“Be always converting, and be always converted; turn us again, O Lord,” Thomas Shepard urged his Cambridge congregation in the 1640s. This mandate coming down from American Puritan times to New Age seekers, to be “always converting, and always converted,” places a radical burden on the self as site of renewal and world-change, even as conversion becomes surrounded by deconversion (rejection of prior beliefs) and counterconversion (turns to alternative beliefs) across global modernity.

Rob Wilson’s reconceptualization of the American project of conversion begins with the story of Henry ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia, the first Hawaiian convert to Christianity, “torn from the stomach” of his Native Pacific homeland and transplanted to New England. Wilson argues that ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia’s conversion is both remarkable and prototypically American, because he dared to redefine himself via this drive to rebirth.

By mapping the poetics and politics of conversion and counterconversion, Wilson returns conversion to its central place in the American literature, history, and psyche. Through ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia’s story, and through the works of the Tongan social scientist and fiction writer Epeli Hau‘ofa, Wild West poet Ai, and the mercurial Bob Dylan, Wilson demonstrates that conversion—seemingly an anachronistic concern in this secular age—is instead a global, yet deeply American subject, less about “salvation” or finality than about “experimentation” and the quest for modern beatitude.

To Train His Soul in Books explores numerous aspects of this rich religious culture, extending previous lines of scholarly investigation and demonstrating the activity of Syriac-speaking scribes and translators busy assembling books for the training of biblical interpreters, ascetics, and learned clergy.

Drawing on the Eastern Orthodox tradition of asceticism and integrating it with recent Western thought on liturgy, David W. Fagerberg examines the interaction between the two and presents a powerful argument that asceticism is necessary for understanding liturgy as the foundation of theology

This volume will constitute the first published English translation of Ferdinand Ebner’s seminal 1921 work, Das Wort und die geistigen realitäten – long available in major languages but never in English. It is frequently compared with Martin Buber’s, I and Thou, published in 1923, which actually draws its central I-Thou insight from Ebner. In recent centuries, Philosophy reflects a turn toward the autonomous subject vs. a biblical sense of person. The limits/failures of science manifest in the horrors of World War I led to the emergence of a “Dialogical Personalist Philosophy” in reaction to the universal doubt of Cartesian thought and to German Idealism, which engages the idea or representation but not the reality of “things-in-themselves.” The core of Ebner: human speech is constitutive of human existence: humans are given the "word." "Having the word" is a miraculous gift from God. It is only in the word, in language, that an "I" meets a "Thou," that relationship and self-identity can occur, and this word is given in Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh: “In the beginning was the Word”; Jesus, the Logos of St. John's Gospel, mediates between God and man and “stands” between I and Thou. It is through Jesus that it is possible to address God in the human thou. The key to life’s meaning, to the centrality of relationship, and to God's continuous action in His creation, is found in the I-Thou question: why the I can never be found in itself, and so must look in the thou, while the false I will try to possess the thou as an object of power. This is Ebner's critique of idealist thought: reality, truth, and personal identity are neither ideas, nor found in ideas, therefore, Descartes' cogito must be rejected, for the existence of the I can't be founded or proved by solitary thinking, but only in relation with a thou.

Completed in 1173, The Book of Divine Works (Liber Divinorum Operum) is the culmination of the Visionary’s Doctor’s theological project, offered here for the first time in a complete and scholarly English translation. The first part explores the intricate physical and spiritual relationships between the cosmos and the human person, with the famous image of the universal Man standing astride the cosmic spheres. The second part examines the rewards for virtue and the punishments for vice, mapped onto a geography of purgatory, hellmouth, and the road to the heavenly city. At the end of each Hildegard writes extensive commentaries on the Prologue to John’s Gospel (Part 1) and the first chapter of Genesis (Part 2)—the only premodern woman to have done so. Finally, the third part tells the history of salvation, imagined as the City of God standing next to the mountain of God’s foreknowledge, with Divine Love reigning over all.

This book rises out of Dr. Kevin Hart’s 2020 Aquinas Lecture at the University of Dallas. Contemplation and Kingdom seeks to retrieve aspects of Richard of St. Victor's treatment of contemplation, principally in De arca mystica, and does so by weighing Thomas Aquinas's reservations about this treatment in the Summa theologiæ. Is Aquinas right to object, as Augustine does in De Doctrina Christiana, that our contemplation should go directly to God and not be stalled in the consideration of the natural world? What relation is there between Jesus's preaching of the Kingdom and the contemplation of God? Is the contemplative life consistent with Jesus's injunction to love both God and neighbor? These are the principal questions considered in the book.

