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

Passover and Easter constitute for Jews and Christians respectively the most important festivals of the year. Although sharing a common root, the feasts have developed in quite distinct ways in the two traditions, in part independently of one another and in part in reaction against the other. Following the pattern set in earlier volumes in this series, these two volumes bring together a group of distinguished Jewish and Christian scholars to explore the history of the two celebrations, paying particular attention to similarities and connections between them as well as to differences and contrasts. They not only present a convenient summary of current historical thought but also open up new perspectives on the evolution of these annual observances. Volume 6 focuses on the contexts in which they occur—the periods of preparation for the feasts in the respective calendars and their connection to Shavuot/Pentecost—as well as to their traditional expression in art and music. Volume 5, also in the series, focuses especially on the origins and early development of the feasts and on the way that established practices have changed in recent years. At the same time, the essays raise some fundamental questions about the future. Have modern human beings so lost the sense of sacred time in their lives, for instance, that these great feasts can never again be what they once were for former generations of believers? And what about recent attempts by some Christians to enter into their heritage by celebrating a Jewish Seder as part of their annual Holy Week and Easter services? Specialists and general readers alike will find much to interest and challenge them within these two additions to what has become a highly regarded series in the world of liturgical scholarship.

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Recent scholarship concerning parish priests in medieval England, their professional training, and their daily pastoral work has produced a more complex and realistic picture of parish clergy in the High and Late Middle Ages which dispels many of the durable myths and stereotypical images that emerged from popular studies written almost a century ago. In this source book, John Shinner and William Dohar bring together a large, varied selection of medieval documents on pastoral care. These materials from a wide range of sources —administrative, theological, legal, historical, and literary—are grouped thematically and prefaced by introductions to each chapter which set the context provide basic background information, and offer a concise summary of the recruitment, training, occupations, and circumstances of the parish clergy during the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. Included in the readings are excerpts from pastoral manuals, bishops’ registers, diocesan legislation, financial accounts, and records of parish visitations that when combined offer a vivid picture of daily parish life. The readings in this volume focus first of all on the multifaceted lives and responsibilities of those men who engaged in the pastoral care of souls in medieval England. What emerges is not the old view of these priests as a fairly anonymous and homogeneous mass entity but rather as a richly diverse group—from noble to baseborn, from academically brilliant to barely lettered, from deeply pious to grossly opportunistic, and from utterly committed to despicably derelict in carrying out their pastoral duties. Selected documents go on to illuminate the elaborate systems of support created to help parish clergy: the administrative divisions of the institutional church; the methods of formulating and disseminating instruction on theological, canonical, and liturgical subjects; and the legal apparatus formed to direct the cure of souls. By highlighting the wider social and religious milieu in which the medieval pastor worked, the author/editors intend to guide the reader to richer appreciation of the Christian religion’s inextricable bond to nearly every facet of life in the High and Late Middle Ages. Suitable for a number of classroom applications and academic disciplines, this book offers those interested in pastoral care, medieval studies, and church history a unique sourcebook, the only collection of translated documents specifically devoted to the lives and mission of the parish clergy in medieval England.

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We encounter many voices in life: from friends and family, from media, from co-workers, from other artists. In a highly connected global world, where people and entities are electronically enmeshed, we filter these voices constantly to get to what we determine to be the truth. Taking inspiration from pop culture, politics, art, and social media, Martin Ott mines daily existence as the inspiration and driving force behind Underdays. Underdays is a dialogue of opposing forces: life/death, love/war, the personal/the political. Ott combines global concerns with personal ones, in conversation between poems or within them, to find meaning in his search for what drives us to love and hate each other. Within many of the poems, a second voice, expressed in italic, hints at an opposing force “under” the surface, or multiple voices in conversation with his older and younger selves—his Underdays—to chart a path forward. What results is a poetic heteroglossia expressing the richness of a complex world.

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“During the first three months of 1972 a trial took place in the middle district of Pennsylvania: THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA versus Eqbal Ahmad, Philip Berrigan, Elizabeth McAlister, Neil McLaughlin, Anthony Scoblick, Mary Cain Scoblick, Joseph Wenderoth. The defendants stood accused of conspiring to raid federal offices, to bomb government property, and to kidnap presidential advisor Henry Kissinger. Six of those seven individuals are, or were, Roman Catholic clergy—priests and nuns. Members of the new ‘Catholic Left.’” —from the introduction When The Harrisburg 7 and the New Catholic Left was originally published in 1972, it remained on The New York Times Book Review “New and Recommended” list for six weeks and was selected as one of the Notable Books of the Year. Now, forty years later, William O’Rourke’s book eloquently speaks to a new generation of readers interested in American history and the religious anti-war protest movements of the Vietnam era. O’Rourke brings to life the seven anti-war activists, who were vigorously prosecuted for alleged criminal plots, filling in the drama of the case, the trial, the events, the demonstrations, the panels, and the people. O’Rourke includes a new afterword that presents a sketch of the evolution of protest groups from the 1960s and 1970s, including the history of the New Catholic Left for the past four decades, claiming that “[a]fter the Harrisburg trial, the New Catholic Left became the New Catholic Right.”

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A significant body of scholarship addresses pre-Norman Irish life and history, including the archaeology, art, and architecture from the time of St. Patrick (d. 493) to the arrival of the Normans in the twelfth century. While the place of the church and its organization in pre-Norman Ireland have been extensively studied, relatively little has been published on the eucharistic liturgy as celebrated in the pre-Norman church or on the attitudes of its worshippers to the Eucharist. But, as Neil Xavier O’Donoghue notes, many of Ireland’s national treasures—including the Ardagh Chalice, the Book of Kells, and Cormac’s Chapel—date from this time and are directly connected with the celebration of the Eucharist. Additionally, many of the textual and archaeological sources for the study of pre-Norman Ireland—saints’ lives, penitentials, monastic rules, manuscripts, eucharistic vessels, church buildings, and ecclesiastical complexes—directly relate to the Eucharist. There has been no attempt to provide a useful synthesis since F. E. Warren’s 1881 Liturgy and Ritual of the Celtic Church. O’Donoghue’s The Eucharist in Pre-Norman Ireland provides a necessary, updated synthesis, one that incorporates advances made in liturgical studies and liturgical theology since the early twentieth century. In addition to reassessing and supplementing the texts discussed by Warren, O’Donoghue considers the social dimension of the Eucharist, its treatment in art and architecture, and its treatment as reflected by the spirituality of the time, placing this new analysis within a better understood Western European cultural and liturgical context. Most importantly, O’Donoghue shows that pre-Norman Ireland was very much a part of the Western (Gallican) liturgical tradition; he argues that what we know of the Eucharist in Ireland must be integrated into what we know of it in Britain and Gaul in order to understand the central role of the Eucharist in the Christianization of the West.

