not only to establish physical possession of the English throne but to occupy it symbolically as well. In this boldly revisionary book, Paul Strohm provides a new account of the Lancastrian revolution and its aftermath. Integrating techniques of literary and historical analysis, he reveals the Lancastrian monarchs as masters of outward display, persuasively "performing" their kingship through a variety of novel ceremonies in a quest for legitimacy. He also describes far-reaching Lancastrian experiments in domination, including the proscription of prophecy; the enlistment of poetry as court propaganda; the extensive use of spies and informers; and, most ambitiously, the redefinition of treason to cover not only overt deeds but words and thoughts as well. Strohm's account of the Lancastrian quest for legitimacy and the uses of symbolic power illuminates—indeed, recasts—our understanding of a period of unprecedented political upheaval.

Read more less

It has long been a commonplace of literary history that in the twelfth century, first in the French-speaking territories controlled by the Anglo-Norman and Capetian ruling families, and especially within the milieu of the English royal court, antique and chivalric romances appear simultaneously with a new kind of historical chronicle driven by contemporary affairs. In short order, historiography and romance, whether written in Latin or in the vernaculars, became culturally dominant kinds of narrative expression throughout the rest of Europe. Why did this happen? Why did these two new kinds of writing appear simultaneously and spread so rapidly within the same cultural milieu? In Reality Fictions, Robert M. Stein argues that the emergence of historiography and romance was linked to large-scale transformations in the structure of power attendant on Capetian and Anglo-Norman state-making. He maintains that an understanding of the changes in the twelfth-century literary constellation requires us to consider the structure of literary production as a whole and in its relation to the world from which it emerges and to which it responds. Stein argues that romance and history writing grew out of the same cultural need and were intended to perform the same cultural tasks, thus determining their simultaneous appearance, rapid development, and formal affinities. In the rearrangements of power that were part of the state-making designs of Capetian and Anglo-Norman ruling families, new imaginative and conceptual entities became matters demanding serious representation, often in new discursive configurations, and often for the first time—the boundaries between self and other, the experience of eros, the differentiation of public from private life all took on new contours. A brilliant study of literary innovation, Reality Fictions provides a new understanding of the large variety of overlapping institutional, epistemological, and practical structures of power that the European Middle Ages presents to us and the ways that dislocations and transformations of power are registered in the consciousness of those who live through them.

Read more less

Needs of the Heart traces five centuries of conflict and change in the life of the clergy in Brazil, home to the world's largest and arguably the most dynamic branch of the Roman Catholic Church. Serbin examines how priests participated in the colonization of Brazil, educated the elite and poor in the faith, propped up the socioeconomic status quo, and reinforced the institution of slavery, all the while living in relative freedom from church authority. Earthy men, many flouted the rule of celibacy and became embroiled in politics. Serbin also describes the conservative modernization of the clergy, effected through seminary education, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Emphasizing discipline, the seminaries aimed to mold a new kind of priest—moral, isolated from politics and social entanglements, and, above all, obedient and celibate. However, the social, cultural, and religious upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s led students to reject the seminary. Seminarians worked to form a national union, and many left seminaries to establish greater contact with the people. The seminarians' movement sparked the practice of liberation theology; it also reflected the quest for professional and individual development, including optional celibacy. The Church responded to its seminarians' demands for personalized education by attempting to build an ambitious program in liberation psychology, a phenomenon as important as liberation theology. Seminaries necessarily dealt in the psychology of sexuality, friendship, and other basic human tendencies—what historian Marc Bloch has called the "secret needs of the heart." Serbin argues that the "needs of the heart" were a cause of the political transformation of the Brazilian Church, a transformation catalyzed by the profound identity crisis experienced by clergymen and seminarians in the 1960s and 1970s. The story of this generation of seminarians and priests is intermingled with the challenges and fears present during the repressive military dictatorship (1964 to 1985) and its aftermath. Serbin's definitive history of the Brazilian clergy combines social science research, including over one hundred interviews, with cultural and social theory and a sweeping historical perspective. Through his history of the clergy and seminaries, he provides a history of modern Brazil itself.

Read more less

In this book Paul Strohm shifts his recognized talent for textual and cultural analysis to the later fifteenth century, arguing that England experienced its own "pre-Machiavellian" moment between 1450 and 1485. These turbulent decades encouraged new pragmatic discussions of political policies of a sort not previously seen and not to be seen again until the middle of the sixteenth century. Strohm contends that England had no need to await the writings of Machiavelli to find its voice in matters of practical statecraft and political calculation. In support of this thesis, he analyzes a range of mainly vernacular fifteenth-century English political texts along with several contemporary writings from Burgundy, France, and Italy. The writers of these texts are unsentimental, shrewdly informed, and keenly concerned with political practice in the world. Intricately connected with this new discussion of worldly politics is a revised, and more hopeful, view of the individual’s relation to Fortune and her operations. Emergent in the English fifteenth century is the possibility that the prudent prince can effectively "Fortune-proof" himself by the exercise of foresight and the qualities of vertue—a trait remarkably anticipatory of its Italian and Machiavellian counterpart, virtú. This view is introduced to England by the poet John Lydgate and flourishes in the second half of the fifteenth century. In addition to Lydgate, Strohm looks at the imaginative accomplishments of other undercredited writers such as Fortescue, Pecock, Whethamstede, Warkworth, and the unnamed authors of Somnium Vigilantis, Historie of the Arrivall of Edward IV, and the Great Chronicle of London. He also offers an appreciation of the collective linguistic and symbolic endeavors of those in the fifteenth-century public sphere. This detailed and rich study, which is based on the 2003 Conway Lectures Strohm delivered at the University of Notre Dame, contributes to the fields of medieval and early modern studies, medieval literary criticism, and political philosophy.

