Results by title
598 books match the query 'Religious' and 59 start with a
A Book of Consolation
Seeing Our Quests for Love, Success, and Meaning in a New LightAndrew Stark
University of Chicago Press, 2027
An invitation to rest in the mystery that there is no single route to fulfillment, but many—often contradictory, unpredictable, endlessly available.
Our lives are restless. Though we strive for meaning, we are often unfulfilled: our loves fail, our careers stall, and our purpose eludes us. We may temporarily ease our frustration by blaming our methods or embracing our limitations, and we may even embrace the self-defeating lie that we must discover the one, linear path for success in love, work, or life. In A Book of Consolation, Andrew Stark offers a liberating third way between self-abandonment and complacency, revealed through a simple mystery: for each road where someone found fulfillment, someone else walked the opposite path to the same end.
Drawing on literature, popular culture, philosophy, and more, A Book of Consolation invites us to appreciate, even marvel at, the possibility that the routes to love, success, and meaning are so various that even inverse lives can satisfy us. Stark holds up a series of opposing journeys for consideration—from the contradictory loves in modern romantic comedies, to the regrets of Dolly Parton and Ernest Hemingway, to the mindsets behind Tiger Woods and Richard Nixon’s success. In juxtaposing these lives, Stark expands our sense of what counts as fulfillment and what alternatives may be available when our own paths falter. Rich in possibility but without prescription, A Book of Consolation encourages us to navigate the frustrations of our finitude by cultivating a faith that the paths to fulfillment are far more pluralized—and often more contradictory—than we know.
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A Brief Apology for a Catholic Moment
Jean-Luc Marion
University of Chicago Press, 2021
A timely new work by one of France’s premier philosophers, A Brief Apology for a Catholic Moment offers insight into what “catholic” truly means. In this short, accessible book, Jean-Luc Marion braids the sense of catholic as all-embracing and universal into conversation about what it is to be Catholic in the present moment. A Brief Apology for a Catholic Moment tackles complex issues surrounding church-state separation and addresses a larger Catholic audience that transcends national boundaries, social identities, and linguistic differences. Marion insists that Catholic universalism, with its core of communion and community, is not an outmoded worldview, but rather an outlook that has the potential to counter the positivist rationality and nihilism at the core of our current political moment, and can help us address questions surrounding liberalism and religion and what is often presented as tension between “Islam and the West.” As an inviting and sophisticated Catholic take on current political and social realities—realities that are not confined to France alone—A Brief Apology for a Catholic Moment is a valuable contribution to a larger conversation.
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A Case for All-Girls' Catholic Schools
A Feminist Theological PerspectiveCynthia L. Cameron
Catholic University of America Press, 2026
Many arguments have been made for the continued good work of all-girls’ schools: they prepare girls well for success in college and career, helping them be better students, better leaders, and more assertive citizens. All-girls’ Catholic schools offer something more: a rationale that is rooted in the theological commitments of the Roman Catholic Church. Indeed, in a contemporary culture that routinely marginalizes adolescent girls and holds them to unattainable expectations, the Church and its theologians and religious educators – because of their commitment to human dignity and flourishing – must advance a theological anthropology that centers adolescent girls. This theological anthropology of female adolescent flourishing then provides both a rationale for the Church’s continued support of all-girls’ Catholic schools and a vision for the mission of these schools as they advocate for the girls they serve. All-girls’ schools, therefore, can be places where the commitment to the flourishing of girls is prioritized and where the toxic milieu of contemporary culture can be resisted.
In this book, Cynthia Cameron draws theological attention to female adolescence and uses the resulting robust theological anthropology to provide a theological argument for all-girls’ Catholic schools. It draws from the work of developmental and clinical psychologists who work with adolescent girls, from systematic, contextual, feminist, and intersectional theologians who explore what it means for humans to be created by God in the image of God, and from educational researchers focusing on the history and mission of Catholic schools in the United States. Ultimately, it argues that, in addition to the psychosocial and educational reasons for supporting all-girls’ Catholic schools, there must also be a theological reason. All-girls’ Catholic schools must be committed to the dignity and goodness of girls, to the basic truth that girls are already good as they are and not just for the adults that they may become.
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A Catholic Approach to Literacy for Struggling Students
Connecting Philosophy and PracticeMargaret G. Walsh
Catholic University of America Press, 2025
Discover effective literacy methods that align with a Christian anthropological view of the human person, as described by Aquinas and Aristotle and joined to research-based strategies. Through this work you will learn the most important pieces to building the skills needed for literacy acquisition. The aim of this book is to provide parents and educators with the foundational understanding of how a person learns to read in order to equip them with the tools needed to effectively implement a full reading curriculum. Included are intervention methods that can be used in conjunction with reading curriculum to improve reading outcomes for students who struggle.
The principles used in this book are research-based intervention methods that are blended with models of human development set out by Aristotle and St Thomas Aquinas. In the Summa Theologiae, St Thomas Aquinas writes about the faculties of the soul, relying on the foundational work of Aristotle in the De Anima. In Aquinas’ description of the powers of the soul, he outlines the way in which man comes to know, through the systematic use of his senses, imagination, memory, cogitative powers and finally his intellect and will. Effective intervention methods, as outlined in this work, align with the process Aquinas outlines. Understanding effective intervention strategies in light of the bigger picture of who man is and what he is made for, elevates learning and puts the development of literacy in a holistic perspective.
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A Change Is Gonna Come
Music, Race & the Soul of AmericaCraig 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.
—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]
A City Called Heaven
Chicago and the Birth of Gospel MusicRobert 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.
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A Companion to Martin Buber
Edited by Paul Mendes-Flohr
University of Chicago Press, 2025
A definitive, international guide to the thought of the most important twentieth-century Jewish philosopher.
In his 1923 essay, I and Thou, the philosopher, theologian, and activist Martin Buber introduced a philosophy of dialogue that achieved a global, interdisciplinary resonance. For Buber, dialogue was more than a conversation; dialogue discloses something essential about our orientation and our lives with one another. This companion assembles twenty-six scholars from a dozen countries to explore Buber’s international reputation and legacy in education, interfaith relations, Judaism, philosophy, politics, and psychology. The result is an essential guide to one of the most influential Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century.
In his 1923 essay, I and Thou, the philosopher, theologian, and activist Martin Buber introduced a philosophy of dialogue that achieved a global, interdisciplinary resonance. For Buber, dialogue was more than a conversation; dialogue discloses something essential about our orientation and our lives with one another. This companion assembles twenty-six scholars from a dozen countries to explore Buber’s international reputation and legacy in education, interfaith relations, Judaism, philosophy, politics, and psychology. The result is an essential guide to one of the most influential Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century.
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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.
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A Fire You Can't Put Out
The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham's Reverend Fred ShuttlesworthAndrew M. Manis
University of Alabama Press, 2001
WINNER, LILLIAN SMITH AWARD
WINNER, JAMES F. SULZBY, JR. AWARD
The fire of freedom that changed Birmingham—and America.
When Fred Shuttlesworth suffered only a bump on the head in the 1956 bombing of his home, members of his church called it a miracle. Shuttlesworth took it as a sign that God would protect him on the mission that had made him a target that night. Standing in front of his demolished home, Shuttlesworth vigorously renewed his commitment to integrate Birmingham's buses, lunch counters, police force, and parks. The incident transformed him, in the eyes of Birmingham's blacks, from an up-and-coming young minister to a virtual folk hero and, in the view of white Birmingham, from obscurity to rabble-rouser extraordinaire.
From his 1956 founding of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights through the historic demonstrations of 1963, driven by a sense of divine mission, Shuttlesworth pressured Jim Crow restrictions in Birmingham with radically confrontational acts of courage. His intensive campaign pitted him against the staunchly segregationist police commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor and ultimately brought him to the side of Martin Luther King Jr. and to the inner chambers of the Kennedy White House.
First published in 1999, Andrew Manis's award-winning biography of "one of the nation's most courageous freedom fighters" demonstrates compellingly that Shuttleworth's brand of fiery, outspoken confrontation derived from his prophetic understanding of the pastoral role. Civil rights activism was tantamount to salvation in his understanding of the role of Christian minister.