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This is the first narrative history of the Archdiocese of St. Paul, from 1840 to 1962. Historian Marvin R. O'Connell brings to life the extraordinary labors and accomplishments of the French priests who came to the upper midwest territory during the first half of the nineteenth century. Over the next fifty years a flood of settlers, primarily Irish and German Catholics, filled up the land. In 1850 Rome created a new diocese centered in the village of St. Paul, and in 1851 French priest Joseph Cretin was named its first bishop. O'Connell's lively account stresses the social, economic, and political context in which the Catholic Church in Minnesota grew and evolved. He vividly illuminates the personalities of the bishops who followed Cretin, Thomas Grace (1859–84) and John Ireland (1884–1918). Ireland inherited a sophisticated system of churches, schools, orphanages, and hospitals, staffed by orders of religious men and women. Ireland built upon this legacy, founding colleges for men and women, a major seminary, and cathedrals in both St. Paul and Minneapolis. Ireland's successors, Austin Dowling (1919–30) and John Gregory Murray (1931–56) were not as colorful as Ireland, although Murray was immensely popular. William Brady is the final archbishop covered in this book, serving from 1956 to 1961 when he died unexpectedly from a heart attack. O’Connell ends his narrative in 1962, soon after the death of Archbishop Brady and a few months before the first session of Vatican II.

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“As I walked away with my refreshments, I felt something peculiar. It was so strange it stopped me mid-step. I was forty-five years old, and I had felt many things, but never before this particular feeling: I felt a click deep inside. The image the sensation produced in my mind was of a BB, a small round piece of copper-colored lead, falling into a socket. It was a very clear image. A BB is tiny, but the one I imagined felt infinitesimal, microscopic. Yet I felt it, a click, metal on metal—like an expensive, microscopic gear had slipped, some exquisite piece of machinery falling out of alignment. Some medieval example of craftsmanship, a gyroscope, something intricate, needing fine balance. The feeling, the event, was located in my chest, below my left breast. It was thoroughly interior, as if a signal had been sent and registered, what those giant satellite dishes are poised waiting for, a transmission from deep space.” —from Chapter 1 That was October 26, 1991, in what became a singularly awful day in the life of William O’Rourke. Minutes later, at the beginning of a Notre Dame football game, he began to suffer his heart attack. O’Rourke’s account of that day, and everything that followed, is personal, informative, humorous, and highly literate. With its extended description of what an MI feels like and how people around the patient react, his memoir provides a bedside view of his experience and all of the emotions—both extraordinary and quotidian—that accompanied it. What is startling is how that momentous event, the heart attack, divides life irretrievably into a “before” and “after.” Gone are the assumptions of what is safe and healthy; replacing them is a newly-forged relation of mind and body, a treacherous one which breeds a physical paranoia that only lessens after months. O’Rourke vividly describes the extreme pain of the attack, the forced inactivity of recuperation, and the melancholy of embracing life anew while accepting a heightened awareness of mortality. He knows his luck in having supportive family and friends, and uses his time away from normal routine to examine his family history for likely genetic proclivities for heart disease. Through his description of his experience—from MI, to angioplasty, to cardiac catheterization to, fourteen years later, a quintuple bypass and a second round of cardio-rehabilitation—he asks us to change behaviors we can affect and pay attention to our health. It does, after all, come down to this: “Here’s to life.” Enriched with a medical glossary and selected bibliography, this is a helpful compendium for other recuperating patients and their families, or anyone concerned about heart disease, or interested in memoir.

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In 1996, Guillermo O’Donnell taught a seminar at the University of Notre Dame on democratic theory. One of the questions explored in this class was whether it is possible to define and determine the “quality” of democracy. Jorge Vargas Cullell, a student in this course, returned to his native country of Costa Rica, formed a small research team, and secured funding for undertaking a “citizen audit” of the quality of democracy in Costa Rica. This pathbreaking volume contains O’Donnell’s qualitative theoretical study of the quality of democracy and Vargas Cullell’s description and analysis of the empirical data he gathered on the quality of democracy in Costa Rica. It also includes twelve short, scholarly reflections on the O’Donnell and Cullell essays. The primary goal of this collection is to present the rationale and methodology for implementing a citizen audit of democracy. This book is an expression of a growing concern among policy experts and academics that the recent emergence of numerous democratic regimes, particularly in Latin America, cannot conceal the sobering fact that the efficacy and impact of these new governments vary widely. These variations, which range from acceptable to dismal, have serious consequences for the people of Latin America, many of whom have received few if any benefits from democratization. Attempts to gauge the quality of particular democracies are therefore not only fascinating intellectual exercises but may also be useful practical guides for improving both old and new democracies. This book will make important strides in addressing the increasing practical and academic concerns about the quality of democracy. It will be required reading for political scientists, policy analysts, and Latin Americanists.

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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.

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Using concrete examples, John T. Noonan, Jr., demonstrates that the moral teaching of the Catholic Church has changed and continues to change without abandoning its foundational commitment to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Specifically, Noonan looks at the profound changes that have occurred over the centuries in Catholic moral teaching on freedom of conscience, lending for a profit, and slavery. He also offers a close examination of the change now in progress concerning divorce. In these changes Noonan perceives the Catholic Church to be a vigorous, living organism answering new questions with new answers, and enlarging the capacity of believers to learn through experience and empathy what love demands. He contends that the impetus to change comes from a variety of sources, including prayer, meditation on Scripture, new theological insights and analyses, the evolution of human institutions, and the examples and instruction given by persons of good will. Noonan also states that the Church cannot change its commitment to preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Given this absolute, how can the moral teaching of the Church change? Noonan finds this question unanswerable when asked in the abstract. But in the context of the specific facts and events he discusses in this book, an answer becomes clear. As our capacity to grasp the Gospel grows, so too, our understanding and compassion, which give life to the Gospel commandments of love, grow.

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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.

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In Jalos, USA, Alfredo Mirandé explores migration between the Mexican town of Jalostotitlán, Jalisco, and Turlock, California, and shows how migrants retain a primal identity with their community of origin. The study examines how family, gender, courtship, religion, and culture promote a Mexicanized version of the “American Dream” for la gente de Jalos. After introducing traditional theories of migration and describing a distinctly circular migration pattern between Jalos and Turlock, Mirandé introduces a model of transnationalism. Residents move freely back and forth across the border, often at great risk, adopting a transnational village identity that transcends both the border and conventional national or state identities. Mirandé’s findings are based on participant observation, ethnographic field research, and captivating in-depth personal interviews conducted on both sides of the border with a wide range of respondents. To include multiple perspectives, Mirandé conducts focus group interviews with youth in Jalos and Turlock, as well as interviews with priests and social service providers. Together, these data provide both a rich account of experiences as well as assessments of courtship practices and problems faced by contemporary migrants. Jalos, USA is written in an accessible style that will appeal to students and scholars of Latino and migration studies, policy makers, and laypersons interested in immigration, the border, and transnational migration.

