After the Bible, the Passover haggadah is the most widely read classic text in the Jewish tradition. More than four thousand editions have been published since the late fifteenth century, but few are as exquisite as the Washington Haggadah, which resides in the Library of Congress. Now, a stunning facsimile edition meticulously reproduced in full color brings this beautiful illuminated manuscript to a new generation.

Joel ben Simeon, the creator of this unusually well-preserved codex, was among the most gifted and prolific scribe-artists in the history of the Jewish book. David Stern’s introduction reconstructs his professional biography and situates this masterwork within the historical development of the haggadah, tracing the different forms the text took in the Jewish centers of Europe at the dawn of modernity.

Katrin Kogman-Appel shows how ben Simeon, more than just a copyist, was an active agent of cultural exchange. As he traveled between Jewish communities, he brought elements of Ashkenazi haggadah illustration to Italy and returned with stylistic devices acquired during his journeys. In addition to traditional Passover images, realistic illustrations of day-to-day life provide a rare window into the world of late fifteenth-century Europe.

This edition faithfully preserves the original text, with the Hebrew facsimile appearing in the original right-to-left orientation. It will be read and treasured by anyone interested in Jewish history, medieval illuminated manuscripts, and the history of the haggadah.

Ezra Taft Benson is perhaps the most controversial apostle-president in the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. For nearly fifty years he delivered impassioned sermons in Utah and elsewhere, mixing religion with ultraconservative right-wing political views and conspiracy theories. His teachings inspired Mormon extremists to stockpile weapons, predict the end of the world, and commit acts of violence against their government. The First Presidency rebuked him, his fellow apostles wanted him disciplined, and grassroots Mormons called for his removal from the Quorum of the Twelve. Yet Benson was beloved by millions of Latter-day Saints, who praised him for his stances against communism, socialism, and the welfare state, and admired his service as secretary of agriculture under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Using previously restricted documents from archives across the United States, Matthew L. Harris breaks new ground as the first to evaluate why Benson embraced a radical form of conservatism, and how under his leadership Mormons became the most reliable supporters of the Republican Party of any religious group in America.

This book can best be described as an extended meditation on suffering, phenomenological in method and dialectical in point of view. The angle the author takes is that of moral self-examination rather that conventional scholarly inquiry, and his aim is to think through and evaluate a fundamental claim of our culture, from Aeschylus to Solzhenitsyn, that suffering is the greatest spiritual teacher.

To bring the argument closer to home, Professor Miller focuses on the experience of crisis as the undermining of our attempts, at all costs, to keep control of our lives. This leads him to discuss topics such as the nature of vulnerability, the difference—as sketched by Heidegger—between ordinary fear and metaphysical dread, the ordinary avoidance of suffering, and the heroic willingness to embrace it exemplified by Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra.

But this is a philosophical essay, not a historical monograph, and Miller's goal is to lead the reader ever deeper in to the heart of crisis where all our illusions about control are stripped away and we forced to face, like Oedipus, the harshest reality of all: that even our existence is not something we can claim as our own. It is here, and only here, Miller claims, the issue of religious conversion can be and must be seriously faced.

This is a demanding book, as exhilarating as it is relentless in its unmasking of the evasions and duplicities with which we shore up our day-to-day lives. The late William F. Lynch, SJ, author of Christ and Apollo, called it "a profoundly moral study of man." To read it is to risk changing your life.

One of the best loved of the American spirituals is here interpreted by an artist whose birthright is an authentic understanding of the spirituals. He gives us that understanding in terms of an art having all the appeal of the Negro's conception of religion in its narrative quality, its close emotional identification with religious ideas and events, and its simplicity of feeling.

The thirty-nine black-and-white drawings which compose the drama are not "illustrations" in the usual sense of visual elaborations of a text, but are rather a translation from musical rhythm into visual rhythm. Where the sung spiritual creates cumulative dramatic tension by repeated variations of a musical phrase, the artist lays increasing stress on the central idea of a pictorial sequence, each drawing dependent for its full power on its relation to those preceding and following it. Human figures have been used as symbols depicting the various shadings and accents of the great story as it is suggested by the words and music of the spiritual. The main motif is that of Christ; the secondary motifs or accompaniments are the Blessed Virgin Mary and St. John, with the chorus in the background. Throughout, the spirit is reverent, and there is, as the changing text of the spiritual demands, a subtle and inevitable change from realism to symbolism.

