Books published by University of Notre Dame Press

This work provides an eye-opening look at the material lives of the poor in America. The narrative aims to allow readers to envision themselves in the real world of the poor, to imagine what it could be like to be faced with their particular circumstances and limited options.

Argues that meaning, truth, impossibility, natural necessity, and our intelligent perception of nature fit together into a distinctly realist account of thought and world. This title intends to offer an analytically and historically respectable alternative to the prevailing positions of various British-American philosophers.

Explores Longley's and Heaney's poetic fidelity to the imagination in the midst of the war in Northern Ireland and their creation, through poetry, of a powerful cultural and sacred space. This space, Russell argues, has contributed to cultural and religious dialogue and thus helped enable reconciliation after the years of the Troubles.

When the Spanish invaded the Inca empire in 1532, the cult of the ancestors was an essential feature of pre-Columbian religion throughout the Andes. The dead influenced politics, protected the living, symbolized the past, and legitimized claims over the land their descendants occupied, while the living honored the presence of the dead in numerous aspects of daily life. A central purpose of the Spanish missionary endeavor was to suppress the Andean cult of the ancestors and force the indigenous people to adopt their Catholic, legal, and cultural views concerning death. In her book, Gabriela Ramos reveals the extent to which Christianizing death was essential for the conversion of the indigenous population to Catholicism.Ramos argues that understanding the relation between death and conversion in the Andes involves not only considering the obvious attempts to destroy the cult of the dead, but also investigating a range of policies and strategies whose application demanded continuous negotiation between Spaniards and Andeans. Drawing from historical, archaeological, and anthropological research and a wealth of original archival materials, especially the last wills and testaments of indigenous Andeans, Ramos looks at the Christianization of death as it affected the lives of inhabitants of two principal cities of the Peruvian viceroyalty: Lima, the new capital founded on the Pacific coast by the Spanish, and Cuzco, the old capital of the Incas in the Andean highlands. Her study of the wills in particular demonstrates the strategies that Andeans devised to submit to Spanish law and Christian doctrine, preserve bonds of kinship, and cement their place in colonial society.

Cultural property and its stewardship have been concerns of museums, archaeologists, art historians, and nations, but the legal and political consequences of collecting antiquities have also attracted broad media attention. This volume contains papers delivered at a 2007 symposium by eminent museum directors and curators, and legal scholars.

With essays ranging from sexual ethics to human rights, medical ethics to freedom, this title offers a perspective on the last twenty-five years of feminist innovation in Christian ethics and a glimpse of its global future, particularly in continents such as Africa.

Delivers a reading of the ""Consolation"". This work argues that it is a Christian work dramatizing not the truths of philosophy as a whole, but the limits of pagan philosophy in particular. It argues that Boethius deliberately dramatizes the act of writing about systematic knowledge in a way that calls into question the value of that knowledge.

Offers an insightful analysis of the efforts of many American Catholics as a private interest group to effect change in the public policy of Mexico and in US-Mexican relations. The author's judicious examination of ecclesiastical and governmental archives, as well as personal papers, elucidates an important period in American Catholic history.

Tracing the interactions of Josiah Royce (1855-1916) with William James, Charles Peirce, and John Dewey, Oppenheim ""re-imagines pragmatism"" in a way that highlights the late Royce's role as mediator and favors the ""seed-plant"" image of O. W. Holmes, Jr., over the corridor image of Papini.

Helen Burke's study explores the significance of theatre ""riots"" and other unruly practices that occurred in Dublin playhouses between 1712 and 1784. It reveals that during this period Irish theatre was a site of struggle between various ethnic, religious and class factions in 18th-century Ireland.

Theosis, or the principle of divine-human communion, sparks the theological imagination of Orthodox Christians and has been historically important to questions of political theology. In The Mystical as Political: Democracy and Non-Radical Orthodoxy, Aristotle Papanikolaou argues that a political theology grounded in the principle of divine-human communion must be one that unequivocally endorses a political community that is democratic in a way that structures itself around the modern liberal principles of freedom of religion, the protection of human rights, and church-state separation. Papanikolaou hopes to forge a non-radical Orthodox political theology that extends beyond a reflexive opposition to the West and a nostalgic return to a Byzantine-like unified political-religious culture. His exploration is prompted by two trends: the fall of communism in traditionally Orthodox countries has revealed an unpreparedness on the part of Orthodox Christianity to address the question of political theology in a way that is consistent with its core axiom of theosis; and recent Christian political theology, some of it evoking the notion of "e;deification,"e; has been critical of liberal democracy, implying a mutual incompatibility between a Christian worldview and that of modern liberal democracy. The first comprehensive treatment from an Orthodox theological perspective of the issue of the compatibility between Orthodoxy and liberal democracy, Papanikolaou's is an affirmation that Orthodox support for liberal forms of democracy is justified within the framework of Orthodox understandings of God and the human person. His overtly theological approach shows that the basic principles of liberal democracy are not tied exclusively to the language and categories of Enlightenment philosophy and, so, are not inherently secular.

Addresses the issue of what the concept of 'human dignity' entails and its proper role in bioethical controversies.

