Bøger udgivet af University of Notre Dame Press

This study provides a compelling account of the major works of Henri de Lubac, one of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century, and argues that soteriology provides a lens through which their inner unity can be discerned.The writings of Henri de Lubac have left an indelible mark on Catholic theology, preparing the ground for, giving shape to, and explaining the seminal event of twentieth-century Catholicism: the Second Vatican Council. Like the Council itself, though, de Lubac remains a contested figure, difficult to classify.Salvation in Henri de Lubac presents an overview of de Lubac¿s major works in light of his own statements that a mystical vision animated them all. De Lubac¿s mystical theology hinges upon a vision of salvation, understood as humanity¿s incorporation into the triune God through the cross and resurrection of the incarnate Christ. From his writings on the supernatural and theological epistemology, to his treatments of the spiritual interpretation of Scripture, ecclesiology, sacramental theology, and the theology of history, the mystery of the cross looms large, gathering these disparate topics into one focal center while also allowing their distinct contours to remain. By attending to de Lubac¿s work in this light, Eugene R. Schlesinger brings important themes from French language scholarship into the English-speaking conversation and clarifies the nature of de Lubac¿s ressourcement. It is not a method, nor a sensibility, but the outgrowth of a conviction: in the mystery of Christ a definitive and unsurpassable gift has been given, one that constitutes the meaning of the world and its history, one whose riches can never be exhausted. Schlesinger claims that unless we understand de Lubac and his work in light of his own motivations and emphases, we risk distorting his contribution, reducing him to a proxy in the struggle for post-conciliar Catholic self-definition.

These essays will interest readers familiar with the work of Nobel Prize-winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and are a great starting point for those eager for an introduction to the great Russian's work.When people think of Russia today, they tend to gravitate toward images of Soviet domination or, more recently, Vladimir Putin's war against Ukraine. The reality, however, is that, despite Russia's political failures, its rich history of culture, religion, and philosophical reflection--even during the darkest days of the Gulag--have been a deposit of wisdom for American artists, religious thinkers, and political philosophers probing what it means to be human in America. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn stands out as the key figure in this conversation, as both a Russian literary giant and an exile from Russia living in America for two decades. This anthology reconsiders Solzhenitsyn's work from a variety of perspectives--his faith, his politics, and the influences and context of his literature--to provide a prophetic vision for our current national confusion over universal ideals.In Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: The Russian Soul in the West, David P. Deavel and Jessica Hooten Wilson have collected essays from the foremost scholars and thinkers of comparative studies who have been tracking what Americans have borrowed and learned from Solzhenitsyn and his fellow Russians. The book offers a consideration of what we have in common--the truth, goodness, and beauty America has drawn from Russian culture and from masters such as Solzhenitsyn--and will suggest to readers what we can still learn and what we must preserve. The last section expands the book's theme and reach by examining the impact of other notable Russian authors, including Pushkin, Dostoevsky, and Gogol.Contributors: David P. Deavel, Jessica Hooten Wilson, Nathan Nielson, Eugene Vodolazkin, David Walsh, Matthew Lee Miller, Ralph C. Wood, Gary Saul Morson, Edward E. Ericson, Jr., Micah Mattix, Joseph Pearce, James F. Pontuso, Daniel J. Mahoney, William Jason Wallace, Lee Trepanier, Peter Leithart, Dale Peterson, Julianna Leachman, Walter G. Moss, and Jacob Howland.

This rich study takes Insular art on its own terms, revealing a distinctive and unorthodox theology that will inevitably change how scholars view the long arc of English piety and the English literary tradition.Drawing on a wide range of critical methodologies, Aesthetics and the Incarnation in Early Medieval Britain treats this era as a "contact zone" of cultural clash and exchange, where Christianity encountered a rich amalgam of practices and attitudes, particularly regarding the sensible realm. Tiffany Beechy illustrates how local cultures, including the Irish learned tradition, received the "Word that was made flesh," the central figure of Christian doctrine, in distinctive ways: the Word, for example, was verbal, related to words and signs, and was not at all ineffable. Likewise, the Word was often poetic-an enigma-and its powerful presence was not only hinted at (as St. Augustine would have it) but manifest in the mouth or on the page. Beechy examines how these Insular traditions received and expressed a distinctly iterable Incarnation. Often disavowed and condemned by orthodox authorities, this was in large part an implicit theology, expressed or embodied in form (such as art, compilation, or metaphor) rather than in treatises. Beechy demonstrates how these forms drew on various authorities especially important to Britain-Bede, Gregory the Great, and Isidore most prominent among them.Beechy's study provides a prehistory in the English literary tradition for the better-known experimental poetics of Middle English devotion. The book is unusual in the diversity of its primary material, which includes visual art, including the Book of Kells; obscure and often cursorily treated texts such as Adamnán's De locis sanctis ("On the holy lands"); and the difficult esoterica of the wisdom tradition.

