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When the young Princess Sonshi became a Buddhist nun in the year 984, a scholar-official of the royal court was commissioned to create a guide to the Buddhist religion that would be accessible for her. He did so in the form of the illustrated works of fiction (monogatari) that appealed to women readers of her time and class. The text has survived in later manuscripts; the illustrations, if they ever existed, have not. This revised translation recreates Sonshi’s experience of receiving this multimedia presentation, with illustrations selected to help contemporary readers visualize its content and essays that provide context on the religious and cultural experience of the author. The Three Jewels is a unique document that opens a window onto the world of Buddhist religious experience—especially for women—in high classical Japan, the time of Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book and Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of Genji.

As gay men and lesbian women increasingly gained recognition and acceptance in twentieth-century literature and film, and subsequently in social and political movements, the Catholic Church reacted by subtly moving away from its overt condemnation of homosexuality as an urgent moral problem and toward tacitly shunning homosexuality as an “unspeakable vice.” In this revealing history, Francesco Torchiani reconstructs the Catholic Church’s shifting attitudes toward homosexuality during this period by drawing on a vast array of internal documents and external accounts. This monograph expands the scholarship on the relationship between Catholicism and homosexuality in terms of both method and content, ultimately concluding that the Catholic Church continues to wholeheartedly condemn homosexuality despite making genuine efforts to reflect on and understand its social and cultural impact. The Unspeakable Vice therefore sheds new light on and places into historical perspective the questions the Catholic Church continues to reckon with regarding its role in contemporary society.

St. Thomas Aquinas’s Treatise on Human Nature occupies questions 75-102 of Part 1 of the Summa Theologiae. It contains St. Thomas’s most mature statement of his philosophical and theological anthropology, i.e., his account of what human beings are and of their origin as distinctive creatures made in the image of God. This translation, moreover, is the only complete edition of all the material St. Thomas envisaged as being part of the Treatise.

The treatise begins with two long and complex questions on the metaphysical status of the human soul and its relation to the human organism. Here St. Thomas tries to show how the human being is both an animal and an animal who transcend the other animals. In doing so he marks out a distinctive Christian/Aristotelian conceptual space between “materialist” accounts of human nature that reduce human beings to mere collections of physical or chemical or biological components and “dualistic” accounts of human nature, such as those propounded by Plato and, later on, Descartes, that identify human beings with their immaterial souls.

The next thirteen questions deal with the powers of the soul, especially those higher intellective powers of understanding and willing that distinguish human beings from the other animals. Here we are given a philosophical framework for the findings of the human sciences.

Finally, the last thirteen questions have to do with human origins, the creation of the first man and first woman, the state of our first parents, and their status as beings created in the image of God. In essence, this is St. Thomas’s philosophically attuned commentary on the parts of Genesis 1–2 that deal specifically with the creation of the human species. These thirteen questions, though an integral part of the Treatise, are not included in other translations of the Treatise on Human Nature.