Opening a bright window into the turbulent world of a renowned saint who lived during a time of great unrest, Bernard Pujo details how politics, war and Vincent's own charismatic personality served as essential elements in his construction of a vast and lasting web of charitable works.

Central to the question of how to promote economic growth in Latin America is the role different types of regimes play in determining economic performance. This text challenges conventional wisdom regarding the expected advantages of military rule for economic growth.

This work brings together a group of leading experts from Canada, the United States and Europe to examine the reception of Plato's ""Timaeus"" throughout history, as well as its impact on major intellectual and cultural traditions.

This work brings together a group of leading experts from Canada, the United States and Europe to examine the reception of Plato's ""Timaeus"" throughout history, as well as its impact on major intellectual and cultural traditions.

Two dialectics are at work in this book: that between the past and the present and that between the individual and the social, and both have moral significance. The first two chapters are methodological; the first is on the historical understanding of medieval literature and the second on how to manage the inseparability of fact and value in the classroom. The next three chapters take up three "e;less-read"e; late medieval writers: Sir John Clanvowe, Thomas Hoccleve, and John Lydgate. Each is used to illuminate a social phenomenon: the nature of court culture, the experience of the city, and Henry V's act of self-making. The following chapter explicitly links past and present by arguing that the bearing of the English aristocrat comes from a tradition beginning with Beowulf and later reinvoked in response to nineteenth-century imperialism. The next three chapters are the most literary, dealing with Chaucer and with literary conventions in relation to a number of texts. The final chapter is on the man Patterson considers one of the most important of our medieval ancestors, Francis of Assisi.

Analyzing how authoritarian regimes utilize coercion, this book sheds light on a fundamental period during the Chilean dictatorship. It provides an account of why the DINA was created in the first place, how it became the most powerful repressive institution in Chile, and why it was suddenly replaced with a different organization.

In the 1960s and 1970s, catholicism offered Cuban exiles in US continuity: a community of faith, a place to gather, a sense of legitimacy as a people. Religion exerted a major influence on the beliefs and actions of Cuban exiles. This work provides insights for this community, and for other faith-based exile communities.

Erich Przywara, S.J (1889-1972) is an important Catholic intellectual of the 20th century, yet in the English-speaking world remains largely unknown. This is a comprehensive study of the German Jesuit and his philosophical theology.

Looks at the disrepair of the divine. This work offers a guide for finding the sacred in the everyday. It speaks to us still with humor and hope because neither God nor the railroad seems to be running much better today.

Offers a history of the Archdiocese of St Paul, covering the years 1840 to 1962. This book presents the extraordinary labors and accomplishments of the French priests who came to the upper midwest territory during the first half of the nineteenth century.

Pseudo-Dionysius was, after Aristotle, the author whom Thomas Aquinas quoted most frequently. This work investigates the pervasive influence of Pseudo-Dionysius, yet the profound originality of Aquinas. Central themes discussed include knowledge of the absolute, existence as the first and most universal perfection, diffusion of creation, and more.

This book provides insights into the intellectual lives, spiritual culture, and literary authorship of medieval women.

For more than fifty years, Giacomo Debenedetti's October 16, 1943 has been considered one of the best and most accurate accounts of the shockingly brief and efficient roundup of more than one thousand Roman Jews from the oldest Jewish community in Europe for the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Completed a year after the event, Debenedetti's intimate details and vivid glimpses into the lives of the victims are especially poignant because Debenedetti himself was there to witness the event, which forced him and his entire family into hiding. Eight Jews, the companion piece to October 16, 1943, was written in response to testimony about the Ardeatine Cave Massacres of March 24, 1944. In this essay, Debenedetti offers insights into that grisly horror and into assumptions about racial equality. Both of these stunning works are appearing together, along with Alberto Moravia's preface to Debenedetti's October 16, 1943, for the first time in an American translation. October 16, 1943/Eight Jews gives American readers a first glimpse into the extraordinary mind of the man who was Italy's foremost critic of twentieth-century literature. In addition to probing the deeper, haunting questions of the Holocaust, Debenedetti briefly describes the seizure of the Roman Jewish community's library of early manuscripts and incunables, the most valuable Jewish library in all of Italy. Following the roundup, this library was never seen again. Award-winning translator Estelle Gilson offers an additional essay on the history of the library and modern-day attempts to locate it. October 16, 1943/Eight Jews is a moving work that will continue to challenge readers long after they have closed its pages.

Pervades the idea of the aperture, the gap, the silence that exists between what we want to say and what we actually do say. This work explores the various dimensions of silence. It considers both literal, obvious silences - death, abandonment, the silence into which lost things vanish - and silences of a more mysterious and paradoxical nature.

In the late 19th century, Irish-American women were leading their ethnic group into the lower-middle-class occupations of civil service, teaching, and health care. Janet Nolan argues that the roots of this female-driven mobility can be traced to immigrant women's education in Ireland.

Defining Acts considers how the surviving English plays of the 15th century represent and transform competing late-medieval practices of interpretation. These works take up a series of contests over who could legitimately determine the meaning of texts.