Iceland’s uncommon proclivity towards storytelling, its robust tradition of medieval manuscripts, and the “re-oralization” of those narratives after the medieval period, create a body of folktales and legends that have encoded a hidden account of how orthodox and heterodox beliefs (sometimes pagan in origin) intermingled as Christianity, and later Reformation, spread through the North. This volume unlocks that secret story by placing Icelandic folktales in a context of religious doctrine, social history, and Old Norse sagas and poetry. The analysis herein reveals a cultural memory of belief.

Though the relationship between Jesuits and Dominicans has historically been marked by theological controversy, Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, shows remarkable affinity for the Thomistic tradition, the tradition advanced above all by the Dominican order. When writing the Jesuit Constitutions, in fact, Ignatius made Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae the primary textbook for Jesuit theological formation. The contributions to this volume—originating from Jesuits, Dominicans, and lay scholars alike—explore different aspects of the complex yet illuminating relationship between Ignatius and Thomas. The themes range from the general relationship between the early Jesuits and scholastic theology to the attempts by Francisco de Toledo, the first Jesuit cardinal, to apply Thomistic reasoning to the religious and legal status of Jewish converts to Christianity. Other contributions compare Ignatius and Thomas on topics of significant interest for dogmatic, sacramental, and spiritual theology: spiritual experience, the ordering of the passions, the use of the imagination, prudence and discernment of spirits, frequent communion, Mariology, the “hierarchical church,” and the limits of obedience. Students of Ignatius of Loyola, Thomas Aquinas, second scholasticism, Christian-Jewish relations, and spiritual theology in general will find this volume an invaluable contribution.

Image and the Office of the Dead in Late Medieval Europe explores the Office of the Dead as a site of interaction between text, image, and experience in the culture of commemoration that thrived in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Office of the Dead was a familiar liturgical ritual, and its perceived importance and utility are evident in its regular inclusion in devotional compilations, which crossed the boundaries between lay and religious readers. The Office was present in all medieval deaths: as a focus for private contemplation, a site of public performance, a reassuring ritual, and a voice for the bereaved. Examining the images at the Office of the Dead and related written, visual, and material evidence, this book explores the relationship of these images to the text in which they are embedded and to the broader experiences of and aspirations for death.

Employing a transregional and interdisciplinary approach, this volume explores indigenous and black confraternities –or lay Catholic brotherhoods– founded in colonial Spanish America and Brazil between the sixteenth and eighteenth century. It presents a varied group of cases of religious confraternities founded by subaltern subjects, both in rural and urban spaces of colonial Latin America, to understand the dynamics and relations between the peripheral and central areas of colonial society, underlying the ways in which colonialized subjects navigated the colonial domain with forms of social organization and cultural and religious practices. The book analyzes indigenous and black confraternal cultural practices as forms of negotiation and resistance shaped by local devotional identities that also transgressed imperial religious and racial hierarchies. The analysis of these practices explores the intersections between ethnic identity and ritual devotion, as well as how the establishment of black and indigenous religious confraternities carried the potential to subvert colonial discourse.

A nuanced study of early Christian exegesis

Miriam DeCock analyzes four important early Christian treatments of the Gospel of John, including commentaries by Origen and Cyril from the Alexandrian tradition and the homilies of John Chrysostom and the commentary of Theodore of Mopsuestia, which represent Antiochian traditions. DeCock maintains that the traditional distinction between nonliteral and literal interpretations in these two early Christian centers remains helpful despite recent challenges to the paradigm. She argues that a major and abiding distinction between the two schools lies in the manner in which Alexandrian and Antiochian authors apply the gospel text to their respective communities. DeCock demonstrates that the Antiochenes find primarily literal moral examples and doctrinal teachings in John's Gospel, whereas the Alexandrians find both these and nonliteral teachings concerning the immediate situation of the church and of its individual members.

Features

• An examination of each author's interpretations of a selection of texts
• Focused explorations of John 2; 4; and 9-11 in early Christian exegesis
• A study of early literal non-literal interpretations of John's Gospel

Investigating Vatican II is a collection of Fr. Jared Wicks’ recent articles on Vatican II, and presents the Second Vatican Council as an event to which theologians contributed in major ways and from which Catholic theology can gain enormous insigh