front cover of Citizenship, Faith, and Feminism
Citizenship, Faith, and Feminism
Jewish and Muslim Women Reclaim Their Rights
Jan Feldman
Brandeis University Press, 2011
Religious women in liberal democracies are “dual citizens” because of their contrasting status as members of both a civic community (in which their gender has no impact on their constitutional guarantee of equal rights) and a traditional religious community (which distributes roles and power based on gender). This book shows how these “dual citizens”—Orthodox Jewish women in Israel, Muslim women in Kuwait, and women of both those faiths in the U.S.—have increasingly deployed their civic citizenship rights in attempts to reform and not destroy their religions. For them, neither “exit” nor acquiescence to traditional religious gender norms is an option. Instead, they use the narrative of civic citizenship combined with a more authentic, if alternative reading of their faith tradition to improve their status.
[more]

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City of Dignity
Christianity, Liberalism, and the Making of Global Los Angeles
Sean T. Dempsey
University of Chicago Press, 2023
City of Dignity illuminates how liberal Protestants quietly, yet indelibly, shaped the progressive ethics of postwar Los Angeles.
 
Contemporary Los Angeles is commonly seen as an American bulwark of progressive secular politics, a place that values immigration, equity, diversity, and human rights. But what accounts for the city’s embrace of such staunchly liberal values, which are more hotly contested in other parts of the country? The answer, Sean Dempsey reveals, lies not with those frequent targets of credit and blame—Democrats in Hollywood—but instead with liberal Protestants and other steadfast religious organizations of the postwar era.

As the Religious Right movement emerged in the 1970s, progressive religious activists quietly began promoting an ethical vision that made waves worldwide but saw the largest impact in its place of origin: metropolitan Los Angeles. At the center of this vision lay the concept of human dignity—entwining the integral importance of political and expressive freedom with the moral sanctity of the human condition—which suffused all of the political values that arose from it, whether tolerance, diversity, or equality of opportunity. The work of these religious organizations birthed such phenomena as the Sanctuary Movement—which provided safe haven for refugees fleeing conflict-torn Central America—and advocacy for the homeless, both of which became increasingly fraught issues amid the rising tides of neoliberalism and conservatism. City of Dignity explores how these interwoven spiritual and theological strands found common ground—and made common impacts—in the humanitarian ecosystem of one of America’s largest and most dynamic metro areas.
[more]

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City of Dignity
Christianity, Liberalism, and the Making of Global Los Angeles
Sean T. Dempsey
University of Chicago Press, 2023
This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.

City of Dignity illuminates how liberal Protestants quietly, yet indelibly, shaped the progressive ethics of postwar Los Angeles.

 
Contemporary Los Angeles is commonly seen as an American bulwark of progressive secular politics, a place that values immigration, equity, diversity, and human rights. But what accounts for the city’s embrace of such staunchly liberal values, which are more hotly contested in other parts of the country? The answer, Sean Dempsey reveals, lies not with those frequent targets of credit and blame—Democrats in Hollywood—but instead with liberal Protestants and other steadfast religious organizations of the postwar era.

As the Religious Right movement emerged in the 1970s, progressive religious activists quietly began promoting an ethical vision that made waves worldwide but saw the largest impact in its place of origin: metropolitan Los Angeles. At the center of this vision lay the concept of human dignity—entwining the integral importance of political and expressive freedom with the moral sanctity of the human condition—which suffused all of the political values that arose from it, whether tolerance, diversity, or equality of opportunity. The work of these religious organizations birthed such phenomena as the Sanctuary Movement—which provided safe haven for refugees fleeing conflict-torn Central America—and advocacy for the homeless, both of which became increasingly fraught issues amid the rising tides of neoliberalism and conservatism. City of Dignity explores how these interwoven spiritual and theological strands found common ground—and made common impacts—in the humanitarian ecosystem of one of America’s largest and most dynamic metro areas.
[more]

front cover of The City of God, Books I–VII
The City of God, Books I–VII
Saint Augustine
Catholic University of America Press, 1952
No description available
[more]

front cover of The City of God, Books VIII–XVI
The City of God, Books VIII–XVI
Saint Augustine
Catholic University of America Press, 1952
No description available
[more]

front cover of The City of God, Books XVII–XXII
The City of God, Books XVII–XXII
Saint Augustine
Catholic University of America Press, 1954
No description available
[more]

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City of God, Volume I
Books 1–3
Augustine
Harvard University Press

A Church Father’s theological citadel.

Aurelius Augustine (AD 354–430), one of the most important figures in the development of western Christianity and philosophy, was the son of a pagan, Patricius of Tagaste, and his Christian wife, Monnica. While studying to become a rhetorician, he plunged into a turmoil of philosophical and psychological doubts, leading him to Manichaeism. In 383 he moved to Rome and then Milan to teach rhetoric. Despite exploring classical philosophical systems, especially skepticism and Neoplatonism, his studies of Paul’s letters with his friend Alypius, and the preaching of Bishop Ambrose, led in 386 to his momentous conversion from mixed beliefs to Christianity. He soon returned to Tagaste and founded a religious community, and in 395 or 396 became bishop of Hippo.

From Augustine’s large output the Loeb Classical Library offers that great autobiography the Confessions (in two volumes); On the City of God (seven volumes), which unfolds God’s action in the progress of the world’s history, and propounds the superiority of Christian beliefs over pagan in adversity; and a selection of Letters which are important for the study of ecclesiastical theologians.

[more]

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City of God, Volume II
Books 4–7
Augustine
Harvard University Press

A Church Father’s theological citadel.

Aurelius Augustine (AD 354–430), one of the most important figures in the development of western Christianity and philosophy, was the son of a pagan, Patricius of Tagaste, and his Christian wife, Monnica. While studying to become a rhetorician, he plunged into a turmoil of philosophical and psychological doubts, leading him to Manichaeism. In 383 he moved to Rome and then Milan to teach rhetoric. Despite exploring classical philosophical systems, especially skepticism and Neoplatonism, his studies of Paul’s letters with his friend Alypius, and the preaching of Bishop Ambrose, led in 386 to his momentous conversion from mixed beliefs to Christianity. He soon returned to Tagaste and founded a religious community, and in 395 or 396 became bishop of Hippo.

From Augustine’s large output the Loeb Classical Library offers that great autobiography the Confessions (in two volumes); On the City of God (seven volumes), which unfolds God’s action in the progress of the world’s history, and propounds the superiority of Christian beliefs over pagan in adversity; and a selection of Letters which are important for the study of ecclesiastical theologians.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
City of God, Volume III
Books 8–11
Augustine
Harvard University Press

A Church Father’s theological citadel.

Aurelius Augustine (AD 354–430), one of the most important figures in the development of western Christianity and philosophy, was the son of a pagan, Patricius of Tagaste, and his Christian wife, Monnica. While studying to become a rhetorician, he plunged into a turmoil of philosophical and psychological doubts, leading him to Manichaeism. In 383 he moved to Rome and then Milan to teach rhetoric. Despite exploring classical philosophical systems, especially skepticism and Neoplatonism, his studies of Paul’s letters with his friend Alypius, and the preaching of Bishop Ambrose, led in 386 to his momentous conversion from mixed beliefs to Christianity. He soon returned to Tagaste and founded a religious community, and in 395 or 396 became bishop of Hippo.

From Augustine’s large output the Loeb Classical Library offers that great autobiography the Confessions (in two volumes); On the City of God (seven volumes), which unfolds God’s action in the progress of the world’s history, and propounds the superiority of Christian beliefs over pagan in adversity; and a selection of Letters which are important for the study of ecclesiastical theologians.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
City of God, Volume IV
Books 12–15
Augustine
Harvard University Press

A Church Father’s theological citadel.

Aurelius Augustine (AD 354–430), one of the most important figures in the development of western Christianity and philosophy, was the son of a pagan, Patricius of Tagaste, and his Christian wife, Monnica. While studying to become a rhetorician, he plunged into a turmoil of philosophical and psychological doubts, leading him to Manichaeism. In 383 he moved to Rome and then Milan to teach rhetoric. Despite exploring classical philosophical systems, especially skepticism and Neoplatonism, his studies of Paul’s letters with his friend Alypius, and the preaching of Bishop Ambrose, led in 386 to his momentous conversion from mixed beliefs to Christianity. He soon returned to Tagaste and founded a religious community, and in 395 or 396 became bishop of Hippo.

From Augustine’s large output the Loeb Classical Library offers that great autobiography the Confessions (in two volumes); On the City of God (seven volumes), which unfolds God’s action in the progress of the world’s history, and propounds the superiority of Christian beliefs over pagan in adversity; and a selection of Letters which are important for the study of ecclesiastical theologians.

[more]

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City of God, Volume V
Books 16–18.35
Augustine
Harvard University Press

A Church Father’s theological citadel.

Aurelius Augustine (AD 354–430), one of the most important figures in the development of western Christianity and philosophy, was the son of a pagan, Patricius of Tagaste, and his Christian wife, Monnica. While studying to become a rhetorician, he plunged into a turmoil of philosophical and psychological doubts, leading him to Manichaeism. In 383 he moved to Rome and then Milan to teach rhetoric. Despite exploring classical philosophical systems, especially skepticism and Neoplatonism, his studies of Paul’s letters with his friend Alypius, and the preaching of Bishop Ambrose, led in 386 to his momentous conversion from mixed beliefs to Christianity. He soon returned to Tagaste and founded a religious community, and in 395 or 396 became bishop of Hippo.

From Augustine’s large output the Loeb Classical Library offers that great autobiography the Confessions (in two volumes); On the City of God (seven volumes), which unfolds God’s action in the progress of the world’s history, and propounds the superiority of Christian beliefs over pagan in adversity; and a selection of Letters which are important for the study of ecclesiastical theologians.

[more]

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City of God, Volume VI
Books 18.36–20
Augustine
Harvard University Press

A Church Father’s theological citadel.

Aurelius Augustine (AD 354–430), one of the most important figures in the development of western Christianity and philosophy, was the son of a pagan, Patricius of Tagaste, and his Christian wife, Monnica. While studying to become a rhetorician, he plunged into a turmoil of philosophical and psychological doubts, leading him to Manichaeism. In 383 he moved to Rome and then Milan to teach rhetoric. Despite exploring classical philosophical systems, especially skepticism and Neoplatonism, his studies of Paul’s letters with his friend Alypius, and the preaching of Bishop Ambrose, led in 386 to his momentous conversion from mixed beliefs to Christianity. He soon returned to Tagaste and founded a religious community, and in 395 or 396 became bishop of Hippo.

From Augustine’s large output the Loeb Classical Library offers that great autobiography the Confessions (in two volumes); On the City of God (seven volumes), which unfolds God’s action in the progress of the world’s history, and propounds the superiority of Christian beliefs over pagan in adversity; and a selection of Letters which are important for the study of ecclesiastical theologians.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
City of God, Volume VII
Books 21–22
Augustine
Harvard University Press

A Church Father’s theological citadel.

