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This collection of essays surveys a wide range of methods of Platonic interpretation, ranging from the dialogues themselves, to Middle and Neoplatonic interpretations of Plato’s writings, to modern uses of Platonism. As a philosophical movement, Platonism is broadly conceived, covering schools and philosophers beginning with Plato and his immediate followers and extending through contemporary philosophers. The history of Platonism begins, of course, with Plato himself. But his adoption of the dialogue style and his active engagement with students in his Academy, where he certainly used dialectic techniques, led almost immediately to questioning what Plato’s doctrines actually were. His student Aristotle raised questions of interpretations and invoked esoteric teachings not present in the written works. The earliest heads of the Academy struggled with Plato’s texts as well, creating rival interpretations. These early discussions gave rise to later ones, and Platonism became simultaneously a dogmatic philosophy and a source of sometimes-heated debate of what the master intended. From its inception, Platonism was a dynamic philosophy, open to varied interpretations on different fronts while also maintaining a common core of beliefs. Platonism gave rise to methods of interpretation that centered on historical, ethical, political, or metaphysical questions engendered by Plato’s writings. The ancient commentators reflected the teachings of their predecessors, and with only a few schools in the Greco-Roman world, many of their students studying under the same teachers, meant a heightened continuity in the tradition of interpretation. This volume honors the seventy-fifth birthday of John Dillon, the great scholar of Platonism whose scholarship had a pivotal role in defining Platonism as a philosophical movement in contemporary academia.

The House of the Lord invites readers to participate in a unique journey: a deep exploration of the Old and New Testaments that searches out and contemplates the reality of God’s presence with his people, with a particular focus on investigating God’s self-revelation in and through the biblical temple. The journey represents a tour de force of biblical theology, guided by author Steven Smith, a Catholic biblical scholar, seminary professor, and expert on the temple and the Holy Land. In addition to the temple, Smith observes the centrality of priesthood in both the Old and New Testaments, exploring all four Gospels like never before, through a temple lens. From Genesis onward, Smith carefully traces the biblical mystery of the temple, including the Sanctuary of Mount Eden, the tabernacle of the wilderness, the rise and fall of Solomon’s Temple, Herod’s Temple in Jesus’s day, and the heavenly sanctuary of Revelation. Supported by a massive array of evidence and details, from sources across two millennia of biblical theology, this book will be read and read again for its value as a reference work. The House of the Lord is for anyone who seeks to understand more deeply the message of the biblical story.

Vestige of Eden, Image of Eternity: Common Experience, the Hierarchy of Being, and Modern Science proffers a Catholic worldview of creation and the universe and shows that it is reasonable in the light of the best of human experience, both modern and pre-modern. The Catholic worldview maintains that the Liturgy of the Church—the image of eternity—is the “blueprint” for material and immaterial reality. This liturgical structure is manifested in the natural world through the hierarchy of being—the vestige of Eden—evident to human knowledge, and as such provides a framework that easily subsumes and makes sense of the data of modern scholarship and science. It also leaves them open to understanding in the light of realties beyond matter. Proposing a novel framework for understanding reality to modern ears, yet old in the history of human thought, Vestige of Eden will be of interest to general readers and college students, while proving profitable for the academic as well.

Drawing on rich insights from the early Church Fathers, Discerning Persons addresses the neglected issue of disablism and how discriminatory attitudes fail to treat people with profound disabilities as persons. This discrimination can be found in the field of bioethics, where the stakes are often high and a matter of life or death. Whereas views that give priority to human beings whatever their capacities are seen as speciesist and so discriminatory, bioethical approaches that are disablist are rarely acknowledged as prejudiced. Many bioethicists do not even realize there is an issue. Current bioethical thinking appears uncritical and unreflective in the way it accepts a separation of the human being from the person and downgrades certain individuals who do not fulfill arbitrarily defined and insubstantial criteria for being persons. Using neglected Patristic thinking and its analogies with the human person, abled and disabled, found in reflection on the image of God and in the Trinitarian and Christological disputes of the early centuries where person language originated, the book makes patristic thinking do important work. It establishes that there are no early historical, philosophical, or theological grounds for calling or treating human beings as anything less than persons. Nor is there foundation for defining the person purely in terms of individuality, rationality, autonomy, or self-consciousness. Patristic insights conclusively call us to be discerning persons: to realize that persons are not so much defined as discerned, and to discern that all human beings, whatever their situations or capacities, are unique and unrepeatable persons.