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According to a fairly standard view, there are several reasons for denying that existence is a real property of individuals. One is that 'exists' cannot be predicated of individuals, and another is that first-level properties are parasitic on individuals for their actuality, which is something that existence could never be. A third is that existence adds nothing to individuals. Moreover, even if existence were to survive all three counter-indications, it would be merely the most vacuous of properties. The Fullness of Being, however, argues that this view of existence is seriously awry. In this brilliant book, Barry Miller argues that existence is not merely a real property of individuals, but by far the richest of their properties. The commonly accepted view of existence is testimony, contends Miller, to what happens when wrong questions are asked, false assumptions are made, and the possibility of a new paradigm for existence is dismissed without consideration. They bear witness to the substantial flaws underlying the familiar claim 'existence is not a predicate' and the Frege-Russell-Quine view not only of 'exists' as exclusively a second-level predicate, but of existence as no more than a Cambridge property of individuals. By way of contrast, The Fullness of Being is an account of what happens when different questions are asked, when false assumptions are eschewed, and when the possibility of a radically different paradigm for existence is actively explored rather than completely ignored. What began for Miller as an exercise in philosophical logic to determine whether 'exists' is predicable of individuals, ends in an argument with groundbreaking consequences for ontology.

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My Kill Adore Him is a collection of poems from Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize-winner Paul Martínez Pompa. With a unique, independent voice, Martínez Pompa interrogates masculinity, race, language, consumerism, and cultural identity in poems that honor los olvidados, the forgotten ones, who range from the usual suspects brutalized by police to factory workers poisoned by their environment, from the victim of a homophobic beating in the boys’ bathroom to the body of Juan Doe at the Cook County Coroner’s Office. Some of the poems rely on somber, at times brutal, imagery to articulate a political stance while others use sarcasm and irony to deconstruct political stances themselves.

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Shaped by the increasing commercialization of economic relations, the social agitation of the agricultural and artisan classes, and the growing formalization of status consciousness, the cultural landscape of late medieval England was fertile territory for the representation of work. In The Voice of the Hammer, Nicola Masciandaro examines the Middle English lexicon, accounts of the history of work, and the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer to reveal that late medieval society understood work as a distinct and problematical field of experience, and that concerns over the relation of work to life were as pressing then as now. "This book deals with questions that historians of late medieval labour scarcely dare to ask—what is the meaning of the words werk, swink, and craft? How did people in the fourteenth century conceptualize and value work? Much superficial speculation about whether people regarded work as punishing or virtuous can be set aside, as Nicola Masciandaro has applied his formidable learning to supply a nuanced and authoritative analysis of the thinking of such writers as Chaucer and Gower. Anyone enquiring into late medieval attitudes to labour must now take account of this important book."—Christopher Dyer, University of Leicester "In The Voice of the Hammer, Nicola Masciandaro engagingly presents a large issue with elegance and capaciousness. His subtle and significant readings of all of the works he addresses support the ingenious topics and important ideas he has highlighted in the broad field of late medieval ideas of labor, at once so central to the concerns of later Middle English poetry and so widely disseminated in the culture from which that arose."—Andrew Galloway, Cornell University "Nicola Masciandaro shows us a contested and complex Middle English set of attitudes towards work, incorporating ideas about nature, humanity's place in the world, and the relation of the present to a simpler past. He gives an intriguing account of the multiple meanings of work in English and shows that texts often regarded as denunciations of workers or of technical progress are more interesting statements about the ambiguity of humanity's control over the world and subjugation to its laws. The result is an important and perceptive contribution to the history of medieval social thought."—Paul Freedman, Chester D. Tripp Professor of History, Yale University

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With I Alone Have Escaped to Tell You, Ralph McInerny—distinguished scholar, mystery writer, editor, publisher, and family man—delivers a thoroughly engaging memoir. In the course of his recollections, McInerny describes his childhood in Minnesota; his grammar school and seminary education, with his decision to leave the path toward ordination; his marriage to his beloved Connie and their active family life and travels; and his life as a fiction writer. We learn of his career as a Catholic professor of philosophy at Notre Dame, his views on the Catholic Church, his experiences as an editor and publisher of Catholic magazines and reviews, his involvement with the International Catholic University, and his thoughts on other Catholic writers. Part homage to his academic home for the last half century and part appreciation of the many significant friendships he has fostered over his life, McInerny's reminiscences beautifully convey his lively interest in the world and his gift for friendship and collegiality. Written in his characteristically elegant style, by turns charming, poignant, humorous, and revealing, I Alone Have Escaped to Tell You will delight McInerny's many devoted readers.

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In Paths to the Triune God, Anselm K. Min brings the theology of Thomas Aquinas into mutually critical dialogue with contemporary theological concerns. Min defends Aquinas's Trinitarian theology of reason and creation against modern detractors of natural theology while also calling attention to the lack of historical consciousness in Aquinas's writing. Min discusses Aquinas's affirmation of the salvation of the non-Christian through a moral life but also criticizes his sometimes naive approach to salvation history. Min presents Aquinas's Trinitarian theology of salvation through the incarnation and the possibility of a sacramental theology of religions for today while also taking seriously the scandal of his doctrine of reprobation. Min highlights Aquinas's contemplative conception of theology against contemporary preoccupations with praxis while also criticizing his intellectualist interpretation of human existence. Min also offers a substantive presentation of Aquinas's Trinitarian theology and a full-scale analysis and critique of the views of such contemporary social Trinitarians as Jürgen Moltmann, Wolfhart Pannenberg, and Cornelius Plantinga, Jr., all in light of Aquinas. He concludes that neither the purely sapiential theology of Aquinas nor the purely prophetic theology of contemporary liberation movements is adequate, arguing that contemporary theology must methodologically incorporate into its content a tension between wisdom and praxis.

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American Compass, Bill Meissner’s fourth book of poetry, is a collection that steers the reader on a varied, memorable journey down the American highway. Like the four points of a compass, each of the book's four sections has a distinct direction. "First Corners" features poems about childhood and the realizations of early adulthood. "Breaking Dreams" illuminates the myths and realities of popular American icons, with portraits of James Dean, Thomas Edison, Elvis Presley, and Joe DiMaggio. The baseball poems in "Taking the Curve" become subtle metaphors for the game of life. In the "Soul Highway" poems, the author concludes the book with a series of poignant personal experiences that will leave the reader thinking more deeply about his or her life. American Compass is a personal comment on growing up in America as well as a political comment on the state of American culture, with its heroes and everyday people, its hopes and failures, its winners and losers.