This book is vintage Hart, erudite, well written, a treat for a wide readership. It is an example of how theology ought to be done, with a clarity and depth unsurpassed in today’s scholarly world. Its blend of anglo-saxon elegance and continental insights will be praised in the Academy and outside. – Jean-Yves Lacoste, Clare Hall, Cambridge
In the light of great contemporary interest in contemplation, this brilliant and erudite work is a stunning example. The focus on Richard of St. Victor and Thomas Aquinas is especially appropriate. Theologians and philosophers will be especially thankful for Kevin Hart’s work on the actuality of contemplation. – David Tracy, University of Chicago 

Kevin Hart holds the Edwin B. Kyle Chair of Christian Theology at the University of Virginia where he is also Courtesy Professor of English and Courtesy Professor of French. In 2020 he was awarded the Aquinas Medal by the Department of Philosophy at the University of Dallas. His 2020 Étienne Gilson Lectures, given at L'Institut Catholique de Paris, offer a fresh approach to the theology of the imago dei in Augustine. His 2020 Gifford Lectures, given at Glasgow University, examine various questions to do with the theology of contemplation and propose a new "hermeneutics of contemplation." His most recent scholarly publications include Kingdoms of God and Poetry and Revelation, and his most recent collections of poetry are Wild Track: New and Selected Poems and Barefoot.

“The ultimate of human happiness is to be found in contemplation.” In offering this proposition of Thomas Aquinas to our thought, Josef Pieper uses traditional wisdom in order to throw light on present-day reality and present-day psychological problems. What, in fact, does one pursue in pursuing happiness? What, in the consensus of the wisdom of the early Greeks, of Plato and Aristotle, of the New Testament, of Augustine and Aquinas, is that condition of perfect bliss toward which all life and effort tend by nature? In this profound and illuminating inquiry, Pieper considers the nature of contemplation, and the meaning and goal of life.

Logos and Revelation looks closely at the writings of two of the most prominent medieval mystical writers: the Muslim, Ibn 'Arabi (1165-1240) and the Christian Meister Eckhart (1260-1328).

Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941) achieved international fame with the publication of her book Mysticism in 1911. Continuously in print since its original publication, Mysticism remains Underhill's most famous work, but in the course of her long career she published nearly forty books, including three novels and three volumes of poetry, as well as numerous poems in periodicals. She was the religion editor for Spectator, a friend of T. S. Eliot (her influence is visible in his last masterpiece, Four Quartets), and the first woman invited to lecture on theology at Oxford University. Her interest in religion extended beyond her Anglican upbringing to embrace the world's religions and their common spirituality.

In time for the centennial celebration of her classic Mysticism, this volume of Underhill's letters will enable readers and researchers to follow her as she reconciled her beliefs with her daily life. The letters reveal her personal and theological development and clarify the relationships that influenced her life and work. Hardly aloof, she enjoyed the interests, mirth, and compassion of close friendships.

Drawing from collections previously unknown to scholars, The Making of a Mystic shows the range of Evelyn Underhill's mind and interests as well as the immense network of her correspondents, including Sir James Frazier and Nobel Prize laureate Rabindranath Tagore. This substantial selection of Underhill's correspondence demonstrates an exceptional scope, beginning with her earliest letters from boarding school to her mother and extending to a letter written to T. S. Eliot from what was to be her deathbed in London in 1941 as the London Blitz raged around her.

The twenty-three discourses presented in this volume have a long textual history that ascribes them to St. Gregory the Illuminator of Armenia (d. 328), a prevalent view that lasted through the nineteenth century. Armenian scholarship through the last century has tended to ascribe them to St. Mashtots‘, the inventor of the Armenian alphabet (d. 440). In his critical introduction to this first-ever English translation of the discourses, Terian presents them as an ascetic text by an anonymous abbot writing near the end of the sixth century. The very title in Armenian, Yačaxapatum Čaŕk‘, literally, “Oft-Repeated Discourses,” further validates their ascetic environment, where they were repeatedly related to novices. For want of answers to introductory questions regarding authorship and date, and because of the pervasive grammatical difficulties of the text, the document has remained largely unknown in scholarship. The discourses include many of the Eastern Fathers’ favorite theological themes. They are heavily punctuated with biblical quotations and laced with recurring biblical images and phraseology; the doctrinal and functional centrality of the Scriptures is emphasized throughout. They are replete with traditional Christian moral teachings that have acquired elements of moral philosophy transmitted through Late Antiquity. Echoes of St. Basil’s thought are heard in several of them, and some evidence of the author’s dependence on the Armenian version of the saint’s Rules, translated around the turn of the sixth century, is apparent. On the whole they show how Christians were driven by the Johannine love-command and the Pauline Spirit-guided practice of virtuous living, ever maturing in the ethos of an in-group solidarity culminating in monasticism.

