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Two hundred years after canon law prohibited clerical marriage, parish priests in the late medieval period continued to form unions with women that were marriage all but in name. This book uses evidence from archives in four Catalan dioceses to show that maintaining a family with a domestic partner was not only a custom entrenched in Catalan clerical culture but also an essential component of priestly masculine identity, one that extended to the carrying of weapons and use of violence to resolve disputes and seek revenge, to intimidate other men, and to maintain their status and authority in the community. From unpublished episcopal visitation records and internal diocesan documents, the book reconstructs the personal lives and careers of Catalan parish priests to better understand the professional identity and masculinity of churchmen who made up the proletariat of the largest institution across Europe. These untapped sources reveal the extent to which parish clergy were embedded in their communities, particularly their kinship ties to villagers and their often contentious interactions with male parishioners and clerical colleagues. The book highlights a clerical culture that embraced violence and illuminates how the parish church could become a battleground in which rivalries among clerics took place and young clerics learned from senior clergymen to meld the lay masculine ideals that were a part of their everyday culture with the privilege and authority of their profession.

This book traces a major line in the history of theology and the philosophy of religion down the “slippery slope” of secularization. At the same time, it points to the persistence of a tradition that grew out of the Reformation and continues in the mostly Protestant philosophical reflection on whether and how faith can be justified by reason. The book posits that faith and reason have long been locked in mutual engagement in which they productively challenge each other as partners in an ongoing dialogue. Although in the secularized West the death of God is said to be fundamental to the modern condition, our current post-modernity is often characterized as a “postsecular” time. This means not only that we are experiencing a broad-based “return of religion” but also, and more important for his argument, that we are now able to recognize the role of religion within the history of modernity. Emphasizing that, thanks to the logos located “in the beginning,” the death of God is part of the inner logic of the Christian tradition, the book argues that this same strand of reasoning also ensures that God will always “return” (often in new forms). Neither a defense of atheism nor a call to belief, the book explores the long history of their interaction in modern religious and philosophical thought.

Tracing Amish settlement in New York from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first century, this book draws on more than thirty years of participant-observation, interviews, and archival research to introduce the Amish to their non-Amish neighbors. In the last decade, New York State has had the fastest-growing Amish population, and this book highlights the diversity of Amish settlement there and the contribution of New York's Amish to the state's rich cultural heritage. This second edition updates settlement areas to acknowledge recently established communities and to demonstrate the impact of growth, schism, and migration on existing settlements. In addition, chapters treating external and internal challenges to Amish settlement and the challenges Amish settlement poses to neighboring non-Amish communities have been updated, and a new chapter looks to the future of New York's Amish. All maps have been updated, and a new map showing all of New York's Amish communities has been added.

The memoirs presented in this book offer a rare close-up account of the underground Orthodox community and its priests during some of the most difficult years in Russian history. The catacomb church in the Soviet Union came into existence in the 1920s and played a significant part in Russian national life for nearly fifty years. Adherents to the Orthodox faith often referred to the catacomb church as the “light shining in the dark.” The book provides a first-hand portrait of lived religion in its social, familial, and cultural setting during this tragic period. Until now, scholars have had only brief, scattered fragments of information about Russia's illegal church organization that claimed to protect the purity of the Orthodox tradition. Vera Iakovlevna Vasilevskaia and Elena Semenovna Men, who joined the church as young women, offer evidence on how Russian Orthodoxy remained a viable, alternative presence in Soviet society, when all political, educational, and cultural institutions attempted to indoctrinate Soviet citizens with an atheistic perspective. The book's translation not only sheds light on Russia's religious and political history, but also shows how two educated women maintained their personal integrity in times when prevailing political and social headwinds moved in an opposite direction.