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Thérèse of Lisieux died on 30 September 1897. Nine months later, the now classic Story of a Soul appeared and proved an immediate success. However, when historians had access fifty years later to manuscripts written by Thérèse they were surprised to discover enormous differences between these texts and the published version of Story of a Soul.Jean-François Six has written this new book with two purposes. First, he recalls the history of how Mother Agnés, Prioress of the Carmelite convent and sister of Thérèse altered and completed Thérèse's text so that it became a travesty of the original. Secondly he re-establishes the truth of the last months of Thérèse's life, her authentic spiritual message, and her contribution to the history of mysticism.Here is a key study and a crucial work of rehabilitation.

From the time they first met as undergraduates at Columbia College in New York City in the mid-1930s, the noted editor Robert Giroux (1914-2008) and the Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton (1915-1968) became friends. The Letters of Robert Giroux and Thomas Merton capture their personal and professional relationship, extending from the time of the publication of Merton's 1948 best-selling spiritual autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, until a few months before Merton's untimely death in December 1968. As editor-in-chief at Harcourt, Brace & Company and then at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Giroux not only edited twenty-six of Merton's books but served as an adviser to Merton as he dealt with unexpected problems with his religious superiors at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky, as well as those in France and Italy.These letters, arranged chronologically, offer invaluable insights into the publishing process that brought some of Merton's most important writings to his readers. Patrick Samway, S.J., had unparalleled access not only to the materials assembled here but to Giroux's unpublished talks about Merton, which he uses to his advantage, especially in his beautifully crafted introduction that interweaves the stories of both men with a chronicle of their personal and collaborative relationship. The result is a rich and rewarding volume, which shows how Giroux helped Merton to become one of the greatest spiritual writers of the twentieth century.

As the only daughter of Blanche of Castile, one of France's most powerful queens, and as the sister of the Capetian saint Louis IX, Isabelle of France (1225-1270) was situated at the nexus of sanctity and power during a significant era of French culture and medieval history. In this ground-breaking examination of Isabelle's career, Sean Field uses a wealth of previously unstudied material to address significant issues in medieval religious history, including the possibilities for women's religious authority, the creation and impact of royal sanctity, and the relationship between men and women within the mendicant orders. Field reinterprets Isabelle's career as a Capetian princess. Isabelle was remarkable for choosing a life of holy virginity and for founding and co-authoring a rule for the Franciscan abbey of Longchamp. Isabelle did not become a nun there, but remained a powerful lay patron, living in a modest residence on the abbey grounds. Field maintains that Isabelle was a key actor in creating the aura of sanctity that surrounded the French royal family in the thirteenth century, underscoring the link between the growth of Capetian prestige and power and the idea of a divinely ordained, virtuous, and holy royal family. Her contemporary reputation for sanctity emerges from a careful analysis of the Life of Isabelle of France written by the third abbess of Longchamp, Agnes of Harcourt, and from papal bulls, letters, and other contemporary sources that have only recently come to light.Field also argues that Isabelle had a profound effect on the institutional history of Franciscan women. By remaining outside the official Franciscan and church hierarchies, Isabelle maintained an ambiguous position that allowed her to embrace Franciscan humility while retaining royal influence. Her new order of Sorores minores was eagerly adopted by a number of communities, and her rule for the order eventually spread from France to England, Italy, and Spain. An important study of a medieval woman's agency and power, Isabelle of France explores the life of a remarkable figure in French and Franciscan history.

Described by David Lodge as "the most gifted and innovative writer of her generation," Muriel Spark had a literary career that spanned from the late 1940s until her death in 2006, and included poems, stories, plays, essays, and, most notably, novels. The extensive bibliography of her works included in this collection reveals the astonishing output of a powerful and sustained creative spirit. Hidden Possibilities gathers a distinguished group of writers from both sides of the Atlantic to offer an informed overview of Muriel Spark's life and work. Critics have often read Spark in a somewhat narrow context--as a Catholic, a woman, or a Scottish writer. The essays in this volume, while making connections between these contexts, cumulatively situate her in a broader European tradition. The volume includes interviews with Spark that cast light both on the course of her professional life and on her notably distinctive personality. Contributors: Regina Barreca, Gerard Carruthers, Barbara Epler, John Glavin, Dan Gunn, Robert E. Hosmer Jr., Joseph Hynes, Gabriel Josipovici, Frank Kermode, John Lanchester, Doris Lessing, David Malcolm, John Mortimer, Alan Taylor, and John Updike.