Syriac Christianity developed in the first centuries CE in the Middle East, where it continued to flourish throughout Late Antiquity and the Medieval period, while also spreading widely, as far as India and China. Today, Syriac Christians are found in the Middle East, in India, as well in diasporas scattered across the globe. Over this extended time period and across this vast geographic expanse, Syriac Christians have built impressive churches and monasteries, crafted fine pieces of art, and written and transmitted a sizable body of literature. Though often overlooked, neglected, and even persecuted, Syriac Christianity has been – and continues to be – an important part of the humanistic heritage of the last two millennia. The present volume brings together fourteen studies that offer fresh perspectives on Syriac Christianity, especially its literary texts and authors. The timeframes of the individual studies span from the second-century Syriac translation of the Hebrew Bible up to the thirteenth century with the end of the Syriac Renaissance. Several studies analyze key authors from Late Antiquity, such as Aphrahat, Ephrem, Narsai, and Jacob of Serugh. Others investigate translations into Syriac, both from Hebrew and from Greek, while still others examine hagiography, especially its formation and transmission. Reflecting a growing trend in the field, the volume also devotes significant attention to the Medieval period, during which Syriac Christians lived under Islamic rule. The studies in the volume are united in their quest to explore the richness, diversity, and vibrance of Syriac Christianity.

This collection of sixteen new critical essays offers fresh perspectives on the Book of Steps, adding greater detail and depth to our understanding of the work's intriguing picture of early Syriac asceticism as practiced within the life of a local church and community.

Miracles occupied a unique place in medieval and Byzantine life and thought. This volume makes available three collections of miracle tales never before translated into English. Together, the collections offer an exceptional variety of miracles from the Byzantine era.

First are the fifth-century Miracles of Saint Thekla. Legendary female companion of the Apostle Paul, Thekla counted among the most revered martyrs of the early church. Her Miracles depict activities, at once extraordinary and ordinary, in a rural healing shrine at a time when Christianity was still supplanting traditional religion. A half millennium later comes another anonymous text, the tenth-century Miracles of the Spring of the Virgin Mary. This collection describes how the marvelous waters at this shrine outside Constantinople healed emperors, courtiers, and churchmen. Complementing the first two collections are the Miracles of Saint Gregory Palamas, fourteenth-century archbishop of Thessalonike. Written by the most gifted hagiographer of his era (Philotheos Kokkinos), this account tells of miraculous healings that Palamas performed, both while alive and once dead. It allows readers to witness the development of a saint’s cult in late Byzantium. Saints and their miracles were essential components of faith in medieval and Byzantine culture. These collections deepen our understanding of attitudes toward miracles. Simultaneously, they display a remarkable range of registers in which Greek could be written during the still little-known Byzantine period.

Created in the tenth century, most likely as an imperial commission, the Menologion is a collection of rewritings of saints’ lives originally intended to be read at services for Christian feast days. Yet Symeon Metaphrastes’s stories also abound in transgression and violence, punishment and redemption, love and miracles. They resemble Greek novels of the first centuries of the Common Era, highlighting intense emotions and focusing on desire, both sacred and profane.

Symeon Metaphrastes was celebrated for rescuing martyrdom accounts and saints’ biographies that otherwise may have been lost. His Menologion, among the most important Byzantine works, represents the culmination of a well-established tradition of Greek Christian storytelling. A landmark of Byzantine religious and literary culture, the Menologion was revered for centuries—copied in hundreds of manuscripts, recited publicly, and adapted into other medieval languages. This edition presents the first English translation of six Christian novels excerpted from Symeon’s text, all of them featuring women who defy social expectations.