Read more less

Racial Thinking in the United States is a comprehensive reassessment of the ideas that Americans have had about race. This useful book draws on the skills and perspectives of nine scholars from the fields of history, sociology, theology, American studies, and ethnic studies. In thirteen carefully crafted essays they tell the history of the American system of racial domination and of twentieth-century challenges to that racial hierarchy, from monoracial movements to the multiracial movement. Racial Thinking in the United States provides excellent summaries of historical events and cultural movements, as well as analysis and criticism. It will be a welcome text for undergraduate courses in ethnic studies and American history.

Read more less

James F. Ross is a creative and independent thinker in contemporary metaphysics and philosophy of mind. In this concise metaphysical essay, he argues clearly and analytically that meaning, truth, impossibility, natural necessity, and our intelligent perception of nature fit together into a distinctly realist account of thought and world. Ross articulates a moderate realism about repeatable natural structures and our abstractive ability to discern them that poses a challenge to many of the common assumptions and claims of contemporary analytic philosophy. He develops a broadly Aristotelian metaphysics that recognizes the "hidden necessities" of things, which are disclosed through the sciences, which ground his account of real impossibility as a kind of vacuity, and which require the immateriality of the human ability to understand. Those ideas are supported by a novel account of false judgment. Ross aims to offer an analytically and historically respectable alternative to the prevailing positions of many British-American philosophers.

Read more less

Religion and Politics in Enlightenment Europe, a collection of original essays from leading scholars, demonstrates that the collapse of the post-Reformation confessional state was more the result of religious dissent from within, much of it orthodox, than attacks of an anti-religious Enlightenment. In sharp contrast to the Reformation-era religious conflicts which tended to pit Protestant and Catholic confessions and states against each other, the eighteenth-century religious conflicts described in Religion and Politics in Enlightenment Europe took place within the various confessional establishments and states that founded and maintained them, such as Russian Orthodoxy in the East and the Anglican Establishment in England and Ireland. In the course of its analysis, Religion and Politics in Enlightenment Europe destroys the notion of any kind of privileged relationship between "religion" and political or social "reaction". This book reveals the religious roots of modern ideas of individual rights and limitations on government, as well as the imperative of political order and the need for social hierarchy. It also shows the impossibility of any purely secular treatment of eighteenth-century European political history or institutions. Based on fresh, primary research as well as a synthesis of secondary sources, Religion and Politics in Enlightenment Europe turns the familiar eighteenth century of the textbooks upside down and inside out, challenging the dominant narratives of secularization and inevitable conclusion in the French Revolution.

Read more less

Love beneath the Napalm is James D. Redwood’s collection of deeply affecting stories about the enduring effects of colonialism and the Vietnamese War over the course of a century on the Vietnamese and the American and French foreigners who became inextricably connected with their fate. These finely etched, powerful tales span a wide array of settings, from the former imperial capital of Hue at the end of the Nguyen Dynasty, to Hanoi after the American pullout from Vietnam, the Chinese invasion of Vietnam in 1979, contemporary San Francisco, and Schenectady, New York. Redwood reveals the inner lives of the Vietnamese characters and also shows how others appear through their eyes. Some of the images and characters in Love beneath the Napalm—the look that Mr. Tu's burned and scarred face always inflicts on strangers in the title story; attorney and American Vietnam War–veteran Carlton Griswold's complicated relationship with Mary Thuy in "The Summer Associate"; Phan Van Toan's grief and desire, caught between two worlds in "The Stamp Collector"—provide a haunting, vivid portrayal of lives uprooted by conflict. Throughout, readers will find moments that cut to the quick, exposing human resilience, sorrow, joy, and the traumatic impact of war on all those who are swept up in it.

Read more less

Michael Longley and Seamus Heaney’s lives and careers have been intertwined since the 1960s, when they participated in the Belfast Group of creative writers and later edited the literary journal Northern Review. In Poetry and Peace: Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney, and Northern Ireland, Richard Rankin Russell explores Longley’s and Heaney’s poetic fidelity to the imagination in the midst of the war in Northern Ireland and their creation, through poetry, of a powerful cultural and sacred space. This space, Russell argues, has contributed to cultural and religious dialogue and thus helped enable reconciliation after the years of the Troubles. The first chapter examines the influence of the Belfast Group on Longley and Heaney’s shared aesthetic of poetry. Successive chapters analyze major works by both poets. Russell offers close readings of poems in the context of the poets’ cultural and political concerns for the province. He concludes by showing how thoroughly their poetic language has entered the cultural, educational, and political discourse of contemporary Northern Ireland as it pursues the process of peace.

Read more less

This interdisciplinary and ecumenical collection of essays honors the transformative work of Margaret A. Farley, Gilbert L. Stark Professor of Christian Ethics at Yale Divinity School, by using it as a starting point for reflection on the contribution of feminist method to theology and ethics. Through a variety of perspectives, contributors show that by resisting classical oppositions between “interpersonal” and “social” ethics and by insisting that social, economic, and political realities be taken seriously in considerations of justice, feminist concerns challenge the very categories of Christian ethics. With essays ranging from sexual ethics to human rights, medical ethics to freedom, A Just and True Love offers a broad perspective on the last twenty-five years of feminist innovation in Christian ethics and a glimpse of its global future, particularly in continents such as Africa.

Read more less

In The Choice of the Jews under Vichy, Adam Rayski buttresses his analysis of war-era archival materials with his own personal testimony. His research in the archives of the military, the Central Consistory of the Jews of France, the police, and Philippe Pétain demonstrates the Vichy government’s role as a zealous accomplice in the Nazi program of genocide. He documents the efforts and absence of efforts of French Protestant and Catholic groups on behalf of their Jewish countrymen; he also explores the prewar divide between French-born and immigrant Jews, manifested in cultural conflicts and mutual antagonism as well as in varied initial responses to Vichy’s antisemitic edicts and actions. Rayski reveals how these Jewish communities eventually set aside their differences and united to resist the Nazi threat.

