From handshakes and toasts to chant and genuflection, ritual pervades our social interactions and religious practices. Still, few of us could identify all of our daily and festal ritual behaviors, much less explain them to an outsider. Similarly, because of the variety of activities that qualify as ritual and their many contradictory yet, in many ways, equally legitimate interpretations, ritual seems to elude any systematic historical and comparative scrutiny. In this book, Catherine Bell offers a practical introduction to ritual practice and its study; she surveys the most influential theories of religion and ritual, the major categories of ritual activity, and the key debates that have shaped our understanding of ritualism. Bell refuses to nail down ritual with any one definition or understanding. Instead, her purpose is to reveal how definitions emerge and evolve and to help us become more familiar with the interplay of tradition, exigency, and self-expression that goes into constructing this complex social medium.

From Eusebio Kino to Daniel Berrigan, and from colonial New England to contemporary Seattle, Jesuits have built and disrupted institutions in ways that have fundamentally shaped the Catholic Church and American society. As Catherine O'Donnell demonstrates, Jesuits in French, Spanish, and British colonies were both evangelists and agents of empire. John Carroll envisioned an American church integrated with Protestant neighbors during the early years of the republic; nineteenth-century Jesuits, many of them immigrants, rejected Carroll's ethos and created a distinct Catholic infrastructure of schools, colleges, and allegiances. The twentieth century involved Jesuits first in American war efforts and papal critiques of modernity, and then (in accord with the leadership of John Courtney Murray and Pedro Arrupe) in a rethinking of their relationship to modernity, to other faiths, and to earthly injustice. O'Donnell's narrative concludes with a brief discussion of Jesuits' declining numbers, as well as their response to their slaveholding past and involvement in clerical sexual abuse.00Also available in Open Access.

Kentucky's rich archaeological heritage spans thousands of years, and the Commonwealth remains fertile ground for study of the people who inhabited the midcontinent before, during, and after European settlement. This long-awaited volume brings together the most recent research on Kentucky's prehistory and early history, presenting both an accurate descriptive and an authoritative interpretation of Kentucky's past. The book is arranged chronologically—from the Ice Age to modern times, when issues of preservation and conservation have overtaken questions of identification and classification. For each time slice of Kentucky's past, the contributors describe typical communities and settlement patterns, major changes from previous cultural periods, the nature of the economy and subsistence, artifacts, the general health and characteristics of the people, and regional cultural differences. Sites discussed include the Green River shell mounds, the Central Kentucky Adena mounds and enclosures, Eastern Kentucky rockshelters, the important Wickliffe site at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, Fort Ancient culture villages, and the fortified towns of the Mississippian period in Western Kentucky. The authors draw from a wealth of unpublished material and offer the detailed insights and perspectives of specialists who have focused much of their professional careers on the scientific investigation of Kentucky's prehistory. The book's many graphic elements—maps, artifact drawings, photographs, and village plans—combined with a straightforward and readable text, provide a format that will appeal to the general reader as well as to students and specialists in other fields who wish to learn more about Kentucky's archaeology.

This volume presents the contributions delivered at the "Josef-Loschmidt-Sympo sium," which took place in Vienna, June 25-27, 1995. The symposium was arranged to honor Josef Loschmidt one hundred years after his death (8 July 1895), to evaluate the sig nificance of his contributions to chemistry and physics from a modem point of view and to trace the development of scientific fields in which he had done pioneering work. Loschmidt is widely known for the first calculation of the size of molecules (1865/66), which also led to values for the number of molecules in unit gas volume and for the mass of molecules. With critical analyses of problems in statistical physics he made important contributions to the development of that field, "Loschmidt's paradoxon" continuing to be a point of departure for present day studies and discussions. For decades there was little awareness that Loschmidt was a pioneer in organic struc tural chemistry. Only in recent years has Loschmidt's first scientific publication "Chemis che Studien I", published in 1861, become more widely known and it is now recognized that with his ideas on the structure of organic molecules he was greatly ahead of the chemists of that time. The papers in these proceedings are arranged in three sections: l. Organic structural chemistry (Chapters 1-12). 2. Physics and physical chemistry (Chapters 13-26). 3. Loschmidt's biography, Loschmidt's world (Chapters 27-33).