CSB/SJU Books

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  Rome, Parthia, and the Politics of Peace: The Origins of War in the Ancient Middle East

  Jason M. Schlude

  This volume offers an informed survey of the problematic relationship between the ancient empires of Rome and Parthia from c.96/95 BCE to 224 CE. Schlude explores the rhythms of this relationship and invites its readers to reconsider the past and our relationship with it. Some have looked to this confrontation to help explain the roots of the long-lived conflict between the West and Middle East. It is a reading symptomatic of most scholarship on the subject, which emphasizes fundamental incompatibility and bellicosity in Roman-Parthian relations. Rather than focusing on the relationship as a series of conflicts, Rome, Parthia, and the Politics of Peace responds to this common misconception by highlighting instead the more cooperative elements in the relationship and shows how a reconciliation of these two perspectives is possible. There was in fact a cyclical pattern in the Roman-Parthian interaction, where a reality of peace and collaboration became overshadowed by images of aggressive posturing projected by powerful Roman statesmen and emperors for a domestic population conditioned to expect conflict. The result was the eventual realization of these images by later Roman opportunists who, unsatisfied with imagined war, sought active conflict with Parthia. Rome, Parthia, and the Politics of Peace is a fascinating new study of these two superpowers that will be of interest not only students of Rome and the Near East, but also to anyone with an interest in diplomatic relations and conflict in the ancient world, and today. -- Provided by publisher

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  The Everyday Life of Urban Inequality : Ethnographic Case Studies of Global Cities

  Megan Sheehan, Angela Storey, and Jessica Bodoh-Creed

  The Everyday Life of Urban Inequality explores how steadily increasing inequality and the spectacular pace of urbanization frame everyday life for city residents around the world. With case studies from five continents, this volume explores what it means to live within cities marked by entrenched inequalities, situating daily life at the intersection between global processes and local histories. Drawing from ethnographic research, scholars in varied social science disciplines examine the reproduction of poverty and stratification, the creation of political and social marginality, and the destruction—and resilience—of communities. (publisher's description)

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  Infected Kin: Orphan Care and AIDS in Lesotho

  Ellen Block and Will McGrath

  AIDS has devastated communities across southern Africa. In Lesotho, where a quarter of adults are infected, the wide-ranging implications of the disease have been felt in every family, disrupting key aspects of social life. In Infected Kin, Ellen Block and Will McGrath argue that AIDS is fundamentally a kinship disease, examining the ways it transcends infected individuals and seeps into kin relations and networks of care. While much AIDS scholarship has turned away from the difficult daily realities of those affected by the disease, Infected Kin uses both ethnographic scholarship and creative nonfiction to bring to life the joys and struggles of the Basotho people at the heart of the AIDS pandemic. The result is a book accessible to wide readership, yet built upon scholarship and theoretical contributions that ensure Infected Kin will remain relevant to anyone interested in anthropology, kinship, global health, and care.

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  Forty years on : Richard Bresnahan and artists of the Saint John's Pottery

  Richard Bresnahan and Ryan Kutter

  Richard Bresnahan, his apprentices, and volunteers built the largest wood-fired kiln in North America at Saint John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota. The Johanna Kiln accommodates 12,000 works of pottery and sculpture and is fired in the autumn. The fire is stoked for ten days and then the kiln cools for two weeks before opening. The Saint John's Pottery has embodied the Benedictine values of community, hospitality and self-sufficiency as well as the University's commitment to the integration of art and life; the preservation of the environment; the linkage between work and worship; and the celebration of diverse cultures. (Westminster Presbyterian Church website, 2019)

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  Reading the Bible in the Age of Francis

  Micah D. Kiel

  Pope Francis has taken the world by storm. He is the most prominent Christian voice in our world today. How does he incorporate Scripture into his ministry and what does Scripture say about those things he emphasizes? This book will explore within Scripture the bedrock themes of Francis' time as Pope, such as the poor, women, a God of surprises, mercy, the environment, and excessive legalism. What we find is that a diversity of biblical perspectives provide deep theological support or precedent for Francis' agenda. Both Francis and Scripture call Christians today to live in dramatically new ways in our world. -- Provided by publisher.