Aurelius Augustine (AD 354–430), one of the most important figures in the development of western Christianity and philosophy, was the son of a pagan, Patricius of Tagaste, and his Christian wife, Monnica. While studying to become a rhetorician, he plunged into a turmoil of philosophical and psychological doubts, leading him to Manichaeism. In 383 he moved to Rome and then Milan to teach rhetoric. Despite exploring classical philosophical systems, especially skepticism and Neoplatonism, his studies of Paul’s letters with his friend Alypius, and the preaching of Bishop Ambrose, led in 386 to his momentous conversion from mixed beliefs to Christianity. He soon returned to Tagaste and founded a religious community, and in 395 or 396 became bishop of Hippo.

From Augustine’s large output the Loeb Classical Library offers that great autobiography the Confessions (in two volumes); On the City of God (seven volumes), which unfolds God’s action in the progress of the world’s history, and propounds the superiority of Christian beliefs over pagan in adversity; and a selection of Letters which are important for the study of ecclesiastical theologians.

[more]

front cover of City on a Hilltop
City on a Hilltop
American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement
Sara Yael Hirschhorn
Harvard University Press, 2017

Since 1967, more than 60,000 Jewish-Americans have settled in the territories captured by the State of Israel during the Six Day War. Comprising 15 percent of the settler population today, these immigrants have established major communities, transformed domestic politics and international relations, and committed shocking acts of terrorism. They demand attention in both Israel and the United States, but little is known about who they are and why they chose to leave America to live at the center of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In this deeply researched, engaging work, Sara Yael Hirschhorn unsettles stereotypes, showing that the 1960s generation who moved to the occupied territories were not messianic zealots or right-wing extremists but idealists engaged in liberal causes. They did not abandon their progressive heritage when they crossed the Green Line. Rather, they saw a historic opportunity to create new communities to serve as a beacon—a “city on a hilltop”—to Jews across the globe. This pioneering vision was realized in their ventures at Yamit in the Sinai and Efrat and Tekoa in the West Bank. Later, the movement mobilized the rhetoric of civil rights to rebrand itself, especially in the wake of the 1994 Hebron massacre perpetrated by Baruch Goldstein, one of their own.

On the fiftieth anniversary of the 1967 war, Hirschhorn illuminates the changing face of the settlements and the clash between liberal values and political realities at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

[more]

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Civil Religion in Political Thought
Ronald Weed
Catholic University of America Press, 2010
The essays in this volume blend historical and philosophical reflection with concern for contemporary political problems. They show that the causes and motivations of civil religion are a permanent fixture of the human condition, though some of its manifestations and proximate causes have shifted in an age of multiculturalism, religious toleration, and secularization
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Claiming Power Over Life
Religion and Biotechnology Policy
Mark J. Hanson, Editor
Georgetown University Press, 2001

Developments in biotechnology, such as cloning and the decoding of the human genome, are generating questions and choices that traditionally have fallen within the realm of religion and philosophy: the definition of human life, human vs. divine control of nature, the relationship between human and non-human life, and the intentional manipulation of the mechanisms of life and death.

In Claiming Power over Life, eight contributors challenge policymakers to recognize the value of religious views on biotechnology and discuss how best to integrate the wisdom of the Christian and Jewish traditions into public policy debates. Arguing that civic discourse on the subject has been impoverished by an inability to accommodate religious insights productively, they identify the ways in which religious thought can contribute to policymaking. Likewise, the authors challenge religious leaders and scholars to learn about biotechnology, address the central issues it raises, and participate constructively in the moral debates it engenders.

The book will be of value to policymakers, religious leaders, ethicists, and all those interested in issues surrounding the intersection of religion and biotechnology policy.

[more]

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The Clash Within
Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future
Martha C. Nussbaum
Harvard University Press, 2009

While America is focused on religious militancy and terrorism in the Middle East, democracy has been under siege from religious extremism in another critical part of the world. As Martha Nussbaum reveals in this penetrating look at India today, the forces of the Hindu right pose a disturbing threat to its democratic traditions and secular state.

Since long before the 2002 Gujarat riots--in which nearly two thousand Muslims were killed by Hindu extremists--the power of the Hindu right has been growing, threatening India's hard-won constitutional practices of democracy, tolerance, and religious pluralism. Led politically by the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Hindu right has sought the subordination of other religious groups and has directed particular vitriol against Muslims, who are cast as devils in need of purging. The Hindu right seeks to return to a "pure" India, unsullied by alien polluters of other faiths, yet the BJP's defeat in recent elections demonstrates the power that India's pluralism continues to wield. The future, however, is far from secure, and Hindu extremism and exclusivity remain a troubling obstacle to harmony in South Asia.

Nussbaum's long-standing professional relationship with India makes her an excellent guide to its recent history. Ultimately she argues that the greatest threat comes not from a clash between civilizations, as some believe, but from a clash within each of us, as we oscillate between self-protective aggression and the ability to live in the world with others. India's story is a cautionary political tale for all democratic states striving to act responsibly in an increasingly dangerous world.

[more]

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Clashing Convictions
Science and Religion in American Fiction
Albert H. Tricomi
The Ohio State University Press, 2016
Clashing Convictions: Science and Religion in American Fiction is the first study to identify a body of twentieth-century American fiction that represents the increasing tensions experienced by people of Christian faith in response to Darwinism, the higher biblical criticism, and modern medicine. Delineating how these works dramatize clashes between scientific and conservative Protestant understandings of the world, Albert H. Tricomi examines a canon of ten novels and one iconic play that present a cultural history of inner turmoil as well as social conflict.  The three parts of the study chart this increasing inner turmoil, a rising secularist ideology, and finally a fundamentalist revival among alienated biblical literalists.
 
With chapters on James Lane Allen’s The Reign of Law, Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware, William Dean Howells’s The Leatherwood God, Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith and Elmer Gantry, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s Inherit the Wind, and James Scott Bell’s The Darwin Conspiracy, Tricomi offers new readings emphasizing how this canon represents science and religion as in deep, if not irreconcilable, conflict. Tricomi’s sweeping study, with its emphasis on the twentieth century, thus reveals from several directions the processes of secularism even as it identifies the emergence of what some have come to describe as the current “postsecular” moment in America.
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Classical Myth
An Introduction
Barry B. Powell
University of Michigan Press, 2024
Myths are not just the stories from the ancient Greeks and Romans—they represent deep truths from the essential concerns people face in their lives. Readers may already have heard of the Trojan Horse or how Oedipus married his own mother, but why have these stories lingered? 

In Classical Myth: An Introduction, Barry B. Powell provides the historical and theoretical background necessary for us to understand not only the concept of what a myth is, but the cultural context of how it emerged, and the different approaches to interpreting myth that were put forward by ancient theorists and their more recent successors. Then he helps readers to understand classical myth as it is found in its primary sources: the works of Homer and Hesiod, and the Greek tragedians and historians, Ovid and Vergil. By examining a number of prominent themes in classical myth, this textbook explores the relationship between myth and art, politics, society, and history of the ancient world. This completely revised second edition features new illustrations and will help readers who want to understand myths or study their original sources.
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The Cleansing of the Heart
Reginald Lynch
Catholic University of America Press, 2017
Recalling the Biblical and Patristic roots of the Church's sacramental identity, the Second Vatican Council calls the Church the 'visible sacrament' of that unity offered through Christ (LG 9). 'Sacrament' in this sense not only describes who the Church is, but what she does. In this regard, the Council Fathers were careful to establish a strong connection between the symbolic nature of the Church's sacraments and their effect on those who received them.

Reginald Lynch is concerned with the cleansing of the heart—a phrase borrowed from St. Augustine and employed by Aquinas, which describes the effects that natural elements such as water or bread have on the human person when taken up by the Church as sacramental signs. Aquinas' approach to sacramental efficacy is unique for its integration of diverse theological topics such as Christology, merit, grace, creation and instrumentality. While all of these topics will be considered to some extent, the primary focus of The Cleansing of the Heart is the sacraments understood as instrumental causes of grace. This volume provides the historical context for understanding the development of sacramental causality as a theological topic in the scholastic period, emphasizing the unique features of Aquinas' response to this question. Following this, relevant texts from Aquinas' early and later work are examined, noting Aquinas' development and integration of the idea of sacramental causality in his later work. The Cleansing of the Heart concludes by contrasting alternatives to Aquinas' theory of sacramental causality that subsequently emerged. The rise of humanism introduced many changes within rhetoric and philosophy of language that had a profound effect on some theologians during the Modern period. This book provides historical context for understanding the most prominent of these theories in contrast to Aquinas, and examines some of their theological implications.
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Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark
Morton Smith
Harvard University Press, 1973

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Clement of Alexandria
Exhortation to the Greeks. The Rich Man’s Salvation. To the Newly Baptized
Clement of Alexandria
Harvard University Press

A scholarly evangelist.

Clement of Alexandria, famous Father of the Church, is known chiefly from his own works. He was born, perhaps at Athens, about AD 150, son of non-Christian parents; he converted to Christianity probably in early manhood. He became a presbyter in the Church at Alexandria and there succeeded Pantaenus in the catechetical school; his students included Origen and Bishop Alexander. He may have left Alexandria in 202, was known at Antioch, was alive in 211, and was dead before 220.

We have Clement’s Exhortation to the Greeks to give up gods for God and Christ; Tutor (3 books), wherein Clement instructs Christians on how to act in keeping with Christ’s teachings; Stromateis (Patchwork, 8 books), intending to stress the true nature of the Christian Gnostic; and Who Is the Man Who Is Saved? (an exposition of Mark 10:17–31). This volume contains the Exhortation to the Greeks, the treatise on the rich man, and an exhortation To the Newly Baptized. Clement was an eclectic philosopher of a neo-Platonic kind who later found a new philosophy in Christianity, and studied not only the Bible but the beliefs of Christian heretics.

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The Clergy Sexual Abuse Crisis
Reform and Renewal in the Catholic Community
Paul R. Dokecki
Georgetown University Press, 2004

The story of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests has sent shock waves around the nation and will not fade from consciousness or the news. We ask, "How could this happen?" And then we ask, "How could the Catholic Church let this continue for so long—in seeming silence and duplicity?" Paul R. Dokecki, a community psychologist at Vanderbilt University, an active Catholic, and a former board member of the National Catholic Education Association, investigates the crisis not only with the eye of an investigative reporter, but with the analytical skills and training of a psychologist as well. Moreover, he lays the foundation for reasonable and practical reform measures.