Read more less

In this collection of essays, 22 writers, historians, theologians and feminists thoughtfully reflect on their own personal experiences with the Catholic Church. The essayists describe how they have, or in some cases have not, come to terms with a church that does not permit them full participation. In so doing, they offer practical suggestions for ways in which the Church can become more open to the concerns of its progressive members. Radford Ruether, who provides a brief history of 20th-century reform movements; internationally-known journalist Mary Kenny, who writes on the abortion debate in Ireland; Pulitzer Prize winner Madeleine Blais, who discusses her youth in parochial schools; short-story writer and New Yorker contributor Jean McGarry, who describes the clash of Catholic and secular cultures; and Grail co-founder Janet Kalven, who depicts the history of this widely recognized religious reform movement. Ebest provide context for these personal and poignant essays. In a format that is easily accessible to general readers, Reconciling Catholicism and Feminism? explores issues of concern to progressive and feminist Catholics, including abortion, birth control, clerical celibacy and the ordination of women.

Read more less

Rethinking the Purpose of Business challenges reigning shareholder and stakeholder management theories using philosophical and theological dimensions of the Catholic social tradition. In this useful book, the contributors, including management theorists, moral theologians, economists, ethicists, and attorneys, debate complicated issues such as the ethics of profit seeking, equity and efficiency in the firm, the shareholder value principle, social ethics of corporate management, the principle of subsidiarity, and modern contract theory. While the contributors to this thought-provoking volume share a respect for the power of markets, they also assign value to community, common goods, and personal virtue. Essays combine organizational and management theory with philosophical and theological accounts of human purpose. A central argument of this collection is that the tradition of Catholic social thought provides principles that enable fruitful conversations across disciplines regarding the purpose of business and economic activity. Contributors Michael J. Naughton, Jean-Yves Calvez, Helen J. Alford, O.P., Charles Clark, S. A. Cortright, and Ernest Pierucci discuss the human implications of current shareholder and stakeholder theories. Robert Kennedy, James Gordley, and Dennis McCann assess the communitarian and personal principles of traditional Catholic social teaching as they relate to organizational and managerial theories. Peter Koslowski, Domènec Melé, Lee Tavis, and Timothy Fort consider how Catholic social principles ought to reshape our understanding of the firm. Jeff Gates, James Murphy, and David Pyke consider how concrete practices in ownership and job design should be affected.

Read more less

This collection of seventeen essays explores the implications of quantum cosmology regarding God’s action in the world. The result is a profound contribution to constructive theology, engaging current research in the natural sciences and investigating the philosophical and theological elements in future natural science research.

Read more less

In Hidden Holiness, Michael Plekon challenges us to examine the concept of holiness. He argues that both Orthodox and Catholic churches understand saints to be individuals whose lives and deeds are unusual, extraordinary, or miraculous. Such a requirement for sainthood undermines, in his view, one of the basic messages of Christianity: that all people are called to holiness. Instead of focusing on the ecclesiastical process of recognizing saints, Plekon explores a more ordinary and less noticeable “hidden” holiness, one founded on the calling of all to be prophets and priests and witnesses to the Gospel. As Rowan Williams has insisted, people of faith need to find God’s work in their culture and daily lives. With that in mind, Plekon identifies a fascinatingly diverse group of faithful who exemplify an everyday sanctity, as well as the tools they have used to enact their faith. Plekon calls upon contemporary writers—among them, Rowan Williams, Kathleen Norris, Sara Miles, Simone Weil, and Darcey Steinke—as well as such remarkable and controversial figures as Mother Teresa, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day—to demonstrate ways to imagine a more diverse and everyday holiness. He also introduces four individuals of "hidden holiness": a Yup'ik Alaskan, Olga Arsumquak Michael; the artist Joanna Reitlinger; the lay theologian Elisabeth Behr-Sigel; and human rights activist Paul Anderson. A generous and expansive treatment of the holy life, accessibly written for all readers, Plekon's book is sure to inspire us to recognize and celebrate the holiness hidden in the ordinary lives of those around us.

Read more less

The history of the Catholic University of Ireland has long been overshadowed by the personality and writings of its first rector, John Henry Newman. Newman—an official candidate for sainthood and author of the renowned The Idea of a University—played a vital role in the foundation of the university. But Colin Barr’s new study paints a richer portrait of CUI’s history by focusing on the university itself and on the influence of Paul Cullen, archbishop of Armagh and then Dublin. Most historians have based their treatments of the Catholic University of Ireland on Newman’s own voluminous correspondence and later writings, and have tended to uncritically accept Newman’s own understanding of his role in Dublin and his relationship with Cullen. Newman has been cast in the role of a liberal, creative visionary who was frustrated at every turn by the obscurantist, ultramontane Cullen. Barr seeks to reassess Cullen’s role in the founding and history of the University by utilizing previously unavailable sources and by relocating the history of the Catholic University in its Irish context. Paul Cullen, John Henry Newman, and the Catholic University of Ireland, 1845-1865 presents a more balanced treatment of both the University and of Newman and Cullen’s role in its history. The resulting text is a fascinating story of determination, conflict, and failure.

Read more less

Central to the question of how to promote economic growth in Latin America is the role different types of regimes play in determining economic performance. Guardians of the Nation? challenges conventional wisdom regarding the expected advantages of military rule for economic growth. Glen Biglaiser explains why many military regimes in Latin America have not performed noticeably better than their democratic counterparts. Biglaiser argues that economic policy-making under military regimes is essentially an unintended by-product of the military’s strategy to retain power. Using this premise, he examines the economic performance of regimes in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. Biglaiser shows that the appointment of neoliberal economists occurred not because military rulers possessed inherent interest in following market-oriented policies, but because they saw the appointments as a way to solidify their power. Biglaiser’s study also depicts Pinochet’s one-man rule as unique vis-à-vis the military regimes in Argentina and Uruguay. He concludes by demonstrating that his study is also applicable for understanding economic policy choice under democratic rule, and by comparing the similarities and differences between presidential and parliamentary governments.

