Nicholas Orme, a professor of history at Exeter University in Great Britain, has published more than a dozen books about ordinary life in the Middle Ages. His latest one, Medieval Children , is a delightfully encyclopedic survey of everything imaginable concerning young people from birth to . . . . Continue Reading »
A Bishop’s Tale: Mathias Hovius Among His Flock in Seventeenth–Century Flander
From the March 2001 Print EditionThose who think that todays Catholic Church has problems reining in its errant clergy should read Craig Harline and Eddy Puts summary of the new code of conduct that Mathias Hovius, Archbishop of Mechelin (not far from Brussels in todays Belgium) from 1596 to 1620, laid down for . . . . Continue Reading »
Next to Julius Caesar, Pontius Pilate”the governor of Judea who sent Jesus to the cross”is probably the best-known Roman citizen who ever lived. His name is etched into the Christian creeds, prompting some fallen-away Christians to quip that crucified under Pontius Pilate is . . . . Continue Reading »
Most people know St. Teresa of Ávila (1515“1582), the Spanish mystic, prolific spiritual writer, and indomitable Carmelite reformer, largely through the High Mannerist statue that Gian Lorenzo Bernini carved of her in Rome about seventy years after her death: a marble“pale woman of . . . . Continue Reading »
It is of course the case that only God knows what will happen in the next century and the next millennium. But we human beings are created with an irrepressible disposition toward the future, as well as a capacity to recall the past. In the last year we published a “millennium series” of . . . . Continue Reading »
What to do about the female saints? Arriving at an acceptable consensus regarding the holy women of Christianity has been a persistent problem for feminist theologians. The first wave of the women’s movement tended to take a disparaging stance toward the nuns, lay spinsters, wives, mothers, . . . . Continue Reading »
Goddess Unmasked: The Rise of Neopagan Feminist Spirituality by Philip G. Davis Spence, 418 pages, $29.95 It is a dogma of feminist mythology that before there was God, there was Goddess. A very long time ago (so goes the story), when war, agriculture, and patriarchy were just glints in male . . . . Continue Reading »
The Women’s Bible Commentary edited by Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe Westminster/John Knox Press, 396 pages, $20 Like most children of my era who got a religious education, I grew up on Bible stories. The stories of the women in the Bible—rare as pearls of great price among the . . . . Continue Reading »
Protestants: The Birth of a Revolution by Steven Ozment Doubleday, 270 pages, $20 I am a Catholic, but I married Protestant. My husband has steeped me in Protestant lore: Protestants get results. Protestants think ahead. Protestants save (Catholics spend). My Protestant in-laws had to endure our . . . . Continue Reading »
Belonging To The Universe by Fritjof Capra and David Steindl-Rast Harper San Francisco, 217 pages, $18.95 In 1975, Fritjof Capra, an Austrian émigré physicist and systems theorist, published The Tao of Physics , an effort to find parallels between scientific principles and the insights of . . . . Continue Reading »
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