Hank Center Publications
Hank Center conferences, symposia, and research projects lead to books and other scholarly publications in many fields.
One of our regulare publications is Nexus, a digital-age journal that amplifies and publishes scholarly dialogue taking place in the Hank Center. Our second issue, titled Robots and Rituals: Reflections on Faith in the Era of Science and AI, was recently featured in America Magazine. The issue transports us into the exciting and complicated present where faith, science, digital culture, and AI collide. You can find information about the past, current, and upcoming issues, as well as links to read all of our published issues of Nexus, here.
In addition to Nexus, the Hank Center also has helped facilitate several published books, listed below.
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The Outlaw Christ (2020)
By John F. Deane In every age and generation, the words and presence of Jesus Christ have given people belief, hope and purpose to develop their full potential. However at the same time, faith in Jesus Christ has often been outlawed as it challenges the overwhelming secular impetus of financial achievements, domination and power over others. To answer this unfortunate occurrence, poets throughout the years have taken up the message and person of Jesus. Often, in the side-lining or the outlawing of Christ, the poets, too, have been side-lined. Outlawed.
This book, developed from a series of talks and lectures at Loyola University Chicago, follows the poets in their search for the true Christ, from the 8th century Dream of the Rood where Christ was a warrior hero climbing onto the Cross to defeat the rule of Satan, to poets like John Donne, George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins, up to our own day, with modern Irish poets like Patrick Kavanaug, Pádraig J. Daly and James Harpur. The book presents a stimulating and intriguing anthology of poems that bring Christ to life in our own uncertain and challenging times.
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The Oxford Handbook of Mystical Theology (2020)
Edited by Edward Howells and Mark A. McIntosh The Oxford Handbook of Mystical Theology provides a guide to the mystical element of Christianity as a theological phenomenon. It differs not only from psychological and anthropological studies of mysticism, but from other theological studies, such as more practical or pastorally-oriented works that examine the patterns of spiritual progress and offer counsel for deeper understanding and spiritual development. It also differs from more explicitly historical studies tracing the theological and philosophical contexts and ideas of various key figures and schools, as well as from literary studies of the linguistic tropes and expressive forms in mystical texts. None of these perspectives is absent, but the method here is more deliberately theological, working from within the fundamental interests of Christian mystical writers to the articulation of those interests in distinctively theological forms, in order, finally, to permit a critical theological engagement with them for today.
Divided into four parts, the first section introduces the approach to mystical theology and offers a historical overview. Part two attends to the concrete context of sources and practices of mystical teaching to theology and metaphysics. Students and scholars with a variety of interests will find different pathways through the Handbook.
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Edited by Colby Dickinson, Hugh Miller, and Kathleen McNutt
The essays in this volume discuss the ways in which God challenges us. They allow leading figures in continental philosophy of religion to rethink and engage with the Catholic intellectual tradition. In view of the double vocative that characterizes the relation of Creator to creature, this book offers critiques of modern and postmodern philosophy for the ways in which they have separated philosophy, theology and spirituality.
At the same time this collection examines the complicated relationship of God to Being and the meaning of Revelation, as well as highlighting the context and the role of the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola. Discussions include the Catholic Principle and its relevance in contemporary times, and Christian epic visionaries such as Dante, Milton, Blake, and Joyce, providing scholars a forum to debate their theological identity and its meaning for future studies. This volume contributes a unique engagement from many perspectives with the Catholic intellectual tradition in its philosophical, theological, spiritual, literary, and artistic dimensions. |
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Edited by Michael P. Murphy and Melissa Bradshaw
That Denise Levertov (1923–97) was one of the most pioneering and skilled poets of her generation is beyond dispute. Her masterly use of language, innovative experimentations with organic form, and the political acuity disclosed by her activist poetry are well marked by critical communities. But it is also quite clear that the poems Levertov wrote in the last twenty years of her life, with their more explicit focus on theological themes and subjects, are among the best poems written on religious experience of any century, let alone the twentieth. The collection of essays gathered here shed vital light on this neglected aspect of Levertov studies so as to expand and enrich the scope of critical engagement. In a mixture of theoretical considerations and close readings, these essays provide valuable reflections about the complex relationship between poetry and belief and offer philosophically robust insights into different styles of poetic imagination. The abiding hope is to broaden the terrain for discussions in twenty-first-century theology, literary theory, poetics, and aesthetics—honoring immanence, exploring transcendence, and dwelling with integrity within the spaces between.
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Edited by Kyle B. Roberts and Stephen Schloesser, S.J.
In Crossings and Dwellings, Kyle Roberts and Stephen Schloesser, S.J., bring together essays by eighteen scholars in one of the first volumes to explore the work and experiences of Jesuits and their women religious collaborators in North America over two centuries following the Jesuit Restoration.
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Edited by Mark Bosco, SJ, and Brent Little
Did Flannery O'Connor really write the way she did because and—not in spite of—her Catholicism?
Revelation & Convergence brings together professors of literature, theology, and history to help both critics and readers better understand O'Connor's religious imagination. The contributors focus on many of the Catholic thinkers central to O'Connor's creative development, especially those that O'Connor mentioned in the recently discovered and published A Prayer Journal (2013), or in her many letters to friends and admirers. Some, such as Leon Bloy or Baron von Hügel, remain relatively obscure to contemporary readers. Other figures, such as Augustine of Hippo or St. John of the Cross, are well-known, but their connection to O'Connor's stories has received little attention. Revelation & Convergence provides a much-needed hermeneutical lens that is often missing from contemporary criticism, representing O'Connor's ongoing conversation with her Catholic theological and literary heritage, and provide a glimpse into the rich Catholic texture of her life and work. |
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Democracy, Culture, Catholicism: Voices from Four Continents (2015)
Edited by Michael Schuck and John Crowley-Buck Compiling scholarly essays from a unique three-year Democracy, Culture and Catholicism International Research Project, Democracy, Culture, Catholicism richly articulates the diverse and dynamic interplay of democracy, culture, and Catholicism in the contemporary world. The twenty-five essays from four extremely diverse cultures—those of Indonesia, Lithuania, Peru, and the United States—explore the relationship between democracy and Catholicism from several perspectives, including historical and cultural analysis, political theory and conflict resolution, social movements and Catholic social thought.
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Edited by Patricia Beattie Jung and Aana Marie Vigen
God, Science, Sex, Gender: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Christian Ethics is a timely, wide-ranging attempt to rescue dialogues on human sexuality, sexual diversity, and gender from insular exchanges based primarily on biblical scholarship and denominational ideology. Too often, dialogues on sexuality and gender devolve into the repetition of party lines and defensive postures, without considering the interdisciplinary body of scholarly research on this complex subject. This volume expands beyond the usual parameters, opening the discussion to scholars in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences to foster the development of Christian sexual ethics for contemporary times.
Essays by prominent and emerging scholars in the fields of anthropology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, literary studies, theology, and ethics reveal how faith and reason can illuminate our understanding of human sexual and gender diversity. Focusing on the intersection of theology and science and incorporating feminist theory, God, Science, Sex, Gender is a much-needed call for Christian ethicists to map the origins and full range of human sexual experience and gender identity. Essays delve into why human sexuality and gender can be so controversial in Christian contexts, investigate the complexity of sexuality in humans and other species, and reveal the implications of diversity for Christian moral theology.
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