logo for Harvard University Press
Caitanya Caritamrta of Krsnadasa Kaviraja
A Translation and Commentary
Edward C. Dimock Jr.
Harvard University Press

The Caitanya Caritamrta is an early-seventeenth-century Bengali and Sanskrit biography of the great saint and Vaisnava leader Caitanya (1486–1533 CE) by the poet and scholar Krsnadasa, who has been given by Bengali tradition the title Kaviraja—“Prince of Poets.”

The text is of interest to theologians—Caitanya was, in Krsnadasa’s view, an androgyne of Krsna and Radha; philosophers—his theory was that aesthetic and religious experience are much the same in kind; historians of religion—the movement that Caitanya inspired has encompassed the great part of the eastern Indian subcontinent, and Krsnadasa has some interesting observations on his own times; and appreciators of literature—in Krsnadasa’s very long poem are embedded some lyric gems.

[more]

front cover of Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val
Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val
Philippe Roy-Lysencourt
Catholic University of America Press, 2021
Rafael Merry del Val (1865-1930) was a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church who had one of the most dazzling careers in ecclesiastical history: he was a secret supernumerary chamberlain at the age of 21, a secret participating chamberlain at the age of 26, an apostolic delegate to Canada at age 31, president of the Academy of Ecclesiastical Nobles and archbishop at age 34, secretary of state for Pius X (1903-1914) and cardinal at age 38, archpriest of St. Peter’s Basilica and prefect of the Fabric of St. Peter at age 48, secretary of the Congregation of the Holy Office at age 49. In 1953, his beatification process was introduced to the Congregation for Rites. In this study, Philippe Roy-Lysencourt presents the life of this personage, his curial charges, his relations with the popes he served (Leo XIII, Pius X, Benedict XV, and Pius XI), his apostolate, his unexpected death and the furor it caused. The book includes an inventory of sources for understanding Cardinal Merry del Val’s life, a list of his published writings, as well as a bibliography of the works written about him.
[more]

front cover of The Cashaway Psalmody
The Cashaway Psalmody
Transatlantic Religion and Music in Colonial Carolina
Stephen A. Marini
University of Illinois Press, 2019
Singing master Durham Hills created The Cashaway Psalmody to give as a wedding present in 1770. A collection of tenor melody parts for 152 tunes and sixty-three texts, the Psalmody is the only surviving tunebook from the colonial-era South and one of the oldest sacred music manuscripts from the Carolinas. It is all the more remarkable for its sophistication: no similar document of the period matches Hills's level of musical expertise, reportorial reach, and calligraphic skill.

Stephen A. Marini, discoverer of The Cashaway Psalmody, offers the fascinating story of the tunebook and its many meanings. From its musical, literary, and religious origins in England, he moves on to the life of Durham Hills; how Carolina communities used the book; and the Psalmody's significance in understanding how ritual song—transmitted via transatlantic music, lyrics, and sacred singing—shaped the era's development. Marini also uses close musical and textual analyses to provide a critical study that offers music historians and musicologists valuable insights on the Pslamody and its period.

Meticulous in presentation and interdisciplinary in scope, The Cashaway Psalmody unlocks an important source for understanding life in the Lower South in the eighteenth century.

[more]

front cover of Chance or Dance
Chance or Dance
An Evaluation of Design
Jimmy H. Davis
Templeton Press, 2008

Chance or Dance provides an overview of design and clarification of the controversial Intelligent Design (ID) movement and ultimately concludes there is no scientific proof behind Intelligent Design. As the controversy over Intelligent Design has grown over the past few years, there is a tendency to confuse all statements about design with the Intelligent Design movement and to confuse any affirmation of creation with Scientific Creationism. Davis and Poe begin with a brief historical perspective of the design argument and then examine the significant breakthroughs in cosmology, math, physics, chemistry, and biology that have provided renewed speculation in design.

The authors discuss that the idea of design is far more expansive than the ID movement’s version of it, evaluate Dawkins’ interpretation of genetic determinism, include a chapter that explores the tendency since Darwin to assume that the presence of an observable cause excludes the possibility of divine involvement; and introduce further reflections on wonder and awe that take into account the recent surge of interest in this area. The book concludes with an argument for the correlation between faith and sensory experience and suggests that science has successfully described processes but failed to explain origins.

Chance or Dance is ideal for students and general readers interested in understanding how modern science gives evidence for nature’s creation by the Bible’s God.

[more]

front cover of A Change Is Gonna Come
A Change Is Gonna Come
Music, Race & the Soul of America
Craig Werner
University of Michigan Press, 2006
". . . extraordinarily far-reaching. . . . highly accessible."
Notes

"No one has written this way about music in a long, long time. Lucid, insightful, with real spiritual, political, intellectual, and emotional grasp of the whole picture. A book about why music matters, and how, and to whom."
—Dave Marsh, author of Louie, Louie and Born to Run: The Bruce Springsteen Story

"This book is urgently needed: a comprehensive look at the various forms of black popular music, both as music and as seen in a larger social context. No one can do this better than Craig Werner."
—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University

"[Werner has] mastered the extremely difficult art of writing about music as both an aesthetic and social force that conveys, implies, symbolizes, and represents ideas as well as emotion, but without reducing its complexities and ambiguities to merely didactic categories."
African American Review

A Change Is Gonna Come is the story of more than four decades of enormously influential black music, from the hopeful, angry refrains of the Freedom movement, to the slick pop of Motown; from the disco inferno to the Million Man March; from Woodstock's "Summer of Love" to the war in Vietnam and the race riots that inspired Marvin Gaye to write "What's Going On."

