University Of Notre Dame Press

This survey of Islamic law combines Western and Islamic views and describes the relationship between the original theories of Islamic law and the views of contemporary Islamic writers. Covering the key topics in the area-including the history, sources and formation of Islamic law, the legal mechanisms, and the contemporary context-it is strong in its coverage of the modern perspective, which distinguishes this book from other texts in the field. The aim is to provide the student with a basic understanding of Islamic law and access to the complexity of the Islamic legal system. The language used is non-technical and understanding is aided with a supplementary detailed glossary and analytical indices.

In this brief but comprehensive study, David W. Wills provides both a broad interpretation and a wealth of factual information on the history of Christianity in the United States. Though Wills pays careful attention to the diversity of American Christianity, charting the growth of American religious pluralism is only one of his goals. He also emphasizes Christian efforts to build a holy commonwealth and the role of religion in America's still unresolved effort to come to terms with the realities of race. Wills places the history of Christianity in the United States in the larger context of the globalization of the Christian religion. He links the rise of African-American Christianity with the emergence of Christianity in the non-western world. He also argues that the history of Christianity in the United States concerns itself in a central way with the relation of religious ideas, institutions, constituencies, and practices to the creation and exercise of political power. This compelling work will be an invaluable text for courses in religious studies, American history, American studies, and African-American studies.

This book is a thorough evaluation of the arguments made by contemporary philosophers about the normative character of reason and the derivative problem of relativism.

For many Americans of both right and left political persuasions, the Russian bear is more of a bugbear. On the right, the country is still mentally represented by Soviet domination. For those on the left, it is a harbor for reactionary values and neo-imperial visions. The reality, however, is that, despite Russia's political failures, its rich history of culture, religion, and philosophical reflection-even during the darkest days of the Gulag-have been a deposit of wisdom for American artists, religious thinkers, and political philosophers probing what it means to be human in America. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn stands out as the key figure in this conversation, as both a Russian literary giant and an exile from Russia living in America for two decades. This anthology reconsiders Solzhenitsyn's work from a variety of perspectives-his faith, his politics, and the influences and context of his literature-to provide a prophetic vision for our current national confusion over universal ideals. In Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: The Russian Soul in the West, David P. Deavel and Jessica Hooten Wilson have collected essays from the foremost scholars and thinkers of comparative studies who have been tracking what Americans have borrowed and learned from Solzhenitsyn as well as his fellow Russians. The book offers a consideration of what we have in common-the truth, goodness, and beauty America has drawn from Russian culture and from masters such as Solzhenitsyn-and will suggest to readers what we can still learn and what we must preserve. The book will interest fans of Solzhenitsyn and scholars across the disciplines, and it can be used in courses on Solzhenitsyn or Russian literature more broadly. Contributors: David P. Deavel, Jessica Hooten Wilson, Nathan Nielson, Eugene Vodolazkin, David Walsh, Matthew Lee Miller, Ralph C. Wood, Gary Saul Morson, Edward E. Ericson, Jr., Micah Mattix, Joseph Pearce, James F. Pontuso, Daniel J. Mahoney, William Jason Wallace, Lee Trepanier, Peter Leithart, Dale Peterson, Julianna Leachman, Walter G. Moss, and Jacob Howland.

Down Along the Piney is John Mort's fourth short-story collection and winner of the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction. With settings in Florida, California, Mexico, Chicago, the Texas Panhandle, and, of course, the Ozarks themselves, these thirteen stories portray the unsung, amusing, brutal, forever hopeful lives of ordinary people. Mort chronicles the struggles of "flyover" people who live not just in the Midwest, but anywhere you can find a farm, small town, or river winding through forested hills. Mort, whose earlier stories have appeared in the New Yorker, GQ, and The Chicago Tribune, is the author of the award-winning Vietnam War novel Soldier in Paradise, as well as Goat Boy of the Ozarks and The Illegal. These ironic, unflaggingly honest stories will remind the reader of Jim Harrison, Sherwood Anderson, and Shirley Jackson.

