Books published by University of Notre Dame Press

This volume investigates the activities of those who worked for the restoration of ecclesial unity, first in the conciliar era, then in the early years of the Protestant reformations, and finally during the ""confessional age,"" when the theological and cultural characteristics of competing religious groups began to emerge.

With a salve in one hand and a butcher's knife in the other, Janet Kaplan offers her masterful third collection, Dreamlife of a Philanthropist. These prose poems and sonnets are packed with postmodern language-leaping, modern irony and absurdity, and a poet's ageless ear for the pleasures of the lyric and formal experimentation.

Presents English translations from the works of Michael Psellos, a key philosopher of the Byzantine Empire. This book contains the works that Psellos wrote about his family, including a funeral oration for his mother that features recollections from a childhood spent in Constantinople.

Various scholars and media analysts have suggested that Vatican II revolutionized American Catholicism, with the changes it mandated filtering down from the Council to the church hierarchy to the laity. The author challenges this assumption, based on his tracing of Catholic lay practices in the Pittsburgh Diocese from the 1950s through the 1970s.

Jan Van Ruusbroec (1293-1381), a Flemish mystical theologian, was one of the most original Trinitarian thinkers in the medieval West. In this book, Van Nieuwenhove explores in detail Ruusbroec's theology of the Trinity, his anthropology, Christology and his understanding of union with God.

A host of modern authors have portrayed Joan of Arc as a heroine, telling her story as a way of commenting on their own situation in a world where the power of art has decreased. Astell argues that many authors have seen their own artistic vocation in the visions and voices that inspired Joan.

The contributors' analyses of people, events and texts seek to provide a balanced perspective on the fate of 12th-century Jewish communities. They reveal that there is considerable evidence that old routines and interactions between Christians and Jews persisted throughout this period.

This text explores why and how democracy broke down in Peru in 1992. The author's argument is that institutional factors - especially the absence of a legislative majority - were crucial to the collapse of democracy in Peru during and before this period and throughout Latin America since the 1960s.

The contrtibutors to this collection offer personal, philosophical and historical views on questions about death. Contributors include: John Lachs, Jurgen Moltmann, David Roochnik, Aaron Garrett, David Schmidtz, David Eckel, Brian Jorgensen, Rita Rouner, Peter Gomes and Wendy Doniger.

Written to honour and extend the work of Rowan A. Greer, Walter H. Gray Professor Emeritus of Anglican Studies at Yale University Divinity School, these essays explore the connections between textual interpretation and the formation of religious identity within ancient scripture.

The authors of this book wrestle with the dilemma that modern society has developed a heightened sensitivity to the demands of human dignity while creating radically new dangers to humanity in the form of the totalitarian state, modern technology, genetic engineering and radical environmentalism.

This series of eight provocative essays examines why Americans have a penchant for going to extremes in their arts, popular culture, politics, social movements, and other aspects of life. Robert Schmuhl considers historical examples (the hunting of the buffalo in the West, Prohibition, business ventures in the Gilded Age) but concentrates on contemporary subjects, including the emphasis on what shocks the audience as entertainment today, tensions among specific groups, the decline of private life, and the excesses of news media coverage in the O.J. Simpson and Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky stories. Indecent Liberties explores the dangers and consequences of carrying fundamental American freedoms too far. In this environment, achieving a public good can get lost in a frenzy of private gain or a worthwhile idea can be pushed to unrecognizable boundaries, producing the opposite of its intended effect. When an attitude of "e;anything goes"e; takes hold, a sense of limits gets lost, and it is different to achieve harmony or a center that holds. Especially as we face a new century with talk of "e;hyperdemocracy"e; and "e;hypercommunications"e; common in intellectual circles, Indecent Liberties argues that seeking equilibrium should be a central objective for all Americans. To go to wretched excess can lead to "e;indecent liberties"e; and wretched results that throw the country off balance and endanger the future. This book asks questions about today and yesterday that require answers for tomorrow. This insightful analysis of a distinct American characteristic is for every reader concerned with America's penchant for going to extremes in ways that produce debatable, even deplorable, consequences.

An analysis of the Irish community of city of Worcester, Massachusetts around the turn of the 20th century. The author reveals how an ethnic group can endure and yet change when its first American-born generation takes control of its destiny.

Gregory Heyworth's Desiring Bodies considers the physical body and its relationship to poetic and corporate bodies in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Beginning in the odd contest between body and form in the first sentence of Ovid's protean Metamorphoses, Heyworth identifies these concepts as structuring principles of civic and poetic unity and pursues their consequences as refracted through a series of romances, some typical of the genre, some problematically so. Bodies, in Ovidian romance, are the objects of human desire to possess, to recover, to form, or to violate. Part 1 examines this desire as both a literal and socio-political phenomenon through readings of Marie de France's Lais, Chretien de Troyes' Cliges and Perceval, and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, texts variously expressing social, economic, and political culture in romance. In part 2, Heyworth is concerned with missing or absent bodies in Petrarch's Rime sparse, Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and Milton's Paradise Lost and the generic rupture they cause in lyric, tragedy, and epic. Throughout, Heyworth draws on social theorists such as Kant, Weber, Simmel, and Elias to explore the connection between social and literary form.The first comparative, diachronic study of romance form in many years, Desiring Bodies is a persuasive and important cultural history that demonstrates Ovid's pervasive influence not only on the poetics but on the politics of the medieval and early modern Western tradition.

By presenting a set of empirical studies, this volume provides a basis for comparisons across sectors on such dimensions as school organization, governance, curriculum, and pedagogy in US elementary and secondary schools. It is of interest to administrators and scholars in education and the sociology of education.

