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 ......
The great nineteenth-century Portuguese author Jose Maria Eca de Queiros (1845-1900) has long been known for his novels, especially The Crime of Father Amaro (1880) and The Maias (1888). However, he also wrote short stories, and a number of them, having stood the test of time, are now regarded as masterpieces. Although there is no question that ......
When Martin Luther distributed his 95 Theses on indulgences on October 31, 1517, he set in motion a chain of events that profoundly transformed the face of Western Christianity. The 500th anniversary of the 95 Theses offered an opportunity to reassess the meaning of that event. The relation of the Catholic Church to the Reformation that Luther set ......
Catholic Labor Movements in Europe narrates the history of industrial labor movements of Catholic inspiration in the period from the onset of World War I to the reconstruction after World War II. The stated goal of concerned Catholics in the 1920s and 1930s was to ""rechristianize society."" But dominant labor movements in many countries during ......
Chaucer's Trolius and Criseyde and the Implications of Authorial Recital
Olde Clerkis Speche affirms both the historical legitimacy and the interpretive benefits of reading Troilus and Criseyde as if the text were initially composed for Chaucer's own recital before a familiar audience. Proposing a qualification rather than contradiction of the ""persona"" as a reading premise, Quinn revitalizes the interpretive ......
Christian Perceptions of Jews in the High Middle Ages
For medieval Latin Christendom, authoritative texts such as the Bible and the writings of the Fathers of the Church provided a skeleton that gave form to Christian perceptions of Jews and Judaism. Eye-witness testimony, hearsay, reports of converts from Judaism, and the testimony of dreams, visions, and miraculous events helped fill in the body ......
In The Orphans of Byzantium, Miller provides a perceptive and original study of the evolution of orphanages in the Byzantine Empire. Contrary to popular belief and even expert opinion, medieval child-welfare systems were sophisticated, especially in the Byzantine world. Combining ancient Roman legal institutions with Christian concepts of charity, ......
St Peter Damian (1007-1072) is an exceptional example of a paradox that is found in many saints and thinkers through the ages (St Jerome, St Bernard, St Bridget of Sweden, St Teresa of Avila and Thomas Merton come to mind) - of a lifelong tension between two competing vocations: the call to solitude and holiness and the call to prophetic social ......
There are many ways of understanding the reality of the world we live in and experience. Science, philosophy, art all offer us ample descriptions, explanations and intuitions. But Christian believers go beyond all that, for they attempt to understand the origins of the universe in terms of the creation of the world by God. Revelation tells us what ......