This text presents a general theory of law based on the principles of liberation theology. Robert Rodes also points out the compatability of this theology with traditional doctrines of natural law and traditional Catholic social teaching.

The central metaphor of Christ as the spiritual physician, operative within late medieval Christianity as a whole, was animated in particular ways within hospitals. These institutions aimed to care for both body and spirit, understood as inextricable from each other. Some of the earliest extended treatments of Christus medicus appear in Augustine, who draws an analogy between Christ's Passion and the bitter medicine of the physician: "Do not fear to drink. For to dispel your fear the physician drank first, that is, the Lord drank first the bitterness of the Passion." Hence the logically related image of the priest as a spiritual physician with authority derived from Christ became familiar in a range of medieval religious texts, codified in a decree of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215: "The priest shall be discerning and prudent, so that like a skilled doctor he may pour wine and oil over the wounds of the injured one. Let him carefully inquire about the circumstances of both the sinner and the sin, so that he may prudently discern what sort of advice he ought to give and what remedy to apply, using various means to heal the sick person." The same Council also banned clerics in major orders from surgery, among other activities involving bloodshed. Jeremy J. Citrome argues that even as priests were barred from operating on bodies, surgery became prevalent as an image for confession in pastoral literature after 1215: "Metaphors of surgery become the key rhetorical device through which subsequent pastoral writers explain spiritual health in this reinforced confessional context, and the surgeon, their foremost model for the perfect confessor." Daniel McCann has also demonstrated the double valence of the Christus medicus image underpinning penitential practice, and by extension, lay devotional reading in late medieval England. On the one hand, Christ's own sufferings are presented as curative for the penitent, as in the passage from Augustine cited above. On the other hand, Christ is a physician who must inflict wounds in order to heal. In his study of the "therapeutic aspects of religious texts," McCann shows how vernacular devotional texts like the Prick of Conscience and the Penitential Psalms function therapeutically "to evoke emotions intense enough to enable salus animae, or the health of the soul" in readers. Although I will be looking at different texts from McCann, the concept of "soul-health" remains crucial throughout. In the space of the hospital, an institution focused on caring for the physically vulnerable while striving, through prayer, to bring spiritual health to its patrons and its diverse community, bodily and spiritual health were always intertwined. The priest's role as spiritual healer offering Christ's salutary suffering to the penitent became heightened and was textualized in diverse ways. Although relatively few records survive from English hospitals of what we would today call medical care, hospitals played an important role in the late medieval health care system. During this period, most health care took place in the home, with women as the primary caregivers. As Katharine Park notes, women served as "the first line of defense against illness and as those primarily entrusted, in the normative context of the home, with the ongoing management of health." People with complex illnesses or injuries needing specialized care did not generally resort to hospitals: if they had the resources, they hired private doctors to come to their homes. Thus English hospitals with a mandate to care for sick patients were mainly serving those without such resources: the poor, the indigent, those shunned by family. Although some hospital libraries contained medical texts, we have relatively few records of physicians attending the sick or injured in English hospitals prior to the sixteenth century. Yet Roberta Gilchrist's recent archaeological work on hospitals and monastic infirmaries has uncovered "technologies of healing" that included "preventative care for the body, medical interventions such as surgery and bone-setting, the provision of prosthetics and specialist medicines." Thus, limited recorded evidence for medical care in hospitals need not mean that such care was unavailable but rather that those providing it were not university-trained "physicians." Carers were generally highly skilled nurses: I detail the extent of their activities below. Together with the care of their bodies, hospital patients received the spiritual comfort of seeing the mass daily and receiving confession and other sacraments. In the interest of promoting spiritual health, later medieval hospital architecture developed to enable patients to see the mass celebrated. Large institutions for the sick poor (including St. Leonard's, York and St. Bartholomew's, London) typically situated a large open infirmary hall with a chapel just to the east, allowing patients to see the Eucharist elevated and listen to the service, even if they were too weak to rise from their beds. The building plans of these two hospitals were fairly standard as well, employing central space such as a "close, cloister, quadrangle or courtyard as their means of central planning." The compound's other buildings radiated around these, including separate dormitories for brothers and sisters and in larger hospitals, multiple chapels staffed by different chaplains. These compounds were in turn surrounded by workshops of artisans such as bakers and masons who provided goods and services to residents. Running water was recognized as de rigueur for maintaining health, and records of water management survive for St. Bartholomew's and St. Mark's. In 1297, St. Bartholomew's was allowed to cover with wood and stone a foul-smelling watercourse running through the hospital; St. Mark's received piped water from springs outside of Bristol. Along with St. Mary's Abbey, St. Leonard's, York was the only local institution to have its drain fully encased in stone.