Read more less

In the early spring of 1358 Francis Petrarch was invited by his friend Giovanni Mandelli, a leading military and political figure of Visconti Milan, to go on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Pleased at the invitation, Petrarch nevertheless declined to undertake the journey. Fear of the sea, of shipwreck, and of “slow death and nausea worse than death” held him back. While Petrarch would not make the literal journey he offered Mandelli a pilgrimage guide instead of his companionship: “nevertheless, I shall be with you in spirit, and since you have requested it, I will accompany you with this writing, which will be for you like a brief itinerary.” Composed over three days between March and April of 1358, the Itinerarium ad sepulchrum domini nostri takes the characteristic Petrarchan form of an epistle to a friend. Delivered to his correspondent in the form of an elegant booklet, the work presents a literary self-portrait that was meant to stand as “the more stable effigy of my soul and intellect” as well as “a description of places.” Although the Holy Land is the ostensible destination of the pilgrimage, more than half of this charming guidebook is devoted to Petrarch’s leisurely and loving descriptions of Italy's physical and cultural landscape. Upon reaching the Holy Land, Petrarch transforms himself into one of the greatest ten-cities-in-four-days Baedekers of all time, as Mandelli and the reader race through sacred landmarks and sites and end up, not at the sepulchrum domini nostri, but at the tomb of Alexander. Theodore Cachey has prepared the first English-language translation of the Itinerarium. Based on an authoritative 14th-century manuscript in the Biblioteca Statale of Cremona, which is, according to the explicit declaration of the scribe, a copy of Petrarch’s 1358 autograph, the translation is accompanied by the manuscript reproduced in facsimile and by a transcription of the Latin text. Cachey’s extensive introduction and notes discuss Petrarch’s text within the multiple contexts of travel in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and contemporary political and cultural issues, including Petrarch’s relation to emergent forms of “cartographic writing” and Renaissance “self-fashioning.” Petrarch’s little book reveals him to be a man of his time, but one whose voice speaks clearly to us across centuries. The Itinerarium is a jewel rediscovered for the modern reader.

Read more less

In Thinking Prayer, Andrew Prevot presents a new, integrated approach to Christian theology and spirituality, focusing on the centrality of prayer to theology in the modern age. Prevot's clear and in-depth analysis of notable philosophical and theological thinkers' responses to modernity through the theme of prayer charts a new spiritual path through the crises of modernity. Prevot offers critical interpretations of Martin Heidegger, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Jean-Louis Chrétien, Johann Baptist Metz, Ignacio Ellacuría, and James Cone, among others, integrating their insights into a constructive synthesis. He explains how doxological and contemplative forms of prayer help one avoid dangers associated with metaphysics, including nihilism, conceptual idolatry, and the concealment of difference. He considers the powerful impact that the prayers of oppressed peoples have on their efforts to resist socioeconomic and racialized violence. The book upholds modern aspirations to critical freedom, while arguing that such freedom can best be preserved and deepened through prayerful interactions with the infinite freedom of God. Throughout, the book uncovers the contemplative dimensions of postmodern phenomenology and liberation theology and suggests how prayer shapes liberative ways of thinking (theology) and living (spirituality) that are crucial for the future of this crisis-ridden world.

Read more less

Seventeenth-Century European Drawings in Midwestern Collections: The Age of Bernini, Rembrandt, and Poussin brings together nearly two hundred treasures of the Baroque age from museum collections throughout the Midwest. The volume presents a fascinating and representative selection of Italian, Dutch, Flemish, and French drawings in Midwestern repositories, offering new insights on many of these works of art. Many are relatively unknown, and some have never before been published. Authored by major scholars in the field, the catalogue presents each drawing along with a concise description with full scholarly apparatus. Four essays, written by Babette Bohn, George S. Keyes, Kristi A. Nelson, and Alvin L. Clark, Jr., respectively, introduce the Italian, Dutch, Flemish, and French schools. The catalogue's introductory essay, by Shelley Perlove, places these works within the historical, iconographic, and stylistic currents of seventeenth-century art. The catalogue is designed to have widespread appeal for art historians, curators, artists, collectors, students, and general readers interested in art and cultural history. Moreover, Seventeenth-Century European Drawings in Midwestern Collections highlights the surprising number of institutions throughout the Midwest that have acquired distinguished European drawings from the seventeenth century worthy of full recognition by collectors and connoisseurs.

Read more less

In this brilliant study, Thomas Pfau argues that the loss of foundational concepts in classical and medieval Aristotelian philosophy caused a fateful separation between reason and will in European thought. Pfau traces the evolution and eventual deterioration of key concepts of human agency—will, person, judgment, action—from antiquity through Scholasticism and on to eighteenth-century moral theory and its critical revision in the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Featuring extended critical discussions of Aristotle, Gnosticism, Augustine, Aquinas, Ockham, Hobbes, Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Hutcheson, Hume, Adam Smith, and Coleridge, this study contends that the humanistic concepts these writers seek to elucidate acquire meaning and significance only inasmuch as we are prepared positively to engage (rather than historicize) their previous usages. Beginning with the rise of theological (and, eventually, secular) voluntarism, modern thought appears increasingly reluctant and, in time, unable to engage the deep history of its own underlying conceptions, thus leaving our understanding of the nature and function of humanistic inquiry increasingly frayed and incoherent. One consequence of this shift is to leave the moral self-expression of intellectual elites and ordinary citizens alike stunted, which in turn has fueled the widespread notion that moral and ethical concerns are but a special branch of inquiry largely determined by opinion rather than dialogical reasoning, judgment, and practice. A clear sign of this regression is the present crisis in the study of the humanities, whose role is overwhelmingly conceived (and negatively appraised) in terms of scientific theories, methods, and objectives. The ultimate casualty of this reductionism has been the very idea of personhood and the disappearance of an adequate ethical language. Minding the Modern is not merely a chapter in the history of ideas; it is a thorough phenomenological and metaphysical study of the roots of today's predicaments.