Originally published in 1998, A Change Is Gonna Come drew the attention of scholars and general readers alike. This new edition, featuring four new and updated chapters, will reintroduce Werner's seminal study of black music to a new generation of readers.

Craig Werner is Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin, and author of many books, including Playing the Changes: From Afro-Modernism to the Jazz Impulse and Up Around the Bend: An Oral History of Creedence Clearwater Revival. His most recent book is Higher Ground: Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, and the Rise and Fall of American Soul.
[more]

front cover of Changing the Subject
Changing the Subject
Philosophy from Socrates to Adorno
Raymond Geuss
Harvard University Press, 2017

“A history of philosophy in twelve thinkers…The whole performance combines polyglot philological rigor with supple intellectual sympathy, and it is all presented…in a spirit of fun…This bracing and approachable book [shows] that there is life in philosophy yet.”
Times Literary Supplement

“Exceptionally engaging…Geuss has a remarkable knack for putting even familiar thinkers in a new light.”
Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

“Geuss is something like the consummate teacher, his analyses navigable and crystal, his guidance on point.”
—Doug Phillips, Key Reporter

Raymond Geuss explores the ideas of twelve philosophers who broke dramatically with prevailing wisdom, from Socrates and Plato in the ancient world to Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Adorno. The result is a striking account of some of the most innovative thinkers in Western history and an indirect manifesto for how to pursue philosophy today. Geuss cautions that philosophers’ attempts to break from convention do not necessarily make the world a better place. Montaigne’s ideas may have been benign, but the fate of those of Hobbes, Hegel, and Nietzsche has been more varied. Yet in the act of provoking people to think differently, philosophers remind us that we are not fated to live within the systems of thought we inherit.

[more]

front cover of Charisma under Pressure
Charisma under Pressure
Joseph Smith, American Prophet, 1831–1839
Dan Vogel
Signature Books, 2023
When Joseph Smith entered Kirtland, Ohio, for the first time, he had only the year before established a church and brought forth a new book of scripture, the Book of Mormon. After moving the church and most of its members from western New York and establishing its headquarters at Kirtland—while simultaneously establishing his Zion in communities in Missouri—he oversaw a decade of both peace and prosperity and chaos and conflict. 

But just who was Joseph Smith? What motivated him? In examining Smith’s life during his Ohio and Missouri sojourns, Vogel seeks to answer those questions. But, Vogel is quick to note, “There are, in fact, many possible constructions of Joseph Smith, and depending on how one assesses the evidence for his truth-claims, a completely different Joseph Smith emerges. But this is probably as Smith wanted it.” 

During this period, Smith established a temple, printing presses, additional scripture, expanded church offices, and built a bank—all indicating a sense of permanence and strength for his young church at one level while causing its near collapse at another. 
[more]

front cover of Christian Philosophy and Free Will
Christian Philosophy and Free Will
Josef Seifert
St. Augustine's Press, 2014

Following an ardent debate in the 1930s on the question over whether something like a “Christian philosophy” exists, as Etienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain, and others held, the term was used by many thinkers and rejected by many others, not only by Heidegger who called it a contradiction in terms, an “iron wood,” but also by Thomists who wanted to see philosophy and Christian faith strictly separated. Seifert analyses five understandings of the term “Christian philosophy” which have never been expounded with such clarity and which he rejects for different, partly for opposite, reasons. He presents these senses of Christian philosophy, and his reasons for rejecting them, in clear, straight-forward language. He presents for the first time a series of eleven wholly different and thoroughly positive and fruitful ways of understanding the (rather misleading) term “Christian philosophy.” Identifying and distinguishing these legitimate ways to speak of “Christian philosophy” shed light on the manifold fruitful relations between reason and faith. In a second part of the book, Seifert gives an example of Christian philosophy in the sense of a philosophy of religion that shows the absolute presupposedness and necessity of the existence of human, divine, and angelic free will to make any sense of divine revelation and of Christian (but also of Muslim and Jewish) religion. In a third part, he presents a penetrating analysis of seven indubitable evidences that demonstrate the nature and real existence of human free will (in a so-called “libertarian” sense that rejects the thesis of the compatibility between free will and determinism). The book is introduced by the eminent Thomist philosopher, John Finnis.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Christianity and Hellenism in the Fifth-Century Greek East
Theodoret’s Apologetics against the Greeks in Context
Yannis Papadogiannakis
Harvard University Press, 2012

This book—the first full-length study of the “last and most beautiful” apology against paganism, Theodoret’s Therapeutic for Hellenic Maladies—combines close readings of the text with detailed analysis of Theodoret’s arguments against Greek religion, philosophy, and culture and the ways in which that Greek influence interacts with other diverse ideas, practices, and developments in the fifth-century Roman empire.

The book’s larger underlying themes—the continuing debate between Christianity and Hellenism, and the relationship between classical and Christian literature—offer insights into more general late Roman and early Byzantine religious and cultural attitudes and issues, including the relations between pagan and Christian paideia, the cult of the martyrs, and the role of Christianity in the Roman empire.

[more]

logo for Southern Illinois University Press
Christina Rossetti
The Poetry of Endurance
Dolores Rosenblum
Southern Illinois University Press, 1987

Christina Rossetti was considered the ideal female poet of her time. Her poetry was devo­tional, moral, and spoke of frustrated affection.