Herbert Marcuse called the preface to Hegel's Phenomenology "one of the greatest philosophical undertakings of all times." This summary of Hegel's system of philosophy is now available in English translation with commentary on facing pages. While remaining faithful to the author's meaning, Walter Kaufmann has removed many encumbrances inherent in Hegel's style.

Margot E. Fassler's richly documented history--winner of the Otto Kinkeldey Award from the American Musicological Society and the John Nicholas Brown Prize from the Medieval Academy of America--demonstrates how the Augustinians of St. Victor, Paris, used an art of memory to build sonic models of the church. This musical art developed over time, inspired by the religious ideals of Hugh and Richard of St. Victor and their understandings of image and the spiritual journey. Gothic Song: Victorine Sequences and Augustinian Reform in Twelfth-Century Paris demonstrates the centrality of sequences to western medieval Christian liturgical and artistic experience, and to our understanding of change and continuity in medieval culture. Fassler examines the figure of Adam of St. Victor and the possible layers within the repertories created at various churches in Paris, probes the ways the Victorine sequences worked musically and exegetically, and situates this repertory within the intellectual and spiritual ideals of the Augustinian canons regular, especially those of the Abbey of St. Victor. Originally published in hardover in 1993, this paperback edition includes a new introduction by Fassler, in which she reviews the state of scholarship on late sequences since the original publication of Gothic Song. Her notes to the introduction provide the bibliography necessary for situating the Victorine sequences, and the late sequences in general, in contemporary thought.

Engineering Education and Practice: Embracing a Catholic Vision is a collection of essays exploring how major themes of Catholic social teaching--respect for the environment, sustainability, technological design, and service to the poor--all positively affect engineering curricula, students, and faculty. Many engineering programs at American universities focus solely on developing technological sophistication without promoting ethical and humanitarian priorities. The contributors to this collection argue, however, that undergraduate engineering education needs to be broadened beyond its current narrow restrictions. The authors of this unique collection, nearly all of whom are engineers themselves, show how some Christian universities in the United States have found creative ways of opening up their engineering curricula. They demonstrate how the professional education of engineers can be enriched not only by ethical and religious themes, which are typically isolated in humanities curricula, but also by special fieldwork courses that offer hands-on service-learning opportunities and embody a rich educational synthesis.

Historians and cultural critics face special challenges when treating the nonhuman natural world in the medieval and early modern periods. Their most daunting problem is that in both the visual and written records of the time, nature seems to be both everywhere and nowhere. In the broadest sense, nature was everywhere, for it was vital to human survival. Agriculture, animal husbandry, medicine, and the patterns of human settlement all have their basis in natural settings. Humans also marked personal, community, and seasonal events by natural occurrences and built their cultural explanations around the workings of nature, which formed the unspoken backdrop for every historical event and document of the time. Yet in spite of the ubiquity of nature's continual presence in the physical surroundings and the artistic and literary cultures of these periods, overt discussion of nature is often hard to find. Until the sixteenth century, responses to nature were quite often recorded only in the course of investigating other subjects. In a very real sense, nature went without saying. As a result, modern scholars analyzing the concept of nature in the history of medieval and early modern Europe must often work in deeply interdisciplinary ways. This challenge is deftly handled by the contributors to Engaging with Nature, whose essays provide insights into such topics as concepts of animal/human relationships; environmental and ecological history; medieval hunting; early modern collections of natural objects; the relationship of religion and nature; the rise of science; and the artistic representations of exotic plants and animals produced by Europeans encountering the New World.