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The interpretation of Scripture has depended largely on the view of history held by theologians and exegetes. In Participatory Biblical Exegesis, Matthew Levering examines the changing views of history that distinguish patristic and medieval biblical exegesis from modern historical-critical exegesis. Levering argues for a delicate interpretive balance, in which history is understood both as a process that participates in God’s creative and redemptive presence and as a set of linear moments. He identifies a split between theological and historical interpretations of scripture beginning in the high Middle Ages, considerably earlier than the emergence of historical-critical methods in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Instead, he offers a vision of Scripture that is rooted in the exegetical practice of St. Thomas Aquinas and his sources but embraces historical-critical research as well. Participatory Biblical Exegesis provides an original theological basis for critical exegesis. It integrates the work of contemporary exegetes, philosophers, theologians, and historians to provide a compelling vision of biblical interpretation.

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Prohibition Is Here to Stay focuses on the Reverend Edward S. Shumaker, a Methodist minister who for nearly twenty-five years led Indiana's influential chapter of the Anti Saloon League. Shumaker was one of the most powerful men in Indiana in the fight against demon rum, and his influence extended well beyond the boundaries of the state during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Jason Lantzer uses Shumaker's life and work to shed new light on the rise and fall of Prohibition and to better understand and appreciate the interplay of religion and politics in American culture. Drawing on Shumaker's personal papers as well as archival work, Lantzer argues that understanding the role of religious faith and in particular evangelical Protestantism is essential to understanding Prohibition. Shumaker's religious faith inspired his crusade against alcohol and his efforts to make the Indiana Anti Saloon League one of the strongest political pressure groups in the country. Lantzer argues that Edward Shumaker's life and the cause to which he devoted most of it were not aberrations but exemplars of central currents in American culture of the time. Lantzer also connects Shumaker and the prohibition movement in Indiana to larger issues of America's transition from a predominantly rural society to an urban culture, with the attendant fears of change, loss of values, the impact of industrialization, and foreign immigration.

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Gathering together essays by some of the most influential modern political philosophers and theorists, War, Peace, and International Political Realism reveals the twentieth-century roots of the realist tradition and demonstrates the enduring relevance of realist insights for current international relations scholarship and foreign affairs. These essays, all of which were published in The Review of Politics, the majority during the 1940s and 1950s, reflect four major tenets of the classical realist tradition: an obligation to confront large and difficult questions about international politics, a recognition of the fundamentally tragic nature of relations among humans and states, a rejection of historical optimism, and a belief in practical morality. Keir A. Lieber provides an excellent introduction emphasizing the importance of political realism as defined by the contributors. Students and scholars of political theory, international relations, and history will welcome having these important essays in one useful volume; they are just as applicable to contemporary foreign policy challenges as they were to the crises of post-World War II international politics.

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In The Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community, 1910–1950, James R. Lothian examines the engagement of interwar Catholic writers and artists both with modernity in general and with the political and economic upheavals of the times in England and continental Europe. The book describes a close-knit community of Catholic intellectuals that coalesced in the aftermath of the Great War and was inspired by Hilaire Belloc's ideology. Among the more than two dozen figures considered in this volume are G. K. Chesterton, novelist Evelyn Waugh, poet and painter David Jones, sculptor Eric Gill, historian Christopher Dawson, and publishers Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward. For Catholic intellectuals who embraced Bellocianism, the response to contemporary politics was a potent combination of hostility toward parliamentary democracy, capitalism, and so-called "Protestant" Whig history. Belloc and his friends asserted a set of political, economic, and historiographical alternatives—favoring monarchy and Distributism, a social and economic system modeled on what Belloc took to be the ideals of medieval feudalism. Lothian explores the community's development in the 1920s and 1930s, and its dissolution in the 1940s, in the aftermath of World War II. Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward, joined by Tom Burns and Christopher Dawson, promoted an aesthetic and philosophical vision very much at odds with Belloc's political one. Weakened by internal disagreement, the community became fragmented and finally dissolved.

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Pity the Drowned Horses is the winner of the first Andres Montoya Poetry Prize. This collection is about place and many of the poems in it are set in the desert southwest on the U.S./Mexico border in El Paso, Texas. Sheryl Luna’s poems are also about family and home within the broader context of the border as both a bridge and a barrier. They deal with the bilingual and bicultural city and how a place is longed for and viewed very differently as the observer changes and experiences other cultures. The first two sections of poems focus on home and family. They show that, despite poverty and geographical isolation, the border towns of El Paso and Ciudad Juarez are places of beauty and promise. The third section explores cultures: how anxiety over aesthetic judgments, values, and difference are negotiated. The final section is one of praise and recognition that despite differences we are all longing for faith and a place to call home.

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Léon Harmel is a penetrating study of the French industrialist who from 1870 to 1914 advanced social Catholic and Christian democratic movements by improving factory conditions and empowering workers. Joan Coffey’s fascinating new book represents the first major study of Léon Harmel in English. Harmel’s model factory at Val-des-Bois demonstrated that mutual accord and respect were possible between labor and management. Harmel turned his profitable spinning mill into a Christian corporation. His ethical business practices captured the attention of Pope Leo XIII and inspired his encyclical Rerum Novarum. Harmel also encouraged his workers to make pilgrimages to Rome. The collaboration of Pope Leo XIII and Léon Harmel laid the foundation of enterprises that collectively became known as Christian democracy. Drawing on extensive archival sources, including the Vatican Archives, Joan Coffey’s work skillfully analyzes the personal relationship between Pope Leo XIII and Léon Harmel. Léon Harmel also offers a timely reminder of the power of personal ethics and provides a refreshing antidote to today’s business climate.

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Psellos and the Patriarchs: Letters and Funeral Orations for Keroullarios, Leichoudes, and Xiphilinos contains translations of the funeral orations written by Michael Psellos, the leading Byzantine intellectual of the eleventh century, for the three ecumenical patriarchs of Constantinople whom he knew best: Michael Keroullarios (1043-1058), Konstantinos Leichoudes (1059-1063), and Ioannes Xiphilinos (1064-1075). The orations are significant sources for the lives and reputations of these patriarchs; they are also a prime source for the educational reforms made by the emperor Konstantinos IX Monomachos in the mid-1040s, and for many events of that turbulent century that Psellos witnessed, including popular uprisings, plots, civil wars, and the battle with the Catholic legates in 1054. Never before translated into English, the orations and letters are introduced by a detailed analysis of Psellos’ historical relationships with the patriarchs and an interpretation of the works. The orations are not only important historical sources: they are crucial specimens of Byzantine rhetoric in a period of transition, as well as being key texts in the corpus of Psellos himself. Psellos used them to score important points in support of his own philosophical agenda and to make broader claims about ethics and metaphysics and the role of learning in political and ecclesiastical life. The orations are here accompanied by translations of a long letter that Psellos wrote to Keroullarios and a pair of letters to Xiphilinos, in which he defended key aspects of his philosophical project.