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A Fragile Life
Accepting Our VulnerabilityTodd May
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Offering a guide on how to positively engage suffering, Todd May ultimately lays out a new way of thinking about how we exist in the world, one that reassures us that our suffering, rather than a failure of physical or psychological resilience, is a powerful and essential part of life itself
It is perhaps our noblest cause, and certainly one of our oldest: to end suffering. Think of the Buddha, Chuang Tzu, or Marcus Aurelius: stoically composed figures impervious to the torments of the wider world, living their lives in complete serenity—and teaching us how to do the same. After all, isn’t a life free from suffering the ideal? Isn’t it what so many of us seek? Absolutely not, argues Todd May in this provocative but compassionate book. In a moving examination of life and the trials that beset it, he shows that our fragility, our ability to suffer, is actually one of the most important aspects of our humanity.
May starts with a simple but hard truth: suffering is inevitable. At the most basic level, we suffer physically—a sprained ankle or a bad back. But we also suffer insults and indifference. We suffer from overburdened schedules and unforeseen circumstances, from moral dilemmas and emotional heartaches. Even just thinking about our own mortality—the fact that we only live one life—can lead us to tremendous suffering. No wonder philosophies such as Buddhism, Taosim, Stoicism, and even Epicureanism—all of which counsel us to rise above these plights—have had appeal over the centuries. May highlights the tremendous value of these philosophies and the ways they can guide us toward better lives, but he also exposes a major drawback to their tenets: such invulnerability is too emotionally disengaged from the world, leading us to place too great a distance between ourselves and our experience. Rather than seeking absolute immunity, he argues most of us just want to hurt less and learn how to embrace and accept what suffering we do endure in a meaningful way.
It is perhaps our noblest cause, and certainly one of our oldest: to end suffering. Think of the Buddha, Chuang Tzu, or Marcus Aurelius: stoically composed figures impervious to the torments of the wider world, living their lives in complete serenity—and teaching us how to do the same. After all, isn’t a life free from suffering the ideal? Isn’t it what so many of us seek? Absolutely not, argues Todd May in this provocative but compassionate book. In a moving examination of life and the trials that beset it, he shows that our fragility, our ability to suffer, is actually one of the most important aspects of our humanity.
May starts with a simple but hard truth: suffering is inevitable. At the most basic level, we suffer physically—a sprained ankle or a bad back. But we also suffer insults and indifference. We suffer from overburdened schedules and unforeseen circumstances, from moral dilemmas and emotional heartaches. Even just thinking about our own mortality—the fact that we only live one life—can lead us to tremendous suffering. No wonder philosophies such as Buddhism, Taosim, Stoicism, and even Epicureanism—all of which counsel us to rise above these plights—have had appeal over the centuries. May highlights the tremendous value of these philosophies and the ways they can guide us toward better lives, but he also exposes a major drawback to their tenets: such invulnerability is too emotionally disengaged from the world, leading us to place too great a distance between ourselves and our experience. Rather than seeking absolute immunity, he argues most of us just want to hurt less and learn how to embrace and accept what suffering we do endure in a meaningful way.
[more]
A Fragile Life
Accepting Our VulnerabilityTodd May
University of Chicago Press, 2017
This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.
It is perhaps our noblest cause, and certainly one of our oldest: to end suffering. Think of the Buddha, Chuang Tzu, or Marcus Aurelius: stoically composed figures impervious to the torments of the wider world, living their lives in complete serenity—and teaching us how to do the same. After all, isn’t a life free from suffering the ideal? Isn’t it what so many of us seek? Absolutely not, argues Todd May in this provocative but compassionate book. In a moving examination of life and the trials that beset it, he shows that our fragility, our ability to suffer, is actually one of the most important aspects of our humanity.
May starts with a simple but hard truth: suffering is inevitable. At the most basic level, we suffer physically—a sprained ankle or a bad back. But we also suffer insults and indifference. We suffer from overburdened schedules and unforeseen circumstances, from moral dilemmas and emotional heartaches. Even just thinking about our own mortality—the fact that we only live one life—can lead us to tremendous suffering. No wonder philosophies such as Buddhism, Taosim, Stoicism, and even Epicureanism—all of which counsel us to rise above these plights—have had appeal over the centuries. May highlights the tremendous value of these philosophies and the ways they can guide us toward better lives, but he also exposes a major drawback to their tenets: such invulnerability is too emotionally disengaged from the world, leading us to place too great a distance between ourselves and our experience. Rather than seeking absolute immunity, he argues most of us just want to hurt less and learn how to embrace and accept what suffering we do endure in a meaningful way.
Offering a guide on how to positively engage suffering, May ultimately lays out a new way of thinking about how we exist in the world, one that reassures us that our suffering, rather than a failure of physical or psychological resilience, is a powerful and essential part of life itself.
May starts with a simple but hard truth: suffering is inevitable. At the most basic level, we suffer physically—a sprained ankle or a bad back. But we also suffer insults and indifference. We suffer from overburdened schedules and unforeseen circumstances, from moral dilemmas and emotional heartaches. Even just thinking about our own mortality—the fact that we only live one life—can lead us to tremendous suffering. No wonder philosophies such as Buddhism, Taosim, Stoicism, and even Epicureanism—all of which counsel us to rise above these plights—have had appeal over the centuries. May highlights the tremendous value of these philosophies and the ways they can guide us toward better lives, but he also exposes a major drawback to their tenets: such invulnerability is too emotionally disengaged from the world, leading us to place too great a distance between ourselves and our experience. Rather than seeking absolute immunity, he argues most of us just want to hurt less and learn how to embrace and accept what suffering we do endure in a meaningful way.
Offering a guide on how to positively engage suffering, May ultimately lays out a new way of thinking about how we exist in the world, one that reassures us that our suffering, rather than a failure of physical or psychological resilience, is a powerful and essential part of life itself.
[more]
A Gift of Angels
The Art of Mission San Xavier del BacBernard L. Fontana; photographs by Edward McCain
University of Arizona Press, 2010
It rises suddenly out of the Sonoran Desert landscape, towering over the tallest tree or cactus, a commanding building with a sensuous dome, elliptical vaults, and sturdy bell towers. There is nothing else like it around, nor does it seem there should be. This incongruity of setting is what strikes first-time visitors to Mission San Xavier del Bac. This great church is of another place and another time, while its beauty is universal and timeless.
Mission San Xavier del Bac is a two-century-old Spanish church in southern Arizona located just a few miles from downtown Tucson, a metropolis of more than half a million people in the American Southwest. A National Historic Landmark since 1963, the mission’s graceful baroque art and architecture have drawn visitors from all over the world.
Now Bernard Fontana—the leading expert on San Xavier—and award-winning photographer Edward McCain team up to bring us a comprehensive view of the mission as we’ve never seen it before. With 200 stunning full-color photographs and incisive text illuminating the religious, historical, and motivational context of these images, A Gift of Angels is a must-have for tourists, scholars, and other visitors to San Xavier.
From its glorious architecture all the way down to the finest details of its art, Mission San Xavier del Bac is indeed a gift of angels.
Mission San Xavier del Bac is a two-century-old Spanish church in southern Arizona located just a few miles from downtown Tucson, a metropolis of more than half a million people in the American Southwest. A National Historic Landmark since 1963, the mission’s graceful baroque art and architecture have drawn visitors from all over the world.
Now Bernard Fontana—the leading expert on San Xavier—and award-winning photographer Edward McCain team up to bring us a comprehensive view of the mission as we’ve never seen it before. With 200 stunning full-color photographs and incisive text illuminating the religious, historical, and motivational context of these images, A Gift of Angels is a must-have for tourists, scholars, and other visitors to San Xavier.
From its glorious architecture all the way down to the finest details of its art, Mission San Xavier del Bac is indeed a gift of angels.