This useful book is the compilation of bibliographical information accumulated over eleven years (1986-1996) in the annual publication of the New Chaucer Society, Studies in the Age of Chaucer. Features of this comprehensive work include an extensive subject index and a descriptive annotation for each entry that identifies the nature of the study and clarifies its utility or argument. These annotations are the work of a large number of scholars and have been carefully updated, corrected, and supplemented. An important component of the Annotated Chaucer Bibliography is its single-codex format, which enables users to peruse eleven years of Chaucer bibliography comprehensively. This is especially valuable for recognizing patterns or trends in individual works or topics. The majority of the entries and their annotations are also available in the electronic format of the Chaucer Online Bibliography, making possible title, author, and keyword searches of the data included in this volume.

While much has been written about the Catholic Church and the Holocaust, little has been published about the hostile role of priests, in particular Jesuits, toward Jews and Judaism. Jesuit Kaddish is a long overdue study that examines Jesuit hostility toward Judaism before the Shoah and the development of a new understanding of the Catholic Church's relation to Judaism that culminated with Vatican II's landmark decree Nostra aetate. James Bernauer undertakes a self-examination as a member of the Jesuit order and writes this story in the hopes that it will contribute to interreligious reconciliation. Jesuit Kaddish demonstrates the way Jesuit hostility operated, examining Jesuit moral theology's dualistic approach to sexuality and, in the case of Nazi Germany, the articulation of an unholy alliance between a sexualizing and a Judaizing of German culture. Bernauer then identifies an influential group of Jesuits whose thought and action contributed to the developments in Catholic teaching about Judaism that eventually led to the watershed moment of Nostra aetate. This book concludes with a proposed statement of repentance from the Jesuits and an appendix presenting the fifteen Jesuits who have been honored as "Righteous Among the Nations" by Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Center. Jesuit Kaddish offers a crucial contribution to the fields of Catholicism and Nazism, Catholic-Jewish relations, Jesuit history, and the history of anti-Semitism in Europe.

This collection of essays debates how written printed, visual, and performed works produced meaning and a multimedia culture in America before 1900.

With extraordinary elegance and philosophic power, Frithjof Bergmann presents a genuine rethinking of freedom. By changing the focus from outside to inside the person, Bergmann shows how freedom can be a reality in self-growth, parenting, education, and in shaping a society that stimulates rather than stunts the self.

Two questions regarding contemporary theological and philosophical studies are often overlooked: "Is God infinite or finite?" and, "What does it mean to say that God is infinite?" In The Infinity of God, Benedikt Paul Göcke and Christian Tapp bring together prominent scholars to discuss God's infinitude from philosophical and theological perspectives. Each contributor deals with a particular aspect of the infinity of God, employing the methods of analytic theology and analytic philosophy. The essays in the first section examine historical issues from a systematic point of view. The contributors focus on the Cappadocian Fathers, Thomas Aquinas, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Bolzano, and Cantor. The second section deals with particular issues concerning the relation between God's infinity and both the finitude of the world and the classical attributes of God: eternity, simplicity, omnipresence, omnipotence, omniscience, and moral perfection. There are some books that deal with the notion of infinity in mathematics and in general philosophy, but no single text brings together the best analytic philosophers and theologians tackling the various aspects of the infinity of God and the correlated problems. This book will interest students and scholars in philosophy of religion, theology, and metaphysics. Contributors: Benedikt Paul Göcke, Christian Tapp, Franz Krainer, Adam Drosdek, William E. Carroll, Christina Schneider, Ruben Schneider, Robert M. Wallace, Bruce A. Hedman, Bernhard Lang, Richard Swinburne, Kenneth L. Pearce, William Hasker, Paul Helm, Brian Leftow, Ken Perszyk, Thomas Schärtl, and Philip Clayton.

