What could Roman Catholicism and Mormonism possibly have to learn from each other? On the surface, they seem to diverge on nearly every point, from their liturgical forms to their understanding of history. With its ancient roots, Catholicism is a continuous tradition, committed to the conservation of the creeds, while Mormonism teaches that the landscape of Christian history is riddled with sin and apostasy and is in need of radical revision and spiritual healing. Moreover, successful proselyting efforts by Mormons in formerly Catholic strongholds have increased opportunities for misunderstanding, polemic, and prejudice. However, in this book a Mormon theologian and a Catholic theologian in conversation address some of the most significant issues that impact Christian identity, including such central doctrines as authority, grace, Jesus, Mary, and revelation, demonstrating that these traditions are much closer to each other than many assume. Both Catholicism and Mormonism have ambitiously universal views of the Christian faith, and readers will be surprised by how close Catholics and Mormons are on a number of topics and how these traditions, probed to their depths, shed light on each other in fascinating and unexpected ways. Catholic-Mormon Dialogue is an invitation to the reader to engage in a discussion that makes understanding the goal, and marks a beginning for a dialogue that will become increasingly important in the years to come.

Does a consumer who bought a shirt made in another nation bear any moral responsibility when the women who sewed that shirt die in a factory fire or in the collapse of the building? Many have asserted, without explanation, that because markets cause harms to distant others, consumers bear moral responsibility for those harms. But traditional moral analysis of individual decisions is unable to sustain this argument. Distant Harms, Distant Markets presents a careful analysis of moral complicity in markets, employing resources from sociology, Christian history, feminism, legal theory, and Catholic moral theology today. Because of its individualistic methods, mainstream economics as a discipline is not equipped to understand the causality entailed in the long chains of social relationships that make up the market. Critical realist sociology, however, has addressed the character and functioning of social structures, an analysis that can helpfully be applied to the market. The True Wealth of Nations research project of the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies brought together an international group of sociologists, economists, moral theologians, and others to describe these causal relationships and articulate how Catholic social thought can use these insights to more fully address issues of economic ethics in the twenty-first century. The result was this interdisciplinary volume of essays, which explores the causal and moral responsibilities that consumers bear for the harms that markets cause to distant others.

Mexican statues and paintings of figures like the Virgin of Guadalupe and the Lord of Chalma are endowed with sacred presence and the power to perform miracles. Millions of devotees visit these miraculous images to request miracles for health, employment, children, and countless everyday matters. When requests are granted, devotees reciprocate with votive offerings. Collages, photographs, documents, texts, milagritos, hair and braids, clothing, retablos, and other representative objects cover walls at many shrines. Miraculous Images and Votive Offerings in Mexico studies such petitionary devotion-primarily through extensive fieldwork at several shrines in Guanajuato, Jalisco, Queretaro, San Luis Potosi, and Zacatecas. Graziano is interested in retablos not only as extraordinary works of folk art but: as Mexican expressions of popular Catholicism comprising a complex of beliefs, rituals, and material culture; as archives of social history; and as indices of a belief system that includes miraculous intercession in everyday life. Previous studies focus almost exclusively on commissioned votive paintings, but Graziano also considers the creative ex votos made by the votants themselves. Among the many miraculous images treated in the book are the Cristo Negro de Otatitlan, Nino del Cacahuatito, Senor de Chalma, and the Virgen de Guadalupe. The book is written in two voices, one analytical to provide an understanding of miracles, miraculous images, and votive offerings, and the other narrative to bring the reader closer to lived experiences at the shrines. This book appears at a moment of transition, when retablos are disappearing from church walls and beginning to appear in museum exhibitions; when the artistic value of retablos is gaining prominence; when the commercial value of retablos is increasing, particularly among private collectors outside of Mexico; and when traditional retablo painters are being replaced by painters with a more commercial and less religious approach to their trade. Graziano's book thus both records a disappearing tradition and charts the way in which it is being transformed.

From 1962 to 1965, in perhaps the most important religious event of the twentieth century, the Second Vatican Council met to plot a course for the future of the Roman Catholic Church. After thousands of speeches, resolutions, and votes, the Council issued sixteen official documents on topics ranging from divine revelation to relations with non-Christians. But the meaning of the Second Vatican Council has been fiercely contested since before it was even over, and the years since its completion have seen a battle for the soul of the Church waged through the interpretation of Council documents. The Reception of Vatican II looks at the sixteen conciliar documents through the lens of those battles. Paying close attention to reforms and new developments, the essays in this volume show how the Council has been received and interpreted over the course of the more than fifty years since it concluded. The contributors to this volume represent various schools of thought but are united by a commitment to restoring the view that Vatican II should be interpreted and implemented in line with Church Tradition. The central problem facing Catholic theology today, these essays argue, is a misreading of the Council that posits a sharp break with previous Church teaching. In order to combat this reductive way of interpreting the Council, these essays provide a thorough, instructive overview of the debates it inspired.