[more]
A God in the House
Poets Talk About FaithEdited by Ilya Kaminsky and Katherine Towler
Tupelo Press, 2012
Editors Ilya Kaminsky and Katherine Towler have gathered conversations with nineteen of America’s leading poets, reflecting upon their diverse experiences with spirituality and the craft of writing. Bringing together poets who are Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim, Pagan, Native American, Wiccan, agnostic, and otherwise, this book offers frank and thoughtful consideration of themes too often polarized and politicized in our society. Participants include Li-Young Lee, Jane Hirshfield, Carolyn Forché, Gerald Stern, Christian Wiman, Joy Harjo, and Gregory Orr, and others, all wrestling with difficult questions of human existence and the sources of art.
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A Historian and His World
A Life of Christopher Dawson, 1889-1970Christina Scott
Catholic University of America Press, 2023
The English historian of culture Christopher Dawson (1889-1970) was an independent scholar and the author of more than twenty books. He served as assistant lecturer in the History of Culture, University College, Exeter (1925), Forwood Lecturer in the Philosophy of Religion, University of Liverpool (1934), Gifford Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh (1947-1949), and as Professor of Catholic Studies at Harvard University (1958-1962). He was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1943 and edited the Dublin Review during the Second World War. This biography by Christina Scott, Dawson’s daughter, is a sensitive portrait of a complex and fascinating scholar.
Unlike other English Christian converts of the twentieth century who excelled in literature, like G. K. Chesterton or C. S. Lewis, Dawson turned to the social sciences. He drew from the new idea of culture as a common way of life emerging from anthropology at the time of the Great War to shape a new approach to history. His study of the intimate relationship between religion and culture throughout world history shaped his trenchant criticisms of his own times. He wrote in 1955 that, “the first step in the transformation of culture is a change in the pattern of culture within the mind, for this is the seed out of which there spring new forms of life which ultimately change the social way of life and thus create a new culture.” Dawson’s engagement with anthropology and the idea of culture marked an important moment of development in the Catholic intellectual tradition.
Christina Scott shows that Dawson is best understood as he himself interpreted his historical subjects—in the context of “the spiritual world in which he lived, the ideas that moved him, and the faith that inspired his action.” Dawson was not a historian of ideas for their own sake; he had a passionate belief in their liberating power. A Historian and His World will be of interest to intellectual historians, historians of religion and culture, and students of modern Catholic thought. The Introduction is written by Dawson scholar Joseph T. Stuart and the book is graced by a postscript by Christopher Dawson reflecting upon the meaning of his work.
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A More Beautiful Question
The Spiritual in Poetry and ArtGlenn Hughes
University of Missouri Press, 2011
As more and more people in North America and Europe have distanced themselves from mainstream religious traditions over the past centuries, a “crisis of faith” has emerged and garnered much attention. But Glenn Hughes, author of A More Beautiful Question: The Spiritual in Poetry and Art, contends that despite the withering popularity of faith-based worldviews, our times do not evince a decline in spirituality. One need only consider the search for “alternative” religious symbolisms, as well as the growth of groups espousing fundamentalist religious viewpoints, to recognize that spiritual concerns remain a vibrant part of life in Western culture.
Hughes offers the idea that the modern “crisis of faith” is not a matter of vanishing spiritual concerns and energy but rather of their disorientation, even as they remain pervasive forces in human affairs. And because art is the most effective medium for spiritually evocation, it is our most significant touchstone for examining this spiritual disorientation, just as it remains a primary source of inspiration for spiritual experience.
A More Beautiful Question is concerned with how art, and especially poetry, functions as a vehicle of spiritual expression in today’s modern cultures. The book considers the meeting points of art, poetry, religion, and philosophy, in part through examining the treatments of consciousness, transcendence, and art in the writings of twentieth-century philosophers Eric Voegelin and Bernard Lonergan. A major portion of A More Beautiful Question is devoted to detailed “case studies” of three influential modern poets: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, and T. S. Eliot. In these and its other chapters, the book examines the human need for artistic symbols that evoke the mystery of transcendence, the ways in which poetry and art illuminate the spiritual meanings of freedom, and the benefits of an individual’s loving study of great literature and art.
A More Beautiful Question has a distinctive aim—to clarify the spiritual functions of art and poetry in relation to contemporary confusion about transcendent reality—and it meets that goal in a manner accessible by the layperson as well as the scholar. By examining how the best art and poetry address our need for spiritual orientation, this book makes a valuable contribution to the philosophies of art, literature, and religion, and brings deserved attention to the significance of the “spiritual” in the study of these disciplines.
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A Mysticism of Kindness
The Lucie Christine StoryAstrid M. O’Brien
University of Scranton Press, 2010
On the surface, Lucie Christine—the pseudonym given to a nineteenth-century Frenchwoman named Mathilde Boutle—was a very ordinary upper-middle-class woman, fulfilling her daily responsibilities to her husband and children. But underneath, Lucie Christine was an extraordinary human being. In A Mysticism of Kindness, Astrid M. O’Brien tells the life story of this remarkable woman, revealing how her experiences as a mystic allowed her to persevere as a wife and mother in the midst of constant verbal and physical abuse from her alcoholic husband. Her story will inspire all those who struggle to find a way to live a strong spiritual life in an often difficult and troubling world.
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A Noble and Independent Course
The Life of the Reverend Edward MitchellForrester A. Lee and James S. Pringle
Dartmouth College Press, 2018
In 1828 Edward Mitchell was the first student of African descent to graduate from Dartmouth College, more than thirty-five years before any other Ivy League school admitted a black student. This book tells Mitchell’s life story with the help of a recently rediscovered trove of his college essays, notes on his religious conversion, and hand-copied versions of his sermons. Born and raised in the French slave colony of Martinique, Mitchell immigrated to the United States and came of age in Philadelphia, where he broke bread with the city’s African American clerics and civic leaders. The Dartmouth trustees initially denied Mitchell admission but yielded to unified student protest. After his graduation, Mitchell continued his northward journey to serve as a Baptist preacher and evangelist in the pulpits of northern New England. His religious odyssey concluded in Lower Canada, where he was remembered as “the most profound theologian ever settled.” During his travels throughout the Atlantic world in an age of revolution and religious revival, Mitchell encountered the dominant social, economic, and political realities of his time. Although long celebrated as the inspiration for Dartmouth’s legacy of educating men and women of African ancestry, Mitchell’s life story remained unknown for almost two centuries. This book, which embodies history as recovery, is a testament to the authors’ desire to know the man behind the story.
[more]
A Privilege of Intellect
Conscience and Wisdom in Newman’s NarrativeD. A. Drennen
University of Scranton Press, 2010
Based on decades of research, A Privilege of Intellect is D. A. Drennen’s portrait of the English cardinal John Henry Newman (1801–90), whose conversion to the Roman Catholic Church in 1845 significantly boosted the presence of the Catholic Church in England and caused many Anglicans to follow his example. Newman—who will be beatified this fall—devoted his life both to the Church and to the university, demonstrating that religious faith and intellectual pursuits could exist in harmony. Drennen’s biography combines theology with psychology and philosophy and will appeal to anyone interested in the history of the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church.
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A Prophet of the People
Isaiah Shembe and the Making of a South African ChurchLauren V. Jarvis
Michigan State University Press, 2024
In 1910 Isaiah Shembe was struggling. He had left his family and quit his job as a sanitation worker to become a Baptist evangelist, but he ended his first mission without much to show. Little did he know that he would soon establish the Nazaretha Church as he began to attract attention from people left behind by industrial capitalism in South Africa. By his death in 1935, Shembe was an internationally known prophet and healer, described by his peers as “better off than all the Black people.” In A Prophet of the People: Isaiah Shembe and the Making of a South African Church, historian Lauren V. Jarvis provides a fascinating and intimate portrait of one of South Africa’s most famous religious figures, and in turn the making of modern South Africa. Following Shembe from his birth in the 1860s across many environments and contexts, Jarvis illuminates the tight links between the spread of Christianity, strategies of evasion, and the capacious forms of community that continue to shape South Africa today.
