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Astronomers, Scribes, and Priests
Intellectual Interchange between the Northern Maya Lowlands and Highland Mexico in the Late Postclassic Period
Gabrielle Vail
Harvard University Press, 2010
Astronomers, Scribes, and Priests examines evidence for cultural interchange among the intellectual powerbrokers in Postclassic Mesoamerica, specifically those centered in the northern Maya lowlands and the central Mexican highlands. Contributors to the volume’s thirteen chapters bring an interdisciplinary perspective to understanding the interactions that led to shared content in hieroglyphic codices and mural art. The authors address similarities in artifacts, architectural styles, and building alignments—often produced in regions separated by hundreds of miles—based on their analyses of iconographic, archaeological, linguistic, and epigraphic material. The volume includes a wealth of new data and interpretive frameworks in this comprehensive discussion of a critical time period in the Mesoamerican past.
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Cattle, Priests, and Progress in Medicine
Calvin W. Schwabe
University of Minnesota Press, 1978

Cattle, Priests, and Progress in Medicine was first published in 1978. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

The author shows that over the centuries many of the most significant breakthroughs in improving humans health have been closely associated with observations and experiments on animals other than man. Because human medical progress has been so dependent on veterinary studies, he urges that schools of veterinary medicine assume a much greater role in the training of persons for research in human medicine.

To illuminate the historical link between animals and man in medical progress, Professor Schwabe recounts highlights in the history of medicine from ancient times onward. He describes the early history of man in terms of animal cultures, focusing on the prehistoric Nile Valley, and points to similarities in medical knowledge between present-day "cattle" societies in Northeastern Africa and the ancient people of the Nile. He discusses the comparative healers of ancient Egypt, the comparative foundations of Greek medicine, the Arabic contribution, Sicily and the beginnings of modern medicine, and subsequent developments through the Renaissance .Bringing the history down to modern times, Professor Schwabe emphasizes the role of veterinary medicine in medical research. He outlines specific reforms in the curricula of schools and colleges of veterinary medicine which would provide for the education of medical investigators.
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Current Issues in Priestly and Related Literature
The Legacy of Jacob Milgrom and Beyond
Roy E. Gane
SBL Press, 2015

New directions and fresh insight for scholars and students

The single greatest catalyst and contributor to our developing understanding of priestly literature has been Jacob Milgrom (1923-2010), whose seminal articles, provocative hypotheses, and comprehensively probing books vastly expanded and significantly altered scholarship regarding priestly and related literature. Nineteen articles build on Milgrom's work and look to future directions of research. Essays cover a range of topics including the interpretation, composition and literary structure of priestly and holiness texts as well as their relationships to deuteronomic and extra-biblical texts. The book includes a bibliography of Milgrom's work published between 1994 and 2014.

Features:

  • Comparisons with Mesopotamian Hittite texts
  • Essays from a diverse group of scholars representing a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and methodologies
  • Charts and tables illustrate complex relationships and structures
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    The Deposition
    Pete Duval
    University of Massachusetts Press, 2021
    An insurance lawyer driving across Iowa engages a wounded, hitchhiking priest in a metaphysical debate. A vacationing air traffic controller with a penchant for Saint Francis of Assisi is bitten by an ancient parrot. The Marxist owner of a Florida curiosity shop confronts a local church community's rising anger over a jarred fetus, while a fasting husband of an evangelical minister holds bloody communion with the leader of a suburban coyote pack and a Catholic cable news cameraman tracks a missing stigmatist through a Caribbean port city. As cosmic struggles play out against the backdrop of forgotten strip malls, suburban cul-de-sacs, and grimy cities, guidance comes from the unlikeliest of sources. In prose both dreamlike and vivid, the characters in Pete Duval's second collection navigate paths through a landscape of vestigial faith and nagging doubt.
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    Every Catholic An Apostle
    A Life of Thomas A. Judge, CM, 1868-1933
    William L. Portier
    Catholic University of America Press, 2017
    Born in Boston of immigrant parents, Thomas A. Judge, CM (1868-1933) preached up and down the east coast on the Vincentian mission band between 1903 and 1915. Disturbed by the “leakage” of the immigrant poor from the church, he enlisted and organized lay women he met on the missions to work for the “preservation of the faith,” his watchword. His work grew apace with, and in some ways anticipated, the growing body of papal teaching on the lay apostolate. When he became superior of the godforsaken Vincentian Alabama mission in 1915, he invited the lay apostles to come south to help. “This is the layman’s hour,” he wrote in 1919. By then, however, many of his lay apostles had evolved in the direction of vowed communal life. This pioneer of the lay apostle founded two religious communities, one of women and one of men. With the indispensable help of his co-founder, Mother Boniface Keasey, he spent the last decade of his life trying to gain canonical approval for these groups, organizing them, and helping them learn “to train the work-a-day man and woman into an apostle, to cause each to be alert to the interests of the Church, to be the Church.” The roaring twenties saw the work expanded beyond the Alabama missions as far as Puerto Rico, which Judge viewed as a gateway to Latin America. The Great Depression ended this expansive mood and time and put agonizing pressure on Judge, his disciples, and their work. In 1932, the year before Judge’s death, the apostolic delegate, upon being appraised of Judge’s financial straits, described his work as “the only organized movement of its kind in the Church today that so completely meets the wishes of the Holy Father with reference to the Lay Apostolate.”
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    Father Groppi
    Marching for Civil Rights
    Stuart Stotts
    Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2013