Vincent de Paul, the Lazarist Mission, and French Catholic Reform offers a major re-assessment of the thought and activities of the most famous figure of the seventeenth-century French Catholic Reformation, Vincent de Paul. Confronting traditional explanations for de Paul's prominence in the devot reform movement that emerged in the wake of the Wars of Religion, the volume explores how he turned a personal vocational desire to evangelize the rural poor of France into a congregation of secular missionaries, known as the Congregation of the Mission or the Lazarists, with three inter-related strands of pastoral responsibility: the delivery of missions, the formation and training of clergy, and the promotion of confraternal welfare. Alison Forrestal further demonstrates that the structure, ethos, and works that de Paul devised for the Congregation placed it at the heart of a significant enterprise of reform that involved a broad set of associates in efforts to transform the character of devotional belief and practice within the church. The central questions of the volume therefore concern de Paul's efforts to create, characterize, and articulate a distinctive and influential vision for missionary life and work, both for himself and for the Lazarist Congregation, and Forrestal argues that his prominence and achievements depended on his remarkable ability to exploit the potential for association and collaboration within the devot environment of seventeenth-century France in enterprising and systematic ways. This is the first study to assess de Paul's activities against the wider backdrop of religious reform and Bourbon rule, and to reconstruct the combination of ideas, practices, resources, and relationships that determined his ability to pursue his ambitions. A work of forensic detail and complex narrative, Vincent de Paul, the Lazarist Mission, and French Catholic Reform is the product of years of research in ecclesiastical and state archives. It offers a wholly fresh perspective on the challenges and opportunities entailed in the promotion of religious reform and renewal in seventeenth-century France.

Cultural conflicts about the family-including those surrounding women's social roles, the debate over abortion, and in more recent years, debates about stem cell research, same-sex marriage, and contraception-have intensified over the last few decades among Catholics, as well as among American citizens generally. In fact, these conflicts comprise much of the substance of the moral polarization that currently characterizes our public politics. Scholars have demonstrated the importance of the media in the endurance of these conflicts, as well as the important role played by elites, particularly religious elites. But less is known about how individuals in local settings and cultures-especially religious settings-experience and participate in them. Why are these conflicts so resonant among ordinary Americans, and Catholics in particular? By exploring how religion and family life are intertwined in local parish settings, this book strives to understand how and why Catholics are divided around these cultural conflicts about the family. It presents a close and detailed comparative ethnographic analysis of the families and local religious cultures in two Catholic parishes: religiously conservative Our Lady of the Assumption Church and theologically progressive St. Brigitta Church. Through an examination of the activities of parish life, together with the faith stories of parishioners, this book reveals how two congregational social processes-the practice of central ecclesial metaphors, and the construction of Catholic identities-matter for the ways in which parishioners work out the routines of marriage, childrearing, and work-family balance, as well as to the ways they connect these everyday challenges to the public politics of the family. The analysis further demonstrates that these institutional processes promote polarization among Catholics through practices that unintentionally fragment the Catholic tradition in local religious settings.

Although he is not always recognised as such, Soren Kierkegaard has been an important ally for Catholic theologians in the early twentieth century. Moreover, understanding this relationship and its origins offers valuable resources and insights to contemporary Catholic theology. Of course, there are some negative preconceptions to overcome. Historically, some Catholic readers have been suspicious of Kierkegaard, viewing him as an irrational Protestant irreconcilably at odds with Catholic thought. Nevertheless, the favourable mention of Kierkegaard in John Paul II's Fides et Ratio is an indication that Kierkegaard's writings are not so easily dismissed. Catholic Theology after Kierkegaard investigates the writings of emblematic Catholic thinkers in the twentieth century to assess their substantial engagement with Kierkegaard's writings. Joshua Furnal argues that Kierkegaard's writings have stimulated reform and renewal in twentieth-century Catholic theology, and should continue to do so today. To demonstrate Kierkegaard's relevance in pre-conciliar Catholic theology, Furnal examines the wider evidence of a Catholic reception of Kierkegaard in the early twentieth century-looking specifically at influential figures like Theodor Haecker, Romano Guardini, Erich Przywara, and other Roman Catholic thinkers that are typically associated with the ressourcement movement. In particular, Furnal focuses upon the writings of Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and the Italian Thomist, Cornelio Fabro as representative entry points.

