Books published by University of Notre Dame Press

Abelard in Four Dimensions: A Twelfth-Century Philosopher in His Context and Ours by John Marenbon, one of the leading scholars of medieval philosophy and a specialist on Abelard's thought, originated from a set of lectures in the distinguished Conway Lectures in Medieval Studies series and provides new interpretations of central areas of Peter Abelard's philosophy and its influence. The four dimensions of Abelard to which the title refers are that of the past (Abelard's predecessors), present (his works in context), future (the influence of his thinking up to the seventeenth century), and the present-day philosophical culture in which Abelard's works are still discussed and his arguments debated.For readers new to Abelard, this book provides an introduction to his life and works along with discussion of his central ideas in semantics, ethics, metaphysics, and philosophy of religion. For specialists, the book contains new arguments about the authenticity and chronology of Abelard's logical work, fresh evidence about his relations with Anselm and Hugh of St. Victor, a new understanding of how he combines the necessity of divine action with human freedom, and reinterpretations of important passages in which he discusses semantics and metaphysics. For all historians of philosophy, it sets out and illustrates a new methodological approach, which can be used for any thinker in any period and will help to overcome the divisions between "e;historians"e; based in philosophy departments and scholars with historical or philological training.

This work shows that the collapse of the post-reformation confessional state was more the result of religious dissent from within, much of it orthodox, than attacks of an anti-religious Enlightenment.

In this brilliant study, Thomas Pfau argues that the loss of foundational concepts in classical and medieval Aristotelian philosophy caused a fateful separation between reason and will in European thought. Pfau traces the evolution and eventual deterioration of key concepts of human agency-will, person, judgment, action-from antiquity through Scholasticism and on to eighteenth-century moral theory and its critical revision in the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Featuring extended critical discussions of Aristotle, Gnosticism, Augustine, Aquinas, Ockham, Hobbes, Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Hutcheson, Hume, Adam Smith, and Coleridge, this study contends that the humanistic concepts these writers seek to elucidate acquire meaning and significance only inasmuch as we are prepared positively to engage (rather than historicize) their previous usages. Beginning with the rise of theological (and, eventually, secular) voluntarism, modern thought appears increasingly reluctant and, in time, unable to engage the deep history of its own underlying conceptions, thus leaving our understanding of the nature and function of humanistic inquiry increasingly frayed and incoherent. One consequence of this shift is to leave the moral self-expression of intellectual elites and ordinary citizens alike stunted, which in turn has fueled the widespread notion that moral and ethical concerns are but a special branch of inquiry largely determined by opinion rather than dialogical reasoning, judgment, and practice. A clear sign of this regression is the present crisis in the study of the humanities, whose role is overwhelmingly conceived (and negatively appraised) in terms of scientific theories, methods, and objectives. The ultimate casualty of this reductionism has been the very idea of personhood and the disappearance of an adequate ethical language. Minding the Modern is not merely a chapter in the history of ideas; it is a thorough phenomenological and metaphysical study of the roots of today's predicaments.

Aims to bring together a collection of essays which considers both the method for and substance of critiques of democracies. This book is useful for scholars working in justice reform, democratization, and comparative politics.

Consists of a series of studies addressing Moses Maimonides' (1138-1204) appropriation of marginal figures - lepers, converts, heretics, and others. Here, each chapter focuses on a type or character that, in Maimonides' hands, becomes a metaphor for a larger, more substantive theological and philosophical issue.

In Whores of Babylon, Frances E. Dolan offers a study of the central role that Catholics and Catholicism played in early modern English law, literature, and politics. This study examines legal and literary representations during three crises in Protestant/Catholic relations, the Gunpowder Plot (1605), the Popish Plot and Meal Tub Plot (1678-80).

Ten scholars from the varied fields of philosophy, theology, history, anthropology and literature reflect on the theme of courage. Contributors to this volume agree that courage is not just for the few or the dramatically heroic but is required of everyone of us.

Edith Stein, a Catholic convert of Jewish heritage is the second woman in German history to be awarded a PhD in philosophy. The sixteen essays in this collection, written by scholars from the US and Europe, examine her legacy. It represents the comprehensive interdisciplinary analysis in English of Stein's life and philosophical writings.

