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Here is the riveting and troubling story of seven U.S. martyrs in Central America who laid down their lives for their neighbors: Father Stanley Rother, Brother James Miller, Sisters Maura Clarke, Ita Ford, Dorothy Kazel, and Carla Piette, and lay-missioner Jean Donovan.
Many U.S. Christians were profoundly moved by the liberation struggles in Central America in the 1980s. Most learned about the situation from missionaries who had worked in the area and witnessed the repression firsthand. These missionaries, Sharon Erickson Nepstad shows, employed the institutional and cultural resources of Christianity to seize the attention of American congregations and remind them of the moral obligations of their faith. Drawing on archival data and in-depth interviews with activists in ten separate solidarity organizations around the country, Nepstad offers a rich analysis of the experiences of religious leaders and church members in the solidarity movement. She explores...
"Healing the Body Politic" examines the contested place of health and development in El Salvador over the last two decades. It recounts the dramatic story of radical health activism from its origins in liberation theology and guerrilla medicine during the third-world country's twelve-year civil war, through development of a remarkable "popular health system," administered by lay providers in a former war zone controlled by leftist rebels. The ethnography contributes to the integration of medical and political anthropology by bringing the semiotics of health and the body to bear on cultural understandings of warfare, the state, and globalization.
A history of Catholic social thought Many Americans assume that the Catholic Church is inherently conservative, based on its stances on abortion, contraception, and divorce. Yet there is a longstanding tradition of progressive Catholic movements in the United States that have addressed a variety of issues from labor, war, immigration, and environmental protection, to human rights, women’s rights, exploitive development practices, and bellicose foreign policies. These Catholic social movements have helped to shift the Church from an institution that had historically supported incumbent governments and political elites to a Church that has increasingly sided with the vulnerable and oppressed...
The Sisters of the Holy Family, founded in New Orleans in 1842, were the first African American Catholics to serve as missionaries. This story of their little-known missionary efforts in Belize from 1898 to 2008 builds upon their already distinguished work, through the Archdiocese of New Orleans, of teaching slaves and free people of color, caring for orphans and the elderly, and tending to the poor and needy. Utilizing previously unpublished archival documents along with extensive personal correspondence and interviews, Edward T. Brett has produced a fascinating account of the 110-year mission of the Sisters of the Holy Family to the Garifuna people of Belize. Brett discusses the foundation...
The ancient Celtic tradition has taken the modern world by storm. Over the past decade seekers have collected all things Celtic-books, art, music, toys, clothing. But how much of it is authentic or lasting? In this highly distinctive book, June Sawyers has culled from a diverse pool of sources to offer readers a weekly dose of Celtic wisdom and witness. Beyond the famous trio of Patrick, Brigid, and Brendan, contemporary seekers will find kindred souls in famous and not-so-famous saints, prophets, martyrs, and poets who make up the fabric of the Celtic tradition. This book features short entries describing the lives, temptations, insights, and struggles of Celtic saints but also Celtic proph...
Throughout the centuries certain Christians chose to live out the challenges of the Gospel in communities that withdrew from the common and conventional in the world. This book studies this phenomenon and focuses on a number of contemporary Christian communities, lay and religious, who respond to the Gospel call to discipleship in a radical way, whether by being communities of peace and reconciliation, of social ministry and solidarity with the poor, of service to the Church, or of prayer and contemplation.
The first book to expose how the Catholic Church systematically covers up scandal by moving abusers across borders. Clerical sexual abuse is as global as the Roman Catholic Church, with bishops moving credibly accused priests not simply between parishes but also across international borders. Unforgivable follows the movement of one such perpetrator from the Great Plains of central Minnesota to the Indigenous highlands of Guatemala, where this priest had access to children and even raised one as his own. Although Father David Roney is at the center of this particular story, author Kevin Lewis O'Neill offers ample evidence that offshoring priests is a common practice. These maneuvers and the callous indifference of the Church--even once caught red-handed--reveal the limits of justice. They also lay bare the disturbing fact that the scale of clerical sexual abuse is far bigger than anyone has yet considered. Rigorously researched and viscerally important, this book raises urgent questions about holding the Catholic Church accountable.
Explores the roles and expectations of women and men in Christian missionary experience
A surprising look at the 28 Catholic radicals who raided a draft board in 1971—and got away with it. When the FBI arrested twenty-eight people in connection to a break-in at a Camden, New Jersey, draft board in 1971, the Bureau celebrated. The case should have been an easy victory for the department—the perpetrators had been caught red-handed attempting to destroy conscription documents for draftees into the Vietnam War. But the results of the trial surprised everyone, and in the process shook the foundations of American law, politics, and religion. In Spiritual Criminals, Michelle M. Nickerson shares a complex portrait of the Camden 28, a passionate group of grassroots religious progres...