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A Quality of Loss
Mcinerny
St. Augustine's Press, 2025
The world in the 1970s was a cultural upheaval in many respects. This novel is a story of the deepest disruption but in the quietest and most hidden of places––namely, a monk living in isolation who is turned upside down by recent developments in the Catholic Church motivated by post-modern plans.
Brother Martin journals what he doesn't identify as confusion in D.Q. McInerny's debut novel that paints the portrait of a period in history that many are only now taking more seriously. What happened before the turn into the new millennium, and why are the effects of Vatican Council II more obvious and influential now than they were in the immediate wake of this council? The story of Brother Martin is a time capsule for many readers, but for others it is an insight into life that was stubbornly resistant to modern thinking in favor of the transcendent and eternal with respect to spirituality. McInerny shows through story-telling how much the institution was anything but a hinderance to the human soul and how much we may have lost by rejecting old forms on the sole basis of not having come up with them ourselves. This story is a generational bridge and reveals religious life in a truthful and still generous light.[more]
A Rascal by Nature, A Christian by Yearning
A Mormon AutobiographyPeterson, Levi S
University of Utah Press, 2006
I will introduce myself with a few facts. I was born and raised in Snowflake, a Mormon town in northern Arizona. I have lived most of my adult life in the cities of the American West. Although I consider myself a religious person, I know very little about God. At first I intended this book to be about wilderness, but as I wrote it, it became an autobiography with many themes. Among these themes are wilderness, my vexed and vexing relationship with Mormonism, my moral and emotional qualities, and my family.' So begins the autobiography of educator and author Levi S. Peterson.
Peterson has won a wide readership for his novels and short stories, his prize-winning biography of historian Juanita Brooks, and the essays that have appeared with regularity in western and Mormon literary and historical journals. In his autobiography, Peterson describes growing up on the Mormon frontier of rural Arizona, his growing skepticism with his Mormon faith, his teaching career at Weber State University, and his struggle to understand and master personal crises of confidence that kept him in therapy for almost two decades. Of particular interest to readers familiar with Peterson’s fiction are the many pages devoted to the creative process.
Winner of the Mormon History Association Turner-Bergera Best Biography Award.
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A Season of Singing
Creating Feminist Jewish Music in the United StatesSarah M. Ross
Brandeis University Press, 2016
In the 1960s, Jewish music in America began to evolve. Traditional liturgical tunes developed into a blend of secular and sacred sound that became known in the 1980s as “American Nusach.” Chief among these developments was the growth of feminist Jewish songwriting. In this lively study, Sarah M. Ross brings together scholarship on Jewish liturgy, U.S. history, and musical ethnology to describe the multiple roots and development of feminist Jewish music in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Focusing on the work of prolific songwriters such as Debbie Friedman, Rabbi Geela Rayzel Raphael, Rabbi Hanna Tiferet Siegel, and Linda Hirschhorn, this volume illuminates the biographies and oeuvres of innovators in the field, and shows how this new musical form arose from the rich contexts of feminism, identity politics, folk music, and Judaism. In addition to providing deep content analysis of individual songs, Ross examines the feminist Jewish music scene across the United States, the reception of this music, challenges to disseminating the music beyond informal settings, and the state of Jewish music publishing. Rounding out the picture of the transformation of Jewish music, the volume contains appendixes of songs and songwriters a selection of musical transcriptions of feminist Jewish songs, and a comprehensive discography. This book will interest scholars and students in the fields of American Jewish history, women’s studies, feminism, ethnomusicology, and contemporary popular and folk music.
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A Sense of Order
And Other StoriesJack Harrell
Signature Books, 2010
The author asks a big question: Who is responsible? One person in need of this information is Lon, who wonders why his marriage is falling apart. Lon thought his wife would re-initiate intimacy at some point. She doesn’t, and he sets out to find the man he thinks stands between them but only finds an apparition—and he still can’t fix his marriage.
In another story, the LDS prophet is drawn to s simpler time when he could wander out unnoticed and buy a candy bar. Church Security won’t let him outside on his own and Public Relations won’t let him wear anything but a suit and tie. Still, the impulse to be a regular guy for an afternoon is compelling. Can’t he make his own decisions? He can, but what are the consequences?
And then there’s Jerry, who passes three men in suits who are talking and laughing at the loading dock behind an LDS temple. One of them looks up, drops a cigarette and crushes it, then slips into a nearby car. Another man—someone who has made Jerry’s life miserable—taunts him, saying: “Jerry, your goodness is your enemy …and tell all your friends.” Who is responsible? Maybe it’s the author’s reverie that’s to blame, but his stories have a way of getting deep inside the psyche and haunting us.
In another story, the LDS prophet is drawn to s simpler time when he could wander out unnoticed and buy a candy bar. Church Security won’t let him outside on his own and Public Relations won’t let him wear anything but a suit and tie. Still, the impulse to be a regular guy for an afternoon is compelling. Can’t he make his own decisions? He can, but what are the consequences?
And then there’s Jerry, who passes three men in suits who are talking and laughing at the loading dock behind an LDS temple. One of them looks up, drops a cigarette and crushes it, then slips into a nearby car. Another man—someone who has made Jerry’s life miserable—taunts him, saying: “Jerry, your goodness is your enemy …and tell all your friends.” Who is responsible? Maybe it’s the author’s reverie that’s to blame, but his stories have a way of getting deep inside the psyche and haunting us.
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A Theory of Knots
Pervin Saket
Seagull Books, 2026
These lyric, unsparing poems stitch together a story of identity, belonging, and dissolution.
A Theory of Knots explores the loops of how identity and belonging are constructed, broken, resurrected, and dissolved. In sections, knots weave DNA and cords, memory and mythology, home and tongue; they draw on desire, Zoroastrian rituals, tradition and transgression, and the legacies of womanhood, asking what connects us, and at what cost.
As layers of identity are examined, Pervin Saket's poems return to language: heirloom, hazard, half-truth. Soon enough, language is both subject and suspect; having exposed the artificial nature of our truths, the poems confront the artificial nature of language itself. At the end, poetry reaches the wilderness of earth, collapses upon itself, dissolving on the page—untangling the final knot.
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A Thomistic Introduction to Modern Psychology
Leslie Kelley
Catholic University of America Press, 2026
Modern psychology has garnered an abundance of data, but how do the discrete studies of psychology fit together into a clear picture of the human person. Chesterton quips, “. . . what is pompously called induction is simply collecting more of the data. And Aristotle or Aquinas, or anybody in his five wits, would of course agree that the conclusion could only be true if the premises were true; and that the more true premises there were the better.” A Thomistic philosophical framework can provide important insights into the meaning and value of modern psychological theories and research. Thomistic anthropology allows us to develop a holistic vision of the human person, avoiding the modern tendencies toward determinism and reductionism. St. Thomas provides clear direction regarding the role and purpose of man’s various powers, and using a Thomistic philosophical framework allows for objectivity in our understanding of human adaptive and dysfunctional behavior, and helps to specify the unique and unified roles of body and mind. The place of psychology, in relation to philosophy and the natural sciences has been unclear throughout psychology’s short history, and Thomistic distinctions can clarify the distinctive position of psychology. In addition to describing Thomistic anthropology as a framework for modern psychology, Leslie Kelly also demonstrates examples of evidence from the social sciences that supports the Thomistic view of the human person. And last of all, a Thomistic framework allows investigators of psychology to develop a teleological perspective, so as to see the results of modern research in relation to the final end of the human person. Whether you are academically seasoned or a beginner, you will enjoy this fresh take on modern psychology through the perspective of St. Thomas.
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A cosmopolitan hermit
modernity and tradition in the philosophy of Josef PieperBernard 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]
Abiding Grace
Time, Modernity, DeathMark C. Taylor
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Post-war, post-industrialism, post-religion, post-truth, post-biological, post-human, post-modern. What succeeds the post- age? Mark C. Taylor returns here to some of his central philosophical preoccupations and asks: What comes after the end?