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  Fictions of Containment in the Spanish Female Picaresque: Architectural Space and Prostitution in the Early Modern Mediterranean

  Emily Kuffner

  This study examines the interdependence of gender, sexuality and space in the early modern period, which saw the inception of architecture as a discipline and gave rise to the first custodial institutions for women, including convents for reformed prostitutes. Meanwhile, conduct manuals established prescriptive mandates for female use of space, concentrating especially on the liminal spaces of the home. This work traces literary prostitution in the Spanish Mediterranean through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from the rise of courtesan culture in several key areas through the shift from tolerance of prostitution toward repression. Kuffner’s analysis pairs canonical and noncanonical works of fiction with didactic writing, architectural treatises, and legal mandates, tying the literary practice of prostitution to increasing control over female sexuality during the Counter Reformation. By tracing erotic negotiations in the female picaresque novel from its origins through later manifestations, she demonstrates that even as societal attitudes towards prostitution shifted dramatically, a countervailing tendency to view prostitution as an essential part of the social fabric undergirds many representations of literary prostitutes. Kuffner’s analysis reveals that the semblance of domestic enclosure figures as a primary erotic strategy in female picaresque fiction, allowing readers to assess the variety of strategies used by authors to comment on the relationship between unruly female sexuality and social order.

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  Espacios De Encuentro E Identidad: Actas del XXXV Congreso Internacional de ALDEEU

  Marina Martin

  Papers presented at the ADLEEU conference in Segovia, Spain, July 2015.

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  American Evangelists and Tuberculosis in Modern Japan

  Elisheva Perelman

  Tuberculosis ran rampant in Japan during the late Meiji and Taisho years (1880s–1920s). Many of the victims of the then incurable disease were young female workers from the rural areas, who were trying to support their families by working in the new textile factories. The Japanese government of the time, however, seemed unprepared to tackle the epidemic. Elisheva A. Perelman argues that pragmatism and utilitarianism dominated the thinking of the administration, which saw little point in providing health services to a group of politically insignificant patients.

  This created a space for American evangelical organizations to offer their services. Perelman sees the relationship between the Japanese government and the evangelists as one of moral entrepreneurship on both sides. All the parties involved were trying to occupy the moral high ground. In the end, an uneasy but mutually beneficial arrangement was reached: the government accepted the evangelists’ assistance in providing relief to some tuberculosis patients, and the evangelists gained an opportunity to spread Christianity further in the country. Nonetheless, the patients remained a marginalized group as they possessed little agency over how they were treated.

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  A Future With Hope: Praying With Youth, Preparing for Confirmation: Complete Leader's Guide

  Matthew Reichert and Zack Stachowski

  Strengthen your confirmation preparation program by helping your young people enter into the liturgical prayer of the Church. Following a strong liturgical model and using liturgical texts, but framed around their experiences preparing for the sacrament, these powerful prayer services will help them grow in their relationship with God and one another.
  
  This Leader’s Guide includes eight complete prayer scripts, each with an introductory prayer overview, full text of prayers, psalms, and Scripture, suggested points for reflection, and recommendations for music. Also included are special preparation guides to help the young people in your parish community serve as presider, lector, or music minister.

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  Guide for Celebrating the Liturgy of the Hours

  Anthony Ruff OSB

  Throughout the history of the Church, Christians have consecrated time by pausing at various moments throughout the day to pray the Liturgy of the Hours, also known as the Divine Office. Day after day, hour after hour, Christians unite their hearts with Christ and his Church as they pray the Divine Office. This book will assist parish communities and groups of Christians who wish to gather to pray the Liturgy of the Hours.

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  The Collegeville chant psalter : for Sundays, solemnities, and major feast days

  Anthony Ruff OSB

  Collection of responsorial psalms, ordered by psalm number. Contains psalm tones with pointing, and antiphons, both with keyboard accompaniment.

