The twentieth anniversary of the beatification of Edith Stein (1891-1942), the accomplished Jewish philosopher who made a spiritual journey from atheism to agnosticism before eventually converting to Catholicism, will be celebrated in 2007. In Edith Stein: Philosopher and Mystic, Josephine Koeppel chronicles the life of this influential saint from her secular youth and entrance into a German monastery to her tragic death at Auschwitz. This accessible work will reward readers of all faiths interested in the life of a remarkable woman who changed the modern conception of sainthood.

During his lifetime, Archbishop Oscar Romero chose to live the Christian Gospel in a radical way, defending, supporting, and serving the poor, and confronting the oppressive and murderous violence of the Salvadoran dictatorship. As a result, in March 1980, while celebrating Mass in a small chapel in El Salvador, he was assassinated.

With Archbishop Oscar Romero, Damian Zynda offers a compelling examination of the bishop's eventful life. Zynda delves into the psychological and spiritual depths of Romero's faith, tracing its progression from age thirteen up to the episcopacy and his prophetic stand against the government.

In this incisive study, John F. X. Knasas grounds the ideal of tolerance in Aquinas's natural law ethics and connects the virtue of civic tolerance to the concept of being. If God is the source of being, argues Knasas, then we are the articulation of being, and it is in this capacity that we recognize our bond with other people and thus acknowledge our duty to be tolerant of one another. An important contribution to practical metaphysics and the philosophical foundations of political theory, Thomism and Tolerance will appeal to philosophy scholars and students at the undergraduate and graduate level.

With Medieval Philosophy Redefined John Deely provides an in-depth, original history of medieval philosophy, tracing a common thread that coherently unifies and defines what he calls the Latin Age--which reaches unbroken from the fifth-century work of Augustine through to the seventeenth-century work of Poinsot. That common thread is the philosophy of sign. Sure to be controversial, this volume will be required reading for all students and scholars of the history of philosophy and medieval specialists.

Realism for the 21st Century is a collection of thirty essays from John Deely--a major figure in contemporary semiotics and an authority on scholastic realism and the works of Charles Sanders Peirce. The volume tracks Deely's development as a pragmatic realist, featuring his early essays on our relation to the world after Darwinism; crucial articles on logic, semiotics, and objectivity; overviews of philosophy after modernity; and a new essay on purely objective reality.

Of the seven sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church, matrimony is the most discussed, debated, disputed, and adjudicated in all of canon law. In this book, Brendan Killeen employs the fundamental question What brings a marriage into existence? as the legal and scholarly means to explore the very nature of marriage within the framework of the canon law of the Catholic Church.

Killeen conducts his exploration in two phases. First he scrutinizes the canon law's primary sources--texts dating as far back as the Roman Empire--and gives readers a fresh perspective of the law's historical progression. He then examines the papers from the Second Vatican Council and offers both an objective evaluation of the law at present and some possible amendments for its future.

Noteworthy for its diligent research and in-depth analysis, What Brings a Marriage into Existence? will be useful to both newcomers to the canon law of marriage as well as seasoned scholars.

Fundamentally different from other more prominent, Jewish traditions and experiences, the Sephardic tradition has long served to bind together the various Jewish communities of the Mediterranean basin. In The Sephardic Legacy, Henry Toledano immerses readers in the medieval historical context that gave rise to the Sephardic tradition, arguing that the golden age of Jewish culture in Spain would not have been possible without the stimulus and inspiration of Islamic civilization. Along the way, Toledano covers such topics as the flourishing of Jewish culture and science, Hebrew poetry, the systematic codification of Jewish law, Jewish philosophy, and the impact of Islamic civilization on the development of critical biblical exegesis.