Abiding Grace navigates the competing Hegelian and Kierkegaardian trajectories born out of the Reformation and finds Taylor arguing from spaces in between, showing how both narratives have shaped recent philosophy and culture. For Hegel, Luther’s internalization of faith anticipated the modern principle of autonomy, which reached its fullest expression in speculative philosophy. The closure of the Hegelian system still endures in the twenty-first century in consumer society, financial capitalism, and virtual culture. For Kierkegaard, by contrast, Luther’s God remains radically transcendent, while finite human beings and their world remain fully dependent. From this insight, Heidegger and Derrida developed an alternative view of time in which a radically open future breaks into the present to transform the past, demonstrating that, far from autonomous, life is a gift from an Other that can never be known.
Offering an alternative genealogy of deconstruction that traces its pedigree back to readings of Paul by way of Luther, Abiding Grace presents a thoroughgoing critique of modernity and postmodernity’s will to power and mastery. In this new philosophical and theological vision, history is not over and the future remains endlessly open.
Abiding Grace navigates the competing Hegelian and Kierkegaardian trajectories born out of the Reformation and finds Taylor arguing from spaces in between, showing how both narratives have shaped recent philosophy and culture. For Hegel, Luther’s internalization of faith anticipated the modern principle of autonomy, which reached its fullest expression in speculative philosophy. The closure of the Hegelian system still endures in the twenty-first century in consumer society, financial capitalism, and virtual culture. For Kierkegaard, by contrast, Luther’s God remains radically transcendent, while finite human beings and their world remain fully dependent. From this insight, Heidegger and Derrida developed an alternative view of time in which a radically open future breaks into the present to transform the past, demonstrating that, far from autonomous, life is a gift from an Other that can never be known.
Offering an alternative genealogy of deconstruction that traces its pedigree back to readings of Paul by way of Luther, Abiding Grace presents a thoroughgoing critique of modernity and postmodernity’s will to power and mastery. In this new philosophical and theological vision, history is not over and the future remains endlessly open.
[more]
About Religion
Economies of Faith in Virtual CultureMark C. Taylor
University of Chicago Press, 1999
"Religion," Mark C. Taylor maintains, "is most interesting where it is least obvious." From global financial networks to the casinos of Las Vegas, from images flickering on computer terminals to steel sculpture, material culture bears unexpected traces of the divine. In a world where the economies of faith are obscure, yet pervasive, Taylor shows that approaching religion directly is less instructive than thinking about it.
Traveling from high culture to pop culture and back again, About Religion approaches cyberspace and Las Vegas through Hegel and Kant and reads Melville's The Confidence-Man through the film Wall Street. As astonishing juxtapositions and associations proliferate, formerly uncharted territories of virtual culture disclose theological vestiges, showing that faith in contemporary culture is as unavoidable as it is elusive.
The most accessible presentation of Taylor's revolutionary ideas to date, About Religion gives us a dazzling and disturbing vision of life at the end of the old and beginning of the new millennium.
Traveling from high culture to pop culture and back again, About Religion approaches cyberspace and Las Vegas through Hegel and Kant and reads Melville's The Confidence-Man through the film Wall Street. As astonishing juxtapositions and associations proliferate, formerly uncharted territories of virtual culture disclose theological vestiges, showing that faith in contemporary culture is as unavoidable as it is elusive.
The most accessible presentation of Taylor's revolutionary ideas to date, About Religion gives us a dazzling and disturbing vision of life at the end of the old and beginning of the new millennium.
[more]
Action and Character According to Aristotle
Kevin L. Flannery, SJ
Catholic University of America Press, 2013
This book will appeal to professional scholars and graduate students with an interest in Aristotles ethics and in ethics generally. It proposes comprehensive interpretations of some difficult passages in Aristotles two major ethical works ( the Nicomachean Ethics and the Eudemian Ethics ). It brings to bear upon the analysis of human behavior passages in Aristotles logical works and in his Physics. It also draws connections among areas of particular interest to contemporary ethics: action theory, the analysis of practical reason, and virtue ethics.
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African Apocalypse
The Story of Nontetha Nkwenkwe, a Twentieth-Century South African ProphetRobert R. Edgar; Hilary SapireRobert R.
Ohio University Press, 1999
The devastating influenza epidemic of 1918 ripped through southern Africa. In its aftermath, revivalist and millenarian movements sprouted. Prophets appeared bearing messages of resistance, redemption, and renewal. African Apocalypse: The Story of Nontetha Nkwenkwe, A Twentieth-Century Prophet is the remarkable story of one such prophet, a middle-aged Xhosa woman named Nontetha. After surviving the deadly virus, Nontetha proclaimed that a series of dreams revealed to her that the influenza had been a punishment from God. Consequently, she embarked on a mission to reform her society. She imposed numerous prohibitions and rules on her followers. In a parallel movement, in 1919, millenarian Israelites congregated in the holy village of Ntabelanga, 100 miles north of Nontetha’s area, to await the end of the world. In May 1921, police killed nearly 200 Israelites near Queenstown in a showdown over attempts to expel the settlers. Accused of sedition by an alarmed government, Nontetha was committed to Fort Beaufort Mental Hospital in 1922. On Nontetha’s death in 1935, officials buried her in an unmarked pauper’s grave. In 1997, Edgar and Sapire located Nontetha’s grave. Of Edgar’s efforts to return Nontetha to her home, the New York Times said, “One would not expect, perhaps, that a mild-mannered professor from Howard University would turn out to be the Indiana Jones of South Africa.” African Apocalypse touches on a variety of themes, including African Christianity, gender, protest, the social history of madness, and the engagement of professional historians in contemporary issues.
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After God
Mark C. Taylor
University of Chicago Press, 2007
Religion, Mark C. Taylor argues in After God, is more complicated than either its defenders or critics think and, indeed, is much more influential than any of us realize. Our world, Taylor maintains, is shaped by religion even when it is least obvious. Faith and value, he insists, are unavoidable and inextricably interrelated for believers and nonbelievers alike.
The first comprehensive theology of culture since the pioneering work of Paul Tillich, After God redefines religion for our contemporary age. This volumeis a radical reconceptualization of religion and Taylor’s most pathbreaking work yet, bringing together various strands of theological argument and cultural analysis four decades in the making.
Praise for Mark C. Taylor
“The distinguishing feature of Taylor’s career is a fearless, or perhaps reckless, orientation to the new and to whatever challenges orthodoxy. . . . Taylor’s work is playful, perverse, rarefied, ingenious, and often brilliant.”—New York Times Magazine
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After the Death of God
Secularization as a Philosophical Challenge from Kant to NietzscheEspen Hammer
University of Chicago Press, 2025
A fresh history of nineteenth-century philosophy’s many ideas about secularization.
The secularization thesis, which held that religious belief would gradually yield to rationality, has been thoroughly debunked. What, then, can we learn from philosophers for whom the death of God seemed so imminent? In this book, Espen Hammer offers a sweeping analysis of secularization in nineteenth-century German philosophy, arguing that the persistence of religion (rather than its absence) animated this tradition. Hammer shows that Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, and Nietzsche, each in their own way, sought to preserve and transform religion’s ethical and communal aspirations for modern life. A renewed appreciation for this tradition’s generous thought, Hammer argues, can help us chart a path through needlessly destructive conflicts between secularists and fundamentalists today.
The secularization thesis, which held that religious belief would gradually yield to rationality, has been thoroughly debunked. What, then, can we learn from philosophers for whom the death of God seemed so imminent? In this book, Espen Hammer offers a sweeping analysis of secularization in nineteenth-century German philosophy, arguing that the persistence of religion (rather than its absence) animated this tradition. Hammer shows that Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, and Nietzsche, each in their own way, sought to preserve and transform religion’s ethical and communal aspirations for modern life. A renewed appreciation for this tradition’s generous thought, Hammer argues, can help us chart a path through needlessly destructive conflicts between secularists and fundamentalists today.