Dolores Rosenblum presents a fresh reading of Rossetti’s works and places them in the con­text of her life. Rosenblum shows that what was ostensibly devotional, moral, and loveless, was actually what Luce Irigaray calls “mimetism,” a subtle parody and subversion of the male tra­dition of literature.

Only with the coming of feminist criticism can Rossetti be meaningfully re-evaluated. Rosenblum calls Rossetti’s works the “poetry of endurance,” stating that it is similar, and at times identical, to the female “sentimental” tradition in literature. Rossetti endured the con­straints of the Victorian female artistic spirit by becoming a “watcher.” Within this self-accepted role, Rossetti was able to carefully and deliber­ately choose artistic self-protection. In her reli­gious poetry, Rossetti transcended, by aesthetic renunciation, the alienation and immobilization forced upon her.

Rossetti’s poetry is full of paradox; it sings about silence, exposes the poet’s oblivion. From the repining Victorian poet, there emerged a “stone woman.” Rosenblum discusses this pas­sively enduring female figure’s alienation from knowledge and power, and how the myth of self strengthened the lyric voice within her. Because she was a woman, she was denied the male use of the lyric “I.”

Rossetti’s work is unified, Rosenblum argues, because she was a deliberate poet, and by accepting the “burden of womanhood,” she played out what men only symbolized as female in their art. By her mimicry and revision of the male tradition of literature, Christina Rossetti engaged the patriarchal tradition in ways that make it usable for the female experience, and that provide a critique of male objectification of women in art.

[more]

front cover of The Churches of Christ in the 20th Century
The Churches of Christ in the 20th Century
Homer Hailey's Personal Journey of Faith
David Edwin Harrell
University of Alabama Press, 2002
The story of one of this country's major religious movements is told through the spiritual odyssey of one of its prominent spokesmen.

When Homer Hailey sparked controversy within Churches of Christ congregations over his stand on divorce and remarriage, he spoke to a movement already sundered. Historian David Edwin Harrell tells Hailey's story as a means of presenting the larger drama of faith and feuding within those churches.

A nondenominational movement of autonomous congregations, Churches of Christ have been among the fastest-growing religious bodies in the 20th century. Throughout the movement's history, church leaders debated issues ranging from missionary societies to the use of instrumental music in worship. Although some disagreements affected only the ties between congregations, others led to the creation of three distinct groups calling themselves Churches of Christ identified by their sociological and theological positions.

This book shows how the story of the Churches of Christ is reflected by Homer Hailey, a preacher, educator, and author whose life puts in perspective the personal journeys traveled by members in this century. Writing from the perspective of the non-institutional wing within the movement, Harrell avoids mainstream biases to describe the various dissenting views as fully and fairly as possible.

Combining institutional history and biography, Harrell's book is the first to bring the story of the Churches of Christ to century's end. It provides new insight into how this movement realigned itself and shows how one man's career reflected a century of spiritual growth and change for the church as a whole.


[more]

front cover of Circling Faith
Circling Faith
Southern Women on Spirituality
Wendy Reed
University of Alabama Press, 2012
Circling Faith is a collection of essays by southern women that encompasses spirituality and the experience of winding through the religiously charged environment of the American South.
 
Mary Karr, in “Facing Altars,” describes how the consolation she found in poetry directed her to a similar solace in prayer. In “Chiaroscuro: Shimmer and Shadow,” Susan Cushman recounts how her dissatisfaction with a Presbyterian upbringing led her to hold her own worship services at home and eventually to join the Eastern Orthodox Church. “Magic” by Amy Blackmarr depicts a religious practice that occurs wholly outside of any formal setting—she recognizes places, such as a fishing shack in south Georgia, and things, such as crystal Cherokee earrings, as reminders that God exists everywhere and that a Great Comforter is always present. In “The Only Jews in Town,” Stella Suberman gives her account of growing up as a religious minority in Tennessee, connecting her story to a larger narrative of Eastern European Jews who moved away from the Northeast, often to found and run “Jew stores” in midwestern and southern towns.  Alice Walker, in an interview with Valerie Reiss titled “Alice Walker Calls God ‘Mama,’” relates her dynamic relationship with her God, which includes meditation and yoga, and explains how she views the role of faith in her work, including her novel The Color Purple.  These essays showcase the large spectrum of spirituality that abides in the South, as well as the equally large spectrum of individual women who hold these faiths.
 
 
[more]

front cover of A City Called Heaven
A City Called Heaven
Chicago and the Birth of Gospel Music
Robert Marovich
University of Illinois Press, 2015
In A City Called Heaven, Robert M. Marovich follows gospel music from early hymns and camp meetings through its growth into the sanctified soundtrack of the city's mainline black Protestant churches. Marovich mines print media, ephemera, and hours of interviews with artists, ministers, and historians--as well as relatives and friends of gospel pioneers--to recover forgotten singers, musicians, songwriters, and industry leaders. He also examines the entrepreneurial spirit that fueled gospel music's rise to popularity and granted social mobility to a number of its practitioners. As Marovich shows, the music expressed a yearning for freedom from earthly pains, racial prejudice, and life's hardships. Yet it also helped give voice to a people--and lift a nation.

A City Called Heaven celebrates a sound too mighty and too joyous for even church walls to hold.

[more]

front cover of Close Encounters between Bible and Film
Close Encounters between Bible and Film
An Interdisciplinary Engagement
Laura Copier
SBL Press, 2016

Explore new routes into the burgeoning field of biblical literature and film theory

The present collection of essays is a sequel to the groundbreaking Semeia 74 issue, published in 1996, entitled Biblical Glamour and Hollywood Glitz. These new essays showcase the divergent approaches from film studies and cultural studies that can be used in the visual analysis of biblical and religious themes, narratives, and characters in cinema. It is the first volume that specifically addresses issues of methodology, theory, and analysis in the study between bible and film. As such, this collection is of interest to scholars in film studies and theology/religion/biblical studies, who are invested in doing interdisciplinary research in the expanding field of religion and film.

