A Companion to the Medieval Papacy brings together an international group of experts on various aspects of the medieval papacy. Each chapter provides an up-to-date introduction to and scholarly interpretation of topics of crucial importance to the development of the papacy's thinking about its place in the medieval world and of its institutional structures. Topics covered include: the Papal States; the Gregorian Reform; papal artistic self-representation; hierocratic theory; canon law; decretals; councils; legates and judges delegate; the apostolic camera, chancery, penitentiary, and Rota; relations with Constantinople; crusades; missions. The volume includes an introductory chapter by Thomas F.X. Noble on the historiographical challenges of writing medieval papal history. Contributors are: Sandro Carocci, Atria A. Larson, Andrew Louth, Jehangir Malegam, Andreas Meyer, Harald Muller, Thomas F.X. Noble, Francesca Pomarici, Rebecca Rist, Kirsi Salonen, Felicitas Schmieder, Keith Sisson, Danica Summerlin, and Stefan Weiss.

The Dictionary contains 135 biographical-critical essays on contemporary Catholic American poets, dramatists, and fiction writers. Not since Hoehn's "Catholic Authors: Contemporary Biographical Sketches, 1930-1947" has such an inventory of Catholic American writers appeared. The Works By bibliographies contain all of each author's productions be they fiction, poetry, drama or non-fiction. The Works About bibliographies to each essay cite five critical studies or, where none exists, book reviews, plus references to other biographical sources. The Introduction explores the diversity of belief in contemporary Catholic expression. An essay by Professor Genaro Padilla examines the place of Catholicism in the work of Hispanic writers in the United States today. A partial list of the authors contained here reads like a Who's Who of American literary luminaries and includes such writers as John Gregory Dunne, Mary Gordon, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, Don Delillo, Robert Stone, and Maureen Howard.

As a resource for further research on the authors contained, for continued reflection on the various forms of contemporary Catholic American writing, and for renewed scholarly interest in many excellent and often-neglected literary texts, the "Biographical Dictionary of Contemporary Catholic American Writing" deserves a place in most academic and public libraries. Generalists and English teachers and majors will find its perusal fascinating and rewarding.

In The Martyrs of Japan, Rady Roldan-Figueroa examines the role that Catholic missionary orders played in the dissemination of accounts of Christian martyrdom in Japan. The work combines several historiographical approaches, including publication history, history of missions, and "new" institutional history. The author offers an overarching portrayal of the writing, printing, and circulation of books of 'Japano-martyrology.' The book is organized into two parts. The first part, "Spirituality of Writing, Publication History, and Japano-martyrology," addresses topics ranging from the historical background of Christianity in Japan to the publishers of Japano-martyrology. The second part, "Jesuits, Discalced Franciscans, and the Production of Japano-martyrology in the Early Modern Spanish World," features closer analysis of selected works of Japano-martyrology by Jesuit and Discalced Franciscan writers.

John Fisher, 1469-1535 was a figure of European stature during the Tudor age. His many roles included those of bishop, humanist, theologian, cardinal, and ultimately martyr. This study places him in the context of sixteenth-century Christendom, focusing not just on his resistance to Henry VIII, but also on his active engagement with the renaissance and reformation.

Representing the highest quality of scholarship, Gilles Emery offers a much-anticipated introduction to Catholic doctrine on the Trinity. His extensive research combined with lucid prose provides readers a resource to better understand the foundations of Trinitarian reflection. The book is addressed to all who wish to benefit from an initiation to Trinitarian doctrine. The path proposed by this introductory work comprises six steps. First the book indicates some liturgical and biblical ways for entering into Trinitarian faith. It then presents the revelation of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the New Testament, by inviting the reader to reflect upon the signification of the word "God." Next it explores the confessions of Trinitarian faith, from the New Testament itself to the Creed of Constantinople, on which it offers a commentary. By emphasizing the Christian culture inherited from the fourth-century Fathers of the Church, the book presents the fundamental principles of Trinitarian doctrine, which find their summit in the Christian notion of "person." On these foundations, the heart of the book is a synthetic exposition of the persons of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit in their divine being and mutual relations, and in their action for us. Finally, the last step takes up again the study of the creative and saving action of the Trinity: the book concludes with a doctrinal exposition of the "missions" of the Son and Holy Spirit, that is, the salvific sending of the Son and Holy Spirit that leads humankind to the contemplation of the Father.

During World War I, the Catholic church blocked the distribution of government-sponsored V.D. prevention films, initiating an era of attempts by the church to censor the movie industry. This book is an entertaining and engrossing account of those efforts-how they evolved, what effect they had on the movie industry, and why they were eventually abandoned. Frank Walsh tells how the church's influence in Hollywood grew through the 1920s and reached its peak in the 1930s, when the film industry allowed Catholics to dictate the Production Code, which became the industry's self-censorship system, and the Legion of Decency was established by the church to blacklist any films it considered offensive. With the industry's Joe Breen, a Catholic layman, cutting movie scenes during production and the Legion of Decency threatening to ban movies after release, the Catholic church played a major role in determining what Americans saw and didn't see on the screen during Hollywood's Golden Age. Walsh provides fascinating details about the church's efforts to guard against anything it felt might corrupt moviegoers' morals: forcing Gypsy Rose Lee to change her screen name; investigating Frank Sinatra's fitness to play a priest in Miracle of the Bells; altering a dance sequence in Oklahoma; eliminating marital infidelity from Two-Faced Woman; compelling Howard Hughes to make 147 cuts in The Outlaw; blocking the distribution of Birth of a Baby; and attacking Asphalt Jungle for serving the "crooked purposes of the Soviet Union." However, notes Walsh, there were serious divisions within the church over film policy. Bishops feuded with one another over how best to deal with movie moguls, priests differed over whether attending a condemned film constituted a serious sin, and Legion of Decency reviewers disagreed over film evaluations. Walsh shows how the decline of the studio system, the rise of a new generation of better-educated Catholics, and changing social values gradually eroded the Legion's power, forcing the church eventually to terminate its efforts to control the type of film that Hollywood turned out. In an epilogue he relates this history of censorship to current efforts by Christian fundamentalists to end "sex, violence, filth, and profanity" in the media.