Artistically the drawings are simple, with an unusual vitality and strength characteristic of this artist's skillful brushwork, which is bold or delicate as the subject matter demands. Crite's work has been exhibited extensively throughout the country and is represented in many collections.

Westminster Abbey is the most complex church in existence. National cathedral, coronation church, royal mausoleum, burial place of poets, resting place of the great and of the Unknown Warrior, former home of parliament, backdrop to the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales—this rich and extraordinary building unites many functions.

Westminster Abbey is both an appreciation of an architectural masterpiece and an exploration of the building’s shifting meanings. We hear the voices of those who have described its forms, moods, and ceremonies, from Shakespeare and Voltaire to Dickens and Henry James; we see how rulers have made use of it, from medieval kings to modern prime ministers. In a highly original book, classicist and cultural historian Richard Jenkyns teaches us to look at this microcosm of history with new eyes.

Gospel music evolved in often surprising directions during the post-Civil Rights era. Claudrena N. Harold's in-depth look at late-century gospel focuses on musicians like Yolanda Adams, Andraé Crouch, the Clark Sisters, Al Green, Take 6, and the Winans, and on the network of black record shops, churches, and businesses that nurtured the music. Harold details the creative shifts, sonic innovations, theological tensions, and political assertions that transformed the music, and revisits the debates within the community over groundbreaking recordings and gospel's incorporation of rhythm and blues, funk, hip-hop, and other popular forms. At the same time, she details how sociopolitical and cultural developments like the Black Power Movement and the emergence of the Christian Right shaped both the art and attitudes of African American performers.

Weaving insightful analysis into a collective biography of gospel icons, When Sunday Comes explores the music's essential place as an outlet for African Americans to express their spiritual and cultural selves.

The collaboration between a future pope and young prelate is transformed into profound friendship when circumstances thrust Joseph Ratzinger into the Apostolic Palace, even as he expected to be released in retirement to his beloved Bavaria. Monsignor Georg Gänswein never left his side, and witnessed one of the most influential people of this century conduct his papacy on both sides of the curtain. From his appointment as private secretary in 2003, which was meant to be temporary, until the abdication of the pope in 2013 and subsequent years as emeritus, Monsignor Gänswein walked the same steps and weathered the same storms as his dear friend, the Roman Pontiff Benedict XVI. Here he offers the truth regarding the man and the papacy as a spiritual testament of a pope whose formidable legacy is often subject to unfounded characterizations of rigidity and secrecy. 

Written with the involvement of the regarded Vaticanista Saverio Gaeta, Mons. Gänswein offers an account of a particular decade in history and confronts false claims of intrigue and cover-up (Vatileaks, the Orlandi abduction case, the sexual abuse scandal, among other issues) to tell the real story of a pope who faced a changing landscape and a public who largely misunderstood him and his style of governance. Here we meet one of the most affable and intellectually formidable popes the Catholic Church has ever known, and a priest who might also be considered a prophet of the post-modern age. Gänswein brilliantly contextualizes many of Benedict's most poignant theological positions, and in giving us a sense of their origin reveals that Benedict seamlessly lived everything he promulgated. His faith was the single bulwark upon which his personality as both teacher and leader were built. No biography has yet to establish the integrity and heart of Joseph Ratzinger as well as his friend, Georg Gänswein, does here.

As a spiritual testament more than just a journalistic exposé, Gänswein provides something only he can give––namely, the candid intelligence and sanctity witnessed up close. This is a remarkable and singular contribution to the history of the papacy and the record of the life of a saint. As Gänswein asserts, knowing this man is to encounter heroic virtue and an invitation to meet God, the greatest lover of mankind. Pope Benedict's own friendship with God will continue to provide warmth for as long as there are people on this earth who believe.  

Barack Obama has called him “one of my favorite philosophers.” John McCain wrote that he is “a paragon of clarity about the costs of a good war.” Andrew Sullivan has said, “We need Niebuhr now more than ever.” For a theologian who died in 1971, Reinhold Niebuhr is maintaining a remarkably high profile in the twenty-first century.

In Why Niebuhr Now? acclaimed historian John Patrick Diggins tackles the complicated question of why, at a time of great uncertainty about America’s proper role in the world, leading politicians and thinkers are turning to Niebuhr for answers. Diggins begins by clearly and carefully working through Niebuhr’s theology, which focuses less on God’s presence than his absence—and the ways that absence abets the all-too-human sin of pride. He then shows how that theology informed Niebuhr’s worldview, leading him to be at the same time a strong opponent of fascism and communism and a leading advocate for humility and caution in foreign policy.