Features

  • Specific focus on methods of film analysis, rather than the more common focus on thematic analysis in the study of religion, Bible, and film.
  • Visual analysis in the encounter between Bible and film
  • Fourteen essays and an introduction by top scholars in the field
[more]

front cover of Colonial Rosary
Colonial Rosary
The Spanish and Indian Missions of California
Alison Lake
Ohio University Press, 2006

California would be a different place today without the imprint of Spanish culture and the legacy of Indian civilization. The colonial Spanish missions that dot the coast and foothills between Sonoma and San Diego are relics of a past that transformed California’s landscape and its people.

In a spare and accessible style, Colonial Rosary looks at the complexity of California’s Indian civilization and the social effects of missionary control. While oppressive institutions lasted in California for almost eighty years under the tight reins of royal Spain, the Catholic Church, and the government of Mexico, letters and government documents reveal the missionaries’ genuine concern for the Indian communities they oversaw for their health, spiritual upbringing, and material needs.

With its balanced attention to the variety of sources on the mission period, Colonial Rosary illuminates ongoing debates over the role of the Franciscan missions in the settlement of California.

By sharing the missions’ stories of tragedy and triumph, author Alison Lake underlines the importance of preserving these vestiges of California’s prestatehood period. An illustrated tour of the missions as well as a sensitive record of their impact on California history and culture, Colonial Rosary brings the story of the Spanish missions of California alive.

[more]

front cover of The Coloniality of the Secular
The Coloniality of the Secular
Race, Religion, and Poetics of World-Making
An Yountae
Duke University Press, 2024
In The Coloniality of the Secular, An Yountae investigates the collusive ties between the modern concepts of the secular, religion, race, and coloniality in the Americas. Drawing on the work of Édouard Glissant, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Sylvia Wynter, and Enrique Dussel, An maps the intersections of revolutionary non-Western thought with religious ideas to show how decoloniality redefines the sacred as an integral part of its liberation vision. He examines these thinkers’ rejection of colonial religions and interrogates the narrow conception of religion that confines it within colonial power structures. An explores decoloniality’s conception of the sacred in relation to revolutionary violence, gender, creolization, and racial phenomenology, demonstrating its potential for reshaping religious paradigms. Pointing out that the secular has been pivotal to regulating racial hierarchies under colonialism, he advocates for a broader understanding of religion that captures the fundamental ideas that drive decolonial thinking. By examining how decolonial theory incorporates the sacred into its vision of liberation, An invites readers to rethink the transformative power of decoloniality and religion to build a hopeful future.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Commentaries
Pius II
Harvard University Press, 2003
The Renaissance popes were among the most enlightened and generous patrons of arts and letters in the Europe of their day. The diaries of Pius II give us an intimate glimpse of the life and thought of one of the greatest of the Renaissance popes. Pius II (1405-1464) began life as Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini in a small town near Siena, and became a famous Latin poet and diplomat. Originally an opponent of the papacy as well as something of a libertine, Aeneas eventually reconciled himself with the Roman church and became a priest, then a cardinal. Finally he was elected Pope Pius II (1458) and dedicated his pontificate to organizing a pan-European crusade against the Ottoman Empire. Pius's Commentaries, the only autobiography ever written by a pope, was composed in elegant humanistic Latin modeled on Caesar and Cicero. This edition contains a fresh Latin text based on the last manuscript written in Pius's lifetime and an updated and corrected version of the 1937 translation by Florence Alden Gragg.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Commentaries
Pius IIEdited by Margaret Meserve and Marcello Simonetta
Harvard University Press
The Renaissance popes were among the most enlightened and generous patrons of arts and letters in the Europe of their day. The diaries of Pius II give us an intimate glimpse of the life and thought of one of the greatest of the Renaissance popes. Pius II (1405-1464) began life as Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini in a small town near Siena and became a famous Latin poet and diplomat. Originally an opponent of the papacy as well as something of a libertine, Aeneas eventually reconciled himself with the Roman church and became a priest, then a cardinal. Finally he was elected Pope Pius II (1458) and dedicated his pontificate to organizing a pan-European crusade against the Ottoman Empire. Pius's Commentaries, the only autobiography ever written by a pope, was composed in elegant humanistic Latin modeled on Caesar and Cicero. This edition contains a fresh Latin text based on the last manuscript written in Pius's lifetime and an updated and corrected version of the 1937 translation by Florence Alden Gragg.
[more]

front cover of Commentaries on the Cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach
Commentaries on the Cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach
A Selective Guide
Hans-Joachim Schulze. Translated by James A. Brokaw II
University of Illinois Press, 2024
Internationally recognized Bach authority Hans-Joachim Schulze authored a 225-part series on the cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach. In this collection, James A. Brokaw II translates a selection of the essays, illuminating a wide range of biographical and cultural features of Bach’s life and creative milieu. Schulze’s lively and engaging discussions provide a wealth of rewarding insights and perspectives focusing on individual cantatas, their texts, and the questions of chronology and context that attend them.

The University of Illinois Press has paired the volume with a special web-based companion overseen by the translator and hosted by the Illinois Open Publishing Network. This online resource includes Brokaw’s translations of all 225 of Schulze’s essays alongside digital tools for searching, sorting, and bundling the commentaries according to date of composition, position within the liturgical church year sequence, and librettist.

