When, in the 1970’s, Sister Prudence Allen, RSM began to investigate philosophical thought on woman, the question was considered to be, at best, a marginal area for philosophical research. Rather, it was seen as a sociological, anthropological, psychological, or political issue. This book confirms that today, partly due to Allen’s groundbreaking work, the complementarity of man and woman is an important and fruitful area of research in philosophy providing an evaluative framework that enriches and challenges many other disciplines. No one could have foreseen the centrality of her research for questions of gender theory that are, in the third decade of the 21st century, in the forefront of public attention. In the present volume, leading authors in the area of sex/gender complementarity reflect upon and further develop various aspects of Allen’s research. In 16 original, scholarly essays, some contributors build upon Allen’s project of exploring “the concept of woman” throughout the history of philosophy. Others explore the work of 20th century philosophers, most of them Christian Personalists, whom Allen credits with significant influence on the development of integral gender complementarity, such as Karol Wojtyła/ John Paul II, Jacques Maritain, Edith Stein, Emmanuel Mounier, W. Norris Clarke, SJ, and Bernard Lonergan, SJ. Still other contributors consider Marian spirituality, analogies between Benedictine spirituality and the physiological realities of a woman’s body during pregnancy, seminary education in the writings of Allen and others, and the impact of Allen’s work on the real lives of women in families, the Church, and professional life. Upon completing her magisterial, three-volume work, The Concept of Woman, Allen passed the baton to a new generation of scholars, stating, “The next phases will be developed by those who themselves take the argument further and deeper in their own research, writing, living, and lecturing.” The present volume takes up the baton, carrying Allen’s work forward and paying tribute to the lifetime achievement of a great scholar.

George Q. Cannon is generally acknowledged as second only to Brigham Young as the most visible leader of Mormonism in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. He became Young’s protégé and was an influential first counselor in the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for almost twenty-five years, serving with presidents Brigham Young, John Taylor, Wilford Woodruff, and Lorenzo Snow. Known as the “spokesman for the kingdom,” Cannon was the central political figure of the church, not only serving as Utah territory’s delegate to Congress for ten years but also as chief political advisor and long-term editor of the Deseret News. Cannon helped shape doctrine, church governance, and administration during a period of significant change, defending and promulgating plural marriage both before and after the 1890 Manifesto. He was at the center of business life in Salt Lake City, serving as president of the largest publishing house, banks, a railroad, mining companies, electric companies, and other businesses. Though Cannon was loved and revered by his people, controversy sometimes touched his life and family. 

This probing analysis of three works by Giotto and the patrons who commissioned them goes far beyond the clichés of Giotto as the founding figure of Western painting. It traces the interactions between Franciscan friars and powerful bankers, illuminating the complex interplay between mercantile wealth and the iconography of poverty.

Political strife and religious faction lacerated fourteenth-century Italy. Giotto’s commissions are best understood against the background of this social turmoil. They reflected the demands of his patrons, the requirements of the Franciscan Order, and the restlessly inventive genius of the painter. Julian Gardner examines this important period of Giotto’s path-breaking career through works originally created for Franciscan churches: Stigmatization of Saint Francis from San Francesco at Pisa, now in the Louvre, the Bardi Chapel cycle of the Life of St. Francis in Santa Croce at Florence, and the frescoes of the crossing vault above the tomb of Saint Francis in the Lower Church of San Francesco at Assisi.

These murals were executed during a twenty-year period when internal tensions divided the friars themselves and when the Order was confronted by a radical change of papal policy toward its defining vow of poverty. The Order had amassed great wealth and built ostentatious churches, alienating many Franciscans in the process and incurring the hostility of other Orders. Many elements in Giotto’s frescoes, including references to St. Peter, Florentine politics, and church architecture, were included to satisfy patrons, redefine the figure of Francis, and celebrate the dominant group within the Franciscan brotherhood.