Through the scandal in the Archdiocese of Boston as well as the earlier, if less well known but momentous, case in the Diocese of Nashville, Dokecki reports on and analyzes what is ultimately an abuse of power—not only by the clergy but by church officials. As distasteful as these instances may be, they are compelling reading, enlightened by the author's abilities to contextualize these events through the lenses of professional ethics, the human sciences, and ecclesiology. According to Dokecki, these and other instances of clergy sexual abuse reveal a systemic deficiency in the structure and the nature of the church itself, one that has prevented the church from adequately dealing with its own worst sins.

Dokecki may shine a spotlight into the church's dark corners—but he does so in the service of enlightenment, calling the church back toward the vision of Vatican II and the spirit of Pope John XXIII—toward a greater transparency, a more open and participatory governance in the church, and for a greatly expanded role for the people of God who make up the church. It is in this way, Dokecki believes, the church will be better able to keep the innocent children of the church safe from harm.

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Clerical Households in Late Medieval Italy
Roisin Cossar
Harvard University Press, 2017

Roisin Cossar brings a new perspective to the history of the Christian church in fourteenth century Italy by examining how clerics managed efforts to reform their domestic lives in the decades after the arrival of the Black Death.

Priests at the end of the Middle Ages resembled their lay contemporaries as they entered into domestic relationships with women, fathered children, and took responsibility for managing households, or familiae. Cossar limns a complex portrait of daily life in the medieval clerical familia that traces the phases of its development. Many priests began their vocation as apprentices in the households of older clerics. In middle age, priests fully embraced the traditional role of paterfamilias—patriarchs with authority over their households, including servants and, especially in Venice, slaves. As fathers they endeavored to establish their illegitimate sons in a clerical family trade. They also used their legal knowledge to protect their female companions and children against a church that frowned on such domestic arrangements and actively sought to stamp them out.

Clerical Households in Late Medieval Italy refutes the longstanding charge that the late medieval clergy were corrupt, living licentious lives that failed to uphold priestly obligations. In fashioning a domestic culture that responded flexibly to their own needs, priests tempered the often unrealistic expectations of their superiors. Their response to the rigid demands of church reform allowed the church to maintain itself during a period of crisis and transition in European history.

[more]

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Cleveland Jews and the Making of a Midwestern Community
Sean Martin
Rutgers University Press, 2020
This volume gathers an array of voices to tell the stories of Cleveland’s twentieth century Jewish community. Strong and stable after an often turbulent century, the Jews of Cleveland had both deep ties in the region and an evolving and dynamic commitment to Jewish life. The authors present the views and actions of community leaders and everyday Jews who embodied that commitment in their religious participation, educational efforts, philanthropic endeavors, and in their simple desire to live next to each other in the city’s eastern suburbs. The twentieth century saw the move of Cleveland’s Jews out of the center of the city, a move that only served to increase the density of Jewish life. The essays collected here draw heavily on local archival materials and present the area’s Jewish past within the context of American and American Jewish studies.
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front cover of Climate Change, Radical Uncertainty and Hope
Climate Change, Radical Uncertainty and Hope
Theology and Economics in Conversation
Jan Jorrit Hasselaar
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
Views on climate change are often either pessimistic or optimistic. In this book Jan Jorrit Hasselaar discovers and explores a third way, one of hope. A debate within economics on risk and uncertainty brings him to theological questions and the concept of hope in the work of the late Jonathan Sacks—and to a renewed way of doing theology as an account of the good life. What follows is an equal conversation between theology and economics as has hardly been undertaken in recent times. It emerges that hope is not contrary to economic insights, but remarkably compatible with them. Communication between these fields of expertise can open the way for a courageous and creative embrace of radical uncertainty in climate change. A key notion here is that of a public Sabbath, or a ‘workplace of hope’—times and places set aside to cultivate inspiration and mutual trust among all parties involved, enabling them to take concrete steps forward.
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front cover of Climate Machines, Fascist Drives, and Truth
Climate Machines, Fascist Drives, and Truth
William E. Connolly
Duke University Press, 2019
In this new installation of his work, William E. Connolly examines entanglements between volatile earth processes and emerging cultural practices, highlighting relays among extractive capitalism, self-amplifying climate processes, migrations, democratic aspirations, and fascist dangers. In three interwoven essays, Connolly takes up thinkers in the "minor tradition" of European thought who, unlike Cartesians and Kantians, cross divisions between nature and culture. He first offers readings of Sophocles and Mary Shelley, asking whether close attention to the Anthropocene could perhaps have arrived earlier had subsequent humanists absorbed their lessons. He then joins Deleuze and Guattari's notion of an abstract machine with contemporary earth sciences, doing so to compare the Antique Little Ice Age of the late Roman empire to contemporary relays between extractive capitalism and accelerating climate processes. The final essay stages a dramatic dialogue between Alfred North Whitehead and Michel Foucault about the pursuit of truth during a time of planetary turbulence. With Climate Machines Fascist Drives, and Truth, Connolly forges incisive interventions into key issues of our time.
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Clogs and Shawls
Mormons, Moorlands, and the Search for Zion
Ann Chamberlin
University of Utah Press, 2019
In this revealing family memoir, best-selling author Ann Chamberlin explores the history of her Mormon grandmother Frances Lyda and her seven sisters who grew up desperately poor in Bradford, Yorkshire, in the early years of the twentieth century. Chamberlin’s narrative follows these eight daughters of Mary Jane Jones and Ralph Robinson Whitaker, a remarkably gifted yet poor and blind piano tuner. Most of the girls were forced by necessity to abandon school at age twelve and find work in terrible conditions at a local factory. When their mother converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1901, she became the backbone of the Mormon community in Yorkshire. Her daughters followed their mother into her faith, while navigating their own, sometimes tragic, ways into adulthood, family, and the world beyond industrial England. Though they were exploited and undereducated, the girls maintained a steadfast belief in a brighter future for the Mormon faithful, a mindset that, despite their many differences, forged an unshakable togetherness between them. All gifted and strong individuals in their own right, many of the Whitaker sisters overcame long odds and incredible hardships to carry on and prosper in Salt Lake City.
 
Chamberlin interviewed her grandmother and six of her surviving great-aunts for Clogs and Shawls, the relatives who had made their way to Mormon Zion. She weaves novelistic passages with their first-person narratives to create a singular work of oral immigrant family history that is both lively and revealing.
 
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Close Encounters between Bible and Film
An Interdisciplinary Engagement
Laura Copier
SBL Press, 2016

Explore new routes into the burgeoning field of biblical literature and film theory

The present collection of essays is a sequel to the groundbreaking Semeia 74 issue, published in 1996, entitled Biblical Glamour and Hollywood Glitz. These new essays showcase the divergent approaches from film studies and cultural studies that can be used in the visual analysis of biblical and religious themes, narratives, and characters in cinema. It is the first volume that specifically addresses issues of methodology, theory, and analysis in the study between bible and film. As such, this collection is of interest to scholars in film studies and theology/religion/biblical studies, who are invested in doing interdisciplinary research in the expanding field of religion and film.

Features

  • Specific focus on methods of film analysis, rather than the more common focus on thematic analysis in the study of religion, Bible, and film.
  • Visual analysis in the encounter between Bible and film
  • Fourteen essays and an introduction by top scholars in the field
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Closing Arguments
Clarence Darrow on Religion, Law, and Society
Clarence Darrow
Ohio University Press, 2005

Clarence Darrow, son of a village undertaker and coffinmaker, rose to become one of America’s greatest attorneys—and surely its most famous. The Ohio native gained renown for his central role in momentous trials, including his 1924 defense of Leopold and Loeb and his defense of Darwinian principles in the 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial.” Some have traced Darrow’s lifelong campaign against capital punishment to his boyhood terror at seeing a Civil War soldier buried—and no client of Darrow’s was ever executed, not even black men who were accused of murder for killing members of a white mob.

Closing Arguments: Clarence Darrow on Religion, Law, and Society collects, for the first time, Darrow’s thoughts on his three main preoccupations, revealing a carefully conceived philosophy expressed with delightful pungency and clarity. His thoughts on social issues, especially on the dangers of religious fundamentalism, are uncannily prescient. A dry humor infuses his essays, and his reflections on himself and his philosophy reveal a quiet dignity at the core of a man better known for provoking Americans during an era of unprecedented tumult. From the wry “Is the Human Race Getting Anywhere?” to the scornful “Patriotism” and his elegiac summing up, “At Seventy-two,” Darrow’s writing still stimulates, pleases and challenges.

A rebel who always sided intellectually and emotionally with the minority, Darrow remains a figure to contend with sixty-seven years after his death. “Inside every lawyer is the wreck of a poet,” Darrow once said. Closing Arguments demonstrates that, in his case, that statement is true.

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The Cloth of Many Colored Silks
Papers on History and Society Ghanaian and Islamic in Honor of Ivor Wilks
John Hunwick and Nancy Lawler
Northwestern University Press, 1997
The Cloth of Many Colored Silks collects a wide variety of scholarship dealing with Ghanaian history and society, including papers by Basil Davidson, Jean Allman, Esther Goody and Jack Goody, Sandra E. Greene, Polly Hill, Ray A. Kea, Peter Shinnie, Victoria B. Tashjian, Larry W. Yarak, Ralph A. Austen, Paulo Fernando de Moraes Farias, Robert S. Kramer, Robert Launay, Donna J.E. Maier, R.S. O'Fahey, David Owusu-Ansah, and Enid Schildkrout.
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Clouds Without Rain
An Amish Country Mystery
P. L. Gaus
Ohio University Press, 2001

Written in the tradition of Tony Hillerman, in Clouds without Rain, P. L. Gaus once again provides compelling intrigue and insight into Amish culture and tradition alongside contemporary American life.

In the wake of a fatal accident involving an Amish buggy and an eighteen-wheeler, Professor Michael Branden, working with the Holmes County Sheriff’s Department, becomes suspicious about the true nature of the crash. His suspicions only grow when the trustee of the dead man’s estate disappears a few days later.

Faced with Amish teenagers in goat masks robbing buggies on dusty lanes, land swindles involving out-of-town developers, several mysterious deaths, and the disappearance of a bank official, Branden realizes that there is far more to the story than a buggy crash on a sleepy country road.

This new edition of Clouds without Rain  features an exclusive interview with the author, reading group materials, and a detailed map and driving guide to Holmes County, Ohio with everything one needs to visit the iconic scenes depicted in the story.

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Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Christians with Depression
A Practical Tool-Based Primer
Michelle Pearce
Templeton Press, 2016
Does religion belong in psychotherapy?
 
For anyone in the helping profession, whether as mental health professional or religious leader, this question is bound to arise. Many mental health professionals feel uncomfortable discussing religion. In contrast, many religious leaders feel uncomfortable referring their congregants to professionals who do not know their faith or intent to engage with it.
 
And yet Michelle Pearce, PhD, assistant professor and clinical psychologist at the Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Maryland, argues that if religion is essential to a client, religion will be a part of psychotherapy, whether it is discussed or not. Clients cannot check their values at the door more than the professionals who treat them.
 