[more]

front cover of The Complementarity of Women and Men
The Complementarity of Women and Men
Philosophy, Theology, Psychology, and Art
Paul C. Vitz
Catholic University of America Press, 2021
The Complementarity of Women and Men provides a Catholic Christian case that men and women are in certain respects quite different but also have a positive, synergistic complementary relationship. Although differences and their mutually supporting relationships are focused on throughout the volume, men and women are assumed to have equal dignity and value. This underlying interpretation comes from the familiar, basic theological position in Genesis that both sexes were made in the image of God. After a cogent philosophical introduction to complementary differences by J. Budziszewski, this position is developed from theological, philosophical, and historical perspectives by Sr. Prudence Allen. Next Deborah Savage, building upon the writings of St. John Paul II, gives a strong theological basis for complementarity. This is followed by Elizabeth Lev’s chapter presenting new and surprising art history evidence from the paintings of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel supporting the complementarity interpretation. A final chapter by Paul Vitz documents and summarizes the scientific evidence supporting sexual difference and complementarity in the disciplines of psychology and neuroscience. As a consequence of both the individual chapters and the integrated understanding they present The Complementarity of Women and Men is a significant contribution to the important, complex, contemporary debate about men, women, sex, and gender.
[more]

front cover of The Complete Ezra Taft Benson FBI File
The Complete Ezra Taft Benson FBI File
Signature Books
Signature Books, 2020
In November 1952, newly elected US president Dwight D. Eisenhower nominated Ezra Taft Benson (1899–1994) as his Secretary of Agriculture. This was an unusual move. For nearly a decade, Benson had been a sitting apostle in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and had been for nearly a decade. Benson’s church duties occupied his full attention and energy.

Shortly after Benson’s nomination as agricultural secretary, the FBI began keeping a routine file on him, as they did other prominent Americans slated for Eisenhower’s cabinet. Filled with letters, memoranda, newspaper clippings, speeches, published writings, and other items, the file spans Benson’s eight-year tenure with the administration and well beyond. Some of the documents date past the Eisenhower era and even into Benson’s years as president of the LDS Church (1985–94).  The material not only deals with Benson’s life and political views, but his association with the John Birch Society, its leaders, and even threats made against his life in the late 1980s. The 570-page dossier is as much a revelation about the workings of the FBI as about the man they were investigating.
[more]

front cover of The Confederacy's Fighting Chaplain
The Confederacy's Fighting Chaplain
Father John B. Bannon
Phillip Thomas Tucker
University of Alabama Press, 1992
1993 Douglas Southall Freeman History Award, sponsored by Military Order of the Stars and Bars

The Confederacy’s Fighting Chaplain is the remarkable story of the Irishman who brought the Bible and his own resourcefulness and daring to both the battlefield and the diplomatic field—a story that has been largely ignored for more than 130 years. The biography of John B. Bannon also chronicles the forgotten Southerners—the Irish immigrants of the Confederacy—whose colorful and crucial role in the Civil War has been seriously neglected.
 
John B. Bannon was born in Ireland in 1829 and raised in peat-bog country. Educated at the Royal College of St. Patrick at Maynooth, he was ordained a priest in May 1853. Ireland was still suffering from the effects of the Potato Famine, which caused thousands of Irish to emigrate to the United States. In response to the need for Roman Catholic priests to minister to America’s immigrant population, Father Bannon was sent to the Archidiocese of St. Louis, Missouri, shortly after his ordination. Many of the Irish parishioners of St. Louis lived in a crowded corner of the city without money, assistance or land.
 
Father Bannon soon became a leading civic and religious figure in St. Louis. An impressive character, he was described as a “handsome man, over six feet in height, with splendid form and intellectual face, courteous manners, and of great personal magnetism, conversing entertainingly and with originality and great wit, in a manner all his own.”
 
By 1860, Missouri contained the second largest Irish population and the largest German population in the Southern and border states, and when the war reached Missouri, Father Bannon volunteered to serve on the battlefield by tending to the wounded and dying. During the war he served as chaplain-soldier in perhaps the finest combat unit on either side—the First Missouri Confederate Brigade. He impressed his fellow Confederates by attending the wounded at the front lines during battle, while most chaplains stayed to the rear. This tall, athletic man was a striking figure with his slouch had and butternut-colored uniform with a red cloth cross on the left shoulder. Various accounts praised the chaplain: A veteran wrote that the chaplain “was everywhere in the midst of battle when the fire was heaviest and the bullets thickest.” General Sterling Price wrote: “The greatest soldier I ever saw was Father Bannon. In the midst of the fray he would step in and take up a fallen soldier.”
 
After the fall of Vicksburg, where Bannon had worked under dangerous fire, he journeyed to Richmond and received recognition and special diplomatic duties from President Jefferson Davis. Bannon conceived a brilliant strategy to gain recognition for the Confederacy from Pope Pius IX and thus open the door for recognition from Britain and France. On a mission for Davis he acted as a secret agent in Ireland during an all-important clandestine effort to stop the flood of Irish immigrants pouring into the Union armies at a critical time—before the decisive campaigns of 1864. After the war he joined the Jesuit order in Ireland, where he served until his death in 1913.
 
The story of Father Bannon is indeed the story of the Missouri Irish Confederates, whose role in the conflict likewise has been neglected. Without doubt, Father Bannon stands out as an important religious-diplomatic personality of the Confederacy. Few men played such a distinguished and diverse role during the Civil War.