Often simply called the Holy Mountain, Mount Athos was the most famous center of Byzantine monasticism and remains the spiritual heart of the Orthodox Church today. This volume presents the Lives of Euthymios the Younger, Athanasios of Athos, Maximos the Hutburner, Niphon of Athos, and Philotheos. These five holy men lived on Mount Athos at different times from its early years as a monastic locale in the ninth century to the last decades of the Byzantine period in the early fifteenth century. All five were celebrated for asceticism, clairvoyance, and, in most cases, the ability to perform miracles; Euthymios and Athanasios were also famed as founders of monasteries.

Holy Men of Mount Athos illuminates both the history and the varieties of monastic practice on Athos, individually by hermits as well as communally in large monasteries. The Lives also demonstrate the diversity of hagiographic composition and provide important glimpses of Byzantine social and political history.

All the Lives in this volume are presented for the first time in English translation, together with authoritative editions of their Greek texts.

Saints of Ninth- and Tenth-Century Greece collects funeral orations, encomia, and narrative hagiography. Together, these works illuminate one of the most obscure periods of Greek history—when holy men played central roles as the Byzantine administration reimposed control on southern and central Greece in the wake of Avar, Slavic, and Arab attacks and the collapse of the late Roman Empire. The bishops of the region provided much-needed leadership and institutional stability, while ascetics established hermitages and faced invaders. The Lives gathered here include accounts of Peter of Argos, which offers insight into episcopal authority in medieval Greece, and Theodore of Kythera, an important source for the history of piracy in the Aegean Sea.

This volume, which illustrates the literary variety of saints’ Lives, presents Byzantine Greek texts written by locals in the provinces and translated here into English for the first time.

The Life of St. Basil the Younger, one of the longest and most important middle Byzantine saints' lives, presents the life of a holy man who lived in Constantinople in the first part of the tenth century. Usually described as a fictional saint, he had the distinction of residing in private homes rather than in a monastery, performing numerous miracles and using the gift of clairvoyance. The vita, purportedly written by one of Basil's disciples, a pious layman named Gregory, includes many details on daily life in Constantinople, with particular attention to slaves, servants, and eunuchs. Two lengthy descriptions of visions provide the most comprehensive source of information for Byzantine views on the afterlife. In one, the soul of an elderly servant Theodora journeys past a series of tollbooths, where demons demand an accounting of her sins in life and collect fines for her transgressions; in the other Gregory describes his vision of the celestial Jerusalem, the enthronement of the Lord at his Second Coming, and the Last Judgment. This volume provides a lengthy introduction and a critical edition of the Greek text facing the annotated English translation, the first in any language.

Ignatios the Deacon was a key figure in the revival of literary culture that took place at Constantinople in the first half of the ninth century. He is best known for his hagiographical works, but he also wrote poems, compiled an anthology of ancient proverbs, and edited textbooks. For some time he served as bishop of Nicaea under an Iconoclastic regime, but later repented of his errors and moved into the “orthodox” camp.

Preserved in a single manuscript, Ignatios’s correspondence has remained practically unknown to scholars. Some of the letters deal with literary trifles, while others contain valuable information on the social and economic history of the period. Taken together, they afford a unique glimpse into the activity of a Byzantine intellectual, struggling to survive in a time of bitter doctrinal strife.

This is the vivid and partisan account of two tremendous ecclesiastical struggles of the ninth century. One was between opposing patriarchs of Constantinople—the learned Photius (858–867, 877–886) and the monk Ignatius (847–858, 867–877)—and gave rise to long periods of schism, intrigue, and scandal in the Greek Orthodox world. The other was between Patriarch Photius and the papacy, which at its low point saw Photius and Nicholas I trade formal condemnations of each other and adversely affected East-West relations for generations afterwards. The author of The Life of Patriarch Ignatius, Nicetas David Paphlagon, was a prolific and versatile writer, but also a fierce conservative in ecclesiastical politics, whose passion and venom show through on every page. As much a frontal attack on Photius as a record of the author’s hero Ignatius, The Life of Patriarch Ignatius offers a fascinating, if biased, look into the complex world of the interplay between competing church factions, the imperial powers, and the papacy in the ninth century. This important historical document is here critically edited and translated into English for the first time. The annotations, maps, and indexes help the reader to place the work in context.

Today the Byzantine mystic, writer, and monastic leader Symeon the New Theologian (ca. 949 to 1022 ce) is considered a saint by the Orthodox Church and revered as one of its most influential spiritual thinkers. But in his own time a cloud of controversy surrounded him and the suspicion of heresy tainted his reputation long afterward.

