Böcker utgivna av University of Notre Dame Press

An Early Modern Dialogue with Islam: Antonio de Sosa'sTopography of Algiers (1612) makes available in translation a riveting sixteenth-century chronicle of European and North African cultural contacts that is virtually unknown to English-speaking readers. The Topography was written by a Portuguese cleric, Doctor Antonio de Sosa, who was captured by Algerian corsairs in 1577 and held as a Barbary slave for over four years while awaiting ransom. Sosa's work is a fascinating description of a city at the crossroads of civilizations, with a sophisticated multilingual population of Turks, Arabs, Moriscos, Berbers, Jews, Christian captives, and converts to Islam from across the world.In the Topography of Algiers, Sosa meticulously describes the inhabitants' daily lives; their fashions, pastimes, feasts, and funerals; their government; the landmarks of the city itself; and much more. Readers will be struck by the vibrancy of his narrative, rendered into English with crisp accuracy by Diana de Armas Wilson. The Topography is a treasure trove of amazing customs, startling behavior, and historical anecdotes that will enthrall readers. The extensive introduction by Maria Antonia Garces is a superb archival study of the Mediterranean world described by the Topography, as well as an expose of the adventurous, even scandalous, life of its author. The introduction also discusses the fraudulent publication of Sosa's Topography under another man's name.Sosa's chronicle stands out for its complexity, vitality, and the sharpness of the author's ethnographic vision. No other account of captivity in this period offers such a detailed and dynamic tableau of Algerian society at the end of the sixteenth century.

Eastern Orthodox and Anglicans is the first sustained study of inter-Orthodox relations, the special role of the Anglican Church, and the problems of Orthodox nationalism in the modern age. Despite many challenges, the interwar years were a time of intense creativity in the Russian Orthodox Church. Russian emigres, freed from enforced isolation in the wake of the Russian Revolution, found themselves in close contact with figures from other Orthodox churches and from the Roman Catholic Church and all varieties of Protestant confessions. For many reasons, Russian exiles found themselves drawn to the Anglican Church in particular. The interwar years thus witnessed a concentrated effort to bridge the gap between Orthodox and Anglican. Geffert's book is a detailed history of that effort. It is the story of efforts toward rapprochement by two churches and their ultimate failure to achieve formal unity. The same political, diplomatic, historical, personal, and religious forces that first inspired contact were the ones that ultimately undermined the effort. Bryn Geffert recounts the history of an important chapter in the history of Christian ecumenism, one that is relevant to contemporary efforts to achieve meaningful interfaith dialogue.

The Outer Bands is a first collection of poems from Andres Montoya prize-winner Gabriel Gomez. The book is an expansive examination of language and landscape, voice and memory, where the balance between experimentation and tradition coexist. The poems realize a reconciliation between the writer's voice and the voice of witness, wonder, and tragedy; a dialogue between two worlds that employs an equally paradoxical imagery of the American Southwest and the marshes of Southern Louisiana. The book concludes with its namesake poem, "e;The Outer Bands,"e; a twenty-eight-day chronicle of the days between Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita, which together decimated the Gulf Coast region in 2005. The sequence poem, a pastiche and re-contextualization of images, news blurbs, and political rhetoric, travels and responds in a spare subjectivity to the storm. Gabriel Gomez completed it during a two-month emergency residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute after his home in New Orleans was destroyed.

While mandatory retirement has been eliminated in the US, a myriad of policies and practices have an impact on an older worker's decision to work or retire and an employer's decision to retain and train an older worker. Teresa Ghilarducci and John Turner address many of the issues considered on a daily basis by employees and employers.

Gathers Sonia Gernes' three books of poetry and builds on their themes with three sections of poems that give lyric voice to the thoughts and questions that surface in the midnight hours: the value of the lives we've chosen, time and mortality, and the struggles with belief.

This volume offers a series of essays debating the topic of globalization - our increasingly integrated and interconnected world. ""Globalization and Multicultural Societies"" argues that the globalization process is a major catalyst in transforming contemporary society.

