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 his 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 companion. 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 Fahey, 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 Augustineand 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 of person, liturgy, and church.

The recovery of nature has been a unifying and enduring aim of the writings of Ralph McInerny, Michael P. Grace Professor of Medieval Studies at the University of Notre Dame, director of the Jacques Maritain Center, former director of the Medieval Institute, and author of numerous works in philosophy, literature, and journalism. While many of the fads that have plagued philosophy and theology during the last half-century have come and gone, recent developments suggest that McInerny's commitment to Aristotelian-Thomism was boldly, if quietly, prophetic. In his persistent, clear, and creative defenses of natural theology and natural law, McInerny has appealed to nature to establish a dialogue between theists and non-theists, to contribute to the moral and political renewal of American culture, and particularly to provide some of the philosophical foundations for Catholic theology.

This volume brings together essays by an impressive group of scholars, including William Wallace, O.P., Jude P. Dougherty, John Haldane, Thomas DeKoninck, Alasdair MacIntyre, David Solomon, Daniel McInerny, Janet E. Smith, Michael Novak, Stanley Hauerwas, Laura Garcia, Alvin Plantinga, Alfred J. Freddoso, and David B. Burrell, C.S.C.

The twenty-three discourses presented in this volume have a long textual history that ascribes them to St. Gregory the Illuminator of Armenia (d. 328), a prevalent view that lasted through the nineteenth century. Armenian scholarship through the last century has tended to ascribe them to St. Mashtots', the inventor of the Armenian alphabet (d. 440). In his critical introduction to this first-ever English translation of the discourses, Terian presents them as an ascetic text by an anonymous abbot writing near the end of the sixth century. The very title in Armenian, Ya?axapatum ?a?k', literally, "Oft-Repeated Discourses," further validates their ascetic environment, where they were repeatedly related to novices. For want of answers to introductory questions regarding authorship and date, and because of the pervasive grammatical difficulties of the text, the document has remained largely unknown in scholarship. The discourses include many of the Eastern Fathers' favorite theological themes. They are heavily punctuated with biblical quotations and laced with recurring biblical images and phraseology; the doctrinal and functional centrality of the Scriptures is emphasized throughout. They are replete with traditional Christian moral teachings that have acquired elements of moral philosophy transmitted through Late Antiquity. Echoes of St. Basil's thought are heard in several of them, and some evidence of the author's dependence on the Armenian version of the saint's Rules, translated around the turn of the sixth century, is apparent. On the whole they show how Christians were driven by the Johannine love-command and the Pauline Spirit-guided practice of virtuous living, ever maturing in the ethos of an in-group solidarity culminating in monasticism.

This book considers the ideological development of English Catholicism in the sixteenth century, from the complementary perspectives of history, theology, and literature. Wooding shows that Catholicism in this period was neither a defunct tradition, nor one merely reacting to Protestantism, but a vigorous intellectual movement responding to the reformist impulse of the age. Her study makes an important contribution to the intellectual history of the Reformation.

Abbo of Fleury was a prominent churchman of late tenth-century France--abbot of a major monastery, leader in the revival of learning in France and England, and the subject of a serious work of hagiography. Elizabeth Dachowski's study presents a coherent picture of this multifaceted man with an emphasis on his political alliances and the political considerations that colored his earliest biographical treatment. Unlike previous studies, Dachowski's book examines the entire career of Abbo, not just his role as abbot of Fleury. When viewed as a whole, Abbo's life demonstrates his devotion to the cause of pressing for monastic prerogatives in a climate of political change. Abbo's career vividly illustrates how the early Capetian kings and the French monastic communities began the symbiotic relationship that replaced the earlier Carolingian models. Despite a stormy beginning, Abbo had, by the time of his death, developed a mutually beneficial working relationship with the Capetian kings and had used papal prerogatives to give the abbey of Fleury a preeminent place among reformed monasteries of northern France. Thus, the monks of Fleury had strong incentives for portraying the early years of Abbo's abbacy as relatively free from conflict with the monarchy. Previous lives of Abbo have largely followed the view put forward by his first biographer, Aimoinus of Fleury, who wrote the Vita sancti Abbonis within a decade of Abbo's death. While Aimoinus clearly understood Abbo's goals and the importance of his accomplishment, he also had several other agendas, including a glossing over of earlier and later conflicts at Fleury and validation of an even closer (and more subservient) relationship with the Capetian monarchs under Abbo's successor, Gaulzin of Fleury. Abbo's achievements set the stage for the continuing prosperity and influence of Fleury but at the expense of Fleury's independence from the monarchy. With Abbo's death, the monastery's relationship with the French crown grew even closer, though Fleury continued to maintain its independence from the episcopacy.

