Fragments: The Existential Situation of Our Time: Selected Essays, Volume 1 (2020)

by David Tracy

 

David Tracy is widely considered one of the most important religious thinkers in North America, known for his pluralistic vision and disciplinary breadth. His first book in more than twenty years reflects Tracy’s range and erudition, collecting essays from the 1980s to 2018 into a two-volume work that will be greeted with joy by his admirers and praise from new readers.

 

In the first volume, Fragments, Tracy gathers his most important essays on broad theological questions, beginning with the problem of suffering across Greek tragedy, Christianity, and Buddhism. The volume goes on to address the Infinite, and the many attempts to categorize and name it by Plato, Aristotle, Rilke, Heidegger, and others. In the remaining essays, he reflects on questions of the invisible, contemplation, hermeneutics, and public theology. Throughout, Tracy evokes the potential of fragments (understood both as concepts and events) to shatter closed systems and open us to difference and Infinity. Covering science, literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and non-Western religious traditions, Tracy provides in Fragments a guide for any open reader to rethink our fragmenting contemporary culture.

 

Tiny You: A Western History of the Anti-Abortion Movement (2020)

by Jennifer L. Holland

 

Tiny You tells the story of one of the most successful political movements of the twentieth century: the grassroots campaign against legalized abortion. While Americans have rapidly changed their minds about sex education, pornography, arts funding, gay teachers, and ultimately gay marriage, opposition to legalized abortion has only grown. As other socially conservative movements have lost young activists, the pro-life movement has successfully recruited more young people to its cause. Jennifer L. Holland explores why abortion dominates conservative politics like no other cultural issue. Looking at antiabortion movements in four western states since the 1960s—turning to the fetal pins passed around church services, the graphic images exchanged between friends, and the fetus dolls given to children in school—she argues that activists made fetal life feel personal to many Americans. Pro-life activists persuaded people to see themselves in the pins, images, and dolls they held in their hands and made the fight against abortion the primary bread-and-butter issue for social conservatives. Holland ultimately demonstrates that the success of the pro-life movement lies in the borrowed logic and emotional power of leftist activism.

 

Unequal Partners: In Search of Transnational Catholic Sisterhood (2020)

by Casey Ritchie Clevenger

 

When we think of Catholicism, we think of Europe and the United States as the seats of its power. But while much of Catholicism remains headquartered in the West, the Church’s center of gravity has shifted to Africa, Latin America, and developing Asia. Focused on the transnational Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, Unequal Partners explores the ways gender, race, economic inequality, and colonial history play out in religious organizations, revealing how their members are constantly negotiating and reworking the frameworks within which they operate.

 

Taking us from Belgium and the United States to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, sociologist Casey Clevenger offers rare insight into how the sisters of this order work across national boundaries, shedding light on the complex relationships among individuals, social groups, and formal organizations. Throughout, Clevenger skillfully weaves the sisters’ own voices into her narrative, helping us understand how the order has remained whole over time. A thoughtful analysis of the ties that bind—and divide—the sisters, Unequal Partners is a rich look at transnationalism’s ongoing impact on Catholicism.

 

Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O'Connor (2020)

by Angela Alaimo O'Donnell

 

Radical Ambivalence is the first book-length study of Flannery O’Connor’s attitude toward race in her fiction and correspondence. It is also the first study to include controversial material from unpublished letters that reveals the complex and troubling nature of O’Connor’s thoughts on the subject. O’Connor lived and did most of her writing in her native Georgia during the tumultuous years of the civil rights movement. In one of her letters, O’Connor frankly expresses her double-mindedness regarding the social and political upheaval taking place in the United States with regard to race: “I hope that to be of two minds about some things is not to be neutral.” Radical Ambivalence explores this double-mindedness and how it manifests itself in O’Connor’s fiction.

 

Visions of Amen: The Early Life and Music of Olivier Messiaen (2014)

by Stephen Schloesser

 

Loyola University Chicago scholar, Stephen Schloesser, S.J. turns his attention to French composer Olivier Messiaen (1908- 1992). Messiaen is probably best known for his Quartet for the End of Time, premiered in a German prisoner-of-war camp in 1941. However, Messiaen was a remarkably complex, intelligent person with a sometimes tragic domestic life who composed a wide range of music. This book explores the enormous web of influences in the early part of Messiaen's long life.

 

The first section of the book provides an intellectual biography of Messiaen's early life in order to make his (difficult) music more accessible to the general listener. The second section offers an analysis of and thematic commentaries on Messiaen's pivotal work for two pianos, Visions of Amen, composed in 1943. Schloesser's analysis includes timing indications corresponding to a downloadable performance of the work by accomplished pianists Stéphane Lemelin and Hyesook Kim.

 

Like the Dewfall (2019)

by John F. Deane

 

Like the Dewfall is a stunning new sequence of poems by John F. Deane. It is written in seven sections, following the seven compositions that comprise Olivier Messiaen’s Visions de l’Amen suite for two pianos, written during the Nazi occupation of Paris in 1943. This collection pairs well with Fr. Schloesser's book and was inspired by it, as Deane writes in the foreword to his beautiful set of poems.

 

Missionaries (2020)
by Phil Klay

A group of Colombian soldiers prepares to raid a drug lord’s safe house on the Venezuelan border. They’re watching him with an American-made drone, about to strike using military tactics taught to them by U.S. soldiers who honed their skills to lethal perfection in Iraq. In Missionaries, Phil Klay examines the globalization of violence through the interlocking stories of four characters and the conflicts that define their lives.

Drawing on six years of research in America and Colombia into the effects of the modern way of war on regular people, Klay has written a novel of extraordinary suspense infused with geopolitical sophistication and storytelling instincts that are second to none. Missionaries is a window not only into modern war, but into the individual lives that go on long after the drones have left the skies.

Shrapnel Maps (2020)
by Philip Metres

Writing into the wounds and reverberations of the Israel/Palestine conflict, Philip Metres’ fourth book of poems, Shrapnel Maps, is at once elegiac and activist, an exploratory surgery to extract the slivers of cartography through palimpsest and erasure. A wedding in Toura, a suicide bombing in Jerusalem, uneasy interactions between Arab and Jewish neighbors in University Heights, the expulsion of Palestinians in Jaffa, another bombing in Gaza: Shrapnel Maps traces the hurt and tender places, where political noise turns into the voices of Palestinians and Israelis. Working with documentary flyers, vintage postcards, travelogues, cartographic language, and first person testimonies, Shrapnel Maps ranges from monologue sonnets to prose vignettes, polyphonics to blackouts, indices to simultaneities, as Palestinians and Israelis long for justice and peace, for understanding and survival.

Self-Transcendence and Virtue: Perspectives from Philosophy, Psychology, and Theology (2020)
edited by Jennifer A. Frey and Candace Vogler

Recent research in the humanities and social sciences suggests that individuals who understand themselves as belonging to something greater than the self—a family, community, or religious or spiritual group—often feel happier, have a deeper sense of purpose or meaning in their lives, and have overall better life outcomes than those who do not. Some positive and personality psychologists have labeled this location of the self within a broader perspective "self-transcendence." This book presents and integrates new, interdisciplinary research into virtue, happiness, and the meaning of life by re-orienting these discussions around the concept of self-transcendence.

Religion in the Anthropocene (2017)
edited by Celia Deane-Drummond, Sigurd Bergmann, and Markus Vogt

This book charts a new direction in humanities scholarship through serious engagement with the geopolitical concept of the Anthropocene. Drawing on religious studies, theology, social science, history and philosophy, and can be broadly termed the environmental humanities, this collection represents a groundbreaking critical analysis of diverse narratives on the Anthropocene. The contributors to this volume recognize that the Anthropocene began as a geological concept, the age of the humans, but that its implications are much wider than this. Will the Anthropocene have good or bad ethical outcomes? Does the Anthropocene idea challenge the possibility of a sacred Nature, which shores up many religious approaches to environmental ethics? Or is the Anthropocene a secularized theological anthropology more properly dealt with through traditional concepts from Catholic social teaching on human ecology? Do theological traditions, such as Christology, reinforce negative aspects of the Anthropocene? Not all contributors in this volume agree with the answers to these different questions. Readers will be challenged, provoked, and stimulated by this book.