Give Them Stones follows Martha Murtagh’s life in Belfast during the Troubles. A working-class Catholic wife and mother, Martha struggles to find work and safe shelter for her children amid growing civil strife. Having renounced an education in order to financially support her family and living in one of the most precarious parts of the city, Martha discovers her passion for home-baking. Her bread provides sustenance and community for her neighbors, and for Martha herself it brings economic independence and spiritual communion. Mary Beckett’s novel is a skillfully written, moving narrative of one woman’s coming of age amid violence. It won the Sunday Tribune Arts Award in 1987 then fell out of print by the end of the century, while male writers of the Troubles rose to prominence. This restored edition brings Give Them Stones to a new readership, for whom Martha’s struggle for financial and personal independence remains an acutely relevant meditation on the burdens carried by women during war and the redemptive power of simple things.

Robert H. Schuller’s ministry—including the architectural wonder of the Crystal Cathedral and the polished television broadcast of Hour of Power—cast a broad shadow over American Christianity. Pastors flocked to Southern California to learn Schuller’s techniques. The President of United States invited him sit prominently next to the First Lady at the State of the Union Address. Muhammad Ali asked for the pastor’s autograph. It seemed as if Schuller may have started a second Reformation. And then it all went away. As Schuller’s ministry wrestled with internal turmoil and bankruptcy, his emulators—including Rick Warren, Bill Hybels, and Joel Osteen— nurtured megachurches that seemed to sweep away the Crystal Cathedral as a relic of the twentieth century. How did it come to this?

Certainly, all churches depend on a mix of constituents, charisma, and capital, yet the size and ambition of large churches like Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral exert enormous organizational pressures to continue the flow of people committed to the congregation, to reinforce the spark of charismatic excitement generated by high-profile pastors, and to develop fresh flows of capital funding for maintenance of old projects and launching new initiatives. The constant attention to expand constituencies, boost charisma, and stimulate capital among megachurches produces an especially burdensome strain on their leaders. By orienting an approach to the collapse of the Crystal Cathedral on these three core elements—constituency, charisma, and capital—The Glass Church demonstrates how congregational fragility is greatly accentuated in larger churches, a notion we label megachurch strain, such that the threat of implosion is significantly accentuated by any failures to properly calibrate the inter-relationship among these elements.

The oldest extant Marathi work, a medieval chronicle of Chakradhar’s divine life on earth, in a new English translation.

God at Play, or Līḷācaritra, is a remarkable biography of the medieval religious figure Chakradhar Svami. His followers, called Mahanubhavs, understand him to be a divine incarnation of Parameshvar. Mhaimbhat, a Brahmin goldsmith who became one of Chakradhar’s most important followers, compiled this astonishingly down-to-earth religious text around 1278. It records not only Chakradhar’s ethical and theological teachings, but also his everyday activities, including the foods he ate and the people he met. This rich, detailed account provides insights into economic conditions, political history, and society in medieval India. Manuscripts of the work were carefully preserved within the Mahanubhav community and were not known to outsiders until the early twentieth century.

The first volume of God at Play describes Chakradhar’s early life, his wanderings as a lone ascetic, and the gathering of the disciples who later accompany him on his travels.

This new English translation of Līḷācaritra is accompanied by an emended Marathi text, based on Hari Narayan Nene’s edition, in the Devanagari script.

Grappling with innate desires and LGBTQ identity, a family struggles under the oppressive expectations foisted on them by fundamentalist Christianity.

Told through alternating perspectives, God of River Mud chronicles the lives of Berna Minor, her husband, their four children, and Berna’s secret lover.

To escape a life of poverty and abuse, Berna Cannaday marries Zechariah Minor, a fundamentalist Baptist preacher, and commits herself to his faith, trying to make it her own. After Zechariah takes a church beside the Elk River in rural Clay, West Virginia, Berna falls in love with someone from their congregation—Jordan, a woman who has known since childhood that he was meant to be a man. Berna keeps her secret hidden as she struggles to be the wife and mother she believes God wants her to be. Berna and Zechariah’s children struggle as well, trying to reconcile the theology they are taught at home with the fast-changing world around them. And Jordan struggles to find a community and a life that allow him both to be safely and fully himself, as Jay, and to be loved for who he is.

As the decades and stories unfold, traditional evangelical Bible culture and the values of rural Appalachia clash against innate desires, LGBTQ identity, and gender orientation. Sympathies develop—sometimes unexpectedly—as the characters begin to reconcile their faith and their love. God of River Mud delves into the quandary of those marginalized and dehumanized within a religious patriarchy and grapples with the universal issues of identity, faith, love, and belonging.

