Charles E. Curran offers the first comprehensive analysis and criticism of the development of modern Catholic social teaching from the perspective of theology, ethics, and church history. Curran studies the methodology and content of the documents of Catholic social teaching, generally understood as comprising twelve papal letters beginning with Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical "Rerum novarum," two documents from Vatican II, and two pastoral letters of the U.S. bishops.

He contends that the fundamental basis for this body of teaching comes from an anthropological perspective that recognizes both the inherent dignity and the social nature of the human person -- thus do the church's teachings on political and economic matters chart a middle course between the two extremes of individualism and collectivism. The documents themselves tend to downplay any discontinuities with previous documents, but Curran's systematic analysis reveals the significant historical developments that have occurred over the course of more than a century. Although greatly appreciative of the many strengths of this teaching, Curran also points out the weaknesses and continuing tensions in Catholic social teaching today.

Intended for scholars and students of Catholic social ethics, as well as those involved in Catholic social ministry, this volume will also appeal to non-Catholic readers interested in an understanding and evaluation of Catholic social teaching.

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.

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.

The Call to Read is the first full-length study to situate the surviving oeuvre of Reginald Pecock in the context of current scholarship on English vernacular theology of the late medieval period. Kirsty Campbell examines the important and innovative contribution Pecock made to late medieval debates about the roles of the Bible, the Church, the faculty of reason, and practices of devotion in fostering a vital, productive, and stable Christian community. Campbell argues that Pecock's fascinating attempt to educate the laity is more than an effort to supply religious reading material: it is an attempt to establish and unite a community of readers around his books, to influence and thus change the ways they understand their faith, the world, and their place in it. The aim of Pecock's educational project is to harness the power of texts to effect religious change. Combining traditional approaches with innovative thinking on moral philosophy, devotional exercises, and theological doctrine, Pecock's works of religious instruction are his attempt to reform a Christian community threatened by heresy through reshaping meaningful Christian practices and forms of belief. Campbell's book will be of interest to scholars and students of medieval literature and culture, especially those interested in fifteenth-century religious history and culture.

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.

The Observant Movement was a widespread effort to reform religious life across Europe. It took root around 1400, and for a century and more thereafter it inspired or shaped much that became central to European religion and culture. The Observants produced many of the leading religious figures of the later Middle Ages-Catherine of Siena, Bernardino of Siena and Savonarola in Italy, Francisco Jimenez de Cisneros in Spain, and in Germany Martin Luther himself. This volume provides scholars with a current, synthetic introduction to the Observant Movement. Its essays also seek collectively to expand the horizons of our study of Observant reform, and to open new avenues for future scholarship. Contributors are Michael D. Bailey, Pietro Delcorno, Tamar Herzig, Anne Huijbers, James D. Mixson, Alison More, Carolyn Muessig, Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli, Bert Roest, Timothy Schmitz, and Gabriella Zarri.

Decisively shaped by the turbulent atmosphere of war, occupation and resistance, the years 1943-1955 gave rise to a most unusual flowering of progressive initiatives in Catholic politics, theology and apostolic missions. Though suffering severe setbacks in the deep freeze of the Cold War politics, mid-Century European Left Catholicism was not without influence in the subsequent emergence of Latin Americam Liberation Theology and the deliberations of the Vatican II. This volume constitutes the first attempt to analyse the phenomenon of Western European Left Catholicism from a comparative and transnational perspective.

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.

A breakthrough in the theology of parenthood, integrating Catholic social thought and social scientific studies of child well-being in order to offer a more diverse and inclusive interpretation The Catholic Church has a long and diverse history of tolerating various child-rearing arrangements. The dominant Catholic framework for conceptualizing parenthood, however, is highly influenced by concerns over sexual ethics and gender norms. While sexual and reproductive ethics are important, the present consensus that theological consideration of parenthood necessarily hinges on these matters diverts attention from actual parenting practices in their social and cultural contexts. In reality, kinship and caregiving are often negotiated in complex ways. In Beyond Biology, Jacob M. Kohlhaas uses a historical and interdisciplinary theological method that engages both analytically and appreciatively with tradition to sketch a broader Catholic anthropology of parenthood. Kohlhaas's identification of interpretive options within the Catholic tradition creates room for meaningful, intellectually convincing, and theologically rich responses to challenges facing Catholic parents and families today. By marshaling the diversity of the Christian tradition and exploring contemporary research in the social sciences and humanities, Kohlhaas frames a theological conversation on parenthood as parenthood-considering the needs and well-being of children as well as the potentials and capabilities of adult caregivers. In his discussion, Kohlhaas considers adoption and nonbiological parenthood, fathers as primary caregivers and nurturers, caregiving by siblings and grandparents, and communal parenting and coparenting beyond the spousal pair. In Kohlhaas's view, conceptions of parenthood should be guided by the meaning of Christian kinship rooted in baptism as well as concern for the actual caregiving capacities of adults and the needs of children.

