Written by one of the foremost contemporary authorities on Saint Dominic, this book represents the latest, best, most concise and readable spiritual biography of Saint Dominic. The focus of the biography is the way in which Saint Dominic embodied the role of Christ as preacher and the results that came from this grace. From his earliest youth, Sacred Scripture was the very heart and foundation of Dominic's spiritual life. He never ceased to plunge into the Word of God, to study it, to pray...

A beautiful book of meditations on various Christian virtues or charisms as reflected in the lives of nine holy Dominican men and women. Manifesting the special grace and spirit given to St. Dominic, these outsanding lives are shining examples for modern Christians on how to make the Gospel teaching incarnate in today's world. Saints portrayed include Thomas Aquinas, Catherine of Siena, Martin de Porres, Fra Angelico, Peter of Verona, Catherine de Ricci and others. Charisms highlighted by ...

A distinguished group of authors here illuminate a broad spectrum of themes in the history of biblical interpretation. Originally published in 1990, these essays take as their common ground the thesis that the intellectual and religious life of the sixteenth century cannot be understood without attention to the preoccupation of sixteenth-century humanists and theologians with the interpretation of the Bible. Topics explored include Jewish exegesis and problems of Old Testament interpretati...

"Arguably the most distinctive feature of the early Christian literature," writes Bart Ehrman, "is the degree to which it was forged." The Homilies and Recognitions of Clement; Paul's letters to and from Seneca; Gospels by Peter, Thomas, and Philip; Jesus' correspondence with Abgar, letters by Peter and Paul in the New Testament--all forgeries. To cite just a few examples. Forgery and Counterforgery is the first comprehensive study of early Christian pseudepigrapha ever produced in English...

What is a rule, if it appears to become confused with life? And what is a human life, if, in every one of its gestures, of its words, and of its silences, it cannot be distinguished from the rule?It is to these questions that Agamben's new book turns by means of an impassioned reading of the fascinating and massive phenomenon of Western monasticism from Pachomius to St. Francis. The book reconstructs in detail the life of the monks with their obsessive attention to temporal articul...

The question of whether and how people who have not had the chance to hear the gospel can be saved goes back to the beginnings of Christian reflection. It has also become a much-debated topic in current theology. In Will Many Be Saved? Ralph Martin focuses primarily on the history of debate and the development of responses to this question within the Roman Catholic Church, but much of Martin's discussion is also relevant to the wider debate happening in many churches around the wo...

What does it mean to be saved? Did God choose who would be his followers, or was it a personal choice? These are just some of the questions Paul addresses in the sixteen challenging chapters of his letter to the Romans.Reading Romans shows how some of the greatest minds in the history of the church have wrestled with, and even been changed by, Paul's words. For example, God used a passage from Romans to speak to the untamed heart of Augustine, and John Wesley said that after hearin...

Why has power in the West assumed the form of an "economy," that is, of a government of men and things? If power is essentially government, why does it need glory, that is, the ceremonial and liturgical apparatus that has always accompanied it?In the early centuries of the Church, in order to reconcile monotheism with God's threefold nature, the doctrine of Trinity was introduced in the guise of an economy of divine life. It was as if the Trinity amounted to nothing more than a pro...

Archbishop Angelo Roncali (later Pope John XXIII) read True and False Reform during his years as papal nuncio in France and asked, A reform of the church 'is such a thing really possible?" A decade later as pope, he opened the Second Vatican Council by describing its goals in terms that reflected Congar's description of authentic reform: reform that penetrates to the heart of doctrine as a message of salvation for the whole of humanity, that retrieves the meaning of prophecy in a ...

Luther's Theology of the Cross represents a fully revised and updated edition of the classic 1985 text that expands on the author's ongoing research and reflects 25 years of Luther scholarship.Rewritten and expanded edition of a highly-acclaimed classic textIncorporates primary and secondary sources that have become available since the publication of the first editionDraws on advances in our understanding of the late medieval intellectual, cultura...

According to a commonplace narrative, the rise of modern political thought in the West resulted from secularization—the exclusion of religious arguments from political discourse. But in this pathbreaking work, Eric Nelson argues that this familiar story is wrong. Instead, he contends, political thought in early-modern Europe became less, not more, secular with time, and it was the Christian encounter with Hebrew sources that provoked this radical transformation.During the sixteenth...

In this follow-up to The Kingdom and the Glory and The Highest Poverty, Agamben investigates the roots of our moral concept of duty in the theory and practice of Christian liturgy. Beginning with the New Testament and working through to late scholasticism and modern papal encyclicals, Agamben traces the Church's attempts to repeat Christ's unrepeatable sacrifice. Crucial here is the paradoxical figure of the priest, who becomes more and more a pure instrument of God's pow...