In Writing Tamil Catholicism: Literature, Persuasion and Devotion in the Eighteenth Century, Margherita Trento explores the process by which the Jesuit missionary Costanzo Giuseppe Beschi (1680-1747), in collaboration with a group of local lay elites identified by their profession as catechists, chose Tamil poetry as the social and political language of Catholicism in eighteenth-century South India. Trento analyzes a corpus of Tamil grammars and poems, chiefly Beschi's Tempavani, alongside archival documents to show how, by presenting themselves as poets and intellectuals, Catholic elites gained a persuasive voice as well as entrance into the learned society of the Tamil country and its networks of patronage. This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 840879.

Inquisitions of heresy have long fascinated both specialists and non-specialists. A Companion to Heresy Inquisitions presents a synthesis of the immense amount of scholarship generated about these institutions in recent years. The volume offers an overview of many of the most significant areas of heresy inquisitions, both medieval and early modern. The essays in this collection are intended to introduce the reader to disagreements and advances in the field, as well as providing a navigational aid to the wide variety of recent discoveries and controversies in studies of heresy inquisitions. Contributors: Christine Ames, Feberico Barbierato, Elena Bonora, Lucia Helena Costigan, Michael Frassetto, Henry Ansgar Kelly, Helen Rawlings, Lucy Sackville, Werner Thomas, and Robin Vose

The world needs saints to show it the way to true humanity. The Church needs saints to show it how to live out its calling.The witness of the lives of the saints is a powerful testimony to the reality of God's plan and the possibility for truly following it in one's life. So often, we do not see this witness. We see hypocrisy and mediocrity among Christians. That is why we must look to the saints -- the ones who really followed the words of Christ and let them be carried out fully in their lives. The saints also give us a reason to hope. Saints were not born; they were made through a life of cooperation with God's grace despite many difficulties, weaknesses, and temptations.This book, written from a Catholic perspective, provides an overview to the lives of the saints celebrated the entirety of the Roman calendar. It covers the whole Church year, and makes for inspirational spiritual reading any time of the year, providing an introduction to the patron saints for many walks of life. Included are the Blessed Virgin Mary and St. Joseph, Apostles like St. Peter and St. Paul, early martyrs like St. Perpetua and St. Felicity, early evangelizers like St. Patrick, medieval giants such as St. Thomas Aquinas, American saints such as St. Elizabeth Ann Seton and St. John Neumann, and many others.

In The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius Loyola: Contexts, Sources, Reception, Terence O'Reilly examines the historical, theological and literary contexts in which the Exercises took shape. The collected essays have as their common theme the early history of the Spiritual Exercises, and the interior life of Ignatius Loyola to which they give expression. The traditional interpretation of the Exercises was shaped by writings composed in the late sixteenth century, reflecting the preoccupations of the Counter-Reformation world in which they were composed. The Exercises, however, belong, in their origins, to an earlier period, before the Council of Trent, and the full recognition of this fact, and of its implications, has confronted modern scholars with fresh questions about the sources, evolution, and reception of the work.