One deep problem facing the Catholic church is the question of how its teaching authority is understood today. It is fairly clear that, while Rome continues to teach as if its authority were unchanged from the days before Vatican II (1962-65), the majority of Catholics - within the first-world church, at least - take a far more independent line, and increasingly understand themselves (rather than the church) as the final arbiters of decision-making, especially on ethical questions. This collection of essays explores the historical background and present ecclesial situation, explaining the dramatic shift in attitude on the part of contemporary Catholics in the U.S. and Europe. The overall purpose is neither to justify nor to repudiate the authority of the church's hierarchy, but to cast some light on: the context within which it operates, the complexities and ambiguities of the historical tradition of belief and behavior it speaks for, and the kinds of limits it confronts - consciously or otherwise. The authors do not hope to fix problems, although some of the essays make suggestions, but to contribute to a badly needed intra-Catholic dialogue without which, they believe, problems will continue to fester and solutions will remain elusive.

Creating a Scottish Church considers Catholicism's transition from an underground and isolated church to a multi-faceted institution that existed on a national scale. By challenging the dominant notion of Scotland as a Presbyterian nation, this study represents a radical departure from traditional perceptions. Included in this journey through nineteenth-century industrial urbanisation are the roles of women as well as the effect of Irish migration that initiated a reappraisal of the Church's position in Scottish culture and society. In taking a more critical look at gender and ethnicity, Kehoe investigates the myriad ways in which Scotland's Catholic population enhanced their experiences of community life and acquired a sense of belonging in a rapidly evolving and modernising nation. Introducing previously unseen material from private collections and archives, Kehoe also considers how the development of church-run social welfare services for the Catholic population helped to support the construction of a civil society and national identity that was distinctively Scottish. The book's primary focus on gender, ethnicity and religiosity introduces a deeper understanding of religion and culture in modern Britain, thus providing a significant contribution to existing historiography.

What is the secret of John Henry Newman's enduring appeal? It perhaps lies in the freshness and persuasiveness and brilliance of his descriptions of Christianity. The word Newman often uses to describe the process of becoming a Christian is not 'faith' or 'belief' but 'realization'. The moment when 'one opens one's heart to a truth'. This collection of sermons - the ones Newman himself thought were his best - is the ideal introduction to one of the greatest writers in the Christian tradition.

The Roman Catholic leadership still refuses to ordain women officially or even to recognize that women are capable of ordination. But is the widely held assumption that women have always been excluded from such roles historically accurate? How might the current debate change if our view of the history of women's ordination were to change?
In The Hidden History of Women's Ordination, Gary Macy offers illuminating and surprising answers to these questions. Macy argues that for the first twelve hundred years of Christianity, women were in fact ordained into various roles in the church. He uncovers references to the ordination of women in papal, episcopal and theological documents of the time, and the rites for these ordinations have survived. The insistence among scholars that women were not ordained, Macy shows, is based on a later definition of ordination, one that would have been unknown in the early Middle Ages. In the early centuries of Christianity, ordination was understood as the process and the ceremony by which one moved to any new ministry in the community. In the early Middle Ages, women served in at least four central ministries: episcopa (woman bishop), presbytera (woman priest), deaconess and abbess. The ordinations of women continued until the Gregorian reforms of the eleventh and twelfth centuries radically altered the definition of ordination. These reforms not only removed women from the ordained ministry, but also attempted to eradicate any memory of women's ordination in the past.
With profound implications for how women are viewed in Christian history, and for current debates about the role of women in the church, The Hidden History of Women's Ordinationoffers new answers to an old question and overturns a long-held erroneous belief.

This is a study of papal bureaucracy during the Renaissance, a time when the Pope was among the most powerful of European rulers. The men who ran the Renaissance Papacy were an important and talented group, including among their number luminaries of Italian humanist literature and scholarship, distinguished church leaders, and statesmen of far-reaching influence. Based on extensive research in Italian archives, The Pope's Men explores the bureaucracy of an early modern state, and the patronage network which permeated and in many ways controlled it. Peter Partner sets the ruling elite of the Renaissance Papacy in its social and political context, and analyses its composition and the ways it operated. He shows the struggle for power in Rome among the competing Italian regions and families. This is a fascinating and scholarly study of men who could be scholars, poets, thinkers, and patrons of the arts, as well as servants of a state of great spiritual and temporal power.