Down Along the Piney is John Mort's fourth short-story collection and winner of the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction. With settings in Florida, California, Mexico, Chicago, the Texas Panhandle, and, of course, the Ozarks themselves, these thirteen stories portray the unsung, amusing, brutal, forever hopeful lives of ordinary people. Mort chronicles the struggles of "flyover" people who live not just in the Midwest, but anywhere you can find a farm, small town, or river winding through forested hills. Mort, whose earlier stories have appeared in the New Yorker, GQ, and The Chicago Tribune, is the author of the award-winning Vietnam War novel Soldier in Paradise, as well as Goat Boy of the Ozarks and The Illegal. These ironic, unflaggingly honest stories will remind the reader of Jim Harrison, Sherwood Anderson, and Shirley Jackson.

Kellie Wells is a writer of startling imagination whose "phantasmal stories," Booklist says, "shimmer with a dreamlike vibrancy." God, the Moon, and Other Megafauna, Wells's second collection of short stories and winner of the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction, is populated with the world's castoffs, cranks, and inveterate oddballs, the deeply aggrieved, the ontologically challenged, the misunderstood mopes that haunt the shadowy wings of the world?s main stage. Here you will find a teacup-sized aerialist who tries to ingest the world's considerable suffering; a lonely god growing ever lonelier as the Afterlife swells with monkeys and other improbable occupants; a father fluent in the language of the Dead who has difficulty communicating with his living son; and Death himself, a moony adolescent with a tender heart and a lack of ambition. God-haunted and apocalyptic, comic and formally inventive, these stories give lyrical voice to the indomitability of the everyday underdog, and they will continue to resonate long after the last word has been read.

An archive-based account of the developmental years of the University of Notre Dame. During these years, university leaders strove to find the additional resources needed to transform their succesful boarding school into an ethically diverse modern Catholic university. The history of the University of Notre Dame from 1842 to 1934 mirrors in many ways the history of American Catholicism during those years. For reasons having to do more with football than religion, most Americans think first of Notre Dame when they think of Catholic universities. Burns, a former Notre Dame faculty member and longtime columnist for U.S. Catholic magazine, traces the emergence of American Catholics from a minority status in society to the elevation of Notre Dame as a great American university. He argues that having one of the most successful college football teams in history helped establish Notre Dame's popularity and reputation in American culture and history. Burns keeps the reader entranced with a narrative filled with lively characters and events. Here we meet Notre Dame founder Reverend Edward Sorin, the KKK in Indiana, Knute Rockne and a host of other heroes and cowards, mountebanks and millionaires, all of whom played a part in the astonishing years covered by this story.

An archive-based account of the developmental years of the University of Notre Dame. During these years, university leaders strove to find the additional resources needed to transform their succesful boarding school into an ethically diverse modern Catholic university. The history of the University of Notre Dame from 1842 to 1934 mirrors in many ways the history of American Catholicism during those years. For reasons having to do more with football than religion, most Americans think first of Notre Dame when they think of Catholic universities. Burns, a former Notre Dame faculty member and longtime columnist for U.S. Catholic magazine, traces the emergence of American Catholics from a minority status in society to the elevation of Notre Dame as a great American university. He argues that having one of the most successful college football teams in history helped establish Notre Dame's popularity and reputation in American culture and history. Burns keeps the reader entranced with a narrative filled with lively characters and events. Here we meet Notre Dame founder Reverend Edward Sorin, the KKK in Indiana, Knute Rockne and a host of other heroes and cowards, mountebanks and millionaires, all of whom played a part in the astonishing years covered by this story.

What happens when poetry deals explicitly with a serious theological issue? In Poetry Does Theology, Jim Rhodes seeks one answer to that question by analyzing the symbiotic relationship that existed between theology and poetry in fourteenth-century England. He pays special attention to the narrative poems of Chaucer, Grosseteste, the Pearl-poet, the author of Saint Erkenwald, and Langland. Rhodes shows that Chaucer and his contemporaries wrote at the end of a linguistic and theological revolution-a time when revised perspectives on the creation and incarnation gave rise to a new humanistic spirit that transformed late medieval theological culture and spurred the development of vernacular theology and poetry. Rhodes' careful analysis describes how the relationship between theology and poetry underwent a radical transformation as the latter half of the fourteenth century progressed.