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.

The specific concern in What We Hold in Trust comes to this: the Catholic university that sees its principal purpose in terms of the active life, of career, and of changing the world, undermines the contemplative and more deep-rooted purpose of the university. If a university adopts the language of technical and social change as its main and exclusive purpose, it will weaken the deeper roots of the university's liberal arts and Catholic mission. The language of the activist, of changing the world through social justice, equality and inclusion, or of the technician through market-oriented incentives, plays an important role in university life. We need to change the world for the better and universities play an important role, but both the activist and technician will be co-opted by our age of hyper-activity and technocratic organizations if there is not first a contemplative outlook on the world that receives reality rather than constructs it. To address this need for roots What We Hold in Trust unfolds in four chapters that will demonstrate how essential it is for the faculty, administrators, and trustees of Catholic universities to think philosophically and theologically (Chapter One), historically (Chapter Two) and institutionally (Chapters Three and Four). What we desperately need today are leaders in Catholic universities who understand the roots of the institutions they serve, who can wisely order the goods of the university, who know what is primary and what is secondary, and who can distinguish fads and slogans from authentic reform. We need leaders who are in touch with their history and have a love for tradition, and in particular for the Catholic tradition. Without this vision, our universities may grow in size, but shrink in purpose. They may be richer but not wiser.

The reign of Pope Gregory VII (1073-85) is critically important in the history of the medieval Church and Papacy. This original and authoritative study, the first for over fifty years, records the remarkable career of the Pope who started life as a humble clerk of the Roman church, gave his name to the Gregorian Reforms, and finally died in exile at Salerno. His reign prepared the way for an age of strong papal monarchy throughout medieval Europe.

Religion in Europe is currently undergoing changes that are reconfiguring physical and virtual spaces of practice and belief, and these changes need to be understood with regards to the proliferation of digital media discourses. This book explores religious change in Europe through a comparative approach that analyzes Atheist, Catholic, and Muslim blogs as spaces for articulating narratives about religion that symbolically challenge the power of religious institutions. The book adds theoretical complexity to the study of religion and digital media with the concept of hypermediated religious spaces. The theory of hypermediation helps to critically discuss the theory of secularization and to contextualize religious change as the result of multiple entangled phenomena. It considers religion as being connected with secular and post-secular spaces, and media as embedding material forms, institutions, and technologies. A spatial perspective contextualizes hypermediated religious spaces as existing at the interstice of alternative and mainstream, private and public, imaginary and real venues. By offering the innovative perspective of hypermediated religious spaces, this book will be of significant interest to scholars of religious studies, the sociology of religion, and digital media.

How did Catholicism sound in the early modern period? What kinds of sonic cultures developed within the diverse and dynamic matrix of early modern Catholicism? And what do we learn about early modern Catholicism by attending to its sonic manifestations? Editors Daniele V. Filippi and Michael Noone have brought together a variety of studies - ranging from processional culture in Bavaria to Roman confraternities, and catechetical praxis in popular missions - that share an emphasis on the many and varied modalities and meanings of sonic experience in early modern Catholic life. Audio samples illustrating selected chapters are available at the following address: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.5311099. Contributors are: Egberto Bermudez, Jane A. Bernstein, Xavier Bisaro, Andrew Cichy, Daniele V. Filippi, Alexander J. Fisher, Marco Gozzi, Robert L. Kendrick, Tess Knighton, Ignazio Macchiarella, Margaret Murata, John W. O'Malley, S.J., Noel O'Regan, Anne Piejus, and Colleen Reardon.

An Exploration of the extent and limitations of Papal power in the period after the Council of Trent in the mid-Sixteenth century, during the 'long' history of the Counter-Reformation. Europe and the wider world were religiously divided in the build-up to the French revolution. The book Challenges the view that the development of Papal authority during this period simply reflected the 'Absolutism' of secular governments of the European Ancien regime. Examines multiple commitments of the Popes of this period, including: the Bishop of Rome, Metropolitan of the Roman Ecclesiastical Province, Primatial Leader of the Italian Church, Patriarchal of the Catholic Church in Western Europe, Supreme Pontiff, Ruler of the Papal States in Central Italy. For anyone interested in religious history, history of the Catholic Church, Italian history or Early Modern European History. Also available in Cloth: 0-582-087481 $79.95.

Justice Blindfolded gives an overview of the history of "justice" and its iconography through the centuries. Justice has been portrayed as a woman with scales, or holding a sword, or, since the fifteenth century, with her eyes bandaged. This last symbol contains the idea that justice is both impartial and blind, reminding indirectly of the bandaged Christ on the cross, a central figure in the Christian idea of fairness and forgiveness. In this rich and imaginative journey through history and philosophy, Prosperi manages to convey a full account of the ways justice has been described, portrayed and imagined. Translation of Giustizia bendata. Percorsi storici di un'immagine (Einaudi, 2008).