Roberto Mangabeira Unger's The Religion of the Future is a secular project for spiritual and political revolution. It offers a comprehensive vision of humanity and a program for the refashioning of self and society that will enable each man and woman to live a greater life. Unger exhorts us to embrace the life we have now by recognizing what makes us human rather than attempt to suppress or overcome — as do existing religions — our existential and spiritual limitations. His program involves both political measures to reform the structure of society and a moral component to engage an individual's conduct of life. Unger's vision of the religion of the future offers us more life here and now so that we can become more human by becoming more godlike. This abridgment represents an edited rendition of the original that, although reduced in size, is complete in argument. It contains an extensive introduction to the argument and the author.

William Stevenson (1768-1857) was a pioneer itinerant Methodist preacher in the southwestern United States, who became the first Protestant of any denomination to preach within the bounds of what is now Texas. His Autobiography, a classic account of frontier and folk Methodism, was first published in serial form in the New Orleans Christian Advocate between March 13 and April 24, 1858. A typescript copy was sent to Bridwell Library in 1936, at the request of SMU President C. C. Selecman. Bridwell Library published the complete Autobiography in 2015, and Bridwell Press is pleased to bring this work to a new audience in 2024.

GERASIMOS AVLONITES (fl. 1752-1773) was a Greek Christian leader who consistently identified himself as the Greek Orthodox Bishop of Arcadia in Crete. A native of Corfu, then dominated by Venice, he worked in Crete during the period of Ottoman domination there. He traveled throughout Europe, visiting Holland, England, Sweden and Switzerland and leaving a trail of letters and other writings in mixed Greek and Latin in each place. His interactions with John Wesley and his ordinations of Evangelical ministers in the 1760s first prompted awareness of him. This volume gathers all known sources for Gerasimos with images of original manuscripts, transcriptions of manuscript materials, and translations.

“The earth / the earth / the earth / said”
 
In Erase Genesis, critically-acclaimed Kentucky poet and translator Rebecca Gayle Howell transforms the KJV creation story for the climate change age. Devoted to the same three chapters, Howell’s erasures raise a new myth—a story of the Earth’s intimacy with us. Here, man is not given dominion. Instead, the trees and the waters keep eternity, and the Lord Woman seeds tenderness as the only way forward. 
 
A book-length poem with its roots in art, ecopoetry, progressive spirituality, and literary translation—Erase Genesis dismantles centuries of hurt as we bare our beginning anew, in abundance with Earth’s divine call: 
 
“Be light and / let be”
 

I Make Jokes When I’m Devastated evokes love, grief, hope and longing across generations, continents, and devastation in Ukraine. The author uses humor and popular culture as a way to speak through her sadness. Midwest grocery stores, Tony Soprano, murderous internet moms, Soviet scientists, and the Cheesecake Factory all make an appearance in the constantly shifting landscape of this work.  This collection also contends with motherhood and what it means to parent through immense loss. Perhaps more than anything the humor in this book acts as an amplifier, a way to hear laughter as clearly as you can hear weeping.

Mixing Oil and Water: The Beginnings of Chautauqua at Fair Point treats the background and development of Chautauqua as a part of the imagination of H. H. Moore, Lewis Miller, John H. Vincent, and others in the Chautauqua Lake Camp Meeting at Fair Point and then since 1874 as the Chautauqua Assembly. The first decade of Chautauqua’s existence as a church body (but independent) has not been examined carefully before. One can see the roots of many traditions coalescing in that first decade into what has become the powerful institution that is the Chautauqua of today.

Rainer Maria Rilke’s fifteen-part poetic cycle Das Marien-Leben stands as his most eloquent meditation on Mary, the mother of Jesus, whose name he shares. Rilke composed these verses in 1912, and ten years later, Paul Hindemith chose to heighten their rhetoric in an expansive song cycle for soprano and piano, the music revised in 1948. The present edition offers a fresh translation of the texts by Christopher Anderson alongside the sensitive artwork of Nishiki Sugawara-Beda, who has fashioned her concept particularly around Hindemith’s music. Supporting essays by translator and artist further situate the work in historical and contemporary contexts. Here is a poetic treasure, less known but no less significant in Rilke’s oeuvre, made accessible to English readers in a unique frame.

The Ruin of Souls presents a new history of Italian Catholic life in the United States, from the founding of the first Italian Catholic church in the United States in 1853 to the end of the immigration flow as a result of the Emergency Quota Act of 1921. In this book, the product of wide research in American and Roman archives that spans the last twelve years, Di Gioacchino invites the reader to look at the religious history of the Italian Catholic immigrants in the United States not through the lens of their devotional culture, but through the perspective of their eccleasiastical life. More specifically, the book aims to document the efforts, problems, and failures of the Roman Catholic Church of the time to preserve the allegiance of the Italian immigrants in the United States to the Church’s magisterium and authority. 

Strengthened by largely unknown archival documentation and an original historiographic methodology, the work reveals a new political dimension in the religious history of Italian immigrants in the United States and their relationship with the Catholic religious canon. By integrating the analysis of the ecclesial practices of the Italian communities into a far-reaching epistemological reflection, the work also contributes to the continuing discussion of how we study and examine the religious practices of Catholic communities in the modern era. 

Here, within these collected zines, you’ll find enough spotted ponies to fill at least three large stables to the brim. Although, of course, you wouldn’t have much luck coaxing them in there. No, instead, it’s likely because of the free rein they’ve been given, because they’ve been cut loose, that so many spotted ponies seem to have chosen these poems as their breeding ground. We’ve never offered them much scrutiny; never subjected them to any polishing or meticulous adjustments. Each of our spotted ponies simply exists in its natural state, as a product of our own wild abandon.

Tilt / Beautiful People brings to life two innovative poetry books integrated into one. 

In Tilt, Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton (1947-2023) write through climate change, Maureen’s illness, and the pandemic with their signature wit and poignancy. Their feminist curiosity leads them to poems about gender identity, marriage equality, and the complexities of national politics. Assembled shortly before Maureen’s death, the poems in Tilt tell the story of a friendship rooted in collaborative artistic play. The title of the book gives a nod to the earth’s tilt, which gives us seasons, but also hints that the poems were written at full tilt, these poets hyperaware they only had so much time left to write with one another.

Beautiful People was written back and forth over the course of several months by poets Maureen Seaton and Aaron Smith. Bold and inventive, it moves from sonnets and sestinas to prose poems and so much more. While its center is a love for poetry and art and laughter, the poets also grapple with mortality, sadness, and what it means to be alive on a broken but beautiful planet. Through their literary friendship, they put a mirror to all our lovely faces.