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  College Hookup Culture and Christian Ethics: The Lives and Longings of Emerging Adults

  Jennifer Beste

  What happens at college parties? Why do students dress and behave the way they do? Who has power, and what kind? And are college students happy overall with party and hookup culture? In response to undergraduates’ skepticism of researchers’ accounts of hookup culture, the author engaged 126 college students as ethnographers to observe and analyze this complex social reality at parties. Part I presents their results, revealing a disillusionment with contemporary sexual and relational norms that challenges benevolent or even neutral views of hookup culture. Part II brings students into conversation with Christianity’s narrative of what it means to become fully human and experience genuine joy and fulfillment. The spokesperson for this vision is theologian Johann Metz, whose portrait of Jesus struggling to become fully human by embracing poverty of spirit resonates with today’s college students. Comparing Jesus’s way of being in the world with their college culture’s status quo, many undergraduates discover in Metz’s Poverty of Spirit a countercultural path to authenticity, happiness, and fulfillment. Part III culminates in a call to action: with understanding of contemporary norms gained in part I, and poverty of spirit as explored in part II, these chapters explore obstacles to sexual justice on college campuses, identify key commitments necessary for change, and envision how undergraduates can work to create the college culture they truly desire and deserve.

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  Form from Form

  Christopher Bolin

  “Was it a crater or a sinkhole?” asks a voice in one of the mysterious, wonderstruck poems in Christopher Bolin’s Form from Form, whose cadences modulate with the energies of form-making, deformation, and elusive reformation. Natural forms and forms of human manufacture, forms of absence and those of urgent desire construct and deconstruct each other in Bolin’s singular music, which blends unnerving plainness and obliqueness, the childlike and the alien.

  As their sites drift from workers’ camps to city squares, isolated coasts to windswept plains, the poems in Form from Form trace a map of a fragmented ecology, dense with physical detail of altered landscapes and displaced populations. In tones of austere beauty and harsh discordance, these poems provide a “field guide to luminescent things,” a visionary fretwork of the possibilities and impossibilities of faith in the present moment.

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  Our Posthuman Futures: student essays from Dr. Michael Livingston’s Honors FYS, Spring 2018

  Anna Bumgardner, Meagan Davis, Anne Marie Griebie, Haley Halvorson, Tanner Johnson, Giles Koski, Andrew Kromer, Jaren Martin, Kaylee McGovern, Cassidy Resmen, Amber Rudenick, Hailey Sabin, Andrew Schmelzer, Joseph Schwamm, Nikolas Thompson, Elizabeth Uecker, Katherine Wagner, and Michael Olson

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  Cahuilla Nation Activism and the Tribal Casino Movement

  Theodor P. (Ted) Gordon

  In 1980, when the Cabazon Band first opened a small poker club on their Indian reservation in the isolated desert of California, they knew local authorities would challenge them. Cabazon persisted and ultimately won, defeating the State of California in a landmark case before the Supreme Court. By fighting for their right to operate a poker club, Cabazon opened up the possibility for native nations across the United States to open casinos on their own reservations, spurring the growth of what is now a $30 billion industry.
  
  Cahuilla Nation Activism and the Tribal Casino Movement tells the bigger story of how the Cahuilla nations—including the Cabazon—have used self-reliance and determination to maintain their culture and independence against threats past and present. From California’s first governor’s “war of extermination” against native peoples through today’s legal and political challenges, Gordon shows that successful responses have depended on the Cahuilla’s ability to challenge non-natives’ assumptions and misconceptions.

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  The Paled Guest

  Jessica Harkins

  "In The Paled Guest, Jessica Harkins gives painterly attention to moments and people lost. These poems move between the death of a brother, the estrangement of navigating foreign places, and a natural world which fails memory by being, constantly, made and unmade. These poems craft elegies as spaces for reclaiming presence—however brief, however painful—and for asking of their paled guests (earth, brother, body): how have we failed you? It is a generous and vital question and these poems resist everything, but the most startling and moving of answers. By crossing myth and wilderness, Oregon and Italy, The Paled Guest sweeps through time and space, bringing voice to the voiceless; bringing song to the silenced."