Is it possible to “see God”? A close examination of the Bible suggests that answering this question is more complex—and interesting—than one might imagine. Following The Word of the Lord and The House of the Lord, this sweeping conclusion to Steven C. Smith’s trilogy asks whether it is possible to see God. After properly framing the question and citing scriptural examples, Smith takes the reader on an epic journey into the literal and spiritual meanings of biblical interpretation.Smith’s thesis is that the multiplicity of “senses” is a pathway and progression toward the face of the Lord. He leads the reader through five Old Testament theophany scenes, beginning with the patriarch Jacob “wrestling” with God and concluding with Job’s contending with the Voice from the Whirlwind. These five encounters span all three parts of the Old Testament: the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings.A tour de force much like Smith’s previous books, The Face of the Lord thoroughly examines each biblical episode from the standpoint of the Literal, Allegorical, Tropological (Moral), and Anagogical (Heavenly) senses. Smith engages all of the relevant literature—from ancient Jewish sources to Christian medieval masters to present-day theologians—without taking his eye off the central question: Can we see God? The result is a fresh, robust exploration of Sacred Scripture, drawing upon ancient, medieval, and contemporary exegesis in pursuit of this fascinating biblical question.

Dana Gioia stands out as one of the most important poets, critics, and defenders of the arts in our day. His advocacy of the renewal of rhyme and meter in poetry, his work as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and his recent efforts to strengthen the role of Catholic artists in American life have made a great impact on our public culture over four decades. Poet and scholar Matthew Brennan provides a thorough introduction to the life and work of this living classic of American poetry.The Colosseum Critical Introduction SeriesEach title in the Colosseum Critical Introduction Series provides a thorough study of the life and work of an important American writer who has sought to renew the craft and deepen the intellectual and spiritual dimensions of contemporary poetry. Intended to be at once brief and compelling, these introductory texts will help readers find their way into some of the best voices in the literature of our day.

The Harvest and the Lamp, the third volume of the Colosseum Books series, is a singular collection of poems in a wide variety of forms and voices. Author Andrew Frisardi writes on fundamental human themes such as love and desire, death and grief, the nature of the self and self-transcendence in a tone that ranges from serious to witty to exuberant.The poems are often set in Italy, where Frisardi has lived for a number of years, drawing on natural or concrete imagery as well as the imaginal or symbolic. Frisardi composes in a number of forms: sonnet and sestina, triolet and ghazal, nonce forms and free verse, gracefully and with a fresh use of diction and rhyme. As the late poet-translator Brett Foster put it, “Andrew Frisardi’s [poems] are exquisitely made things, many angled and shining brightly. Ear, eye, and mind do their elegant, exact work.”Frisardi is an internationally noted translator and independent scholar of Dante, and Dante’s impact appears directly or indirectly in much of his poetry, including a few translations in this volume. The poet-biographer Paul Mariani has written that in Frisardi’s poetry one finds the “resins of the classics everywhere. Add wit, sensitivity, humor and the recurring shock of recognition, then sit back and enjoy what Andrew Frisardi has prepared for you. Then come back and taste again for the sheer pleasure of the company.

