In A People Adrift, a prominent Catholic thinker states bluntly that the Catholic Church in the United States must transform itself or suffer irreversible decline. Peter Steinfels shows how even before the recent revelations about sexual abuse by priests, the explosive combination of generational change and the thinning ranks of priests and nuns was creating a grave crisis of leadership and identity. This groundbreaking book offers an analysis not just of the church's immediate troubles but of less visible, more powerful forces working below the surface of an institution that provides a spiritual identity for 65 million Americans and spans the nation with its parishes, schools, colleges and universities, hospitals, clinics, and social service agencies. In A People Adrift, Steinfels warns that entrenched liberals and conservatives are trapped in a "theo-logical gridlock" that often ignores what in fact goes on in families, parishes, classrooms, voting booths, and Catholic organizations of all types. Above all, he insists, the altered Catholic landscape demands a new agenda for leadership, from the selection of bishops and the rethinking of the priesthood to the thorough preparation and genuine incorporation of a lay leadership that is already taking over key responsibilities in Catholic institutions. Catholicism exerts an enormous cultural and political presence in American life. No one interested in the nation's moral, intellectual, and political future can be indifferent to the fate of what has been one of the world's most vigorous churches -- a church now severely challenged.
More than three decades ago, in 'The neoconservatives,' Peter Steinfels described a nascent movement, predicting that it would be the sixties' 'most enduring legacy to American politics.' Now, in a new foreword to that portrait, he traces neoconservatism's fateful transformation. What was a movement of dissenting intellectuals creating a new, modern kind of conservatism became a phalanx of political insiders urging the nation to flex its muscles overseas. 'The neoconservatives' describes the founders of the movement, disenchanted liberals recoiling from the turmoil of the sixties, a decline in authority, and a loss of tough-minded leadership at home and abroad. Written contemporaneously to the birth of the movement that would profoundly mark American history, 'The neoconservatives' holds clues, Steinfels argues, to how and why neoconservatism swerved from its original promise even as it successfully implanted itself as an influential and aggressive element in our politics." --
Sheed & Ward, in partnership with Commonweal magazine, presents the second of two volumes in the groundbreaking series, American Catholics in the Public Square, a project funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts. Essays by scholars, journalists, lawyers, business and labor leaders, church administrators and lobbyists, novelists, activists, policy makers and politicians address the most critical issues facing the Catholic Church in the United States. Volume 2, American Catholics, American Culture: Tradition and Resistance, is introduced by Peter Steinfels and Robert Royal. Part One, "Against the Grain," explores the philosophical and practical differences between Catholicism and American culture on issues in sexuality, marriage, abortion, stem cell research, women's rights, and physician-assisted suicide. The essays attempt to mediate the divide between Catholicism's communal and personalist view of the human person and the American preference for autonomy and pluralism. Part Two, "Popular Culture & Literature," confronts the role and interaction of the Church in popular culture and explores the identity of the "Catholic" writer on the literary page and in the media. Part Three, "Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice?" endeavors to define what anti-Catholicism is, where it is found in North American culture, what it means for maintaining group identity, and how it can be interpreted as an American or religious phenomenon.
As religiously grounded moral arguments have become ever more influential factors in the national debate-particularly reinforced by recent presidential elections and the creation of the faith-based initiative office in the White House-journalists' ignorance about theological convictions has often worked to distort the public discourse on important policy issues. Pope John Paul II's pronouncements on stem-cell research, the constitutional controversies regarding faith-based initiatives, the emerging participation of Muslims in American life-issues like these require political journalists in print and broadcast media to cover religious contexts that many admit they are ill-equipped to understand. Put differently, these news events reflect subtle theological nuances and deep faith commitments that shape the activities of religious believers in the public square. Inasmuch as a faith tradition is an active or significant participant in the public arena, journalists will need to better understand the theological sources and religious convictions that motivate this political activity. The current national discourse has brought faith and its relationship to public policy to the forefront of our daily news. Since 1999, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, through the generosity of the Pew Charitable Trusts, has hosted six conferences for national journalists to help raise the level of their reporting by increasing their understanding of religion, religious communities, and the religious convictions that inform the political activity of devout believers. This book contains the presentations and conversations that grew out of those conferences.
