So much has changed about Catholic intellectual life in the half century since the end of the Second Vatican Council that it has become difficult to locate the core concepts that make up the tradition. In the Logos of Love is a collection of essays that grew out of a 2013 conference on Catholic intellectual life co-sponsored by the University of Dayton and the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies of the University of Southern California. The essays, written by scholars of theology, history, law, and media studies of religion, trace the history of this intellectual tradition in order to craft new tools for understanding the present day and approaching the future. Each essay explores both the promise of Catholic intellectual life and its various contemporary predicaments. How does a changed media landscape affect the way Catholicism is depicted, and the way its adherents understand and communicate among themselves? What resources can the tradition offer for reflection on new understandings of sexuality and gender? How can and should US Catholic intellectual life embrace and enhance-and introduce students to-the new ways in which Catholicism is becoming a more global tradition? What is the role of scholars in disciplines beyond theology? Of scholars who are not Catholic? Of scholars in universities not sponsored by Catholic religious orders or dioceses? By providing context for and proposing responses to these questions, the scholars invite discussion and reflection from a wide range of readers who have one important thing in common-a stake in sustaining a vibrant, flourishing intellectual tradition.

Journey through Struggles applies to church people and non-church people alike. Every man, woman, and child originates from the same God force; the Universal energy-source; and have in common the same - spiritual-human being-ness - uniquely formed by God who calls us individually (and collectively) into existence for His own purpose and pleasure. Every living soul experiences struggles. We share the same breath, the sunlight and rain, joy and pain; and are touched with unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind (of natural and man- created disasters) which caused echoes of cries of pain to reverberate in our hearts. However, though this book is written primarily with Black people as the target group [the reasons which no doubt will become clear throughout 'The Project', in God's grand design of his universe we should be mindful that all mankind have come short of the glory of God, therefore 'journey through struggles' also applies to every one of God's children, what ever his/her colour, culture, language or race, etc. On our 'Journey through Struggles' we are reminded that "The Road of Life" takes us on to highways of individual experiences. Therefore, let us remember that however long we might be in our storms, "It's the Journey that's Important, not just the getting there." Furthermore, our journey is ongoing, always. It is not just about climbing ladders to a higher level. In addition to the view 'as life's path' our journey may be viewed as a mountain; a forest, a beaten trail, our challenges and trials; or it may be a process of self discovery. Finally, when we reach the summit of our mountain, there we will make a wonderful and startling discovery that it's not the end of the journey. We are not just here to achieve our purpose; we are here to transcend it. In other words, when we reach the top of the mountain, we keep on rising. These are all ideas which we will come across time and again throughout this book.

The author of Not Counting Women and Children invites readers to listen again to the parables of Jesus. Like arrows, these stories pierce the heart of the listener, opening up new understanding of our lives as Christians. Interspersed with these familiar Gospel parables are other stories, traditional and contemporary, which draw the readers deeper into their challenges.

Who or What is controlling our lives? Western society is in the process of undergoing profound changes in moral ethos and in the structure of relationships as more and more areas of life are commodified. The Church is now having to grapple with the challenges to its authority-patterns posed by contemporary individualism, reductionism, consumerism and moral relativism, as the fierce debates over issues of abortion and sexuality show. This book seeks to address theologically the question of authority in terms of the poles of freedom and form. The tendency of each pole is to dominate. When freedom dominates we have chaos but when form dominates we have control (as exemplified in Islamic societies). Thus the choice facing the West looks like one between chaos and control. Bradshaw argues that this is a false choice. He suggests that Christ is the form for human freedom and diversity and that the Church has sufficient apostolic guides and practices to chart its way ahead in faith. The book maintains that Western, liberal, capitalist democracy needs to recover a Christian ethical basis to avoid the dangers of both chaos and of control.

Hayyim Schauss taught for more than twenty-five years at the Jewish Teachers Seminary in New York and at the College of Jewish Studies and the University of Judaism in Los Angeles. He was the author of many books and articles on the Jewish religion and its customs, ceremonies and folklore.

This book is an insight into the life and thoughts of a busy priest, punctuated with frequent reminiscences and amusing stories. Some basic questions are touched on - the nature of God, the Trinity, his love for us and how Christ leads us to respond to this. This is an entertaining and yet profound book which shows Christianity as the answer to life's whys and hows.

Translated by Aylmer Maude, V. Tchertkoff, and A.C. Fifield.

Ranson's Folly is the title story in a collection of novellas. The author was an American journalist whose vivid wartime accounts made him one of the leading reporters of his day.

In the tumultuous decades of rapid expansion and change between the American Founding and the Civil War, Americans confronted a cluster of overlapping crises whose common theme was the difficulty of finding authority in written texts. The issue arose from several disruptive developments: rising challenges to the traditional authority of the Bible in a society that was intensely Protestant; persistent worries over America’s lack of a “national literature” and an independent cultural identity; and the slavery crisis, which provoked tremendous struggles over clashing interpretations of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, even as these “parascriptures” were rising to the status of a kind of quasi-sacred secular canon. At the same time but from the opposite direction, new mass media were creating a new, industrial-scale print culture that put a premium on very non-sacred, disposable text: mass-produced “news,” dispensed immediately and in huge quantities but meant only for the day or hour. Perpetual Scriptures in Nineteenth-Century America identifies key features of the writings, careers and cultural politics of several prominent Americans as responses to this cluster of challenges. In their varied attempts to vindicate the sacred and to merge the timeless with the urgent present, Joseph Smith, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Theodore Parker, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, Abraham Lincoln, and other religious and political leaders and men and women of letters helped define American literary culture as an ongoing quest for new “bibles,” or what Emerson called a “perpetual scripture.”

An exploration of how psychological mechanisms produce intuitions, beliefs, behaviors, and experiences that are misattributed as being unique outcomes of religious or spiritual influences. Written from a social psychology perspective, this book proposes that religious and spiritual content represent one possible interpretation of the output of processes that also produce and govern nonreligious content. In looking at why people believe in God, and why belief in God is often linked with a range of positive outcomes such as prosociality, morality, health, and happiness, the author uses a critical lens that challenges past theories of religion’s functions and adds new perspectives into a discipline that is often limited by an exclusive focus on evolutionary theory. This book features several cross-cutting themes—including “dual process” theory and an exploration of how various social cognition mechanisms and biases can channel or shape religious content—and provides a continuous through-line linking the underlying building blocks of thought, as studied in the cognitive sciences of religion (CSR) to specific religious and spiritual concepts using a social cognition lens.