Louis IX, king of France from 1226 to 1270 and twice crusader, was canonized in 1297. He was the last king canonized during the medieval period, and was both one of the most important saints and one of the most important kings of the later Middle Ages. In Blessed Louis, the Most Glorious of Kings: Texts Relating to the Cult of Saint Louis of France, M. Cecilia Gaposchkin presents six previously untranslated texts that informed medieval views of St. Louis IX: two little-known but early and important vitae of Saint Louis; two unedited sermons by the Parisian preacher Jacob of Lausanne (d. 1322); and a liturgical office and proper mass in his honor--the most commonly used liturgical texts composed for Louis' feast day--which were widely copied, read, and disseminated in the Middle Ages. Gaposchkin's aim is to present to a diverse readership the Louis as he was known and experienced in the Middle Ages: a saint celebrated by the faithful for his virtue and his deeds. She offers for the first time to English readers a typical hagiographical view of Saint Louis, one in counterbalance to that set forth in Jean of Joinville's Life of Saint Louis. Although Joinville's Life has dominated our views of Louis, Joinville's famous account was virtually unknown beyond the French royal court in the Middle Ages and was not printed until the sixteenth century. His portrayal of Louis as an individual and deeply charismatic personality is remarkable, but it is fundamentally unrepresentative of the medieval understanding of Louis. The texts that Gaposchkin translates give immediate access to the reasons why medieval Christians took Louis to be a saint; the texts, and the image of Saint Louis presented in them, she argues, must be understood within the context of the developing history of sanctity and sainthood at the end of the Middle Ages.

The central theme in any history of texts and books must be that of change and renewal: Parchment that is written on, in one set of circumstances in late antiquity, may in the Early Middle Ages be scraped clean and written on again, leaving evidence of a civilization in which blank parchment is more valuable than ancient literature. A manuscript can be regarded as an archeological artifact, but unlike pieces of pottery or chips of flint, a manuscript has a voice.The 12 essays gathered here vary in subject from the transmission of ancient authors to the invention of the subject index and range in time from the Gregorian reform of the eleventh century to the Protestant reformation of the early sixteenth century. Diverse in subject and period, these essays are unified by the questions they pose and the methodology they employ in seeking answers. A common thread is the desire to discover what information the manuscripts can yield about the society that created them: how the great concordance to the Bible was compiled, how book production at the medieval university was organized, how a vernacular poet carried his songs.Each surviving manuscript exists not only by the decision of the original maker but as a result of subsequent owners, who made notes, entered corrections, added an index composed a continuation. Changing times brought new uses for old texts changes that are reflected, like personal and cultural fingerprints, in glosses, marginalia, even the chain marks showing how the book was kept in the medieval library.

Michael H. McCarthy has carefully studied the writings of Bernard Lonergan (Canadian philosopher-theologian, 1904-1984) for over fifty years. In his 1989 book, The Crisis of Philosophy, McCarthy argued for the superiority of Lonergan's distinctive philosophical project to those of his analytic and phenomenological rivals. Now in Authenticity as Self-Transcendence: The Enduring Insights of Bernard Lonergan, he develops and expands his earlier argument with four new essays, designed to show Lonergan's exceptional relevance to the cultural situation of late modernity. The essays explore and appraise Lonergan's cultural mission: to raise Catholic philosophy and theology to meet the intellectual challenges and standards of his time.

Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941) was one of the greatest spiritual writers of the twentieth century. Living most of her life in England, Underhill used writing as a vehicle to express her passionate search for the infinite life. Her philosophy transcends generations and her legacy as a pivotal figure in Christian mysticism endures today. In this comprehensive biography Dana Greene expertly captures Underhill's true essence. She gives us a thorough account of Underhill's development as a mystic and theologian and also explores beyond to the heart of who she was as a person. The connections Greene makes between Underhill's personal life and work create an in-depth and accurate portrait of this extraordinary woman.

The "long twelfth century"--1050 to 1215--embraces one of the transformative moments in European history: the point, for some, at which Europe first truly became "Europe." Historians have used the terms "renaissance,""reformation,"and "revolution" to account for the dynamism of intellectual, religious, and structural renewal manifest across schools, monasteries, courts, and churches. Complicating the story, more recent historical work has highlighted manifestations of social crisis and oppression. In European Transformations: The Long Twelfth Century, nineteen accomplished medievalists examine this pivotal era under the rubric of "transformation" a time of epoch-making change both good and ill, a release of social and cultural energies that proved innovative and yet continuous with the past. Their collective reappraisal, although acknowledging insights gained from over a century of scholarship, fruitfully adjusts the questions and alters the accents. In addition to covering such standard regions as England and France, and such standard topics as feudalism and investiture, the contributors also address Scandinavia, Iberia, and Eastern Europe, women's roles in medieval society, Jewish and Muslim communities, law and politics, and the complexities of urban and rural situations. With their diverse and challenging contributions, the authors offer a new point of departure for students and scholars attempting to grasp the dynamic puzzle of twelfth-century Europe.