In essays on topics ranging from Teresa of Avila's mysticism to the politicized spirituality of postmodern women writers, the contributors chronicle the development of women's spiritual writing as a context for defining, challenging, and changing women's experiences in the world.

At the end of his landmark 1994 book, The Soul of the American University, historian George Marsden asserted that religious faith does indeed have a place in today's academia. Marsden's contention sparked a heated debate on the role of religious faith and intellectual scholarship in academic journals and in the mainstream media. The contributors to Confessing History: Explorations in Christian Faith and the Historian's Vocation expand the discussion about religion's role in education and culture and examine what the relationship between faith and learning means for the academy today. The contributors to Confessing History ask how the vocation of historian affects those who are also followers of Christ. What implications do Christian faith and practice have for living out one's calling as an historian? And to what extent does one's calling as a Christian disciple speak to the nature, quality, or goals of one's work as scholar, teacher, adviser, writer, community member, or social commentator? Written from several different theological and professional points of view, the essays collected in this volume explore the vocation of the historian and its place in both the personal and professional lives of Christian disciples.

Philo's Portrayal of Moses in the Context of Ancient Judaism presents the most comprehensive study of Philo's De Vita Mosis that exists in any language. Feldman, well known for his work on Josephus and ancient Judaism, here paves new ground using rabbinic material with philological precision to illuminate important parallels and differences between Philo's writing on Moses and rabbinic literature. One way in which Hellenistic culture marginalized Judaism was by exposing the apparent defects in Moses' life and character. Philo's De Vita Mosis is a counterattack to these charges and is a vital piece of his attempt to reconcile Judaism and Hellenism. Feldman rigorously examines the text and shows how Philo presents a narrative of Moses's life similar to that of a mythical divine and heroic figure, glorifying his birth, education, and virtues. Feldman demonstrates that Philo is careful to explain in a scientific way those portions of the Bible, particularly miracles, that appear incredible to his skeptical Hellenistic readers. Through Feldman's careful analysis, Moses emerges as unique among ancient lawgivers. Philo's Portrayal of Moses in the Context of Ancient Judaism mirrors the organization of Philo's biography of Moses, which is in two books, the first, in the style of Plutarch, proceeding chronologically, and the second, in the style of Suetonius, arranged topically. Following an introductory chapter, Feldman's study discusses the life of Moses chronologically in the second chapter and examines his virtues topically in the third. Feldman compares the particular features of Philo's portrait of Moses with the way in which Moses is viewed both by Jewish sources in antiquity (including Pseudo-Philo; Josephus; Graeco-Jewish historians, poets, and philosophers; and in the Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha, Samaritan tradition, Dead Sea Scrolls, and rabbinic tradition) and by non-Jewish sources, notably the Greek and Roman writers who mention him.

Moses Mendelssohn (1725-1786) is considered the foremost representative of Jewish Enlightenment. In No Religion without Idolatry, Gideon Freudenthal offers a novel interpretation of Mendelssohn's general philosophy and discusses for the first time Mendelssohn's semiotic interpretation of idolatry in his Jerusalem and in his Hebrew biblical commentary. Mendelssohn emerges from this study as an original philosopher, not a shallow popularizer of rationalist metaphysics, as he is sometimes portrayed. Of special and lasting value is his semiotic theory of idolatry. From a semiotic perspective, both idolatry and enlightenment are necessary constituents of religion. Idolatry ascribes to religious symbols an intrinsic value: enlightenment maintains that symbols are conventional and merely signify religious content but do not share its properties and value. Without enlightenment, religion degenerates to fetishism; without idolatry it turns into philosophy and frustrates religious experience. Freudenthal demonstrates that in Mendelssohn's view, Judaism is the optimal religious synthesis. It consists of transient ceremonies of a "e;living script."e; Its ceremonies are symbols, but they are not permanent objects that could be venerated. Jewish ceremonies thus provide a religious experience but frustrate fetishism. Throughout the book, Freudenthal fruitfully contrasts Mendelssohn's views on religion and philosophy with those of his contemporary critic and opponent, Salomon Maimon. No Religion without Idolatry breaks new ground in Mendelssohn studies. It will interest students and scholars in philosophy of religion, Judaism, and semiotics.