Read more less

In this brilliant study, Thomas Pfau argues that the loss of foundational concepts in classical and medieval Aristotelian philosophy caused a fateful separation between reason and will in European thought. Pfau traces the evolution and eventual deterioration of key concepts of human agency—will, person, judgment, action—from antiquity through Scholasticism and on to eighteenth-century moral theory and its critical revision in the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Featuring extended critical discussions of Aristotle, Gnosticism, Augustine, Aquinas, Ockham, Hobbes, Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Hutcheson, Hume, Adam Smith, and Coleridge, this study contends that the humanistic concepts these writers seek to elucidate acquire meaning and significance only inasmuch as we are prepared positively to engage (rather than historicize) their previous usages. Beginning with the rise of theological (and, eventually, secular) voluntarism, modern thought appears increasingly reluctant and, in time, unable to engage the deep history of its own underlying conceptions, thus leaving our understanding of the nature and function of humanistic inquiry increasingly frayed and incoherent. One consequence of this shift is to leave the moral self-expression of intellectual elites and ordinary citizens alike stunted, which in turn has fueled the widespread notion that moral and ethical concerns are but a special branch of inquiry largely determined by opinion rather than dialogical reasoning, judgment, and practice. A clear sign of this regression is the present crisis in the study of the humanities, whose role is overwhelmingly conceived (and negatively appraised) in terms of scientific theories, methods, and objectives. The ultimate casualty of this reductionism has been the very idea of personhood and the disappearance of an adequate ethical language. Minding the Modern is not merely a chapter in the history of ideas; it is a thorough phenomenological and metaphysical study of the roots of today's predicaments.

Read more less

This volume brings together Lee Patterson’s essays published in various venues over the past twenty-seven years. As he observes in his preface, “The one persistent recognition that emerged from writing these otherwise quite disparate essays is that whatever the text . . . and whoever the people . . ., the values at issue remain central to contemporary life.” Two dialectics are at work in this book: that between the past and the present and that between the individual and the social, and both have moral significance. The first two chapters are methodological; the first is on the historical understanding of medieval literature and the second on how to manage the inseparability of fact and value in the classroom. The next three chapters take up three "less-read" late medieval writers: Sir John Clanvowe, Thomas Hoccleve, and John Lydgate. Each is used to illuminate a social phenomenon: the nature of court culture, the experience of the city, and Henry V's act of self-making. The following chapter explicitly links past and present by arguing that the bearing of the English aristocrat comes from a tradition beginning with Beowulf and later reinvoked in response to nineteenth-century imperialism. The next three chapters are the most literary, dealing with Chaucer and with literary conventions in relation to a number of texts. The final chapter is on the man Patterson considers one of the most important of our medieval ancestors, Francis of Assisi.

Read more less

In The Rise and Fall of Repression in Chile, Pablo Policzer tackles the difficult task of analyzing how authoritarian regimes utilize coercion. Even in relatively open societies, coercive institutions such as the police and military tend to be secretive and mistrustful of efforts by outsiders to oversee their operations. In more closed societies, secrecy is the norm, making coercion that much more difficult to observe and understand. Drawing on organization theory to develop a comparative typology of coercive regimes, Policzer analyzes the structures and mechanisms of coercion in general and then shifts his focus to the early part of the military dictatorship in Chile, which lasted from 1973 to 1990. Policzer's book sheds new light on a fundamental, yet little-examined, period during the Chilean dictatorship. Between 1977 and 1978, the governing junta in Chile quietly replaced the secret police organization known as the Dirección de Informaciones Nacional (DINA) with a different institution, the Central Nacional de Informaciones (CNI). Policzer provides the first systematic account of why the DINA was created in the first place, how it became the most powerful repressive institution in the country, and why it was suddenly replaced with a different organization, one that carried out repression in a markedly more restrained manner. Policzer shows how the dictatorship's reorganization of its security forces intersected in surprising ways with efforts by human rights watchdogs to monitor and resist the regime's coercive practices. He concludes by comparing these struggles with how dictatorships in Argentina, East Germany, and South Africa organized coercion.

Read more less

Everyday life for Cubans in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s involved an intimate interaction between commitment to an exile identity and reluctant integration into a new society. For Catholic Cuban exiles, their faith provided a filter through which they analyzed and understood both their exile and their ethnic identities. Catholicism offered the exiles continuity: a community of faith, a place to gather, a sense of legitimacy as a people. Religion exerted a major influence on the beliefs and actions of Cuban exiles as they integrated into U.S. culture and tried at the same time to make sense of events in their homeland. Cuban Catholics in the United States, 1960-1980 examines all these facets of the exile and integration process among Catholics, primarily in south Florida, but the voices of others across the United States, Latin America, and Europe also enter the story. The personal papers of exiles, their books and pamphlets, newspaper articles, government archives, and personal interviews provide the historical data for this book. In his thorough examination Gerald E. Poyo provides insights not only for this community but for other faith-based exile communities.