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Questions about the dignity of the human person give rise to many of the most central and hotly disputed topics in bioethics. In A Defense of Dignity: Creating Life, Destroying Life, and Protecting the Rights of Conscience, Christopher Kaczor investigates whether each human being has intrinsic dignity and whether the very concept of "dignity" has a useful place in contemporary ethical debates. Kaczor explores a broad range of issues addressed in contemporary bioethics, including whether there is a duty of "procreative beneficence," the ethics of ectopic pregnancy, and the possibility of "rescuing" human embryos with human wombs or artificial wombs. A Defense of Dignity also treats issues relevant to the end of life, including physician-assisted suicide, provision of food and water to patients in a persistent vegetative state, and how to proceed with organ donation following death. Finally, what are the duties and prerogatives of health care professionals who refuse in conscience to take part in activities that they regard as degrading to human dignity? Should they be forced to do what they consider to be violations of the patient's well being, or does patient autonomy always trump the conscience of a health care professional? Grounded in the Catholic intellectual and moral tradition, A Defense of Dignity argues that all human beings from the beginning to the end of their lives should be treated with respect and considers how this belief should be applied in controversial cases.

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In Miserere Mei, Clare Costley King'oo examines the critical importance of the Penitential Psalms in England between the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century. During this period, the Penitential Psalms inspired an enormous amount of creative and intellectual work: in addition to being copied and illustrated in Books of Hours and other prayer books, they were expounded in commentaries, imitated in vernacular translations and paraphrases, rendered into lyric poetry, and even modified for singing. Miserere Mei explores these numerous transformations in materiality and genre. Combining the resources of close literary analysis with those of the history of the book, it reveals not only that the Penitential Psalms lay at the heart of Reformation-age debates over the nature of repentance, but also, and more significantly, that they constituted a site of theological, political, artistic, and poetic engagement across the many polarities that are often said to separate late medieval from early modern culture. Miserere Mei features twenty-five illustrations and provides new analyses of works based on the Penitential Psalms by several key writers of the time, including Richard Maidstone, Thomas Brampton, John Fisher, Martin Luther, Sir Thomas Wyatt, George Gascoigne, Sir John Harington, and Richard Verstegan. It will be of value to anyone interested in the interpretation, adaptation, and appropriation of biblical literature; the development of religious plurality in the West; the emergence of modernity; and the periodization of Western culture. Students and scholars in the fields of literature, religion, history, art history, and the history of material texts will find Miserere Mei particularly instructive and compelling.

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Advance Praise for Dinner with Osama “Marilyn Krysl is one of our most gifted, quirky, and delightful storytellers—unpredictable, funny, and wildly inventive in wondrous ways. Her new collection shows her at the top of her form as she details the ordinary, the absurd, and the apocalyptic in outrageous and deeply affecting ways.” —Jay Neugeboren, author of 1940 and News from the New American Diaspora “Marilyn Krysl’s astonishing Dinner with Osama somehow finds the intersection between deep anguish at the state of the world and brilliant, caustic, and hilarious sociopolitical satire of America post-9/11. Its effrontery is peculiarly female, its fierce intelligence that of a mother—or even (‘Are We Dwelling Deep Yet?’) a Great Mother—who needs to save and feed the world however she can. Its north and south must be ‘Mitosis,’ Krysl’s heartbreaking life history of a young Dinka woman whose way of life, and source of food, have been destroyed by civil war in Sudan; its east and west is surely the title story, in the voice of a politically irreproachable matriarch of Boulder, Colorado, who does her part by extending a dinner invitation to Osama—yes, that Osama—through her ‘pal’ Abdullah at the local gyros stand; and Osama not only receives it, he accepts. Israelis and Palestinians, ‘conflict’-addicted cliché-mongers of the creative writing workshop, violent extremists of every stripe, and above all the wealthy consumerist left are all skewered in this miraculous collection.” —Jaimy Gordon, author of Bogeywoman and She Drove Without Stopping “We may have to invent a new term––‘the political lyric,’ perhaps––to describe the ‘airy speech and inspired story’ in Marilyn Krysl’s brilliant new collection of short fiction, Dinner with Osama. What holds all the fiction together, as much as the impassioned political and cultural concerns that inform them, is the writing, which is lyrical in the best sense, lyrical as in musical, expressive, and vivid.” —Ed Falco, author of Sabbath Night in the Church of the Piranha: New and Selected Stories

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Knowing the Love of Christ provides a thorough introduction to the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas in accessible language. As a complement to the many short introductions to St. Thomas’s philosophy, this book fills a gap in the literature on Thomas—a comprehensive introduction to his thought written by theologians. With enthusiasm and insight, Michael Dauphinais and Matthew Levering make available the vast theology of Thomas Aquinas. Focusing upon the Summa Theologiae, Dauphinais and Levering illumine the profoundly biblical foundations of Thomas’s powerful vision of reality. Drawing upon their own experience, the authors guide readers into grappling with the fresh and penetrating insights of St. Thomas. Students at all stages of theological education will find this book an enriching introduction to the mysteries of the Christian faith.

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Mennonite German Soldiers traces the efforts of a small, pacifist, Christian religious minority in eastern Prussia-the Mennonite communities of the Vistula River basin-to preserve their exemption from military service, which was based on their religious confession of faith. Conscription was mandatory for nearly all male Prussian citizens, and the willingness to fight and die for country was essential to the ideals of a developing German national identity. In this engaging historical narrative, Mark Jantzen describes the policies of the Prussian federal and regional governments toward the Mennonites over a hundred-year period and the legal, economic, and social pressures brought to bear on the Mennonites to conform. Mennonite leaders defended the exemptions of their communities' sons through a long history of petitions and legal pleas, and sought alternative ways, such as charitable donations, to support the state and prove their loyalty. Faced with increasingly punitive legal and financial restrictions, as well as widespread social disapproval, many Mennonites ultimately emigrated, and many others chose to join the German nation at the cost of their religious tradition. Jantzen tells the history of the Mennonite experience in Prussian territories against the backdrop of larger themes of Prussian state-building and the growth of German nationalism. The Mennonites, who lived on the margins of German society, were also active agents in the long struggle of the state to integrate them. The public debates over their place in Prussian society shed light on a multi-confessional German past and on the dissemination of nationalist values.

