W. B. Yeats's poem "Adam's Curse" provides Donoghue with motif and incentive. In Genesis God says to Adam: "Because thou hast harkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life." Yeats put it this way: "It is certain there is no fine thing / Since Adam's curse but needs much labouring." Based on a conversation he had with his beloved Maud Gonne and her sister Kathleen, Yeats's poem thinks about how difficult it is to be...

Nicholas Boyle's latest work begins with an observation--from theologian and medievalist Father Marie-Dominique Chenu, O.P.--that the Bible should be seen as a divinely ordained mediation between human culture and divine truth. But how far can we say that the Bible is 'literature'? Chenu is surely right that God is revealed in Scripture not through a system of ideas, but through a vivid historical narrative of people and places. But the Bible is also a sacred book. Expanding on this central dilemma, Boyle demonstrates that biblical scholarship and literary criticism must work together in the...

Using concrete examples, John T. Noonan, Jr., demonstrates that the moral teaching of the Catholic Church has changed and continues to change without abandoning its foundational commitment to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Specifically, Noonan looks at the profound transformations that have occurred over the centuries in Catholic moral teaching on freedom of conscience, lending for a profit, and slavery. He also offers a close examination of the evolution now in progress concerning divorce. Noonan perceives the Catholic Church to be a vigorous, living organism answering new questions with new...

This work shows that the collapse of the post-reformation confessional state was more the result of religious dissent from within, much of it orthodox, than attacks of an anti-religious Enlightenment. In sharp contrast to the Reformation-era religious conflicts which tended to pit Protestant and Catholic confessions and states against each other, the 18th century religious conflicts described in this work took place within the various confessional establishments and states that founded and maintained them, such as Russian Orthodoxy in the East and the Anglican Establishment in England and...

Many of the critical political issues of our time - from the 1992-1995 Balkan Wars to the continuing crisis in the Middle East to the role of Muslim immigrants in Western Europe - revolve around issues of religion and tolerance. The predominant approach to these concerns is to espouse the doctrines of liberal humanistic virtue. These doctrines, however, fail to resonate in communities that maintain more traditional religious definitions of self and society. Modest Claims, which features essays by Seligman and dialogues between scholars representing the three monotheistic faiths, provides the...