Examines how the Augustinians of St. Victor, Paris, used an art of memory to build sonic models of the church. This musical art developed over time, inspired by the religious ideals of Hugh and Richard of St. Victor and their understandings of image and the spiritual journey.

Examining the Europe's single currency beyond its impact on financial markets and the economy itself, this book offers perspectives on currency change and European convergence. It offers assessments on European affairs as to whether the common currency will reshape the continent's cultures, societies, and political systems; if so, in what ways.

Investigates judicial reform in Argentina, Mexico, and Peru. This book suggests that while ruling parties can be induced to initiate judicial reforms by introducing constitutional revisions, they often prove unwilling to implement these constitutional changes by enacting required legislation.

Isabelle of France (1225-1270) was situated at the nexus of sanctity and power during a significant era of French culture and medieval history. This work presents an examination of Isabelle's career, and addresses significant issues in medieval religious history, including the possibilities for women's religious authority, and more.

A clearly-written, brief introduction to philosophic thinking that guides the reader through an exploration of sense perception, ordinary knowing, scientific knowing, and philosophic knowing. This philosophic journey culminates in a justification of philosophy itself as a genuine form of knowing and thus is a natural prelude to metaphysics.

James W. Felt, S.J., invites his audience to consider that we are responsible for what we do precisely because we do it freely. In the course of his analysis, Felt considers determinism, compatibilism, agency, and the problem of evil.

In this historically informed work in moral psychology, Rick Anthony Furtak develops a conceptual account of the emotions that addresses the conventional idea that reason and emotion stand in sharp opposition.

In his examination of the bishopric of Orvieto from 1100 to 1250, David Foote reveals how three defining developments of the Middle Ages - the feudal revolution, ecclesiastical reform, and state building - played out in a typical medieval Italian commune.

This text contains original essays by five leading scholars in the fields of history, art history, and literature on the ways in which communities were imagined and built between the 11th and 16th centuries.

This text contains original essays by five leading scholars in the fields of history, art history, and literature on the ways in which communities were imagined and built between the 11th and 16th centuries.

This text questions developments in human genetic research from the perspective of persons with mental disabilities and their families. The author points out that the possibility of preventing disabled lives is at odds with our commitments to the full inclusion of disabled citizens in society.

In The Sword and the Pen: Women, Politics, and Poetry in Sixteenth-Century Siena, Konrad Eisenbichler analyzes the work of Sienese women poets, in particular, Aurelia Petrucci, Laudomia Forteguerri, and Virginia Salvi, during the first half of the sixteenth century up to the fall of Siena in 1555. Eisenbichler sets forth a complex and original interpretation of the experiences of these three educated noblewomen and their contributions to contemporary culture in Siena by looking at the emergence of a new lyric tradition and the sonnets they exchanged among themselves and with their male contemporaries. Through the analysis of their poems and various book dedications to them, Eisenbichler reveals the intersection of poetry, politics, and sexuality, as well as the gendered dialogue that characterized Siena's literary environment during the late Renaissance. Eisenbichler also examines other little-known women poets and their relationship to the cultural environment of Siena, underlining the exceptional role of the city of Siena as the most important center of women's writing in the first half of the sixteenth century in Italy, and probably in all of Europe. This innovative contribution to the field of late Renaissance and early modern Italian and women's studies rescues from near oblivion a group of literate women who were celebrated by contemporary scholars but who have been largely ignored today, both because of a dearth of biographical information about them and because of a narrow evaluation of their poetry. Eisenbichler's analysis and reproduction of many of their poems in Italian and modern English translation are an invaluable contribution not only to Italian cultural studies but also to women's studies.