Read more less

The central task of Being With God is an analysis of the relation between apophaticism, trinitarian theology, and divine-human communion through a critical comparison of the trinitarian theologies of the Eastern Orthodox theologians Vladimir Lossky (1903–58) and John Zizioulas (1931– ), arguably two of the most influential Orthodox theologians of the past century. These two theologians identify as the heart and center of all theological discourse the realism of divine-human communion, which is often understood in terms of the familiar Orthodox concept of theosis, or divinization. The Incarnation, according to Lossky and Zizioulas, is the event of a real divine-human communion that is made accessible to all; God has become human so that all may participate fully in the divine life. Aristotle Papanikolaou shows how an ontology of divine-human communion is at the center of both Lossky's and Zizioulas's theological projects. He also shows how, for both theologians, this core belief is used as a self-identifying marker against "Western" theologies. Papanikolaou maintains, however, that Lossky and Zizioulas hold profoundly different views on how to conceptualize God as the Trinity. Their key difference is over the use of apophaticism in theology in general and especially the relation of apophaticism to the doctrine of the Trinity. For Lossky, apophaticism is the central precondition for a trinitarian theology; for Zizioulas, apophaticism has a much more restricted role in theological discourse, and the God experienced in the eucharist is not the God beyond being but the immanent life of the trinitarian God. Papanikolaou provides readers with a richer understanding of contemporary Orthodox theology through his analysis of the consensus and debate between two leading Orthodox theologians.

Read more less

From 1968 until his death in 2003, Gerald Hanratty was professor of philosophy at University College Dublin. In this volume dedicated to his memory, Fran O'Rourke has assembled twenty-six essays reflecting Hanratty's broad philosophical interests, dealing with central questions of human existence and the ultimate meaning of the universe. Whether engaged in historical investigations into Gnosticism or the Enlightenment, Hanratty was concerned with fundamental themes in the philosophy of religion and philosophical anthropology. Human Destinies brings together a wide range of approaches to these central questions. Included are historical studies of classical thinkers of the ancient and medieval periods (Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas) and studies of numerous modern authors (among them, Kant, Husserl, Heidegger, Marcel, Adorno, Derrida, Plantinga, Scruton, and many others). Contributors: Fran O'Rourke, Peter L. P. Simpson, Rowland Stout, Andrew Smith, Eoin G. Cassidy, Cyril O'Regan, Michael Nolan, Patrick Masterson, Tim Lynch, James R. O'Shea, Ciarán McGlynn, Maria Baghramian, Mark Dooley, Brendan Purcell, Brendan Sweetman, Ciarán Benson, Richard Kearney, Dermot Moran, Belinda McKeon, Brian Elliott, Eileen Brennan, Liberato Santoro-Brienza, Brian O'Connor, Timothy Mooney, David Walsh, and Gerard Casey.

Read more less

Finding the Voice of the Church is written for a broad audience interested in the challenges facing the contemporary Catholic Church. These challenges are ones that should concern all Christians, not only Catholics. Noted scholar and commentator George Dennis O’Brien poses (and answers) three provocative questions: What is the proper voice of the church? Is there a voice of Christian faith? Can what is said about Christianity be fundamentally distorted by how it is said? Through his clear and relevant discussion of the basic content of Christianity, O’Brien concludes that the primary voice of Catholic Christianity, the papal teaching voice, must be radically “re-understood” if the Church is to be the proper medium and voice of the gospel message. O’Brien begins with the primary voice of the Church: baptism, gospel, and Eucharist. He contends that too much official teaching from the Roman magisterium to the local pulpit reverses the order of the ancient formula lex orandi, lex credendi (the law of prayer is the law of faith) and therefore misses its message. In the second part of the book, he turns to specific consideration of the papal voice as the teaching voice of the Church. O’Brien concludes with a series of practical suggestions for how the practices and institutions of the Church can again become the authentic voice of faith. This is a book all concerned Christians will want to read and discuss.

Read more less

In this important new work, Kevin Madigan studies the development and union of scholastic, apocalyptic, and Franciscan interpretations of the Gospel of Matthew from 1150 to 1350. These interpretations are placed within the context of high-medieval religious life and attitudes of the papacy toward the Franciscan Order. Madigan uses the fortunes of the Franciscan Peter Olivi (d. 1298) and his commentary on Matthew as a lens through which to observe the larger theological and ecclesiastical developments of this era. Structured in three sections, Olivi and the Interpretation of Matthew in the High Middle Ages begins with an analysis of the scholastic gospel commentary tradition in the schools of Laon and Paris. The second section of the book offers a detailed examination of the Treatise on the Four Gospels by the famed apocalyptic writer Joachim of Fiore. Finally, Madigan turns his attention to the disputes which plagued the Franciscan Order during the first century of its existence. Madigan also focuses on Olivi’s Commentary on Matthew. He argues that this little-known work is perhaps the only Matthew commentary in the high Middle Ages to have been influenced by Joachim’s apocalyptic thought and shaped by internal and external disagreements over the highest form of religious life. Filled with severe criticisms of the hierarchy and leadership of the church, Olivi’s Matthew commentary was examined and eventually condemned by papally appointed theologians in the early fourteenth century. Olivi and the Interpretation of Matthew in the High Middle Ages is not only a worthy contribution to the study of gospel exegesis, but also a valuable cultural and ecclesiastical history.

Read more less

Many great thinkers have wrestled with the topic of evil. St. Thomas Aquinas's disputed question On Evil merges as the longest and most comprehensive study on the subject of evil available. This long-awaited translation is based on the critical edition of the Latin text published by the Leonine Commission in 1982. The disputed question De malo (On Evil) was first presented as a series of oral debates at the University of Paris (1263-1272) and subsequently recorded in the form in which it now appears. The length of the work and the thoroughness of the treatment is eloquent testimony of the importance St. Thomas attached to this topic.