More than three decades ago, in 'The neoconservatives,' Peter Steinfels described a nascent movement, predicting that it would be the sixties' 'most enduring legacy to American politics.' Now, in a new foreword to that portrait, he traces neoconservatism's fateful transformation. What was a movement of dissenting intellectuals creating a new, modern kind of conservatism became a phalanx of political insiders urging the nation to flex its muscles overseas. 'The neoconservatives' describes the founders of the movement, disenchanted liberals recoiling from the turmoil of the sixties, a decline in authority, and a loss of tough-minded leadership at home and abroad. Written contemporaneously to the birth of the movement that would profoundly mark American history, 'The neoconservatives' holds clues, Steinfels argues, to how and why neoconservatism swerved from its original promise even as it successfully implanted itself as an influential and aggressive element in our politics." --
In A People Adrift, a prominent Catholic thinker states bluntly that the Catholic Church in the United States must transform itself or suffer irreversible decline. Peter Steinfels shows how even before the recent revelations about sexual abuse by priests, the explosive combination of generational change and the thinning ranks of priests and nuns was creating a grave crisis of leadership and identity. This groundbreaking book offers an analysis not just of the church's immediate troubles but of less visible, more powerful forces working below the surface of an institution that provides a spiritual identity for 65 million Americans and spans the nation with its parishes, schools, colleges and universities, hospitals, clinics, and social service agencies. In A People Adrift, Steinfels warns that entrenched liberals and conservatives are trapped in a "theo-logical gridlock" that often ignores what in fact goes on in families, parishes, classrooms, voting booths, and Catholic organizations of all types. Above all, he insists, the altered Catholic landscape demands a new agenda for leadership, from the selection of bishops and the rethinking of the priesthood to the thorough preparation and genuine incorporation of a lay leadership that is already taking over key responsibilities in Catholic institutions. Catholicism exerts an enormous cultural and political presence in American life. No one interested in the nation's moral, intellectual, and political future can be indifferent to the fate of what has been one of the world's most vigorous churches -- a church now severely challenged.
Sexual abuse scandals, declining attendance, a meltdown in the number of priests and nuns, the closing of many parishes and parochial schools--all have shaken American Catholicism. Yet conservatives have increasingly dominated the church hierarchy. In The Catholic Labyrinth, Peter McDonough tells a tale of multiple struggles that animate various groups--the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, Voice of the Faithful, and the Leadership Roundtable chief among them--pushing to modernize the church. One contest pits reformers against those who back age-old standards of sexual behavior and gender roles. Another area of contention, involving efforts to maintain the church's far-flung operations in education, social services, and healthcare, raises constitutional issues about the separation of church and state. Once a sidebar to this debate, the bishops' campaign to control the terms of employment and access to contraceptives in church-sponsored ministries has fueled conflict further. McDonough draws on behind-the-scenes documentation and personal interviews with leading reformers and "loyalists" to explore how both retrenchment and resistance to clericalism have played out in American Catholicism. Despite growing support for optional celibacy among priests, the ordination of women, and similar changes, and in the midst of numerous departures from the church, immigration and a lingering reaction against the upheavals of the sixties have helped sustain a popular traditionalism among "Catholics in the pews." So have the polemics of Catholic neoconservatives. These demographic and cultural factors--as well as the silent dissent of those who simply ignore rather than oppose the church's more regressive positions--have reinforced a culture of deference that impedes reform. At the same time, selective managerial improvements show promise of advancing incremental change. Timely and incisive, The Catholic Labyrinth captures the church at a historical crossroads, as advocates for change struggle to reconcile religious mores with the challenges of modernity.