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Afterlight
Caleb Nolen
University of Utah Press, 2026
Winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry
“When I wake I’m in ninth grade again,” begins “Reunion,” the first poem in Caleb Nolen’s debut collection Afterlight. These haunting, tender poems revisit the fraught adolescence of a group of boys growing up in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Told through the voice of one of the boys who left and is later looking back, Afterlight navigates the silences left by absent fathers, early deaths, and a God who doesn't speak. Interwoven throughout are letters to saints and biblical figures: pleas for intercession and understanding that echo the speaker’s search for grace amid violence and loss. By the book’s end, the lost boys and the saints share the same hallowed space, their stories entwined. Written in plain, unsparing language, these poems reveal the tenderness within troubled masculinity and the ache of trying to love what has already vanished.
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Against Dogmatism
Dwelling in Faith and DoubtMadhuri Yadlapati
University of Illinois Press, 2013
Many contemporary discussions of religion take an absolute, intractable approach to belief and nonbelief that privileges faith and dogmatism while treating doubt as a threat to religious values. As Madhuri M. Yadlapati demonstrates, however, there is another way: a faith (or nonfaith) that embraces doubt and its potential for exploring both the depths and heights of spiritual reflection and speculation. Through three distinct discussions of faith, doubt, and hope, Yadlapati explores what it means to live creatively and responsibly in the everyday world as limited, imaginative, and questioning creatures. She begins with a perceptive survey of diverse faith experiences in Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, and Protestant Christianity and then narrows her focus to Protestant Christianity and Hinduism to explore how the great thinkers of those faiths have embraced doubt in the service of spiritual transcendence.
Yadlapati traces religious perspectives on trust, humility, belonging, commitment, and lively skepticism as they relate to faith and doubt. Drawing on various doctrines, scriptures, and the writings of great religious thinkers such as C. S. Lewis, Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Barth, and Raimon Panikkar, Yadlapati demonstrates how doubt can serve to enhance faith, not hinder it. Defending the rich tapestry of faith and doubt against polarization, Against Dogmatism reveals an ecumenical middle way, a spiritual approach native to traditions in which faith and doubt are interwoven in constructive and dynamic ways.
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Al-Ghazali's "Moderation in Belief"
Al-Ghazali
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Centuries after his death, al-Ghazali remains one of the most influential figures of the Islamic intellectual tradition. Although he is best known for his Incoherence of the Philosophers, Moderation in Belief is his most profound work of philosophical theology. In it, he offers what scholars consider to be the best defense of the Ash'arite school of Islamic theology that gained acceptance within orthodox Sunni theology in the twelfth century, though he also diverges from Ash'arism with his more rationalist approach to the Quran. Together with The Incoherence of the Philosophers, Moderation in Belief informs many subsequent theological debates, and its influence extends beyond the Islamic tradition, informing broader questions within Western philosophical and theological thought.
The first complete English-language edition of Moderation in Belief, this new annotated translation by Aladdin M. Yaqub draws on the most esteemed critical editions of the Arabic texts and offers detailed commentary that analyzes and reconstructs the arguments found in the work’s four treatises. Explanations of the historical and intellectual background of the texts also enable readers with a limited knowledge of classical Arabic to fully explore al-Ghazali and this foundational text for the first time.
With the recent resurgence of interest in Islamic philosophy and the conflict between philosophy and religion, this new translation will be a welcome addition to the scholarship.
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All Great Art is Praise
Aidan Nichols
Catholic University of America Press, 2016
The volume looks especially closely at Ruskin's changing attitudes to Catholicism. The son of a stoutly Bible-Protestant mother and a father politically opposed to the civil emancipation of Catholics, Ruskin found it increasingly difficult to combine his inherited anti-Catholicism with his appreciation of Byzantine-Venetian, Renaissance-humanist, and Franciscan-evangelical art and the program for living these contained or implied. The rumors in late life of his immanent conversion to Rome proved unfounded, but they were not implausible. All Great Art is Praise seeks to show why
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All Things Human
Henry Codman Potter and the Social Gospel in the Episcopal ChurchMichael Bourgeois
University of Illinois Press, 2004
In addition to being the sixth bishop of the Diocese of New York, Henry Codman Potter (1835-1908) was a prominent voice in the Social Gospel movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This book, the first in-depth study of Potter's life and work, examines his career in the Episcopal church as well as the origins and legacy of his progressive social views.
As industrialization and urbanization spread in the nineteenth century, the Social Gospel movement sought to apply Christian teachings to effect improvements in the lives of the less fortunate. Potter was firmly in this tradition, concerning himself especially with issues of race, the place of women in society, questions of labor and capital, and what he called "political righteousness." Placing Potter against the wider backdrop of nineteenth-century American Protestantism, Bourgeois explores the experiences and influences that led him to espouse these socially conscious beliefs, to work for social reform, and to write such works as Sermons of the City (1881) and The Citizen in His Relation to the Industrial Situation (1902).
In telling Potter's remarkable story, All Things Human stands as a valuable contribution to intellectual and religious history as well as an exploration of the ways in which religion and society interact.
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Amasa Mason Lyman, Mormon Apostle and Apostate
A Study in DedicationEdward Leo Lyman
University of Utah Press, 2009
The early history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is filled with fascinating characters, but few led a more tumultuous life than Amasa Lyman. Though he has been largely forgotten, this new biography provides a unique and revealing account of the early days of Mormonism and Lyman’s role in creating that history. He served as a missionary in the “burned-over” district of upstate New York and in Ohio before moving to Kirtland, where he suffered in the infant church’s financial crisis. He participated in the conflicts with hostile Missourians and emigrated to Nauvoo, Illinois. There, he became a leader in the church and a close associate of Joseph Smith. Lyman then led a company of pioneers across Iowa to Winter Quarters and on to the Salt Lake Valley. He was sent to the California gold fields and led the colonization of San Bernardino, where he became its first mayor, before returning to Utah, and he traveled to Europe as head of the church’s European missions.
Having spent more than thirty years in the service of his church, Lyman began to move away from its teachings after a series of conflicts with its second leader, Brigham Young. Lyman was one of the first Mormons to criticize the Mountain Meadows Massacre, which led to his dismissal as an apostle. He was excommunicated in 1870 and became one of the foremost spokesmen of the Godbeite Church of Zion movement before his death in 1877. Author Edward Leo Lyman chronicles Amasa Lyman’s life and interactions with Mormon history with an honesty true to his ancestor’s freethinking spirit.
Winner of the Francis Armstrong Madsen Best Utah History Book Award from the Utah Division of State History.
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Ambient Sufism
Ritual Niches and the Social Work of Musical FormRichard C. Jankowsky
University of Chicago Press, 2021
Ambient Sufism is a study of the intertwined musical lives of several ritual communities in Tunisia that invoke the healing powers of long-deceased Muslim saints through music-driven trance rituals. Richard C. Jankowsky illuminates the virtually undocumented role of women and minorities in shaping the ritual musical landscape of the region, with case studies on men’s and women’s Sufi orders, Jewish and black Tunisian healing musical troupes, and the popular music of hard-drinking laborers, as well as the cohorts involved in mass-mediated staged spectacles of ritual that continue to inject ritual sounds into the public sphere. He uses the term “ambient Sufism” to illuminate these adjacent ritual practices, each serving as a musical, social, and devotional-therapeutic niche while contributing to a larger, shared ecology of practices surrounding and invoking the figures of saints. And he argues that ritual musical form—that is, the large-scale structuring of ritual through musical organization—has agency; that is, form is revealing and constitutive of experience and encourages particular subjectivities. Ambient Sufism promises many useful ideas for ethnomusicology, anthropology, Islamic and religious studies, and North African studies.