This collection of original essays examines debates on how written, printed, visual, and performed works produced meaning in American culture before 1900. The contributors argue that America has been a multimedia culture since the eighteenth century. According to Sandra M. Gustafson, the verbal arts before 1900 manifest a strikingly rich pattern of development and change. From the wide variety of indigenous traditions, through the initial productions of settler communities, to the elaborations of colonial, postcolonial, and national expressive forms, the shifting dynamics of performed, manuscript-based, and printed verbal art capture critical elements of rapidly changing societies. The contributors address performances of religion and government, race and gender, poetry, theater, and song. Their studies are based on texts--intended for reading silently or out loud--maps, recovered speech, and pictorial sources. As these essays demonstrate, media, even when they appear to be fixed, reflected a dynamic American experience.Contributors: Caroline F. Sloat, Matthew P. Brown, David S. Shields, Martin Brückner, Jeffrey H. Richards, Phillip H. Round, Hilary E. Wyss, Angela Vietto, Katherine Wilson, Joan Newlon Radner, Ingrid Satelmajer, Joycelyn Moody, Philip F. Gura, Coleman Hutchison, Oz Frankel, Susan S. Williams, Laura Burd Schiavo, and Sandra M. Gustafson

Stanley Hauerwas presents an overall introduction to the themes and method that have distinguished his vision of Christian ethics. Emphasizing the significance of Jesus' life and teaching in shaping moral life, The Peaceable Kingdom stresses the narrative character of moral rationality and the necessity of a historic community and tradition for morality. Hauerwas systematically develops the importance of character and virtue as elements of decision making and spirituality and stresses nonviolence as critical for shaping our understanding of Christian ethics.

Landscape is never static, but changes continuously when seen in relation to human occupation, movement, labor, and discourse. Contested Territory explores the ways in which Peru's early colonial landscapes were experienced and portrayed, especially by the Spanish conquerors but also by their conquered subjects. It focuses on the role played by indigenous groups in shaping the Spanish experiences of landscapes, the diverse geographical images of Peru and ways in which these were constructed and contested, and what this can tell us about the nature of colonial relations in post-conquest Peru. This exceptional study, which draws from archival records and sources such as cartographies, offers a richly nuanced view of the complexity of colonial relations. It will be read with appreciation by those interested in Spanish history, geography, and colonialism.

For scholars of medieval literature, confession, with its language of sin and contrition, has often provided the basis for our understanding of medieval selfhood and subjectivity. Confessional texts, whether penitential manuals or literary depictions of confession, suggest ways that people spoke about themselves and how they understood their interiority.In Confession and Resistance, Katherine C. Little cautions that medieval selfhood should not be understood merely in terms of confessional practice. She points to the controversy over confession and, more generally, lay instruction that was generated in late medieval England around the heresy known as Wycliffism (or Lollardy). This controversy, she maintains, reveals the contested nature of the language of medieval selfhood.Through her readings of Wycliffite sermons and polemical writings, Little argues that the Lollard resistance to confession should be understood as a debate over self-formation. For the Wycliffites, traditional confessional language had failed in its expected function--to define the self and to reveal the interior--and had to be replaced with new terms and new stories taken from the Bible. This new view of Wycliffism, as a crisis in the language of selfhood, allows the author to reevaluate the impact of Wycliffite ideas in Chaucer's Parson's Tale, Gower's Confessio Amantis, and Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes. Little finds in these texts, all of which include confession as a theme, a similar concern with the inadequacy of the traditional confessional mode.

At the end of his landmark 1994 book, The Soul of the American University, historian George Marsden asserted that religious faith does indeed have a place in today's academia. Marsden's contention sparked a heated debate on the role of religious faith and intellectual scholarship in academic journals and in the mainstream media. The contributors to Confessing History: Explorations in Christian Faith and the Historian's Vocation expand the discussion about religion's role in education and culture and examine what the relationship between faith and learning means for the academy today. The contributors to Confessing History ask how the vocation of historian affects those who are also followers of Christ. What implications do Christian faith and practice have for living out one's calling as an historian? And to what extent does one's calling as a Christian disciple speak to the nature, quality, or goals of one's work as scholar, teacher, adviser, writer, community member, or social commentator? Written from several different theological and professional points of view, the essays collected in this volume explore the vocation of the historian and its place in both the personal and professional lives of Christian disciples.