Thomas Eisele explores the premise that the Socratic method of inquiry need not teach only negative lessons (showing us what we do not know, but not what we do know). Instead, Eisele contends, the Socratic method is cyclical: we start negatively by recognizing our illusions, but end positively through a process of recollection performed in response to our disillusionment, which ultimately leads to renewal. Thus, a positive lesson about our resources as philosophical investigators, as students and teachers, becomes available to participants in Socrates' robust conversational inquiry. Bitter Knowledge includes Eisele's detailed readings of Socrates' teaching techniques in three fundamental Platonic dialogues, Protagoras, Meno, and Theaetetus, as well as his engagement with contemporary authorities such as Gregory Vlastos, Martha Nussbaum, and Stanley Cavell. Written in a highly engaging and accessible style, this book will appeal to students and scholars in philosophy, classics, law, rhetoric, and education.

This work analyzes the image Europe presented to Japan, deliberately or otherwise, from the mid-16th century to the end of the 18th century. It covers developments in Japanese culture and civilization during 300 years of interaction between Japanese and Europeans.

This volume offers an account of the life and labours of Edward Sorin, founder of the University of Notre Dame. It describes how he overcame great odds to found and grow one of world's premier Catholic institutions of higher learning.

A six-day series of interviews between Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Elie Wiesel and French journalist Philippe de Saint-Cheron, Evil and Exile probes some of the most crucial and pressing issues facing humankind today. Having survived the unspeakable evil of the Holocaust, Wiesel remained silent for ten years before dedicating his life to the memory of this tragedy, witnessing tirelessly to remind an often indifferent world of its potential for self-destruction. Wiesel offers wise counsel in this volume concerning evil and suffering, life and death, chance and circumstance. Moreover, the dialogue evokes candid and often surprising responses by Wiesel on the Palestinian problem, Judeo-Christian relations, recent changes in the Soviet Union as well as insights into writers such as Kafka, Malraux, Mauriac, and Unamuno.

Traditionally, Christian martyrdom is a repetition of the story of Christ's suffering and death: the more closely the victim 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 do we reconcile the broad range of individuals, beliefs, and persecutions seeking justification by claims of martyrdom? Observing how martyrdom is constituted through the interplay of historical event and literary form, Alice Dailey explores the development of English martyr literature 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 traces the shifting constructions of the martyr figure across 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 late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, she argues, martyrdom develops from medieval notions of strict typological repetition into Charles I's defense of individual conscience-an abstract, figurative form of martyrdom that survives into modernity. Far from static or purely formulaic, martyrology emerges in Dailey's study as a deeply nuanced genre that discloses the mutually constitutive relationship between the lives we live and the stories we tell.

Cement, Earthworms, and Cheese Factories examines the ways in which religion and community development are closely intertwined in a rural part of contemporary Latin America. Using historical, documentary, and ethnographic data collected over more than a decade as an aid worker and as a researcher in central Ecuador, Jill DeTemple examines the forces that have led to this entanglement of religion and development and the ways in which rural Ecuadorians, as well as development and religious personnel, negotiate these complicated relationships. Technical innovations have been connected to religious change since the time of the Inca conquest, and Ecuadorians have created defensive strategies for managing such connections. Although most analyses of development either tend to ignore the genuinely religious roots of development or conflate development with religion itself, these strategies are part of a larger negotiation of progress and its meaning in twenty-first-century Ecuador. DeTemple focuses on three development agencies-a liberationist Catholic women's group, a municipal unit dedicated to agriculture, and evangelical Protestant missionaries engaged in education and medical work-to demonstrate that in some instances Ecuadorians encourage a hybridity of religion and development, while in other cases they break up such hybridities into their component parts, often to the consternation of those with whom religious and development discourse originate. This management of hybrids reveals Ecuadorians as agents who produce and reform modernities in ways often unrecognized by development scholars, aid workers, or missionaries, and also reveals that an appreciation of religious belief is essential to a full understanding of diverse aspects of daily life.