This volume focuses on the life and work of Rhina P. Espaillat, an extraordinarily observant lyric poet who applies ideals of musicality, metaphor, and meaning to formally crafted verse that connects personal experience to universal themes.Born in the Dominican Republic, Espaillat was seven years old when her family was granted political asylum in the United States during the brutal dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. She published her first poems in Ladies' Home Journal at age fifteen, and after graduating from college went on to marry, teach, raise a family, and maintain a literary career spanning more than seven decades. Having cultivated a fluent and scholarly bilingualism throughout her life, Espaillat also became a gifted translator of works by numerous important poets of the Spanish- and English speaking worlds, including Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, St. John of the Cross, Robert Frost and Richard Wilbur.THE COLOSSEUM CRITICAL INTRODUCTION SERIESEach title in the Colosseum Critical Introduction Series provides a thorough study of the life and work of an important American writer who has sought to renew the craft and deepen the intellectual and spiritual dimensions of contemporary poetry. Intended to be at once brief and compelling, these introductory texts will help readers find their way into some of the best voices in the literature of our day.

Plotinus (204-70) is the founder of Neoplatonism and its most significant thinker. He shaped late antique philosophy and significantly influenced the entire metaphysical tradition of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and German Idealism. In this volume, Jens Halfwassen presents Plotinus' life and work, as well as the most important aspects of his historical influence. Issues of key importance for the Neoplatonists—such as the interaction between Being and Thought, the ascent of the soul, and the interpretation of Plato's theory of principles—are explained in detail in the course of outlining the Neoplatonic metaphysical system. The introduction outlines Halfwassen's significant contribution to the study of Plotinus, paying particular attention to the differences between the current German and Anglophone approaches to the Platonic tradition.The introduction contextualizes Jens Halfwassen's research within the German tradition, and outlines differences and points of contact between the study of Platonism and Neoplatonism in the German- and English-speaking worlds. While the first part (Plotinus and Neoplatonism) is a translation of the standard German introduction to Neoplatonism, the four research articles in the appendix discuss some of the more advanced metaphysical questions addressed by Plotinus. (As an introduction, this volume presupposes little prior knowledge of Neoplatonism but takes the reader to a more advanced level than competing volumes.)

This volume brings together articles by sixteen leading scholars on a cross-section of Platonists authors—Christian and non-Christian—from early through late Byzantium philosophy, including the Capaddocians, Cyril, Proclus, Damascius, Dionysius, George of Pisidia, Nicetas Stethatos, Nikephoros Choumenos, Psellos, and George Palamas. The reception of Byzantine thought in the Latin tradition is also considered. The articles collectively show development in the Greek East on ontological issues such as the doctrine of the soul, as well as theological concepts of the One/God and Trinity within a hierarchical universe. The volume considers exegetical questions relating to the use of Plato and the Platonists by Byzantine Christian authors.

Latter Days tells a story about the meaning of a human life in the strange new world that is emerging today.After an initial sonnet that presents the existential challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic, it opens with "The Wanderer," a view of the world from the perspective of an aging world traveler seeking a summation of his more than seventy years of wayfaring. It continues with "In a Plague Season," a collection of poetic notes on the pandemic and its parallel to the changing climate of the earth. The next section, "A House Divided," extends the plague metaphor to the current state of political warfare, and the following sequence, "Toxic Manhood," examines the idea of maleness as a contested site at the center of the current struggle, suggesting an apocalyptic picture of a world in which the fertile union of sexuality has become obsolete.The next section, "Ars Poetica," is a turning point where the art of poetry, together with the other arts, especially music, is enlisted in a process of healing and recuperation. Poetry's economy and wit are called in by the next section, "Oeconomics," to outline a modestly contrarian political philosophy that might provide the basis for a cure. Three sections follow—"Observations," "You Know Who You Are," and "Valentines"—that recover poetry's sensory grasp of the world, turn to human affection as a foundation of renewed health, and celebrate a long marriage. The final section, "Second Childhood," prepares the wanderer for the conclusion of his long search for meaning.