Presenting with moving insight the relations between man, as a person and as an individual, and the society of which he is a part, Maritain's treatment of a lasting topic speaks to this generation as well as those to come. Maritain employs the personalism rooted in Aquinas's doctrine to distinguish between social philosophy centered in the dignity of the human person and that centered in the primacy of the individual and the private good.

This volume contains Guillermo O'Donnell's qualitative theoretical study of the quality of democracy and Vargas Cullell's description and analysis of the empirical data he gathered on the quality of democracy in Costa Rica.

A philosophical investigation of practical knowledge, with major import for professional practice and the ethical life in modern society. It intends to clarify the kind of knowledge that informs good practice in a range of disciplines such as education, psychotherapy, medicine, management, and law.

Celebrates the work and influence of Stephen T. Davis over the past four decades in philosophy of religion, philosophical theology, and biblical studies. His emphasis on argumentative clarity and logical rigour is reflected in the contributions by the sixteen internationally recognized scholars of Christian philosophical theology whose work is gathered here.

For nearly four decades, E P Sanders has been the foremost scholar in shaping and refocusing scholarly debates in three different but related disciplines in New Testament studies: Second Temple Judaism, Jesus and the Gospels, and Pauline studies. This collection of essays includes a substantive intellectual autobiography by E P Sanders himself.

This collection of original essays by historians and literary critics explores the complex and difficult question of how a culture does, in fact, "return to peace" after a war.

A biography of the Alsop brothers, Joseph and Stewart, who wrote a column for the New York Herald Tribune syndicate from 1946 to 1958. Noted as the ultimate Washington insiders, the brothers were diligent and imaginative reporters who relied on a vast network of sources for news that no one else reported.

Although slaveholding southerners and Catholics in general had little in common, both groups found themselves relentlessly attacked in the northern evangelical press during the decades leading up to the Civil War. In Catholics, Slaveholders, and the Dilemma of American Evangelicalism, 1835-1860, W. Jason Wallace skillfully examines sermons, books, newspaper articles, and private correspondence of members of three antebellum groups--northern evangelicals, southern evangelicals, and Catholics--and argues that the divisions among them stemmed, at least in part, from disagreements over the role that religious convictions played in a free society. Focusing on journals such as The Downfall of Babylon, Zion's Herald, The New York Evangelist, and The New York Observer, Wallace argues that northern evangelicals constructed a national narrative after their own image and, in the course of vigorous promotion of that narrative, attacked what they believed was the immoral authoritarianism of both the Catholic and the slaveholder. He then examines the response of both southerners and Catholics to northern evangelical attacks. As Wallace shows, leading Catholic intellectuals interpreted and defended the contributions made by the Catholic Church to American principles such as religious liberty and the separation of church and state. Proslavery southern evangelicals, while sharing with evangelicals in the North the belief that the United States was founded on Protestant values, rejected the attempts by northern evangelicals to associate Christianity with social egalitarianism and argued that northern evangelicals compromised both the Bible and Protestantism to fit their ideal of a good society. The American evangelical dilemma arose from conflicting opinions over what it meant to be an American and a Christian. "e;Despite their obvious differences, antebellum American Catholics and pro-slavery Southern evangelicals had one feature in common: their powerful aversion to Northern evangelicals' transformation of the Christian faith into a crusading gospel of 'progress.' By exploring their respective critiques of Northern evangelical theology, with its overconfidence in individual and social perfectibility and its tendency to identify Christianity with American nationalism, W. Jason Wallace provides us with keen insight into American evangelicalism's characteristic dilemmas, many of which still bedevil it today."e; --Wilfred M. McClay, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga "e;Jason Wallace makes a clear argument of why Northern evangelical Protestants were consistent in opposing both slavery and Catholicism. Although the general relationship between abolitionists and nativists has been well known, Wallace not only proves the connection but also shows the theological basis for that connection. This book will be of interest to the academic specialist and to a wider audience interested in American religious history."e; --Gerald Fogarty, S.J., University of Virginia "e;For those who like their history complicated, Jason Wallace's book should be at the top of their reading list. In this book Wallace takes the familiar dispute between abolitionist and pro-slavery evangelical Protestants and throws in Roman Catholicism, not only as an intriguing voice in the debates about slavery but also as a related subject of debate, with Roman Catholicism representing to evangelicals another form of slavery. The result is an episode that opens the question of slavery to the larger political and economic context of European and American debates about freedom and tyranny after the eighteenth century revolutions. Wallace argues convincingly that these disputes produced no winners, and suggests just as plausibly that the reputed winners--the northern evangelicals--lost as much as they won."e; --D. G. Hart, Westminster Seminary California

English-speaking philosophers are generally attuned to the German and French philosophical traditions but not to the Spanish. This anthology intends to introduce the Spanish philosophical tradition to English-speaking readers.