"Every political order depends on a set of shared expectations about how the order does and should work. In Making a Modern Political Order, James Sheehan provides a sophisticated analysis of these expectations and shows how they are a source of both cohesion and conflict in the modern society of nation states. The author divides these expectations into three groups: first, expectations about the definition and character of political space, which in the modern era are connected to the emergence of a new kind of state; second, expectations about the nature of political communities (that is, about how people relate to one another and to their governments); and finally, expectations about the international system (namely, how states interact in a society of nation states). Although Sheehan treats these three dimensions of the political order separately, they are closely bound together, each dependent on--and reinforcing--the others. Ultimately, he claims, the modern nation state must balance all three organizing principles if it is to succeed. Sheehan's project begins with an examination of people's expectations about political space, community, and international society in the premodern European world that came to be called the 'ancien râegime.' He then, in chapters on states, nations, and the society of nation states, proceeds to trace the development of a modern political order that slowly and unevenly replaced the ancien râegime in Europe and eventually spread throughout the world. To close, he offers some speculations about the horizon ahead of us, beyond which lies a future order that may someday replace our own."--Back cover.

Grdzelidze¿s study evaluates the present state of ecclesiology in the Orthodox Church, focusing on the history of autocephaly and its relationship with the rise of religious nationalism.To date, the Orthodox Church has not sufficiently addressed the pressing problem of religious nationalism. Tamara Grdzelidze¿s Ecclesial Boundaries and National Identity in the Orthodox Church fills this lacuna, offering a solution to the ecclesiological problems posed by the rise of group-related sentiment in Orthodox communities.Grdzelidze¿s monograph begins with an examination of the history of autocephaly and synodality in the Orthodox Church. As she explains, the political autonomy of local churches in the Eastern Roman Empire, which was later transformed into autocephaly, instinctively carried the kernel of group-related sentiments, whether national or ethnic. Over time, such sentiments have given rise to religious nationalism, which has further resulted in the inability of autocephalous churches to disengage from their national political involvements. Consequently, Orthodox Churches are unable to conduct a conversation on the hermeneutics of authority.After sketching this historical background, Grdzelidze offers a solution to this ecclesiological problem, proposing a eucharistic hermeneutics by which the concepts of autocephaly and synodality might be preserved from misappropriation by religious nationalists. This proposal is centered on the principle that the Church represents the Body of Christ and thus embraces the whole people of God and the whole of God¿s creation through the sacramental life. Ultimately, this eucharistic mode of visioning the Church furnishes a solution to the crisis of borders and boundaries in the Orthodox Church.

Just War and Christian Traditions introduces readers ¿ lay persons and clergy alike ¿ to classical Christian thinking across denominational lines on the tradition of just war thinking. Representing a two-millennia-old conversation in our wider cultural tradition, just war thinking (often going by the misnomer ¿just war theory¿) is rooted in biblical texts from the Old and New Testaments, historic Christian thinkers such as Ambrose, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Vitoria, Suárez, and Grotius, ethical principles such as the ¿Golden Rule¿ and neighbor-love, as well as natural law principles embedded in Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian thought. As such, it is a shared tradition that unites the vast majority of the world¿s Christians across denominational and theological divides.