    Father Groppi Marched to Change Milwaukee


    "Father Groppi: Marching for Civil Rights" tells the story of Father James Groppi, a Catholic priest from Milwaukee, Wis., who stood up for civil rights in the 1960s and 1970s.

    This important new addition to the Badger Biographies series for young readers also tells about a turbulent time in Wisconsin history and sheds light on the civil rights movement and its place in the North.

    Growing up on the south side of Milwaukee as the son of Italian immigrants, young James Groppi learned early on what it felt like to be made fun of just because of who you are, and he learned to respect people from other races and ethnic groups. Later, while studying to become a priest, he saw the discrimination African Americans faced. It made him angry, and he vowed to do whatever he could to fight racism.

    Father Groppi marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders of the civil rights movement. But he knew there was work to be done in his own city. In Milwaukee, he teamed up with the NAACP and other organizations, protesting discrimination and segregation wherever they saw it. It wasn't always easy, and Father Groppi and the other civil rights workers faced great challenges.

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    Harry, Tom, and Father Rice
    Accusation and Betrayal in America’s Cold War
    John Hoerr
    University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007

    John Hoerr tells the story of three men—his uncle, Congressman Harry Davenport, union leader Tom Quinn, and Father Charles Owen Rice—whose lives became intertwined during the anti-Communist witch hunts of the McCarthy Era. The story helps illuminate one of the more repressive periods in American history, when thousands of Americans guilty only of enlisting in leftist causes were caught up in dragnets cast by overzealous Communist hunters on behalf of the House Un-American Activities Committee and other bodies. Much has been written about well-known cultural figures (the Hollywood Ten), and prominent writers (Arthur Miller and Lillian Hellman) who contended with HUAC. Hoerr tells of mostly ordinary Americans who were largely unknown at the time, but whose stories are nonetheless remarkable.

    Writing from personal experience with the title characters, as well as archival research, Hoerr recreates the events of the 1949 HUAC hearings, where rigged testimony by a few workers cast suspicion on their union brothers.  The results would echo through the years, causing people to lose jobs, marriages, and self-respect. Hoerr traces the paths followed by Harry, Tom, and Father Rice and relates their individual experiences to the great conflict between anti-Communist and Communist forces in the American labor movement, leading to the eventual demise of the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations).

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    Ojibwe, Activist, Priest
    The Life of Father Philip Bergin Gordon, Tibishkogijik
    Tadeusz Lewandowski
    University of Wisconsin Press, 2019
    Born in Wisconsin, Philip Bergin Gordon—whose Ojibwe name Tibishkogijik is said to mean Looking into the Sky—became one of the first Native Americans to be ordained as a Catholic priest in the United States. Gordon's devotion to Catholicism was matched only by his dedication to the protection of his people. A notable Native rights activist, his bold efforts to expose poverty and corruption on reservations and his reputation for agitation earned him the nickname "Wisconsin's Fighting Priest."
    Drawing on previously unexplored materials, Tadeusz Lewandowski paints a portrait of a contentious life. Ojibwe, Activist, Priest examines Gordon's efforts to abolish the Bureau of Indian Affairs, his membership in the Society of American Indians, and his dismissal from his Ojibwe parish and exile to a tiny community where he'd be less likely to stir up controversy. Lewandowski illuminates a significant chapter in the struggle for Native American rights through the views and experiences of a key Native progressive.
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    "Other Sheep I Have" The Autobiography of Father Paul M. Washington
    Paul Washington
    Temple University Press, 1994