From the launch of the Journal of Social Research in 1932 to the recent work of Jurgen Habermas on law and democracy, the Frankfurt School has produced some of the most ambitious and influential theories of the past century. This new introduction to the critical theory of the School provides a thorough, concise and up-to-date assessment of thinkers including Pollock, Marcuse, Horkheimer, Adorno, Neumann, Lowenthal, Fromm, Kirchheimer and Habermas. Peter Stirk's lively account places the formative work of the School within the context of the Weimar Republic and of Nazi Germany. He contrasts this environment with the very different background of 1950s Germany in which Habermas embarked on his academic career. Stirk goes on to discuss the enduring relevance of political theory to the contemporary political agenda. In particular, he illustrates the continuing validity of the Frankfurt School's criticism of positivist, metaphysical and more recently postmodernist views, and its members' attempts to incorporate psychological perspectives into broader theories of social dynamics. He assesses their contribution to key areas of contemporary debate, including morality, interest, individual and collective identity and the analysis of authoritarian and democratic states. Specifically focused on the interests and needs of social scientists, philosophers and historians of ideas, Critical Theory, Politics and Society is an essential book both for students and for all those who wish to grasp the contours of critical theory and to understand its enduring relevance.
Contains summaries of nearly two hundred Christian-themed movies made between 1905 and 2008, each with commentary; arranged chronologically by decade to highlight the decline in positive portrayals.
In this updated and revised edition of Just Passing Through: A German American Family Saga, first published in 2011, the author tells the story of several generations of his unique but dysfunctional family spanning over a hundred years including the two world wars. Peter Zell was eight years old when World War II ended and in a prologue entitled A German - American Childhood recounts his boyhood experiences that included the apocalyptic firebombing of his hometown of Stuttgart by the western Allies, the postwar occupation of Germany, and his family’s emigration to America. The book centers on the author’s mother, whom her children called Mutti, and her ordeal during the Nazi era for having been married to a Jew, the son of prosperous Frankfurt business owners, with whom she had two children. With anti-Semitism on the rise in Germany, her husband decided to emigrate to America but Mutti chose to remain behind to take care of her ailing father. The couple had an amicable divorce and while her ex-husband took their son with him, their daughter remained with Mutti in Germany. Under the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, mother and daughter now found themselves classified as non-Aryans which meant that Mutti could not remarry while their teenage daughter, being half Jewish, was put in dire jeopardy of her life. At this point Mutti’s older brother, himself a dedicated National Socialist, proposed an unconventional solution that ensured her survival. Following his advice, she had more children, fathered by so-called Aryans, who were eventually all brought to America. The book follows the lives of the five siblings, all half-brothers and half-sisters, and their difficult relationships with each other as each seeks to achieve his or her version of the American Dream.
For years, historians have argued that Catholicism in the United States stood decisively apart from papal politics in European society. The Church in America, historians insist, forged an "American Catholicism," a national faith responsive to domestic concerns, disengaged from the disruptive ideological conflicts of the Old World. Drawing on previously unexamined documents from Italian state collections and newly opened Vatican archives, Peter D'Agostino paints a starkly different portrait. In his narrative, Catholicism in the United States emerges as a powerful outpost within an international church that struggled for three generations to vindicate the temporal claims of the papacy within European society. Even as they assimilated into American society, Catholics of all ethnicities participated in a vital, international culture of myths, rituals, and symbols that glorified papal Rome and demonized its liberal, Protestant, and Jewish opponents. From the 1848 attack on the Papal States that culminated in the creation of the Kingdom of Italy to the Lateran Treaties in 1929 between Fascist Italy and the Vatican that established Vatican City, American Catholics consistently rose up to support their Holy Father. At every turn American liberals, Protestants, and Jews resisted Catholics, whose support for the papacy revealed social boundaries that separated them from their American neighbors.
A perceptive & provocative analysis of the transformation that swept through American Catholicism in the decades leading up to Vatican II. The Jesuits have been the carriers of a culture borne along by a fruitful & often frustrating tension between their dual commitment to ancient virtues & to the pursuit of the free play of ideas. This book explains developments among the Jesuits and sets them in the larger context of the sea-changes that shook the world and the Catholic Church in the world during the mid-20th century.