U.S. flag officers are intended to be exemplary defenders of duty, honor, and country-but what can we learn by exposing the bad leaders lurking within these venerable ranks?There is an ugly strain of criminal and unethical leadership in the upper ranks of the American military. Despite the exemplary service of most American military members, a persistent minority of U.S. flag officers (Navy admirals and Army, Air Force, and Marine generals) have embroiled the profession in scandal since the Revolutionary War. In Generals and Admirals, Criminals and Crooks, award-winning author Jeffrey J. Matthews examines bad leadership in American military history over the past one hundred years, beginning with war crimes in the Philippine-American War and ending with the recent Fat Leonard corruption scandal.Scrutinizing a range of leadership failures, including moral cowardice, sex crimes, insubordination, toxic leadership, and obstruction of justice, Matthews offers a fascinating analysis of the bases and motives leading to these missteps and explores what could be done to curtail future misconduct of generals and admirals. The book also includes an up-to-date examination of President Trump's term in office that highlights the vital role honorable military leadership plays in our democracy. Confronting the dark side of criminal and unethical conduct among U.S. flag officers, this frank and historically grounded book offers valuable lessons in leadership that will stimulate further debate and critical self-assessment within the U.S. military..

The Rivers Are Inside Our Homes handles themes of loss and exile, aging generations, fable and fairy tale, marriage and hurt, with the island of Cuba at its heart.These incandescent poems by Cuban American poet Victoria María Castells explore how we can salvage our notion of paradise in an overspent Eden. In thwarted homes located in Havana and Miami, Rapunzel and her prince, persecuted nymphs, Morgause, and Bluebeard¿s wife speak to us directly, all in need of returning to safety. Confronting machismo, illness, heartbreak, and isolation, the poems depict how women are at the mercy of men, either husband or oligarch. Yet all generations of Cubans are bombarded with this need to return or to leave, to have both, to have neither.Meanwhile, hurricane seasons add further instability to shelter and family, growing fiercer every year. Exile and displacement are accepted as permanent conditions. Latin America will mirror Cubäs violent struggles as conquered land and despotic object. From the colonial desecrations to fraught revolutionary aftermath, the search for home is lyrically charted by this contradictory land of suffering and dreams. Through these poems, dictators, grandmothers, mythical characters, and buccaneers are given voices of equal strength, challenging what constitutes truth under a prism of fantasy and desire.

This fascinating study traces sixteenth-century German colonialism in Venezuela through the lens of racialized capitalism and the subsequent memorialization of the period through to the twentieth century.Giovanna Montenegro investigates one of the strangest and often-ignored episodes in the conquest and colonization of the Americas--the governance of the Province of Venezuela by the Welsers, a German banking family from Augsburg, in the sixteenth century. Using a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, the book chronicles the Welsers' business expansion beyond banking to colonization and the slave trade in the Spanish Indies and the eventual failure of the colony. Montenegro follows the money that financed the Habsburg empire, tackling a multifaceted, multilingual corpus of primary documents. She examines numerous legal documents, from contracts granting colonization and slave trade rights (capitulaciones, asientos) to complex financial transactions (interests, exchange rates). She also analyzes maps, literary texts, and various chronicles and poems of the period. The book examines a history of violence perpetrated upon enslaved Indigenous and African people, but it is also the story of how different generations across the Atlantic, up to Nazi Germany in the twentieth century, have remembered and recalled this Welser period of governance in Venezuela to serve other social and political purposes. Montenegro positions her research in relation to current critical discussion on inequality, slavery, White supremacy, and neoconservative nationalist movements in contemporary Latin America and Germany. German Conquistadors in Venezuela is a stimulating read. The book will appeal to Latin Americanists, Germanists, early modernists, and scholars and students interested in postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and memory studies.