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In Liberalism’s Troubled Search for Equality, Robert P. Jones presents a penetrating examination of physician-assisted suicide that exposes unresolved tensions deep within liberal political theory. Jones asks why egalitarian liberal philosophers—most notably, Ronald Dworkin and John Rawls—support legalized physician-assisted suicide in direct opposition to groups of disadvantaged citizens they theoretically champion. Jones argues that egalitarian liberals ought to oppose physician-assisted suicide—at least until we find the political will to ensure access to health care for all. More broadly, Jones challenges progressives to find the heart of the liberal tradition not in allegedly neutral appeals to “choice” but in a renewed commitment to equality and social justice that welcomes public religious voices as allies.

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In Evidence and Transcendence, Anne Inman critiques modern attempts to explain the knowability of God and points the way toward a religious epistemology that avoids their pitfalls. Christian apologetics faces two major challenges: the classic Enlightenment insistence on the need to provide evidence for anything that is put forward for belief; and the argument that all human knowledge is mediated by finite reality and thus no "knowledge"of a being interpreted as completely other than finite reality is possible. Modern Christian apologists have tended to understand their task primarily, if not exclusively, in terms of one of these challenges. As examples of contemporary rationalist and postliberal approaches, Inman analyzes in depth the religious epistemologies of philosopher Richard Swinburne and theologians George Lindbeck and Ronald Theimann. She concludes that none of their positions is satisfactory, because none can uphold the notion of God's transcendence while at the same time preserving a sound account of our claims to freedom and knowledge. The root cause of such failures, Inman argues, is an inadequate philosophy of God and of the relation of God and the finite world. Her exploration of the theologies of Karl Rahner and Friedrich Schleiermacher provides the material for the constructive work in this book. Against rationalist and postliberal epistemologies, Inman calls for an austere grounding of Christian faith in the claim that God is known in human conscious activity as such, as the "other" that grounds the finite.

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Incarnate Love is a major contribution to both Orthodox ethics and to Christian self-understanding. Completely revised with a new preface and two additional chapters, this work aims to articulate a social ethic that can make sense of the Orthodox experience in the United States, as well as challenge the Orthodox tradition to formulate a new strategy for church and societal interaction.

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Ivan Sergeevich Gagarin analyzes questions of nationality and religious identity in nineteenth-century Russian history as reflected in the life of Jesuit priest Ivan Gagarin. A descendent of one of Russia’s most ancient and politically powerful families, Father Ivan Gagarin, S.J. (1814–1882) dedicated his life to creating a union between the Orthodox and Catholic churches that would preserve the dogmatic and traditional beliefs of both. Traditional understandings of Russian identity have emanated from the perspective of the dominant Orthodox religion; this captivating study uses the unionist work of Gagarin to illumine Russia's national identity from the perspective of Roman Catholicism. Seeing his unionist proposals as necessary for the preservation of Russian stability, Gagarin found himself in frequent opposition to the Orthodox Church. While Gagarin believed that Church union would preserve Russia from the threats of communism and revolution, the Russian Orthodox Church believed that union would mean the sacrifice of religious truth, ecclesial independence and religious orthodoxy. Jeffrey Beshoner’s even-handed analysis reveals that the Roman Catholic Church presented its own share of barriers to attempts at church union. Ivan Sergeevich Gagarin examines Roman Catholic attitudes of superiority vis-à-vis the Orthodox Church and argues that the nineteenth-century Roman Catholic Church simply did not possess the humility or respect for Eastern beliefs that church union required. Despite the failure of his unionist activity, Gagarin exerted important influence on such contemporary and later Roman Catholic and Russian thinkers as Pope Pius IX, Alexei Khomiakov and Vladimir Solovev. As the collapse of communism has permitted Russia to again seek its national identity in Russian Orthodoxy, Gagarin's ideas and perspectives on the relationship between national and religious identity continue to prove relevant.

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The poetry in Humanophone, the third volume from award-winning poet Janet Holmes, celebrates composers and creators such as Harry Partch, Raymond Scott, Leon Theremin, and George Ives, who had to invent new instruments to capture the music heard in their “mind’s ear.” Taking its title from a George Ives invention—an instrument made from a group of humans, each of whom sings a single note, arrayed like a xylophone—Humanophone appears on its surface to be about music. But its real subject is the artist’s creative dilemma—how to deliver a new idea, whether it be a song or a poem, through existing media. Holmes works language into a variety of forms both familiar—syllabics, couplets, villanelles, sonnets—and engagingly new. With everything from kumquats to abandoned wedding pictures, Clara Bow to Bill Robinson, Keats’s belle dame to Dante’s Francesca, feng shui to a recipe for octopus, Humanophone celebrates how the body shapes art from the world it is given. In Humanophone, Holmes not only chronicles events such as Harry Partch’s transformation of glass chemical containers from the Berkeley Radiation Lab into the melodious and beautiful Cloud-Chamber Bowls, but also traces a playful path through the familiar, as a trombone’s upwards glissando becomes “a backwards pratfall/in brass.” Engaging a broad array of subjects, Holmes’s poetry is as delightful as it is thoughtful, as simple as it is complex.

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In Structuring Spaces: Oral Poetics and Architecture in Early Medieval England, Lori Ann Garner illuminates the idiomatic and traditional meanings invested in depictions of architecture within the vernacular verse of early medieval England, portrayals that consistently demonstrate a shared aesthetic between literary texts and physical buildings. Through systematic exploration of the period's verbal and material culture as complementary art forms, Garner argues that in Anglo-Saxon England the arts of poetry and building emerged from the same cultural matrix. Not only did Anglo-Saxon builders and poets draw demonstrably from many of the same traditionally encoded motifs and images, but so rhetorically powerful was the period's architectural poetics that its expressive force continued in literature and architecture produced long after the Norman Conquest. Far from conceiving this inherited tradition as monolithic in nature, Structuring Spaces foregrounds the complex interface of orality and literacy as a nexus of varied and multivalent cultural traditions that influenced the production of texts and buildings alike. After establishing a model of architectural poetics based on oral theory and vernacular architecture, Garner explores fictionalized buildings in such works as Beowulf and the Ruin, architectural representation in Old English adaptations of Greek and Latin works, uses of architectural metaphor, and themes of buildings in Anglo-Saxon maxims, riddles, elegies, hagiographies, and charms. Her book draws on scholarship from art history, archaeology, anthropology, and architecture, as well as the great wealth of studies addressing the literature itself.