Pedro Arrupe: Witness of the Twentieth Century, Prophet of the Twenty-First (2020)
by Pedro Miguel Lamet

Pedro Miguel Lamet researched Arrupe’s life for five years in Rome, Japan, and the Basque Country, and he had the privilege of spending many hours conversing with Arrupe after he had suffered a debilitating stroke. Drawing on a vast variety of sources, Lamet has written this entertaining and captivating biography, which has been revised several times and is already a classic, available now for the first time in English. Fr. Adolfo Nicolás, S.J., the 30th Superior General of the Society of Jesus states in the prologue, "this biography has the merit of being the very first to trace with fidelity [Pedro Arrupe's] human and spiritual profile and to make it available to a larger public."

Latin American Theology: Roots and Branches (2016)
by Maria Clara Bingemer

With the emergence of liberation theology in the 1970s, Latin American theology made a bold entrance on the world scene. The immediate roots of this theology were in the efforts of the Latin American bishops at the Medellin Conference in 1968 to reflect on the implications of the Second Vatican Council for a continent marked by poverty and social injustice. That conference charted a new “preferential option for the poor,” and it also fostered a new method of theology, rooted in the experience and perspective of those on the margins.

Maria Clara Bingemer, a key protagonist in the development of Latin American theology, provides a succinct summary of this history and its distinctive elements. She goes on to show how this theology grew and adapted to new challenges, including the issues of gender, the role of indigenous voices, concern for ecology, and dialogue with other religious traditions.

Via Negativa (2020)
by Daniel Hornsby

Father Dan is homeless. Dismissed by his conservative diocese for eccentricity and insubordination, he’s made his exile into a kind of pilgrimage, transforming his Toyota Camry into a mobile monk’s cell. Like the ascetic religious philosophers he idolizes, he intends to spend his trip in peaceful contemplation. But then he sees a minivan sideswipe a coyote. Unable to suppress his Franciscan impulses, he takes the wild animal in, wrapping its broken leg with an old T-shirt and feeding it Spam with a plastic spoon.

With his unexpected canine companion in the backseat, Dan makes his way west, encountering other offbeat travelers and stopping to take in the occasional roadside novelty (MARTIN’S HOLE TO HELL, WORLD-FAMOUS BOTTOMLESS PIT NEXT EXIT!). But the coyote is far from the only oddity fate has delivered into this churchless priest’s care: it has also given him a bone-handled pistol, a box of bullets, and a letter from his estranged friend Paul—a summons of sorts, pulling him forward.

By the time Dan gets to where he’s going, he’ll be forced to reckon once and for all with the great mistakes of his past, and he will have to decide: is penance better paid with revenge, or with redemption?

Laudato Si': On Care for Our Common Home (2015)
By Pope Francis

 

In his second encyclical, Pope Francis draws all Christians into a dialogue with every person on the planet about our common home. We as human beings are united by the concern for our planet, and every living thing that dwells on it, especially the poorest and most vulnerable. Pope Francis' letter joins the body of the Church's social and moral teaching, draws on the best scientific research, providing the foundation for "the ethical and spiritual itinerary that follows."

 

What You Have Heard is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance (2019)
By Carolyn Forché

 

Carolyn Forché is twenty-seven when the mysterious stranger appears on her doorstep. The relative of a friend, he is a charming polymath with a mind as seemingly disordered as it is brilliant. She's heard rumors from her friend about who he might be: a lone wolf, a communist, a CIA operative, a sharpshooter, a revolutionary, a small coffee farmer, but according to her, no one seemed to know for certain. He has driven from El Salvador to invite Forché to visit and learn about his country. Captivated for reasons she doesn't fully understand, she accepts and becomes enmeshed in something beyond her comprehension.

 

Together they meet with high-ranking military officers, impoverished farm workers, and clergy desperately trying to assist the poor and keep the peace. These encounters are a part of his plan to educate her, but also to learn for himself just how close the country is to war. As priests and farm-workers are murdered and protest marches attacked, he is determined to save his country, and Forché is swept up in his work and in the lives of his friends. Pursued by death squads and sheltering in safe houses, the two forge a rich friendship, as she attempts to make sense of what she's experiencing and establish a moral foothold amidst profound suffering. This is the powerful story of a poet's experience in a country on the verge of war, and a journey toward social conscience in a perilous time.

 

Chicago Católico: Making Catholic Parishes Mexican (2020)
By Deborah E. Kanter

 

Today, over one hundred Chicago-area Catholic churches offer Spanish-language mass to congregants. How did the city's Mexican population, contained in just two parishes prior to 1960, come to reshape dozens of parishes and neighborhoods?

 

Deborah E. Kanter tells the story of neighborhood change and rebirth in Chicago's Mexican American communities. She unveils a vibrant history of Mexican American and Mexican immigrant relations as remembered by laity and clergy, schoolchildren and their female religious teachers, parish athletes and coaches, European American neighbors, and the immigrant women who organized as guadalupanas and their husbands who took part in the Holy Name Society. Kanter shows how the newly arrived mixed memories of home into learning the ways of Chicago to create new identities. In an ever-evolving city, Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans' fierce devotion to their churches transformed neighborhoods such as Pilsen.

 

The first-ever study of Mexican-descent Catholicism in the city, Chicago Católico illuminates a previously unexplored facet of the urban past and provides present-day lessons for American communities undergoing ethnic integration and succession.

 

Fragments: The Existential Situation of Our Time: Selected Essays, vol. 1 (2020)
By David Tracy

 

David Tracy is widely considered one of the most important religious thinkers in North America, known for his pluralistic vision and disciplinary breadth. His first book in more than twenty years reflects Tracy's range and erudition, collecting essays from the 1980s to 2018 into a two-volume work that will be greeted with joy by his admirers and praise from new readers.

 

In the first volume, Fragments, Tracy gathers his most important essays on broad theological questions, beginning with the problem of suffering across Greek tragedy, Christianity, and Buddhism. The volume goes on to address the Infinite, and the many attempts to categorize and name it by Plato, Aristotle, Rilke, Heidegger, and others. In the remaining essays, he reflects on questions of the invisible, contemplation, hermeneutics, and public theology. Throughout, Tracy evokes the potential of fragments (understood both as concepts and events) to shatter closed systems and open us to difference and Infinity. Covering science, literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and non-Western religious traditions, Tracy provides in Fragments a guide for any open reader to rethink our fragmenting contemporary culture.

 

Imagining Judeo-Christian America: Religion, Secularism, and the Redefinition of Democracy (2019)
By K. Healan Gaston

 

"Judeo-Christian" is a remarkably easy term to look right through. Judaism and Christianity obviously share tenets, texts, and beliefs that have strongly influenced American democracy. In this ambitious book, however, K. Healan Gaston challenges the myth of a monolithic Judeo-Christian America. She demonstrates that the idea is not only a recent and deliberate construct, but also a potentially dangerous one. From the time of its widespread adoption in the 1930s, the ostensible inclusiveness of Judeo-Christian terminology concealed efforts to promote particular conceptions of religion, secularism, and politics. Gaston also shows that this new language, originally rooted in arguments over the nature of democracy that intensified in the early Cold War years, later became a marker in the culture wars that continue today. She argues that the debate on what constituted Judeo-Christian-and American-identity has shaped the country's religious and political culture much more extensively than previously recognized.

 

The Varieties of Nonreligious Experience: Atheism in American Culture (2019)
By Jerome P. Baggett

 

Self-identified atheists make up roughly 5 percent of the American religious landscape, comprising a larger population than Jehovah's Witnesses, Orthodox Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus combined. In spite of their relatively significant presence in society, atheists are one of the most stigmatized groups in the United States, frequently portrayed as immoral, unhappy, or even outright angry. Yet we know very little about what their lives are actually like as they live among their largely religious, and sometimes hostile, fellow citizens.

 

In this book, Jerome P. Baggett listens to what atheists have to say about their own lives and viewpoints. Drawing on questionnaires and interviews with more than five hundred American atheists scattered across the country, The Varieties of Nonreligious Experience uncovers what they think about morality, what gives meaning to their lives, how they feel about religious people, and what they think and know about religion itself.

 

Though the wider public routinely understands atheists in negative terms, as people who do not believe in God, Baggett pushes readers to view them in a different light. Rather than simply rejecting God and religion, atheists actually embrace something much more substantive-lives marked by greater integrity, open-mindedness, and progress.