 Jean-Luc Marion is one of the world’s foremost philosophers of religion as well as one of the leading Catholic thinkers of modern times. In God Without Being, Marion challenges a fundamental premise of traditional philosophy, theology, and metaphysics: that God, before all else, must be. Taking a characteristically postmodern stance and engaging in passionate dialogue with Heidegger, he locates a “God without Being” in the realm of agape, or Christian charity and love. If God is love, Marion contends, then God loves before he actually is.

Poems that consider the human body as a meeting place of the infinite and the mortal.
 
Starting with the idea that the human experience is the universe looking back at itself, godhouse takes the notion a few steps further by centering cosmology within a raced and gendered body. Ruth Ellen Kocher’s poems envision this body as a union of god and soul that, within our material world, encompasses love and hate, joy and despair. The body is a site of divine presence made mortal, electrified with the resonance of both the infinite and the human. In godhouse, we encounter the body as a site where the universe is made personal and celebratory, where the celestial endure the complications of flesh and friction forms between the glorious and the monstrous aspects of personhood.
 

A theory of divine ideas was the standard Scholastic response to the question how does God know and produce the world? A theory was deemed to be successful only if it simultaneously upheld that God has perfect knowledge and that he is supremely simple and one. In articulating a theory of divine ideas, Carl Vater answers two sorts of questions. First, what is an idea? Does God have ideas? Are there many divine ideas? What sort of existence does an idea enjoy? Second, he answers questions about the scope of divine ideas: does God have ideas of individuals, species, genera, accidents, matter, evil, etc.? How many divine ideas are there? These questions cause the Scholastic authors to articulate clearly, among other things, their positions on the nature of knowledge, relation, exemplar causality, participation, infinity, and possibility. An author’s theory of divine ideas, then, is the locus for him to test the coherence of his metaphysical, epistemological, and logical principles. Many of the debates over divine ideas have their roots in disagreements over whether a given theory adequately articulates one of the underlying positions or the overall coherence of those positions. Peter John Olivi, for example, argues that his predecessors’ theories of knowledge and theories of relations are at odds, and this critique results in a major shift in theories of divine ideas. God's Knowledge of the World examines theories of divine ideas from approximately 1250–1325 AD (St. Bonaventure through Ockham). It will be the only work dedicated to categorizing and comparing the major theories of divine ideas in the Scholastic period.

Goodbye, My Tribe: An Evangelical Exodus is Vic Sizemore’s collection of personal essays chronicling two simultaneous transformations. One is the gathering of unconnected—and nonpolitical—evangelical congregations across the nation into the political juggernaut called the Religious Right; the other is the author’s own coming to terms with the emotional and spiritual trauma of his life deep inside fundamentalist Christianity, and his struggle to free himself from its grasp. Sizemore, whose father was a preacher and professor at a small West Virginia Bible college, attended Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, arguably the crucible of American evangelical Christianity.
 
Sizemore began writing these essays with the aim of exploring and understanding what happened when the mythology of his “tribe” crumbled from beneath his feet. He draws heavily on his upbringing and his family history as a framework for how his “tribe” of white evangelicals have found ways to reconcile Christianity with what the author finds to be troubling stances on many social issues, among them race, gender, sexuality, materialism, anti-intellectualism, and white supremacy.
 
In a clear-eyed and eloquent voice, Sizemore grapples movingly with his own bewilderment and chagrin as he struggles to reconcile the essential philosophical and moral decay that he believes many evangelicals have come to embrace. His insights, arranged topically and thematically and told through graceful and accessible prose, toggle between memoir and literary journalism, along a spectrum that touches on history, philosophy, theology, and personal reflections.

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The classic translation of this most important medieval Jewish text, presented in one volume for the first time.

The twelfth-century Judeo-Arabic text The Guide of the Perplexed is a monument of rabbinical exegesis and one of the most important works in the history of Jewish thought. Written by Moses ben Maimon,commonly known as Maimonides, the Guide aims to liberate people from the perplexities that arise from an understanding of the Bible based only on its literal meaning.

Shlomo Pines’s translation has served students and scholars for decades, and it is presented here, with Leo Strauss’s influential introduction, in one volume for the first time.