Traditionally, Christian martyrdom is a repetition of the story of Christ’s suffering and death: the more closely the victim’s narrative replicates the Christological model, the more legible the martyrdom. But if the textual construction of martyrdom depends on the rehearsal of a paradigmatic story, how does the discourse reconcile the broad range of individuals, beliefs, and persecutions seeking legitimation by claims of martyrdom? By observing how martyrdom is constructed through the interplay of historical event and literary form, Alice Dailey explores the development of English martyr discourse through the period of intense religious controversy from the heresy executions of Queen Mary to the regicide of 1649. Through close study of texts ranging from late medieval passion drama and hagiography to John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, martyrologies of the Counter-Reformation, Charles I’s Eikon Basilike, and John Milton’s Eikonoklastes, The English Martyr from Reformation to Revolution considers the shifting religiopolitical rhetoric of Reformation England. By putting history and literary form in dialogue, Dailey describes not only the reformation of one of the oldest, most influential genres of the Christian West but a revolution in the very concept of martyrdom. In England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, martyrdom develops from medieval notions of strict typological repetition, she argues, into Charles I’s defense of individual conscience—an abstract, figurative form of martyrdom that survives into modernity. Rather than being a static genre, martyrology emerges in Dailey’s study as deeply nuanced and subtly responsive to historical circumstance.

Erich Przywara, S.J. (1889–1972), is one of the important Catholic intellectuals of the twentieth century. Yet, in the English-speaking world Przywara remains largely unknown. Few of his sixty books or six hundred articles have been translated. In this engaging new book, Thomas O’Meara offers a comprehensive study of the German Jesuit Erich Przywara and his philosophical theology. Przywara’s scholarly contributions were remarkable. He was one of three theologians who introduced the writings of John Henry Cardinal Newman into Germany. From Przywara’s position at the Jesuit journal in Munich, Stimmen der Zeit, he offered an open and broad Catholic perspective on the cultural, philosophical, and theological currents of his time. As one of the first Catholic intellectuals to employ the phenomenologies of Edmund Husserl and Max Scheler, he was also responsible for giving an influential, more theological interpretation of the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola. Przywara was also deeply engaged in the ideas and authors of his times. He was the first Catholic dialogue partner of Karl Barth and Paul Tillich. Edmund Husserl was counted among Przywara’s friends, and Edith Stein was a close personal and intellectual friend. Through his interactions with important figures of his age and his writings, ranging from speculative systems to liturgical hymns, Przywara was of marked importance in furthering a varied dialogue between German Catholicism and modern culture. Following a foreword by Michael A. Fahey, S.J., O’Meara presents a chapter on Pryzwara’s life and a chronology of his writings. O’Meara then discusses Pryzwara’s philosophical theology, his lecture-courses at German universities on Augustine and Aquinas, his philosophy of religion, and his influence on important intellectual contemporaries. O’Meara concludes with an in-depth analysis of Pryzwara’s theology—focusing particularly on his Catholic views on person, liturgy, and church.

Faith and the Historian collects essays from eight experienced historians discussing the impact of being touched? by Catholicism on their vision of history. That first graduate seminar, these essays suggest, did not mark the inception of ones historical sensibilities; rather, the process had deeper, and earlier, roots. The authors­--ranging from cradle to the grave? Catholics to those who havent practiced for forty years, and everywhere in between--explicitly investigate the interplay between their personal lives and beliefs and the sources of their professional work. A variety of heartfelt, illuminating, and sometimes humorous experiences emerge from these stories of intelligent people coming to terms with their Catholic backgrounds as they mature and enter the academy. Contributors include: Philip Gleason, David Emmons, Maureen Fitzgerald, Joseph A. McCartin, Mario T. García, Nick Salvatore, James R. Barrett, and Anne M. Butler.

