BiblioVault - Books about Christian Church

SCRIBE OF HEAVEN

SWEDENBORG'S LIFE, WORK, AND IMPACT

Jonathan S. Rose

Swedenborg Foundation Publishers, 2005

The essays in this volume testify to the far-reaching effects of Emanuel Swedenborg’s works in Western culture. From his early days as an ambitious young scientist in the ferment of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment Europe, through his mid-life entrance into an ongoing experience of the spiritual world, to his last decades as a researcher of things spiritual, Swedenborg built a career that left a unique legacy. His vivid descriptions of the nonphysical realm made a powerful impression on minds as diverse as Goethe, Blake, Emerson, Yeats, and Borges.

This book serves as a self-contained resource on Swedenborg’s life and thought and as a gateway into further exploration of the labyrinthine garden of Swedenborg’s works. It includes a biography, rich in fascinating detail; lively overviews of the content and history of Swedenborg’s writings on spiritual topics; and essays tracing Swedenborg’s impact in various regions of the world.

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Secularisms

Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini, eds.

Duke University Press, 2008

At a time when secularism is put forward as the answer to religious fundamentalism and violence, Secularisms offers a powerful, multivoiced critique of the narrative equating secularism with modernity, reason, freedom, peace, and progress. Bringing together essays by scholars based in religious studies, gender and sexuality studies, history, science studies, anthropology, and political science, this volume challenges the binary conception of “conservative” religion versus “progressive” secularism.

With essays addressing secularism in India, Iran, Turkey, Great Britain, China, and the United States, this collection crucially complicates the dominant narrative by showing that secularism is multifaceted. How secularism is lived and experienced varies with its national, regional, and religious context. The essays explore local secularisms in relation to religious traditions ranging from Islam to Judaism, Hinduism to Christianity. Several contributors explicitly take up the way feminism has been implicated in the dominant secularization story. Ultimately, by dislodging secularism’s connection to the single (and singular) progress narrative, this volume seeks to open spaces for other possible narratives about both secularism and religion—as well as for other possible ways of inhabiting the contemporary world.

Contributors: Robert J. Baird, Andrew Davison, Tracy Fessenden, Janet R. Jakobsen, Laura Levitt,
Molly McGarry, Afsaneh Najmabadi, Taha Parla, Geeta Patel, Ann Pellegrini, Tyler Roberts,
Ranu Samantrai, Banu Subramaniam, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Angela Zito

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A Service Beyond All Recompense

Kurt Martens

Catholic University of America Press, 2018

When Monsignor Thomas J. Green, professor at the School of Canon Law at The Catholic University of America, approached his seventy-fifth birthday and the fiftieth anniversary of his priestly ordination, his colleagues planned on offering him a fitting tribute in the form of a festschrift. Six people with different backgrounds, but all related to Msgr. Green on one way or another, have written a laudatio – a short congratulatory letter – in honor of Monsignor Green. No less than fifteen contributions on various topics by colleagues, canon law scholars, clearly relate and reflect upon the honoree's scholarly contributions to canon law. The topics are extremely varied, and illustrate how Monsignor Green has been or is active in nearly every area of canon law. Virtually every book of the Code of Canon Law is covered, if not directly, at least indirectly. While the book is a tribute to an eminent professor, the various scholarly contributions are unique pieces of scholarship. The authors of the laudatio are: John Garvey (President, The Catholic University of America); Andrew Abela (Provost, The Catholic University of America); Rev. Msgr. J. Brian Bransfield (General Secretary of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops); Rev. Msgr. Ronny E. Jenkins (Dean, School of Canon Law, The Catholic University of America); Rev. Msgr. J. James Cuneo (Diocese of Bridgeport) and Sister Sharon Euart, RSM (Executive Director, Resource Center for Religious Institutes, Silver Spring, MD).

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Shaping American Catholicism

Maryland and New York, 1805-1915

Robert Emmett Curran

Catholic University of America Press, 2012

Distinguished historian Robert Emmett Curran presents an informed and balanced study of the American Catholic Church's experience in its two most important regions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

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A Sip from the "Well of Grace"

Medieval Texts from the Apostolic Penitentiary

Kirsi Salonen

Catholic University of America Press, 2009

The first book to include full texts and photographs from the Apostolic Penitentiary, A Sip from the "Well of Grace" is groundbreaking in its analysis of one of the most important papal offices of the Middle Ages.

