This book comprises essays honoring the life and work of Yiu Sing Lucas Chan, S.J., who died unexpectedly on May 19, 2015, at the end of his first year as a member of the faculty in the Department of Theology at Marquette University. The editors intend to commemorate Chan's brief but productive career by furthering the critical conversations he started. The essays included thus touch on aspects of the brilliant young Jesuit's wide-ranging work in the fields of scriptural research, moral theology, and systematic theology. Each essay either engages Chan's scholarship directly or seeks to advance his design to bridge the disciplinary gaps between scriptural research and constructive theology. This book includes contributions by noted Roman Catholic theologians James F. Keenan, S.J., Bryan N. Massingale, and John R. Donohue, S.J., as well as two original poems by his Marquette colleagues dedicated to Lucas.

How did Jews perceive the first Christians? By what means did they come to appreciate Christianity as a religion distinct from their own? In The Christian Schism in Jewish History and Jewish Memory, Professor Joshua Ezra Burns addresses those questions by describing the birth of Christianity as a function of the Jewish past. Surveying a range of ancient evidences, he examines how the authors of Judaism's earliest surviving memories of Christianity speak to the perspectives of rabbinic observers who were conditioned by the unique circumstances of their encounters with Christianity to recognize its adherents as fellow Jews. Only upon the decline of the Church's Jewish demographic were their successors compelled to see Christianity as something other than a variation of Jewish cultural expression. The evolution of thought in the classical Jewish literary record thus offers a dynamic account of Christianity's separation from Judaism counterbalancing the abrupt schism attested in contemporary Christian texts.