Grazia Mangano Ragazzi offers an in-depth examination of the concept of discretion in the spiritual writings of Saint Catherine of Siena (1347-1380), who is honored as one of the few female ''Doctors'' of the Catholic Church and who in 2000 was named a co-patroness of Europe by Pope John Paul II. Despite her illiteracy, which necessitated that she dictate to a scribe, Catherine is revered for her writings, which reveal spiritual reflection of remarkable depth. At the same time she is an inspiring example of one who remained active in the political and ecclesiastical life of her time without sacrificing an intense contemplative life. This book investigates the concept of "discretion," to which Catherine dedicates chapters IX to XI of her Dialogue and letter 213. Discretion, Ragazzi argues, is a helpful tool for interpreting the whole edifice of Catherine's spirituality. The term evades precise definition but can be summarized as a form of self-knowledge that leads to an authentic knowledge of God. Ragazzi first examines the role played by scribes in the composition of Catherine's writings, and whether it is possible to consider such writings as authentic representations of her thought, then provides a detailed analysis of Catherine's works to determine the meaning and importance of discretion in her spirituality, and how it relates to the concept of prudence. Ragazzi finds that the clearest influence on Catherine's thought was that of Dominican spirituality: her spiritual director, Raymond of Capua, was a Dominican, as was the majority of those belonging to her circle. But Franciscan mysticism, which was prevalent in religious life during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, also seems to have exerted considerable influence. Ragazzi's meticulous study shows how Catherine's way of being a theologian exemplifies the principle that any person authentically striving to live a Christian life, if gifted with great faith and intellectual ability, can engage in theology in a creative manner without the abstract and specialized speculation reserved for academic theologians.

The End of an Elite is the first scholarly study in English of the bishops of the French church at the outbreak of the French Revolution. The 130 members of the episcopate formed an elite within an elite, the First Estate of France. Nigel Aston explores the role of the episcopate in national and provincial politics in the last years of the ancien regime. He traces the policies and patronage of episcopal ministers such as Lomienie de Brienne and J.-M. Champion de Cice, who were as much politicians as pastors, and examines their relationships with their fellow bishops. Dr Aston emphasizes the leading role of the bishops in the Assemblies of Notables and offers a fresh interpretation of clerical elections to the Estates-General of 1789. This is an intensively researched and immensely readable account, which will be invaluable to all historians of late eighteenth-century France.

How can religion contribute to democracy in a secular age? What can the millennia-old Catholic tradition say to church-state controversies in the United States and around the world? Secularism, Catholicism, and the Future of Public Life, presents a dialogue between Douglas W. Kmiec, a prominent scholar of American constitutional law and Catholic legal thought, and an international cast of experts from a range of fields. In his essay, "Secularism Crucified?," Kmiec illustrates the profound tensions around religion and secularism through an examination of the Lautsi case, a European judicial decision that supported the presence of crucifixes in Italian classrooms. Laying out a church-state typology, Kmiec argues for clarifying U.S. church-state jurisprudence, and advances principles to prudently limit the over-stretching impulse of religious conscience claims. In the process, he engages secular thinkers, popes, U.S. Supreme Court rulings, and President Barack Obama. The respondents, scholars of legal theory, international relations, journalism, religion, and social science, challenge Kmiec and illustrate ways in which both scholars and citizens should understand religion, democracy, and secularism. Their essays bring together current events in Catholic life, recent social theory, and issues such as migration, the Arab Spring, and social change.

Our Lady of the Nations is a detailed and scholarly overview of the apparitions of Mary in 20th-century Catholic Europe. Chris Maunder discusses apparitions in general and how they are interpreted in Catholicism by, for example, Karl Rahner and Benedict XVI. The role of women and children as visionaries is considered, including issues concerning changing views of gender, children's spirituality, and the protection of minors. He covers cases that are well known and approved by the Church (Fatima, Beauraing, Banneux, and Amsterdam), others that are well known but not approved (such as Garabandal and Medjugorje), and many that are neither well known nor approved, such as those in Belgian Flanders or Nazi Germany in the 1930s, or in France, Italy, or Germany after the Second World War. Resources include academic studies of particular apparitions, some Catholic theological and devotional literature, and occasionally travel writing. There is also coverage of material in French which is not known to the English reader. Shrines and visionaries are believed to be indicators of the presence of Mary. In the visionary perspective, she has appeared in order to reassure her followers and to warn of divine judgement. Her messages echo doctrinal Catholic Mariology with some innovations, but also express a deep dissatisfaction with the events and trends of the 20th century, from communism to Nazism to liberalism and religious indifference. While the Marian cult evolves according to new templates for apparitions and developments in Mariology, the fundamental message of presence, consolation, and admonition remains constant.