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America's Theologian
Father Richard McBride of Notre DameTodd Hartch
Catholic University of America Press, 2027
America's Theologian: Father Richard McBrien of Notre Dame is an intellectual biography of the Catholic theologian and commentator Richard McBrien (1936-2015), author of the best-selling Catholicism and 24 other books, arguably the most influential American Catholic voice of the 1980s and 1990s. Like Wilson Miscamble’s American Priest: The Ambitious Life and Conflicted Legacy of Notre Dame's Father Ted Hesburgh, this biography gives a respectful yet critical treatment of one of the lions of American liberal Catholicism. Openly radical in his younger days and critical of Vatican II for being too moderate, McBrien was frustrated with the slow pace of religious change in the 1970s but realized that his bold and straightforward approach was not working. His 1980 magnum opus, Catholicism, which sold 150,000 copies in its first edition and 50,000 more in later editions, marked a change of course. From this point forward, he adopted the rhetoric of moderation, used ambiguity to cloak his more radical ideas, and became an outspoken defender of Vatican II. His theology did not change, but he presented himself as a centrist who was defending the legacy of Vatican II. One of those impressed by Catholicism was University of Notre Dame President Ted Hesburgh, who recruited McBrien in 1980 to transform the university’s theology department. During his decade as chair, McBrien turned the Notre Dame theology department into an influential center of liberal Catholic theology.
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American Catholics and the Church of Tomorrow
Building Churches for the Future, 1925–1975Catherine R. Osborne
University of Chicago Press, 2018
In the mid-twentieth century, American Catholic churches began to shed the ubiquitous spires, stained glass, and gargoyles of their European forebears, turning instead toward startling and more angular structures of steel, plate glass, and concrete. But how did an institution like the Catholic Church, so often seen as steeped in inflexible traditions, come to welcome this modernist trend?
Catherine R. Osborne’s innovative new book finds the answer: the alignment between postwar advancements in technology and design and evolutionary thought within the burgeoning American Catholic community. A new, visibly contemporary approach to design, church leaders thought, could lead to the rebirth of the church community of the future. As Osborne explains, the engineering breakthroughs that made modernist churches feasible themselves raised questions that were, for many Catholics, fundamentally theological. Couldn’t technological improvements engender worship spaces that better reflected God's presence in the contemporary world? Detailing the social, architectural, and theological movements that made modern churches possible, American Catholics and the Churches of Tomorrow breaks important new ground in the history of American Catholicism, and also presents new lines of thought for scholars attracted to modern architectural and urban history.
Catherine R. Osborne’s innovative new book finds the answer: the alignment between postwar advancements in technology and design and evolutionary thought within the burgeoning American Catholic community. A new, visibly contemporary approach to design, church leaders thought, could lead to the rebirth of the church community of the future. As Osborne explains, the engineering breakthroughs that made modernist churches feasible themselves raised questions that were, for many Catholics, fundamentally theological. Couldn’t technological improvements engender worship spaces that better reflected God's presence in the contemporary world? Detailing the social, architectural, and theological movements that made modern churches possible, American Catholics and the Churches of Tomorrow breaks important new ground in the history of American Catholicism, and also presents new lines of thought for scholars attracted to modern architectural and urban history.
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American Unitarian Churches
Architecture of a Democratic ReligionAnn Marie Borys
University of Massachusetts Press, 2021
The Unitarian religious tradition was a product of the same eighteenth-century democratic ideals that fueled the American Revolution and informed the founding of the United States. Its liberal humanistic principles influenced institutions such as Harvard University and philosophical movements like Transcendentalism. Yet, its role in the history of American architecture is little known and studied.
In American Unitarian Churches, Ann Marie Borys argues that the progressive values and identity of the Unitarian religion are intimately intertwined with ideals of American democracy and visibly expressed in the architecture of its churches. Over time, church architecture has continued to evolve in response to developments within the faith, and many contemporary projects are built to serve religious, practical, and civic functions simultaneously. Focusing primarily on churches of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple and Louis Kahn's First Unitarian Church, Borys explores building histories, biographies of leaders, and broader sociohistorical contexts. As this essential study makes clear, to examine Unitarianism through its churches is to see American architecture anew, and to find an authentic architectural expression of American democratic identity.
In American Unitarian Churches, Ann Marie Borys argues that the progressive values and identity of the Unitarian religion are intimately intertwined with ideals of American democracy and visibly expressed in the architecture of its churches. Over time, church architecture has continued to evolve in response to developments within the faith, and many contemporary projects are built to serve religious, practical, and civic functions simultaneously. Focusing primarily on churches of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple and Louis Kahn's First Unitarian Church, Borys explores building histories, biographies of leaders, and broader sociohistorical contexts. As this essential study makes clear, to examine Unitarianism through its churches is to see American architecture anew, and to find an authentic architectural expression of American democratic identity.
[more]
An Epitaph for German Judaism
From Halle to JerusalemEmil Fackenheim
University of Wisconsin Press, 2007
Emil Fackenheim’s life work was to call upon the world at large—and on philosophers, Christians, Jews, and Germans in particular—to confront the Holocaust as an unprecedented assault on the Jewish people, Judaism, and all humanity. In this memoir, to which he was making final revisions at the time of his death, Fackenheim looks back on his life, at the profound and painful circumstances that shaped him as a philosopher and a committed Jewish thinker.
Interned for three months in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp after Kristallnacht, Fackenheim was released and escaped to Scotland and then to Canada, where he lived in a refugee internment camp before eventually becoming a congregational rabbi and then, for thirty-five years, a professor of philosophy. He recalls here what it meant to be a German Jew in North America, the desperate need to respond to the crisis in Europe and to cope with its overwhelming implications for Jewish identity and community. His second great turning point came in 1967, as he saw Jews threatened with another Holocaust, this time in Israel. This crisis led him on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and ultimately back to Germany, where he continued to grapple with the question, How can the Jewish faith—and the Christian faith—exist after the Holocaust?
“An ‘epoch-making’ autobiography.”—Arnold Ages, Jewish Tribune
“An ‘epoch-making’ autobiography.”—Arnold Ages, Jewish Tribune
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An Immigrant Bishop
John England's Adaptation of Irish Catholicism to American Republicanism, Second EditionPatrick W. Carey
Catholic University of America Press, 2022
An Immigrant Bishop is a revised examination of the Irish intellectual roots of Bishop John England’s American pastoral works in the diocese of Charleston, South Carolina (1820-1842). The text focuses on his political philosophy and his theology of the Church, both of which were influenced by the Enlightenment and a theological, not a political, Gallicanism. As the study demonstrates, we now know more about England’s intellectual life prior to his immigration than we do about any other Catholic immigrant from Ireland. Neither Peter Guilday’s monumental two-volume biography (1927) of England nor any subsequent scholarly study of England has uncovered and analyzed, as this book does, England’s many unpublished and published writings in Ireland—his explicitly authored texts, his published speeches before the Cork Aggregate meetings, and his pseudonymous articles in the Cork Mercantile Chronicle between 1808, when he was ordained, and 1820, when he emigrated to the United States.
John England (1786-1842), the first Catholic bishop of Charleston, was the foremost national spokesman for Catholicism in the United States during the years of his episcopacy and the primary apologist for the compatibility of Catholicism and American republicanism. He was also the first Catholic bishop to speak before the United States Congress and the first American to receive a papal appointment as an Apostolic Delegate to a foreign country (in this case to negotiate a concordat with President Jean Pierre Boyer of Haiti). He is considered the father of the Baltimore Provincial Councils and the nineteenth-century American Catholic conciliar tradition. He was also the only bishop in American history to develop a constitutional form of diocesan government and administration. Among other things he was the first cleric to establish a diocesan newspaper that had something of a national distribution. England’s contribution to the early formation of an American Catholicism has been told many times before, but he has the kind of creative mind and episcopal leadership that demands repeated re-considerations.
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An Intimate Chronicle
The Journals of William ClaytonGeorge D. Smith
Signature Books, 1995
William Clayton is best remembered today for his hymns, especially “Come, Come Ye Saints.” But as one of the earliest Latter-day Saint scribes, he made intellectual as well as artistic contributions to his church, and his records have been silently incorporated into official Mormon scripture and history. Of equal significance are his personal impressions of day-to-day activities, which describe a social and religious world largely unfamiliar to modern readers.
In ministering to the sick, for instance, Clayton anointed with perfumed oil and rum. He performed baptisms to heal the sick. Church services, held irregularly, were referred to as “going to meeting” and seemed to be elective. He testifies of people speaking in tongues and of others “almost speaking in tongues.” When introduced to plural marriage, he was reluctant but eventually became one of its most enthusiastic proponents, marrying ten women and fathering forty-two children.
