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Supernatural phenomena and causalities played an important role in medieval society. Religious practice was relying upon a set of cult images and the sacral status of these depictions of divine or supernatural persons became the object of heated debates and provoked iconoclastic reactions.The miraculous intervention of saints or other divine agents, the wondrous realities beyond understanding, or the manifestations of magic attributed to diabolic forces, were contained by a variety of discourses, described and discussed in religion, philosophy, chronicles, literature and fiction, and also in a large number of pictures and material objects. The nine essays in this collection discusses how supernatural phenomena – especially angels and devils – found visual manifestation in Latin and Eastern Christianity as well as Judaism in the late medieval, early renaissance period.

“What are we to say of a theology which has so proceeded on the basis of a moral neglet of God’s creatures?” asks Andrew Linzey. In Animal Theology, he seeks ways in which doctrine can help morally motivated Christians to perceive meaning in animal suffering.

In Linzey’s view, animal rights is synonymous with animal theology. Linzey argues that historical theology, creatively defined, must reject humanocentricity. Questioning the assumption that if theology is to speak on this issue, “it must only do so on the side of the oppressors,” Linzey investigates not only the abstractions of theory, but also the realities of hunting, animal experimentation, and genetic engineering. His is a pioneering, vital, and unequivocally Christian voice advocating on behalf of the countless creatures who share our world and our lives but cannot speak for themselves.

Anthony of Padua: Franciscan, Preacher, Teacher, Saint represents the culmination of a lifetime of scholarly work by Valentin Strappazzon (d. 2023) on Anthony of Padua and especially on his sermons and spirituality. About 20 years prior to this volume, he had penned a short overview of his life in the popular "Petites Vies" series in the French language. A few years before the publication of the book in question, he edited and published three significant volumes on the sermons of the saint. Although the present volume has been written in a less rigorous and erudite manner, it is intended to be a solid historical and analytical treatment for a wider reading public interested in the life and preaching of this fascinating medieval friar. Particular attention is given to explaining how and why Anthony, once he became a Franciscan living in France and Italy, became the focus of intense waves of popular devotion to whom numerous miracles and wonders came to be attributed both in the Middle Ages and even in our own time. Being the penultimate work of this author, written in French and lucidly translated by Michael F. Cusato, Anthony of Padua is a work of intelligence and reflection on a medieval figure who has too often only been the subject of piety rather than an assessment of the towering spiritual person that he was.

This book investigates the complex anti-Jewish and anti-Judaizing rhetoric of Ephrem, a fourth-century poet, deacon, and theologian from eastern Roman Syria whose Syriac-language writings remain unfamiliar and linguistically inaccessible to centuries of scholars who study the well-known Greek and Latin writings of his contemporaries.

2021 Finalist Raul Yzaguirre Best Political/Current Affairs Book, International Latino Book Awards

Winner of the Texas Association of Chicanos in Higher Education Inaugural Book Award

Unraveling the intertwined histories of Latino radicalism and religion in urban America, this book examines how Latino activists transformed churches into staging grounds for protest against urban renewal and displacement.

In the late 1960s, the American city found itself in steep decline. An urban crisis fueled by federal policy wreaked destruction and displacement on poor and working-class families. The urban drama included religious institutions, themselves undergoing fundamental change, that debated whether to stay in the city or move to the suburbs. Against the backdrop of the Black and Brown Power movements, which challenged economic inequality and white supremacy, young Latino radicals began occupying churches and disrupting services to compel church communities to join their protests against urban renewal, poverty, police brutality, and racism.

Apostles of Change tells the story of these occupations and establishes their context within the urban crisis; relates the tensions they created; and articulates the activists' bold, new vision for the church and the world. Through case studies from Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, and Houston, Felipe Hinojosa reveals how Latino freedom movements frequently crossed boundaries between faith and politics and argues that understanding the history of these radical politics is essential to understanding the dynamic changes in Latino religious groups from the late 1960s to the early 1980s.