Turning to the present, Diggins highlights what he argues is a misuse of Niebuhr’s legacy on both the right and the left: while neoconservatives distort Niebuhr’s arguments to support their call for an endless war on terror in the name of stopping evil, many liberal interventionists conveniently ignore Niebuhr’s fundamental doubts about power. Ultimately, Niebuhr’s greatest lesson is that, while it is our duty to struggle for good, we must at the same time be wary of hubris, remembering the limits of our understanding.

The final work from a distinguished writer who spent his entire career reflecting on America’s history and promise, Why Niebuhr Now? is a compact and perceptive book that will be the starting point for all future discussions of Niebuhr.

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) is known in the English-speaking world principally for the wager (an argument that it is rational to do what will affect belief in God and irrational not to), and, more generally, for the Pensées, a collection of philosophical and theological fragments of unusual emotional and intellectual intensity collected and published after his death. He thought and wrote, however, about much more than this: mathematics; physics; grace, freedom, and predestination; the nature of the church; the Christian life; what it is to write and read; the order of things; the nature and purpose of human life; and more. He was among the polymaths of the seventeenth century, and among the principal apologists of his time for the Catholic faith, against both its Protestant opponents and its secular critics. Why Read Pascal? engages all the major topics of Pascal's theological and philosophical writing. It provides discussion of Pascal's literary style, his linked understandings of knowledge and of the various orders of things, his anthropology (with special attention to his presentation of affliction, death, and boredom), his politics, and his understanding of the relation between Christianity and Judaism. Pascal emerges as a literary stylist of a high order, a witty and polemical writer (never have the Jesuits been more thoroughly eviscerated), and, perhaps above all else, as someone concerned to show to Christianity's cultured despisers that the fabric of their own lives implies the truth of Christianity if only they can be brought to look at what their lives are like. Why Read Pascal? is the first book in English in a generation to engage all the principal themes in Pascal's theology and philosophy. The book takes Pascal seriously as an interlocutor and as a contributor of continuing relevance to Catholic thought; but it also offers criticisms of some among the positions he takes, showing, in doing so, how lively his writing remains for us now.

In Wild Experiment, Donovan O. Schaefer challenges the conventional wisdom that feeling and thinking are separate. Drawing on science studies, philosophy, affect theory, secularism studies, psychology, and contemporary literary criticism, Schaefer reconceptualizes rationality as defined by affective processes at every level. He introduces the model of “cogency theory” to reconsider the relationship between evolutionary biology and secularism, examining mid-nineteenth-century Darwinian controversies, the 1925 Scopes Trial, and the New Atheist movement of the 2000s. Along the way, Schaefer reappraises a range of related issues, from secular architecture at Oxford to American eugenics to contemporary climate denialism. These case studies locate the intersection of thinking and feeling in the way scientific rationality balances excited discovery with anxious scrutiny, in the fascination of conspiracy theories, and in how racist feelings assume the mantle of rational objectivity. The fact that cognition is felt, Schaefer demonstrates, is both why science succeeds and why it fails. He concludes that science, secularism, atheism, and reason itself are not separate from feeling but comprehensively defined by it.

The Will to Believe addresses several of the most important and perplexing problems of philosophy. In ten lucid essays James deals with such subjects as causality and free will, the definition of the good life and the Good itself, the importance of the individual in society, and the intellectual claims of scientific method. Linking all these essays, most of which were delivered as lectures to popular audiences, is James's deep belief that philosophy does not operate in a vacuum but is influenced by our passional and volitional natures.As Edward H. Madden points out in his substantial introduction, these essays, written over a span of seventeen years, represent not so much a fixed system of ideas as a patient searching, an organic development of James's thought in response to his own criticism and that of others.This is the sixth volume to be published in The Works of William James, an authoritative edition sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies.

William L. Dawson is recognized for his genre-defining choral spirituals and for his Negro Folk Symphony, a masterpiece enjoying a twenty-first-century renaissance. Gwynne Kuhner Brown’s engaging and tirelessly researched biography reintroduces a musical leader whose legacy is more important today than ever.