  —Christopher Bolin, author of Ascension Theory

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  God’s Word, Your World, 2017-2018: Reflections to Share with Catholic Youth

  Jeffrey J. Kaster

  Those who work with Catholic teens know that they are a unique group with profound capabilities and tremendous challenges. It is hard to know how to approach teens, and as a result, many parishes wind up retaining a small group of core youth ministry members while the rest of the parish teens seem to disappear. How can parishes talk to teenagers, especially those who don’t seem to be listening? God’s Word, Your World! provides you with the ability to “speak teen,” communicating with all teens in your parish on their level. This CD-ROM contains one-page, Lectionary-based digital reproducible handouts for every Sunday and Holyday of Obligation from the first Sunday in September 2017 through the last Sunday in August, 2018. Each digital reproducible contains a Scripture reflection, a suggestion for action, and journaling questions. They can be printed out for handouts, e-mailed, blogged, put on a parish website, or shared on Facebook. This gives you a way to meet teens where they are and communicate about the things that they are facing in their daily lives.

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  Dear Parents: A Field Guide for College Preparation

  John McGee

  Written for parents and families of college-bound students, Jon McGee’s Dear Parentsis an essential tool you’ll need to navigate the complex and often emotional challenge of getting your daughter or son prepared for—and through—college. Organized chronologically, the book takes readers through the stages of childhood leading up to college, as well as the process of searching for and selecting a college. From the decisions you make during your child’s early years to the process of setting up their dorm room, this book provides parents with insights, wisdom, and guidance about college, college preparation, and choosing a college.

  Letters written by college and educational professionals, all with children, frame and illuminate each chapter. Drawing on their personal and professional experience, these experts offer practical and sympathetic advice about preparing for college. The book concludes with insights about sending children off to college and the appropriate roles for parents as your children experience these important years. Undergirded by research but informed by on-the-ground insight, Dear Parents is designed to both engage and inform while demystifying the daunting and ever-changing process of entering college.

  "If you’ve picked up this book, my guess is you don’t need convincing that there is a lifelong return from a college education. You want to understand the process better and you’d like to help your teen smartly navigate their choices. You picked wisely if that’s the case.... Jon McGee is a wonderful guide, shedding light on the mysterious process of applying to college while bringing much insight to the inevitable trade-offs."—from the foreword by Chris Farrell, Marketplace

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  Military Interventions, War Crimes, and Protecting Civilians

  Christi Siver

  War crimes have devastating effects on victims and perpetrators and endanger broader political and military goals. The protection of civilians, one of the most fundamental norms in the laws of war, appears to have weakened despite almost universal international agreement. Using insights from organizational theory, this book seeks to understand the process between military socialization and unit participation in war crimes. How do militaries train their soldiers in the laws of war? How do they enforce compliance with these laws? Drawing on evidence from the Korean War, the Malayan Emergency, and the Canadian peacekeeping mission in Somalia, the author discovers that military efforts to train soldiers about the laws of war are poor and leadership often sent mixed signals about the importance of compliance. However, units that developed subcultures that embraced these laws and had strong leadership were more likely to comply than those with weak discipline or countercultural norms.

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  The Stories We Live: Finding God's Calling All Around Us

  Kathleen A. Cahalan

  "Christian vocation," says Kathleen Cahalan, "is about connecting our stories with God's story." In The Stories We Live Cahalan rejuvenates and transforms vocation from a static concept to a living, dynamic reality.

  Incorporating biblical texts, her own experience, and the personal stories of others, Cahalan discusses how each of us is called by God, to follow, as we are, from grief, for service, in suffering, through others, within God. Readers of this book will discover an exciting new vocabulary of vocation and find a fresh vision for God's calling in their lives.

