The Foundations Of Religious Life

In keeping with the vision set forth in Vatican II, the Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious has maintained a more traditional form of religious life. While most religious orders are now facing marked decline in novitiates and the aging of their members, the communities of the CMSWR are experiencing growth on a worldwide scale. In this visionary manifesto, the CMSWR articulates a vision for the future of women religious, suggesting that their commitment to a more radical gospel-based life and ministry is what attracts young women to religious life. The contributors explain the historical and theological significance of religious consecration, the spousal bond, the vow of chastity, and living in communion. This concise outline of traditional religious life is ideal reading for sisters as well as priests already in religious orders, and for those interested in the shift taking place in the different expressions of religious life.

“Scrupulously prepared and eminently readable,” this volume presents Heidegger’s most important lectures on religion from 1920–21 (Choice). In the early 1920s, Martin Heidegger delivered his famous lecture course, Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion, at the University of Freiburg. He also prepared notes for a course on The Philosophical Foundations of Medieval Mysticism that was never delivered. Though he never prepared this material for publication, it represents a significant evolution in his philosophical perspective. Heidegger’s engagements with Aristotle, Neoplatonism, St. Paul, Augustine, and Martin Luther give readers a sense of what phenomenology would come to mean in the mature expression of his thought. Heidegger reveals an impressive display of theological knowledge, protecting Christian life experience from Greek philosophy and defending Paul against Nietzsche.

Following the Second Vatican Council, when each Religious Institute was encouraged to research its charism, some Institutes experienced a tension between their charism and their mission, or even difficulty identifying what their charism was. This book is a study of the theological understanding of charism and of mission in relation to Religious Life within the Catholic Church. While this topic has featured in much Roman Catholic theological literature since Vatican II, there appears to be a dearth of in-depth studies. This book addresses this apparent lacuna. It draws particularly on the work of two major theologians, Jean-Marie Roger Tillard OP and Sandra Marie Schneiders IHM, who have reflected at length on charism and mission in the period leading up to Vatican II and on the implementation of its documents with respect to Religious Life. The very significant contributions of Tillard and Schneiders on the topic provide Religious, as well as others who want to know and understand Religious Life, with an interesting and motivating insight into charism and mission in Religious Life. Within the Roman Catholic Church, a “Year of Consecrated Life” has just drawn to a close, and this book forms a background and a response to Pope Francis’ Apostolic Letter to “all Consecrated People on the occasion of the Year of Consecrated Life” (November 2014), which invited Religious to reflect on these aspects that are essential to the life they have chosen to live.

For decades, Engelhardt has alluded to the ethics that binds moral friends. While his 'Foundations of Bioethics' explored the sparse ethics binding moral strangers, this long-awaited volume addresses the morality at the foundations of Christian bioethics. The volume opens with an analysis of the marginalization of Christian bioethics in the 1970s and the irremedial shortcomings of secular ethics in general. Drawing on the Christianity of the first millennium, Engelhardt provides the ontological and epistemological foundations for a Christian bioethics that can remedy the onesidedness of a secular bioethics and supply the bases for a Christian bioethics. The volume then addresses issues from abortion, third-party-assisted reproduction, and cloning, to withholding and withdrawing treatment, physician-assisted suicide, and euthanasia. Practices such as free and informed consent are relocated within a traditional Christian morality. Attention is also given to the allocation of scarce resources in health care, and to the challenge of maintaining the Christian identity of physicians, nurses, patients, and health care institutions in a culture that is now post-Christian.

"The Elementary Forms of Religious Life" is a book that analyzes religion as a social phenomenon. The author, the French sociologist Émile Durkheim, attributes the development of religion to the emotional security attained through communal living. He drives his conclusions from the study of totemic societies in Australia, which led him to a conclusion that the animal or plant that each clan worshipped as a sacred power was, in fact, that society itself.