Books published by University of Notre Dame Press

This work analyzes the image Europe presented to Japan, deliberately or otherwise, from the mid-16th century to the end of the 18th century. It covers developments in Japanese culture and civilization during 300 years of interaction between Japanese and Europeans.

This volume offers an account of the life and labours of Edward Sorin, founder of the University of Notre Dame. It describes how he overcame great odds to found and grow one of world's premier Catholic institutions of higher learning.

A six-day series of interviews between Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Elie Wiesel and French journalist Philippe de Saint-Cheron, Evil and Exile probes some of the most crucial and pressing issues facing humankind today. Having survived the unspeakable evil of the Holocaust, Wiesel remained silent for ten years before dedicating his life to the memory of this tragedy, witnessing tirelessly to remind an often indifferent world of its potential for self-destruction. Wiesel offers wise counsel in this volume concerning evil and suffering, life and death, chance and circumstance. Moreover, the dialogue evokes candid and often surprising responses by Wiesel on the Palestinian problem, Judeo-Christian relations, recent changes in the Soviet Union as well as insights into writers such as Kafka, Malraux, Mauriac, and Unamuno.

Traditionally, Christian martyrdom is a repetition of the story of Christ's suffering and death: the more closely the victim replicates the Christological model, the more legible the martyrdom. But if the textual construction of martyrdom depends on the rehearsal of a paradigmatic story, how do we reconcile the broad range of individuals, beliefs, and persecutions seeking justification by claims of martyrdom? Observing how martyrdom is constituted through the interplay of historical event and literary form, Alice Dailey explores the development of English martyr literature through the period of intense religious controversy from the heresy executions of Queen Mary to the regicide of 1649. Through close study of texts ranging from late medieval passion drama and hagiography to John Foxe's Acts and Monuments, martyrologies of the Counter-Reformation, Charles I's Eikon Basilike, and John Milton's Eikonoklastes, The English Martyr from Reformation to Revolution traces the shifting constructions of the martyr figure across Reformation England. By putting history and literary form in dialogue, Dailey describes not only the reformation of one of the oldest, most influential genres of the Christian West but a revolution in the very concept of martyrdom. In late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, she argues, martyrdom develops from medieval notions of strict typological repetition into Charles I's defense of individual conscience-an abstract, figurative form of martyrdom that survives into modernity. Far from static or purely formulaic, martyrology emerges in Dailey's study as a deeply nuanced genre that discloses the mutually constitutive relationship between the lives we live and the stories we tell.

Cement, Earthworms, and Cheese Factories examines the ways in which religion and community development are closely intertwined in a rural part of contemporary Latin America. Using historical, documentary, and ethnographic data collected over more than a decade as an aid worker and as a researcher in central Ecuador, Jill DeTemple examines the forces that have led to this entanglement of religion and development and the ways in which rural Ecuadorians, as well as development and religious personnel, negotiate these complicated relationships. Technical innovations have been connected to religious change since the time of the Inca conquest, and Ecuadorians have created defensive strategies for managing such connections. Although most analyses of development either tend to ignore the genuinely religious roots of development or conflate development with religion itself, these strategies are part of a larger negotiation of progress and its meaning in twenty-first-century Ecuador. DeTemple focuses on three development agencies-a liberationist Catholic women's group, a municipal unit dedicated to agriculture, and evangelical Protestant missionaries engaged in education and medical work-to demonstrate that in some instances Ecuadorians encourage a hybridity of religion and development, while in other cases they break up such hybridities into their component parts, often to the consternation of those with whom religious and development discourse originate. This management of hybrids reveals Ecuadorians as agents who produce and reform modernities in ways often unrecognized by development scholars, aid workers, or missionaries, and also reveals that an appreciation of religious belief is essential to a full understanding of diverse aspects of daily life.