Explores how democracy has changed the Catholic Church and, in turn, how religious changes have influenced democratic politics in Latin America. This book assess the ways in which the Catholic Church in Latin America deals with these political, religious, and social changes.

A collection of original essays on the history of Jews and Christians in antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the modern era that honors the influential work of Michael A Signer (1945-2009).

A collection of ten 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.

Identifies and recovers the excitement and dynamism that characterized ceremonial culture in pre-modern Europe. This work talks about: the relation between public and private space, the development of fully-realized dramas and rituals from earlier forms, and the semiotic code that ceremonies manifested to their audiences.

This work traces the development of Heidegger's explanation of philosophy as a methodological atheism, relating it to his reading of Aristotle, Aquinas and Nietzsche. A predominant issue throughout this study is Heidegger's pursuit of an answer to the question: how did God get into philosophy?

Explores the way in which Hispanic American thinkers in Latin America and Latino/a philosophers in the United States have posed and thought about questions of race, ethnicity, and nationality, and how they have interpreted the most significant racial and ethnic labels used in Hispanic America in connection with issues of rights, nationalism, power, and identity.

This volume offers a series of essays debating the topic of globalization - our increasingly integrated and interconnected world. ""Globalization and Multicultural Societies"" argues that the globalization process is a major catalyst in transforming contemporary society.

A guide through Social Security and the economics of growing old in America. It explores the average life expectancy and the number of elderly living in poverty; the Social Security system and benefits; the economic path to old age; changing social norms, including women in the workforce; and what happens when the elderly work for pay.

Barrio Boy is the remarkable story of one boy's journey from a Mexican village so small its main street didn't have a name, to the barrio of Sacramento, California, bustling and thriving in the early decades of the twentieth century. With vivid imagery and a rare gift for re-creating a child's sense of time and place, Ernesto Galarza gives an account of the early experiences of his extraordinary life-from revolution in Mexico to segregation in the United States-that will continue to delight readers for generations to come. Since it was first published in 1971, Galarza's classic work has been assigned in high school and undergraduate classrooms across the country, profoundly affecting thousands of students who read this true story of acculturation into American life. To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the publication of Barrio Boy, the University of Notre Dame Press is proud to reissue this best-selling book with a new text design and cover, as well an introduction-by Ilan Stavans, the distinguished cultural critic and editor of the Norton Anthology of Latino Literature-which places Ernesto Galarza and Barrio Boy in historical context.

This volume derives its title from John Dryden's phrase for the British tendency to take up literary masterpieces from the past and ""perfect"" them. It adopts Dryden's notion as a framework for exploring ways in which classical and medieval texts have been rewritten by modern authors.

The View from Within examines the character of reason and the ability of an individual to effectively distance himself from the normative framework in which he functions in order to be self-critical and innovative. To accomplish this task, Menachem Fisch and Yitzhak Benbaji critically employ or reject the recent writings of Brandom, Friedman, Frankfurt, Walzer, Davidson, Williams, Habermas, Rorty, and McDowell to offer a fundamental analysis of the character of reason and the problem of relativism. This ambitious book forcefully raises the problem of rational normative change and makes the unique and insightful claim that although we cannot be convinced by normative criticism to modify or replace our norms, we can be rationally motivated to do so by the effect of exposure to trusted critics. Its unprecedented analysis, with its solution to the problem of normative self-criticism that has baffled philosophers for the past sixty years, will be welcomed by both students and scholars of philosophy. "e;The View from Within is a thorough evaluation of the arguments made by contemporary philosophers about the normative character of reason and the derivative problem of relativism. Fisch and Benbaji have admirably compared and contrasted competing positions, and with a balanced critique, they have made a sustained effort to 'save' rationality and provide new guideposts for its philosophical evaluation. A timely and important contribution."e;-Alfred I. Tauber, Boston University

The "e;Galileo Affair"e; has been the locus of various and opposing appraisals for centuries: some view it as an historical event emblematic of the obscurantism of the Catholic Church, opposed a priori to the progress of science; others consider it a tragic reciprocal misunderstanding between Galileo, an arrogant and troublesome defender of the Copernican theory, and his theologian adversaries, who were prisoners of a narrow interpretation of scripture. In The Case of Galileo: A Closed Question? Annibale Fantoli presents a wide range of scientific, philosophical, and theological factors that played an important role in Galileo's trial, all set within the historical progression of Galileo's writing and personal interactions with his contemporaries. Fantoli traces the growth in Galileo Galilei's thought and actions as he embraced the new worldview presented in On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, the epoch-making work of the great Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus. Fantoli delivers a sophisticated analysis of the intellectual milieu of the day, describes the Catholic Church's condemnation of Copernicanism (1616) and of Galileo (1633), and assesses the church's slow acceptance of the Copernican worldview. Fantoli criticizes the 1992 treatment by Cardinal Poupard and Pope John Paul II of the reports of the Commission for the Study of the Galileo Case and concludes that the Galileo Affair, far from being a closed question, remains more than ever a challenge to the church as it confronts the wider and more complex intellectual and ethical problems posed by the contemporary progress of science and technology. In clear and accessible prose geared to a wide readership, Fantoli has distilled forty years of scholarly research into a fascinating recounting of one of the most famous cases in the history of science.

Winner of the 2010 Richard Sullivan Prize in Fiction, Joan Frank's second story collection, In Envy Country, explores the uncertainties and triumphs of women and men in and out of love and marriage, at varying ages and stages of contemporary American life. By turns wry, pained, and amused, In Envy Country investigates those small, complex truths that gain clarity with time and distance. Frank, whose earlier books have been reviewed in The New York Times Book Review and Publisher's Weekly, sets these stories in Paris, California, and Spain.