This book establishes how the doctrine of divine simplicity was interwoven with the formation of a Christian Trinitarian understanding of God before Nicaea.For centuries, Christian theology affirmed God as simple (haplous) and Triune. But the doctrine of the simple Trinity has been challenged by modern critics of classical theism. How can God, conceived as purely one without multiplicity, be a Trinity? This book sets a new historical foundation for addressing this question by tracing how divine simplicity emerged as a key notion in early Christianity. Pui Him Ip argues that only in light of the Platonic synthesis between the Good and the First Principle (arche) can we make sense of divine simplicity as a refusal to associate any kind of plurality that brings about contraries in the divine life. This philosophical doctrine, according to Ip, was integral to how early Christians began to speak of the divine life in terms of a relationship between Father and Son.Through detailed historical exploration of Irenaeus, sources from the Monarchian controversy, and especially Origen's oeuvre, Ip contends that the key contribution from ante-Nicene theology is the realization that it is nontrivial to speak of the begetting of a distinct person (Son) from a simple source (Father). This question became the central problematic in Trinitarian theology before Nicaea and remained crucial for understanding the emergence of rival accounts of the Trinity ("e;pro-Nicene"e; and "e;anti-Nicene"e; theologies) in the fourth century. Origen and the Emergence of Divine Simplicity before Nicaea suggests a new revisional historiography of theological developments after Origen and will be necessary reading for serious students both of patristics and of the wider history of Christian thought.

Drawing on a wide context of bookmaking, this sweeping study traces fundamental changes in books made to support musical practice during the Carolingian Renaissance.During the late eighth and ninth centuries, there were dramatic changes in the way European medieval scribes made books for singers, moving from heavy reliance on unwritten knowledge to the introduction of musical notation into manuscripts. Well-made liturgical books were vital to the success of the Carolingian fight for Christian salvation: these were the basis for carrying out worship correctly, rendering it most effective in petitions to the Christian God. In Sounding the Word of God, Susan Rankin explores Carolingian concern with the expression and control of sound in writing-discernible through instructions for readers and singers visible in liturgical books. Her central focus is on books made for singers, including those made for priests. The emergence of musical notations for ecclesiastical chant and of books designed to accommodate those notations, Rankin concludes, are important aspects of the impact of Carolingian reforming zeal on material culture.The book has three sections. Part 1 considers late antique and early medieval texts, which deal with the value of singing and its necessary regulation. Part 2 describes and investigates techniques used by Carolingian scribes to provide instructions for readers and singers. The extant books themselves are the focus of part 3. Rankin's analysis of over two hundred manuscripts and extensive supporting images represents the work of a scholar who has spent a lifetime with the sources; her explication of the images, particularly those of the earlier manuscripts, changes the way in which musicologists and liturgical scholars will view the images. Indeed, it will change the way in which they approach the unfolding history of chant and liturgy in the Carolingian period.

Rodes examines the legal materials (cases, statutes, canons, and measures) used in the English experience of updating the medieval synthesis of church and state.

The meaning of selfhood has become an urgent question, largely in reaction to the radical individualism in which many modern Western notions of selfhood have been cast. The 11 contributors to "Selves, People, and Persons" aim to reshape fundamental ideas of the self in such varied fields as theology, biology, psychoanalysis and political philosophy. Nearly all of them agree that selves are always to be understood in relation to the communities of which they are a part. The first section of the book focuses on basic issues in the philosophy of selfhood. Erazim Kohak's title essay explores American personalism while Harold H. Oliver argues that a self is always in the act of relation to some other. Lawrence E. Cahoone counters with reflections on the limits of this social and rational notion of selfhood and Edward W. James sketches a holistic view of the self in which the "either/or" of dualism can be transformed by a "both/and". The second group deals with selfhood in various cultures, beginning with Eliot Deutsch's exploration of how each tradition can enlarge its understanding of selfhood by incorporating elements from other traditions. John B. Carman examines the role of the self in Hindu "Bhakti", and Livia Kohn explores the role of spontaneity in Chinese views of selfhood. The problem of selfhood in theology, biology, psychoanlaysis and political theory comprises the final section: Krister Stendahl discusses the idea that our selfhood is understood primarily in terms of God's selfhood; Alfred I. Tauber examines biological ideas of organism in the work of Elie Metchnikoff; John E. Mack proposes that a spiritual point of view is now required in order to fully understand the psyche; and Bhikhu Parekh examines how the issue of violence is formulated and debated in liberal democracies.