To Pearce, the question isn’t really, “does religion belong?” but rather, “how can mental health professionals help their religious clients engage with and use their faith as a healing resource in psychotherapy?”
 
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Christian Clientswith Depression is the answer to that question, as the book’s purpose is to educate mental health professionals and pastoral counselors about religion’s role in therapy, as well as equip them to discuss religious issues and use evidence-based, religiously-integrated tools with Christian clients experiencing depression.
 
In this book, readers will find the following resources in an easy-to-use format: 
  • An overview of the scientific benefits of integrating clients’ religious  beliefs and practices in psychotherapy
  • An organizing therapeutic approach for doing Christian CBT
  • Seven tools specific to Christian CBT to treat depression
  • Suggested dialogue for therapists to introduce concepts and tools
  • Skill-building activity worksheets for clients
  • Clinical examples of Christian CBT and the seven tools in action
Practitioners will learn the helpful (and sometimes not so beneficial) role a person’s Christian faith can play in psychotherapy. They will be equipped to discuss religious issues and use religiously-integrated tools in their work. At the same time, clergy will learn how Christianity can be integrated into an evidence-based secular mental health treatment for depression, which is sure to increase their comfort level for making referrals to mental health practitioners who provide this form of treatment.
 
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Christian Clients with Depression is a practical guide for mental health professionals and pastoral counselors who want to learn how to use Christian-specific CBT tools to treat depression in their Christian clients.
 
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Cognitive Science, Religion, and Theology
From Human Minds to Divine Minds
Justin L. Barrett
Templeton Press, 2011
Cognitive Science, Religion, and Theology is the eighth title published in the Templeton Science and Religion Series, in which scientists from a wide range of fields distill their experience and knowledge into brief tours of their respective specialties. In this volume, well-known cognitive scientist Justin L. Barrett offers an accessible overview of this interdisciplinary field, reviews key findings in this area, and discusses the implications of these findings for religious thought and practice.
 
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary study of minds and mental activity, and as such, it addresses a fundamental feature of what it is to be human. Further, as religious traditions concern ideas and beliefs about the nature of humans, the nature of the world, and the nature of the divine, cognitive science can contribute directly and indirectly to these theological concerns. Barrett shows how direct contributions come from the growing area called cognitive science of religion (CSR), which investigates how human cognitive systems inform and constrain religious thought, experience, and expression. CSR attempts to answer questions such as: Why do humans tend to be religious? And why are specific ideas (e.g., the possibility of an afterlife) so cross-culturally recurrent? Barrett also covers the indirect implications that cognitive science has for theology, such as human similarities and differences with the animal world, freedom and determinism, and the relationship between minds and bodies.
 
Cognitive Science, Religion, and Theology critically reviews the research on these fascinating questions and discusses the many implications that arise from them. In addition, this short volume also offers suggestions for future research, making it ideal not only for those looking for an overview of the field thus far but also for those seeking a glimpse of where the field might be going in the future.
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Collaborators for Emancipation
Abraham Lincoln and Owen Lovejoy
William F. Moore and Jane Ann Moore
University of Illinois Press, 2019
Few expected politician Abraham Lincoln and Congregational minister Owen Lovejoy to be friends when they met in 1854. One was a cautious lawyer who deplored abolitionists' flouting of the law, the other an outspoken antislavery activist who captained a stop on the Underground Railroad. Yet the two built a relationship that, in Lincoln's words, "was one of increasing respect and esteem."
 
In Collaborators for Emancipation: Abraham Lincoln and Owen Lovejoy, the authors examine the thorny issue of the pragmatism typically ascribed to Lincoln versus the radicalism of Lovejoy, and the role each played in ending slavery. Exploring the men's politics, personal traits, and religious convictions, the book traces their separate paths in life as well as their frequent interactions. Collaborators for Emancipation shows how Lincoln and Lovejoy influenced one another and analyzes the strategies and systems of belief each brought to the epic controversies of slavery versus abolition and union versus disunion.
 
Moore and Moore, editors of a previous volume of Lovejoy's writings, use their deep knowledge of his words and life to move beyond mere politics to a nuanced perspective on the fabric of religion and personal background that underlay the minister's worldview. Their multifaceted work of history and biography reveals how Lincoln embraced the radical idea of emancipation, and how Lovejoy shaped his own radicalism to wield the pragmatic political tools needed to reach that ultimate goal.
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Collected Leonard J Arrington Mormon History Lectures
USU Special Collections
Utah State University Press, 2004
The first ten lectures in Leonard J. Arrington Mormon History Lecture Series are here collected in one volume. The series, established by one of the twentieth-century West's most distinguished historians, Leonard Arrington, has become a leading forum for prominent historians to address topics related to Mormon history. The first lecturer was Arrington himself. He was followed by Richard Lyman Bushman, Richard E. Bennett, Howard R. Lamar, Claudia L. Bushman, Kenneth W. Godfrey, Jan Shipps, Donald Worster, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and F. Ross Peterson. Utah State University hosts the Leonard J. Arrington Mormon History Lecture Series. The University Libraries' Special Collections and Archives houses the Arrington collection. The state's land grant university began collecting records very early, and in the 1960s became a major depository for Utah and Mormon records. Leonard and his wife Grace joined the USU faculty and family in 1946, and the Arringtons and their colleagues worked to collect original diaries, journals, letters, and photographs.
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Collectio CCCC capituloru, The Collection in 400 Chapters
Introduction and Text
Sven Meeder
Catholic University of America Press, 2024
Surviving in three ninth-century manuscripts, the collection of canon law known as the Collectio 400 capitulorum is a remarkable and understudied witness to the scholarly vitality of the Carolingian period. Its 404 chapters offer ecclesiastical rules and moral guidelines taken from an unusually wide variety of authoritative sources. In addition to the customary canonical texts, such as the acts of the ecumenical councils and papal letters, the compiler of this collection drew his canons from the bible, Roman law, local Gallic synods, the Church Fathers, as well as Frankish and Insular penitential works. Although the Collectio 400 capitulorum is a so-called systematic collection, eminent scholars of canon law commented on its lack of structure. Even ‘with the best will in the world’, the collection’s system eluded them. Despite its flaws, however, there is evidence that the collection gained some popularity in the ninth century, apparently providing the basis for the Poenitentiale Martenianum, directly or indirectly influencing Hrabanus Maurus and Benedictus Levita. The ninth-century appreciation is understandable for, as one of the many products of the vigorous canonical activity of the eighth and ninth centuries, the Collectio 400 capitulorum impresses in its handling of the canonical material as well as the breadth of sources and the topics covered. This book constitutes the first in-depth study of this intriguing canonical collection, with a detailed description of the extant manuscript witnesses, its sources, and its influence. The critical edition offers scholars of the early Middle Ages in general and canon law in particular access to an instructive, if unpolished, product of Carolingian legal thought.
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Colleges in Controversy
The Jesuit Schools in France from Revival to Suppression, 1815–1880
John W. Padberg, S.J.
Harvard University Press, 1969

Until the suppression of the Society of Jesus in 1773 by Pope Clement XIV, the Jesuits had been the undisputed “schoolmasters of Europe.” In France, especially, the educational system of the Society had attained its most widespread development and its greatest fame. The nineteenth-century colleges, formed after the revival of the Society in 1814, never reached the number, size, or influence of their predecessors; but for their time and for the new obstacles they faced, these schools were important. Founded during a period of growing secularization, they faced the constant threat of political attack. Indeed, both their admirers and their critics believed that the Jesuit schools fostered in their graduates distinctive attitudes toward state and society.

John W. Padberg, S.J., has written the first full-length study of these colleges, from their revival in 1815 to their suppression in 1880. Drawing almost exclusively on archival material not previously utilized, Father Padberg places his study against the background of anti-clericalism, revolution, the Second Empire, and the first decade of the Third Republic. He describes the founding of the schools; their resources; their curriculum structure and content; their inner life—religious practices, the daily order, the social structure; and their relation to the political and social milieu of the times. He also discusses the backgrounds and ideological orientations of the faculty and students.

The author first portrays life in the semi-clandestine seminary schools in France from 1815 to 1828. He then depicts the experiences of the exile colleges on the borders of France. With the passage of the Falloux Law of 1850, Jesuit colleges became legal in France for the first time since the 18th century. Father Padberg describes the subsequent rush to found new schools and the resultant problems of lack of personnel, financial crises, and governmental suspicion. He discusses in detail the inner lives of these seventeen new colleges.

During the early years of the Third Republic, the Jesuits founded eleven more colleges. But the mutual fear and misunderstanding between the Society and the Republic and the growing anti-clericalism of the government came to a climax in 1880, when Jules Ferry expelled the Jesuits from these institutions and made impossible their control over any such schools in France.

Father Padberg concludes that during these sixty-five years the French Jesuit schools had little room to maneuver. Externally, government suspicion and hostility circumscribed them. Internally, they reacted to this hostility, which antedated the French Revolution, by the inability to adapt to contemporary circumstances their commitment to the values of a humane and Christian education.

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Colonial Habits
Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru
Kathryn Burns
Duke University Press, 1999
In Colonial Habits Kathryn Burns transforms our view of nuns as marginal recluses, making them central actors on the colonial stage. Beginning with the 1558 founding of South America’s first convent, Burns shows that nuns in Cuzco played a vital part in subjugating Incas, creating a creole elite, and reproducing an Andean colonial order in which economic and spiritual interests were inextricably fused.
Based on unprecedented archival research, Colonial Habits demonstrates how nuns became leading guarantors of their city’s social order by making loans, managing property, containing “unruly” women, and raising girls. Coining the phrase “spiritual economy” to analyze the intricate investments and relationships that enabled Cuzco’s convents and their backers to thrive, Burns explains how, by the late 1700s, this economy had faltered badly, making convents an emblem of decay and a focal point for intense criticism of a failing colonial regime. By the nineteenth century, the nuns had retreated from their previous roles, marginalized in the construction of a new republican order.
Providing insight that can be extended well outside the Andes to the relationships articulated by convents across much of Europe, the Americas, and beyond, Colonial Habits will engage those interested in early modern economics, Latin American studies, women in religion, and the history of gender, class, and race.
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Colonial Rosary
The Spanish and Indian Missions of California
Alison Lake
Ohio University Press, 2006

California would be a different place today without the imprint of Spanish culture and the legacy of Indian civilization. The colonial Spanish missions that dot the coast and foothills between Sonoma and San Diego are relics of a past that transformed California’s landscape and its people.

In a spare and accessible style, Colonial Rosary looks at the complexity of California’s Indian civilization and the social effects of missionary control. While oppressive institutions lasted in California for almost eighty years under the tight reins of royal Spain, the Catholic Church, and the government of Mexico, letters and government documents reveal the missionaries’ genuine concern for the Indian communities they oversaw for their health, spiritual upbringing, and material needs.

With its balanced attention to the variety of sources on the mission period, Colonial Rosary illuminates ongoing debates over the role of the Franciscan missions in the settlement of California.

By sharing the missions’ stories of tragedy and triumph, author Alison Lake underlines the importance of preserving these vestiges of California’s prestatehood period. An illustrated tour of the missions as well as a sensitive record of their impact on California history and culture, Colonial Rosary brings the story of the Spanish missions of California alive.

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Colonial Transactions
Imaginaries, Bodies, and Histories in Gabon
Florence Bernault
Duke University Press, 2019
In Colonial Transactions Florence Bernault moves beyond the racial divide that dominates colonial studies of Africa. Instead, she illuminates the strange and frightening imaginaries that colonizers and colonized shared on the ground. Bernault looks at Gabon from the late nineteenth century to the present, historicizing the most vivid imaginations and modes of power in Africa today: French obsessions with cannibals, the emergence of vampires and witches in the Gabonese imaginary, and the use of human organs for fetishes. Struggling over objects, bodies, agency, and values, colonizers and colonized entered relations that are better conceptualized as "transactions." Together they also shared an awareness of how the colonial situation broke down moral orders and forced people to use the evil side of power. This foreshadowed the ways in which people exercise agency in contemporary Africa, as well as the proliferation of magical fears and witchcraft anxieties in present-day Gabon. Overturning theories of colonial and postcolonial nativism, this book is essential reading for historians and anthropologists of witchcraft, power, value, and the body.
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Colonialism and Christianity in Mandate Palestine
By Laura Robson
University of Texas Press, 2011

Drawing on a rich base of British archival materials, Arabic periodicals, and secondary sources, Colonialism and Christianity in Mandate Palestine brings to light the ways in which the British colonial state in Palestine exacerbated sectarianism. By transforming Muslim, Christian, and Jewish religious identities into legal categories, Laura Robson argues, the British ultimately marginalized Christian communities in Palestine. Robson explores the turning points that developed as a result of such policies, many of which led to permanent changes in the region's political landscapes. Cases include the British refusal to support Arab Christian leadership within Greek-controlled Orthodox churches, attempts to avert involvement from French or Vatican-related groups by sidelining Latin and Eastern Rite Catholics, and interfering with Arab Christians' efforts to cooperate with Muslims in objecting to Zionist expansion. Challenging the widespread but mistaken notion that violent sectarianism was endemic to Palestine, Colonialism and Christianity in Mandate Palestine shows that it was intentionally stoked in the wake of British rule beginning in 1917, with catastrophic effects well into the twenty-first century.

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Coloniality and the Rise of Liberation Thinking during the Sixteenth Century
Thomas Ward
Arc Humanities Press, 2021
This book delves into the inadequately explored, liberative side of Humanism during the late Renaissance. While some long-sixteenth-century thinking anticipates twentieth-century Liberation Theology, a more appropriate description is simply “liberation thinking,” which embraces its diverse, timeless, and sometimes nontheological aspects. Two moments frame the treatment of American colonialism’s physical and mental pathways and the liberative response to them, known as liberation thinking. These are St. Thomas More’s Utopia, published in 1516, and Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s thousand-page Nueva crónica y buen gobierno, completed one hundred years later. These works and others by Erasmus and Bartolomé de las Casas trace the development of the idea of human liberation in the face of degrading chattel and encomienda slavery as well as the peonage that gave rise to the hacienda system in the Americas. Catholic humanists such as More, Erasmus, Las Casas, and Guaman Poma developed arguments, theories, and even theology that attempted to deconstruct those subordinating structures.
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The Coloniality of the Secular
Race, Religion, and Poetics of World-Making
An Yountae
Duke University Press, 2024
In The Coloniality of the Secular, An Yountae investigates the collusive ties between the modern concepts of the secular, religion, race, and coloniality in the Americas. Drawing on the work of Édouard Glissant, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Sylvia Wynter, and Enrique Dussel, An maps the intersections of revolutionary non-Western thought with religious ideas to show how decoloniality redefines the sacred as an integral part of its liberation vision. He examines these thinkers’ rejection of colonial religions and interrogates the narrow conception of religion that confines it within colonial power structures. An explores decoloniality’s conception of the sacred in relation to revolutionary violence, gender, creolization, and racial phenomenology, demonstrating its potential for reshaping religious paradigms. Pointing out that the secular has been pivotal to regulating racial hierarchies under colonialism, he advocates for a broader understanding of religion that captures the fundamental ideas that drive decolonial thinking. By examining how decolonial theory incorporates the sacred into its vision of liberation, An invites readers to rethink the transformative power of decoloniality and religion to build a hopeful future.
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Colors and Textures of Roman North Africa
Essays in Memory of Maureen A. Tilley
Elizabeth A. Clark
Catholic University of America Press, 2023
This book serves two purposes: first, it celebrates the career of the late Maureen Tilley; second, it provides a “state of the field” look at some of the latest scholarship on Christian North Africa in late antiquity. The chapters, written by both senior scholars and the next generation of North African researchers, fills gaps in some of our understandings of the colorful people, places, and disputes that arose in the unique environment of Christian North Africa. The book centers around Augustine, Donatist studies, and North African biblical interpretation, representing Tilley’s major areas of interest, while also ensuring coverage of Tertullian (a major figure in the North African church and one of Tilley’s hobbyhorses) and the pilgrimages to North Africa and other places. It contributes to the field(s) by providing new scholarship from some of the biggest names in Christian North Africa studies (Patout Burns, Robin Jensen, Bill Tabbernee, Anthony Dupont, and Allan Fitzgerald) and in Patristic/early Christian studies writ large (Blake Leyerle and Geoffrey Dunn) while demonstrating the new trajectories of Christian North Africa research from early career (Alden Bass) and emerging (Colum Dever) scholars. The editors were Tilley’s dissertation director (the late Liz Clark) and one of her last mentees (Zach Smith), so the entire collection has a meta-view of academic genealogy – knowledge flowing from Tilley’s mentor, through colleagues and mentees, and down through and to the next generation who carry on those legacies.
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The Colors of Violence
Cultural Identities, Religion, and Conflict
Sudhir Kakar
University of Chicago Press, 1996
For decades India has been intermittently tormented by brutal outbursts of religious violence, thrusting thousands of ordinary Hindus and Muslims into bloody conflict. In this provocative work, psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar exposes the psychological roots of Hindu-Muslim violence and examines with grace and intensity the subjective experience of religious hatred in his native land.

With honesty, insight, and unsparing self-reflection, Kakar confronts the profoundly enigmatic relations that link individual egos to cultural moralities and religious violence. His innovative psychological approach offers a framework for understanding the kind of ethnic-religious conflict that has so vexed social scientists in India and throughout the world.

Through riveting case studies, Kakar explores cultural stereotypes, religious antagonisms, ethnocentric histories, and episodic violence to trace the development of both Hindu and Muslim psyches. He argues that in early childhood the social identity of every Indian is grounded in traditional religious identifications and communalism. Together these bring about deep-set psychological anxieties and animosities toward the other. For Hindus and Muslims alike, violence becomes morally acceptable when communally and religiously sanctioned. As the changing pressures of modernization and secularism in a multicultural society grate at this entrenched communalism, and as each group vies for power, ethnic-religious conflicts ignite. The Colors of Violence speaks with eloquence and urgency to anyone concerned with the postmodern clash of religious and cultural identities.
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Come and Hear
What I Saw in My Seven-and-a-Half-Year Journey through the Talmud
Adam Kirsch
Brandeis University Press, 2021
A literary critic’s journey through the Talmud.
 
Spurred by a curiosity about Daf Yomi—a study program launched in the 1920s in which Jews around the world read one page of the Talmud every day for 2,711 days, or about seven and a half years—Adam Kirsch approached Tablet magazine to write a weekly column about his own Daf Yomi experience. An avowedly secular Jew, Kirsch did not have a religious source for his interest in the Talmud; rather, as a student of Jewish literature and history, he came to realize that he couldn’t fully explore these subjects without some knowledge of the Talmud. This book is perfect for readers who are in a similar position. Most people have little sense of what the Talmud actually is—how the text moves, its preoccupations and insights, and its moments of strangeness and profundity. As a critic and journalist Kirsch has experience in exploring difficult texts, discussing what he finds there, and why it matters. His exploration into the Talmud is best described as a kind of travel writing—a report on what he saw during his seven-and-a-half-year journey through the Talmud. For readers who want to travel that same path, there is no better guide.
 
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Come On, Men, One More Effort …
Anthropogenesis, Christianity, Sexuation
Thierry De Duve
Diaphanes, 2024
A theoretical exploration of possible ways out of concepts adopted by the Enlightenment.

Thierry de Duve outlines the main features of a critical theory of male, all-too-male sexuation and cross-gender emancipation, drawing on Marcel Gauchet’s theses on Christianity as an exit from religion, Jacques Lacan’s algebra of desire, and Geneviève Morel’s analysis of the “law of the mother.”

Wouldn’t it have required more than the translation of the three Christian maxims “faith, hope, love” into the revolutionary maxims “liberté, egalité, fraternité?”  Is there more to the knot of incarnation, fatherhood, and the cult of Mary than just Christian mysticism? Can the uncertainty of fatherhood become an act of faith that acknowledges a fundamental uncertainty?

Come On, Men, One More Effort… explores ways out of the dead end of political concepts adopted by the Enlightenment and their continued impact today, since the only possibility seems to be to embrace the religious and reject it at the same time.
 
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Comic Faith
The Great Tradition from Austen to Joyce
Robert M. Polhemus
University of Chicago Press, 1980
"Polhemus sketches several distinctions between nineteenth- and twentieth-century novelists and concludes that what most characterizes the nineteenth century, from the perspective of the twentieth, is the tendency in its comic fiction to criticize and to undermine the dogma and institutions of religion and to put faith instead of the existence of the comic perspective. Comic Faith is a virtuoso performance of impressive stature; I suspect the book will be influential for many years to come."—John Halperin, Modern Fiction Studies
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Coming of Age in Jewish America
Bar and Bat Mitzvah Reinterpreted
Patricia Keer Munro
Rutgers University Press, 2016
The Jewish practice of bar mitzvah dates back to the twelfth century, but this ancient cultural ritual has changed radically since then, evolving with the times and adapting to local conditions. For many Jewish-American families, a child’s bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah is both a major social event and a symbolic means of asserting the family’s ongoing connection to the core values of Judaism. Coming of Age in Jewish America takes an inside look at bar and bat mitzvahs in the twenty-first century, examining how the practices have continued to morph and exploring how they serve as a sometimes shaky bridge between the values of contemporary American culture and Judaic tradition.
 
Interviewing over 200 individuals involved in bar and bat mitzvah ceremonies, from family members to religious educators to rabbis, Patricia Keer Munro presents a candid portrait of the conflicts that often emerge and the negotiations that ensue. In the course of her study, she charts how this ritual is rife with contradictions; it is a private family event and a public community activity, and for the child, it is both an educational process and a high-stakes performance.
 
Through detailed observations of Conservative, Orthodox, Reform, and independent congregations in the San Francisco Bay Area, Munro draws intriguing, broad-reaching conclusions about both the current state and likely future of American Judaism.  In the process, she shows not only how American Jews have forged a unique set of bar and bat mitzvah practices, but also how these rituals continue to shape a distinctive Jewish-American identity.  
 
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The Coming of the King James Gospels
A Collection of the Translators’ Work-in-Progress
Ward S. Allen
University of Arkansas Press, 1994

The Coming of the King James Gospels is a primary publication exploring the handwritten annotations of the Oxford New Testament Company, made as members completed Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Their original edited pages, gathered into one binding as the Bodleian Bishops’ Bible ([1602] b.1), offer us the only known surviving record of their monumental work.

Ward Allen’s painstakingly produced collation of this Bishops’ Bible is available for the first time in acessible visual layout. It allows a reader to study simultaneously the three texts, that of the original Bishops’ Bible, the revisions suggested for the 1602 text, and the final King James version of the Gospels. Rejected readings reveal the reasoning which led to the wording of the final text. Beautifully produced, The Coming of the King James Gospels is now a prime resource for all students of the Bible and the English language.

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The Comity and Grace of Method
Essays in Honor of Edmund F. Perry
Thomas Ryba
Northwestern University Press, 2004
A work that at once celebrates and extends the formidable contributions of the late Edmund Perry to the study of religions, this comprehensive collection brings together three generations of distinguished scholars to consider the history, theory, and applications of the comparative method in religious study. Both the title and the content of this volume reflect Perry's conviction that the comparative religionist is morally bound to contribute to a comity of religions-the voluntary and courteous recognition of the dignity and truth present in all religions. Following the general framework advocated by Perry for this pursuit, the volume reveals the strengths of such a framework-and of Perry's lifelong interest in theory and method--for religious understanding,

The essays in the first section—"Theory and Method in the History and Study of Religion"—clarify the role of scientific, phenomenological, and comparative approaches within the history of the study of religion; collectively, they represent a multifaceted statement about recurring and subtle problems in the field. In the second section—"Theories and Methods in Application"—the authors move from overarching theoretical concerns to the application of these methods in specific religious traditions, Western and Eastern. The third section demonstrates the effectiveness of these theories and methods as guidelines for promoting global inter-religious comity.

More than a fitting tribute to a revered and highly influential scholar, this book gives even those who knew nothing of Perry and his work much to learn from and ponder about the study of religion.
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Commentaries
Pius II
Harvard University Press, 2003
The Renaissance popes were among the most enlightened and generous patrons of arts and letters in the Europe of their day. The diaries of Pius II give us an intimate glimpse of the life and thought of one of the greatest of the Renaissance popes. Pius II (1405-1464) began life as Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini in a small town near Siena, and became a famous Latin poet and diplomat. Originally an opponent of the papacy as well as something of a libertine, Aeneas eventually reconciled himself with the Roman church and became a priest, then a cardinal. Finally he was elected Pope Pius II (1458) and dedicated his pontificate to organizing a pan-European crusade against the Ottoman Empire. Pius's Commentaries, the only autobiography ever written by a pope, was composed in elegant humanistic Latin modeled on Caesar and Cicero. This edition contains a fresh Latin text based on the last manuscript written in Pius's lifetime and an updated and corrected version of the 1937 translation by Florence Alden Gragg.
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Commentaries
Pius IIEdited by Margaret Meserve and Marcello Simonetta
Harvard University Press
The Renaissance popes were among the most enlightened and generous patrons of arts and letters in the Europe of their day. The diaries of Pius II give us an intimate glimpse of the life and thought of one of the greatest of the Renaissance popes. Pius II (1405-1464) began life as Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini in a small town near Siena and became a famous Latin poet and diplomat. Originally an opponent of the papacy as well as something of a libertine, Aeneas eventually reconciled himself with the Roman church and became a priest, then a cardinal. Finally he was elected Pope Pius II (1458) and dedicated his pontificate to organizing a pan-European crusade against the Ottoman Empire. Pius's Commentaries, the only autobiography ever written by a pope, was composed in elegant humanistic Latin modeled on Caesar and Cicero. This edition contains a fresh Latin text based on the last manuscript written in Pius's lifetime and an updated and corrected version of the 1937 translation by Florence Alden Gragg.
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Commentary on Galatians
Jerome
Catholic University of America Press, 2011
Jerome's Commentary on Galatians is presented here in English translation in its entirety.
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Commentary on Genesis
Didymus the Blind
Catholic University of America Press, 2016
Blind since early childhood, the Egyptian theologian and monk Didymus (ca. 313-398) wielded a masterful knowledge of Scripture, philosophy, and previous biblical interpretation, earning the esteem of his contemporaries Athanasius, Antony of Egypt, Jerome, Rufinus, and Palladius, as well as of the historians Socrates and Theodoret in the decades following his death. He was, however, anathematized by the Fifth Ecumenical Council in 553 because of his utilization and defense of the works of Origen, and this condemnation may be responsible for the loss of many of Didymus's writings. Jerome and Palladius mentioned that Didymus had written commentaries on Old Testament books; these commentaries were assumed to be no longer extant until the discovery in 1941 in Tura, Egypt, of papyri containing commentaries on Genesis, Zechariah, Job, Ecclesiastes, and some of the Psalms.
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Commentary on Matthew
D.H. St. Hilary of Poiters
Catholic University of America Press, 2012
St. Jerome (347-420) has been considered the pre-eminent scriptural commentator among the Latin Church Fathers. His Commentary on Matthew, written in 398 and profoundly influential in the West, appears here for the first time in English translation.
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Commentary on Matthew
Saint Jerome
Catholic University of America Press, 2008
His Commentary on Matthew, written in 398 and profoundly influential in the West, appears here for the first time in English translation. Jerome covers the entire text of Matthew's gospel by means of brief explanatory comments that clarify the text literally and historically.
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A Commentary on Nigel of Canterbury’s Miracles of the Virgin
Jan M. Ziolkowski
Harvard University Press

Nigel of Canterbury, also known as Longchamp and Whiteacre, wrote toward the end of the so-called Twelfth-Century Renaissance. He was a Benedictine monk of Christ Church when Thomas Becket was martyred, and a star of Anglo-Latin literature while the Angevin kings held sway over a vast empire that encompassed not only the British Isles but also western France.

The Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library volume features, alongside the Latin, the first-ever English translation of Nigel’s second-longest poem, Miracles of the Virgin. The Miracles is the oldest extant collection of versified miracles of Mary in Latin and indeed in any language. The seventeen narratives, telling a gamut of tales from diabolic pacts to pregnant abbesses, gave scope for Nigel to display skills as a storyteller and stylist, while recounting the miraculous mercy of the Virgin. This supplement offers an extensive commentary to facilitate appreciation of the Miracles as poetry by a medieval writer deeply imbued in the long tradition of Latin literature.

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Commentary on Saint John the Apostle and Evangelist, Homilies 1–47
Saint John Chrysostom
Catholic University of America Press, 1957
No description available
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Commentary on Saint John the Apostle and Evangelist, Homilies 48–88
Saint John Chrysostom
Catholic University of America Press, 1957
No description available
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Commentary on the Apocalypse
Andrew of Caesarea
Catholic University of America Press, 2012
Striking a balance between the symbolic language of the book and its literal, prophetic fulfillment, Andrew?s interpretation is a remarkably intelligent, spiritual, and thoughtful commentary that encourages the pursuit of virtue and confidence in the love of God for humanity
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Commentary on the Apocalypse
John N. Oecumenius
Catholic University of America Press, 2006
No description available
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Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans
Peter Abelard
Catholic University of America Press, 2011
Despite its importance and the frequent references made to it by modern scholars, this commentary has never before been translated into English in its entirety. This volume, which includes an extensive introduction, fills this gap, thus providing a needed contribution to medieval scholarship.
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Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, Books 1-5
Origen
Catholic University of America Press, 2001
No description available
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Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, Books 6-10
Origen
Catholic University of America Press, 2002
No description available
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Commentary on the Gospel According to John, Books 13-32
Origen
Catholic University of America Press, 1989
No description available
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Commentary on the Gospel of John, Books 1-10
Origen
Catholic University of America Press, 1989
No description available
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Commentary on the Gospel of John
Chapters 13-21
Thomas Aquinas
Catholic University of America Press, 2010
No description available
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Commentary on the Gospel of John
Chapters 1-5
Thomas Aquinas
Catholic University of America Press, 2010
No description available
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Commentary on the Gospel of John, Chapters 6-12
Thomas Aquinas
Catholic University of America Press, 2010
No description available
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Commentary on the Lord’s Sermon on the Mount with Seventeen Related Sermons
Saint Augustine
Catholic University of America Press, 1951
No description available
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Commentary on the Old Greek and Peshitta of Isaiah 1–25
Ronald L. Troxel
SBL Press, 2020

The first thorough commentary on the Old Greek and Peshitta of Isaiah

Ronald L. Troxel’s new textual commentary on Isaiah focuses on the book’s Greek and Syriac translations and seeks to recover, as much as possible, the Hebrew texts on which these early translations relied. Troxel treats the Greek and Syriac together in order to present a detailed analysis of their relationship, devoting particular attention to whether the Syriac was directly or indirectly influenced by the Greek. This comparison sheds light on both the shared and distinct approaches that the translators took in rendering lexemes, phrases, verses, and even passages. In addition Troxel presents observations about the literary structures the translators created that differ from those implicit in their source texts (as we understand them), to produce coherent discourse in the target language.

Features:

  • Textual commentary on the life of the text of Isaiah 1–25
  • Use of the Dead Sea Scrolls to shed light on particular issues
  • Detailed comparison of the Masoretic Text, the Old Greek, and the Peshitta
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Commentary on the Psalms, Psalms 1-72
Robert C. Theodoret of Cyrus
Catholic University of America Press, 2000
No description available
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Commentary on the Songs of Songs
Vittorio Rupert of Deutz
Catholic University of America Press, 2024
This is the first English translation of a major work by Rupert of Deutz, arguably the most prolific Christian author since Augustine. During his lifetime, which spanned the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Rupert engaged in controversies on the Eucharist and on predestination and composed works on the Trinity, salvation in Christ, and other major theological topics. An ardent defender of a monastic theology that focused on the interpretation of Scripture and the liturgy, Rupert is well known also for his distinctive hermeneutical approach to the Bible. His Commentary on the Songs of Songs builds on the long Hebrew-Christian tradition of allegorical interpretation of this Old Testament book but adds a radically original dimension to it: it interprets the text as a dialogue between Jesus and Mary and unfolds in this context a novel approach to Mary, who is presented as the teacher of the apostles and assumed to have participated in the Apostolic Council, described in Acts 15. Rupert has prefaced his commentary with a letter to Thietmar, bishop of Verden (in northern Germany), as well as a prologue in which he reflects on his experience of being called to perform this exegetical task. The complete translation by Jieon Kim and Vittorio Hösle of this major work (up to now translated only into German) is preceded by an introduction that discusses Rupert's life and works, as well as the history of the interpretation of the Song of Songs, and offers hermeneutical reflections on Rupert's methodology.
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Commentary on the Twelve Prophets
Robert C. Theodore of Mopsuestia
Catholic University of America Press, 2004
No description available
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Commentary on the Twelve Prophets, Volume 1
Saint Cyril of Alexandria
Catholic University of America Press, 2007
No description available
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Commentary on the Twelve Prophets, Volume 2
Saint Cyril of Alexandria
Catholic University of America Press, 2007
No description available
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Commentary on the Twelve Prophets, Volume 3
Cyril of Alexandria
Catholic University of America Press, 2012
No description available
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Commentary on Zechariah
Robert C. Didymus the Blind
Catholic University of America Press, 2006
A disciple of Origen, whose work on Zechariah reached only to chapter five and is no longer extant, Didymus's commentary on this apocalyptic book illustrates the typically allegorical approach to the biblical text that we associate with Alexandria
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Common Calling
The Laity and Governance of the Catholic Church
Stephen J. Pope, Editor
Georgetown University Press, 2004

The sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church has been exacerbated in the minds of many by the dismal response of church leadership. Uncovered along with the abuse of power were decisions that were not only made in secrecy, but which also magnified the powerlessness of the people of the church to have any say in its governance. Accordingly, many have left the church, many have withheld funding—others have vowed to work for change, as witnessed by the phenomenal growth of Voice of the Faithful. Common Calling is indeed a call—for change, for inclusion, and a place at the table for the laity when it comes to the governance of the church.

By first providing compelling historical precedents of the roles and status of the laity as it functioned during the first millennium, Common Calling compares and contrasts those to the place of the laity today. It is this crossroad—between the past and the possible future of the Catholic Church—where the distinguished contributors to this volume gather in the hope and expectation of change. They examine the distinction between laity and clergy in regard to the power of church governance, and explore the theological interpretation of clergy-laity relations and governance in the teachings of the Second Vatican Council. They look at how church officials interpret the role of the laity today and address the weaknesses in that model. Finally, they speak clearly in outlining the ways governance may be improved, and how—by emphasizing dialogue, participation, gender equality, and loyalty—the role of the laity can be enhanced.

Speaking as active believers and academic specialists, all of the contributors assert that the church must evolve in the 21st century. They represent a variety of disciplines, including systematic theology, sacramental theology, canon law, political science, moral theology, pastoral theology, and management. The book also includes an essay by James Post, cofounder of the Catholic lay movement Voice of the Faithful, the organization that was in part responsible for the resignation of Boston's Cardinal Bernard Law. Common Calling looks to a future of transparency in the Catholic Church that, with an invested laity, will help to prevent any further abuse—especially the abuse of power.

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Common Ground
Islam, Christianity, and Religious Pluralism
Paul L. Heck
Georgetown University Press, 2009

Christian-Muslim interaction is a reality today in all corners of the globe, but while many celebrate the commonality of these traditions, significant differences remain. If these religions cannot be easily reconciled, can we perhaps view them through a single albeit refractive lens? This is the approach Paul Heck takes in Common Ground: To undertake a study of religious pluralism as a theological and social reality, and to approach the two religions in tandem as part of a broader discussion on the nature of the good society.

Rather than compare Christianity and Islam as two species of faith, religious pluralism offers a prism through which a society as a whole—secular and religious alike—can consider its core beliefs and values. Christianity and Islam are not merely identities that designate particular communities, but reference points that all can comprehend and discuss knowledgeably. This analysis of how Islam and Christianity understand theology, ethics, and politics—specifically democracy and human rights—offers a way for that discussion to move forward.

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A Common Humanity
Ritual, Religion, and Immigrant Advocacy in Tucson, Arizona
Lane Van Ham
University of Arizona Press, 2011
As debate about immigration policy rages from small towns to state capitals, from coffee shops to Congress, would-be immigrants are dying in the desert along the US–Mexico border. Beginning in the 1990s, the US government effectively sealed off the most common border crossing routes. This had the unintended effect of forcing desperate people to seek new paths across open desert. At least 4,000 of them died between 1995 and 2009. While some Americans thought the dead had gotten what they deserved, other Americans organized humanitarian aid groups. A Common Humanity examines some of the most active aid organizations in Tucson, Arizona, which has become a hotbed of advocacy on behalf of undocumented immigrants.

This is the first book to examine immigrant aid groups from the inside. Author Lane Van Ham spent more than three years observing the groups and many hours in discussions and interviews. He is particularly interested in how immigrant advocates both uphold the legitimacy of the United States and maintain a broader view of its social responsibilities. By advocating for immigrants regardless of their documentation status, he suggests, advocates navigate the conflicting pulls of their own nation-state citizenship and broader obligations to their neighbors in a globalizing world. And although the advocacy organizations are not overtly religious, Van Ham finds that they do employ religious symbolism as part of their public rhetoric, arguing that immigrants are entitled to humane treatment based on universal human values.

Beautifully written and immensely engaging, A Common Humanity adds a valuable human dimension to the immigration debate.
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The Common Legal Past of Europe, 1000–1800
Manlio Bellomo
Catholic University of America Press, 1995
With a vigor and passion rarely found in a scholarly text, Manlio Bellomo has written a broad history of the western European legal tradition. It is now made available to an English-speaking audience in an elegant and lucid translation from the original Italian.
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Commoner Ritual and Ideology in Ancient Mesoamerica
Nancy Gonlin
University Press of Colorado, 2016
Were most commoners in ancient Mesoamerica poor? In a material sense, yes, probably so. Were they poor in their beliefs and culture? Certainly not, as Commoner Ritual and Ideology in Ancient Mesoamerica demonstrates.

This volume explores the ritual life of Mesoamerica's common citizens, inside and outside of the domestic sphere, from Formative through Postclassic periods. Building from the premise that ritual and ideological expression inhered at all levels of society in Mesoamerica, the contributors demonstrate that ideology did not emanate solely from exalted individuals and that commoner ritual expression was not limited to household contexts. Taking an empirical approach to this under-studied and under-theorized area, contributors use material evidence to discover how commoner status conditioned the expression of ideas and values.

Revealing complex social hierarchies that varied across time and region, this volume offers theoretical approaches to commoner ideology, religious practice, and sociopolitical organization and builds a framework for future study of the correlation of ritual and ideological expression with social position for Mesoamericanists and archaeologists worldwide.
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Communicating Faith
John Sullivan
Catholic University of America Press, 2011
This book enriches appreciation of the many ways that Christian faith is communicated. It casts light on the sensitivities, skills, and qualities necessary for the effective communication of faith, where justice is done both to the "seed" to be sown and to the "soil" being cultivated.
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Communicating the Infinite
The Emergence of the Habad School
Naftali Loewenthal
University of Chicago Press, 1990
At the end of the eighteenth century the hasidic movement was facing an internal crisis: to what extent should the teachings of Baal Shem Tov and Maggid of Mezritch, with their implicit spiritual demands, be transmitted to the rank-and-file of the movement? Previously these teachings had been reserved for a small elite. It was at this point that the Habad school emerged with a communication ethos encouraging the transmission of esoteric to the broad reaches of the Jewish world. Communicating the Infinite explores the first two generations of the Habad school under R. Shneur Zalman of Liadi and his son R. Dov Ber and examines its early opponents.

Beginning with the different levels of communication in the teachings of the Baal Shem Tov and the Maggid and his disciples, Naftali Loewenthal traces the unfolding of the dialectic between the urge to transmit esoteric ideas and a powerful inner restraint. Gradually R. Shneur Zalman came to the fore as the prime exponent of the communication ethos. Loewenthal follows the development of his discourses up to the time of his death, when R. Dov Ber and R. Aaron Halevi Horowitz formed their respective "Lubavitch" and "Staroselye" schools. The author continues with a detailed examination of the teachings of R. Dov Ber, an inspired mystic. Central in his thought was the esoteric concept of self-abnegation, bitul, yet this combined with the quest to communicate hasidic teachings to every level of society, including women.

From the late eighteenth century onwards, the main problem for the Jewish world was posed by the fall of the walls of the social and political ghetto. Generally, the response was either to secularize, or abandon altogether, traditional Judaism or to retreat from the threatening modern world into enclave religiosity; by stressing communication, the Habad school opened the way for a middle range response that was neither a retreat into elitism nor an abandonment of tradition. Based on years of research from Hebrew and Yiddish primary source materials, Communicating the Infinite is a work of importance not only to specialists of Judaic studies but also to historians and sociologists.
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Communicating the Word
Revelation, Translation, and Interpretation in Christianity and Islam
David Marshall, Editor. Afterword by Archbishop Rowan Williams
Georgetown University Press, 2015

Communicating the Word is a record of the 2008 Building Bridges seminar, an annual dialogue between leading Christian and Muslim scholars convened by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Featuring the insights of internationally known Christian and Muslim scholars, the essays collected here focus attention on key scriptural texts but also engage with both classical and contemporary Islamic and Christian thought. Issues addressed include, among others, the different ways in which Christians and Muslims think of their scriptures as the “Word of God,” the possibilities and challenges of translating scripture, and the methods—and conflicts—involved in interpreting scripture in the past and today.

In his concluding reflections, Archbishop Rowan Williams draws attention to a fundamental point emerging from these fascinating contributions: “Islam and Christianity alike give a high valuation to the conviction that God speaks to us. Grasping what that does and does not mean . . . is challenging theological work.”

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Communication Culture in a Digital Age
Being Seriously Relational
Cristian Mendoza
St. Augustine's Press, 2023
Why are human beings so attracted to information and communication technologies? Developments in this field have formed new social networks around these technologies and that seem to compete with pre-existing structures in human lives. Cristian Mendoza and Lluís Clavell confront this phenomenon and its effect on human happiness, but have no desire to condemn the trajectory of human reliance on communication technology. Rather, they see an opportunity to explore human nature at greater depths. Only in this way can our use of technology properly support human activity and not sabotage our grasp of reality. 