    Father Paul M. Washington rose to local and nation prominence as an unflagging supporter of civil and women's rights. One of a handful of black priests in a traditionally white church, he fought for understanding among all people, eventually serving twenty-five years as the Rector of the Episcopal Church of the Advocate in an inner-city Philadelphia neighborhood. Though his ideas about equality often went against the views of the Episcopal church leadership, he rejected threats of withdrawn funding or retaliation to follow his heart and his theology.

    Father Washington's story is a window of insight into the struggles for justice and dignity in the latter half of the twentieth century. In the tumultuous 1960s he supported the Black Power movement, the Black Panther Party, and many other groups working for peace and justice, providing meeting places and guidance. He often found himself in the midst of racial disturbances—the riots on Susquehanna Avenue in 1963 and on Columbia Avenue in 1964, in front of the Board of Education where high school students protested the Eurocentric curriculum, and outside the walls of Girard College where citizens and civic leaders demonstrated against the school's exclusion of black children. In the 1980s, he helped Philadelphia city officials negotiate with MOVE members and was a vocal supporter of Ramona Africa, fighting for her release from prison. It was in his church on the corner of 18th and Diamond Streets that women were first ordained a priests in the Episcopal church. And it was one of his congregation, Barbara Harris, who became the first female Episcopal bishop.

    In his evocative voice, Father Washington describes the pivotal events of his life and how each impacted upon his evolving ideas of the relationship between religion and justice. Spanning seven decades, his account is at once an insightful and unique historical account of political action, of the reformation of the church, of the changing urban landscape, and of a life graced by leadership and spiritual enlightenment.

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    PADRES
    The National Chicano Priest Movement
    By Richard Edward Martínez
    University of Texas Press, 2005

    From the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to the 1960s, Mexican American Catholics experienced racism and discrimination within the U.S. Catholic church, as white priests and bishops maintained a racial divide in all areas of the church's ministry. To oppose this religious apartheid and challenge the church to minister fairly to all of its faithful, a group of Chicano priests formed PADRES (Padres Asociados para Derechos Religiosos, Educativos y Sociales, or Priests Associated for Religious, Educational, and Social Rights) in 1969. Over the next twenty years of its existence, PADRES became a powerful force for change within the Catholic church and for social justice within American society.

    This book offers the first history of the founding, activism, victories, and defeats of PADRES. At the heart of the book are oral history interviews with the founders of PADRES, who describe how their ministries in poor Mexican American parishes, as well as their own experiences of racism and discrimination within and outside the church, galvanized them into starting and sustaining the movement. Richard Martínez traces the ways in which PADRES was inspired by the Chicano movement and other civil rights struggles of the 1960s and also probes its linkages with liberation theology in Latin America. He uses a combination of social movement theory and organizational theory to explain why the group emerged, flourished, and eventually disbanded in 1989.

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    Politics in the Parish
    The Political Influence of Catholic Priests
    Gregory Allen Smith
    Georgetown University Press, 2008

    For well over a century the Catholic Church has articulated clear positions on many issues of public concern, particularly economics, capital punishment, foreign affairs, sexual morality, and abortion. Yet the fact that some of the Church's positions do not mesh well with the platforms of either of the two major political parties in the U.S. may make it difficult for Americans to look to Catholic doctrine for political guidance. Scholars of religion and politics have long recognized the potential for clergy to play an important role in shaping the voting decisions and political attitudes of their congregations, yet these assumptions of political influence have gone largely untested and undemonstrated.

    Politics in the Parish is the first empirical examination of the role Catholic clergy play in shaping the political views of their congregations. Gregory Allen Smith draws from recent scholarship on political communication, and the comprehensive Notre Dame Study of Parish Life, as well as case studies he conducted in nine parishes in the mid-Atlantic region, to investigate the extent to which and the circumstances under which Catholic priests are influential in shaping the politics of their parishioners.