The Assumption of Mary refers to the ancient Christian belief that the Mother of God was taken up into Heaven, body and soul, at the end of her earthly life. For centuries, Catholics and other Christians celebrated the Assumption as a liturgical feast and meditated on the miraculous event in the Rosary. Nevertheless, its relationship to Revelation remained undefined. This changed in 1950 when Pope Pius XII declared the Assumption of Mary a dogma of the Catholic Church. In this rare exercise of papal authority, Pius XII infallibly and irrevocably taught that the Assumption was a truth revealed by God. This book explores how the definition of this Marian dogma came to fruition. After a brief history of the prior three Marian dogmas — Mother of God, Ever-Virgin, and the Immaculate Conception — this book narrates the major moments in the effort to obtain a dogmatic definition of the Assumption. The beginning of this “Assumptionist movement” can be dated to 1863 when Queen Isabel II of Spain petitioned the pope to declare the Assumption a dogma. Subsequently, petitionary efforts and scholarly inquiry increased and spread throughout the world. In addition to the narrative of this movement, this book gives special consideration to three vital aspects: debate over the Assumption’s definability as a dogma, if and how Scripture reveals the Assumption, and the contribution of the laity on a matter of doctrine. Collectively, the Assumptionist movement emerges as a critical event in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Catholic Church. Culminating in a dogmatic definition shortly before the opening of Vatican II, it also serves as a key point of inquiry for continuity and development of doctrine. A final chapter argues that the operative beliefs pertaining to Revelation, Scripture, and the laity during the Assumptionist movement stand in continuity with the teachings of Vatican II.

Aquinas and the Early Chinese Masters lays intellectual foundations for the integration of Chinese philosophy into Catholic theology. Although Catholic theology in Chinese contexts has drawn upon Chinese philosophical concepts, few have attempted to develop a rigorous, systematic approach to testing what in the Chinese philosophical traditions can be fruitful or unfruitful for Catholic theological expression. This book attempts to model such an approach by engaging classical Chinese philosophy with the mind and spirit of St. Thomas Aquinas, who read Aristotle and other pagan philosophers with both charitable appreciation and a firm, critical eye. It applies this Thomistic lens through concrete comparative engagements with three main representatives of early Chinese philosophy: Mencius (Mengzi孟子), Xunzi荀子, and Mozi墨子. In each chapter, the book presents Aquinas’ thought as an evaluative frame for perceiving how Chinese philosophical commitments and concepts do or do not seem fit for adoption into Catholic theological science. Following the general structure of the Summa theologiae, the book is comprised of six chapters touching on the doctrine of God, morality, and Christology. The first two chapters engage Confucian master Mengzi’s notion of Heaven (Tian天), and then the Mohist doctrine of Heaven’s Will (Tian zhi天志). Chapter three provides a Thomistic assessment of the two main positions in the classical Confucian debate on the goodness of man’s moral nature (renxing人性). Chapter four compares Aquinas’ account of charity and Mozi’s doctrine of “universal love” (jian ai兼愛). Chapter 5 offers a Thomistic assessment of the possibility of understanding Christ in terms of Xunzi’s “sage” (shengren聖人). Finally, Chapter 6 explores Christ as a moral teacher by putting Aquinas’ reading of Matt 8:21-22 into conversation with Confucian ethics of filial virtue.

These volumes gather together the latest research from 40 of the world's most eminent Thomistic theologians and philosophers, in commemoration of the 800th anniversary of Thomas Aquinas's birth. To mark this anniversary, these scholars each prepared a chapter that is an original research study shared at a major international conference in September 2024. The volumes cover a wide range of both philosophical and theological topics, reflecting the breadth of Aquinas's own thought, and will be organized by subject matter. Together, these volumes will provide a compendium of outstanding research on the wide spectrum of Aquinas's thought, which we hope will have enduring value for the field, offering an opportunity to revisit the ongoing importance of the work of Thomas Aquinas today.