We learn a good deal about David Mason's life through his poetry: we learn of his family life and troubles, his travels, his loves, and his losses, but we never have the impression of being buttonholed by a man who is self-centered or egoistical. Partly this is because we are convinced of the numerous ways in which the life he recounts is connected to other lives, to places and to historical events. But it is mainly because we always sense how closely what he recounts is related to ourselves. As with all major poets, his voice becomes our own."This book examines Mason's career in detail, from his very first volume (1990) to his most recent publications, bringing out the full range of his accomplishment in a number of different genres—lyrics, narrative poetry, children's verse, drama, and opera libretti—while also examining his critical essays and memoirs. While offering close readings of all his most important poems—from the shortest epigram to the book-length verse narrative, Ludlow—the book also provides the biographical context for these works, giving an insight into a rich and varied life that has spanned three continents.

What if the world you learned in flame and darkness/is apprehended only through these fancies?/What if the whole of it is heavenly? These urgent questions posed by Maryann Corbett at the start of her new collection The O in the Air set in motion a series of powerful poems that explore that would-be-heavenly world in all of its beauty, pain, squalor, and ordinary glory. Corbett's poems are alternately visionary - eloquent prayers that reach after the numinous - and also earthly - frank utterances that lament and interrogate the quotidian. The sacred and the profane continually rub up against one another as the poet fixes her gaze on the world around her and perceives the unexpected connections that pervade the creation. Hers is a deeply Catholic sensibility, one that is both animated and troubled by the faith given to her by her parents, revenants who haunt her memory and her poetry. These elegant, deftly crafted poems lead the reader, step by step, on a quest for an answer to the mystery of our origins and our being: ""God is the question, the O in the air"" the poet is hell-bent to find.

While there is a long-standing history of reflection among Catholics about the proper orientation of Catholicism towards American society, today the American Catholic community confronts a fundamentally new situation. Catholics face the dual threat of an ever more centralized and increasingly omnicompetent state and a new cultural ethos fundamentally incompatible with--and hostile to--Catholicism.Today, American Catholics no longer live as a religious minority in a Protestant society whose commitment to limited government and religious freedom affords Catholics considerable space to live out their faith commitments, and whose Christian character assures the existence of substantial moral commonality. Now, Catholics are a religious minority in a post-Christian society animated by an anthropology and public morality incompatible with Catholic truth and committed to the exclusion of the faith from public life.This new situation demands a rethinking on the part of American Catholics of their place in America and their relationship with American society. These essays seek to assist with this challenging task by casting light on this new situation and exploring its implications for the Church in America.

Theodore Metochites (1270-1332) is one of the most important writers, thinkers, and statemen of the Byzantine Empire. Metochites and his rival Nikephoros Choumnos (1250-1327) animated the philosophical and cultural debate in Constantinople in the early fourteenth century. Each held the title of mesazon (??????), a powerful position in the Byzantine government, and both men were active just before the controversy concerning the ""divine light"" and mystic contemplation (Hesychasm) that broke out in 1340. They had become monks before the synods were gathered to decide whether Gregory Palamas was Orthodox or not, resulting in his victory (Synods of Constantinople of 1341, 1347, 1351). Metochites is famous for his artistic patronage of the Monastery of Saint Saviour in Chora (Kariye Camii), where he retired. The monastery's mosaics and frescoes are among the greatest witnesses to Byzantine aesthetics. Metochites's writings are significant in the Byzantine era and are presented in this volume by some of the principal specialists of his work.

A Cut-and-Paste Country is comprised of poems which explore the narratives of both characters and artists who cut and paste in an effort to create personal refuges of beauty and peace. We all do much the same, of course, though our created worlds exist mostly in our heads. In every case, however, Hart shows us that in the end we all engage in a ""praise of our Maker.

