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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.

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

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.

In Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Critical Appropriation of Russian Religious Thought, Jennifer Newsome Martin offers the first systematic treatment and evaluation of the Swiss Catholic theologian's complex relation to modern speculative Russian religious philosophy. Her constructive analysis proceeds through Balthasar's critical reception of Vladimir Soloviev, Nicholai Berdyaev, and Sergei Bulgakov with respect to theological aesthetics, myth, eschatology, and Trinitarian discourse and examines how Balthasar adjudicates both the possibilities and the limits of theological appropriation, especially considering the degree to which these Russian thinkers have been influenced by German Idealism and Romanticism. Martin argues that Balthasar's creative reception and modulation of the thought of these Russian philosophers is indicative of a broad speculative tendency in his work that deserves further attention. In this respect, Martin consciously challenges the prevailing view of Balthasar as a fundamentally conservative or nostalgic thinker. In her discussion of the relation between tradition and theological speculation, Martin also draws upon the understudied relation between Balthasar and F. W. J. Schelling, especially as Schelling's form of Idealism was passed down through the Russian thinkers. In doing so, she persuasively recasts Balthasar as an ecumenical, creatively anti-nostalgic theologian hospitable to the richness of contributions from extra-magisterial and non-Catholic sources.

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.

In Fleshly Tabernacles, Bryan Hampton examines John Milton's imaginative engagement with, and theological passion for, the Incarnation. As aesthetic symbol, theological event, and narrative picture of humanity's potential, the Incarnation profoundly governs the way Milton structures his 1645 Poems, ponders the holy office of the pulpit, reflects on the ends of speech and language, interprets sacred scripture or secular texts, and engages in the radical politics of the Civil War and Interregnum. Richly drawing upon the disciplines of historical and postmodern theology, philosophical hermeneutics, theological aesthetics, and literary theory, Fleshly Tabernacles pursues the wide-ranging implications of the heterodox, perfectionist strain in Milton's Christology. Hampton illustrates how vibrant Christologies generated and shaped particular brands of anticlericalism, theories of reading and language, and political commitments of English nonconformist sects during the turbulent decades of the seventeenth century. Ranters and Seekers, Diggers and Quakers, Fifth monarchists and some Anabaptists-many of those identified with these radical groups proclaim that the Incarnation is primarily understood, not as a singular event of antiquity, but as a present eruption and charged manifestation within the life of the individual believer, such that faithful believers become "e;fleshly tabernacles"e; housing the Divine.

These remarkable sermons by John Henry Newman (1801-1890) were first published at Oxford in 1843, two years before he was received into the Roman Catholic Church. Published here in its entirety is the third edition of 1872 for which Newman added an additional sermon, bracketed notes, and, importantly, a comprehensive, condensed Preface. In her introduction, noted Newman scholar Mary Katherine Tillman considers the volume as an integral whole, showing how all of the sermons systematically relate to the central theme of the faith-reason relationship.

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.

These essays examine papal teaching authority from Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century to the Dominican School of Salamanca in sixteenth century Spain. Fr. Ulrich Horst, O.P., an internationally renowned authority in historical theology, describes the various debates between the Dominicans and other orders over papal teaching authority, especially whether there should be limits placed on papal authority and, if so, what they might be.Horst reviews in a brief and masterful fashion the teaching of medieval and Catholic Reformation Dominican theologians about the teaching authority of the pope. He succinctly shows the differences within the order on the topic and makes clear how Dominicans tended to differ on the matter from theologians of other orders such as the Franciscans and, later, the Jesuits, whose views would eventually lead to the proclamation at Vatican I.In the first chapter, Horst discusses the canonization of St. Thomas, the lecture on the gospel of St. Matthew, and Summa Theologiae II-II 1, 10. Horst then examines the road to conflict under Pope John XXII and the position of a number of the Dominican theologians such Hervaeus Natalis, John of Naples, and Guido Terreni. In the last chapter, Horst brings to light the contributions of Francisco de Vitoria, Dominicus Sots, Melchior Cano, and Juan de la Peña, among others.Despite his distinguished career as a medievalist, little of Horst's imposing scholarly corpus has been translated into English. These lectures, then, mark an introduction of this formidable scholar to a wider audience.