These volumes gather together the latest research from 40 of the world's most eminent Thomistic theologians and philosophers, in commemoration of the 800th anniversary of Thomas Aquinas's birth. To mark this anniversary, these scholars each prepared a chapter that is an original research study shared at a major international conference in September 2024. The volumes cover a wide range of both philosophical and theological topics, reflecting the breadth of Aquinas's own thought, and will be organized by subject matter. Together, these volumes will provide a compendium of outstanding research on the wide spectrum of Aquinas's thought, which we hope will have enduring value for the field, offering an opportunity to revisit the ongoing importance of the work of Thomas Aquinas today.

Aquinas on Prophecy argues that a lacuna exists (especially among Anglophone scholars of Aquinas) that neglects to identify his most famous work as a prophetic witness to the transformative effect of Christian theology. Through a detailed examination of Aquinas’s treatment of prophecy in the Summa Theologiae (II-II, QQ.171-174), Paul Rogers reveals how prophetic testimony is central to the understanding of Christian revelation, faith, and theology, since it presents an initial (and historically-rooted) model for a Christian pedagogy that attempts to affect intellectual and moral transformation through communicating knowledge about God. The theologian thus conceived by Aquinas exercises analogously a prophetic, and hence social, function among Christian believers that has a special care for their spiritual and moral guidance. In contrast to readings of Aquinas that portray him as overly reliant on Aristotelian gnoseology (e.g., Jenkins 1997), Rogers lays out a reading more in line with recent ‘ressourcement’ Thomistic interpreters that identifies in his account of prophecy a creative adaptation of Arabic-Aristotelian gnoseology in the service of clarifying difficulties that had arisen in the thirteenth century surrounding the reception of a patristic (and predominantly Augustinian) tradition of prophetic illumination or vision. In the hands of Aquinas, the traditional Augustinian theory of prophetic illumination was re-envisioned and reinvigorated, which in turn allowed him to reassert confidently prophecy’s status as certain knowledge (scientia) that required its own distinct ‘light’, comparable to the light of natural reason and the lights of faith and glory. Highlighting prophecy in Aquinas’s thought helps especially to refocus today’s readers on how knowledge of the final end as revealed was for Aquinas the ultimate moral objective shared by both the prophet and theologian: a point that is best appreciated when his account of prophecy is related back to his understanding of sacred doctrine and faith as a whole—the book’s central task.

The book is composed of eleven essays by an international group of renowned scholars from the United States, England, Switzerland, Holland, and Italy

The predominant understanding of St. Thomas’s account of the natural law to date has been that it is basically philosophical in character. In Thomas Aquinas’s Cruciform Theology of the Natural Law, Kevin E. O’Reilly, OP, argues that Thomas’s construal of the natural law is, on the contrary, thoroughly theological in its inspiration. In order to establish this point the author first unpacks the significance of the scriptural quotations employed by Thomas in his very first article devoted to the natural law (ST I-II, q. 91, a. 2). Exegesis of one of those quotations, namely Ps. 4:6 – "Offer up the sacrifice of justice" – intimates that the degree to which one grasps the demands of the natural law is intimately bound up with the extent to which one is conformed to the Crucified Christ. Consideration of the notion that the natural law is the participation of the eternal law in the rational creature yields the same conclusion. Thus, while the eternal law pertains to God’s essence, it is nevertheless expressed by and therefore appropriated to the Word uttered by the Father. This Word is the divine Wisdom ultimately disclosed on the Cross. It becomes apparent that the eternal law is thus cruciform in nature. So too is the natural law as a cognitive participation therein. This cognitive participation engages the life of faith and charity as well as the Gifts of the Holy Spirit. Examination of Thomas’s account of the three degrees of charity as well as his treatment of the Gifts of the Holy Spirit and the beatitudes that are correlated with them underscores the important role that the dynamics of cruciformity play in illuminating the demands of the natural law. Cruciformity and moral illumination are intimately connected.