Since polygamy was initially secret, Clayton spent much of his time putting out the fires of innuendo and discontent. He caught his first plural wife rendezvousing with her former fiancé; later, when she became pregnant, her mother–his unaware mother-in-law–was so overwrought that she attempted suicide. Joseph Smith reassured him: “Just keep her at home and brook it and if they raise trouble about it and bring you before me I will give you an awful scourging and probably cut you off from the church and then I will set you ahead as good as ever.” Clayton was also the object of Emma Smith’s attentions, allegedly part of a jealous wife’s plan to make a cuckold of her errant husband.
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Anchoress and Abbess in Ninth-Century Saxony
The Lives of Liutbirga of Wendhausen and Hathumoda of GandersheimFrederick S. Paxton
Catholic University of America Press, 2009
In the growing field of early medieval texts in translation, this book presents the first full English translations of the Lives of Liutbirga of Wendhausen, the first anchoress in Saxony, and Hathumoda, the first abbess of Gandersheim.
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Apocalypse of Truth
Heideggerian MeditationsJean Vioulac
University of Chicago Press, 2021
We inhabit a time of crisis—totalitarianism, environmental collapse, and the unquestioned rule of neoliberal capitalism. Philosopher Jean Vioulac is invested in and worried by all of this, but his main concern lies with how these phenomena all represent a crisis within—and a threat to—thinking itself.
In his first book to be translated into English, Vioulac radicalizes Heidegger’s understanding of truth as disclosure through the notion of truth as apocalypse. This “apocalypse of truth” works as an unveiling that reveals both the finitude and mystery of truth, allowing a full confrontation with truth-as-absence. Engaging with Heidegger, Marx, and St. Paul, as well as contemporary figures including Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Žižek, Vioulac’s book presents a subtle, masterful exposition of his analysis before culminating in a powerful vision of “the abyss of the deity.” Here, Vioulac articulates a portrait of Christianity as a religion of mourning, waiting for a god who has already passed by, a form of ever-present eschatology whose end has always already taken place. With a preface by Jean-Luc Marion, Apocalypse of Truth presents a major contemporary French thinker to English-speaking audiences for the first time.
In his first book to be translated into English, Vioulac radicalizes Heidegger’s understanding of truth as disclosure through the notion of truth as apocalypse. This “apocalypse of truth” works as an unveiling that reveals both the finitude and mystery of truth, allowing a full confrontation with truth-as-absence. Engaging with Heidegger, Marx, and St. Paul, as well as contemporary figures including Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Žižek, Vioulac’s book presents a subtle, masterful exposition of his analysis before culminating in a powerful vision of “the abyss of the deity.” Here, Vioulac articulates a portrait of Christianity as a religion of mourning, waiting for a god who has already passed by, a form of ever-present eschatology whose end has always already taken place. With a preface by Jean-Luc Marion, Apocalypse of Truth presents a major contemporary French thinker to English-speaking audiences for the first time.
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Aquinas and the Cry of Rachel
John F.X. Knasas
Catholic University of America Press, 2013
In Aquinas and the Cry of Rachel , John F. X. Knasas explores Thomas Aquinas's philosophical thinking about evil, and brings the results into discussion with the contemporary theodicies - philosophies of the problem of evil. It examines the relation of the human person and human nature to nature as a whole.
Generally speaking, possible philosophical accounts for evil are two kinds: cosmological or personal. The cosmological account has evils rebounding to the perfection of creation. The personal account would have evils suffered rebounding to the good of the sufferer. Knasas argues that for Aquinas no philosophical resolution of these two kinds of accounts
is possible. This argument is based upon Aquinas's understanding of the human as an intellector of analogical being. Such an understanding establishes two truths. First, the human is by nature only a principal part of the created whole. Second, there is the philosophically discernible possibility of supernatural elevation by the creator.
Hence, as far as philosophy can discern, evil may have a natural explanation or it may have a supernatural one. The Thomistic philosopher has no answer as to why evil exists because that philosopher discerns too many possible ones. In that respect, Aquinas's thinking on evil is similar to his thinking about the philosophical knowledge of the biblical
truth of the world's creation in time. Such a creation is one metaphysical possibility among others. Some authors that Aquinas and the Cry of Rachel considers are: Anthony Flew and Albert Camus, Jacques Maritain and Charles Journet, William Rowe, Marily McCord Adams, William Hasker, John Hick, David Ray Griffin, David Hume, Diogenes Allen, J. L. Mackie, Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, Bruce Reichenbach,
Brian Davies, and Eleonore Stump.
Generally speaking, possible philosophical accounts for evil are two kinds: cosmological or personal. The cosmological account has evils rebounding to the perfection of creation. The personal account would have evils suffered rebounding to the good of the sufferer. Knasas argues that for Aquinas no philosophical resolution of these two kinds of accounts
is possible. This argument is based upon Aquinas's understanding of the human as an intellector of analogical being. Such an understanding establishes two truths. First, the human is by nature only a principal part of the created whole. Second, there is the philosophically discernible possibility of supernatural elevation by the creator.
Hence, as far as philosophy can discern, evil may have a natural explanation or it may have a supernatural one. The Thomistic philosopher has no answer as to why evil exists because that philosopher discerns too many possible ones. In that respect, Aquinas's thinking on evil is similar to his thinking about the philosophical knowledge of the biblical
truth of the world's creation in time. Such a creation is one metaphysical possibility among others. Some authors that Aquinas and the Cry of Rachel considers are: Anthony Flew and Albert Camus, Jacques Maritain and Charles Journet, William Rowe, Marily McCord Adams, William Hasker, John Hick, David Ray Griffin, David Hume, Diogenes Allen, J. L. Mackie, Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, Bruce Reichenbach,
Brian Davies, and Eleonore Stump.
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Aquinas and the Platonist Tradition
Fran O'Rourke
Catholic University of America Press, 2026
Aquinas and the Platonist Tradition studies a variety of central topics to illustrate the pervasive influence of Platonism and Neoplatonism in the philosophy of St Thomas. The overall thesis is that Aquinas combined the transcendent impulse of Platonism with the natural sensibility of Aristotle; his deepest metaphysical intuitions are unmistakably Platonist. While Aquinas followed Aristotle in epistemology, his deeper insights were more in tune with Plato. Adopting Aristotle’s method, he provided a more secure foundation for positions that was more characteristic of Plato. Fran O'Rourke notes the fundamental unity of Plato and Aristotle fashioned by Aquinas at a deeper level.
The opening chapter deals in broad strokes with themes common to Plato and St Thomas. Direct influence is not always evident (Aquinas had limited knowledge of Plato’s writings), rather a shared interest in profound philosophical questions, approached separately on converging paths. Subsequent chapters deal in detail with particular questions, relying frequently on indirect Neoplatonic sources and interpretations, in particular St Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, and the author of the Liber de Causis. Central topics include the immortality of the soul, the nature of beauty, the status of evil, the names of God, Aquinas’ debt to Pseudo-Dionysius in the understanding of being/existence (esse) as intensive power (virtus essendi), the knowledge of transcendent reality, and the nature and ontological status of angels.
O'Rourke's method is to begin each topic with a close reading of relevant texts from the entire corpus thomisticum. There followed a comparison and contrast with earlier authors and references to later influences. Each essay concludes with an evaluation, frequently criticizing the arguments involved. The studies are not merely historical, but aim to show the abiding philosophical relevance of the Platonist and Thomistic thought.
There is a dearth of extended studies of the Platonist/Neoplatonist heritage of Aquinas. Many books refer in a general way to these influences, but none in an extended or systematic manner. While this book is a collection of diverse essays, it has nevertheless a comprehensive unity. It presents many new insights regarding the fundamental significance of Platonist/Neoplatonist aspects of Aquinas’ thought.
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Aquinas, Wittgenstein, and the Riddle of Spiritual Pedagogy
Matthew Dunch
Catholic University of America Press, 2027
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.
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