Among the issues that continue to divide the Catholic Church from the Orthodox Church-the two largest Christian bodies in the world, together comprising well over a billion faithful-the question of the papacy is widely acknowledged to be the most significant stumbling block to their unification. For nearly forty years, commentators, theologians, and hierarchs, from popes and patriarchs to ordinary believers of both churches, have acknowledged the problems posed by the papacy. In Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity, Adam A. J. DeVille offers the first comprehensive examination of the papacy from an Orthodox perspective that also seeks to find a way beyond this impasse, toward full Orthodox-Catholic unity. He first surveys the major postwar Orthodox and Catholic theological perspectives on the Roman papacy and on patriarchates, enumerating Orthodox problems with the papacy and reviewing how Orthodox patriarchates function and are structured. In response to Pope John Paul II's 1995 request for a dialogue on Christian unity, set forth in the encyclical letter Ut Unum Sint, DeVille proposes a new model for the exercise of papal primacy. DeVille suggests the establishment of a permanent ecumenical synod consisting of all the patriarchal heads of Churches under a papal presidency, and discusses how the pope qua pope would function in a reunited Church of both East and West, in full communion. His analysis, involving the most detailed plan for Orthodox-Catholic unity yet offered by an Orthodox theologian, could not be more timely.

Simone Weil's philosophical and social thought during her short life (1909-1943) was intimately engaged with the nature of power and force, both human and natural, and the problems inherent in the use of force. Weil argued vehemently for pacifism, then moved toward a guarded acceptance of the use of force under very specific circumstances, in the context of the rise of Nazism. Ultimately she came to a nuanced and unique perspective on force and on the preservation of human dignity, in the aftermath of several profound mystical experiences during the last years of her life. E. Jane Doering carefully examines and analyzes the material in Weil's notebooks and lesser-known essays to illuminate her evolving thought on violence, war, and injustice. In addition, Doering addresses Weil's engagement with the Bhagavad Gita during her final years, a text that reoriented and enlightened Weil's activist and intellectual search for moral value in a violent world. Apart from small excerpts, none of the four volumes of Weil's notebooks, only recently published in French, have been translated into English. Simone Weil and the Specter of Self-Perpetuating Force contains Doering's expert translations of numerous notebook entries. The book will interest Weil scholars, those in French studies, and those who explore interdisciplinary topics in philosophy, religious studies, history, and political science. "e;Simone Weil and the Specter of Self-Perpetuating Force is a definitive contribution not only to Weil studies, but to any effort to understand the problem of violence and the sources of peace. The study seamlessly blends narratives of Weil's life and thought during the early twentieth century with those of people, political movements, and events pivoting on the world stage. E. Jane Doering helps to frame a plausible case for the optimism Weil forged in the fire of her own suffering: there is a counterforce to violence, and it is available when we attend to life beyond the delusions we habitually cultivate."e; -- Ann Pirruccello, University of San Diego "e;E. Jane Doering's book provides us a new, more penetrating focus on the central message of Simone Weil. The 'mine of pure gold' that Weil referred to in her last days is sharply delineated here: the possibility of grace as the countervailing power that may efficaciously oppose oppressive force. Doering's research is impeccable and opens new perspectives for Weil scholars for years to come."e; --John Marson Dunaway, Mercer University "e;E. Jane Doering deals in a novel and insightful way with the concept of force (and self-perpetuating violence) in the thought of Simone Weil particularly as this was elaborated in the anguished writings of the last years of her life (1938-43) after her mystical experience and her renunciation of pacifism."e; --Lawrence Schmidt, University of Toronto "e;Jane Doering has done a great service in bringing to light many of Weil's writings that have received scant attention. These especially include numerous untranslated early works on the degenerating political situation in Europe in the 1930s, works that have been left aside as having narrow historical interest. But Prof. Doering in bringing them to light has done us all in our present situation an even greater service in using these work to expose Weil's eternally valid insights into the empire of force, and its alternatives to it."e; -- The Rev. Dr. Eric O. Springsted, President of the American Weil Society "e;Doering reveals the evolution of our French philosopher's thought concerning the 'spirit of justice' as the fruit of meditation on classical texts from different civilizations as well as purely philosophical reflection. The author of this work brings together in an innovative way the thought of Albert Camus and Simone Weil on force and justice. Doering persuasively shows that Simone Weil offers a spiritual and political key to resolving some of the thorniest problems afflicting our contemporary world."e; --Robert Chenavier, President de l'Association pour l'etude de la pensee de Simone Weil