Next to the Lord's Prayer, the Hail Mary may well be the most recited prayer in Catholic Christendom. In this volume, which comprises the most thorough and comprehensive book-length study of the Hail Mary available, Nicholas Ayo, C.S.C., presents a compendium study of this ancient prayer, one that is at once historical and exegetical as well as critical and meditative. Here he thoughtfully examines the quintessential Marian prayer word by word and line by line, analyzing each phrase in itself and in relation to the other phrases, a method that will enable readers to study the prayer for maximum understanding, appreciation, and spiritual gain.With a balance of clarity and insight, Ayo considers the Hail Mary from every angle, taking into consideration its history, language, literary quality, theology, and spirituality. His reflections reveal a deeper spiritual appreciation for the particular genius of the Ave Maria, which, when combined with an enhanced knowledge of it, will help readers gain a more meaningful understanding of this treasured prayer.In addition to an in-depth study of the pray itself, The Hail Mary includes an overview of the larger issues of Marian theology and devotion, a review of Mary in the biblical scriptures and in the apocrypha, and a summary review of the place of the Virgin Mary in the hearts and prayers of Christian men and women. Although Ayo treats the Hail Mary as it is known today, he also provides an anthology of commentary on the prayer from over the centuries, including the reflections of such writers as Thomas Aquinas, Matilda of Helfta, and Caryll Houselander, and others.This insightful study will be useful for clergy, religious, and all Christians who seek a greater understanding of the fundamentals of their faith and devotion.

Medicine and Shariah brings together experts from various fields, including clinicians, Islamic studies experts, and Muslim theologians, to analyze the interaction of the doctors and jurists who are forging the field of Islamic bioethics.Although much ink has been spilled in generating Islamic responses to bioethical questions and in analyzing fatwas, Islamic bioethics still remains an emerging field. How are Islamic bioethical norms to be generated? Are Islamic bioethical writings to be considered as part of the broader academic discourse in bioethics? What even is the scope of Islamic bioethics? Taking up these and related questions, the essays in Medicine and Shariah provide the groundwork for a more robust field. The volume begins by furnishing concepts and terms needed to map out the discourse. It concludes by offering a multidisciplinary model for ethical deliberation that accounts for the various disciplines needed to derive Islamic moral norms and to understand biomedical contexts. In between these bookends, contributors apply various analytic, empirical, and normative lenses to examine the interaction between biomedical knowledge (represented by physicians) and Islamic law (represented by jurists) in Islamic bioethical deliberation.By providing a multidisciplinary model for generating Islamic bioethics rulings, Medicine and Shariah provides the critical foundations for an Islamic bioethics that better attends to specific biomedical contexts and also accurately reflects the moral vision of Islam. The volume will be essential reading for bioethicists and scholars of Islam; for those interested in the dialectics of tradition, modernity, science, and religion; and more broadly for scholarly and professional communities that work at the intersection of the Islamic tradition and contemporary healthcare.Contributors: Ebrahim Moosa, Aasim I. Padela, Vardit Rispler-Chaim, Abul Fadl Mohsin Ebrahim, Muhammed Volkan Yildiran Stodolsky, Mohammed Amin Kholwadia, Hooman Keshavarzi, and Bilal Ali.

Using St. Thomas Aquinas's analogy of God as an architect, The Architecture of Law explores the metaphor of law as an architectural building project.

From its probable beginnings as an interrogatory creed for catechumens to its current place in the Sunday liturgy, the Apostoles' Creed has played an integral role in the sacraments of the church. The symbol of faith, as it was called by generations of Christians, was not only a vehicle of orthodox instruction but a profession of faith of profound beauty and meaning to be memorized and pondered for a lifetime. It is this Creed, a lasting achievement of the Christian tradition that Nicholas Ayo, C.S.C., presents to the general reader in The Creed as Symbol.A meditative yet thought-provoking study, this volume presents the Apostles' Creed as more than a basic confession of faith but as a symbol/metaphor of the mystery of God. Ayo holds that the Apostles' Creed is a sacred poem, an ancient psalm, holy and beautiful in its form as well as in its content. Basic literary criticism and linguistics are used to explicate the figurative body of the Creed-its words-as well as the theological meditation of its soul-the mysteries it seeks to teach. And as Ayo balances the study of the medium with the message, he does so with the conviction that the two are inextricably linked together and can never be separated.Ayo divides the Apostoles' Creed into its 12 historically recognized articles, each with its own chapter. In addition to his introduction, Ayo has included a brief history of the Creed's formation, a full summary of the ideas covered, an appendix containing differing versions of the Creed, a bibliography, and complete notes. This work is an ideal companion piece to any student religious text or standing alone, as a parish renewal source book or primary text for catechumens. The Creed as Symbol will enrich anyone's understanding of the Creed, the perennial and core doctrine of Christianity.