This is an accessible response to the contemporary anti-God arguments of the 'new atheists' (Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens, Grayling, etc). Atheism has become militant in the past few years, with its own popular mass media evangelists such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. In this readable book, Christian philosopher Peter S. Williams considers the arguments of the 'new atheists' and finds them wanting. Williams explains the history of atheism and responds to the claims that: 'belief in God causes more harm than good'; 'religion is about blind faith and science is the only way to know things'; 'science can explain religion away'; 'there is not enough evidence for God'; 'the arguments for God's existence do not work'. Williams argues that belief in God is more intellectually plausible than atheism.
Today the idea of natural law as the basic ingredient in moral, legal, and political thought presents a challenge not faced for almost two hundred years. On the surface, there would appear to be little room in the contemporary world for a widespread belief in natural law. The basic philosophies of the opposition--the rationalism of the philosophes, the utilitarianism of Bentham, the materialism of Marx--appear to have made prior philosophies irrelevant. Yet these newer philosophies themselves have been overtaken by disillusionment born of conflicts between "might" and "right." Many thoughtful people who were loyal to secular belief have become dissatisfied with the lack of normative principles and have turned once more to natural law. This first book-length study of Edmund Burke and his philosophy, originally published in 1958, explores this intellectual giant's relationship to, and belief in, the natural law. It has long been thought that Edmund Burke was an enemy of the natural law, and was a proponent of conservative utilitarianism. Peter J. Stanlis shows that, on the contrary, Burke was one of the most eloquent and profound defenders of natural law morality and politics in Western civilization. A philosopher in the classical tradition of Aristotle and Cicero, and in the Scholastic tradition of Aquinas, Burke appealed to natural law in the political problems he encountered in American, Irish, Indian, and British affairs, and in reaction to the French Revolution. This book is as relevant today as it was when it was first published, and will be mandatory reading for students of philosophy, political science, law, and history.
From creeping capitalism to abortion to government corruption, these three books shed light on controversial topics that are too often left in the dark. Curated by NYU professor Mark Crispin Miller, the Forbidden Bookshelf series resurrects books from America’s repressed history. All touching on bold and debated topics, these three books are more relevant today than ever. Friendly Fascism: Bertram Gross, a presidential adviser in the New Deal era, explores the insidious way that capitalist politics could subvert America’s constitutional democracy. First published over three decades ago, this book predicted the threats and realities that occur when big business and big government become bedfellows, while demonstrating how US citizens can build a truer democracy. The Search for an Abortionist: Nancy Howell Lee’s eye-opening account reveals the dangerous and illegal options for women seeking an abortion before Roe v. Wade. Based on interviews with 114 women, this groundbreaking work takes an intimate look at the abortion process. Dallas ’63: Peter Dale Scott exposes the deep state, an intricate network within the American government, linking Wall Street influence, corrupt bureaucracy, and the military-industrial complex. Since World War II, its power has grown unchecked, and nowhere has it been more apparent than at Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963. Scott details the CIA and FBI’s involvement in the JFK assassination, and shows how events like Watergate, the Iran–Contra affair, and 9/11 are all connected to this behind-the-scenes web of corruption.