The book presents Daniel Berrigan's contribution and challenge to Catholic Social Thought. His contribution lies in his consistent, comprehensive, theoretical, and practical approach to issues of social justice and peace over the last fifty years. His challenge lies in his critique of capitalism, imperialism, and militarism, inviting Catholic activists and thinkers to undertake not just a reformist but a radical critique and alternative to these realities. The aim of this book is, for the first time, to make Berrigan's thought and life available to the academic Catholic community, so that a fruitful interaction takes place. How does this work enlighten and challenge such a community? How can this community enrich and criticize his work?To these ends, the editors have recruited scholars and thinker-activists already familiar with and sympathetic to Berrigan's work and those who are less so identified. The result is a rich, engaging, and critical treatment of the meaning and impact of his work. What kind of challenge does he present to academic-business-as-usual in Catholic universities? How can the life and work of individual Catholic academics be transformed if such persons took Berrigan's work seriously, theoretically and practically? Do Catholic universities need Berrigan's vision to fulfill more integrally and completely their own mission? Does the self-knowing subject and theorist need to become a radical subject and theorist?Even though the appeal of academics is important and perhaps primary, because of the range and depth of his work and thought and the power of his writing, there is a larger appeal to the Catholic community and to activists working for social justice and peace. The work has, therefore, not only a theoretical and academic appeal but also a popular and grass roots appeal.Given the current and on-going US military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, Berrigan's work invites us to think about the justice of such interventions or, given the destructiveness of modern weapons, whether the notion of just war makes any sense. Given the recent crisis on Wall Street, does it make sense any longer to talk about the possibility of a just capitalism? Given the most recent revelations about Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and Bagram, is it not imperative to think about how torture, preventative detention, and extraordinary rendition serve the ends of empire? In light of all of this, doesn't Berrigan's call for a pacific, prophetic community of justice rooted in the Good News of the Gospel make compelling sense?

Three of the most influential Catholic theologians of the twentieth century--Bernard Lonergan, John Courtney Murray, and Karl Rahner--were all born in 1904, at the height of the Church's most militant rhetoric against all things modern. In this culture of suspicion, Lonergan, Murray, and Rahner grew in faith to join the Society of Jesus and struggled with the burden of antimodernist policies in their formation. By the time of their mature work in the 1950s and 1960s, they had helped to redefine the critical dialogue between modern thought and contemporary Catholic theology.



After the d

Philosophers have long and skeptically viewed religion as a source of overeasy answers, with a singular, totalizing Godand the comfort of an immortal soul being the greatest among them. But religious thought has always been more interesting-indeed, a rich source of endlessly unfolding questions.With questions from the 1885 Baltimore Catechism of the Catholic Church as the starting point for each chapter, Karmen MacKendrick offers postmodern reflections on many of the central doctrines of the Church: the oneness of God, original sin, forgiveness, love and its connection to mortality, reverence for the relics of saints, and the doctrine of bodily resurrection. She maintains that we begin and end in questions and not in answers, in fragments and not in totalities-more precisely, in a fragmentation paradoxically integralto wholeness.Taking seriously Augustine's idea that we find the divine in memory, MacKendrick argues that memory does not lead us back in time to a tidy answer but opens onto a complicated and fragmented time in which we find that the one and the many, before and after and now, even sacred and profane are complexly entangled. Time becomes something lived, corporeal, and sacred, with fragments of eternity interspersed among the stretches of its duration. Our sense of ourselves is correspondingly complex, because theological considerations leadus not to the security of an everlasting, indivisible soul dwelling comfortably in the presence of a paternal deity but to a more complicated, perpetually peculiar, and paradoxical life in the flesh.Written out of MacKendrick's extensive background in both recent and late-ancient philosophy, this moving and poetic book can also be an inspiration to anyone, scholar or lay reader, seeking to find contemporary significance in these ancient theological doctrines.

In this thought-provoking book Thaddée Matura offers a new way of lookingIn this thought-provoking book Thaddée Matura offers a new way of looking at how the Franciscan tradition was adapted and contemporized during the centuries. In a clear and accessible style he shows how the Franciscan Family has gotten to the stage it now enjoys and shows how liberating history can be and is. In 2004 Franciscan Institute Publications reprinted Matura’s Francis of Assisi: The Message in His Writings.

Franciscan scholars of the 1950s and 1960s sparked a vibrant revival of first-rate Franciscan scholarship. For the past forty years, their progeny have worked long and hard and have further probed, developed, translated, and made available deeper riches of this ancient, yet fertile tradition. This exploring of the past in light of the contemporary has established a launching pad for what might well be described as a third generation of Franciscan studies. The scholarship in this volume represents an array of gifted North American thinkers who continue the important task of bringing historical knowledge, critical acumen and theological imagination to a dialogue of the past with our contemporary age.