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

When the Spanish invaded the Inca empire in 1532, the cult of the ancestors was an essential feature of pre-Columbian religion throughout the Andes. The dead influenced politics, protected the living, symbolized the past, and legitimized claims over the land their descendants occupied, while the living honored the presence of the dead in numerous aspects of daily life. A central purpose of the Spanish missionary endeavor was to suppress the Andean cult of the ancestors and force the indigenous people to adopt their Catholic, legal, and cultural views concerning death. In her book, Gabriela Ramos reveals the extent to which Christianizing death was essential for the conversion of the indigenous population to Catholicism.Ramos argues that understanding the relation between death and conversion in the Andes involves not only considering the obvious attempts to destroy the cult of the dead, but also investigating a range of policies and strategies whose application demanded continuous negotiation between Spaniards and Andeans. Drawing from historical, archaeological, and anthropological research and a wealth of original archival materials, especially the last wills and testaments of indigenous Andeans, Ramos looks at the Christianization of death as it affected the lives of inhabitants of two principal cities of the Peruvian viceroyalty: Lima, the new capital founded on the Pacific coast by the Spanish, and Cuzco, the old capital of the Incas in the Andean highlands. Her study of the wills in particular demonstrates the strategies that Andeans devised to submit to Spanish law and Christian doctrine, preserve bonds of kinship, and cement their place in colonial society.

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.

City and Campus tells the rich history of a Midwest industrial town and its two academic institutions through the buildings that helped bring these places to life.John W. Stamper paints a narrative portrait of South Bend and the campuses of the University of Notre Dame and Saint Mary's College from their founding and earliest settlement in the 1830s through the boom of the Roaring Twenties. Industrialist giants such as the Studebaker Brothers Manufacturing Company and Oliver Chilled Plow Works invested their wealth into creating some of the city's most important and historically significant buildings.Famous architects, including Frank Lloyd Wright, brought the latest trends in architecture to the heart of South Bend. Stamper also illuminates how Notre Dame's founder and long-time president Father Edward Sorin, C.S.C., recruited other successful architects to craft in stone the foundations of the university and the college at the same time as he built the scholarship. City and Campus provides an engaging and definitive history of how this urban and academic environment emerged on the shores of the St. Joseph River.

Given the largely Eurocentric nature of moral theology in the history of the Roman Catholic Church, what will it take to invest the theological community in the history and moral challenges of the Church in other parts of the world, especially Africa? What is to be gained for the whole Church when this happens in a deep and lasting way? In this timely and important study, Paulinus Ikechukwu Odozor brings greater theological clarity to the issue of the relationship between Christianity and African tradition in the area of ethical foundations. He also provides a constructive example of what fundamental moral theology done from an African and Christian (especially Catholic) moral theological point of view could look like. Following a brief history of the development of African Christian theology, Odozor examines responses of African theologians to African tradition and Christian responses to the reality of non-Christian religions. In a context where the African religious experience and heritage are powerful sources of meaning and identity, Christian evangelization raises questions both about the African primal religions and about Christianity itself and its claims. Odozor takes up the subject of moral reasoning in an African Christian theological ethics and concludes with case studies that show how the African Church has tried to inculturate moral discourse on a religiously pluralistic continent and relate the healing gospel message to African situations. Students and scholars of moral theology and ethics and church leaders will profit from the issues raised in Morality Truly Christian, Truly African.

The poems in Juan Luna' s Revolver both address history and attempt to transcend it through their exploration of the complexity of diaspora. Attending to the legacy of colonial and postcolonial encounters, Luisa A. Igloria has crafted poems that create links of sympathetic human understanding, even as they revisit difficult histories and pose necessary questions about place, power, displacement, nostalgia, beauty, and human resilience in conditions of alienation and duress. Igloria traces journeys made by Filipinos in the global diaspora that began since the encounter with European and American colonial power. Her poems allude to historical figures such as the Filipino painter Juan Luna and the novelist and national hero Jose Rizal, as well as the eleven hundred indigenous Filipinos brought to serve as live exhibits in the 1904 Missouri World's Fair. The image of the revolver fired by Juan Luna reverberates throughout the collection, raising to high relief how separation and exile have shaped concepts of identity, nationality, and possibility. Suffused with gorgeous imagery and nuanced emotion, Igloria's poetry achieves an intimacy fostered by gem-like phrases set within a politically-charged context speaking both to the personal and the collective.

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.

