The intertwining of U.S. Catholicism and race-based slavery is a painful aspect of the Church's history. Many scholars have shied away from this uncomfortable topic, but in recent years a cadre of historians have studied Catholics' varied roles: as enslaved persons, slaveholders, defenders of slavery, and, in a few cases, advocates of abolition ......
Bruno, a cleric who served the archbishop of Magdeburg and subsequently the bishop of Merseburg during the course of the 1060s to the 1080s, composed one of the most important historical works treating the tumultuous period in the history of the German kingdom in the second half of the eleventh century. Bruno's main focus in his Saxon War is the ......
Cyril of Alexandria (ca. 376-444) is best known for his defense of orthodoxy at the time of the Nestorian controversy over the nature of Christ. However, by far the larger part of Cyril's literary output consisted of commentaries on books of both Old and New Testaments, written before the Christological debate was sparked off in 428. One of these ......
Victim of history," "a martyr from behind the Iron Curtain," "the Hungarian Gandhi" - these are just some of the epithets which people used to describe Cardinal Mindszenty, archbishop of Esztergom, who was the last Hungarian prelate to use the title of prince primate. Today, Mindszenty has been forgotten in most countries except for Hungary, but ......
Recovering the Carmelites of Salamanca on the Logic of the Incarnation
Saint Thomas Aquinas famously held the opinion that, in God's actual plan for the world, the Word would not have become flesh except to redeem us from sin. Conversely, Blessed John Duns Scotus argued that God intended Christ first, such that Christ would have come even if there had been no sin. While Aquinas and Scotus were far from the first to ......
The topic of habitus is one of Thomas Aquinas's greatest contributions to moral theology, but it has been generally neglected in theological scholarship until now. Habits and Holiness is the first work in English to explore Aquinas's rich theology of habit in all of its grandeur and depth. Habits and Holiness shows that most facets of human life ......
Pope Benedict XVI on Living the Theological Virtues in a Secular Age
Pope Benedict XVI memorably remarked that the Christian faith is a lot like a Gothic cathedral with its stained-glass windows. From the outside, the Church can appear dark, dreary, and worn with age-the crumbling relic of an institution that no longer speaks to men and women living in our modern world. Indeed, for many people today, Christian ......
With this publication, English readers now have available to them the complete homilies of Origen of Alexandria on the book of Joshua. These homilies were among the last Origen gave before his torture and death during the Decian persecution, around 254. With the saga of the Israelites entering and possessing their promised land, Origen unfolds ......
Born of an aristocratic pagan family at Neocaesarea in Pontus at the beginning of the third century, St. Gregory received his early training in literature and rhetoric in his birthplace. While visiting Caesarea in Palestine, he chanced to hear the Christian philosopher and theologian Origen and remained there for five years as his pupil. Deeply ......