[more]

front cover of Confessions of a Gay Priest
Confessions of a Gay Priest
A Memoir of Sex, Love, Abuse, and Scandal in the Catholic Seminary
Tom Rastrelli
University of Iowa Press, 2020

Tom Rastrelli is a survivor of clergy-perpetrated sexual abuse who then became a priest in the early days of the Catholic Church’s ongoing scandals. Confessions of a Gay Priest divulges the clandes­tine inner workings of the seminary, providing an intimate and unapologetic look into the psychosexual and spiritual dynamics of celibacy and lays bare the “formation” system that perpetuates the cycle of abuse and cover-up that continues today.

Under the guidance of a charismatic college campus minister, Rastrelli sought to reconcile his homosexuality and childhood sexual abuse. When he felt called to the priesthood, Rastrelli be­gan the process of “priestly discernment.” Priests welcomed him into a confusing clerical culture where public displays of piety, celibacy, and homophobia masked a closeted underworld in which elder priests preyed upon young recruits.

From there he ventured deeper into the seminary system seeking healing, hoping to help others, and striving not to live a double life. Trained to treat sexuality like an addiction, he and his brother seminarians lived in a world of cliques, competition, self-loathing, alcohol, hidden crushes, and closeted sex. Ultimately, the “for­mation” intended to make Rastrelli a compliant priest helped to liberate him.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Confessions, Volume I
Books 1–8
Augustine
Harvard University Press, 2014

The classic account of crisis and conversion.

Aurelius Augustine (AD 354–430), one of the most important figures in the development of western Christianity and philosophy, was the son of a pagan, Patricius of Tagaste, and his Christian wife, Monnica. While studying to become a rhetorician, he plunged into a turmoil of philosophical and psychological doubts, leading him to Manichaeism. In 383 he moved to Rome and then Milan to teach rhetoric. Despite exploring classical philosophical systems, especially skepticism and Neoplatonism, his studies of Paul’s letters with his friend Alypius, and the preaching of Bishop Ambrose, led in 386 to his momentous conversion from mixed beliefs to Christianity. He soon returned to Tagaste and founded a religious community, and in 395 or 396 became bishop of Hippo.

Confessions, composed ca. 397, is a spiritual autobiography of Augustine’s early life, family, personal and intellectual associations, and explorations of alternative religious and theological viewpoints as he moved toward his conversion. Cast as a prayer addressed to God, though always conscious of its readers, Confessions offers a gripping personal story and a philosophical exploration destined to have broad and lasting impact, all delivered with Augustine’s characteristic brilliance as a stylist.

This edition replaces the earlier Loeb Confessions by William Watts.

[more]

front cover of Confessions, Volume II
Confessions, Volume II
Books 9–13
Augustine
Harvard University Press, 2016

The classic account of crisis and conversion.

Aurelius Augustine (AD 354–430), one of the most important figures in the development of western Christianity and philosophy, was the son of a pagan, Patricius of Tagaste, and his Christian wife, Monnica. While studying to become a rhetorician, he plunged into a turmoil of philosophical and psychological doubts, leading him to Manichaeism. In 383 he moved to Rome and then Milan to teach rhetoric. Despite exploring classical philosophical systems, especially skepticism and Neoplatonism, his studies of Paul’s letters with his friend Alypius, and the preaching of Bishop Ambrose, led in 386 to his momentous conversion from mixed beliefs to Christianity. He soon returned to Tagaste and founded a religious community, and in 395 or 396 became bishop of Hippo.

Confessions, composed ca. 397, is a spiritual autobiography of Augustine’s early life, family, personal and intellectual associations, and explorations of alternative religious and theological viewpoints as he moved toward his conversion. Cast as a prayer addressed to God, though always conscious of its readers, Confessions offers a gripping personal story and a philosophical exploration destined to have broad and lasting impact, all delivered with Augustine’s characteristic brilliance as a stylist.

This edition replaces the earlier Loeb Confessions by William Watts.

[more]

front cover of Confronting Vulnerability
Confronting Vulnerability
The Body and the Divine in Rabbinic Ethics
Jonathan Wyn Schofer
University of Chicago Press, 2010

While imparting their ethical lessons, rabbinic texts often employ vivid images of death, aging, hunger, defecation, persecution, and drought. In Confronting Vulnerability, Jonathan Wyn Schofer carefully examines these texts to find out why their creators thought that human vulnerability was such a crucial tool for instructing students in the development of exemplary behavior.

These rabbinic texts uphold virtues such as wisdom and compassion, propound ideal ways of responding to others in need, and describe the details of etiquette. Schofer demonstrates that these pedagogical goals were achieved through reminders that one’s time on earth is limited and that God is the ultimate master of the world. Consciousness of death and of divine accounting guide students to live better lives in the present. Schofer’s analysis teaches us much about rabbinic pedagogy in late antiquity and also provides inspiration for students of contemporary ethics. Despite their cultural distance, these rabbinic texts challenge us to develop theories and practices that properly address our frailties rather than denying them.

[more]

front cover of The Construction of Gothic Cathedrals
The Construction of Gothic Cathedrals
A Study of Medieval Vault Erection
John Fitchen
University of Chicago Press, 1981
John Fitchen systematically treats the process of erecting the great edifices of the Gothic era. He explains the building equipment and falsework needed, the actual operations undertaken, and the sequence of these operations as specifically as they can be deduced today. Since there are no contemporary accounts of the techniques used by medieval builders, Fitchen's study brilliantly pieces together clues from manuscript illuminations, from pictorial representations, and from the fabrics of the building themselves.