David J. Leigh explores the innovative influences of the Book of Revelation and ideas of an end time on fiction of the twentieth century, and probes philosophical, political, and theological issues raised by apocalyptic writers from Walker Percy, C. S. Lewis, and Charles Williams to Doris Lessing, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo. Leigh tackles head on a fundamental question about Christian-inspired eschatology: Does it sanction, as theologically sacred or philosophically ultimate, the kind of "last battles" between good and evil that provoke human beings to demonize and destroy the other? Against the backdrop of this question, Leigh examines twenty modern and postmodern apocalyptic novels, juxtaposing them in ways that expose a new understanding of each. The novels are clustered for analysis in chapters that follow seven basic eschatological patterns--the last days imagined as an ultimate journey, a cosmic battle, a transformed self, an ultimate challenge, the organic union of human and divine, the new heaven and new earth, and the ultimate way of religious pluralism. For religious novelists, these patterns point toward spiritual possibilities in the final days of human life or of the universe. For more political novelists--Ralph Ellison, Russell Hoban, and Salman Rushdie among them--the patterns are used to critique political or social movements of self-destruction. Beyond the twenty novels closely analyzed, Leigh makes pertinent reference to many more as well as to reflections from theologians Jürgen Moltmann, Zachary Hayes, Wolfhart Pannenberg, and Paul Ricoeur. Both a guidebook and a critical assessment, Leigh's work brings theological concepts to bear on end-of-the-world fiction in an admirably clear and accessible manner.

From 1910 to the end of World War I, American society witnessed a tremendous outpouring of books, pamphlets, and especially newspapers espousing virulently anti-Catholic themes and calling on readers to recognize the danger of Catholicism to the American republic. By 1915 the most popular anti-Catholic newspaper, The Menace, boasted over 1.6 million weekly readers. Justin Nordstrom's Danger on the Doorstep examines for the first time the rise and abrupt decline of anti-Catholic literature during the Progressive Era, as well as the issues and motivations that informed anti-Catholic writers and their "Romanist" opponents.Nordstrom explores the connection between anti-Catholicism and nationalism from 1910-1919. He argues that the anti-Catholic literature that occupied such a prominent place in the cultural landscape derived its popularity by infusing long-standing anti-Catholic traditions with the emerging themes of progressivism, masculinity, and nationalism. Nordstrom demonstrates that in the pages of anti-Catholic texts, Catholicism emerged as a manifestation of and a scapegoat for the dangers of modernity--including rampant urbanization, immigration, political corruption, and the proliferation of power conglomerates. Samples of Menace cartoons underscore Nordstrom's arguments.Danger on the Doorstep also examines Catholics' vigorous and highly-organized responses to journalistic attacks in the 1910s, ranging from lawsuits to widespread public relations campaigns. According to Nordstrom, the unraveling of anti-Catholic print literature by the end of the 1910s and the growing public presence of American Catholicism suggest that Catholic claims to full citizenship had trumped opponents' assertions of conspiracy. This fascinating look at an understudied episode of anti-Catholic radicalism will be of interest to scholars and students of religious history, popular culture, and journalism.

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.

The title poem--about a group of schoolchildren illustrating Shelley's "Ode to a Skylark"--ends with the following assertion: "these are the only / lessons they will ever need to learn: that life / is not artifact, but aperture--a stepping into / and a falling away; that to sing is to rise / from the grave of the body. And still / say less than nothing." This idea of the aperture, the gap, the silence that exists between what we want to say and what we actually do say pervades The Curator of Silence. The paradox, of course, is that the creation of art itself makes this gap, as there is always a gulf between the impulse and the gesture, the vision and the poem. Nutter's experience of living for two months in the Antarctic, perhaps the greatest silence and solitude possible on earth, is the archetype of silence whose many dimensions she explores in this volume. She considers both literal, obvious silences--death, abandonment, loneliness, the silence into which lost things vanish--and silences of a more mysterious and paradoxical nature: the (mis)perceptions of childhood, the erasures of addiction and brain damage, the isolation of Antarctic explorers, and the seemingly distant, and often fearsome, lives of animals. In the end, this great silence we batter our hearts against--call it the grave or god or the universe or the intimate silence of the white page--is the silence these poems are singing to and with, not against.

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

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.

Among the many fruitful and challenging sites for mutual engagement of theology and philosophy, the renewed study of St. Thomas Aquinas has proven to be both lively and controversial. Given particular impetus in recent years by the widespread assessment of modernity that occupies many academic disciplines today, this study is both interesting and relevant to a number of intellectual debates, even as it demands for itself the highest level of scholarship. The essays here arise out of a conference held in 2001 at Heythrop College, University of London, which was introduced by Bishop Malcolm McMahon, OP. This collection reflects the state of Aquinas studies throughout North America, Britain, and Northern Europe, and provides an introduction to this diversity for a general and scholarly readership. Widely differing and often starkly contrasting and even contradictory interpretations of Aquinas are to be found here, which by their very differences invite readers to go deeper into the background from which each emerges and so to find for themselves a way to contemplate Aquinas.

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.