Among the issues that continue to divide the Catholic Church from the Orthodox Church-the two largest Christian bodies in the world, together comprising well over a billion faithful-the question of the papacy is widely acknowledged to be the most significant stumbling block to their unification. For nearly forty years, commentators, theologians, and hierarchs, from popes and patriarchs to ordinary believers of both churches, have acknowledged the problems posed by the papacy. In Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity, Adam A. J. DeVille offers the first comprehensive examination of the papacy from an Orthodox perspective that also seeks to find a way beyond this impasse, toward full Orthodox-Catholic unity. He first surveys the major postwar Orthodox and Catholic theological perspectives on the Roman papacy and on patriarchates, enumerating Orthodox problems with the papacy and reviewing how Orthodox patriarchates function and are structured. In response to Pope John Paul II's 1995 request for a dialogue on Christian unity, set forth in the encyclical letter Ut Unum Sint, DeVille proposes a new model for the exercise of papal primacy. DeVille suggests the establishment of a permanent ecumenical synod consisting of all the patriarchal heads of Churches under a papal presidency, and discusses how the pope qua pope would function in a reunited Church of both East and West, in full communion. His analysis, involving the most detailed plan for Orthodox-Catholic unity yet offered by an Orthodox theologian, could not be more timely.

Simone Weil's philosophical and social thought during her short life (1909-1943) was intimately engaged with the nature of power and force, both human and natural, and the problems inherent in the use of force. Weil argued vehemently for pacifism, then moved toward a guarded acceptance of the use of force under very specific circumstances, in the context of the rise of Nazism. Ultimately she came to a nuanced and unique perspective on force and on the preservation of human dignity, in the aftermath of several profound mystical experiences during the last years of her life. E. Jane Doering carefully examines and analyzes the material in Weil's notebooks and lesser-known essays to illuminate her evolving thought on violence, war, and injustice. In addition, Doering addresses Weil's engagement with the Bhagavad Gita during her final years, a text that reoriented and enlightened Weil's activist and intellectual search for moral value in a violent world. Apart from small excerpts, none of the four volumes of Weil's notebooks, only recently published in French, have been translated into English. Simone Weil and the Specter of Self-Perpetuating Force contains Doering's expert translations of numerous notebook entries. The book will interest Weil scholars, those in French studies, and those who explore interdisciplinary topics in philosophy, religious studies, history, and political science. "e;Simone Weil and the Specter of Self-Perpetuating Force is a definitive contribution not only to Weil studies, but to any effort to understand the problem of violence and the sources of peace. The study seamlessly blends narratives of Weil's life and thought during the early twentieth century with those of people, political movements, and events pivoting on the world stage. E. Jane Doering helps to frame a plausible case for the optimism Weil forged in the fire of her own suffering: there is a counterforce to violence, and it is available when we attend to life beyond the delusions we habitually cultivate."e; -- Ann Pirruccello, University of San Diego "e;E. Jane Doering's book provides us a new, more penetrating focus on the central message of Simone Weil. The 'mine of pure gold' that Weil referred to in her last days is sharply delineated here: the possibility of grace as the countervailing power that may efficaciously oppose oppressive force. Doering's research is impeccable and opens new perspectives for Weil scholars for years to come."e; --John Marson Dunaway, Mercer University "e;E. Jane Doering deals in a novel and insightful way with the concept of force (and self-perpetuating violence) in the thought of Simone Weil particularly as this was elaborated in the anguished writings of the last years of her life (1938-43) after her mystical experience and her renunciation of pacifism."e; --Lawrence Schmidt, University of Toronto "e;Jane Doering has done a great service in bringing to light many of Weil's writings that have received scant attention. These especially include numerous untranslated early works on the degenerating political situation in Europe in the 1930s, works that have been left aside as having narrow historical interest. But Prof. Doering in bringing them to light has done us all in our present situation an even greater service in using these work to expose Weil's eternally valid insights into the empire of force, and its alternatives to it."e; -- The Rev. Dr. Eric O. Springsted, President of the American Weil Society "e;Doering reveals the evolution of our French philosopher's thought concerning the 'spirit of justice' as the fruit of meditation on classical texts from different civilizations as well as purely philosophical reflection. The author of this work brings together in an innovative way the thought of Albert Camus and Simone Weil on force and justice. Doering persuasively shows that Simone Weil offers a spiritual and political key to resolving some of the thorniest problems afflicting our contemporary world."e; --Robert Chenavier, President de l'Association pour l'etude de la pensee de Simone Weil