In his inimitable prose, master storyteller Peter Quinn chronicles his odyssey from the Irish Catholic precincts of the Bronx to the arena of big-league politics and corporate hardball. Cross Bronx is Peter Quinn’s one-of-a-kind account of his adventures as ad man, archivist, teacher, Wall Street messenger, court officer, political speechwriter, corporate scribe, and award-winning novelist. Like Pete Hamill, Quinn is a New Yorker through and through. His evolution from a childhood in a now-vanished Bronx, to his exploits in the halls of Albany and swish corporate offices, to then walking away from it all, is evocative and entertaining and enlightening from first page to last. Cross Bronx is bursting with witty, captivating stories. Quinn is best known for his novels (all recently reissued by Fordham University Press under its New York ReLit imprint), most notably his American Book Award–winning novel Banished Children of Eve. Colum McCann has summed up Quinn’s trilogy of historical detective novels as “generous and agile and profound.” Quinn has now seized the time and inspiration afforded by “the strange interlude of the pandemic” to give his up-close-and-personal accounts of working as a speechwriter in political backrooms and corporate boardrooms: “In a moment of upended expectations and fear-prone uncertainty, the tolling of John Donne’s bells becomes perhaps not as faint as it once seemed. Before judgment is pronounced and sentence carried out, I want my chance to speak from the dock. Let no man write my epitaph. In the end, this is the best I could do.” (from the Prologue) From 1979 to 1985 Quinn worked as chief speechwriter for New York Governors Hugh Carey and Mario Cuomo, helping craft Cuomo’s landmark speech at the 1984 Democratic Convention and his address on religion and politics at Notre Dame University. Quinn then joined Time Inc. as chief speechwriter and retired as corporate editorial director for Time Warner at the end of 2007. As eyewitness and participant, he survived elections, mega-mergers, and urban ruin. In Cross Bronx he provides his insider’s view of high-powered politics and high-stakes corporate intrigue. Incapable of writing a dull sentence, the award-winning author grabs our attention and keeps us enthralled from start to finish. Never have his skills as a storyteller been on better display than in this revealing, gripping memoir.
Combining his unique experience as tenured professor of moral theology at Creighton University with over twenty years as pastoral minister and executive director of Boys Town, author Rev. Val J. Peter offers assessments, critiques, and insights into contemporary social problems. His forthright style, various examples, and specific suggestions offer practical advice and guidance to assist the spiritual lives of 21st-century Catholics in dealing with these seven secular challenges."--BOOK JACKET.
The death of Pope John Paul II and consequent election of Pope Benedict XVI has shed light on a political process that the world has not been privy to for almost twenty-six years. People from around the world gathered in St. Peter's Square, wondering who the next Vatican leader would be and how the election process really worked, while everyone from international news correspondents to local priests added their own opinions to the debate. In Heirs of the Fisherman, former Vatican insider John-Peter Pham presents a candid portrait of the modern Vatican, the only account to reveal the striking changes to papal succession procedures made by John Paul II. Blending political and ecclesiastical history, Pham goes beyond a mere description of the complex rituals to offer rare insight into the dramatic shifts inside the College of Cardinals, whose 100 members now hail from 50 nations around the globe. He takes us into the secret conclave, where the electors were kept under lock and key, until they had selected a new pope. He also includes a chapter devoted to the intrigues of the 20th century where the first conclave had an emperor's veto and the last was won by the first non-Italian in four centuries becauase the Italians were bitterly divided. With a new Preface, Afterword, and appendices that include an English translation of the last will and testament of Pope John Paul II, Heirs of the Fisherman is an illuminating history and must-have guide to this vitally important world event. It will continue to be an indispensable reference to observers of future Catholic Church politics.
More than six years after the September 11 attacks, the close friendship forged between George W. Bush and John Howard remains. But in their nations more broadly, the common purpose has withered, drained by the sense that both men have failed the moral and intellectual challenges of that day. In this powerful and provocative book, Peter Beinart offers a new liberal vision, based on principles liberals too often forget: that America's greatness cannot simply be asserted, it must be proved. That American leadership is not American empire. And that liberalism cannot merely define itself against the right, but must fervently oppose the totalitarianism that stalks the Islamic world today. Peter Beinart's The Good Fight is a passionate rejoinder to the conservatives who have ruled Washington since 9/11. Beinart argues that America can again embrace the creed that brought it greatness in the past, but only if liberals remember that democracy begins at home. Above all, it is a call for liberals to revive the spirit that once swept America, and inspired the world.
In this wide-ranging study bursting with insights, Peter Leithart explores how and why Jesus' death and resurrection addresses the deepest realities of this world. This biblical and theological examination of atonement and justification challenges conventional perceptions and probes the depths of the death that changes everything.
An entertaining and useful alternative to run-of-the-mill thesauri, a new edition of a unique reference offers original synonyms with contextual examples from books, magazines and newspapers. Simultaneous.