In 1991, acclaimed poet Kenneth A. McClane published Walls: Essays, 1985-1990, a volume of essays dealing with life in Harlem, the death of his alcoholic brother, and the complexities of being black and middle-class in America. Now, in Color: Essays on Race, Family, and History, McClane contributes further to his self-described "autobiographical sojourn" with a second collection of interconnected essays. In McClane's words, "All concern race, although they, like the human spirit, wildly sweep and yaw." A timely installment in our national narrative, Color is a chronicle of the black middle class, a group rarely written about with sensitivity and charity. In evocative, trenchant, and poetic prose, McClane employs the art of the memoirist to explore the political and the personal. He details the poignant narrative of racial progress as witnessed by his family during the 1950s, '60s, and '70s. We learn of his parents' difficult upbringing in Boston, where they confronted much racism; of the struggles they and McClane encountered as they became the first blacks to enter previously all-white institutions, including the oldest independent school in the United States; and of the part his parents played in the civil rights movement, working with Dr. King and others. The book ends with a tender account of his parents in the throes of Alzheimer's disease, which claimed both their lives.

Maurice Blanchot is perhaps best known as a major French intellectual of the twentieth century: the man who countered Sartre's views on literature, who affirmed the work of Sade and Lautréamont, who gave eloquent voice to the generation of '68, and whose philosophical and literary work influenced the writing of, among others, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault. He is also regarded as one of the most acute narrative writers in France since Marcel Proust. In Clandestine Encounters, Kevin Hart has gathered together major literary critics in Britain, France, and the United States to engage with Blanchot's immense, fascinating, and difficult body of creative work. Hart's substantial introduction usefully places Blanchot as a significant contributor to the tradition of the French philosophical novel, beginning with Voltaire's Candide in 1759, and best known through the works of Sartre. Clandestine Encounters considers a selection of Blanchot's narrative writings over the course of almost sixty years, from stories written in the mid-1930s to L'instant de ma mort (1994). Collectively, the contributors' close readings of Blanchot's novels, recits, and stories illuminate the close relationship between philosophy and narrative in his work while underscoring the variety and complexity of these narratives.Contributors: Christophe Bident, Arthur Cools, Thomas S. Davis, Christopher Fynsk, Rodolphe Gasché, Kevin Hart, Leslie Hill, Michael Holland, Stephen E. Lewis, Vivian Liska, Caroline Sheaffer-Jones, Christopher A. Strathman, Alain Toumayan

Bound Fast with Letters brings together in one volume many of the significant contributions that Richard H. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse have made over the past forty years to the study of medieval manuscripts through the prism of textual transmission and manuscript production. The eighteen essays collected here address medieval authors, craftsmen, book producers, and patrons of manuscripts from different epochs in the Middle Ages, extending from late antiquity to the early Renaissance, and ranging from North Africa to northern England. Their investigations reveal valuable information about the history of texts and their transmission, and their careful scrutiny of texts and of the physical manuscripts that convey them illuminate the societies that created, read, and preserved these objects. The book begins in Part I with articles on writers from the patristic era through the twelfth century who experimented with, and mastered, various physical forms of presenting ideas in writing. Part II contains essays on patronage and patrons, including Richard de Fournival, Jean de Brienne, Watriquet de Couvin, Pope Clement V, the Counts of Saint-Pol, and Christine de Pizan. Part III, on manuscript producers, discusses the questions, for whom? and by whom? were manuscripts made. The four essays in this section each reflect on a different part of the process of book-making. Throughout, Bound Fast with Letters focuses on the close ties between the physical remains of literate culture--from the wax tablets of the patristic era to the vernacular literature of the wealthy laity of the late Middle Ages--and their social and economic context.

More than any other secular story of the Middle Ages, the tale of Tristan and Isolde fascinated its audience. Adaptations in poetry, prose, and drama were widespread in western European vernacular languages. Visual portrayals of the story appear not only in manuscripts and printed books but in individual pictures and pictorial narratives, and on an amazing array of objects including stained glass, wall paintings, tiles, tapestries, ivory boxes, combs, mirrors, shoes, and misericords. The pan-European and cross-media nature of the surviving medieval evidence is not adequately reflected in current Tristan scholarship, which largely follows disciplinary and linguistic lines. The contributors to Visuality and Materiality in the Story of Tristan and Isolde seek to address this problem by opening a cross-disciplinary dialogue and by proposing a new set of intellectual coordinates--the concepts of materiality and visuality--without losing sight of the historical specificity or the aesthetic character of individual works of art and literature. Their theoretical paradigm allows them to survey the richness of the surviving evidence from a variety of disciplinary approaches, while offering new perspectives on the nature of representation in medieval culture. Enriched by numerous illustrations, this volume is an important examination of the story of Tristan and Isolde in the European context of its visual and textual transmission.