 

Beyond just talking about or to American atheists, the time is overdue to let them speak for themselves. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in joining the conversation.

 

Avery Dulles: Essential Writings from America Magazine (2019)
By Avery Dulles, S.J.; Edited by James T. Keane

 

Cardinal Avery Dulles, S.J. (1918-2008), was one of the leading American Catholic theologians of the twentieth century. Published in partnership with America Media, this collection of Dulles's essential work from America magazine includes more than five decades of writing that showcases his wide-ranging interests in ecclesiology, salvation history, pastoral theology, and contemporary literature and reflects the Jesuit's warm personality and astute insights on the Church in an era of great change.

 

Avery Dulles: The Essential Writings from America Magazine includes occasional and formal writing, book reviews, reflections, and extended essays from America. Known as a synthesizer of Catholic thought from disparate traditions and theological positions, Dulles is perhaps best known for his book Models of the Church, one of a number of important academic works he wrote. Dulles was the author of twenty-five books and produced hundreds of articles for America and other journals.

 

In these selections from America, Dulles reflects on theological questions such as the relationship between faith and reason, as well as events like the Second Vatican Council that affected average Catholics. Avery Dulles also includes the late cardinal's exploration of the teachings of John Paul II and the authority of the episcopacy-solidifying our understanding of Dulles as both a towering figure and a mediating voice in American Catholicism.

 

Song of Solomon (1977)
By Toni Morrison

 

Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family’s origins, Morrison introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized black world.

 

Racial Justice and the Catholic Church (2010)
By Bryan N. Massingale

 

Confronting racism is difficult but essential work if we are to heal the brokenness in our society and our church. In the author's words, "We all are wounded by the sin of racism... How can we struggle together against an evil that harms us all?" Racial Justice and the Catholic Church examines the presence of racism in America from its early history through the Civil Rights Movement and the election of Barack Obama. It also explores how Catholic social teaching has been used--and not used--to promote reconciliation and justice.

 

Massingale writes from an abiding conviction that the Catholic faith and the black experience make essential contributions in the continuing struggle against racial injustice that is the work of all people. His book is essential reading for all those concerned with justice and healing in our world.

 

The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity (2019)
By Eugene McCarraher

 

If socialists and Wall Street bankers can agree on anything, it is the extreme rationalism of capital. At least since Max Weber, capitalism has been understood as part of the “disenchantment” of the world, stripping material objects and social relations of their mystery and sacredness. Ignoring the motive force of the spirit, capitalism rejects the awe-inspiring divine for the economics of supply and demand.

 

Eugene McCarraher challenges this conventional view. Capitalism, he argues, is full of sacrament, whether or not it is acknowledged. Capitalist enchantment first flowered in the fields and factories of England and was brought to America by Puritans and evangelicals whose doctrine made ample room for industry and profit. Later, the corporation was mystically animated with human personhood, to preside over the Fordist endeavor to build a heavenly city of mechanized production and communion. By the twenty-first century, capitalism has become thoroughly enchanted by the neoliberal deification of “the market.” Informed by cultural history and theology as well as economics, management theory, and marketing, The Enchantments of Mammon looks not to Marx and progressivism but to nineteenth-century Romantics for salvation. The Romantic imagination favors craft, the commons, and sensitivity to natural wonder. It promotes labor that, for the sake of the person, combines reason, creativity, and mutual aid. In this impassioned challenge, McCarraher makes the case that capitalism has hijacked and redirected our intrinsic longing for divinity-and urges us to break its hold on our souls.

 

America's Most Famous Catholic (According to Himself): Stephen Colbert and American Religion in the Twenty-First Century (2019)
By Stephanie N. Brehm

 

Religion and the foibles of religious institutions have served as rich fodder for scores of comedians over the years. What set Stephen Colbert's persona, “Colbert,” apart on his Comedy Central show, The Colbert Report, was that his critical observations were made more powerful and harder to ignore because he approached religious material not from the predictable stance of the irreverent secular comedian but from his position as one of the faithful. He is a Catholic celebrity who can bridge critical outsider and participating insider, neither fully reverent nor fully irreverent.

 

Providing a digital media ethnography and rhetorical analysis of Stephen Colbert and his character from 2005 to 2014, author Stephanie N. Brehm examines the intersection between lived religion and mass media, moving from an exploration of how Catholicism shapes Colbert’s life and world toward a conversation about how “Colbert” shapes Catholicism. Brehm provides historical context by discovering how “Colbert” compares to other Catholic figures, such Don Novello, George Carlin, Louis C.K., and Jim Gaffigan, who have each presented their views of Catholicism to Americans through radio, film, and television. The last chapter provides a current glimpse of Colbert on The Late Show, where he continues to be a voice for Catholicism on late night, now to an even broader audience.

 

Future Home of the Living God (2017)
By Louise Erdrich

 

Louise Erdrich, the New York Times bestselling, National Book Award-winning author of LaRose and The Round House, paints a startling portrait of a young woman fighting for her life and her unborn child against oppressive forces that manifest in the wake of a cataclysmic event.

 

The world as we know it is ending. Evolution has reversed itself, affecting every living creature on earth. Science cannot stop the world from running backwards, as woman after woman gives birth to infants that appear to be primitive species of humans. Twenty-six-year-old Cedar Hawk Songmaker, adopted daughter of a pair of big-hearted, open-minded Minneapolis liberals, is as disturbed and uncertain as the rest of America around her. But for Cedar, this change is profound and deeply personal. She is four months pregnant. Though she wants to tell the adoptive parents who raised her from infancy, Cedar first feels compelled to find her birth mother, Mary Potts, an Ojibwe living on the reservation, to understand both her and her baby’s origins. As Cedar goes back to her own biological beginnings, society around her begins to disintegrate, fueled by a swelling panic about the end of humanity.A chilling dystopian novel both provocative and prescient, Future Home of the Living God is a startlingly original work from one of our most acclaimed writers: a moving meditation on female agency, self-determination, biology, and natural rights that speaks to the troubling changes of our time.

 

Catholic Bioethics and Social Justice: The Praxis of US Health Care in a Globalized World (2019)
Edited by M. Therese Lysaught and Michael McCarthy; Foreword by Lisa Sowle Cahill

 

Catholic health care is one of the key places where the church lives Catholic social teaching (CST). Yet the individualistic methodology of Catholic bioethics inherited from the manualist tradition has yet to incorporate this critical component of the Catholic moral tradition. Informed by the places where Catholic health care intersects with the diverse societal injustices embodied in the patients it encounters, this book brings the lens of CST to bear on Catholic health care, illuminating a new spectrum of ethical issues and practical recommendations from social determinants of health, immigration, diversity and disparities, behavioral health, gender-questioning patients, and environmental and global health issues.

 

Converts to the Real: Catholicism and the Making of Continental Philosophy (2019)
by Edward Baring

 

Of all modern schools of thought, phenomenology has the strongest claim to the mantle of "continental" philosophy. In the first half of the twentieth century, phenomenology expanded from a few German towns into a movement spanning Europe. Edward Baring shows that credit for this prodigious growth goes to a surprising group of early enthusiasts: Catholic intellectuals. Placing phenomenology in historical context, Baring reveals the enduring influence of Catholicism in twentieth-century intellectual thought.

 

Converts to the Real argues that Catholic scholars allied with phenomenology because they thought it mapped a path out of modern idealism-which they associated with Protestantism and secularization-and back to Catholic metaphysics. Seeing in this unfulfilled promise a bridge to Europe's secular academy, Catholics set to work extending phenomenology's reach, writing many of the first phenomenological publications in languages other than German and organizing the first international conferences on phenomenology. The Church even helped rescue Edmund Husserl's papers from Nazi Germany in 1938. But phenomenology proved to be an unreliable ally, and in debates over its meaning and development, Catholic intellectuals contemplated the ways it might threaten the faith. As a result, Catholics showed that phenomenology could be useful for secular projects, and encouraged its adoption by the philosophical establishment in countries across Europe and beyond.

Baring traces the resonances of these Catholic debates in postwar Europe. From existentialism, through the phenomenology of Paul Ricoeur and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, to the speculative realism of the present, European thought bears the mark of Catholicism, the original continental philosophy.