There are currently no books on Catholic higher education that offer a theological foundation for academic freedom. Academic freedom and its role in the mission of the Catholic university has been a contentious issue in Catholic higher education for the past forty years. Although most Catholic colleges and universities have accepted academic freedom as a core principle, Garcia argues that it is the secular version that they have adopted. He proposes a specifically theological understanding of academic freedom that does not undermine the secular version, but builds on, extends, and completes it. Such a theological understanding provides scholars the freedom to explore beyond their disciplinary domains to an ultimate horizon, or God. This understanding can be found implicitly throughout the Christian tradition, in ancient, medieval, & modern Christian writers, & Garcia seeks to recover that implicit tradition & formulate it explicitly for the modern Catholicuniversity

An archive-based account of the developmental years of the University of Notre Dame. During these years, university leaders strove to find the additional resources needed to transform their succesful boarding school into an ethically diverse modern Catholic university. The history of the University of Notre Dame from 1842 to 1934 mirrors in many ways the history of American Catholicism during those years. For reasons having to do more with football than religion, most Americans think first of Notre Dame when they think of Catholic universities. Burns, a former Notre Dame faculty member and longtime columnist for U.S. Catholic magazine, traces the emergence of American Catholics from a minority status in society to the elevation of Notre Dame as a great American university. He argues that having one of the most successful college football teams in history helped establish Notre Dame's popularity and reputation in American culture and history. Burns keeps the reader entranced with a narrative filled with lively characters and events. Here we meet Notre Dame founder Reverend Edward Sorin, the KKK in Indiana, Knute Rockne and a host of other heroes and cowards, mountebanks and millionaires, all of whom played a part in the astonishing years covered by this story.

In 1824 in Washington, D.C., Ann Mattingly, widowed sister of the city's mayor, was miraculously cured of a ravaging cancer. Just days, or perhaps even hours, from her predicted demise, she arose from her sickbed free from agonizing pain and able to enjoy an additional thirty-one years of life. The Mattingly miracle purportedly came through the intervention of a charismatic German cleric, Prince Alexander Hohenlohe, who was credited already with hundreds of cures across Europe and Great Britain. Though nearly forgotten today, Mattingly's astonishing healing became a polarizing event. It heralded a rising tide of anti-Catholicism in the United States that would culminate in violence over the next two decades.
Nancy L. Schultz deftly weaves analysis of this episode in American social and religious history together with the astonishing personal stories of both Ann Mattingly and the healer Prince Hohenlohe, around whom a cult was arising in Europe. Schultz's riveting book brings to light an early episode in the ongoing battle between faith and reason in the United States.

The Catholic theological faculty at the Tubingen school in Germany in the first half of the 19th century are today widely regarded as some of the most significant figures in the development of modern Catholic thought. Up until now, however, little of their work has been available to non-German readers. This English translation makes available Johann Sebastian Drey's ""Brief Introduction to the Study of Theology with Reference to the Scientific Standpoint and the Catholic System"" (1819). In this text, Drey presented an encyclopaedic introduction to the study of theology and its methods, which provided not only a programme for the way Catholic theology would be studied at Tubingen but also related Catholic theology to the scientific views of German idealist and romantic philosophy, especially that of Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling. In the first part of the book, Drey examines the fundamental concepts of Christian theology - religion, revelation, Christianity, theology - and corrects some erroneous notions about them. In the second and more important part of the book, the ""encyclopaedia"", Drey focuses on how theology as a whole relates to other fields of knowledge and how its various subdisciplines relate to and affect one another. Theology's scholarly growth in the 18th century and its branching out into many new fields, such as biblical exegesis, textual criticism, and the new historical methods, has stimulated interest in works such as this volume. Anyone concerned with the role of theology and theologians in the Church today should find this book important because Drey was one of the first to insist that the theologian must be responsible to the scholarly and academic world as well as to the Church. In this text he demonstrated that Catholic thought could open itself without fear to modernity and profit from the experience.

A volume in Research on Religion and Education Series Editors Stephen J. Denig, Niagara University and Lyndon G. Furst, Andrews University This book is a study of the contributions of Catholic K-12 schools in the United States to the public interest from the 1800's to the present. It presents seven strategies that have the possibility of leading Catholic schools in positive, new directions. Outsiders often misunderstand the mission, purpose, and inclusivity of Catholic schools. This book brings a new focus on Catholic schools from the perspective of their service to this country through the education of Catholics and non-Catholics. In 16 chapters, a variety of scholars examine these schools across three periods: echoes of the past, realities of the present, and future directions. The intention of the editor and authors of this volume is that Catholic schools and those interested in conducting Catholic school research will find guidance, especially in examining newer types of partnerships flourishing in different types of Catholic schools in different regions of the country and types of schools from rural, suburban to city and inner-city schools. By increasing the data we have, such studies could help stem the tide of Catholic school demise. In addition, Catholic school leaders, and parents who chose them or are thinking about choosing them, will find here a balanced description of what constitutes a Catholic school and how they are different from public schools. In understanding better the role and function of Catholic schools in serving the public interest, new ideas, innovations, and improvements can help these schools survive and grow.