Explores the topic of female spirituality. Through her analyses of the variety of ways in which medieval spirituality was deliberately and actively carried forward to the early modern period, Nancy Bradley Warren underscores both continuities and revisions that challenge conventional distinctions between medieval and early modern culture.

"e;In Abroad for Her Country, Jean M. Wilkowski shares the story of her extraordinary career in the U.S. Foreign Service during the last half of the twentieth century. Born in an era when few women sought professional careers, Wilkowski graduated from Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College and the University of Wisconsin and then rose through the ranks at the Department of State, from Vice Consul to the first woman U.S. Ambassador to an African country and the first woman acting U.S. Ambassador in Latin America. During her thirty-five-year diplomatic career, Wilkowski was sent first as a vice consul to the Caribbean during World War II, when the Department of State was "e;even taking in 4-Fs and women."e; She moved on to more challenging assignments in Latin America and Europe. For much of her career, she specialized in protecting and promoting U.S. trade and investment interests in such posts as Paris, Milan, Rome, Santiago, and Geneva. She also served during a revolution in Bogota, attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa, and the war between El Salvador and Honduras, when she called in U.S. humanitarian aid for 50,000 war-displaced persons. In 1977 she became coordinator of the U.S. preparation for the 1979 United Nations Conference on Science and Technology in Vienna. She worked closely with Notre Dame president Theodore Hesburgh, head of the U.S. delegation, and accompanied the delegation on its fact-finding visit to the Peoples' Republic of China.

While the structure and themes of the Divine Comedy are defined by the narrative of a spiritual pilgrimage guided by Christian truth, Winthrop Wetherbee's remarkable new study reveals that Dante's engagement with the great Latin poets Vergil, Ovid, Lucan, and Statius constitutes a second, complementary narrative centered on psychological and artistic self-discovery. This fresh, illuminating approach departs from the usual treatment of classical poets in Dante criticism, which assigns them a merely allegorical function. Their true importance to Dante's project is much greater. As Wetherbee meticulously shows, Dante's use of the poets is grounded in an astute understanding of their historical situation and a deeply sympathetic reading of their poetry. Dante may have been motivated to correct pagan thought and imagery, but more pervasive was his desire to recreate classical style and to restore classical auctoritas to his own times. Dante's journey in the Commedia, beginning with the pilgrim's assumption of a tragic view of the human condition, progresses with the great poetry of the classical past as an intrinsic component of-not just a foil to-the spiritual experience. Dante ultimately recognizes classical poetry as an essential means to his discovery of truth. A stunning contribution by one of the nation's leading medievalists, Wetherbee's investigation of the poem's classicism makes possible an ethical and spiritual but non-Christian reading of Dante, one that will spur new research and become an indispensable tool for teaching the Commedia.

Why has Colombia's internal war become so entrenched? Why have peace efforts failed to produce durable agreements? Why has Colombia's long-standing democracy experienced such glaring failures? This book addresses these questions and delves into the underlying politics and bedrock human rights issues in Colombia.

Presents a collection of ten stories by an award-winning fiction writer, ""Chicago Tribune"" reporter, and former foreign correspondent. These stories explore the emotional repercussions of fragile humans caught in often harsh situations beyond their control. It chronicles the fictive lives that all too clearly resonates with our world.

This book is about the history of Christianity in the United States, covering the diversity and growth of American and Global Christianity, efforts to build a ""holy commonwealth"", and the role of religion in race. As well as the relation of religious ideas, institutions, constituencies, and practices to the creation and exercise of political power.

An abbess in the Franciscan abbey of Longchamp, Agnes of Harcourt wrote a biography of Isabelle of France and a letter detailing Louis IX's involvement with the abbey, both of which provide a window on 13th-century religious life. This translation also contains an introduction to her life and work.