    Smith is able to verify that clergy do exercise political influence, but he makes clear that such influence is likely to be nuanced, limited in magnitude, and exercised indirectly by shaping parishioner religious attitudes that in turn affect political behavior. He shows that the messages that priests deliver vary widely, even radically, from parish to parish and priest to priest. Consequently, he warns that scholars should exercise caution when making any global assumptions about the political influence that Catholic clergy affect upon their congregations.

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    The Priesthood, Mystery of Faith
    Priestly Ministry in the Magisterium of John Paul II
    Nilson Leal de Sa, CB
    Catholic University of America Press, 2022
    After almost twenty-seven years of his pontificate, what was John Paul II’s legacy regarding the ministerial priesthood? What answers did he give to the questions still surrounding this reality today? Nilson Leal de Sá, CB, examines the pontiff’s twenty-seven letters of Holy Thursday addressed annually to the priests. Unlike some papal documents, which are drafted by many hands, these letters to priests were born of a personal initiative, wherein the pope spoke ab imo pectore (from the depths of his heart), giving a little of himself and his thought. Cardinal Georges-Marie Cottier, theologian emeritus of the Pontifical House and a connoisseur of the texts of the Holy Father, has confirmed that “the Letters of Holy Thursday were written by John Paul II himself.” Leal de Sá has sought in the diversity of the letters of Holy Thursday the major points of the thought of John Paul II on this important topic. The first chapter dwells on the sources of his teaching and emphasizes his use of the Word of God, Tradition, and the conciliar Magisterium. These foundations are the basis of the second chapter, which highlights the priestly identity in the life of the Church. Finally, the third chapter elucidates the specific mission of the priest. The Priesthood, Mystery of Faith presents itself as a real and stimulating synthesis of John Paul II’s thought about the ministerial priesthood in a systematic way. It renews us in the appreciation of the inestimable gift that God makes to the whole Church through the sacrament of the Holy Orders.
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    Priestly Celibacy
    Gary B. Selin
    Catholic University of America Press, 2016
    Pope Francis has called mandatory priestly celibacy a "gift for the Church," but added "since it is not a dogma, the door is always open" to change. As this Church discipline continues to be debated, it is important for Catholics to delve into the theological and not merely pragmatic reasons behind its continuation. Priestly Celibacy: Theological Foundations, therefore, fills a critical gap in the current theological literature on this important topic of ecclesial ministry and life, and also helps to contribute to the advancement of the rather underdeveloped theology of priestly celibacy.
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    Priests
    A Calling in Crisis
    Andrew M. Greeley
    University of Chicago Press, 2004
    For several years now, the Roman Catholic Church and the institution of the priesthood itself have been at the center of a firestorm of controversy. While many of the criticisms lodged against the recent actions of the Church—and a small number of its priests—are justified, the majority of these criticisms are not. Hyperbolic and misleading coverage of recent scandals has created a public image of American priests that bears little relation to reality, and Andrew Greeley's Priests skewers this image with a systematic inside look at American priests today.

    No stranger to controversy himself, Greeley here challenges those analysts and the media who parrot them in placing the blame for recent Church scandals on the mandate of celibacy or a clerical culture that supports homosexuality. Drawing upon reliable national survey samples of priests, Greeley demolishes current stereotypes about the percentage of homosexual priests, the level of personal and professional happiness among priests, the role of celibacy in their lives, and many other issues. His findings are more than surprising: they reveal, among other things, that priests report higher levels of personal and professional satisfaction than doctors, lawyers, or faculty members; that they would overwhelmingly choose to become priests again; and that younger priests are far more conservative than their older brethren.

    While the picture Greeley paints should radically reorient the public perception of priests, he does not hesitate to criticize the Church's significant shortcomings. Most priests, for example, do not think the sexual abuse problems are serious, and they do not think that poor preaching or liturgy is a problem, though the laity give them very low marks on their ministerial skills. Priests do not listen to the laity, bishops do not listen to priests, and the Vatican does not listen to any of them. With Greeley's statistical evidence and provocative recommendations for change—including a national "Priest Corps" that would offer young men a limited term of service in the Church—Priests offers a new vision for American Catholics, one based on real problems and solutions rather than on images of a depraved, immature, and frustrated priesthood.
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    Priests and Cults in the Book of the Twelve
    Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer
    SBL Press, 2016