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Sojourner in the Promised Land

Forty Years among the Mormons

Jan Shipps

University of Illinois Press, 2001

Infused with Jan Shipps’s lively curiosity, scholarly rigor, and contagious fascination with a significant subculture, Sojourner in the Promised Land presents a distinctive parallel history in which Shipps surrounds her professional writings about the Latter-day Saints with an ongoing personal description of her encounters with them. By combining a portrait of the dynamic evolution of contemporary Mormonism with absorbing intellectual autobiography, Shipps illuminates the Mormons and at the same time shares with the reader what it has been like to be on the outside of a culture that remains both familiar and strange.

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Southern Religion and Christian Diversity in the Twentieth Century

Wayne Flynt, Foreword by Charles A. Israel and John Giggie

University of Alabama Press, 2016

Essays by the distinguished historian of southern religion Wayne Flynt, that illuminate the often overlooked complexity among southern Protestants.

Throughout its dramatic history, the American South has wrestled with issues such as poverty, social change, labor reform, civil rights, and party politics, and Flynt’s writing reaffirms religion as the lens through which southerners understand and attempt to answer these contentious questions. In Southern Religion and Christian Diversity in the Twentieth Century, however, Flynt gently but persuasively dispels the myth—comforting to some and dismaying to others—of religion in the South as an inert cairn of reactionary conservatism.

Flynt introduces a wealth of stories about individuals and communities of faith whose beliefs and actions map the South’s web of theological fault lines. In the early twentieth century, North Carolinian pastor Alexander McKelway became a relentless crusader against the common practice of child labor. In 1972, Rev. Dr. Ruby Kile, in a time of segregated churches led by men, took the helm of the eight-member Powderly Faith Deliverance Center in Jefferson County, Alabama and built the fledgling group into a robust congregation with more than 700 black and white worshippers. Flynt also examines the role of religion in numerous pivotal court cases, such as the US Supreme Court school prayer case Engel v. Vitale, whose majority opinion was penned by Justice Hugo Black, an Alabamian. These fascinating case studies and many more illuminate a religious landscape of far more varied texture and complexity than is commonly believed.

Southern Religion and Christian Diversity in the Twentieth Century offers much to readers and scholars interested in the South, religion, and theology. Writing with his hallmark wit, warmth, and erudition, Flynt’s Southern Religion and Christian Diversity in the Twentieth Century is a vital record of gospel-inspired southerners whose stories revivify sclerotic assumptions about the narrow conformity of southern Christians.

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A Star in the East

The Rise of Christianity in China

Rodney Stark

Templeton Press, 2015

What is the state of Christianity in China? Some scholars say that China is invulnerable to religion. In contrast, others say that past efforts of missionaries have failed, writing off those converted as nothing more than “rice Christians” or cynical souls who had frequented the missions for the benefits they provided. Some wonder if the Cultural Revolution extinguished any chances of Christianity in China.

Rodney Stark and Xiuhua Wang offer a different perspective, arguing that Christianity is alive, well, and on the rise. Stark approaches the topic from an extensive research background in Christianity and Chinese history, and Wang provides an inside look at Christianity and its place in her home country of China. Both authors cover the history of religion in China, disproving older theories concerning the number of Christians and the kinds of Christians that have emerged in the past 155 years. Stark and Wang claim that when just considering the visible Christians—those not part of underground churches—thousands of Chinese are still converted to Christianity daily, and forty new churches are opening each week.

A Star in the East draws on two major national surveys to sketch a close-up of religion in China. A reliable estimate is that by 2007 there were approximately 60 million Christians in China. If the current growth rate were to hold until 2030, there would be more Christians in China—about 295 million—than in any other nation. This trend has significant implications, not just for China but for the greater world order. It is probable that Chinese Christianity will splinter into denominations, likely leading to the same political, social, and economic ramifications seen in the West today.

Whether you’re new to studying Christianity in China or whether this has been your area of interest for years, A Star in the East provides a reliable, thought-provoking, and engaging account of the resilience of the Christian faith in China and the implications it has for the future.

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Stimulus Pastorum

A Charge to Pastors

Bartholomew of the Martyrs, O.P.

St. Augustine's Press, 2022

The work of St. Bartholomew of Braga, O.P. (1514–1590) appears here in English for the first time despite its long and enduring influence in ecclesiastical circles. His meditations on the office of pastor have provided critical insight bishops since their initial circulation and have helped form the most famous among them, including Bartholomew's proteges Charles Borromeo. Pope Paul VI ordered a copy of Bartholomew's work to be distributed among the Catholic bishops at the Second Vatican Council. Donald Prudlo's translation situates St. Bartholomew of the Martyrs in his historical context as a lynchpin of Catholic Reform and affirms him as a figurehead of pastoral administration even in our own times.

