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Booklist calls this massively monumental, yet readable biography of Saint Francis of Assisi, "a classic vita". Helen Moak's translation of this masterpiece is excellent as it includes the "scenic details from the late 12th to early 13th century Umbria that Fortini knows so astonishingly well".--Best Sellers.

The Roman Catholic Church has always been concerned with the quality of the music used in the liturgy, and the essays in this volume trace the church's efforts, during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, to cultivate a more appropriate liturgical music for its Latin Rite. The task of restoration - expressed, for example, in the chant revival associated with the monks of Solesmes, the efforts of the Cecilian movement, and Pius X's determination to reform sacred music in th...

Intercessions for Years A, B and C is a collection of prayers to accompany the Church of England Common Worship Lectionary. Wholly relevant to our everyday world, the intercessions do not sidestep the challenges of living faithfully in difficult circumstances; they do seek to inspire our minds and expand our hearts, as we offer up all we have and all we are, to the grace and mercy of God. The prayers are compatible with the traditional pattern of interceding for the Church, political governance...

Graham Gould studies the life and thought of the Christian monks of fourth and fifth century lower Egypt. He works from collections of their sayings and stories which were compiled in the late fifth century and which are known collectively as the Apopthegmata Patrum. These texts show that the Desert Fathers were deeply concerned with the nature of the monastic community which they formed and with the problems which might affect relationships between individuals within it. Successive chapters of...

This collection of essays was written to mark the fortieth anniversary of the Second General Conference of Latin American Bishops, which convened at Medellin, Colombia, in 1968. Inspired by the Second Vatican Council and seeking to implement its vision, the bishops viewed the occasion as a decisive one for Latin America, which they saw as standing 'on the threshold of a new epoch in the history of our continent'. It appears to have been a time full of zeal for emancipation, of liberation from ev...

Driven by funding agencies, empirical research in the social scientific study of health and medicine has grown in quantity and developed in quality. When it became evident, in what is now a tradition of inquiry, that people's religious activities had significant health consequences, a portion of that body of work began to focus more frequently on the relationship between health and religion. The field has reached a point where book-length summaries of empirical findings, especially those pertine...

The Missionary, the Catechist and the Hunter examines the role of Protestantism in the Danish colonization of Greenland and shows how the process of colonization entails a process of subjectification where the identity of indigenous population is transformed. The figure of the hunter, commonly regarded as quintessential Inuit figure is traced back to the efforts of the Greenlandic intelligentsia to distance themselves from the hunting lifestyle by producing an abstract hunter identity in Green...

More than any other European city, Baroque Naples was dominated by convents. Behind their imposing facades and highly decorated churches, the convents of Naples housed the daughters of the city's most exclusive families, women who, despite their cloistered existence, were formidable players in the city's power structure. Invisible City vividly portrays the religious world of seventeenth-century Naples, a city of familial and internecine rivalries, of religious devotion and intense urban politics...

This timely study analyses the seventeenth-century revival of monasticism by English women who founded convents in France and the Low Countries. Examining the nuns' membership of both the English Catholic community and the continental Catholic Church, it argues that despite strict monastic enclosure and exile, they nevertheless engaged actively in the spiritual and political controversies of their day. The book will add much to our understanding of women's power in early modern Europe, and offer...