News in Jesuit Studies
The following are notices of significant events related to the field of Jesuit Studies.
The notices appear chronologically, and all entries are indexed into the Portal’s search capabilities.
To contribute news of significant publications and events, both recent and forthcoming, please contact the Portal’s editors (jesuitportal@bc.edu)
Harvard University Press has published The Death and Afterlife of the North American Martyrs by Emma Anderson (University of Ottawa), on the 1930 canonization of eight Jesuit missionaries who died in the 1640s, becoming North America’s first Catholic saints. Anderson, according to the publisher, explores “how Jesuit missionaries perceived their terrifying final hours, the work also seeks to comprehend the motivations of the those who confronted them from the other side of the axe, musket, or caldron of boiling water, and to illuminate the experiences of those native Catholics who, though they died alongside their missionary mentors, have yet to receive comparable recognition as martyrs by the Catholic Church.”
- Update: The Journal of Jesuit Studies has reviewed The Death and Afterlife of the North American Martyrs (Volume 2, Issue 3).
Brill Publishers announces the first volume in the new Jesuit Studies book series. The inaugural volume is Saints or Devils Incarnate?: Studies in Jesuit History, a collection of 15 essays by John O’Malley, SJ. Brill’s announcement notes: “Almost from the moment the Jesuits were founded in 1540 by Ignatius of Loyola and his companions they suffered from misunderstanding, some positive, much of it negative. Myth and misinformation abounded. The Society of Jesus, the Jesuits’ official name, was a society of saints or of devils incarnate. Not until the mid-twentieth century did historians begin to dispel some of the myths, but only with John O’Malley’s The First Jesuits (1993) did a new era open in the study of the Society. Since then the Jesuits have attracted great attention from scholars of all disciplines on an international basis. O’Malley has continued to write about Saint Ignatius and the subsequent history of the Jesuits. This volume contains a number of such studies and presses forward the trajectory he launched two decades ago with his book.”
Chapters in Saints or Devils Incarnate? include:
1. The Historiography of the Society of Jesus: Where Does It Stand Today?
2. The Pastoral, Social, Ecclesiastical, Civic, and Cultural Mission of the Society of Jesus.
3. Society of Jesus.
4. Was Ignatius of Loyola a church Reformer? How to Look at Early Modern Catholicism.
5. The Ministry to Outsiders: The Jesuits.
6. Ignatius of Loyola (c.1491-1556).
7. Ignatius’s Special ‘Way of Proceeding.’
8. Early Jesuit Spirituality: Spain and Italy.
9. To Travel to Any Part of the World: Jerónimo Nadal and the Jesuit Vocation.
10. Some Distinctive Characteristics of Jesuit Spirituality in the Sixteenth Century.
11. Renaissance Humanism and the Religious Culture of the Early Jesuits.
12. How the First Jesuits Became Involved in Education.
13. Mission and the Early Jesuits.
14. Saint Ignatius and the Cultural Mission of the Society of Jesus.
15. The Many Lives of Ignatius of Loyola: Future Saint.