Read more less

In the late nineteenth century, an era in which social mobility was measured almost exclusively by the success of men, Irish American women were leading their ethnic group into the lower middle class occupations of civil service, teaching, and health care. Unlike their immigrant mothers who became servants of the rich, Irish American daughters became servants of the poor by teaching in public school classrooms. The remarkable success of Irish American women was tied to their educational achievements. Unlike many of their contemporaries, the daughters of Irish America attended four-year academic programs in high schools, followed by two to three years of normal school training. By the first decade of the twentieth century, Irish American women were the largest single ethnic group among public elementary school teachers in cities such as Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco. Janet Nolan argues that the roots of this female-driven mobility can be traced to immigrant women's education in Ireland. Armed with the literacy and numeracy learned in Irish schools, Irish immigrant women in America sent their daughters, more than their sons, to school in preparation for professional careers. As a result, Nolan contends, Irish American women entered white-collar work at least a generation before their brothers. Servants of the Pooris a pioneering work which looks at the teaching profession at the turn of the century from the perspective of the women who taught in Irish and American classrooms. Drawing on previously unpublished archival and manuscript sources, including memoirs and letters, Servants of the Poor will be of considerable value to those interested in Irish, Irish American, educational, and women's history.

Read more less

In The News and Other Poems, David Citino confronts and attempts to make sense of the news. He explores the good and bad ways the world has of careening into a life and sending it off course. Citino tries to understand how we come to know what we know, driven as we are by haughty assumptions about the world we’re making and the control we think we exert over our own lives and loves. While still holding romantic notions of ivory towers and ivy-covered garrets, Citino welcomes the latest information—no matter how bad the news. He struggles to understand stories from sources impeachable and unimpeachable—supermarket tabloids and journals of science, folklore and the laboratory, chronicles of ancient history and news wires, even those sometimes terrible things we learn from our doctors or those we love. “This is high entertainment by a poet who possesses honesty and playfulness in equal measure and who is an expert at deploying the line and boxing the stanza.” —Billy Collins “Pound said that literature is news that stays news and the distinguished poet, David Citino, has taken this observation from the wittiest reinvention of current events all the way to the Great Tabloid of the inexpressible. The News and Other Poems is funny, remarkable, and profound.” —Carol Muske-Dukes “The strength of this book resides in its vivid mixture of the sacred and the profane. The real ‘news’ of these poems is that here is a person alert to all our profane and post-modern predicaments, and yet who still finds within himself the stirrings and yearnings toward whatever we can dimly perceive of the sacred.” —Fred Marchant “These vivid topical poems try wryly to come to terms with human depravity, with ‘the grim, thorny symmetry/ of war,’ ‘the usual apocalypse’ of people drowned or killed in meaningless accidents. But this is not a dark book. Citino's wit and passionate love of life sparkle throughout. Speaking through Sister Mary Appassionata, he declares, ‘there is a place where it all makes sense.’” —Maxine Kumin

Read more less

Defining Acts considers how the surviving English theatrical works of the fifteenth century represent competing practices of interpretation. The plays take up a series of contests over who could legitimately determine the meaning of texts—men or women, clerics or laity, rulers or subjects, Christians or Jews—and transform these questions for audiences far beyond their original medieval academic contexts. Ruth Nisse focuses in particular on how theater translates the temporal ideas of textual exegesis into spatial models and politics. She situates medieval drama, therefore, both in its vernacular literary setting, as a genre composed against the same cultural background as The Canterbury Tales, Piers Plowman, and The Book of Margery Kempe, and in its performances, which negotiate a range of contemporary social and political issues. Defining Acts begins with an introductory chapter that reveals the dangers and pleasures of theater in a reading of Chaucer's antic Miller's Tale and the violently anti-theatrical Wycliffite Treatise of Miracle Playing. These two radically different works provide a dialectic entry into late-medieval controversies over biblical interpretation and vernacular theology, versions of which then reappear in dramatic texts themselves. Subsequent chapters engage problems such as the clash between civic rule and the authority of women's visionary experiences in the York Plays; competing ideas of labor and poverty in the Towneley Plays; and theories of Jewish exegesis that continue to haunt Christian and national understandings of history in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament. By reading medieval drama in relation to its intertexts, Nisse explores the ways in which ideas previously limited to academic discourse become elements of public theatrical performances, available to new audiences. Her pathbreaking approach to the study of medieval drama makes this book required reading for scholars and students alike.

Read more less

In Rethinking the Medieval Legacy for Contemporary Theology, six distinguished theologians bridge medieval and contemporary theologies by developing the theological significance of medieval insights in response to contemporary issues. Their nuanced readings of medieval texts, extended to major theological issues of our time, provide examples of the retrieval of the medieval tradition, an essential part of any contemporary theological reconstruction. Barbara Newman extends the theology of perichoresis or mutual indwelling to illuminate the relationship between donor and recipient in the case of organ transplants; Marilyn McCord Adams applies insights about divine friendship to the perennial issue of horrendous evil; and Kevin Madigan brings principles of medieval exegesis to bear on the contemporary historical critical approach to biblical interpretation. Ingolf U. Dalferth applies insights from the doctrine of divine omnipotence and creation ex nihilo to deconstruct Heidegger’s limitation of the possibilities of authentic existence to historical facticity. Pim Valkenberg explores the possibilities of a theological encounter between Christianity and Islam in the works of Aquinas and Nicholas of Cusa; and Anselm K. Min applies the analogical insights of Aquinas on the nature and limits of human knowledge of God to a critique of contemporary theologies that claim to know either too little or too much about God.