Immigration is one of the critical issues of our time. In Citizens, Strangers, and In-Betweens, an integrated series of fourteen essays, Yale professor Peter Schuck analyzes the complex social forces that have been unleashed by unprecedented legal and illegal migration to the United States, forces that are reshaping American society in countless ways. Schuck first presents the demographic, political, economic, legal, and cultural contexts in which these transformations are occurring. He then shows how the courts, Congress, and the states are responding to the tensions created by recent immigration. Next, he explores the nature of American citizenship, challenging traditional ways of defining the national community and analyzing the controversial topics of citizenship for illegal alien children, the devaluation and revaluation of American citizenship, and plural citizenship. In a concluding section, Schuck focuses on four vital and explosive policy issues: immigration's effects on the civil rights movement, the cultural differences among various American ethnic groups as revealed in their experiences as immigrants throughout the world, the protection of refugees fleeing persecution, and immigration's effects on American society in recent years.
The concepts of 'Modernism' and 'Postmodernism' constitute the single most dominant issue of twentieth-century literature and culture and are the cause of much debate. In this influential volume, Peter Brooker presents some of the key viewpoints from a variety of major critics and sets these additionally alongside challenging arguments from Third World, Black and Feminist perspectives. His excellent Introduction and detailed headnotes for each section and essay provide an indispensable guide to interpreting the many different opinions, and prove to be valuable contributions in their own right.
This is the single best book on the 1970s." --Leo Ribuffo, George Washington University "A compelling and persuasive challenge to the journalistic characterization of the '70s as the 'Me Decade.'" --Ruth Rosen, University of California, Davis The title of Peter Carroll's book, It Seemed Like Nothing Happened, ironically reveals the message. The decade of the '70s was far from our common impression of the calm following the turbulent '60s. Instead, it was a time filled with dramatic events and changes. In this unique, comprehensive history of the 1970s, we learn about international developments: the war in Cambodia, Nixon's trip to China, the oil embargo and resulting gas shortage, the Mayaguez incident, the Camp David accords, the Iranian capture of the U.S. embassy and the taking of hostages, and the ill-fated rescue mission. All this signaled a decline in American power and influence. We also learn about domestic politics: Kent State, the Pentagon Papers, Haynsworth and Carswell, the Eagleton affair, the rise of ticket splitting, the Saturday night massacre, Nixon's resignation, the conservative shift in the Democratic Party, and the Reagan electoral landslide. Carroll reminds us of tragedies and occasional moments of levity, bringing up the names Patricia Hearst, George Jackson and Angela Davis, Wilbur Mills and the Argentina Firecracker, Wayne Hays and Elizabeth Ray, Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone. Peter N. Carroll has taught at the University of Illinois, the University of Minnesota, and Stanford University. He is the author of The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War.
When his book Mainstream and Margins was published in 1983, Peter Rose's writings on American minorities and those who studied them painted a vivid picture of what life was like in America for Jews, blacks, and other minorities in the United States. Now, a third of a century later, he revisits the topic, with sixteen new chapters, in addition to seven from the original edition. Newer content covers immigration and American refugee policy; reexamines the term "model minority," first used to describe Jews, but now applied to Asian Americans; and the resurgence of nativism both in regard to new migrants from Latin America and to the growth of Islamophobia since the 9/11 attacks. Rose also reassesses what is still one of the most controversial documents about race and class ever written, Daniel Patrick Moynihan's "The Negro Family: A Case for National Action." Rose writes about other authors who have addressed many of the principal concerns of this book, ranging from novelists Tom Wolfe and Harper Lee to sociologists David Riesman, Robin M. Williams, Jr., and William Julius Wilson. Historical tensions between Jews and African Americans and debates about "liberal" vs. "corporate" pluralism seen from the perspective of both whites and non-whites are also discussed in this seminal volume by a master on the subject.
Bianchi draw on interviews and statements gathered from over 400 Jesuits and former Jesuits to provide an intimate look at turmoil among Catholicism's legendary best-and-brightest.".
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