The Life was written more than thirty years after Symeon’s death by his disciple and apologist the theologian Niketas Stethatos, who also edited all of Symeon’s spiritual writings. An unusually valuable piece of Byzantine hagiography, it not only presents compelling descriptions of Symeon’s visions, mystical inspiration, and role as a monastic founder, but also provides vivid glimpses into the often bitter and unpleasantly conflicted politics of monasticism and the construction of sanctity and orthodoxy at the zenith of the medieval Byzantine Empire. Although the many volumes of Symeon’s spiritual writings are now readily available in English, the present translation makes the Life accessible to English readers for the first time. It is based on an authoritative edition of the Greek.

The late Russian Empire experienced rapid economic change, social dislocation, and multiple humanitarian crises, enduring two wars, two famines, and three revolutions. A “pastoral activism” took hold as parish clergymen led and organized the response of Russia’s Orthodox Christians to these traumatic events. In Russia’s Social Gospel, Daniel Scarborough considers the roles played by pastors in the closing decades of the failing tsarist empire and the explosive 1917 revolutions.
 
This volume draws upon extensive archival research to examine the effects of the pastoral movement on Russian society and the Orthodox Church. Scarborough argues that the social work of parish clergymen shifted the focus of Orthodox practice in Russia toward cooperative social activism as a devotional activity. He furthers our understanding of Russian Orthodoxy by illuminating the difficult position of parish priests, who were charged with both spiritual and secular responsibilities but were supported by neither church nor state. His nuanced look at the pastorate shows how social and historical traumas shifted perceptions of what being religious meant, in turn affecting how the Orthodox Church organized itself, and contributed to Russia’s modernization.

"This book is even more essential now than when these voices were first heard. It deals with a movement that is so much a symbol of American hope that it's in a class by itself. I strongly recommend Voices from the Catholic Worker." --Studs Terkel This rich oral history weaves a tapestry of memories and experience from interviews, roundtable discussions, personal memoirs, and thorough research. In the sixtieth anniversary year of the Catholic Worker, Rosalie Riegle Troester reconfirms the diversity and commitment of a movement that applies basic Christianity to social problems. Founded in 1933 by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, the Catholic Worker has continued to apply the principles of voluntary poverty and nonviolence to changing social and political realities. Over 200 interviews with Workers from all over the United States reveal how people came to this movement, how they were changed by it, and how they faced contradictions between the Catholic Worker philosophy and the call of contemporary life. Vivid memoirs of Dorothy Day, Peter Maurin, and Ammon Hennacy are interwoven with accounts of involvement with labor unions, war resistance, and life on Catholic Worker farms. The author also addresses the Worker's relationship with the Catholic Church and with the movement's wrenching debates over abortion, homosexuality, and the role of women.

In this historical study, Lara Medina examines the early development and continuing influence of Las Hermanas, a feminist organization established in 1971 to counter the patriarchy and Eurocentrism of the U.S. Catholic Church.Lara Medina weaves archival research and oral interviews into a cohesive narrative that highlights the keen ethnic and political awareness among the movement's leaders and participants. Medina also illuminates the strides made by Las Hermanas in undermining and reorienting the male-dominated structure of both the Catholic ministry and the Chicano civil rights movement.By showing how the group has engaged such issues as moral authority, sexuality, and domestic abuse through its religiously informed efforts in grassroots community organizing and education, Lara Medina showcases the crucial role played by Las Hermanas in the articulation of a spiritually and politically grounded Latina/Chicana identity.

This monumental two-volume publication brings together in the original languages and an English translation, all the decrees of all the ecumenical councils from Nicaea I to Vatican II. As such it represents an indispensable reference work for theologians and historians, as well as for anyone interested in the development of Christian thought and doctrine. Indeed, these decrees represent the authoritative distillation of Christian tradition which itself is bound together with scripture "in a close and reciprocal relationship" so that the two "form a single sacred deposit of the word of God, entrusted to the church."

The original text is a reproduction of the brilliant edition by G. Alberigo and others of the decrees Conciliorum Oecumenicorum Decreta, which provides for the first time a reliable critical text for all the ecumenical councils. The English translation faces each page of the original text and is the first rendering into English of all these decrees taken together. The translators have used inclusive language throughout to emphasize the continuity of conciliar documents.

The 2,528 total pages of these two volumes include all the authenticated texts and their English renderings as well as a preface and introduction by the oringinal languages editor, a foreword by the English language editor, a bibliography for each decree, various commentaries and explanatory notes, and ten comprehensive indices.