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How do Catholic intellectuals draw on faith in their work? And how does their work as scholars influence their lives as people of faith?For more than a generation, the University of Dayton has invited a prominent Catholic intellectual to present the annual Marianist Award Lecture on the general theme of the encounter of faith and profession. Over the years, the lectures have become central to the Catholic conversation about church, culture, and society.In this book, ten leading figures explore the connections in their own lives between the private realms of faith and their public calling as teachers, scholars, and intellectuals.This last decade of Marianist Lectures brings together theologians and philosophers, historians, anthropologists, academic scholars, and lay intellectuals and critics.Here are Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., on the tensions between faith and theology in his career; Jill Ker Conway on the spiritual dimensions of memory and personal narrative; Mary Ann Glendon on the roots of human rights in Catholic social teaching; Mary Douglas on the fruitful dialogue between religion and anthropology in her own life; Peter Steinfels on what it really means to be a liberal Catholic; and Margaret O'Brien Steinfels on the complicated history of women in today's church. From Charles Taylor and David Tracy on the fractured relationship between Catholicism and modernity to Gustavo Gutirrez on the enduring call of the poor and Marcia Colish on the historic links between the church and intellectual freedom, these essays track a decade of provocative, illuminating, and essential thought. James L. Heft, S.M., is President and Founding Director of the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies and University Professor of Faith and Culture and Chancellor, University of Dayton. He has edited Beyond Violence: Religious Sources for Social Transformation in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Fordham).

How do religion and politics interact in America? How has that relationship changed over time? Why have American religious and political thought sometimes developed along a parallel course while at other times they have moved in opposite directions? These are among the many questions addressed in this volume. Originally published in 1990 as Religion and American Politics: From The Colonial Period to the 1980s, this book offers a survey of the relationship between religion and politics in America. It features scholars including Richard Carwardine, Nathan Hatch, Daniel Walker Howe, George Marsden, Martin Marty, Harry Stout, John Wilson, Robert Wuthnow, and Bertram Wyatt-Brown. Since its publication, the influence of religion on American politics—and, therefore, interest in the topic—has grown exponentially. For this new edition, the editors offer a completely new introduction, and have also commissioned several new pieces, eliminating those that are now out of date. The resulting book offers a historically grounded approach to one of the most divisive issues of our time.

Considerable controversy was stirred by the contrast between the specific approaches to public policy contained in the first draft of the Catholic bishops' letter on the U.S. economy and the policies favored by the Reagan administration. However, a much more basic contrast actually existed between the bishops' underlying vision of economic life and contemporary capitalism. The pastoral challenges a separation between moral criteria and economic activity that is deeply embedded in modernity itself. Indeed, the splitting off of economic life from its moral-religious matrix is seen by the bishops' critics as a positive, defining feature of \"democratic capitalism.\" The critics see the separate economic and moral-religious spheres related by \"due balance\"; the bishops, while acknowledging an autonomy to economic life, emphasize that its fundamental choices remain moral. The bishops (and, for different reasons, their critics) have preferred to minimize the contrast between the letter's vision and the contemporary economy. They avoid any clearcut judgment on the economic system by stressing \"pragmatism\" and \"reforms\"; but implicitly they are granting \"a strictly conditioned acceptance of reformist capitalism,\" the condition being the system's openness to questioning and change.

I was born into the world a liberal Catholic. Exhibit A: My liturgically oriented parents sent out not the standard birth announcement but a card with simple religious symbols and the wording, The Lord of life has visited Margaret and Melville Steinfels with a child Peter Francis born a child of Adam on July 15, 1941 reborn of water and the Holy Ghost a child of God on July 27, 1941. In 1941, this kind of announcement was enough to cause a stir. One irreverent wag in the family wrote back “Who is this fellow Adam? And does Mel know