This book explores how the great sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century Jesuits read the secunda pars of the Summa theologiae. Their interpretation of Aquinas’s moral theology is shaped in part by their historical context, including the impact of the Protestant Reformation and the European discovery of the "New World," as well as new trade routes with Asia. The essays in this volume explore a wide variety of topics, including the natural desire to see God, infused moral virtues, freedom of conscience, faith and justification, doctrinal development, just war, slavery, the virtue of religion, Eucharistic sacrifice, sexual ethics, the theology of vocation, and natural law. The essays engage the thought of Francisco Suárez, Gabriel Vázquez, Luis de Molina, Francisco de Toledo, and various others. The underlying argument of the book is that this erudite, deeply Catholic and broadly Thomistic approach to ethics should be retrieved, given its Christian seriousness. Guided by divine revelation as taught in Scripture and Tradition, moral theologians in the Jesuit tradition ground themselves in Aquinas and in a rich understanding of natural law, universal moral norms, and the virtues, as well as in appreciation for spiritual interiority, conscience, and discernment.

How can Paul, or you and I for that matter, speak with authority about mystery? Using the language of sacred riddles, Aquinas, Wittgenstein, and the Riddle of Spiritual Pedagogy argues that spiritual authority arises within the creative tension between the mystery of God’s will and our concrete human circumstances. Since at least the Enlightenment and increasingly in times of scandal, spiritual authority is suspect. Speaking authoritatively about mystery seems like a contradiction. Critics accuse such authorities of being at best vapid or at worst manipulative. Using a philosophical approach, Matt Dunch, SJ, defends the tradition of Christian spiritual teaching from St. Paul, through St. John Cassian and St. Ignatius Loyola, to contemporaries such as Dorothy Day. He supplements St. Thomas Aquinas’s account of prudence and counsel with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s sensitivity to the context and limits of sensible speech. Taken together, they all give us their accounts of how spiritual teaching can emerge from sacred riddles. Spiritual authority is unlike other forms of authority because the mystery or riddle of God is outside human understanding. At the same time, spiritual authority must address our concrete needs. Dunch considers how such riddles might be lived with and through, though not solved. This book will be of interest to readers who love the nature and practice of religious language, including philosophers of religion, systematic theologians, and spiritual directors. It will speak to anyone contemplating sacred mysteries.

Short Questionnaire, an Armenian question-and-answer text that survives in a seventeenth-century manuscript, draws on Armenian parabiblical traditions to systematically explore biblical events from creation to the exodus. The volume includes Michael E. Stone’s translation, extensive commentary, and twenty-seven essays that trace the history of parabiblical concepts and events from the Second Temple and early Christian periods down to the second millennium. Including stories of Satan’s fall from the garden, the raven’s role in Abel’s murder, the burial places of Adam and Eve, and Noah’s fourth son, the book forms a dictionary of Armenian parabiblical traditions for scholars and students interested in reception history in early Judaism and Christianity.

Analyzes the Southern Baptist denomination’s influence on southern culture during the 19th century
 
First published in 1967, Rufus Spain’s thorough investigation into Southern Baptist attitudes set the stage for research on religion in the American South. In At Ease in Zion, Spain questions the titular “ease” with society that Southern Baptists seemed to maintain following the Civil War. His analysis of denominational newspapers, as well as reports from the Southern Baptist Convention and state conventions, paint a compelling picture of the subjects’ complacency with their social existence, even as they criticized personal and recreational ethics.

While the South faced significant social, economic, and political changes after the Civil War, religion remained the primary moral influence. As the Southern Baptist denomination made up a significant majority of the population at that time, its leaders and attitudes had a clear and undeniable impact on social norms. Rufus Spain was one of the first writers to actively demonstrate the relationship between Southern religion and Southern society, and his work displays meticulous attention to the ways in which we are affected by complacency. He asserts that Southern Baptists viewed the American South as a version of God’s ideal society; any issues they wished to address were caused by individuals (such as those who did not conform to societal norms) or external attitudes (such as those in differing religions or regions).

At Ease in Zion is a critical part of the scholarly discussion on religion in society. Spain’s research offers a bold analysis of the American South and its citizens during one of the most tumultuous times in its history while providing a basis for arguments on “social Christianity” and its ever-shifting role in the world.
 

