An assessment of the rise and fall within the Franciscan Order of the doctrine of the absolute poverty of Christ and the apostles. Covering the decades between 1210-1323, Lambert describes the doctrine as found in the mind of St. Francis and moves to Pope John XXII’s condemnation of one particular form of the doctrine.

Franciscan Studies is an annual scholarly review, published by The Franciscan Institute at Saint Bonaventure University, and containing articles in the major languages of the western world on Franciscan history, sources, philosophy and theology.

Over the centuries in word and deed, Franciscan scholars and practitioners have demonstrated a clear and faithful understanding of what it means to live as followers of Christ in a defined ecclesia. Francis of Assisi was eminently clear about his attitude toward the Church, understood both as community and institution.

What, exactly, does it mean to be human? It is an age-old question, one for which theology, philosophy, science, and medicine have all provided different answers. But though a unified response to the question can no longer be taken for granted, how we answer it frames the wide range of different norms, principles, values, and intuitions that characterize today's bioethical discussions. If we don't know what it means to be human, how can we judge whether biomedical sciences threaten or enhance our humanity? This fundamental question, however, receives little attention in the study of bioethics. In a field consumed with the promises and perils of new medical discoveries, emerging technologies, and unprecedented social change, current conversations about bioethics focus primarily on questions of harm and benefit, patient autonomy, and equality of health care distribution. Prevailing models of medical ethics emphasize human capacity for self-control and self-determination, rarely considering such inescapable dimensions of the human condition as disability, loss, and suffering, community and dignity, all of which make it difficult for us to be truly independent. In Health and Human Flourishing, contributors from a wide range of disciplines mine the intersection of the secular and the religious, the medical and the moral, to unearth the ethical and clinical implications of these facets of human existence. Their aim is a richer bioethics, one that takes into account the roles of vulnerability, dignity, integrity, and relationality in human affliction as well as human thriving. Including an examination of how a theological anthropologyùa theological understanding of what it means to be a human beingùcan help us better understand health care, social policy, and science, this thought-provoking anthology will inspire much-needed conversation among philosophers, theologians, and health care professionals.

The Innes Review is a fully peer-reviewed journal covering the part played by the Catholic Church in Scottish history. It includes all aspects of Scottish history and culture, especially ones related to religious history. Published continuously by the Scottish Catholic Historical Association since 1950, it contains articles and book reviews on a wide field of ecclesiastical, cultural, liturgical, literary and political history ranging from Celtic times to the present day. It is named after Thomas Innes (1662-1744), a missionary priest, historian, and archivist of the Scots College in Paris whose impartial scholarship stood out amongst the denominational prejudices of the time.

The Magdalen laundries were workhouses in which many Irish women and girls were effectively imprisoned because they were perceived to be a threat to the moral fiber of society. Mandated by the Irish state beginning in the eighteenth century, they were operated by various orders of the Catholic Church until the last laundry closed in 1996. A few years earlier, in 1993, an order of nuns in Dublin sold part of their Magdalen convent to a real estate developer. The remains of 155 inmates, buried in unmarked graves on the property, were exhumed, cremated, and buried elsewhere in a mass grave. This triggered a public scandal in Ireland and since then the Magdalen laundries have become an important issue in Irish culture, especially with the 2002 release of the film “The Magdalene Sisters.” Focusing on the ten Catholic Magdalen laundries operating between 1922 and 1996, Ireland's Magdalen Laundries and the Nation's Architecture of Containment offers the first history of women entering these institutions in the twentieth century. Because the religious orders have not opened their archival records, Smith argues that Ireland's Magdalen institutions continue to exist in the public mind primarily at the level of story (cultural representation and survivor testimony) rather than history (archival history and documentation). Addressed to academic and general readers alike, James M. Smith challenges the nation—church, state, and society—to acknowledge its complicity in Ireland's Magdalen scandal and to offer redress for victims and survivors alike.

John Cuthbert Ford, SJ (1902-1989) was one of the leading American Catholic moralists of the 20th century. This is the first full-length analysis of his work and influence, one that not only reveals a traditionally Catholic method of moral analysis but al

This small book offers, in a Latin/English editon, a contribution of John Duns Scotus to the theological discussion on Mary the Mother of God. His views had a profound influence on Marian doctrine and devotion over the centuries, culminating in Pius IX’s dogmatic proclamation of Mary’s Immaculate Conception. The questions are dealt with in Scotus’s Ordinatio and are set up in the stylized tripartite format used by medieval professional theologians in their commentaries on the Sentences of Peter Lombard.

This detailed discussion of Augustine’s journey toward God, as it is described in the first six books of the Confessions, begins with infancy, moves through childhood and adolescence, and culminates in youthful maturity. In the first stage, Augustine deals with the problems of original innocence and sin; in the second, he addresses a pear-stealing episode that recapitulates the theft of the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden and confronts the problem of sexuality with which he wrestles until his conversion; and in the third, he turns toward philosophy, only to be captivated successively by dualism, skepticism, and Catholicism. Augustine’s journey exhibits temporal, spatial, and eternal dimensions and combines his head and his heart in equal proportions. Vaught shows that the Confessions should be interpreted as an attempt to address the person as a whole rather than through our intellectual or volitional dimensions exclusively. The passion with which Augustine describes the end of his journey is reflected best in a sentence found in the opening chapter of the text—“You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” Interpreting this statement, Carl G. Vaught presents a more emphatically Christian Augustine than is usually found in contemporary scholarship. Refusing to view Augustine in an exclusively Neoplatonic framework, Vaught holds that Augustine baptizes Plotinus just as successfully as Aquinas baptizes Aristotle. It cannot be denied that Ancient philosophy influences Augustine decisively. Nevertheless, he holds the experiential and the theoretical dimensions of his journey toward God together as a distinctive expression of the Christian tradition.

The only journal published in the United States devoted to the study and promotion of canon law. The Jurist explores canon law issues relating to the life of the church today, its historical sources, and various applications in diverse church ministries. The journal is peer-reviewed.