 

Apostles of Empire: The Jesuits and New France (2019)
by Bronwen McShea

 

Apostles of Empire is a revisionist history of the French Jesuit mission to indigenous North Americans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, offering a comprehensive view of a transatlantic enterprise in which secular concerns were integral. Between 1611 and 1764, 320 Jesuits were sent from France to North America to serve as missionaries. Most labored in colonial New France, a vast territory comprising eastern Canada and the Great Lakes region that was inhabited by diverse Native American populations. Although committed to spreading Catholic doctrines and rituals and adapting them to diverse indigenous cultures, these missionaries also devoted significant energy to more-worldly concerns, particularly the transatlantic expansion of the absolutist-era Bourbon state and the importation of the culture of elite, urban French society.

In Apostles of Empire, Bronwen McShea accounts for these secular dimensions of the mission's history through candid portraits of Jesuits engaged in a range of secular activities. We see them not only preaching and catechizing in terms that borrowed from indigenous idioms but also cultivating trade and military partnerships between the French and various Indian tribes. Apostles of Empire contributes to ongoing research on the Jesuits, New France, and Atlantic World encounters, as well as on early modern French society, print culture, Catholicism, and imperialism. McShea shows how the Jesuits' robust conceptions of secular spheres of Christian action informed their efforts from both sides of the Atlantic to build up a French and Catholic empire in North America through significant indigenous cooperation.

 

Vatican I: The Council and the Making of the Ultramontane Church (2018)
by John W. O'Malley

 

The enduring influence of the Catholic Church has many sources-its spiritual and intellectual appeal, missionary achievements, wealth, diplomatic effectiveness, and stable hierarchy. But in the first half of the nineteenth century, the foundations upon which the church had rested for centuries were shaken. In the eyes of many thoughtful people, liberalism in the guise of liberty, equality, and fraternity was the quintessence of the evils that shook those foundations. At the Vatican Council of 1869-1870, thechurch made a dramatic effort to set things right by defining the doctrine of papal infallibility.

 

In Vatican I: The Council and the Making of the Ultramontane Church, John W. O'Malley draws us into the bitter controversies over papal infallibility that at one point seemed destined to rend the church in two. Archbishop Henry Manning was the principal driving force for the definition, and Lord Acton was his brilliant counterpart on the other side. But they shrink in significance alongside Pope Pius IX, whose zeal for the definition was so notable that it raised questions about the very legitimacy of the council. Entering the fray were politicians such as Gladstone and Bismarck. The growing tension in the council played out within the larger drama of the seizure of the Papal States by Italian forces and its seemingly inevitable consequence, the conquest of Rome itself.

 

Largely as a result of the council and its aftermath, the Catholic Church became more pope-centered than ever before. In the terminology of the period, it became ultramontane.

 

Religion in the University (2019)
by Nicholas Wolterstorff

 

What is religion's place within the academy today? Are the perspectives of religious believers acceptable in an academic setting? In this lucid and penetrating essay, Nicholas Wolterstorff ranges from Max Weber and John Locke to Ludwig Wittgenstein and Charles Taylor to argue that religious orientations and voices do have a home in the modern university, and he offers a sketch of what that home should be like.

 

He documents the remarkable changes that have occurred within the academy over the past five decades with regard to how knowledge is understood. During the same period, profound philosophical advancements have also been made in our understanding of religious belief. These shifting ideals, taken together, have created an environment that is more pluralistic than secular. Tapping into larger debates on freedom of expression and intellectual diversity, Wolterstorff believes a scholarly ethic should guard us against becoming, in Weber's words, "specialists without spirit and sensualists without heart."

 

He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art (2018)
by Christian Wiman

 

What is it we want when we can't stop wanting? And how do we make that hunger productive and vital rather than corrosive and destructive? These are the questions that animate Christian Wiman as he explores the relationships between art and faith, death and fame, heaven and oblivion. Above all, He Held Radical Light is a love letter to poetry, filled with moving, surprising, and sometimes funny encounters with the poets Wiman has known. Seamus Heaney opens a suddenly intimate conversation about faith; Mary Oliver puts half of a dead pigeon in her pocket; A. R. Ammons stands up in front of an audience and refuses to read. He Held Radical Light is as urgent and intense as it is lively and entertaining-a sharp sequel to Wiman's earlier memoir, My Bright Abyss.

 

Letters from Father Christmas (2012)
by J.R.R. Tolkien

 

This classic festive book of Tolkien's amazing Father Christmas letters written to his children between the 1920s and the 1940s has been reworked into a new and attractive edition. It contains brand new high-quality digital reproductions of his amazing letters and pictures, including a number of them that have never been printed before.

 

Wounded Shepherd: Pope Francis and His Struggle to Convert the Catholic Church (2019)
by Austen Ivereigh

 

This deeply contextual biography centers on the tensions generated by the pope’s attempt to turn the Church away from power and tradition and outwards to engage humanity with God’s mercy. Through battles with corrupt bankers and worldly cardinals, in turbulent meetings and on global trips, history’s first Latin-American pope has attempted to reshape the Church to evangelize the contemporary age. At the same time, he has stirred other leaders’ deep-seated fear that the Church is capitulating to modernity-leaders who have challenged his bid to create a more welcoming, attentive institution.

 

Facing rebellions over his allowing sacraments for the divorced and his attempt to create a more "ecological" Catholicism, as well as a firestorm of criticism for the Church’s record on sexual abuse, Francis emerges as a leader of remarkable vision and skill with a relentless spiritual focus-a leader who is at peace in the turmoil surrounding him.

 

With entertaining anecdotes, insider accounts, and expert analysis, Ivereigh’s journey through the key episodes of Francis’s reform in Rome and the wider Church brings into sharp focus the frustrations and fury, as well as the joys and successes, of one of the most remarkable pontificates of the contemporary age.

 

American Catholics and the Church of Tomorrow: Building Churches for the Future, 1925-1975 (2018)
by Catherine R. Osborne

 

In the mid-twentieth century, American Catholic churches began to shed the ubiquitous spires, stained glass, and gargoyles of their European forebears, turning instead toward startling and more angular structures of steel, plate glass, and concrete. But how did an institution like the Catholic Church, so often seen as steeped in inflexible traditions, come to welcome this modernist trend?

 

Catherine R. Osborne’s innovative new book finds the answer: the alignment between postwar advancements in technology and design and evolutionary thought within the burgeoning American Catholic community.  A new, visibly contemporary approach to design, church leaders thought, could lead to the rebirth of the church community of the future. As Osborne explains, the engineering breakthroughs that made modernist churches feasible themselves raised questions that were, for many Catholics, fundamentally theological. Couldn’t technological improvements engender worship spaces that better reflected God's presence in the contemporary world? Detailing the social, architectural, and theological movements that made modern churches possible, American Catholics and the Churches of Tomorrow breaks important new ground in the history of American Catholicism, and also presents new lines of thought for scholars attracted to modern architectural and urban history.

 

Stroke of a Pen: Essays on Poetry and Other Provocations (2011)
by Samuel Hazo

 

For over five decades, Samuel Hazo has taught his readers about literature and life with generosity and awareness, taking everyday experiences and translating them into songs at once familiar and surprising. In his poetry, fiction, essays, and plays, Hazo, in a style that is unmistakably his own, extols the wonderment and discovery that emerge in the act of writing, in the movement toward wisdom that results from the expression of feeling. The Stroke of a Pen is a collection of occasional essays on a variety of subjects, from the relationship between poetry and public speech, to the pursuit of the literary life, to reading within a cultural context governed by power relations. Two essays focus on religion and literature, and the final five include a literary travel essay on Provence, a counterpointing one on the virtues of not traveling but remaining home, a lighter essay that extends the discussion of home to houses, a memory piece on the actor Gregory Peck, and a personal reflection on the author's retirement. Throughout, Hazo is belletristic in his approach, calling on such writers as T. S. Eliot, Wilfred Owen, Jacques Maritain, and Nathan A. Scott, Jr., who deeply influences Hazo's thinking and writing in this entertaining collection.

 

"this need to dance / this need to kneel": Denise Levertov and the Poetics of Faith (2019)
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.

 

 

Night at the Fiestas (2015)
by Kirstin Valdez Quade

 

Winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize.