“Women of faith, discussing complicated things.” That’s how  authors Susan Hinckley and Cynthia Winward describe At Last She Said It, and they don’t expect the knots to untangle themselves. Even with two very different personalities and a decade or so between them, as their friendship developed they kept stumbling onto what felt like an uncanny amount of common ground in their church experiences. Often their conversations ended with, “Why isn’t anyone talking about this? Someone should do a podcast!” So they did. They had a hunch they weren’t the only women wishing they had a place to discuss the things they were thinking about, a lot of which they’d never said—or heard—out loud. That hunch was right. Their 200-and-counting recorded conversations have been downloaded some two million times. Hinckley and Winward have learned, right along with their listeners, that there’s no power quite like finding out you’re not alone. 

Their book now asks Latter-day Saints to think about old ideas in new ways. Stretching can be uncomfortable, but the willingness to consider diverse perspectives—even on the things we hold most dear—feels essential in an evolving world. So does being open to changing our minds, including how we think about ourselves. Faith is alive when it’s growing, and growing means change. Hopefully, these conversations will be the beginning of thousands more.

 

“Women of faith, discussing complicated things.” That’s how  authors Susan Hinckley and Cynthia Winward describe At Last She Said It, and they don’t expect the knots to untangle themselves. Even with two very different personalities and a decade or so between them, as their friendship developed they kept stumbling onto what felt like an uncanny amount of common ground in their church experiences. Often their conversations ended with, “Why isn’t anyone talking about this? Someone should do a podcast!” So they did. They had a hunch they weren’t the only women wishing they had a place to discuss the things they were thinking about, a lot of which they’d never said—or heard—out loud. That hunch was right. Their 200-and-counting recorded conversations have been downloaded some two million times. Hinckley and Winward have learned, right along with their listeners, that there’s no power quite like finding out you’re not alone. 

Their book now asks Latter-day Saints to think about old ideas in new ways. Stretching can be uncomfortable, but the willingness to consider diverse perspectives—even on the things we hold most dear—feels essential in an evolving world. So does being open to changing our minds, including how we think about ourselves. Faith is alive when it’s growing, and growing means change. Hopefully, these conversations will be the beginning of thousands more.

 

Thomas Weinandy has done an excellent job in this book in introducing Athanasius' theology. A well-known Catholic scholar in historical theology, Weinandy has provided students of theology with a profound historiography of Athanasius' major theological writing. - Calvin Theological Journal

"A reliable, concise introduction to the theology of Athanasius." - International Journal of Systematic Theology

"A sustained and intelligent introduction to Athanasius and his literature, and will rightly appear on all undergraduate patristic bibliographies." - The Journal of Theological Studies

"A very fine theological (as its subtitle emphasizes) introduction to the Alexandrian bishop…[an] accessible, intelligent, and worthy volume, which offers the reader an overview of Athanasius's thought within the context of his full, if at times harried, ecclesiastical life." - Nova et Vetera

"Weinandy offers a summary of Athanasius' central works and a balanced assessment of his theology's merits and contemporary significance…No student of Athanasius should overlook this reliable guidebook to the little Alexandrian's great life and works." - Religious Studies Review

"Weinandy's introduction to Athanasius is an important work, familiarizing the reader with Athanasius' life, writings, and fundamental concerns. Throughout, the centrality of soteriology clearly emerges, whether the topic is the doctrine of the Trinity or the life of Antony. Hopefully this book will serve to bring Athanasius' soteriology more prominently into contemporary discussions alongside the other great masterpieces on this doctrine." - Themelios

This volume offers a comprehensive portrait--or rather, self-portrait, since its words are mostly Augustine's own--drawn from the breadth of his writings and from the long course of his career

