St. Jerome's reputation rests primarily on his achievements as a translator and as a scriptural exegete. The important service that he rendered to the Church in his doctrinal works is often overlooked or minimized by those who look for originality and independence of thought

As a scholar, writer and ascetic, Jerome was a major intellectual force in the early Church and influenced the ideals of Christian chastity and poverty for many generations after his death. This book assembles a representative selection of his voluminous output. It will help readers to a balanced portrait of a complex and brilliant, but not always likeable man.

The two-volume Encyclopedia of Monasticism describes the monastic traditions of both Christianity and Buddhism with more than 600 entries on important monastic figures of all periods and places, surveys of countries and localities, and topical essays covering a wide range of issues (e.g., art, behavior, economics, liturgy, politics, theology, and scholarship). Coverage encompasses not only geography and history worldwide but also the contemporary dilemmas of monastic life. Recent upheavals in certain countries are highlighted (Korea, Russia, Sri Lanka, etc.). Topical essays subtitled Christian Perspectives and Buddhist Perspectives explore in imaginative fashion comparisons and contrasts between Christian and Buddhist monasticism. Encyclopedia of Monasticism also includes more than 500 color and black and white illustrations covering all aspects of monastic life, art, and architecture.

Christmas cheers the birth of Christ with a fresh look at the festive season. English engages the rich theological and biblical themes of Advent as well as family traditions, popular carols, and legends of the holidays. Topics range from a theology of the incarnation of the Word, the role of Mary, the historical origin of December 25, the significance of Bethlehem and the star, the plight of the holy family in a hostile world, and the place of American pop icons like Frosty the Snowman, Santa Claus, and Buddy the Elf. Christmas brims with anticipation.

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This compendium of significant documents issued in recent years by the U.S. bishops and the papal magisterium provides an indispensable source of contemporary Church teachings on the Blessed Virgin Mary. Of value to students, theologians, ecumenists, and parishioners alike, these documents offer the authentic teaching of the Church on the meaning of Mary's role in the Church and her place in the mystery of Christ's salvation. Opening with the complete text of the bishop's 1973 pastoral letter, Behold Your Mother: Woman of Faith, the selections include Pope Paul VI's apostolic exhortation Marialis Cultus: For the Right Ordering and Development of Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary and Pope John Paul II's apostolic letter Rosarium Virginis Mariae (On the Most Holy Rosary). Mary in the Church will enrich the faith and love of all who seek to imitate the Mother of God on their way to Christ.

The original essays in Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature mean to provoke rather than reassure, to challenge rather than codify. Instead of summarizing existing knowledge scholars working in the field aim at opening fresh discussion; instead of emphasizing settled consensus they direct their readers to areas of enlivened and unresolved debate. The deepest periodic division in English literary history has been between the Medieval and the Early Modern, not least because the cultural investments in maintaining that division are exceptionally powerful. Narratives of national and religious identity and freedom; of individual liberties; of the history of education and scholarship; of reading or the history of the book; of the very possibility of persuasive historical consciousness itself: each of these narratives (and more) is motivated by positing a powerful break around 1500. None of the claims for a profound historical and cultural break at the turn of the fifteenth into the sixteenth centuries is negligible. The very habit of working within those periodic bounds (either Medieval or Early Modern) tends, however, simultaneously to affirm and to ignore the rupture. It affirms the rupture by staying within standard periodic bounds, but it ignores it by never examining the rupture itself. The moment of profound change is either, for medievalists, just over an unexplored horizon; or, for Early Modernists, a zero point behind which more penetrating examination is unnecessary. That situation is now rapidly changing. Scholars are building bridges that link previously insular areas. Both periods are starting to look different in dialogue with each other. The change underway has yet to find collected voices behind it. Cultural Reformations volume aims to provide those voices. It will give focus, authority, and drive to a new area.

We all live in a community, and it was no different for the Jews and Christians of medieval Germany—or was it? This book draws together disparate threads of Christian and Jewish communal development in an effort to give a deeper understanding to the complex tapestry of Jewish and Christian interaction. In the broad examination presented herein, it is possible to compare the general transformations that affected Jews and Christians both as residents of a shared German society and as residents of their own separate communities. Jews and Christians interacted in a variety of ways, in numerous settings, and at a multitude of levels that defy simple categorization. To label late medieval Germany a period of crisis is too simplisitc, the “Reformation” should not categorically be viewed as the central development in the shift between medieval and early modern times. This book seeks to recontextualize the world of Jewish and Christian relations by bringing together divergent sources not often taken together, but equally important, to inform one another and offer a fuller picture of Jewish and Christian notions of each other and themselves than has been possible up to this point.

This landmark work presents the most illuminating portrait we have to date of goddesses and sacred female imagery in Western culture—from prehistory to contemporary goddess movements. Beautifully written, lucidly conceived, and far-ranging in its implications, this work will help readers gain a better appreciation of the complexity of the social forces— mostly androcentric—that have shaped the symbolism of the sacred feminine. At the same time, it charts a new direction for finding a truly egalitarian vision of God and human relations through a feminist-ecological spirituality. Rosemary Radford Ruether begins her exploration of the divine feminine with an analysis of prehistoric archaeology that challenges the popular idea that, until their overthrow by male-dominated monotheism, many ancient societies were matriarchal in structure, governed by a feminine divinity and existing in harmony with nature. For Ruether, the historical evidence suggests the reality about these societies is much more complex. She goes on to consider key myths and rituals from Sumerian, Babylonian, Egyptian, and Anatolian cultures; to examine the relationships among gender, deity, and nature in the Hebrew religion; and to discuss the development of Mariology and female mysticism in medieval Catholicism, and the continuation of Wisdom mysticism in Protestanism. She also gives a provocative analysis of the meeting of Aztec and Christian female symbols in Mexico and of today's neo-pagan movements in the United States.