Read more less

In Patristics and Catholic Social Thought: Hermeneutical Models for a Dialogue, Brian Matz argues that scholars and proponents of the modern Catholic social tradition can gain from the use of ancient texts for contemporary socioethical formation. Although it is impossible to expect a one-to-one correspondence between the social ideas of early church theologians, such as Augustine, and those of modern Catholic social thought, this book offers four hermeneutical models that will facilitate a fruitful dialogue between the two worlds. The result is a challenge to modern Christian ethicists to think more deeply about their work in light of the perspective of those who trod a similar path centuries ago. Matz first examines an "authorial intent" hermeneutical model, as articulated in the philosophies of Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey. The second is a "distanciation" model, relying on the thought of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur. The third is a "normativity of the future" model, so named by its proponents, Reimund Bieringer and Mary Elsbernd. The fourth is a "new intellectual history" model, which relies on contemporary literary-critical theories. In a series of case studies, Matz applies each model to two early Christian sermons on the parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man and, in so doing, illustrates that each one draws out different social ideas. Although each model ultimately bears fruit for Catholic social thought today, Matz concludes that the "normativity of the future" model is the one best suited to a productive use of early Christian texts in contemporary Catholic social thought.

Read more less

From Knowledge to Beatitude is a collection of original essays on the intersection between Christian theology and spiritual life primarily in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, especially in the Parisian School of St. Victor, which honors the influential work of Grover A. Zinn, Jr. Written by distinguished scholars from various fields of medieval studies, these essays range from the study of the exegetical school of twelfth-century St. Victor and medieval glossed Bibles to the medieval cultural reception of women visionaries, preachers, and crusaders. Although focused on St. Victor, they provide analyses of Christian themes up to the modern period. A common thread is Zinn’s careful attention to the connections between medieval spirituality and biblical studies, the origin of these ideas, and their lasting influence in Christian culture. The essays take us from Hugh of St. Victor’s foundation—material culture—to the “beatitude” of a wider understanding of Victorine culture and its lasting legacy. This volume is a fitting tribute to a generous scholar, teacher, and mentor. It will appeal to historians, scholars of religion and theology, and art historians. Contributors: Raymond Clemens, Catherine Delano-Smith, Walter Cahn, William Clark, Thomas Waldman, Franklin T. Harkins, Lesley Smith, Hugh Feiss, Boyd Taylor Coolman, Dale M. Coulter, Marcia L. Colish, Dominique Poirel, Barbara Newman, Rachel Fulton Brown, Jeremy Adams, Frans van Liere, E. Ann Matter

Read more less

The Very Rich Hours of Jacques Maritain is distinguished philosopher Ralph McInerny’s hymn of praise to the spiritual and intellectual life of the great Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain (1881–1973). The structure of this work is modeled on the medieval book of hours, making use of the daily offices, from Matins through Compline, to examine each stage of the life of Maritain and his wife, Raïssa. Through this unique blending of biography and meditation, McInerny creates a powerful portrait of the Maritains, one that reveals a model of the intellectual life as lived by Christian believers. McInerny’s authoritative work provides an interesting and accessible avenue of entry to Maritain’s life and thought. Among the topics McInerny covers are Maritain’s remarkable and diverse set of friends, his involvement in French politics, and the development of his views on the nature and future of democracy, the church, and Catholic intellectual life. By skillfully interweaving Maritain’s philosophy with anecdotes from his life, McInerny demonstrates what distinguished Maritain as a Catholic philosopher and why he is a source of inspiration for McInerny and others of his generation.

Read more less

When Bill Meissner’s collection of short stories Hitting into the Wind was published in 1994, it was called “a quiet masterpiece of baseball writing” by the Greensboro, North Carolina, News and Record. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer said, “Bill Meissner captures baseball with all its crystalline beauty—the remarkable reverberation of time and space and character.” And The New York Times Book Review said, “Just about every tale here recalls those precious years when a chance to play in the majors was all a boy could ask from life.” Now, in his first novel, Bill Meissner again uses baseball as a window to his characters. In Spirits in the Grass, we meet Luke Tanner, a thirty-something ball player helping to build a new baseball field in his beloved hometown of Clearwater, Wisconsin. Luke looks forward to trying out for the local amateur team as soon as possible. His chance discovery of a small bone fragment on the field sets in motion a series of events and discoveries that will involve his neighbors, local politicians, and the nearby Native American reservation. Luke’s life, most of all, will be transformed. His growing obsession with the ball field and what’s beneath it threatens his still fragile relationship with his partner, Louise, and challenges Luke’s assumptions about everyone, especially himself. Spirits in the Grass rings true with small-town Midwestern values. The characters, including Luke’s independent partner Louise, grapple with their passion and their identities. In this beautiful and haunting novel, baseball serves as a metaphor for life itself, with its losses and defeats, its glories and triumphs.

Read more less

Historical writing of the early middle ages tends to be regarded as little more than a possible source of facts, but Rosamond McKitterick establishes that early medieval historians conveyed in their texts a sophisticated set of multiple perceptions of the past. In these essays, McKitterick focuses on the Frankish realms in the eighth and ninth centuries and examines different methods and genres of historical writing in relation to the perceptions of time and chronology. She claims that there is an extraordinary concentration of new text production and older text reproduction in this period that has to be accounted for, and whose influence is still being investigated and established. Three themes are addressed in Perceptions of the Past in the Early Middle Ages. McKitterick begins by discussing the Chronicon of Eusebius-Jerome as a way of examining the composition and reception of universal history in the ninth and early tenth centuries. She demonstrates that original manuscripts turn out in many cases to be compilations of sequential historical texts with a chronology extending back to the creation of the world or the origin of the Franks. In the second chapter, she explores the significance of Rome in Carolingian perceptions of the past and argues that its importance loomed large and was communicated in a great range of texts and material objects. In the third chapter, she looks at eighth- and ninth-century perceptions of the local past in the Frankish realm within the wider contexts of Christian and national history. She concludes that in the very rich, complex, and sometimes, contradictory early medieval perceptions of a past stretching back to the creation of the world, the Franks in the Carolingian period forged their own special place.

Read more less