"Anyone who has caught the fascination of Gothic Churches (and once caught, has almost necessarily got it in the blood) will find this book enthralling. . . . Clearly written and beautifully illustrated." —A. D. R. Caroe, Annual Review, Central Council for the Care of Churches

"Fitchen's study is a tribute to the extraordinary creative and engineering skills of successive generations of mediaeval builders. . . . This study enables us to appreciate more fully the technical expertise and improvements which enabled the creative spirit of the day to find such splendid embodiment." —James Lingwood, Oxford Art Journal

"Fitchen, in what can only be defined as an architectural detective story, fully explores the problems confronting the medieval vault erectors and uncovers their solution. . . . This is a book that no serious student of architecture will want to miss." —Progressive Architecture

[more]

logo for Catholic University of America Press
A Contemporary Introduction to Thomistic Metaphysics
Michael Gorman
Catholic University of America Press, 2023
A Contemporary Introduction to Thomistic Metaphysics provides the reader with an introductory presentation of key themes in Thomistic metaphysics. There are many such books, but this one is, to use a phrase Michael Gorman has adopted, “analytic-facing,” i.e., it presents things in dialogue with analytic philosophy. Sometimes that means disagreeing with analytic proposals (for example, possible worlds), and sometimes it means agreeing with them (for instance, making ample use of Ryle’s notion of “systematically misleading expressions”). What’s more, it (gently) takes a somewhat deflationary attitude towards many things metaphysicians like to talk about, such as accidents, universals, and the like. By “deflationary” Gorman means that such items are taken seriously, but their ontological status is taken down a notch: features, universals, possible worlds, and other such things are understood in terms of what substances are and what substances are. Substances are ”basic beings,” and other things are what they are only in relation to substances. Of course this is Aristotle 101, but metaphysicians, Aristotelians included, often slip into treating non-substances as mini-substances, and Gorman pushes back against this throughout. A Contemporary Introduction to Thomistic Metaphysics begins by explaining what philosophy is, what metaphysics is, and how these relate to other kinds of thinking. It then moves through a series of topics, ending with a brief look at applications of metaphysical thinking in theology.
[more]

front cover of Convicting the Innocent
Convicting the Innocent
Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong
Brandon L. Garrett
Harvard University Press, 2011

On January 20, 1984, Earl Washington—defended for all of forty minutes by a lawyer who had never tried a death penalty case—was found guilty of rape and murder in the state of Virginia and sentenced to death. After nine years on death row, DNA testing cast doubt on his conviction and saved his life. However, he spent another eight years in prison before more sophisticated DNA technology proved his innocence and convicted the guilty man.

DNA exonerations have shattered confidence in the criminal justice system by exposing how often we have convicted the innocent and let the guilty walk free. In this unsettling in-depth analysis, Brandon Garrett examines what went wrong in the cases of the first 250 wrongfully convicted people to be exonerated by DNA testing.

Based on trial transcripts, Garrett’s investigation into the causes of wrongful convictions reveals larger patterns of incompetence, abuse, and error. Evidence corrupted by suggestive eyewitness procedures, coercive interrogations, unsound and unreliable forensics, shoddy investigative practices, cognitive bias, and poor lawyering illustrates the weaknesses built into our current criminal justice system. Garrett proposes practical reforms that rely more on documented, recorded, and audited evidence, and less on fallible human memory.

Very few crimes committed in the United States involve biological evidence that can be tested using DNA. How many unjust convictions are there that we will never discover? Convicting the Innocent makes a powerful case for systemic reforms to improve the accuracy of all criminal cases.

[more]

front cover of A cosmopolitan hermit
A cosmopolitan hermit
modernity and tradition in the philosophy of Josef Pieper
Bernard N Schumacher
Catholic University of America Press, 2009
Composed of ten original essays written with the goal of exploring the thought of one of the most significant German philosophers of the 20th century, namely, Josef Pieper (1904-1997), this book is the only systematic treatment of his expansive philosophy to date.
[more]

front cover of THE COVERT ENLIGHTENMENT
THE COVERT ENLIGHTENMENT
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY COUNTERCULTURE & ITS AFTERMATH
ALFRED J. GABAY
Swedenborg Foundation Publishers, 2005

The European Enlightenment in the latter half of the eighteenth century heralded a grave conflict between theological and scientific modes of thought, starkly revealing the ancient tensions between spiritual knowledge and rationalism. Yet there was another, lesser-known movement during this time---a "covert" Enlightenment---that sought to bring fresh perspectives on the soul, and by extension, on the human mind and on consciousness. This work examines the influence of Emanuel Swedenborg and Anton Mesmer on the budding movement toward psychology in the late-eighteenth century and also spiritualism and millennialism in the nineteenth century.

[more]

front cover of Cowboy Apostle
Cowboy Apostle
The Diaries of Anthony W. Ivins, 1875-1932
Anthony W. Ivins
Signature Books, 2013

Anthony W. Ivins (1852-1934) migrated to St. George, Utah, at age nine where he later became an influential civic and ecclesiastical leader. He married Elizabeth A. Snow, daughter of apostle Erastus F. Snow. Ivins was a first cousin of Heber J. Grant, and served as his counselor while Grant was LDS president. Ivins filled several Mormon missions to Mexico and presided as the Juarez, Mexico stake president where he performed post-manifesto marriages. He was appointed by the U.S. government as an Indian agent, and was warmly acquainted with Porfirio Diaz, president of Mexico. Involved in politics in St. George, Ivins held aspirations of running as a Democrat for governor of Utah. In 1907, he was ordained an apostle and later advanced to the First Presidency. Tone, as he called himself, was an accomplished horseman who worked with, and invested in, livestock. He was a game-hunting cowboy who became a statesman for both his country and his expanding religious community.