Arabic literary salons emerged in ninth-century Iraq and, by the tenth, were flourishing in Baghdad and other urban centers. In an age before broadcast media and classroom education, salons were the primary source of entertainment and escape for middle- and upper-rank members of society, serving also as a space and means for educating the young. Although salons relied on a culture of oral performance from memory, scholars of Arabic literature have focused almost exclusively on the written dimensions of the tradition. That emphasis, argues Samer Ali, has neglected the interplay of oral and written, as well as of religious and secular knowledge in salon society, and the surprising ways in which these seemingly discrete categories blurred in the lived experience of participants. Looking at the period from 500 to 1250, and using methods from European medieval studies, folklore, and cultural anthropology, Ali interprets Arabic manuscripts in order to answer fundamental questions about literary salons as a social institution. He identifies salons not only as sites for socializing and educating, but as loci for performing literature and oral history; for creating and transmitting cultural identity; and for continually reinterpreting the past. A fascinating recovery of a key element of humanistic culture, Ali's work will encourage a recasting of our understanding of verbal art, cultural memory, and daily life in medieval Arab culture.

In Hermeneutics and the Church, James A. Andrews presents a close reading of De doctrina christiana as a whole and places Augustine's text into dialogue with contemporary theological hermeneutics. The dialogical nature of the exercise allows Augustine to remain a living voice in contemporary debates about the use of theology in biblical interpretation. In particular, Andrews puts Augustine's hermeneutical treatise into dialogue with the theologians Werner Jeanrond and Stephen Fowl.Andrews argues on the basis of De doctrina christiana that the paradigm for theological interpretation is the sermon and that its end is to engender the double love of God and neighbor. With the sermon as the paradigm of interpretation, Hermeneutics and the Church offers practical conclusions for future work in historical theology and biblical interpretation. For Augustine scholars, Andrews offers a reading of De doctrina that takes seriously the entirety of the work and allows Augustine to speak consistently through words written at the beginning and end of his bishopric. For theologians, this book provides a model of how to engage theologically with the past, and, more than that, it offers the actual fruits of such an engagement: suggestions for the discipline of theological hermeneutics and the practice of scriptural interpretation.

Gregory the Great (bishop of Rome from 590 to 604) is one of the most significant figures in the history of Christianity. His theological works framed medieval Christian attitudes toward mysticism, exegesis, and the role of the saints in the life of the church. The scale of Gregory's administrative activity in both the ecclesial and civic affairs of Rome also helped to make possible the formation of the medieval papacy. Gregory disciplined malcontent clerics, negotiated with barbarian rulers, and oversaw the administration of massive estates that employed thousands of workers. Scholars have often been perplexed by the two sides of Gregory--the monkish theologian and the calculating administrator. George E. Demacopoulos's study is the first to advance the argument that there is a clear connection between the pontiff's thought and his actions. By exploring unique aspects of Gregory's ascetic theology, wherein the summit of Christian perfection is viewed in terms of service to others, Demacopoulos argues that the very aspects of Gregory's theology that made him distinctive were precisely the factors that structured his responses to the practical crises of his day. With a comprehensive understanding of Christian history that resists the customary bifurcation between Christian East and Christian West, Demacopoulos situates Gregory within the broader movements of Christianity and the Roman world that characterize the shift from late antiquity to the early Middle Ages. This fresh reading of Gregory's extensive theological and practical works underscores the novelty and nuance of Gregory as thinker and bishop.