 

Kirstin Valdez Quade's unforgettable stories plunge us into the fierce, troubled hearts of characters defined by the desire to escape the past or else to plumb its depths. Always hopeful, these stories chart the passions and obligations of family life, exploring themes of race, class, and coming-of-age, as Quade's characters protect, betray, wound, undermine, bolster, define, and, ultimately, save each other.

 

The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded (2017)
by Molly McCully Brown

 

Haunted by the voices of those committed to the notorious Virginia State Colony, an epicenter of the American eugenics movement in the first half of the twentieth century, this evocative debut marks the emergence of a poet of exceptional poise and compassion, who grew up in the shadow of the Colony itself. Molly McCully Brown's poems are a chorus of women who’ve long been denied a voice and, disarmingly, those who witnessed- or inflicted- their agony. Yet for all the horrors it channels, Brown’s visionary book uplifts through communion. In her poems, Brown listens to the callers from a dark past and takes on their anguish.

 

Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period (2017)
by Anthony Domestico

 

Following the religious turn in other disciplines, literary critics have emphasized how modernists like Woolf and Joyce were haunted by Christianity’s cultural traces despite their own lack of belief. In Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period, Anthony Domestico takes a different tack, arguing that modern poets such as T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and David Jones were interested not just in the aesthetic or social implications of religious experience but also in the philosophically rigorous, dogmatic vision put forward by contemporary theology. Domestico examines both modernist institutions (the Criterion) and specific works of modern poetry (Eliot’s Four Quartets and Jones’s The Anathemata). The book also traces the contours of what it dubs "theological modernism": a body of poetry that is both theological and modernist. In doing so, this book offers a new literary history of the modernist period, one that attends both to the material circulation of texts and to the broader intellectual currents of the time.

 

Into the Deep: An Unlikely Catholic Conversion (2018)
by Abigail Rine Favale

 

Into the Deep traces one woman’s spiritual odyssey from birthright evangelicalism through postmodern feminism and, ultimately, into the Roman Catholic Church. As a college student, Abigail Favale experienced a feminist awakening that reshaped her life and faith. A decade later, on the verge of atheism, she found herself entering the oldest male-helmed institution on the planet-the last place she expected to be. Into the Deep is a thoroughly twenty-first-century conversion, a compelling account of recovering an ancient faith after a decade of doubt.

 

Walker Percy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the Search for Influence (2017)
by Jessica Hooten Wilson

 

Although Walker Percy named many influences on his work and critics have zeroed in on Kierkegaard in particular, no one has considered his intentional influence: the nineteenth-century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. In a study that revives and complicates notions of adaptation and influence, Jessica Hooten Wilson details the long career of Walker Percy. Walker Percy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the Search for Influence demonstrates- through close reading of both writers’ works, examination of archival materials, and biographical criticism- not only how pervasive and inescapable Dostoevsky’s influence was but also how necessary it was to the distinctive strengths of Percy’s fiction.

 

The Sun and Other Stars (2014)
by Brigid Pasulka

 

From PEN/Hemingway award winner Brigid Pasulka, the “charming...refreshing tale” (The New York Times Book Review) of a widowed butcher and his son whose losses are transformed into love in a small town on the Italian Riviera. “Full of light and surprising grace, [The Sun and Other Stars] is both a poetic coming-of-age story and a poignant examination of the nature of family and belonging” (The Boston Globe). It is a gorgeous, celebratory novel about families, compromise, and community, a big-hearted masterpiece that showcases a writer at the joyful height of her talents.

 

Listen and other Stories (2015)
by Liam Callanan

 

Liam Callanan, author of the critically acclaimed novels The Cloud Atlas and All Saints, returns with a short story collection that crosses decades, oceans and continents in pursuit of stories that, like its title suggests, are more than worthy of a listen. 

 

The Transcendental Style in Film (2018)
by Paul Schrader

 

With a new introduction, acclaimed director and screenwriter Paul Schrader revisits and updates his contemplation of slow cinema over the past fifty years. Unlike the style of psychological realism, which dominates film, the transcendental style expresses a spiritual state by means of austere camerawork, acting devoid of self-consciousness, and editing that avoids editorial comment. This seminal text analyzes the film style of three great directors-Yasujiro Ozu, Robert Bresson, and Carl Dreyer-and posits a common dramatic language used by these artists from divergent cultures. The new edition updates Schrader's theoretical framework and extends his theory to the works of Andrei Tarkovsky (Russia), Béla Tarr (Hungary), Theo Angelopoulos (Greece), and Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Turkey), among others. This key work by one of our most searching directors and writers is widely cited and used in film and art classes. With evocative prose and nimble associations, Schrader consistently urges readers and viewers alike to keep exploring the world of the art film.

 

The World Within the Word: Maritain and the Poet (2018; first edition 1957)
by Samuel Hazo

 

This book, written in 1957, arises from the encounter of two men: the American poet Samuel Hazo and the French philosopher Jacques Maritain. They met on September 12, 1956, at Maritain's home in Princeton, New Jersey. Hazo sought to engage Maritain's diffuse writings in aesthetics by bringing them into conversation with the great voices of the English literary tradition, especially Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and John Keats.

 

Hazo was also striving to understand and articulate his own experience of the creative process. Then at the beginning of his writing life, he would later emerge as a leading voice in American poetry. He is the author of more than thirty collections, the winner of many awards, the founder of the International Poerty Forum, and a National Book Award finalist.

The World within the Word: Maritain and the Poet is the only book about Jacques Maritain for which Maritain himself wrote a foreword.

 

Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2014)
by Richard Rodriguez

 

An award-winning writer delivers a major reckoning with religion, place, and sexuality in the aftermath of 9/11.

Hailed in The Washington Post as "one of the most eloquent and probing public intellectuals in America," Richard Rodriguez now considers religious violence worldwide, growing public atheism in the West, and his own mortality.

Rodriguez's stylish new memoir-the first book in a decade from the Pulitzer Prize finalist-moves from Jerusalem to Silicon Valley, from Moses to Liberace, from Lance Armstrong to Mother Teresa. Rodriguez is a homosexual who writes with love of the religions of the desert that exclude him. He is a passionate, unorthodox Christian who is always mindful of his relationship to Judaism and Islam because of a shared belief in the God who revealed himself within an ecology of emptiness. And at the center of this book is a consideration of women-their importance to Rodriguez's spiritual formation and their centrality to the future of the desert religions.

 

Only a mind as elastic and refined as Rodriguez's could bind these threads together into this wonderfully complex tapestry.

 

Elizabeth Jennings: "The Inward War" (2018)
by Dana Greene

 

Elizabeth Jennings was one of the most popular, prolific, and widely anthologized lyric poets in the second half of the twentieth century. This first biography, based on extensive archival research and interviews with Jennings's contemporaries, integrates her life and work and explores the 'inward war' the poet experienced as a result of her gender, religion, and mental fragility.

 

Originally associated with the Movement, Jennings was sui generis, believing poetry was 'communication' and 'communion.' She wrote of nature, friendship, childhood, religion, love, and art, endearing her to a wide audience. Yet lifelong depression, unbearable loneliness, unrelenting fears, poverty, and physical illness plagued her. These were exacerbated by her gender in a male-dominated literary world and an inherited Catholic worldview which initially inculcated guilt and shame. However, a tenacious drive to be a poet made her, 'the most unconditionally loved writer of her generation.'

Although her claim was that the poem is not the poet, her life is tracked in her voluminous published and unpublished poetry and prose. The themes of mental illness, the importance of place, the problems associated with being an unmarried woman artist, her relationship with literary mentors and younger poets, her non-feminist feminism, and her marginality and sympathy for the outcast are all explored. It was poetry which saved her; it helped her push back darkness and discover order in the midst of chaos. Poetry was her raison d'etre. It was her life.

 

Still Pilgrim: Poems (2017)
by Angela Alaimo O'Donnell

 

Still Pilgrim is a collection of poems that chronicles the journey of life as seen through the eyes of a keenly-observant friend and fellow traveler. The reader accompanies the Still Pilgrim as she maps universal terrain, navigating the experiences that constitute her private history yet also serve to remind the reader of his or her own moments of enlightenment, epiphany, and encounter with mystery. Each of the 58 poems of the collection marks a way station along the pilgrimage where the Pilgrim and reader might pause and ponder before continuing with the inevitable march forward.