Though in his correspondence Ivins expressed paramount concern for members of his family, he rarely mentions them in his journals. Rather, his diaries chronicle his business and religious observations including meetings with the Quorum of the Twelve and others. He records meetings of the apostles where decisions were made to remove Church leaders from office who had entered into polygamy after 1904, and details the Church’s dealings with the Mexican government to safeguard the Mormon colonists. There are also discussions where doctrinal principles were clarified. For example, in 1912, Ivins reported that President Joseph F. Smith addressed Brigham Young’s Adam God teachings and affirmed that it was “not a doctrine of the Church.” Ivins clearly loved the ruggedness of outdoor life, as evidenced in his passion for hunting, but was also intrigued with the curiosities at the Utah State Fair, the entertaining showmanship of Buffalo Bill, and the refinement of the theater. Tragedy became commonplace as he recorded vigilante-like justice against Indians and Mexicans who were killed for stealing food, and witnessing the execution of John D. Lee, a once favored son of Mormonism. Appendices of Cowboy Apostle include Ivins Record Book of Marriage and an essay by Ivins son, H. Grant Ivins titled “Polygamy in Mexico as Practiced by the Mormon Church, 1895-1905.”

[more]

front cover of Creating a Human World
Creating a Human World
A New Psychological and Religious Anthropology In Dialogue with Freud, Heidegger, and Kierkegaard
Ernest Daniel Carrere
University of Scranton Press, 2006
In Creating a Human World, Trappist monk and scholar Ernest Daniel Carrere explores what it means to be fully human, to live in a shared world, and to resist the easy tendency to flee reality and seek pleasure in material pursuits. To do so he examines the writings of three great modern thinkers—Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger, and Søren Kierkegaard—and proposes a new reading of their work in light of his own understanding of New Testament teachings.

Carrere elucidates the paradoxical spiritual truth that salvation lies not in an escape from humanity, but in embracing it.  An interdisciplinary tour de force, this book will appeal to anyone interested in philosophy, psychology, religion, or cultural anthropology.
[more]

front cover of Creating a Perfect World
Creating a Perfect World
Religious and Secular Utopias in Nineteenth-Century Ohio
Catherine M. Rokicky
Ohio University Press, 2002

Powerful currents of religious revival and political and social reform swept nineteenth-century America. Many people expressed their radical religious and social ideals by creating or joining self-contained utopian communities. These utopianists challenged the existing social and economic order with alternative notions about religion, marriage, family, sexuality, property ownership, and wage labor.

Between 1787 and 1919, approximately 270 utopian communities existed in the United States. Due to its unique location on the young nation’s frontier, the state of Ohio was the site of much of this activity.

Creating a Perfect World examines Ohio’s utopian movements, both religious and secular. These include the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Coming, or Shakers; the Society of Separatists at Zoar; the Mormons, who stopped in the state for several years on their way west; and several societies based on the philosophies of European social reformers Robert Owen and Charles Fourier.

In this detailed account of a unique and fascinating chapter in Ohio’s history, Catherine M. Rokicky profiles these communities and explores their ideals, how and why they were established, their leaders, and their members’ reasons for joining and sometimes leaving. She also examines the roles men and women played, their approaches to communal living and community property, their economic activities, their relations with surrounding communities and the state, and the various reasons for their success or failure.

[more]

logo for Catholic University of America Press
Cusanus Today
Thinking with Nicholas of Cusa Between Philosophy and Theology
David C. Albertson
Catholic University of America Press, 2024
At the end of the nineteenth century, German theologians and philosophers rediscovered the Renaissance cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464). Immediately they hailed Cusanus as the first modern thinker, a brilliant German rival to the French Descartes. But since the founding of the Cusanus critical edition in 1927 up to its conclusion in 2005, historians have gradually learned that Nicholas was more of a medieval preacher and contemplative than a modern philosopher. Yet over the same century, modern German and French readers were already digging into Nicholas’s many works. There they encountered an exciting voice with fresh perspectives about God’s immanence in the cosmos and the awesome capacities of the human mind. Leading philosophers and theologians from Erich Przywara to Karl Jaspers to Hans-Georg Gadamer, and from Gilles Deleuze to Jacques Lacan to Michel de Certeau, found their own thinking stimulated by the cardinal’s innovative concepts and interdisciplinary style. Even as Nicholas shifted from modern to medieval among historians, he was emerging as a contemporary interlocutor for moderns and postmoderns. Who could have guessed that the first debate between Jean-Luc Marion and Emmanuel Falque would take place over the fifteenth-century mystical dialogue, De visione dei? If Meister Eckhart found his moment amidst Deconstruction in prior decades, Nicholas of Cusa is our thinker for today. His interests anticipate themes in continental philosophy of religion, whether alterity, invisibility, the fold, or the icon. His habit of interweaving philosophy and theology anticipates current debates on the thresholds of phenomenology. Our volume first maps the contours of modern receptions of Nicholas of Cusa in French and German spheres, and then beyond Europe to the Americas and Japan. It also hosts the next round of engagement by some of today’s most original Christian thinkers: Emmanuel Falque, John Milbank, and David Bentley Hart.
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter