Books published by University of Notre Dame Press

This work celebrates composers and creators such as Harry Partch, Raymond Scott, Leon Theremin, and George Ives, who had to invent new instruments to capture the music heard in their ""mind's ear"". It's subject is the artist's dilemma - how to deliver a new idea through existing media.

This book focuses the reader's attention on great teachers in the act of teaching and on their students in the act of learning. The book challenges us to question our assumptions about ourselves and others as everyday teachers and learners.

The interpretation of Scripture has depended largely on the view of history held by theologians and exegetes. This title examines the changing views of history that distinguish patristic and medieval biblical exegesis from modern historical-critical exegesis. It provides an original theological basis for critical exegesis.

Collects shards of the expectations and regrets that survive in petitions, manuscript records of university controversy, and recollections of proponents of lay and local control. The fragments recover thinking about the laity that gave ""revolutionary force"" to late Tudor puritanism.

Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them; there is no third. This study attempts to explain and justify T.S. Eliot's claim. John Scott offers a critical overview of Dante's writings: the ""Vita Nova"", the ""Convivio"", the ""De Vulgari Eloquentia"", his ""Rime"", and ""Monarchia"",

Taking the film ""The Dead Poet's Society"" as his inspiration, Vittorio Hosle creates a place where the great philosophers of antiquity and their modern successors can all meet. They gather in the ""Cafe of the Dead But Ever Young Philosophers"" and discuss eleven-year-old Nora K.'s letters.

The Templars and the Hospitallers were the two earliest and most famous of the major Military Orders of the Roman Catholic Church from the early twelfth to the middle of the thirteenth century. In this book, Jonathan Riley-Smith attends to the Templars' and Hospitallers' primary role as religious orders, not as military phenomena or economic powerhouses. In a prologue, four chapters, and an epilogue, Riley-Smith discusses the origins of the orders in dedication to the protection of pilgrims to the Holy Land (Templars) and to the care of the poor and the sick among them (Hospitallers). He examines their traditions and early history, the organization of their communities, modes of governance, and, in the fourth chapter, important differences between the orders and a brief account of their respective fates in the wake of the Crusades. The Templars were eventually persecuted by the Church and the order suppressed. Riley-Smith speculates that the violent end of the order was caused both by jealousy of its wealth and by internal problems of governance that left it vulnerable to accusations of conducting blasphemous rites. The Hospitallers survived in one form or another to the present day; vestiges of the original order inform the contemporary Knights of Malta.

This work provides an overview of the research of Lawrence Kohlberg, best known for his theory of stages of moral development. The book illustrates how the Kohlbergian project has much to offer the debate about moral psychology and how to renew our society's jaded sense of fairness.

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.

In Three American Poets, William C. Spengemann describes the very different sorts of poetry Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville wrote, their comparable reasons for writing as they did, and the posthumous critical effects of their having done so. By linking these utterly singular poets and their work-verse connected by shared qualities of oddity, complexity, and difficulty-Spengemann illuminates the poets' efforts to create verse equal to the demands of a changing nineteenth century. All three responded to a widespread sense of loss-loss, above all, of Christian understandings of the origins, nature, and purpose of human existence, both individual and collective. All three, too, regarded poetry as the sole means of dealing with that loss and of comprehending not only a changing world but the old world from which the new one had departed, and hence the connections between the vanished, discredited past, the baffling present, and the as yet inscrutable future. Spengemann suggests that the poetic eccentricities of Whitman, Melville, and Dickinson arose directly from their use of poetry as a vehicle of thought; each devised a poetic language either to attempt to recover a lost sense of assurance threatened by the collapse of traditional faith or to discover an altogether new ground of knowledge and being. Spengemann guides us in parsing their respective poetics with masterful readings closely attuned to diction, syntax, meter, and figure. His authoritative and empirical descriptions of the poets' verse and their respective characteristic aesthetics afford us heightened access to the poems and the pleasures peculiar to them, in the process making us better readers of poetry in general.

Elisabeth Behr-Sigel (1907-2005) was one of the most important Orthodox theologians of the twentieth century. For seventy years she helped her church, dispersed and uprooted from its cultural heritage, adapt to a new world. Born in Alsace, France, to a Protestant father and a Jewish mother, Behr-Sigel received a master's degree in theology from the Protestant Faculty of Theology at Strasbourg and began a pastoral ministry. It lasted only a year. Already attracted by the beauty of its liturgy and by its characteristic spirituality, Behr-Sigel officially embraced the Orthodox faith at age twenty-four. During World War II her family (husband Andre Behr and their three children) lived in Nancy, France, where Behr-Sigel taught in the public school system. She later referred to this time as her real apprenticeship in ecumenism, when people of different traditions came together in opposition to Nazism, hiding Jews and providing escape routes. After the war she took advantage of courses at St. Sergius Theological Institute in Paris, where she later joined the faculty. Behr-Sigel also taught at the Catholic Institute of Paris, the Dominican College of Ottowa, and the Ecumenical Institute of Tantur near Jerusalem. She wrote and published books in Orthodox theology, spirituality, and the role of women in the Orthodox Church. In her retirement she continued to work on behalf of women and of the ecumenical movement. Published in 2007 in France as Vers le jour sans declin, this biography by the Orthodox writer Olga Lossky will bring to English-speaking readers of all religious persuasions the life and career of a remarkable and admirable woman of faith. Behr-Sigel fully cooperated with this biography, meeting with Lossky weekly during the last year of her life and giving Lossky access to her journal and personal letters.

Addresses the political, cultural, and historical debate that has ensued in Spain as a result of the discovery and exhumation of mass graves dating from the years during and after the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). This title includes essays that present an analysis of how Spain has sought to come to terms with the violence of Franco's regime.

This work explores the notion that home is both a place and a condition of the spirit. While a person may have a place that is home, he or she may also be nostalgic for an inner spiritual home which beckons even as it lies beyond the human grasp.

Using Argentina as the main example, this work examines all aspects of democracy and democratization in Latin America. The author illustrates many weaknesses of authoritarianism and repressive regimes which, he argues, can be taken advantage of appropriately by the struggle for democracy.

The Semantics of Analogy is the first book-length interpretive study in English of Thomas de Vio Cajetan's (1469?-1534) classic treatise on analogy. Written in 1498, De Nominum Analogia (On the Analogy of Names) has long been treated as Cajetan's attempt to systematize Aquinas's theory of analogy. A traditional interpretation regarded it as the official Thomistic treatise on analogy, but current scholarly consensus holds that Cajetan misinterpreted Aquinas and misunderstood the phenomenon of analogy. Both approaches, argues Joshua P. Hochschild, ignore the philosophical and historical context and fail to accurately assess Cajetan's work. In The Semantics of Analogy, Hochschild reinterprets De Nominum Analogia as a significant philosophical treatise in its own right. He addresses some of the most well-known criticisms of Cajetan's analogy theory and explicates the later chapters of De Nominum Analogia, which are usually ignored by commentators. He demonstrates that Cajetan was aware of the limits of semantic analysis, had a sophisticated view of the relationship between semantics and metaphysics, and expressed perceptive insights about concept formation and hermeneutics that are of continuing philosophical relevance. "e;Cajetan's universally scorned doctrine on analogy of proportionality has for some time been ripe for rehabilitation. Given recent philosophical and scholarly work on the semantics of analogy, it is no accident that only now could a philosopher be found who is up to the task. Joshua Hochschild is certainly that. The Semantics of Analogy will make the Thomist and Scotist alike rethink his or her position on analogy, and Hochschild's sustained argument will challenge all to take seriously the way classical semantics deals with ambiguity. It is a masterful book."e; --David B. Twetten, Marquette University "e;A reassessment of Cajetan's work on analogy is long overdue. As Joshua Hochschild shows, Cajetan's admirable and lucid little treatise on the topic deserves to be understood in its own right. Hochschild presents it to us convincingly as a treatise in which Cajetan focuses on a properly semantic question regarding the need for some common ratio in syllogistic reasoning (if such reasoning is to be saved from fallacies of equivocation)."e; --Philip L. Reynolds, Candler School of Theology, Emory University "e;Cajetan's work on analogy is 'the' classic, systematic account of this logico-linguistic phenomenon and its far-reaching metaphysical and epistemological implications. While historians of philosophy, especially Thomists, tended to evaluate Cajetan's theory in terms of its faithfulness to Aquinas' intentions, Hochschild's work engages it from a systematic philosophical perspective, showing its relevance to contemporary theorizing about the subject, despite its historical and conceptual distance from contemporary research in the field. While always treating Cajetan's work in its proper historical context, Hochschild's down-to-earth philosophical style effortlessly closes the conceptual gap between Cajetan and us, breathing new life into Cajetan's difficult, rarefied philosophical prose."e; --Gyula Klima, Fordham University

Helps in understanding the French Enlightenment by analyzing a diverse constellation of Theological Enlightenment discourses, which were compromised between about 1730 and 1762 by high-stakes cultural and political controversies involving the royal court, the government, and the Catholic Church.