At the center of this travel book lies a paradox: the Pilgrim's desire for the gift of stillness amid the flux and flow of time, change, and circumstance. "Be still and know that I am God," sings the Psalmist, channeling the voice of the divine. "Teach us to care and not care. Teach us to sit still," prays the poet, T.S. Eliot. Still Pilgrim depicts and embodies this human dilemma--our inevitable movement through time, moment by moment, day by day, and the power of art to stop both time and our forward march, to capture the present moment so we might savor the flavor of life.

 

Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Critical Appropriation of Russian Religious Thought (2015)
by Jennifer Newsome Martin

 

In Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Critical Appropriation of Russian Religious Thought, Jennifer Newsome Martin offers the first systematic treatment and evaluation of the Swiss Catholic theologian's complex relation to modern speculative Russian religious philosophy. Her constructive analysis proceeds through Balthasar's critical reception of Vladimir Soloviev, Nicholai Berdyaev, and Sergei Bulgakov with respect to theological aesthetics, myth, eschatology, and Trinitarian discourse and examines how Balthasar adjudicates both the possibilities and the limits of theological appropriation, especially considering the degree to which these Russian thinkers have been influenced by German Idealism and Romanticism.

 

Martin argues that Balthasar's creative reception and modulation of the thought of these Russian philosophers is indicative of a broad speculative tendency in his work that deserves further attention. In this respect, Martin consciously challenges the prevailing view of Balthasar as a fundamentally conservative or nostalgic thinker. In her discussion of the relation between tradition and theological speculation, Martin also draws upon the understudied relation between Balthasar and F. W. J. Schelling, especially as Schelling's form of Idealism was passed down through the Russian thinkers. In doing so, she persuasively recasts Balthasar as an ecumenical, creatively anti-nostalgic theologian hospitable to the richness of contributions from extra-magisterial and non-Catholic sources.

 

Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard (2018)
By Cynthia L. Haven

 

René Girard (1923-2015) was one of the leading thinkers of our era-a provocative sage who bypassed prevailing orthodoxies to offer a bold, sweeping vision of human nature, human history, and human destiny. His oeuvre, offering a “mimetic theory” of cultural origins and human behavior, inspired such writers as Milan Kundera and J. M. Coetzee, and earned him a place among the forty “immortals” of the Académie Française. In this first-ever biographical study, Cynthia L. Haven traces the evolution of Girard’s thought in parallel with his life and times. She recounts his formative years in France and his arrival in a country torn by racial division, and reveals his insights into the collective delusions of our technological world and the changing nature of warfare. Drawing on interviews with Girard and his colleagues, Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard provides an essential introduction to one of the twentieth century’s most controversial and original minds. Haven will be speaking at the 2019 Catholic Imagination Conference hosted by the Hank Center.

 

Christian Flesh (2018)
By Paul J. Griffiths

 

A sustained and systematic theological reflection on the idea that being a Christian is, first and last, a matter of the flesh, Christian Flesh shows us what being a Christian means for fleshly existence. Depicting and analyzing what the Christian tradition has to say about the flesh of Christians in relation to that of Christ, the book shows that some kinds of fleshly activity conform well to being a Christian, while others are in tension with it. But to lead a Christian life is to be unconstrained by ordinary ethical norms. Arguing that no particular case of fleshly activity is forbidden, Paul J. Griffiths illustrates his message through extended case studies of what it is for Christians to eat, to clothe themselves, and to engage in physical intimacy.

 

Postsecular Catholicism: Relevance and Renewal (2018)
By Michele Dillon

 

The Catholic Church faces the challenge of maintaining its relevance in an increasingly secularized society. On issues ranging from sexuality and gender equality to economic policy and social welfare, the church hierarchy is frequently out-of-step with Catholics and non-Catholics alike. In Postsecular Catholicism, Michele Dillon argues that the Church's relevance is increasingly contingent on its ability to incorporate secular experiences and expectations into the articulation of the Church's teachings.

 

Informed by the postsecular notion that religious and secular actors should recognize their mutual relevance in contemporary society, Dillon examines how secular realities and church doctrine intersect in American Catholicism. She shows that the Church's 21st-century commitment to institutional renewal has been amplified by Pope Francis's vision of public Catholicism and his accessible language and intellectual humility. Combining wide-ranging survey data with a rigorous examination of Francis's statements on economic inequality, climate change, LGBT rights, and women's ordination, the highly consequential Vatican Synod on the Family, and the US Bishops' religious freedom campaign, Postsecular Catholicism assesses the initiatives and strategies impacting the Church's relevance in the contemporary world.

 

The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis (2018)
By Alan Jacobs

 

By early 1943, it had become increasingly clear that the Allies would win the Second World War. Around the same time, it also became increasingly clear to many Christian intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic that the soon-to-be-victorious nations were not culturally or morally prepared for their success. A war won by technological superiority merely laid the groundwork for a post-war society governed by technocrats. These Christian intellectuals-Jacques Maritain, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, W. H. Auden, and Simone Weil, among others-sought both to articulate a sober and reflective critique of their own culture and to outline a plan for the moral and spiritual regeneration of their countries in the post-war world.

 

In this book, Alan Jacobs explores the poems, novels, essays, reviews, and lectures of these five central figures, in which they presented, with great imaginative energy and force, pictures of the very different paths now set before the Western democracies. Working mostly separately and in ignorance of one another's ideas, the five developed a strikingly consistent argument that the only means by which democratic societies could be prepared for their world-wide economic and political dominance was through a renewal of education that was grounded in a Christian understanding of the power and limitations of human beings. The Year of Our Lord 1943 is the first book to weave together the ideas of these five intellectuals and shows why, in a time of unprecedented total war, they all thought it vital to restore Christianity to a leading role in the renewal of the Western democracies.

Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1968)
By Thomas Merton

 

December 10, 2018 marked the 50th anniversary of Thomas Merton's death. In this series of notes, opinions, experiences, and reflections, Merton examines some of the most urgent questions of our age. With his characteristic forcefulness and candor, he brings the reader face-to-face with such provocative and controversial issues as the "death of God," politics, modern life and values, and racial strife--issues that are as relevant today as they were fifty years ago.

 

One in Christ: Chicago Catholics and the Quest for Interracial Justice (2018)
By Karen J. Johnson

 

Karen J. Johnson tells the story of Catholic interracial activism from the bottom up through the lives of a group of women and men in Chicago who struggled with one another, their Church, and their city to try to live their Catholic faith in a new, and what they thought was more complete and true, way. Black activists found a handful of white laypeople, some of whom later became priests, who believed in their vision of a universal church in a segregated city. Together, they began to fight for interracial justice, all while knitted together in sometimes-contentious friendship as members of the Mystical Body of Christ. In the end, not only had Catholic activists lived out their faith as active participants in the long civil rights movement and learned how to cooperate, and indeed lvoe, across racial lines, but they had changed the practice of Catholicism. They broke down the hierarchy that placed priests above the laity and crossed the parish boundaries that defined urban Catholicism.

 

Theologies of Guadalupe: From the Era of Conquest to Pope Francis (2018)
By Timothy Matovina

Our Lady of Guadalupe, whose feast day is December 12th, is the only Marian apparition tradition in the Americas- and indeed in all of Roman Catholicism- that has since inspired a sustained series of published theological analyses. In Theologies of Guadalupe, Timothy Matovina explores the way theologians have understood Our Lady of Guadalupe and sought to assess and foster her impact on the lives of her devotees since the seventeenth century. He examines core theological topics in the Guadalupe tradition, developed in response to major events in Mexican history: conquest, attempts to Christianize native peoples, society-building, independence, and the demands for justice of marginalized groups. This book tells how, amidst the plentiful miraculous images of Christ, Mary, and the saints that dotted the sacred landscape of colonial New Spain, the Guadalupe cult rose above all others and was transformed from a local devotion into a regional, national, and then international phenomenon. Matovina traces the development of the theologies of Guadalupe from the colonial era to our own time, revealing how Christian ideas imported from Europe developed in dynamic interaction with the new contexts in which they took root.

99 Poems: New & Selected (2017)
By Dana Gioia

Gioia, who will be part of the 2019 Catholic Imagination Conference at Loyola in the fall, has long been celebrated as a poet of sharp intelligence and brooding emotion with an ingenious command of his craft. 99 Poems: New & Selected gathers for the first time work from across his career, including many remarkable new poems. Gioia has not arranged this selection chronologically but instead has organized it by theme in seven sections: Mystery, Place, Remembrance, Imagination, Stories, Songs, and Love. The result is a book that reveals and renews the pleasures, consolations, and sense of wonder that poetry bestows.