Teaches us how to speak personally and with confidence in prayer to God, who, the Saint says, will not "speak" to us unless we first speak to Him. We can approach God as His friends, with confidence and boldness. (5-2.00 ea.; 10-1.75 ea.; 25-1.25 ea.; 50-1.00 ea.; 100-.75 ea.).

Mark W. Roche presents a clear, precise, and positive view of the challenge and promise of a Catholic university. Roche makes visible the ideal of a Catholic university and illuminates in original ways the diverse, but interconnected, dimensions of Catholic identity. Roche's vision of the distinct intellectual mission of a Catholic university will appeal to Catholics as well as to persons who are not Catholic but who may recognize through this essay the unexpected allure of a Catholic university.

'These prayers help me to pray... All prayer is talking to God as to a friend, and it is God's closest friends who can teach me how to do that best.' Timothy Radcliffe OPThis treasury of prayers for the Third Christian Millennium offers practical spiritual guidance for an increasingly busy world.The late Cardinal Basil Hume, in his Introduction, writes that the need for us to be people of prayer has never been more urgent. We know that unless we are deeply rooted in a sense of God's presence and able to refer all things to God, then our pilgrimage into the future will be marked more by uncertainty than by the peace which is God's gift.The book's extensive range includes favourite Catholic prayers such as the Rosary and the Stations of the Cross, along with others that may be less familiar, organized under many different themes and topics. Helpful introductions and a pattern of daily prayers make this book nothing less than a course in Christian spirituality.The book is for people approaching Christian prayer for the first time, and also for those who want to begin afresh. It will be especially helpful to young people, and the parents and teachers who want to help them learn to pray in the living tradition of the Church.

This study is in its broadest sense an inquiry into the intellectual origins of the Reformed branch of Protestantism generally, but inaccurately, designated Calvinism. More specifically, it concerns one of the early theologians who gave formative shape to Reformed theology, Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499-1562), and focuses on his adoption of the soteriological doctrine of gemina praedestinatio, double predestination: divine election and divine reprobation. One of the most erudite men of his age, Vermigli was also one of the most remarkable, for his religious career spanned the ecclesiastical horizon from prominence as a Roman Catholic theologian to one of the formative theologians of sixteenth century Reformed Protestantism. No other theologian of the early sixteenth century was so distinguished in both camps. James argues that Vermigli derived the doctrine of gemina praedestinatio from the writings of Gregory of Rimini and that it was fully formed before he allied himself with the Protestant cause, thus illustrating an important aspect of soteriological continuity between late medieval and reformation thought.

The present volume is a result of an international symposium on the encounters between Jesuits and Protestants in Asia and the Americas, which was organized by Boston College's Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies at Boston College in June 2017. In Asia, Protestants encountered a mixed Jesuit legacy: in South Asia, they benefited from pioneering Jesuit ethnographers while contesting their conversions; in Japan, all Christian missionaries who returned after 1853 faced the equation of Japanese nationalism with anti-Jesuit persecution; and in China, Protestants scrambled to catch up to the cultural legacy bequeathed by the earlier Jesuit mission. In the Americas, Protestants presented Jesuits as enemies of liberal modernity, supporters of medieval absolutism yet master manipulators of modern self-fashioning and the printing press. The evidence suggests a far more complicated relationship of both Protestants and Jesuits as co-creators of the bright and dark sides of modernity, including the public sphere, public education, plantation slavery, and colonialism.

The course of the French Wars of Religion, commonly portrayed as a series of civil wars, was profoundly shaped by foreign actors. Many German Protestants in particular felt compelled to intervene. In Germany and the French Wars of Religion, 1560-1572 Jonas van Tol examines how Protestant German audiences understood the conflict in France and why they deemed intervention necessary. He demonstrates that conflicting stories about the violence in France fused with local religious debates and news from across Europe leading to a surprising range of interpretations of the nature of the French Wars of Religion. As a consequence, German Lutherans found themselves on opposing sides on the battlefields of France.

The recovery of nature has been a unifying and enduring aim of the writings of Ralph McInerny, Michael P. Grace Professor of Medieval Studies at the University of Notre Dame, director of the Jacques Maritain Center, former director of the Medieval Institute, and author of numerous works in philosophy, literature, and journalism. While many of the fads that have plagued philosophy and theology during the last half-century have come and gone, recent developments suggest that McInerny's commitment to Aristotelian-Thomism was boldly, if quietly, prophetic. In his persistent, clear, and creative defenses of natural theology and natural law, McInerny has appealed to nature to establish a dialogue between theists and non-theists, to contribute to the moral and political renewal of American culture, and particularly to provide some of the philosophical foundations for Catholic theology.

This volume brings together essays by an impressive group of scholars, including William Wallace, O.P., Jude P. Dougherty, John Haldane, Thomas DeKoninck, Alasdair MacIntyre, David Solomon, Daniel McInerny, Janet E. Smith, Michael Novak, Stanley Hauerwas, Laura Garcia, Alvin Plantinga, Alfred J. Freddoso, and David B. Burrell, C.S.C.