Born in 1899, Dawson studied at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. He worked as a church, jazz, and orchestral musician in Kansas City and Chicago in the 1920s while continuing his education as a composer. He then joined the Tuskegee faculty, where for 25 years he led the Tuskegee Institute Choir to national prominence through performances of spirituals at the opening of Radio City Music Hall, on radio and television, and at the White House. The Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Leopold Stokowski premiered Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony in 1934.

Engaging and long overdue, William L. Dawson celebrates a pioneering Black composer whose contributions to African American music, history, and education inspire performers and audiences to this day.

This volume will constitute the first published English translation of Ferdinand Ebner’s seminal 1921 work, Das Wort und die geistigen realitäten – long available in major languages but never in English. It is frequently compared with Martin Buber’s, I and Thou, published in 1923, which actually draws its central I-Thou insight from Ebner. In recent centuries, Philosophy reflects a turn toward the autonomous subject vs. a biblical sense of person. The limits/failures of science manifest in the horrors of World War I led to the emergence of a “Dialogical Personalist Philosophy” in reaction to the universal doubt of Cartesian thought and to German Idealism, which engages the idea or representation but not the reality of “things-in-themselves.” The core of Ebner: human speech is constitutive of human existence: humans are given the "word." "Having the word" is a miraculous gift from God. It is only in the word, in language, that an "I" meets a "Thou," that relationship and self-identity can occur, and this word is given in Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh: “In the beginning was the Word”; Jesus, the Logos of St. John's Gospel, mediates between God and man and “stands” between I and Thou. It is through Jesus that it is possible to address God in the human thou. The key to life’s meaning, to the centrality of relationship, and to God's continuous action in His creation, is found in the I-Thou question: why the I can never be found in itself, and so must look in the thou, while the false I will try to possess the thou as an object of power. This is Ebner's critique of idealist thought: reality, truth, and personal identity are neither ideas, nor found in ideas, therefore, Descartes' cogito must be rejected, for the existence of the I can't be founded or proved by solitary thinking, but only in relation with a thou.

Forming souls and building culture together form the sacramental mission of Catholic education. These profoundly related goals are laid out by the Church for education, following the general sacramental principle that permeates the whole of Catholic life. This approach seeks conformity to the Logos, the divine mind, that shapes the way disciples think, imagine, and pray. Guided by this approach, the student will be able to contemplate the truth of reality in a holistic and integrated fashion. As sacramental, it also leads to a concrete embodiment in the life of the Christian community and the daily actions of the disciple. A sacramental approach to education draws together the inner and outer life: mind and body, soul and culture, prayer and work, salvation and mission, the individual and community. For the future of society and renewal within the Church, we need nothing less than a reintegration of the person and our communities through the renewal of education, forming students deeply rooted in our heritage and prepared to hand it on in creative ways.

In 1988, Nadine Dormoy conducted a series of interviews with René Girard at a pivotal moment in his career, just after a number of books and conferences had situated his work in a new context of research on self-organizing systems. In these interviews, Girard discusses the flurry of intellectual activity that followed the landmark 1981 Stanford University conference, Disorder and Order. Attended by several Nobel prize winners and other important intellectual figures, this event expanded his reputation in Europe and laid the groundwork for later accolades, including the Modern Language Association’s Award for Lifetime Scholarly Achievement and being elected as a member of the Académie Française. Girard also discusses Theater of Envy, his then-forthcoming book on Shakespeare and his first book written in English, as well as corrects several misunderstandings of his mimetic hypothesis. Dormoy is a spirited interlocutor, like Girard a postwar émigré who came to make a new life for herself teaching French in American universities. Translated into English for the first time by leading mimetic studies scholar William A. Johnsen, The World of René Girard is a must-have for those new to and familiar with Girard’s work.

Icons and murals depicting the biblical scene of the Last Judgment adorned many Eastern-rite churches in medieval and early modern Ukraine. Dating from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries, these images were extraordinarily elaborate, composed of dozens of discrete elements reflecting Byzantine, Novgorodian, Moldavian, and Catholic influences, in addition to local and regional traditions. Over time, the details of the iconography evolved in response to changing cultural resources, the conditions of material life at the time, and new trends in mentality and taste.

The World to Come lists and describes more than eighty Last Judgment images from present-day Ukraine, eastern Slovakia, and southeastern Poland, making it the largest compilation of its kind. Photographs show overviews and details of the images, and most are printed in full color. The icons and murals provide a valuable source of knowledge about the culture in which they were created: what was meant by good and evil, what was prophesied for the future, and what awaited in the afterlife.