    Key essays that explore a range of attitudes toward clergy and ritual

    This book discusses the depictions of the cult and its personnel in the twelve prophetic books commonly referred to as the Book of the Twelve or the Minor Prophets. The articles in the volume explore the following questions: How did these prophetic writers envision the priests and the Levites? What did they think about the ritual aspects of ancient Israelite faith, including not only the official temple cult in Jerusalem but also cultic expressions outside the capital? What, in their views, characterized a faithful priest and what should the relationship be between his cultic performance and the ways in which he lived his life? How does the message of each individual author fit in with the wider Israelite traditions? Finally, who were these prophetic authors, in which historical contexts did they live and work, and what stylistic tools did they use to communicate their message?

    Features:

  • Essays investigate the ways in which key texts in the Book of the Twelve endorse, criticize, seek to reform, or seek to abolish the cult and clergy
  • Articles focus on the books of Hosea, Joel, Amos, Zephaniah, Zechariah, and Malachi, but include other texts
  • Exploration of how the attitudes towards cult and clergy in these key texts tie in with the attitudes found elsewhere in the Book of the Twelve
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    Wehrmacht Priests
    Catholicism and the Nazi War of Annihilation
    Lauren Faulkner Rossi
    Harvard University Press, 2015

    Between 1939 and 1945 more than 17,000 Catholic German priests and seminarians were conscripted into Hitler’s Wehrmacht. Men who had devoted their lives to God found themselves advancing the cause of an abhorrent regime. Lauren Faulkner Rossi draws on personal correspondence, official military reports, memoirs, and interviews to present a detailed picture of Catholic priests who served faithfully in the German armed forces in the Second World War. Most of them failed to see the bitter irony of their predicament.

    Wehrmacht Priests plumbs the moral justifications of men who were committed to their religious vocation as well as to the cause of German nationalism. In their wartime and postwar writings, these soldiers often stated frankly that they went to war willingly, because it was their spiritual duty to care for their countrymen in uniform. But while some priests became military chaplains, carrying out work consistent with their religious training, most served in medical roles or, in the case of seminarians, in general infantry. Their convictions about their duty only strengthened as Germany waged an increasingly desperate battle against the Soviet Union, which they believed was an existential threat to the Catholic Church and German civilization.

    Wehrmacht Priests unpacks the complex relationship between the Catholic Church and the Nazi regime, including the Church’s fierce but futile attempts to preserve its independence under Hitler’s dictatorship, its accommodations with the Nazis regarding spiritual care in the military, and the shortcomings of Catholic doctrine in the face of total war and genocide.

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    A Year in White
    Cultural Newcomers to Lukumi and Santería in the United States
    Carr, C. Lynn
    Rutgers University Press, 2016
    In the Afro-Cuban Lukumi religious tradition—more commonly known in the United States as Santería—entrants into the priesthood undergo an extraordinary fifty-three-week initiation period. During this time, these novices—called iyawo—endure a host of prohibitions, including most notably wearing exclusively white clothing. In A Year in White, sociologist C. Lynn Carr, who underwent this initiation herself, opens a window on this remarkable year-long religious transformation.
     
    In her intimate investigation of the “year in white,” Carr draws on fifty-two in-depth interviews with other participants, an online survey of nearly two hundred others, and almost a decade of her own ethnographic fieldwork, gathering stories that allow us to see how cultural newcomers and natives thought, felt, and acted with regard to their initiation. She documents how, during the iyawo year, the ritual slowly transforms the initiate’s identity. For the first three months, for instance, the iyawo may not use a mirror, even to shave, and must eat all meals while seated on a mat on the floor using only a spoon and their own set of dishes. During the entire year, the iyawo loses their name and is simply addressed as “iyawo” by family and friends.
     
    Carr also shows that this year-long religious ritual—which is carried out even as the iyawo goes about daily life—offers new insight into religion in general, suggesting that the sacred is not separable from the profane and indeed that religion shares an ongoing dynamic relationship with the realities of everyday life. Religious expression happens at home, on the streets, at work and school.
     
    Offering insight not only into Santería but also into religion more generally, A Year in White makes an important contribution to our understanding of complex, dynamic religious landscapes in multicultural, pluralist societies and how they inhabit our daily lives.
     
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