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Experiencing the Afterlife provides the first sustained analysis of popular, vernacular depictions of the afterlife written in Italy before the Divine Comedy by authors such as Uguccione da Lodi, Giacomino da Verona, and Bonvesin da la Riva. Manuele Gragnolati uses his readings of these poets to provide a new interpretation of Dante’s work. Combining elements from several disciplines, he investigates the richness of high medieval eschatology and the concept of personal identity it expresses. Gragnolati is particularly concerned with how the notions of body and pain characteristic of medieval spirituality and devotion inform the eschatological representations of the time, especially in their paradoxical urge to stress at once the physical experience of the separated soul and the final necessity of bodily resurrection. By integrating lesser-known texts and scholarship from other disciplines into the specialized field of Dante studies, Gragnolati sheds new light on some of the most vigorously debated and crucial questions raised by the Divine Comedy, including the embryological discourse of Purgatorio 25, the relation between the soul’s experience of pain in Purgatory and the devotion that late medieval culture expressed toward Christ’s suffering, and the significance of the audacious vision of resurrected bodies that Dante the pilgrim enjoys at the end of his journey. At the same time, Gragnolati brings these questions back into contemporary discussions of medieval eschatology and opens new perspectives for current and future work on embodiment and identity. Scholars and students of Dante and Italian studies, as well as those in medieval history, religion, culture, and art history, will be rewarded by the fresh insights contained in Experiencing the Afterlife.

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This timely book offers a series of lively essays debating the topic of globalization—our increasingly integrated and interconnected world. Globalization and Multicultural Societies argues that the globalization process is a major catalyst in transforming contemporary society. Focusing primarily on Europe, this collection brings together writings by renowned intellectual, cultural, and political figures, such as Romano Prodi, Pierre Boulez, Jacky Mamou, and Franco Modigliani, that reflect on the key features and problems of globalization. Essays range across broad topics, including multinational corporations, technology, the arts, science, information flow, finance, unemployment, and the environment. Part 1 of the book is devoted to an analysis of contemporary society’s evolution toward globalization. Part 2 focuses on the restructuring of the systems that produce and distribute goods and services around the world. Part 3 explores the effect of globalization on culture. Taken in their entirety, these essays offer a deeply and meaningfully multidisciplinary volume in which each piece contrasts and contextualizes the other. As most of the contributors are European, the text also offers a fascinating snapshot of contemporary European consciousness, and reveals how much of a “great experiment” the European Union really is. This significant book makes a timely and learned contribution to the debates over globalization that are currently raging not only in the academy, but also on the nightly news and in daily political life. It will appeal to anyone who wishes to better understand the evolution of the world in which we live.

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The concept of the goddess Natura–one of the most significant allegorical figures of medieval Latin and vernacular poetry–drew upon many strands of classical and Christian thought, from Plato’s Timaeus to Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. In what is perhaps the best history of the goddess Natura, George Economou provides a full-length study of her philosophical background and the literary traditions that contributed to her image. Economou’s work focuses on the renaissance of the twelfth century, when a new kind of allegory appeared that celebrated and explored the nature of the cosmos. He analyzes the central role that Natura played in the writings of Bernard Silvestris, Jean de Meun, Alain de Lille, and Geoffrey Chaucer. This edition features a new introduction by the author and an updated bibliography.

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Philo's Portrayal of Moses in the Context of Ancient Judaism presents the most comprehensive study of Philo's De Vita Mosis that exists in any language. Feldman, well known for his work on Josephus and ancient Judaism, here paves new ground using rabbinic material with philological precision to illuminate important parallels and differences between Philo's writing on Moses and rabbinic literature. One way in which Hellenistic culture marginalized Judaism was by exposing the apparent defects in Moses' life and character. Philo's De Vita Mosis is a counterattack to these charges and is a vital piece of his attempt to reconcile Judaism and Hellenism. Feldman rigorously examines the text and shows how Philo presents a narrative of Moses's life similar to that of a mythical divine and heroic figure, glorifying his birth, education, and virtues. Feldman demonstrates that Philo is careful to explain in a scientific way those portions of the Bible, particularly miracles, that appear incredible to his skeptical Hellenistic readers. Through Feldman's careful analysis, Moses emerges as unique among ancient lawgivers. Philo's Portrayal of Moses in the Context of Ancient Judaism mirrors the organization of Philo's biography of Moses, which is in two books, the first, in the style of Plutarch, proceeding chronologically, and the second, in the style of Suetonius, arranged topically. Following an introductory chapter, Feldman's study discusses the life of Moses chronologically in the second chapter and examines his virtues topically in the third. Feldman compares the particular features of Philo's portrait of Moses with the way in which Moses is viewed both by Jewish sources in antiquity (including Pseudo-Philo; Josephus; Graeco-Jewish historians, poets, and philosophers; and in the Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha, Samaritan tradition, Dead Sea Scrolls, and rabbinic tradition) and by non-Jewish sources, notably the Greek and Roman writers who mention him.

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In Aims: A Brief Metaphysics for Today, James W. Felt turns his attention to combining elements of Thomas Aquinas's metaphysics, especially its deep ontology, with Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy to arrive at a new possibility for metaphysics. In his distinctive style, Felt concisely pulls together the strands of epistemology, ontology, and teleology, synthesizing these elements into his own "process-enriched Thomism." Aims does not simply discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each philosopher's position, but blends the two into a cohesive argument based on principles derived from immediate experience. Felt arrives at what he calls a "Whiteheadian-type solution,"appealing to his original concept of the "essential aim"as necessary for understanding our existence in a coherent yet unique world. This concise, finely crafted discussion provides a thoroughly teleological, value-centered approach to metaphysics. Aims, an experiment in constructive metaphysics, is a thorough and insightful project in modern philosophy. It will appeal to philosophers and students of philosophy interested in enriching their knowledge of contemporary conceptions of metaphysics.

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Fenwick analyzes poverty alleviation strategies in Brazil and Argentina to show how federalism affects the ability of a national government to sustain a conditional cash transfer program. With the goal of showing the effect of domestic factors on the performance of poverty alleviation strategies in Latin America, Tracy Beck Fenwick explores the origins and rise of conditional cash transfer programs (CCTs) in the region, and then traces the politics and evolution of specific programs in Brazil and Argentina. Utilizing extensive field research and empirical analysis, Fenwick analyzes how federalism affects the ability of a national government to deliver CCTs. One of Fenwick’s key findings is that broad institutional, structural, and political variables are more important in the success or failure of CCTs than the technical design of programs. Contrary to the mainstream interpretations of Brazilian federalism, her analysis shows that municipalities have contributed to the relative success of Bolsa Familia and its ability to be implemented territory-wide. Avoiding Governors probes the contrast with Argentina, where the structural, political, and fiscal incentives for national-local policy cooperation have not been adequate, at least this far, to sustain a CCT program that is conditional on human capital investments. She thus challenges the virtue of what is considered to be a mainly majoritarian democratic system. By laying out the key factors that condition whether mayors either promote or undermine national policy objectives, Fenwick concludes that municipalities can either facilitate or block a national government’s ability to deliver targeted social policy goods and to pursue a poverty alleviation strategy. By distinguishing municipalities as separate actors, she presents a dynamic intergovernmental relationship; indeed, she identifies a power struggle between multiple levels of government and their electorates, not just a dichotomously framed two-level game of national versus subnational.