Students of English literature now rarely receive instruction in versification (theory or practice) at either the undergraduate or the graduate level. The Long and the Short of It is a clear, straightforward account of versification that also functions as an argument for a renewed attention to the formal qualities of verse and for a renewed awareness of the forms and traditions that have shaped the way we think about English verse. After an introduction and discussion of basic principles, Joseph A. Dane devotes a chapter to quantitative verse (Latin), syllabic or isosyllabic verse (French), and accentual verse (Old English/Germanic). In addition to basic versification systems, the book includes a chapter on musical forms, since verse was originally sung. Most serious studies of these systems in English have been designed for language students, and are not accessible to students of English literature or general readers. This book will enable the reader to scan verse in all three systems, and it will also provide a framework within which students can understand points of contention about particular verse forms. The guide includes a chapter addressed to teachers of English, an appendix with examples of verse types, and a glossary of commonly used terms.

Brings together essays on eleven of the founders of the American republic - Abigail Adams, Samuel Adams, Oliver Ellsworth, Alexander Hamilton, Patrick Henry, John Jay, Thomas Paine, Edmund Randolph, Benjamin Rush, Roger Sherman, and Mercy Otis Warren that focus on the thinking of these men and women on the proper role of religion in public life.

Religion and the Rise of Modern Culture describes and analyzes changing attitudes toward religion during three stages of modern European culture: the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Romantic period. Louis Dupre is an expert guide to the complex historical and intellectual relation between religion and modern culture. Dupr begins by tracing the weakening of the Christian synthesis. At the end of the Middle Ages intellectual attitudes toward religion began to change. Theology, once the dominant science that had integrated all others, lost its commanding position. After the French Revolution, religion once again played a role in intellectual life, but not as the dominant force. Religion became transformed by intellectual and moral principles conceived independently of faith. Dupr explores this new situation in three areas: the literature of Romanticism (illustrated by Goethe, Schiller, and Hlderlin); idealist philosophy (Schelling); and theology itself (Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard). Dupr argues that contemporary religion has not yet met the challenge presented by Romantic thought. Dupr's elegant and incisive book, based on the Erasmus Lectures he delivered at the University of Notre Dame in 2005, will challenge anyone interested in religion and the philosophy of culture.

In late antiquity, the rising number of ascetics who joined the priesthood faced a pastoral dilemma. This book explores the struggles of 5 clerics to reconcile their ascetic idealism with the reality of pastoral responsibility. It explores each pastor's criteria for ordination, supervision of subordinate clergy, and methods of spiritual direction.

By looking at the ways in which cultures in Northern Europe interpret lyric songs, this work illuminates both commonalities of interpretive practice and unique features of their musical traditions. It draws on sets of lyric songs from England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, and Finland to explore the question of meaning in folklore.

Focusing on the effects of violence in internal conflicts after peace agreements have been signed, this book adopts a four-part analysis, examining in turn violence emanating from the state, from militants, from destabilized societies, and from the challenge of implementing a range of issues including demobilization, disarmament, and policing.

After the Berlin Wall fell, scholars flocked to eastern Europe to conduct research on citizens' political attitudes. This work finds little evidence to suggest that the political attitudes of eastern parliamentarians have hindered their adaptation to united Germany's political system. It describes German politics.

Examines the way that ideas of difference were forged in four types of medieval Iberian discourse. This book makes an important contribution to the growing interest in medieval Iberia and offers a nuance understanding of medieval history and culture in general. It will appeal to a broad range of medievalists.