Newton on Matter and Activity shows persuasively that while the Principia remains within the first two stages of inquiry (mathematical and physical) into nature, Newton spent the next forty years of his life making a philosophical analysis of matter, force, and transmission of force. Close attention is paid to methodological issues, especially Newton's move beyond inductivism and toward a reproductive theoretical schema of interpretation required to treat of attraction, hardness, and impenetrability. --Cross Currents

This two-volume set provides an analysis of early Italian humanist thought and the Christian Renaissance. The author argues that the Italian humanists drew their inspiration more from the Church fathers than from the pagan ancients.

Drawing upon a vast range of human experience and reflection, this book seeks to demonstrate how people have tried to cope with the inevitability of death. Different cultures teach people to respond to their own death and the death of others in different ways.

A compilation of bibliographical information accumulated between 1986 and 96 in the annual publication of the New Chaucer Society, ""Studies in the Age of Chaucer"". Features include an extensive subject index and a descritptive annotation for each entry, identifying the nature of the study.

Thomas Aquinas, whose metaphysics implies the moral gulf, holds that human beings are ultimately separate from nature. This title analyzes and challenges Thomas' understanding of the human soul, his primary justification for the moral separation.

Written between 1292 and 1295, the Vita Nuova consists of 31 poems inspired by the historical but idealised and mythologised Lady Beatrice. This bi-lingual edition contains Michael Barbi's 1932 Italian edition plus an English translation.

The Bible is the most widely read book in the world. From the transcription of the Old Testament to Greek, to the collection of the Gospels, the Bible has always been in a state of literary and scholarly transition. In her classic work, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, Beryl Smalley describes the changes in the organization, technique, and purpose of Bible studies in northwestern Europe from the Carolingian renaissance to about 1300. This was the period when the emergence of Aristotelian thought inspired medieval scholars to take a fresh look at the Scriptures. The large number of medieval commentaries on the Bible confirms that they did so and that they expressed their reactions in writing. Medieval historians and students of literature will find special value in this book: they will learn, in systematic fashion, what earlier scholars have accomplished in the field of exegesis; and they will be enabled to employ the history of biblical interpretation recounted here as a mirror for the social and cultural upheavals that were taking place simultaneously.

Philip Quinn, John A. O''Brien Professor at the University of Notre Dame from 1986 until his death in 2004, was well known for his work in the philosophy of religion, political philosophy, and core areas of analytic philosophy. Although he had a wide range of philosophical interests, such that it would be virtually impossible to identify any one set as representative, the contributors to this volume provide an excellent introduction to, and advance the discussion of, some of the questions of central importance to Quinn in the last years of his working life. Paul J. Weithman argues in his introduction that Quinn''s interest and analyses in many areas grew out of a distinctive and underlying sensibility that we might call "liberal faith." It included belief in the value of a liberal education and in rigorous intellectual inquiry, the acceptance of enduring religious, cultural, and political pluralism, along with a keen awareness of problems posed by pluralism, and a deeply held but non-utopian faith in liberal democratic politics. These provocative essays, at the cutting edge of epistemology, the philosophy of religion, philosophical theology, and political philosophy, explore the tenets of liberal faith and invite continuing engagement with the philosophical issues.

Since the publication of Gustavo Gutiérrez''s 1973 groundbreaking work, A Theology of Liberation, much has been written on liberation theology and its central premise of the preferential option for the poor. Arguably, this has been one of the most important yet controversial theological themes of the twentieth century. As globalization creates greater gaps between the rich and the poor, and as the situation for many of the world''s poor worsens, there is an ever greater need to understand the gift and challenge of Christian faith from the context of the poor and marginalized of our society. This volume draws on the thought of leading international scholars and explores how the Christian tradition can help us understand the theological foundations for the option for the poor. The central focus of the book revolves around the question, How can one live a Christian life in a world of destitution? The contributors are concerned not only with a social, economic, or political understanding of poverty but above all with the option for the poor as a theological concept. While these essays are rooted in a solid grounding of our present "reality," they look to the past to understand some of the central truths of Christian faith and to the future as a source of Christian hope.

In this work, Roberto DaMatta focuses on the trajectories of three types of public ritual (carnival, Independence Day and other military parades, and local-level religious processions) as principal axes in defining the values and attitudes that shape urban Brazil.