 

The Art of the Wasted Day (2018)
By Patricia Hampl 

 

The Art of the Wasted Day is a compelling celebration of the purpose and appeal of letting go. Hampl's own life winds through these pilgrimages, from childhood days lazing under a neighbor's beechnut tree, to a fascination with monastic life, and then to love--and the loss of that love which forms this book's silver thread of inquiry. Finally, a remembered journey down the Mississippi near home in an old cabin cruiser with her husband turns out, after all her international quests, to be the great adventure of her life. As Maureen Corrigan notes, "It's impossible to do justice to the cumulative power of Hampl's dream-weaver writing style by just quoting a few lines. You have to go on the whole voyage with her . . . by wasting some of your time with Hampl, you'll understand more of what makes life worth living." 

 

 

Introduction to Christianity (1968)
by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger

One of Cardinal Ratzinger's most important and widely read books, Introduction to Christianity was born out of the days immediately following Vatican II and becomes a touchstone for the subsequent development of his ecclesiology of continuity. The future Pope Benedict XVI arrived in Tubingen in 1966 at the request of his friend, Hans Kung; he left this prestigious position in late in 1968. So many changes and significant events occurred in the world as he gave his lectures and the students at Tubingen, fully engaged in the signs of the times, often tested their professors on serious questions. In many ways, Ratzinger's text is a reaction to this. His approach puts the question of God and the question about Christ in the very center, which leads to a "narrative Christology" that both insists on eschatological care and demonstrates that the place for faith is in the Church-even in the context of radical social change. His approach is not without controversy. On the one hand, supportive readings applaud his treatment of Christianity's basic truths, combining a spiritual outlook with a deep knowledge of Scripture and the history of theology; critical readings lament the absence of pastorally meaningful engagement with the many injuries to justice that characterize the age.

 

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)
by Milan Kundera

The Unbearable Lightness of Beinggrows out of the dramatic political, spiritual, and cultural convulsions of the Prague Spring of 1968 and is a major achievement from one of the world's truly great writers. Milan Kundera's magnificent novel of passion and politics, infidelity and ideas, encompasses the extremes of comedy and tragedy, illuminating all aspects of human existence. The story at its root is of a young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing and one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover. But the novel is so much more-juxtaposing geographically distant places (including theological and philosophical places), brilliant and playful reflections about art and life, and a variety of styles to take its place to form a late modern masterpiece.

 

From Revolution to Ethics (2008)
By Julian Bourg

Our Global '68 Symposium: Days of Past Present keynote speaker, Julian Bourg, argues that during the subsequent decade the revolts led to a remarkable paradigm shift in French thought-the concern for revolution in the 1960s was transformed into a fascination with ethics. Challenging the prevalent view that the 1960s did not have any lasting effect, From Revolution to Ethics shows how intellectuals and activists turned to ethics as the touchstone for understanding interpersonal, institutional, and political dilemmas. In absorbing and scrupulously researched detail Bourg explores the developing ethical fascination as it emerged among student Maoists courting terrorism, anti-psychiatric celebrations of madness, feminists mobilizing against rape, and pundits and philosophers championing humanitarianism. From Revolution to Ethics provides a compelling picture of how May 1968 helped make ethics a compass for navigating contemporary global concerns.

 

The Five Quintets (2018)
By Michael O'Siadhail

The Five Quintets is both poetry and cultural history. It offers a sustained reflection on modernity - people and movement - in poetic meter. Just as Dante, in his Divine Comedy, summed up the Middle Ages on the cusp of modernity, The Five Quintets takes stock of a late modern world on the cusp of the first-ever global century. O'Siadhail will be our guest at CCIH on October 17.

 

Man and the State (1951)
By Jacques Maritain

 

The Mystery of Evil: Benedict XVI and the End of Days (2017)
By Giorgio Agamben

 

The House of Broken Angels (2018)
By Luis Alberto Urrea

"All we do, mija, is love. Love is the answer. Nothing stops it. Not borders. Not death."
Pulitzer Prize finalist, Luis Alberto Urrea, presents the quintessential American story in this powerful and poignant novel about the American dream as experienced by the Mexican American de La Cruz family. Urrea artfully crafts a narrative that takes readers on a multigenerational journey spread across two countries and one border, calling forth the dreams, disappointments, and hopes common to all families.

 

In This House of Brede (2005)
By Rumer Godden (Edited by Amy Welborn, with an Introduction by Phyllis Tickle)

This extraordinarily sensitive and insightful portrait of religious life centers on Philippa Talbot, a highly successful professional woman who leaves her life among the London elite to join a cloistered Benedictine community. This edition of the book includes an introduction by best-selling Christian writer Phyllis Tickle, as well as discussion questions designed to help deepen the reading experience for both individuals and reading groups.

 

A Confederacy of Dunces (1987)
By John Kennedy Toole (with a Foreword by Walker Percy)

In this comic masterpiece, John Kennedy Toole introduces one of the most memorable characters in American fiction, Ignatius J. Reilly, a "flatulent frustrated scholar deeply learned in Medieval philosophy and American junk food... in violent revolt against the entire modern age." Set in New Orleans, A Confederacy of Duncesis filled with unforgettable characters and zany plot twists bound to dazzle any reader with its originality and true-to-life portrayals.

 

April 2018 Recommended Reads

Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative (2016)
By Alasdair McIntyre

In this wide-ranging discussion of ethics and moral philosophy, Alasdair MacIntyre explores central philosophical, political, and moral claims of modernity. Challenging readers to rethink the relationships between philosophical theories and every-day practice, MacIntyre argues that a proper understanding of human good requires a rejection of some of common central claims. Using case studies from the contemporary world and drawing on thinkers as wide-ranging as Thomas Aquinas and David Hume, MacIntyre proposes a contemporary politics and ethics that subvert modernity from within it.

A Political Companion to Flannery O'Connor (2017)
Edited by Henry T. Edmondson III

Although Flannery O'Connor did not pursue political philosophy formally in her writing, her various renowned novels, short stories, and essays frequently addressed important questions about human nature, social change, and ethics. In this collection, leading scholars explore pieces of O'Connor's fiction, prose, and correspondence that reveal her central ideas about political and cultural themes in America. Addressing topics such as O'Connor's attitude toward civil rights and thoughts on the eugenics controversies, these essays highlight the valuable insights to be found in O'Connor's interplay between fiction, faith, and politics.

Night at the Fiestas: Stories (2016)
By Kirstin Valdez Quade

Winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, this unforgettable collection of short stories will plunge you into the hearts of characters who are defined by their desire to either escape or uncover significant past events. Writing with emotional intensity and insight, Quade offers her readers stories that plumb the depths of human passions, spirituality, cultures, and family life, exposing the best and worst human inclinations in the process. Betrayal and desire abound in these narrative journeys of self-definition, as do hope and redemption.

Thérèse (2016)
By Dorothy Day (with a Foreword by Robert Ellsberg)

Dorothy Day struggled to write this short biography of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, which has been put back in print only recently. Originally designed for non-believers or those unfamiliar with the "Little Flower", and emphasizing why Thérèse's simplicity and humility are so vital for modern life, this unpretentious account of St. Thérèse's life illustrates how Day herself came to deeply appreciate and embrace the simple, yet profound "Little Way", inviting readers down a similar path of spiritual conversion.

 

Why Liberalism Failed (2018)
By Patrick J. Deneen

In this provocative book, Patrick Deneen poses the challenging question of whether liberalism, the champion ideology of the twentieth century (having conquered both fascism and communism) has, in fact, failed. Deneen develops his thesis by revealing the inherent contradictions in which liberalism is grounded (such as trumpeting equal rights while also fostering incomparable material inequality) and warns that the centripetal forces now at work on our political culture are not superficial flaws but inherent features of a system whose success is generating its own failure.

