Search results

Before the atrocities of the 1994 genocide, which left more than a million people dead, the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ appeared to eight young people in the remote village of Kibeho, Rwanda. They warned of the coming bloodshed, but prophesised that it could be averted if Rwandans opened their hearts to God and embraced His love. Their powerful spiritual message spread throughout the country, with thousands making pilgrimage and experiencing the miracles. Our Lady of Kibeho goes to the heart...

Mary, Mother of the Word, became an icon for excellent communication during the English Middle Ages. This engaging work explores the literature that established Mary as headmistress of the liberal arts and exemplar of perfected speech. Given England's rich and extended practices of Marian piety, Georgiana Donavin focuses her research solely on English writers, from the Anglo-Saxon period through the Late Middle Ages. In the writings of John of Garland, John of Howden, Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, Ma...

Mary, the mother of Jesus, is one of the most powerful, influential and complex of all religious figures. The focus for women, the inspiration of faith, the subject of innumerable paintings, sculptures, pieces of music and churches, Mary is so entangled in our world that it is impossible to conceive of the history of Western culture and religion without her. Miri Rubin's "Mother of God" is a major work of cultural imagination. Mary's role in the Gospels is a relatively minor one, and yet in the...

Thirteen European and American theologians treat the entire historical development and theological significance of a major Roman Catholic doctrine in The Dogma of the Immaculate Conception published (University of Notre Dame Press, 1958). Edward 0'Connor, C.S.C., has edited the 700-page volume which includes an exhaustive bibliography, a number of documents, and over fifty illustrations. A specialist in mediaeval theology, Father O'Connor notes in the preface that the subject of the Virgin Mary'...

This book examines women’s relationship to the Virgin Mary in two different cultural and religious contexts, and compares how these relationships have been analyzed and explained on a theological and a sociological level. The figure of the Virgin Mary is a divisive one in our modern culture. To some, she appears to be a symbol of religious oppression, while to others, she is a constant comfort and even an inspiration towards empowerment. Drawing on the author’s own ethnographic research among C...

The Virgin Mary plays a major - although often paradoxical - role in the incarnation and crucifixion and in the ecclesiastical structure of Christianity. This role is shaped by sacrifice as understood in terms of the religious patrimony of ancient Israel and as refigured in the new Christian and Islamic paradigms arising from it. Here the offering up of a son is a frequently occurring motif, one in which fathers and mothers play an emotionally fraught, anthropologically conditioned and theologic...