This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1997.

This revisionist view of Ignatius Loyola argues that his "autobiography"--until now taken to be a literal, documentary account--is in reality a work of rhetoric, a moral narrative that exploits the techniques of fiction. In radically reinterpreting this canonical text, our main source of information about the founder of the largest and most powerful religious order in Roman Catholicism, Boyle paints a vivid picture of Loyola's world. She surveys rhetorical and artistic theory, religious iconography, everyday custom, and an astonishing array of scenes and subjects: from curiosity, to codes of honor, to the holy places of Spain, to the significance of apparitions and flying serpents. Written in the tradition of Renaissance studies on individualism, Loyola's Acts engages current interest in autobiography and in the history of private life. The book also provides a powerful heuristic for interpreting a wide range of texts of the Christian tradition. Finally, this secular treatment of a canonized saint provides revealing insights into how a prestigious sixteenth-century figure like Loyola understood himself. This revisionist view of Ignatius Loyola argues that his "autobiography"--until now taken to be a literal, documentary account--is in reality a work of rhetoric, a moral narrative that exploits the techniques of fiction. In radically reinterpreting this canonical text, our main source of information about the founder of the largest and most powerful religious order in Roman Catholicism, Boyle paints a vivid picture of Loyola's world. She surveys rhetorical and artistic theory, religious iconography, everyday custom, and an astonishing array of scenes and subjects: from curiosity, to codes of honor, to the holy places of Spain, to the significance of apparitions and flying serpents. Written in the tradition of Renaissance studies on individualism, Loyola's Acts engages current interest in autobiography and in the history of private life. The book also provides a powerful heuristic for interpreting a wide range of texts of the Christian tradition. Finally, this secular treatment of a canonized saint provides revealing insights into how a prestigious sixteenth-century figure like Loyola understood himself.

It's only natural to want to move forward: in our careers, in our family lives, in our faith. . . . But how do we begin moving forward when there is so much weighing us down and holding us back? In Simple Acts of Moving Forward, author and workshop leader Vinita Hampton Wright offers simple but profound solutions to the problem of getting stuck in our lives, providing us with the help we need to move forward again. Wright, who has learned in her own life how to avoid gridlock, lists 60 suggestions for taking a step, making a change, and becoming the whole person each of us was meant to be.

For over thirty years, Steven Mailloux has championed and advanced the field of rhetorical hermeneutics, a historically and theoretically informed approach to textual interpretation. This volume collects fourteen of his most recent influential essays on the methodology, plus an interview. Following from the proposition that rhetorical hermeneutics uses rhetoric to practice theory by doing history, this book examines a diverse range of texts from literature, history, law, religion, and cultural studies. Through four sections, Mailloux explores the theoretical writings of Heidegger, Burke, and Rorty, among others; Jesuit educational treatises; and products of popular culture such as Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran and Star Trek: The Next Generation. In doing so, he shows how rhetorical perspectives and pragmatist traditions work together as two mutually supportive modes of understanding, and he demonstrates how the combination of rhetoric and interpretation works both in theory and in practice. Theoretically, rhetorical hermeneutics can be understood as a form of neopragmatism. Practically, it focuses on the production, circulation, and reception of written and performed communication. A thought-provoking collection from a preeminent literary critic and rhetorician, Rhetoric’s Pragmatism assesses the practice and value of rhetorical hermeneutics today and the directions in which it might head. Scholars and students of rhetoric and communication studies, critical theory, literature, law, religion, and American studies will find Mailloux’s arguments enlightening and essential.

This fascinating collection of primary source documents furnishes the accounts—in their own words—of those who initiated, advanced, or lived through the Reformation. Starting in 1500, Europe transformed from a united Christendom into a continent bitterly divided between Catholicism and Protestantism by the end of the century. This illuminating text reveals what happened during that period by presenting the social, religious, economic, political, and cultural life of the European Reformation of the 16th century in the words of those who lived through it. Detailed and comprehensive, the work includes 60 primary source documents that shed light on the character, personalities, and events of that time and provides context, questions, and activities for successfully incorporating these documents into academic research and reading projects. A special section provides guidelines for better evaluating and understanding primary documents. Topics include late medieval religion, Martin Luther, reformation in Germany and the Peasants' War, the rise of Calvinism, and the English Reformation.

In A Companion to Jesuit Mysticism, Robert A. Maryks provides thirteen unique essays discussing the Jesuit mystical tradition, a somewhat neglected aspect of Jesuit historiography that stretches as far back as the order’s co-founder, Ignatius of Loyola, his spiritual visions at Manresa, and ultimately the mystical perspective contained in his Spiritual Exercises. The volume’s contributions on the most significant representatives of the Jesuit mystical tradition—from Baltasar Álvarez to Louis Lallemant to Hugo Makibi Enomiya-Lassalle—aim to fill this lacuna in Jesuit historiography. Although intended primarily as a handbook for scholars seeking to further their own research in this area, the volume will undoubtedly be of interest to scholars and students of Jesuit studies more broadly.

This comprehensive study investigates the role that Ignatian spirituality has played in the renewal of academic theology using three prominent Jesuits as case studies. Over several centuries, spirituality has come to define a field of concerns and themes increasingly treated separately from those of academic theology, as if the latter had little relation to the former. This raises the question for us today: How is spirituality related to the practice of theology? In Renewing Theology, J. Matthew Ashley provides an answer by turning to Ignatian spirituality and three prominent twentieth-century theologians who embraced its spiritual resources: Karl Rahner, Ignacio Ellacuría, and Jorge Mario Bergoglio—that is, Pope Francis. Ashley begins his investigation by considering the historical origins of the widening separation between spirituality and academic theology in the Christian West. He provides an initial overview of Ignatian spirituality, focusing on the openness and multidimensionality of Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, presented here as a text in which the conditions of modernity that defined its author’s world are present, at least incipiently. Ashley then offers three case studies in order to show how each Jesuit—Rahner, Ellacuría, and Pope Francis—responded to the challenges of modernity in a way that is uniquely nourished and illuminated by themes constitutive of Ignatian spirituality. Their theologies, Ashley suggests, evince a particular clarity and force when the Ignatian spirituality that animates them is foregrounded. Providing new and productive avenues into understanding the theologies of these three individuals, this sophisticated and enlightening book will interest scholars and students of systematic theology, as well as readers who are interested in the future of theology and spirituality in a fragmented age.

"This is a subtle, intelligent, and deeply learned recasting of a whole range of issues central to art history: the place of the Baroque in the construction of modern art histories; the peculiar aesthetics of propaganda as a distinctively institutional mobilizing of images and forms; the role of the Jesuits in constructing (and then deconstructing) the relation of architectural style and ideology. Evonne Levy's careful readings of key monuments in the Catholic Baroque shed light not only on those works, but on the whole evolution of art historical understanding—and misunderstanding—that has made the Baroque so central and problematic for the discipline of art history."—W. J. T. Mitchell, editor of Critical Inquiry and author of Iconology and Picture Theory "One of the most original and provocative books in the field of Baroque studies to emerge in the last twenty years, Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque at once presents a wealth of new materials and radically rethinks what has long been known about the Jesuit Order as a patron of the arts. Through the lens of propaganda, Evonne Levy illuminates her subject in an unprecedented way."—Steven F. Ostrow, author of Art and Spirituality in Counter-Reformation Rome