 

Beyond Apathy: A Theology for Bystanders (2015)
By Elisabeth T. Vasko

In this important and timely book, Elisabeth Vasko seeks to expand theological conversations about violence, which typically focus narrowly on victim-perpetrator dichotomies. Arguing that this focus, while important, only addresses part of the problem, Vasko advocates for a more comprehensive theological and pastoral response to violence that directly addresses the complex issue of collective passivity in the face of human denigration. Giving special attention to the social issues of bullying, white racism, and sexual violence, Vasko utilizes resources within the Christian tradition to offer both a critical examination of, and a theology of redeeming grace for bystanders to violence.

 

Love Alone is Credible (2005)
By Hans Urs von Balthasar (Translated by D.C. Schindler)

In his master work, The Glory of the Lord, Hans Urs von Balthasar used the term "theological aesthetic" to describe what he believed to be the most accurate method of interpreting the concept of divine love. In this book, newly translated from its original German edition (1963), von Balthasar delves deeper into explorations of what love means, how the divine love of God is distinct, and how we must all become lovers of God in the footsteps of saints like Francis de Sales, John of the Cross, and Thérèse of Lisieux. Bringing a fresh perspective on an oft-explored subject, Love Alone is Credible, offers a profound theological meditation that serves to both inform and deepen one's faith.

 

Incarnadine: Poems (2013)
By Mary Szybist

Leading her readers through an array of richly imagined encounters, Szybist creatively expresses poetic sentiment through diverse mediums, including a diagrammed sentence, an abeccedarium, annunciations, and lines of dialogue. Blending conventional and innovative aesthetics, Szybist's poems boldly recast the Blessed Mary, offering alternative visions through lyrical yearning. This restless and inventive collection of poems is perfect Christmas reading. Incarnadine was named to Best Book of the Year lists by NPR, Slate, Oregonian, Kansas City Star, Willamette Week, and Publishers Weekly, and named Amazon's Best Book of the Year in Poetry 2013.

 

Mr. Ives' Christmas (2003)
By Oscar Hijuelos

Another solid read for the Christmas season is this gem from 2003. In no way a sentimental work, Hijuelos' novel presents the perennial issue of faith in the face of tragedy. Weaved into the narrative of Mr. Ives, whose life and faith in God and humanity is thrown into question when a terrible tragedy befalls him at Christmas. Part love story and part meditation on how a person can find spiritual peace in the midst of crisis, Mr. Ives' Christmas is a compelling story of one man struggling to put his life in perspective. In the expert hands of Oscar Hijuelos, the novel speaks eloquently to the most basic and fulfilling aspects of human existence-- a Christmas story if there ever was one.

 

Building the Human City: William F. Lynch's Ignatian Spirituality for Public Life (2016)
By John F. Kane (with a Foreword by Kevin F. Burke)

Kane's text provides a first rate overview of the work of Jesuit philosopher William F. Lynch. Writing from the 1950s to the mid-1980s, Lynch was not only a literary theorist, but a pioneering "social critic," and one of the first to warn against the fierce cultural and political polarizations that are prevalent in our society today. In his diverse works, Lynch calls for transformation and encourages healing discernment through imagination, while also addressing critical ironies of an Ignatian (and Socratic) spirituality. Kane's presentation in this collection brings to the forefront, perhaps for the first time, Lynch's unified vision of transformation, which is arguably more necessary now than when it was first written. A masterly study of a great Jesuit and scholar who more readers should know.

 

The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods (1946, 1992)
By A. G. Sertillanges, OP (Translated by Mary Ryan, with a Foreword by James V. Schall, SJ)
A perfect stocking stuffer, A.G. Sertillanges's book is equal parts romantic evocation of the spiritual dignity of the life of scholarship and practical advice to the aspiring young intellectual. Do you want to do intellectual work? This is the central question to which Fr. Sertillanges orients his book of timeless teachings. First published in 1920, The Intellectual Life has been acclaimed for its practical approach to both scholarly habits of mind and vocation discernment. Providing generations of scholars with robust foundation in intellectual practices and sensibilities, this book is a must read for any young (or even not-so-young) scholar.

 

To Overcome Oneself: The Jesuit Ethic and Spirit of Global Expansion, 1520-1767 (2013)
By J. Michelle Molina

This study examines practices of Catholic missionaries in Europe and New Spain from the 1520s through the 1760s in order to demonstrate how the emergence of the Western concept of the "modern self" was enmeshed in the process of early modern Catholic missionary expansion. Emphasizing the centrality of embodied Catholic spiritual practices--such as Jesuit practices of meditation, narrative self-reflection, confession, and the spiritual exercises-- in the development of the idea of "self", Molina also investigates the importance of the relationship between spiritual directors and their subjects. Throughout this original retelling of the emergence of the concept of modern "selfhood," Molina poses two important questions: Why does the effort to know and transcend self require so many others? And what can we learn about the inherent intersubjectivity of missionary colonialism?

 

We Are Not Ourselves: A Novel (2015)
By Matthew Thomas

Named to New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2014, Washington Post Top 50 Fiction List for 2014, and Entertainment Weekly Ten Best Fiction Books of 2014, among many other accolades, this novel traces one family's pursuit of the American Dream in New York in the 1940s & 50s. Through the lives of his characters, Thomas charts the movements of an American century, in the process exposing our greatest desires, as well as our greatest failures. The Washington Post praises Thomas for his superb ability to capture "both an individual's life and the universality of that person's experience"-- with a solid eye fixed on Catholic spirituality-- in this stunning piece of literature.

 

A Course in Christian Mysticism: Thomas Merton (2017)
Edited by Jon M. Sweeney (with a Foreword by Michael N. McGregor)

This collection of Merton's lectures to young monastics at the Abbey of Gethsemani provides a valuable look at Merton the scholar. Covering sixteen centuries of central Christian mystical thinkers, this book is complete with a helpful introduction, which provides background historical and thematic information, as well as study materials at the back of the book, which offer additional reading sources and reflection questions. This compact volume displays the relevance of Merton's thought for any student of Christian mysticism and other spiritual seekers today.

 

Do Guns Make Us Free?: Democracy and the Armed Society (2015)
By Firmin DeBrabander

A crucial examination of the political and philosophical arguments undergirding possibly the most emotionally charged debate taking place in the United States today. In this insightful and eye-opening analysis, DeBrabander interrogates the major claim made by guns rights supporters, led by the National Rifle Association, that the right to unchecked gun ownership safeguards all other citizen rights. As the title indicates, this book offers an alternative viewpoint, demonstrating several reasons why an armed society is, in fact, not a free society-- but one locked in a kind of servility that harms the safety of the citizens and the health of the common good.

 

Age of Anger: A History of the Present (2017)
By Pankaj Mishra

In this thought-provoking book, Pankaj Mishra takes a long look at the origins of the great wave of paranoid hatreds that bewilder and terrify us in today's world. Exposing how the promises of modernity-- freedom, prosperity, stability-- represent broken promises for all but global elites, Mishra explores how those excluded have become increasingly susceptible to demagogues. While not a text in the Catholic intellectual tradition, Mishra takes the religious dimension seriously and questions secularism with insight and alacrity.

 

Faith and Resistance in the Age of Trump (2017)
Edited by Miguel A. De La Torre

Featuring an essay by LUC's own Miguel Diaz, John Courtney Murray University Chair in Public Service, this book offers reflections from notable religious leaders and scholars about the political and confessional crises that currently threaten not only our republic, but also our most deeply held religious claims and values.

 

The Jesuits and Globalization: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Challenges (2016)
Edited by Thomas Banchoff & José Casanova

What do the Jesuits tell us about globalization, and what can globalization tell us about the Jesuits? Banchoff and Casanova present a multidisciplinary exploration into what we can learn from the historical and contemporary experiences of the Society of Jesus.

 

The Ninth Hour: A Novel (2017)
By Alice McDermott

Set in 1940s/50s Catholic Brooklyn, this novel weaves the story of one Irish immigrant family through three generations. Revealing along the way a wholly individual and universal understanding of the human condition, the story tests the limits of love and sacrifice, of forgiveness and forgetfulness. Alice McDermott is not only a gifted novelist, but a leading practitioner of the Catholic Imagination.

 

Rebel in the Ranks: Martin Luther, the Reformation, and the Conflicts That Continue to Shape Our World (2017)
By Brad S. Gregory

Just in time for the 500th Anniversary of the Reformation, Notre Dame Historian Brad Gregory examines the complicated legacy of Martin Luther and how his unintended yet epochal movement continues to shape the world today.