16th-century humanist Erasmus allows ""Peace"" to speak as a plaintiff, protesting her shabby treatment at the hands of humankind and our ever-ready inclination to launch wars. Against this lure of warfare, Erasmus pits the higher task of peace-building, which can only succeed through the cultivation of justice and respect for all human life.

Margaret Stieg Dalton offers a comprehensive study of the German Catholic cultural movement that lasted from the late 19th century until 1933. Her book examines the encounter of clergy and lay Catholics with both high culture and popular culture in Germany

In this book, a group of renowned international scholars seek to discern the ways in which Simone Weil was indebted to Plato, and how her provocative readings of his work offer challenges to contemporary philosophy, theology, and spirituality.

The poems in this work examine a variety of cultural, natural and personal damages in a lyrical voice ironically marked by intense beauty. This disjunction is what makes the volume so disturbing and yet so tantalizing.

Exploring the major changes that have shaped Latin America since independence - decentralization of the state - this text explores the causes of decentralization in six significant case studies: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Venezuela. Shorter analyses of Uruguay and Peru are also included.

These essays are a treatment of one of the changes that have shaped Latin America since independence: decentralization of the state. Contributors argue that though the assignment of political, fiscal, and administrative duties to subnational governments has been an important political developments, it is also one of the most overlooked..

This text takes a serious look at Dante's relation to Latin grammar and the new ""mother tongue"" - Italian vernacular - by exploring the cultural significance of the nursing mother in medieval discussions of language and selfhood.

This title provides a comprehensive analytical overview of public dialogue among 19th century American Protestant intellectuals who struggled with the theory of organic evolution. Arguments over the scientific merits of Darwin's theory gave way to discussions of its theological implications.

Gathers studies and reflections that investigate the meaning of Christian help, comment on the theological, spiritual, and canonical guidelines of ""Deus caritas est"", and illustrate concrete ways to help the needy and, in doing so, experience the goodness of God.

Presents key documents from the pre-1915 history of the extraterrestrial life debate. This work also demonstrates that belief in extraterrestrial life has had major effects on science and society, and that metaphysical and religious views have permeated the debate throughout much of its history.

A study by Marcia L. Colish of the patriarch treatises of Ambrose of Milan (c. 340-397), in which he develops an ethics for the laity and a corpus of works aimed at the conversion of pagan Roman adults to Christianity, Christian ethics for the common man emerges.

Creation as Emanation examines Albert's reading of The Book of Causes with an eye toward two questions: First, how does Albert view the relation between faith and reason, so that he can identify creation from nothing with emanation from God? And second, how does he understand Platonism and Aristotelianism, so that he can avoid the misreadings of his fellow theologians by finding in a late-fifth-century Neoplatonist the key to Aristotle's meaning?

The religious education of children represents a critical component of the Catholic Reformation that has often been overlooked by historians of early modern Europe. In Creating Catholics: Catechism and Primary Education in Early Modern France, Karen E. Carter examines rural schooling in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries-the period when community-supported primary education began-and brings to light a significant element of the early modern period. Carter scrutinizes Catholic religious education in rural parishes in France through its two leading forms: the explosion of Catholic catechisms for children and their use in village schools. She concentrates on educational opportunities for rural peasants in three French dioceses: Auxerre (in Burgundy) and Chalons-sur-Marne and Reims (in Champagne). Carter argues that the study of catechism in village schools was an integral part of a comprehensive program, implemented by both clerical and lay leaders, for the religious, ethical, and moral education of children. Her research demonstrates that the clergy and a majority of the lay population believed in the efficacy of this program; for this reason, parish priests taught catechism in their parishes on a weekly basis, and small village communities established and paid for a surprisingly large number of local schools so that their sons and daughters could receive an education both in basic literacy skills and, through memorization of catechism, in Catholic faith and practice.

Explores a widespread ideological crisis concerning poverty that emerged in the aftermath of the plague in late medieval England. This work identifies poverty as a central preoccupation in texts ranging from Piers Plowman and Wycliffite writings to ""The Book of Margery Kempe"" and the York cycle plays.