This book examines St. Augustine of Hippo’s involvement in the Pelagian controversy and argues that this involvement was prompted not simply by his opposition to Pelagian doctrinal views but, to a significant degree, by his desire to defend Church unity. To prove this thesis, Andrew Chronister analyzes the historical context of the controversy as well as Augustine’s argumentation in his anti-Pelagian works. Attending to the historical context reveals the fact that at various moments in the controversy, Augustine was faced with what he believed to be significant threats to Church unity. For example, the beginnings of the controversy coincided with a key attempt in June 411 to end the Donatist schism that had split the African Church for a century: at the very moment when one schism was being healed, another threat to unity appeared in Caelestius and Pelagius. At the same time, internal evidence in Augustine’s anti-Pelagian works reveals his desire not only to refute Pelagian doctrinal views but also to undermine the Pelagians’ claims that they were simply teaching what the Church had always and everywhere taught. This can be seen in a particular way in Augustine’s frequent appeals to liturgical and sacramental praxis as well as in his rather novel practice of citing renowned Christian authors as evidence for the antiquity and universality of his views. Augustine in the Pelagian Controversy has two main contributions: (1) it offers a new perspective on Augustine’s involvement in the controversy that makes his prolonged and polemical engagement with the Pelagians more intelligible and (2) it provides a detailed history of the controversy itself.

What distinguishes humans from nonhumans? Two common answers—free will and religion—are in some ways fundamentally opposed. Whereas free will enjoys a central place in our ideas of spontaneity, authorship, and deliberation, religious practices seem to involve a suspension of or relief from the exercise of our will. What, then, is agency, and why has it occupied such a central place in theories of the human?

Automatic Religion explores an unlikely series of episodes from the end of the nineteenth century, when crucial ideas related to automatism and, in a different realm, the study of religion were both being born. Paul Christopher Johnson draws on years of archival and ethnographic research in Brazil and France to explore the crucial boundaries being drawn at the time between humans, “nearhumans,” and automata. As agency came to take on a more central place in the philosophical, moral, and legal traditions of the West, certain classes of people were excluded as less-than-human. Tracking the circulation of ideas across the Atlantic, Johnson tests those boundaries, revealing how they were constructed on largely gendered and racial foundations. In the process, he reanimates one of the most mysterious and yet foundational questions in trans-Atlantic thought: what is agency?

Avenues of Faith documents how religion flourished in southern cities after the turn of the century and how a cadre of clergy and laity created a notably progressive religious culture in Richmond, Virginia. Famous as the former capital of the Confederacy, in Avenues of Faith Richmond emerges as a dynamic and growing industrial city invigorated by the social activism of its Protestants.
 
By examining six mainline white denominations—Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Disciples of Christ, and Lutherans—Samuel C. Shepherd Jr. emphasizes the extent to which the city fostered religious diversity, even as “blind spots” remained regarding Catholics, African Americans, Mormons, and Jews. Shepherd explores such topics as evangelism, interdenominational cooperation, the temperance campaign, the Sunday school movement, the international peace initiatives, and the expanding role of lay people of both sexes. He also notes the community’s widespread rejection of fundamentalism, a religious phenomenon almost automatically associated with the South, and shows how it nurtured social reform to combat a host of urban problems associated with public health, education, housing, women’s suffrage, prohibition, children, and prisons.
 
In lucid prose and with excellent use of primary sources, Shepherd delivers a fresh portrait of Richmond Protestants who embraced change and transformed their community, making it an active, progressive religious center of the New South.
 

A fresh account of early American religious history that argues for a new understanding of ritual.

In the years between the American Revolution and the Civil War, there was an awkward persistence of sovereign rituals, vestiges of a monarchical past that were not easy to shed. In Awkward Rituals, Dana Logan focuses our attention on these performances, revealing the ways in which governance in the early republic was characterized by white Protestants reenacting the hierarchical authority of a seemingly rejected king. With her unique focus on embodied action, rather than the more common focus on discourse or law, Logan makes an original contribution to debates about the relative completeness of America’s Revolution.
 
Awkward Rituals theorizes an under-examined form of action: rituals that do not feel natural even if they sometimes feel good. This account challenges common notions of ritual as a force that binds society and synthesizes the self. Ranging from Freemason initiations to evangelical societies to missionaries posing as sailors, Logan shows how white Protestants promoted a class-based society while simultaneously trumpeting egalitarianism. She thus redescribes ritual as a box to check, a chore to complete, an embarrassing display of theatrical verve. In Awkward Rituals, Logan emphasizes how ritual distinctively captures what does not change through revolution.