Mendoza and Clavell's treatment of this topic renders an important philosophical conversation about digital realities and how they can actually make human life more human. This book provides a framework for using human attraction to information and communication tech for human benefit. It can be done! The authors apply the work of old and new masters to help open the new horizons of communication technology wherein human beings can flourish.
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Communication, Pedagogy, and the Gospel of Mark
Elizabeth E. Shively
SBL Press, 2016
Reflections on the relationship between research and teaching

Using Mark as a test case, scholars address questions like: How should my research and my approach to the text play out in the classroom? What differences should my academic context and my students' expectations make? How should new approaches and innovations inform interpretation and teaching? This resource enables biblical studies instructors to explore various interpretative approaches and to begin to engage pedagogical issues in our changing world.

Features:

  • Ideas that may be adapted for teaching any biblical text
  • Diverse perspectives from nine experts in their fields
  • Essays include tips, ideas, and lesson plans for the classroom
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Communism, Religion, and Revolt in Banten in the Early Twentieth Century
Mis Sea#86
Michael Williams
Ohio University Press, 1990

Twice in this century popular revolts against colonial rule have occured in the Banten district of West Java. These revolts, conducted largely under an Islamic leadership, also proclaimed themselves Communist. Islamic Communism is seemingly a paradox. This is especially the case when one considers that probably no religion has proved more resistant to Communist ideology than Islam.

Michael Williams here details the complicated history of the Bantenese revolts in the twentieth century and probes the ideological riddle of Islamic Communism. Modern history is replete with examples of regions with a long history of organizing themselves politically to resist intrusion on their territory, resources, and people. This book establishes that in Indonesia, the Bantenese were among the most practiced exponents of resistance.

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Communities in Dispute
Current Scholarship on the Johannine Epistles
R. Alan Culpepper
SBL Press, 2014

Presenting the best work on the Johannine Epistles from a world-class gathering of scholars

This anthology includes papers presented at the McAfee School of Theology Symposium on the Johannine Epistles (2010). Contributions on the relationship between the Gospel of John and the Letters of John, Johannine theology and ethics, the concept of the Antichrist, and the role of the elder round out the collection. This is a must-have book for libraries and New Testament scholars.

Features:

  • Introductory essay places the collection in context
  • Articles engage the work of Raymond Brown and J. Louis Martyn
  • Sixteen essays from the Book of Psalms Consultation group and invited scholars
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The Community of Believers
Christian and Muslim Perspectives
Lucinda Mosher and David Marshall, Editors
Georgetown University Press, 2015

The Community of Believers offers the proceedings of the 2013 Building Bridges seminar, a dialogue between leading Christian and Muslim scholars under the stewardship of Georgetown University.

These essays consider such themes as the Church as mystical body of Christ versus the Church as proclamation; the roots and uses of the term ummah and its development over time; Christian desires for communion, experiences of division, and approaches to unity; the history of Muslim disunity; twentieth-century Christian ecclesiology and its responses to a post-Christendom and post-Christian world; and the Arab Spring as a case study for contemplating accommodationism, conservatism, reformism, and fundamentalism as Muslim strategies to address the pressures of modernism. The volume also includes texts and commentaries used in the seminar’s discussions of each topic and a concluding essay summarizing the tone, content, and style of participant exchanges throughout the seminar.

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The Community of St. Cuthbert in the Late Tenth Century
The Chester-le-Street Additions to Durham Cathedral Library A.IV.19
Karen Louise Jolly
The Ohio State University Press, 2012

The Community of St. Cuthbert in the Late Tenth Century: The Chester-le-Street Additions to Durham Cathedral Library A.IV.19 reveals the dynamic role a seemingly marginalized community played during a defining period for the emergence of English religious identity. Based on her new critical edition of additions made to Durham Cathedral Library A.IV.19 and by questioning the purpose of those late tenth-century additions, Karen Louise Jolly is able to uncover much about the Chester-le-Street scribes and their tumultuous time, rife as it was with various political tensions, from Vikings and local Northumbrian nobles to an increasingly dominant West Saxon monarchy.

Why, for instance, would a priest laboriously insert an Old English gloss above every Latin word in a collection of prayers intended to be performed in Latin? What motivated the same English scribe to include Irish-derived Christian materials in the manuscript, including prayers invoking the archangel Panchiel to clear birds from a field?

Jolly’s extensive contextual analysis includes a biography of Aldred, the priest and provost of the community primarily responsible for adding these unusual texts. Besides reinterpreting the manuscript's paleography and codicology, she investigates both the drive for reform evidenced by the added liturgical materials and the new importance of Irish-derived encyclopedic and educational materials.
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The Community Rule
A Critical Edition with Translation
Sarianna Metso
SBL Press, 2019

An authoritative critical edition

The discovery and translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls transformed our understanding of the life and history of ancient Jewish communities when both rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity were emerging. As part of this rich discovery, the Community Rule serves to illuminate the religious beliefs and practices as well as the organizational rules of the group behind the Dead Sea Scrolls. However, there is no single, unified text of the Community Rule; rather, multiple manuscripts of the Community Rule show considerable variation and highlight the work of ancient Jewish scribes and their intentional literary development of the text. In this volume, Sarianna Metso brings together the surviving evidence in a new edition that presents a critically established Hebrew text with an introduction and an English translation.

Features:

  • A critical apparatus and textual notes
  • All the surviving evidence of the Community Rule
  • A new method for presenting complex developments and transmission history of ancient texts
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A Companion to Margaret More Roper Studies
Life Records, Essential Texts, and Critical Essays
Elizabeth McCutcheon
Catholic University of America Press, 2022
This volume is an important contribution to the field of Margaret More Roper studies, early modern women's writing, as well as Erasmian piety, Renaissance humanism, and historical and cultural studies more generally.

Margaret More Roper is the learned daughter of St. Thomas More, the Catholic martyr; their lives are closely linked to each other and to early sixteenth-century changes in politics and religion and the social upheaval and crises of conscience that they brought. Specifically, Roper's major works - her translation of Erasmus's commentary on the Lord's Prayer and the long dialogue letter between More and Roper on conscience - highlight two major preoccupations of the period: Erasmian humanism and More's last years, which led to his death and martyrdom.

Roper was one of the most learned women of her time and a prototype of the woman writer in England, and this edited volume is a tribute to her life, writings, and place among early women authors. It combines comprehensive and convenient joining of biographical, textual, historical, and critical components within a single volume for the modern reader. There is no comparable study in print, and it fills a significant gap in studies of early modern women writers.
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Companions in the Mission of Jesus
Texts for Prayer and Reflection in the Lenten and Easter Seasons
Brian E. Daley, SJ, and Vincent T. O'Keefe, SJ, Editors
Georgetown University Press, 1987

A sequel and companion to Place Me with Your Son, this anthology of passages from the writings of St. Ignatius of Loyola and from the foundation documents of the Society of Jesus are arranged thematically so as to be suitable for prayerful reading during the Lenten and Easter seasons.

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Comparative Essays on the Poetry and Prose of John Donne and George Herbert
Combined Lights
Russell M. Hillier
University of Delaware Press, 2022
This book brings together ten essays on John Donne and George Herbert composed by an international group of scholars. The volume represents the first collection of its kind to draw close connections between these two distinguished early modern thinkers and poets who are justly coupled because of their personal and artistic association. The contributors' distinctive new approaches and insights illuminate a variety of topics and fields while suggesting new directions that future study of Donne and Herbert might take. Some chapters explore concrete instances of collaboration or communication between Donne and Herbert, and others find fresh ways to contextualize the Donnean and Herbertian lyric, carefully setting the poetry alongside discourses of apophatic theology or early modern political theory, while still others link Herbert's verse to Donne's devotional prose. Several chapters establish specific theological and aesthetic grounds for comparison, considering Donne and Herbert's respective positions on religious assurance, comic sensibility, and virtuosity with poetic endings. 
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Competing Kingdoms
Women, Mission, Nation, and the American Protestant Empire, 1812–1960
Barbara Reeves-Ellington, Kathryn Kish Sklar, and Connie A. Shemo, eds.
Duke University Press, 2010
Competing Kingdoms rethinks the importance of women and religion within U.S. imperial culture from the early nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth. In an era when the United States was emerging as a world power to challenge the hegemony of European imperial powers, American women missionaries strove to create a new Kingdom of God. They did much to shape a Protestant empire based on American values and institutions. This book examines American women’s activism in a broad transnational context. It offers a complex array of engagements with their efforts to provide rich intercultural histories about the global expansion of American culture and American Protestantism.

An international and interdisciplinary group of scholars, the contributors bring under-utilized evidence from U.S. and non-U.S. sources to bear on the study of American women missionaries abroad and at home. Focusing on women from several denominations, they build on the insights of postcolonial scholarship to incorporate the agency of the people among whom missionaries lived. They explore how people in China, the Congo Free State, Egypt, India, Japan, Ndebeleland (colonial Rhodesia), Ottoman Bulgaria, and the Philippines perceived, experienced, and negotiated American cultural expansion. They also consider missionary work among people within the United States who were constructed as foreign, including African Americans, Native Americans, and Chinese immigrants. By presenting multiple cultural perspectives, this important collection challenges simplistic notions about missionary cultural imperialism, revealing the complexity of American missionary attitudes toward race and the ways that ideas of domesticity were reworked and appropriated in various settings. It expands the field of U.S. women’s history into the international arena, increases understanding of the global spread of American culture, and offers new concepts for analyzing the history of American empire.

Contributors: Beth Baron, Betty Bergland, Mary Kupiec Cayton, Derek Chang, Sue Gronewold, Jane Hunter, Sylvia Jacobs, Susan Haskell Khan, Rui Kohiyama, Laura Prieto, Barbara Reeves-Ellington, Mary Renda, Connie A. Shemo, Kathryn Kish Sklar, Ian Tyrrell, Wendy Urban-Mead

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The Complementarity of Women and Men
Philosophy, Theology, Psychology, and Art
Paul C. Vitz
Catholic University of America Press, 2021
The Complementarity of Women and Men provides a Catholic Christian case that men and women are in certain respects quite different but also have a positive, synergistic complementary relationship. Although differences and their mutually supporting relationships are focused on throughout the volume, men and women are assumed to have equal dignity and value. This underlying interpretation comes from the familiar, basic theological position in Genesis that both sexes were made in the image of God. After a cogent philosophical introduction to complementary differences by J. Budziszewski, this position is developed from theological, philosophical, and historical perspectives by Sr. Prudence Allen. Next Deborah Savage, building upon the writings of St. John Paul II, gives a strong theological basis for complementarity. This is followed by Elizabeth Lev’s chapter presenting new and surprising art history evidence from the paintings of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel supporting the complementarity interpretation. A final chapter by Paul Vitz documents and summarizes the scientific evidence supporting sexual difference and complementarity in the disciplines of psychology and neuroscience. As a consequence of both the individual chapters and the integrated understanding they present The Complementarity of Women and Men is a significant contribution to the important, complex, contemporary debate about men, women, sex, and gender.
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