Faithful Catholic and other traditional Christian scholars and commentators write a great deal about the troubling developments in secular Western culture and its many components: morality, social life, politics, law, the situation of the family, etc. While critique of the secular culture—even trenchant critique—is often necessary, it is not adequate. Christians have to be careful not to just “curse the darkness.” After all, one of the great theological virtues, which are the highest of virtues, is hope. It was in that spirit that the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at Franciscan University of Steubenville assembled a group of traditional Christian scholars and writers for a conference in April 2015 to consider what things need to be done—and, in fact, realistically can be done and how they might be done—to begin to challenge the secular culture and restore the traditions that the Western world emerged from. Their papers at the conference—spanning education, family life, sexual morality, politics, law, the media, and the arts and architecture—are assembledinto this book.To challenge and try to change the secular culture is no small concern. Not only are Christians called to “re-establish all things in Christ” (Eph. 1:10), but they increasingly have no choice in the matter as the culture—whether by its propagation of immoral public practices or the increasing threats to religious liberty—inevitably impinges on them as they now may have to act simply to protect themselves. It is the hope of the scholars connected with the Veritas Center that this book may spawn further, ongoing reflection about how Christians and all those concerned about a sound culture that respects true human dignity should engage and, where necessary, confront a culture that has moved so sharply away from its religious foundations.The contributors to this volume are James Kalb, Benjamin Wiker,Anthony Esolen, Robert R. Reilly, Allan C. Carlson, Sheila Liaugminas, Duncan Stroik, Lawrence M. Stratton, and the book’s editor Stephen M. Krason. There is a foreword by Anne Hendershott.

Faith and Freedom is a collection of essays marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of Ex Corde Ecclesiae. Bishops, theologians, canon lawyers, and university presidents offer speculative and practical reflections on the relationship between the Catholic university and the Church, the place of faith and revelation in the life of a university, the meaning and limits of academic freedom, the mission of the Catholic university to the wider culture, and the purpose and application of the canon laws bearing on Catholic universities. In addition, the volume offers practical guidance and suggestions for how Catholic universities can retrieve and maintain their Catholic identity. Included also are the stories of three Catholic universities that have self-consciously striven to implement Ex Corde Ecclesiae: Walsh University, the University of Mary, and Franciscan University of Steubenville.

This book, written in 1957, arises from the encounter of two men: the American poet Samuel Hazo and the French philosopher Jacques Maritain. They met on September 12, 1956, at Maritain’s home in Princeton, New Jersey. Hazo sought to engage Maritain’s diffuse writings in aesthetics by bringing them into conversation with the great voices of the English literary tradition, especially Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and John Keats.Hazo was also striving to understand and articulate his own experience of the creative process. Then at the beginning of his writing life, he would later emerge as a leading voice in American poetry. He is the author of more than thirty collections, the winner of many awards, the founder of the International Poetry Forum, and a National Book Award finalist.The World within the Word is the only book about Jacques Maritain for which Maritain himself wrote a foreword.

These essays focus on the absence of the poetic imagination in much contemporary poetry and criticism. The retreat of poets into craft, gender, race, and so on has made poetry seem more like sociology than literature. Such lack of insight can be attributed to forces in American society that place undue emphasis on technique and identity rather than talent and vision, currently evident as well in contemporary popular music, dance, and art. There is a similar imaginative deficiency in the teaching of literature and in political oratory and social commentary.The consequence where poetry is concerned is the acceptance and anthologizing of work that relies on novelty or shock for notice. We are left with mere appearances instead of essences. In this collection, Samuel Hazo calls for a return to forms of expression in which poet and reader engage in a conversation that speaks to the human condition, where less is more—The Power of Less.