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The “Galileo Affair” has been the locus of various and opposing appraisals for centuries: some view it as an historical event emblematic of the obscurantism of the Catholic Church, opposed a priori to the progress of science; others consider it a tragic reciprocal misunderstanding between Galileo, an arrogant and troublesome defender of the Copernican theory, and his theologian adversaries, who were prisoners of a narrow interpretation of scripture. In The Case of Galileo: A Closed Question? Annibale Fantoli presents a wide range of scientific, philosophical, and theological factors that played an important role in Galileo’s trial, all set within the historical progression of Galileo’s writing and personal interactions with his contemporaries. Fantoli traces the growth in Galileo Galilei’s thought and actions as he embraced the new worldview presented in On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, the epoch-making work of the great Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus. Fantoli delivers a sophisticated analysis of the intellectual milieu of the day, describes the Catholic Church’s condemnation of Copernicanism (1616) and of Galileo (1633), and assesses the church’s slow acceptance of the Copernican worldview. Fantoli criticizes the 1992 treatment by Cardinal Poupard and Pope John Paul II of the reports of the Commission for the Study of the Galileo Case and concludes that the Galileo Affair, far from being a closed question, remains more than ever a challenge to the church as it confronts the wider and more complex intellectual and ethical problems posed by the contemporary progress of science and technology. In clear and accessible prose geared to a wide readership, Fantoli has distilled forty years of scholarly research into a fascinating recounting of one of the most famous cases in the history of science.

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Apophasis has become a major topic in the humanities, particularly in philosophy, religion, and literature. This monumental two-volume anthology gathers together most of the important historical works on apophaticism and illustrates the diverse trajectories of apophatic discourse in ancient, modern, and postmodern times. William Franke provides a major introductory essay on apophaticism at the beginning of each volume, and shorter introductions to each anthology selection. The first volume, Classic Formulations, offers excerpts from Plato, Plotinus, Damascius, the Bible, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, Maimonides, Rumi, Thomas Aquinas, Marguerite Porete, Dante, Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross, and more.

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Most moral philosophers and psychologists have missed something crucial in the work of Lawrence Kohlberg (1927–87), best known for his theory of stages of moral development. In Following Kohlberg: Liberalism and the Practice of Democratic Community, Donald R.C. Reed clearly illustrates how the Kohlbergian project has much to offer the crucial debate about moral psychology and how to revivify our society's jaded sense of fairness and responsibility. Psychologists, philosophers, theologians, educators, and therapists will find here a comprehensive guide to Kohlberg's life work, a clear presentation of both theory and practice, and an understanding of moral maturity which encompasses both justice and responsiveness. All who care about nurturing and preserving a democratic community are well-advised to read this book.

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Private Histories is a complete literary history of the American Irish during the first part of the twentieth century. Ron Ebest offers a fresh perspective on familiar novelists, dramatists, and poets, introduces readers to a number of important writers who are often overlooked, and reveals rarely considered aspects of Irish-American social history. Ebest analyzes themes of particular importance to early twentieth-century Irish Americans—such as religion, marriage, family, eceonomic hardship, social status, and education—in the writings of well-known authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Eugene O’Neill. He also explores these issues in the works of lesser known authors such as the Vanity Fair satirist Anne O’Hagan, labor activist and novelist Jim Tully, muckraking journalist Clara Laughlin, and the mystery writer John T. McIntyre. Ebest’s highly readable style makes Private Histories an excellent book for undergraduate and graduate courses on Irish-American literature and history, as well as for general readers interested in this fascinating subject.

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Using Augustine as a conversation partner, this important new book explores the value of Michel Foucault’s controversial writings for theologians, ethicists, philosophers, and cultural theorists. J. Joyce Schuld demonstrates the promising possibilities as well as the difficulties and limits of applying Foucault’s social criticisms within Christian contexts. She maintains that the best way to make Foucault’s postmodern concerns and his unsettling descriptions, metaphors, and methods accessible to Christian readers is to examine his thought through a premodern lens. By bringing Foucault and Augustine into constructive dialogue, Schuld reveals the surprising analytical usefulness of Augustine’s writings for postmodern and poststructuralist studies. She pursues from a new and critically illuminating perspective the personal, cultural, and historical ramifications of Augustine’s formative understanding of love and the complicated effects of original sin on all inter- and intrapersonal relations. Schuld argues that Foucault’s dynamic and relational description of power helps us reconceptualize an ancient doctrine that has lost currency in the modern era and challenges us to rethink the vulnerabilities to which human loves endlessly expose us as individuals and engaged members of sociohistorical communities. This approach facilitates further theological examination of the intertwining personal and political implications of pride, the morally ambiguous aspirations for progress and perfecting knowledge, and the paradoxical power of the incarnation, the cross, and eschatological hope. Schuld’s is the first sustained analysis of the rich theological possibilities of employing Foucault’s most influential concepts and methods, historical research, and contemporary cultural criticisms. Foucault and Augustine: Reconsidering Power and Love will appeal to those who already use Foucault constructively and to those who have either never read him or who are familiar with his writings but have never considered them valuable for Christians.

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Most medieval texts were not really texts in the modern sense of printed, bound, stand-alone volumes, but were instead scribal productions that circulated in manuscript form, often alongside unrelated writings, thereby producing what seem to be haphazard compilations. In The Neighboring Text: Chaucer, Boccaccio, Henryson, George Edmondson argues that we have tended to apply a vertical, linear model of literary history to this late medieval manuscript culture. By contrast, he brings recent work in the fields of psychoanalysis and political philosophy to bear on the question of literary history in order to develop a countermodel informed by a horizontal ethos of “neighborliness.” Edmondson analyzes the different ways that three canonical texts—Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde; its source, Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato; and its fifteenth-century Scottish derivative, Robert Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid—treat two figures, Troilus and Criseyde, and how those differences affect our understanding of literary history. He argues that what makes them neighboring texts is their shared concern with the subject of medieval Trojan historiography in general, and their very different treatments of Troilus in particular. At the same time, Edmondson supplements the medieval ideal of neighborliness with the psychoanalytic understanding of the neighbor as a figure both proximate and strange: at once the building block of community and its stumbling block. The result is a repositioning of the three works as a textual neighborhood—one in which the legendary history of Troy is transformed from the basis of imaginary national genealogies to a figure for the aggression and enjoyment, the conflicting gestures of identification and estrangement, that shape the neighbor relation.

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