From the time they first met as undergraduates at Columbia College in New York City in the mid-1930s, the noted editor Robert Giroux (1914-2008) and the Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton (1915-1968) became friends. The Letters of Robert Giroux and Thomas Merton capture their personal and professional relationship, extending from the time of the publication of Merton's 1948 best-selling spiritual autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, until a few months before Merton's untimely death in December 1968. As editor-in-chief at Harcourt, Brace & Company and then at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Giroux not only edited twenty-six of Merton's books but served as an adviser to Merton as he dealt with unexpected problems with his religious superiors at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky, as well as those in France and Italy. These letters, arranged chronologically, offer invaluable insights into the publishing process that brought some of Merton's most important writings to his readers. Patrick Samway, S.J., had unparalleled access not only to the materials assembled here but to Giroux's unpublished talks about Merton, which he uses to his advantage, especially in his beautifully crafted introduction that interweaves the stories of both men with a chronicle of their personal and collaborative relationship. The result is a rich and rewarding volume, which shows how Giroux helped Merton to become one of the greatest spiritual writers of the twentieth century.

This is a critical assessment of the Liturgical Reform after the second Vatican Council that seeks the origins of failure in pre-conciliar developments. If the suppression of the traditional Roman liturgy against the wishes of the Second Vatican Council was, in the words of Silvio Cardinal Oddi, 'a crime for which history will never forgive the Church', why, at the end of the 1960s, did the vast majority of Latin Catholics abandon, with little or no regret, their time-hallowed forms of worship? "The Banished Heart" seeks to account for this cultural and spiritual catastrophe by demonstrating what will surprise many: how the present mainstream Catholic Church, with its modernistic and secular aura, grew directly from the official conservatism of the Church as it was before the Council. T Clark Studies in "Fundamental Liturgy" offer cutting edge scholarship from all disciplines related to liturgical study. The books in the series seek to reintegrate biblical, patristic, historical, dogmatic and philosophical questions with liturgical study in ways faithful and sympathetic to classical liturgical enquiry. Volumes in the series include monographs, translations of recent texts and edited collections around very specific themes.

Faith of Our Fathers traces the historical journey of American Catholics from a minority despised by the founding fathers to a valuable and accepted part of the American tapestry today. Author Edward Mannino, an historian and lawyer, demonstrates how Catholics have continuously functioned as a conscience in the broader American society, and surveys the contributions Catholics have made in the arts, in politics, in law, and in education and public health. Faith of Our Fathers contains chapters on Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Merton, Fulton Sheen, Bruce Springsteen, Denise Levertov and John Berryman in the arts; Al Smith, Michael Harrington, and Robert Kennedy in politics; Catholic Supreme Court justices in law; and American nuns in education and public health. The book ends with a chapter on the portrayal of American Catholics in popular culture, showing how movies and television programs from the mid twentieth century through the present reflect a growing appreciation of the Catholic presence in America.

Mining the unusually rich range of diaries, memoirs, and poems written by Catholics in the sixteenth-century Low Countries, Judith Pollmann explores how Catholic believers experienced religious and political change in the generations between Erasmus and Rubens. The Revolt that ripped apart the sixteenth-century Netherlands came at the expense of a civil war, that eventually became a war of religion. Originally both Catholics and Protestants supported the rebellion, but it soon transpired that Catholics stood much to lose. Their churches were ravaged by iconoclasts, priests feared for their lives, and thousands of Catholics were forced to flee their hometowns; Calvinist city republics imposed radical religious changes, and in the rebel Dutch Republic Catholic worship was banned. Although the Habsburg Netherlands eventually witnessed the triumph of the militant Catholicism of the Baroque, Catholics throughout the Netherlands found that the Revolt had changed their lives forever.
By listening to the voices of individual Catholics, lay and clerical, Professor Pollmann offers a new perspective both on the Revolt of the Netherlands, and on the experience of religious change in this period. She asks why Catholics responded so passively to Calvinist aggression in the early decades of the conflict, only to start offering very active support for a Catholic revival after 1585, when the Habsburg Netherlands once again became a Catholic bulwark. By exploring what it took to turn traditional Christians into the agents of their own Counterreformation, she highlights the changing dynamic between priests and laypeople as a catalyst for religious change in early modern Europe.