In Western Creed, Western Identity, Jude P. Dougherty investigates the classical roots of Western culture and its religious sources in an effort to define its underlying intellectual and spiritual commitments.

This book explores what Catholics and Methodists believe about eucharistic sacrifice. Eucharistic sacrifice refers to the offering that Christ and his church make in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. It is, therefore, both a Christian doctrine and a church practice. The sacrificial dimension of the sacrament comes both from Christ’s sacrifice on the cross and from his self-offering at the Last Supper in which Christ gives himself to the Father on behalf of his people. “This is my body, which is given for you” (Luke 22:19). The eucharist is a sacrificial meal because in the bread and cup Christians are united to the body and blood of Christ that was sacrificed for them on the cross. Moreover, the resurrected Lord is really present with his people in the eucharist, and while his historic crucifixion is an event in the past, Jesus’ salvation continues and his grace is given to his people in the sacrament, “for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” (Matthew 26:28). Catholics and Methodists believe that Jesus instructs his followers to repeat his words and actions from the Last Supper in their celebration of the eucharist, but a long running assumption is that Catholics and Methodists—following the historic Reformation schism—are deeply divided over eucharistic sacrifice. This book challenges that assumption by analyzing what these churches teach on eucharistic sacrifice from historical, sacramental, liturgical, and ecumenical perspectives. Key figures like Thomas Aquinas and John Wesley help define eucharistic sacrifice in each tradition. Subsequently, authoritative texts such as ecclesial statements, eucharistic prayers, and hymns further specify what Catholics and Methodists believe they are doing when they offer the eucharist to God. Sours argues that far from being divided, Catholics and Methodists have much in common regarding this controversial doctrine.

Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464), widely considered the most important original philosopher of the Renaissance, was born in Kues on the Moselle River. A polymath who studied canon law and became a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, he wrote principally on speculative theology, philosophy, and church politics. As a political thinker he is best known for De concordantia catholica, which presented a blueprint for peace in an age of ecclesiastical discord.

This volume makes most of Nicholas’s other writings on Church and reform available in English for the first time, including legal tracts arguing the case of Pope Eugenius IV against the conciliarists, theological examinations of the nature of the Church, and writings on reform of the papacy and curia. Among the works translated are an early draft of De concordantia catholica and the Letter to Rodrigo Sanchez de Arevalo, which discusses the Church in light of the Cusan idea of “learned ignorance.”

A few years before he died in 1662, Blaise Pascal wrote fifteen interconnected essays on grace, which have collectively come to be known as the Écrits sur la grâce. These were not published before his death, and were not polished and revised by him with an eye to publication, which means that they show his mind at work experimentally, trying out lines of argument and engagements with magisterial and patristic texts without resolving them into anything like a final system. The Écrits are replete with experimental formulations and bursts of literary and intellectual energy; taken together, they provide an intense and extreme presentation of Pascal's version of Augustinianism with respect to grace, election, and predestination, the meaning of the Council of Trent, and much else. These essays provide one of the keys to the entirety of Pascal's thought, and they provide a view of grace's workings -- perhaps better, a grammar of grace -- which still warrants serious attention by Catholic theologians. Less than one-fifth of the Écrits has yet been published in English. This book provides a complete translation, made from the French text provided in Michel Le Guern's edition (1998, 2000) of Pascal's Oeuvres complètes, and annotated to provide full information about Pascal's sources and how he used them. The translation is followed by a substantial interpretive essay in which Pascal's positions and approaches are restated and argued with.