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

"The object of this book," writes William C. Dowling in his preface, "is to make the key concepts of Paul Ricoeur's Time and Narrative available to readers who might have felt bewildered by the twists and turns of its argument." The sources of puzzlement are, he notes, many. For some, it is Ricoeur's famously indirect style of presentation, in which the polarities of argument and exegesis seem so often and so suddenly to have reversed themselves. For others, it is the extraordinary intellectual range of Ricoeur's argument, drawing on traditions as distant from each other as Heideggerian existentialism, French structuralism, and Anglo-American analytic philosophy. Yet beneath the labyrinthian surface of Ricoeur's Temps et récit, Dowling reveals a single extended argument that, though developed unsystematically, is meant to be understood in systematic terms. Ricoeur on Time and Narrative presents that argument in clear and concise terms, in a way that will be enlightening both to readers new to Ricoeur and those who may have felt themselves adrift in the complexities of Temps et récit, Ricoeur's last major philosophical work. Dowling divides his discussion into six chapters, all closely involved with specific arguments in Temps et récit: on mimesis, time, narrativity, semantics of action, poetics of history, and poetics of fiction. Additionally, Dowling provides a preface that lays out the French intellectual context of Ricoeur's philosophical method. An appendix presents his English translation of a personal interview in which Ricoeur, having completed Time and Narrative, looks back over his long career as an internationally renowned philosopher. Ricoeur on Time and Narrative communicates to readers the intellectual excitement of following Ricoeur's dismantling of established theories and arguments--Aristotle and Augustine and Husserl on time, Frye and Greimas on narrative structure, Arthur Danto and Louis O. Mink on the nature of historical explanation--while coming to see how, under the pressure of Ricoeur's analysis, these ideas are reconstituted and revealed in a new set of relations to one another.

Jeffry H. Morrison offers readers the first comprehensive look at the political thought and career of John Witherspoon--a Scottish Presbyterian minister and one of America's most influential and overlooked founding fathers. Witherspoon was an active member of the Continental Congress and was the only clergyman both to sign the Declaration of Independence and to ratify the federal Constitution. During his tenure as president of the College of New Jersey at Princeton, Witherspoon became a mentor to James Madison and influenced many leaders and thinkers of the founding period. He was uniquely positioned at the crossroads of politics, religion, and education during the crucial first decades of the new republic. Morrison locates Witherspoon in the context of early American political thought and charts the various influences on his thinking. This impressive work of scholarship offers a broad treatment of Witherspoon's constitutionalism, including his contributions to the mediating institutions of religion and education, and to political institutions from the colonial through the early federal periods. This book will be appreciated by anyone with an interest in American political history and thought and in the relation of religion to American politics.

Adventures in Philosophy at Notre Dame recounts the fascinating history of the University of Notre Dame's Department of Philosophy, chronicling the challenges, difficulties, and tensions that accompanied its transition from an obscure outpost of scholasticism in the 1940s into one of the more distinguished philosophy departments in the world today. Its author, Kenneth Sayre, who has been a faculty member for over five decades, focuses on the people of the department, describing what they were like, how they got along with each other, and how their personal predilections and ambitions affected the affairs of the department overall. The book follows the department's transition from its early Thomism to the philosophical pluralism of the 1970s, then traces its drift from pluralism to what Sayre terms "professionalism," resulting in what some perceive as a severance from its Catholic roots by the turn of the century. Each chapter includes an extensive biography of an especially prominent department member, along with biographical sketches of other philosophers arriving during the period it covers. Central to the story overall are the charismatic Irishmen Ernan McMullin and Ralph McInerny, whose interaction dominated affairs in the department in the 1960s and 1970s, and who continued to play major roles in the following decades. Philosophers throughout the English-speaking world will find Adventures in Philosophy at Notre Dame essential reading. The book will also appeal to readers interested in the history of the University of Notre Dame and of American higher education generally.

A Christian theological interpretation of the border reality is a neglected area of immigration study. The foremost contribution of A Promised Land, A Perilous Journey is its focus on the theological dimension of migration, beginning with the humanity of the immigrant, a child of God and a bearer of his image. The nineteen authors in this collection recognize that one characteristic of globalization is the movement not only of goods and ideas but also of people. The crossing of geographical borders confronts Christians, as well as all citizens, with choices: between national security and human insecurity, between sovereign national rights and human rights, between citizenship and discipleship. Bearing these global dimensions in mind, the essays in this book focus on the particular problems of immigration across the U.S.-Mexico border. The contributors to this volume include scholars as well as pastors and lay people involved in immigration aid work. Contributors: Oscar Andrés Cardinal Rodríguez, Gioacchino Campese, Daniel G. Groody, Jacqueline Hagan, Donald Senior, Peter C. Phan, Alex Nava, Gustavo Gutiérrez, Stephen Bevans, Robert Schreiter, Giovanni Graziano Tassello, Patrick Murphy, Robin Hoover, Graziano Battistella, Donald Kerwin, Raúl Fornet-Betancourt, Olivia Ruiz Marrujo, and Jorge E. Castillo Guerra.