How far have we come putting into practice what was declared in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which this year marks its 70th anniversary? How can the Church respond today to the new challenges threatening these rights, whether relativism, fundamentalism, and persecution or new types of poverty and oppression? And with whom can the Church engage on these issues? With states, religious leaders, international institutions, cultural institutions, or first and foremost with global civil society? In addition, what are the roots of fundamental rights, and what response can there be to the danger of a multiplication of rights that can paradoxically threaten concepts on the rule of law and human dignity? These are the fundamental questions addressed and debated by the experts whose essays appear in this book. Fundamental Rights and Conflicts among Rights is divided into four parts: Genesis and Meaning of the Idea of Religious Liberty, Laicité and Natural Law, Birth and Transformation of the Culture of Liberty and Human Rights, and the Multiplication of Rights and the Risk of Destruction of the Idea of Right. Throughout the volume, prestigious international experts analyze these issues. Among them are Giuseppe Dalla Torre (Libera Università Maria SS. Assunta), Jean Louis Ska (Pontificio Istituto Biblico), Robert P. George (Princeton University), Marta Cartabia (vice president of the Italian Constitutional Court), Carlos Ignacio Massini (Mendoza, Argentina), Barbara Zehnpfennig (Universität Passau), Mary Ann Glendon (Harvard University), Joseph H. Weiler (New York University), and Roberto Baratta (Macerata, Italia). The volume also contains an essay by Cardinal Pietro Parolin, secretary of state, on “The Church's Interlocutors in the Debate and in the Affirmation of Human Rights.”

This book reveals how extensively the contemporary medical assaults on the unwanted unborn and vulnerable born bear a striking resemblance to the participation of health professionals in expediting the Nazi war against Jews, Gypsies, and others deemed superfluous. It provides indispensable contemporary and historical perspectives for challenging the deceptive justifications facilitating the draconian biomedical practices directed against today’s least visible and most vulnerable victims. The book thus contributes a compelling antidote to the corruption of technology, ideology, and terminology with an urgent call for mounting a full-scale physician’s crusade against the destruction of human lives before and after birth based upon the "do no harm" and healing imperatives embodied in the Hippocratic Oath’s sanctity of life moral core.

Through the lens of Samuel Hazo's engaging poems, Janine Molinaro tells the story of this fascinating man's life and career. Facilitated by extensive interviews with the poet and deeply moving excerpts from his personal journals, Molinaro provides insights into Hazo's family history, childhood, military service, and teaching career; his forty-three-year stewardship of the International Poetry Forum, which brought more than eight hundred international poets and performers to the city of Pittsburgh; his beloved wife Mary Anne and son Sam; and his views on politics, education, love, friendship, mortality, war, gender, poetry, and a host of other topics. The book captures pivotal periods and significant events in Hazo's life that shaped the person and writer he became as well as the remarkable individuals who added meaning and vibrancy to his life's collage. Candid, wise, and conversational, Hazo's poems are central to this pioneering biographical form—guiding the narrative as opposed to merely adorning or supporting it. Hazo once noted, "There are too many analytical books about authors and not many that see life as a story—which is what life is." Before the Pen Runs Dry is such a story: an intimate portrait of the man who penned a lifetime of compelling and memorable poetry.

The translations - or ""conversions"" - in this book make available to contemporary readers of English-language poetry a wealth of poems that belong to what T.S. Eliot called ""the tradition."" From Homer, Sappho, and Archilochus to Catullus, Horace, and Virgil; from Dante, Villon, and Lope de Vega to Baudelaire, Rilke, and Pessoa; this book presents fresh versions of many of the best-loved poems in the Western European tradition in strikingly new versions, allowing readers without access to the originals the opportunity to possess, in some measure, both the sense and style of these monumental works.Ryan Wilson's first book of poems, The Stranger World - winner of the prestigious Donald Justice Poetry Prize - explored the ways in which human beings may discover themselves in life's unforseen and unpredictable phenomena. That book, described by poet and professor James Matthew Wilson as ""a most astonishing debut"" and ""maybe the best first book by a poet I've ever read,"" lays the groundwork for Proteus Bound, in which the author's practice of xenia, or ""hospitality,"" welcomes poems from more than a half dozen languages, spanning nearly three millennia, into English.