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Summa Theologiae, Prima Pars

Volume 1, The One God, QQ 1-26: With the Commentary of Cardinal Cajetan

Thomas Aquinas

Catholic University of America Press, 2023

When Leo XII promulgated Aeterni Patris in 1879, he stipulated that the “Leonine,” or official, edition of the Summa should always be printed in conjunction with Cajetan’s Commentary. For five hundred years they were studied together. Generations were trained by reading through the Summa article by article with Cajetan’s commentaries in hand. Early printed editions of the Summa typically included them in a Talmudic arrangement, as marginal text running around each article by Aquinas. This edition imitates that example. Recently, serious thinkers of all denominations – and none – have found new reasons to be interested in St. Thomas. His text is deceptively simple, yet important issues are handled in every article, sometimes below the surface. Cajetan extracts these hidden issues, and explains and elaborates on them with remarkable affinity to modern analytical philosophy. Part of that affinity lies in the use of modal logic, a tool whose importance was overlooked between the Renaissance and the twentieth century. The time is ripe for an analytically-inspired translation of Thomas: hence this volume. Never until now has Cajetan’s Commentary been put into English in its entirety. William Marshner’s translation is consistent with fidelity to the technical force of the original. The translator’s footnotes acknowledge what empirical science has made obsolete in the work of St. Thomas, and also make clear how much today’s science would have saved Thomas useless labor. This volume will, for the first time, make Cajetan’s help available to the modern reader.

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Summa Theologiae, Prima Pars

Volume 2, On the Holy Trinity and Creation in General, QQ 27-74: With the Commentary of Cardinal Cajetan

Thomas Aquinas

Catholic University of America Press, 2023

When Leo XII promulgated Aeterni Patris in 1879, he stipulated that the “Leonine,” or official, edition of the Summa should always be printed in conjunction with Cajetan’s Commentary. For five hundred years they were studied together. Generations were trained by reading through the Summa article by article with Cajetan’s commentaries in hand. Early printed editions of the Summa typically included them in a Talmudic arrangement, as marginal text running around each article by Aquinas. This edition imitates that example. Recently, serious thinkers of all denominations – and none – have found new reasons to be interested in St. Thomas. His text is deceptively simple, yet important issues are handled in every article, sometimes below the surface. Cajetan extracts these hidden issues, and explains and elaborates on them with remarkable affinity to modern analytical philosophy. Part of that affinity lies in the use of modal logic, a tool whose importance was overlooked between the Renaissance and the twentieth century. The time is ripe for an analytically-inspired translation of Thomas: hence this volume. Never until now has Cajetan’s Commentary been put into English in its entirety. William Marshner’s translation is consistent with fidelity to the technical force of the original. The translator’s footnotes acknowledge what empirical science has made obsolete in the work of St. Thomas, and also make clear how much today’s science would have saved Thomas useless labor. This volume will, for the first time, make Cajetan’s help available to the modern reader.

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Summa Theologiae, Prima Pars

Volume 3, Human Beings and God's Governance of Creation, QQ 75-119: With the Commentary of Cardinal Cajetan

Thomas Aquinas

Catholic University of America Press, 2023

When Leo XII promulgated Aeterni Patris in 1879, he stipulated that the “Leonine,” or official, edition of the Summa should always be printed in conjunction with Cajetan’s Commentary. For five hundred years they were studied together. Generations were trained by reading through the Summa article by article with Cajetan’s commentaries in hand. Early printed editions of the Summa typically included them in a Talmudic arrangement, as marginal text running around each article by Aquinas. This edition imitates that example. Recently, serious thinkers of all denominations – and none – have found new reasons to be interested in St. Thomas. His text is deceptively simple, yet important issues are handled in every article, sometimes below the surface. Cajetan extracts these hidden issues, and explains and elaborates on them with remarkable affinity to modern analytical philosophy. Part of that affinity lies in the use of modal logic, a tool whose importance was overlooked between the Renaissance and the twentieth century. The time is ripe for an analytically-inspired translation of Thomas: hence this volume. Never until now has Cajetan’s Commentary been put into English in its entirety. William Marshner’s translation is consistent with fidelity to the technical force of the original. The translator’s footnotes acknowledge what empirical science has made obsolete in the work of St. Thomas, and also make clear how much today’s science would have saved Thomas useless labor. This volume will, for the first time, make Cajetan’s help available to the modern reader.

[more]