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  Integrating Work in Theological Education

  Kathleen A. Cahalan, Edward Foley, and Gordon S. Mikoski

  If only we could do a better job of helping students at "connecting the dots," theological educators commonly lament. Integration, often proposed as a solution to the woes of professional education for ministry, would help students integrate knowledge, skills, spirituality, and integrity. When these remain disconnected, incompetence ensues, and the cost runs high for churches, denominations, and ministers themselves. However, we fail in thinking that integrating work is for students alone. It is a multifaceted, constructive process of learning that is contextual, reflective, and dialogical. It aims toward important ends--competent leaders who can guide Christian communities today. It entails rhythms, not stages, and dynamic movement, including disintegration. Integrating work is learning in motion, across domains, and among and between persons. It is social and communal, born of a life of learning together for faculty, staff, administrators and students. It is work that bridges the long-standing gaps between school, ministry practice, and life. It's a verb, not a noun. Here a diverse group of theological educators, through descriptive case studies, theological reflection, and theory building, offer a distinctive contribution to understanding integrating work and how best to achieve it across three domains: in community, curriculums, and courses.

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  Calling All Years Good: Christian Vocation Throughout Life's Seasons

  Kathleen A. Cahalan and Bonnie J. Miller-Mclemore

  A uniquely comprehensive discussion of vocation from infancy to old age

  Do infants have a vocation? Do Alzheimer's patients? In popular culture, vocation is often reduced to adult work or church ministry. Rarely do we consider childhood or old age as crucial times for commencing or culminating a life of faith in response to God's calling. This book addresses that gap by showing how vocation emerges and evolves over the course of an entire lifetime. The authors cover six of life's distinct seasons, weaving together personal narrative, developmental theory, case studies, and spiritual practices. Calling All Years Good grounds the discussion of vocation in concrete realities and builds a cohesive framework for understanding calling throughout all of life.

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  Grief: Finding Hope in Sorrow

  Laura Kelly Fanucci

  Loss comes to each of us, without fail. Scripture can serve as a companion to us in the grief we bear and ultimately in our surrender to our compassionate God. Through this set of insightful reflections on the stories of Ruth and Naomi, the death and raising of Jesus' friend Lazarus, and the promise of a new heaven and earth, Laura Kelly Fanucci invites us to a deepening experience of God's healing presence in our lives.

  Laura Kelly Fanucci is the research associate for the Collegeville Institute Seminars. She is the author of Mercy: God's Nature, Our Challenge and Dashed Hopes: When Our Best-Laid Plans Fall Apart in the Alive in the Word series; Everyday Sacrament: The Messy Grace of Parenting (Liturgical Press, 2014); and the coauthor of Living Your Discipleship: 7 Ways to Express Your Deepest Calling (23rd Publications, 2015). She blogs about spirituality and parenting at www.motheringspirit.com

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  To Bless Our Callings: Prayers, Poems, and Hymns to Celebrate Vocation

  Laura Kelly Fanucci

  To Bless Our Callings: Prayers, Poems, and Hymns to Celebrate Vocation is an ecumenical collection that supports the callings of everyone within the Christian community. This valuable resource of over two hundred prayers, blessings, poems, and sacred songs from diverse Christian traditions speaks to the heart of vocation’s richness.

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  Empirical Foundations of the Common Good: What Theology Can Learn from Social Science

  Daniel K. Finn

  The idea of the common good was borrowed by the Fathers of the early Catholic Church from the rich philosophical traditions of ancient Greece and Rome. It has been a fundamental part of Catholic thinking about social, political, and economic life throughout the Catholic intellectual tradition, from Augustine and Aquinas to modern Catholic social thought in the encyclicals of popes in recent centuries. Yet this history has been rooted in the traditions of philosophy and theology. With the rise of the social sciences in the nineteenth century as distinct disciplines no longer limited to the methods of their philosophical origins, humanity has learned a great deal more about the human condition. Empirical Foundations of the Common Good asks two questions: what have the social sciences learned about the common good? how might theology alter its understanding of the common good in light of that insight?

  In this volume, six social scientists, with backgrounds in economics, political science, sociology, and policy analysis, speak about what their disciplines have to contribute to discussions within Catholic social thought about the common good. Two theologians then respond by examining the insights of social science and exploring how Catholic social thought can integrate social scientific insights into its understanding of the common good. This volume's interplay of social scientific and religious views is a unique contribution to contemporary discussion of what constitutes "the common good."