This volume examines the changing role of Marian devotion in politics, public life, and popular culture in Western Europe and America during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book brings together, for the first time, studies on Marian devotions across the Atlantic, tracing their role as a rallying point to fight secularization, adversarial ideologies, and rival religions. This transnational approach illuminates the deep transformations of devotional cultures across the world. Catholics adopted modern means and new types of religious expression to foster mass devotions that epitomized the catholic essence of the "nation." In many ways, the development of Marian devotions across the world is also a response to the questioning of Pope Sovereignty. These devotional transformations followed an Ultramontane pattern inspired not only by Rome but also by other successful models approved by the Vatican such as Lourdes. Collectively, they shed new light on the process of globalization and centralization of Catholicism.

Karl Pruter, Presiding Bishop of the Christ Catholic Church and an acknowledged expert on the modern autocephalous churches, delineates the history of the Old Catholic Church in North America and provides the most straightforward account of the numerous offspring of this very active religious movement. Complete with Chronology, Notes, Bibliography, Index, and photographs.

"The Maryknoll Sisters in Hong Kong, 1921-1969: In Love with the Chinese "describes the adaptation of American women to cross-cultural situations in Hong Kong from 1921 to 1969. The Maryknoll Sisters were the first American Catholic community of women founded for overseas missionary work, and were the first American Sisters in Hong Kong. Maryknollers were independent, outgoing, and joyful women who were highly educated, and acted in professional capacities as teachers, social workers, and medical personnel. The assertion of this book is that the mission provided Maryknollers what they had long desired--equal employment opportunities--which were only later emphasized in the women's liberation movement of the 1960s.

Jesuits established a large number of astronomical, geophysical and meteorological observatories during the 17th and 18th centuries and again during the 19th and 20th centuries throughout the world. The history of these observatories has never been published in a complete form. Many early European astronomical observatories were established in Jesuit colleges.
During the 17th and 18th centuries Jesuits were the first western scientists to enter into contact with China and India. It was through them that western astronomy was first introduced in these countries. They made early astronomical observations in India and China and they directed for 150 years the Imperial Observatory of Beijing.
In the 19th and 20th centuries a new set of observatories were established. Besides astronomy these now included meteorology and geophysics. Jesuits established some of the earliest observatories in Africa, South America and the Far East.
Jesuit observatories constitute an often forgotten chapter of the history of these sciences.

This book explores the role of children and young people within early modern England's Catholic minority. It examines Catholic attempts to capture the next generation, Protestant reactions to these initiatives, and the social, legal and political contexts in which young people formed, maintained and attempted to explain their religious identity.

In 2012 Dr. Marina Marin Pradel, an archivist at the Bayerische Stattsbibliotek in Munich, discovered that a thick 12th-century Byzantine manuscript, Codex Monacensis Graecus 314, contained twenty-nine of Origen's Homilies on the Psalms, hitherto considered lost. Lorenzo Perrone of the University of Bologna, an internationally respected scholar of Origen, vouched for the identification and immediately began work on the scholarly edition that appeared in 2015 as the thirteenth volume of Origen's works in the distinguished Griechische Christlichen Schrifsteller series. In an introductory essay Perrone provided proof that the homilies are genuine and demonstrated that they are, astonishingly, his last known work. Live transcripts, these collection homilies constitute our largest collection of actual Christian preaching from the pre-Constantinian period. In these homilies, the final expression of his mature thought, Origen displays, more fully than elsewhere, his understanding of the church and of deification as the goal of Christian life. They also give precious insights into his understanding of the incarnation and of human nature. They are the earliest example of early Christian interpretation of the Psalms, works at the heart of Christian spirituality. Historians of biblical interpretation will find in them the largest body of Old Testament interpretation surviving in his own words, not filtered through ancient translations into Latin that often failed to convey his intense philological acumen. Among other things, they give us new insights into the life of a third-century Greco-Roman metropolis, into Christian/Jewish relations, and into Christian worship. This translation, using the GCS as its basis, seeks to convey, as faithfully as possible, Origen's own categories of thought. An introduction and notes relate the homilies to the theology and principles of interpretation in Origen's larger work and to that work's intellectual context and legacy.

In this thoughtful and compelling book, leading Spanish literature scholar Noel Valis re-examines the role of Catholicism in the modern Spanish novel. While other studies of fiction and faith have focused largely on religious themes, "Sacred Realism" views the religious impulse as a crisis of modernity: a fundamental catalyst in the creative and moral development of Spanish narrative.

This book is a theory-informed, comparative and historical exploration of the notion of the public sphere within Western and Islamic traditions. It situates the emergence of the modern public sphere in a wider historical and theoretical context than usually done in conventional analyses. The work traces cross-cutting genealogies spanning conventional borders between tradition and modernity, and in particular between the Western and the Islamic world. This approach unsettles received, evolutionary views of the public sphere as an exclusive legacy of Western political cultures. The public sphere is finally reconceived as a complex platform for the modern cultivation of culturally diverse, competing, yet intersecting discourses.

While focusing on the relationship between the papacy and the 14th-century crusades, this study also illuminates other fields of activity in Avignon, such as papal taxation and interaction with Byzantium. Using recent research, Housley covers all areas where crusading occurred--including the eastern Mediterranean, Spain, eastern Europe, and Italy--and analyzes the Curia's approach to related issues such as peacemaking between warring Christian powers, the work of Military Orders, and western attempts to maintain a trade embargo on Mamluk, Egypt. Placing the papal policies of Avignon firmly in context, the author demonstrates that the period witnessed the relentless erosion of papal control over the crusades.

A scholarly edition of the letters and diaries of John Henry Newman. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

This is the first book length study in English of the development of Catholic identity and a specific German Catholic culture in the 300 years after the Protestant Reformation. Focusing on religious and cultural history, Forster highlights the importance of Catholicism in the German-speaking lands and seeks to integrate the study of Catholic Germany into our understanding of the origins of both modern Germany and modern European Catholicism.